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**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 4 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/139392/edit)
A character in one of my stories wants to steal a valuable artifact from a museum. The artifact is on top of a sensitive pressure plate, which is configured to trigger an alarm if the weight changes for more than a few seconds. This character’s plan is to replace the artifact with another item(s) of identical weight, so as to avoid triggering the alarm.
The problem is, the character does not know the exact weight of the artifact—no one does. How can he remove the artifact without triggering the alarm?
Assume that that this world is identical to ours, pre-Industrial Revolution.
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I don't even know how I got to this webpage in the middle of the workday. The aversion to work is great today!
# Precision Sand Swap
I'll expand on the sand idea by Cyn to explain how you would synchronize the rate of sand pouring with object lifting and put the correct amount of sand on the plate with the use of a fulcrum or pulley system.
## Supplies
1. **Fulcrum** or possibly a pulley system
2. **Counterweight** greater than weight of object
3. Sand collecting **bucket**
4. **Bag of sand** exactly equal to the weight of the counterweight minus the weight of the bucket.
5. Possibly some sand collecting hardware like a funnel or tube and some sort of apparatus like a y-shaped piece of metal to keep the bag of sand separate from the object.
## Procedure
1. **Set up the base of the fulcrum next to the object and platform with one end (A) over the object and the other end (B) away from the object. Attach the weight to end B. Attach the bag of sand to the end over the object (A).** The counterweight is slightly heavier so you'll have to hold it level.
2. Now **simultaneously attach end A to the object while placing the bucket on the platform**. Here is where you may need a method to keep the sand from disturbing the object. The bucket will add weight to the platform, but the fulcrum, with the bag of sand lighter than the counterweight by exactly the weight of the bucket, will lift the object to exactly counteract the weight. This is the riskiest part of the operation as you will be directly disturbing both the plate and the object. There is no way to avoid a certain amount of weight fluctuation here. Be a ninja and hold your breath. The rest is easy!
3. Assuming that the bag of sand is over the bucket (if not use a funnel or tube), **cut a hole in the bag**. The sand will pour into the bucket, increasing the weight on the platform. At the same time, the total weight on end A of the fulcrum is decreasing, so the counterweight begins to pull the object off of the platform at the same rate.
4. **As soon as the object is lifted off of the platform, immediately plug or move the bag** to stop it from spilling more sand into the bucket.
This solution depends on the pressure plate being bigger than the object being stolen.
It does not solve the problem of weight distribution across the plate if there are multiple sensors underneath, perhaps one at each corner. In this case even though the overall weight stays the same, the distribution across sensors could change and trigger the alarm.
Note also that the counterweight and sand (plus bucket) being equal assumes that the arms of the fulcrum are equal length. You can adjust weights and arm lengths of the initial setup as long as the fulcrum stays balanced.
And... back to work.
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## Fix the plate in place.
What the best way to do this is, will depend on what the pressure plate looks like.
However the key fact to remember is that the pressure plate works by being depressed by the weight on top of it. So it is not actually necessary to put something else of exact weight on a pressure plate in order to stop it from firing an alarm. It just has to not lift up when the item is removed.
Options:
1. **Super Glue**: If the pressure plate's mechanism is open and available to see then try spraying adhesive to lock the pressure plate in place. This is like spraying super glue into the gears of a clock to prevent the gears from moving.
2. **Make a Mold**: Create a mold of the pressure plate that will lock its depression in place. This one is a bit harder because any mold batter you pour on a plate will also have weight, but you could probably lift the item by the same force you are adding, since you know how much batter you are adding. The batter just needs to coil around some external object so that it can rigidly be kept in place.
3. **Two tables and a metal bar**: If the item is completely in the open, you can place 2 tables on either side of the plate. Adjust the height of tables until they exactly match the height of the plate. Then use 2 rigid poles (cast iron, wood) that cross over the plate and are attached to each table to lock the plates depression in place. This one adds no actual weight since the tables are supporting the poles' weight. The poles just lock the pressure plate in place by preventing it from moving up.
4. Other similar ideas. The limitations are only how fancy your thieves' gear can be, and the type of scale you are dealing with.
Those are just some basic ideas. The key concept here is to lock the pressure plate in place, rather than trying to match an unknowable weight.
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# Sand
This is hardly original, I'm sure I've seen it in various movies. Fill a small bag with sand, enough to be more than the weight of the object (have a friend holding another bag just in case it turns out to be lead). Pierce the bag and let the sand slowly pour out as you gently lift the artifact (with straps or help from another human if it's large). If the area with the pressure plate isn't very large, make the first weight transfer a properly shaped container to hold the sand and fit perfectly on the pressure plate next to the artifact.
Because you're writing the story, this difficult task will turn out perfectly right. Or right until the very end when suddenly the thief goofs, the alarm goes off, and the thief grabs the item and runs (which is what s/he should have done in the first place).
Any pre-industrial alarm system will have a bit of flexibility. Either the weight doesn't have to be exact, or the time it takes to make the alarm sound, or the time for the guards to arrive, is just barely enough for the thief to get away (or almost get away, depending on your story).
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Go buy a luggage hand scale (or custom make one for greater sensitivity). Attach it to the item and as you lift it up, add extra weights to the pressure plate to balance it out. You can use anything for a weight as long as you can add it in increments. So sand and iron weights would allow you to basically get the exact weight you want.
If you have an even better setup, you could attach the scale to a solid base that doesn't move and lift the item with a motor and have it auto dispense the weight it is lifting.
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Sync's Precision Sand Swap will work if you have enough space on the pressure plate to dump the sand, and if you can ensure the two sand flows are at identical mass per second. But a much simpler method is available if the "weight changes for more than a few seconds" comment in the question is valid. Either bring a spring scale or a two-pan balance in which one pan is swapped with an attachment that can be tethered to the top of the object.
With the spring balance, just lift the object fairly quickly to determine its weight, then gently drop it down again. Should be possible to do this in less than 'a few seconds'. Then Make up an identical weight (sack of sand, brass weights etc.) and quickly lift the object and place the weights. Once again the "few seconds" grace should ensure the alarm doesn't ring.
With the two-pan balance. Connect the first side of the balance to your mystery object. Place a small weight in the second side of the balance while holding it up by hand. Let go of the balance and see if the object rises off the plate. Then, de-weight the second balance. Repeat, increasing or decreasing weight two till it exactly balances. Then, once again, the "few seconds" will give you time to swap the two weights.
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## A beam balance, some balloons, and a weight set
Since the alarm takes a few second to go off, we can use a risk free solution!
First, attach a balloon to a beam balance, so that the whole configuration is neutrally buoyant (you will probably want a tank of helium or hydrogen to adjust the balloon's size). Now, remove the artifact, put the beam balance on the pressure plate, and then place the artifact on one of the scales.
Now, you can place test masses on the other scale to determine the mass of the artifact. Note however that you must also attach more balloons to the balance, or the more weight will be exerted on the pressure plate. Therefore, before adding a test mass to the scale, blow up a balloon that neutralizes the buoyancy of the test mass. Note that since the pressure plate is slow to react, you do not need to put the test mass on the scale and attach the balloon to the balance at exactly the same time. Just remember that when removing a test mass, you must detach its balloon. I recommend using different colors for all the balloons to help you keep track of which balloon goes with which weight. This also adds variety.
Once you determine the mass of the artifact using the test masses, you can just dump the test masses onto the pressure plate and remove the balance (along with the balloons and the artifact). Additionally, you can use the test mass neutralizing balloons to neutralize the weight of the artifact. This is not technically necessary, but that way instead of carrying the artifact and scale home, you can just pull them home, which will be much easier on your arms.
If you do not want to abandon the test weights, you can bring a second scale so you can find another object with the same mass of the artifact.
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**You need balloons, a tank of helium, and a bucket of sand.**
Affix the balloon with neutral buoyancy balloon to the [McGuffin](https://www.videomaker.com/videonews/2013/02/what-is-a-mcguffin-movie-terms-defined) with the hose to the helium still attached.
Gradually add equal amounts of buoyancy to the balloon and sand to the pressure plate -- you will need accurate metering of each of course.
As you slowly add to the system, you will reach a point where the McGuffin begins to slowly rise, and you stop adding sand when this happens.
You don't even need to allow for a few seconds of imbalance, just a accurate metering system for the helium and sand. Besides, it is really cool in the movie version.
You don't ever have to know the weight of the McGuffin and you can experiment and refine the system in your own lab till you get it right.
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What kinds of abstract colors, shapes, and other compositional elements could be used to indicate various emotions?
My story features an artificial intelligence that’s embodied in an industrial practical body design, *not* a humaniform body. The head is an ellipsoid with a grey zone for the eye region. It resembles a motorcycle helmet, with the visor part covering sensory apparatus, and the rest of it — what would cover the mouth and cheeks of a human — is a **display surface**.
As [I’ve mentioned before](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53412/53418#53418), the manufacturer doesn’t want to ship a creepy and potentially dangerous psychopath, right? So they will arrange the expression of “feelings” to be an honest and a reliable indication of the AI’s motives and understanding, on a subconscious level that it can’t override.
In this particular design, the emotions are shown as patterns on the “face” comprised of the display surface. I’m thinking along the same lines as the icons assigned people who have not specified an image here on SE, which are automatically generated from a seed and are varied and unique.
The general appearance should make sence to humans, in an intuative poetic way. Furthermore, the different design elements should be able to be combined to reflect mixed states. For example, a **background color** is clearly orthogonal to a set of **lines**, and the lines can be straight and even, wavy, or jagged.
I’d like to include descriptions of the display as a unique “colorful” part of the story.
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> Joe’s helm bore irregular jagged red lines in front (where the mouth would be if a human head were under the helmet), and the sides blushed with foggy patches of bright red and dark blue. Although I hated to disturb him in such a mood, I had to deal with the issue quickly. Obviously, he’d already heard the news. …
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Rather than just making up evocative images willy-nilly, I think I should have some **general schema** in mind first.
Would you suggest some mappings between graphical design elements and specific emotions or states of mind? And, how can these be combined, if they are not independent types of features?
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**Note:** the screen is *not* going to show Emoticons or any coherent pictures including character glyphs or photos.
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You want something that represents emotion but not to try to make expressions too realistic (be wary of the [uncanny valley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)).
One problem may be cultural associations. Colours, as were mentioned in the comments, are pretty good but [do vary based on cultural background](http://www.empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com/cultural-color.html).
Shapes, however, can represent facial expressions - like emoticons in text :) - but also have a general trend of crossing cultural boundaries (see the [bouba/kiki effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect) see below). Sharpness is associated with negative emotions, roundness with content or happiness. The speed of motion could also be translated into agitation, excitement or depression and reluctance.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ESUj7.png)
The picture above shows an example of two shapes used in the study of the bouba/kiki effect. If you attempt to attach a name, bouba or kiki to those shapes you will probably choose the softer sounding "bouba" to the round shape and the "kiki" will be the sharp edged shape. This effect is far from limited to soft and round shapes.
Interestingly it was found:
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> Individuals who have autism do not show as strong a preference. Where typically developing individuals agree with the standard result 88% of the time, individuals with autism agree only 56% of the time.
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Given that autism is ["characterized by impaired social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism) we may be able to infer that this could be considered a form of body language.
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Since emotion and face recognition is deeply coded in our brains while learning an abstract code would require proper training, a good solution can be to have the screen on the visor displaying emoticons or even human faces representing the wished emotion.
As a bonus you can customize it to "local" faces and/or to a given gender to further increase the acceptance.
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As has been mentioned in the comments the use of colour alone may not be a good indicator as different colours have different connotations depending on the culture.
Since you want a somewhat complicated pattern what if the mood was indicated by the feeling of the picture. Brighter colours is a stronger feeling, so anger or happiness is bright whereas sadness would probably be dull colours.
A pleasing image (symmetrical, rounded edges maybe) is a positive emotion whereas a more jarring unpleasant image represents negative emotions (sharp edges and irregularity is anger).
There would definitely still be a potential for misunderstanding, but this is going to be true of any method of communicating. In the UK (and most Western countries as far as I know) everyone knows nodding your head is yes and shaking it is no, but other cultures have different meanings for these actions.
Basic emotional responses (blushing say) should be fairly universal for people, but there are still some people who (for whatever reason) don't understand or pick up on these cues, so it should be expected that not everyone can correctly interpret your AI's emotional state.
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A lot of these answers talk about how colors and shapes can mean different things based on region.
**But if it's a standard schema across all robots, then that doesn't matter as much, because people will learn what that means.**
If I'm from the US and go traveling through Europe and Asia, I don't want the schema to change because then I won't know if the robot is happy or about to blow its circuits.
You can try to make the schema as culture neutral as possible, possibly by using imagery that is not as abstract.
Fire is hot everywhere, and it looks the same everywhere. If the robot is getting mad then imagery that invokes thoughts of fire would apply everywhere.
The sun is warm and happy. There is a theory I've read that the human smile is an imitation of looking at the sun.
Images that invoke thoughts of the sun could show happiness.
Falling water, like rain and tears, is generally associated with sadness, and so could be used.
The idea is that these robots would have their own emotional queues, and people would learn what they mean, so long as they mean the same thing everywhere.
Human sadness looks the same everywhere in all cultures, so it should be that way for robots too.
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I'm picturing a full color oscilloscope screen. Different colors represent different categories of emotion. Red would be the joyful/angry and the smoothness or jaggedness of the circle would indicate the positive or negative aspects. The thickness and/or number of traces of that color would indicate intensity. So, a thin red trace with one or two points, would indicate a mild annoyance that just isn't worth dealing with and multiple smooth red curving shapes indicating extreme joy. You could have multiple colors displayed at once for complex displays of emotion. This would get around the East/West issues with the color Red. If the jaggies show up on one area of the loop, you might be able to tell which person in a group caused it. So, if you're telling it bad puns, that jag is pointing at **you**.
Whatever scheme you pick will likely be difficult for adults to learn but any children growing up with robots will find it natural and get more detail from the display.
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**Colours are key**
There are links between [colour and psychological response](http://www.colour-affects.co.uk/psychological-properties-of-colours), it is possible (as the site shows) to build several personality types from an array of colours.
# [Studies](http://www.colour-affects.co.uk/research):
The studies (below and linked) were carried out to test the [Wright theory of colour](https://lathifakprofessionalpractice.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/wright-theory-copy3.pdf) which underpins the whole thing.
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> Experiment 1.
> The objective of the experiment was to investigate the connection between adjective combinations and colour combinations. Four groups of adjectives and 4 groups of colours were selected in accordance with the Wright theory. Each time, observers were shown four groups of colours and one group of adjectives (emotional/human characteristics) and asked to choose which group of colours best captured the group of adjectives.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ra7iI.jpg)
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> The results were remarkable - achieving 77% overall agreement with the Wright Theory, and over 90% agreement in places. However, perhaps the most striking discovery from this project was the remarkable level of agreement among all observers - reaching over 92% in places - demonstrating that response to colour is not as dependent on age, gender or culture as was previously thought.
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## Application
Whether the a screen contains shapes or not (your prerogative, it could even just be strip lighting) the colours used could influence the impression the user gathers from interaction. Much like body language this would be a method of non-verbal communication available to the robot.
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Well, I explain my answer with an example. I think you should use a pattern of semi-alphabetic colored lines or splotches and so on. An example of where something like this is used is the sequels to Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. The Octospiders use colored lines that run across the sides of their head to express emotions, words, and various other things.
As far as colors themselves go, there are some cultural boundaries, but studies have shown that blue is sad, red is angry, green is happy, amber is cautious or suspicious, and so on.
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I wonder why you would want to use an abstraction on a humanoid face. It is freaky. Humans are hardwired to see and interpret facial features.
You should use facial features. But I can imagine the frownbot / smileyface look provides little narrative opportunity.
Instead, **sample faces from movies**. The entire human emotional range has been depicted in the movies, up close, thousands of times. The face of the robot would show the face of an actor emoting appropriately. I like the idea that some of these clips would be recognizable to the person seeing them and some not.
You could also have the AI play music attuned to its mood. Music is more culturally specific than faces but still well matched to various emotional states. Plus this would lend itself to the movie version.
I worry this scheme will underuse the wealth of romantic faces / music but maybe your AIs get romantic too.
ADDENDUM
It looks like by @Dlugosz comments my answer was misunderstood. From the OP
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> "The head is an ellipsoid with a grey zone for the eye region. It
> resembles a motorcycle helmet, with the visor part covering sensory
> apparatus, and the rest of it — what would cover the mouth and cheeks
> of a human — is a display surface."
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nll9H.jpg)
from [inventorspot.com](http://inventorspot.com/articles/creepy-robot-can-wear-your-friends-faces-and-predict-your-emotio)
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> "...embodied in an industrial practical body design, not a humaniform
> body."
> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iQxFc.gif)
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/J0JKi.jpg)
Why not have just one light indicating mood? That's how computers and servers work right now.
I can look at a machine and know all sorts of basic things from the lights, if a hard drive is online, if a hard drive is faulty, if a mb has an issue, if it's the front or the back, if the wifi is on or off, if the network cable is sending and recieving etc. So the colour of the lights tell me something, the speed it's blinking or not blinking tells me something etc.,
Seems much more logical to have one or 2 lights indicate this rather a pattern. The picture illustrates a range, it doesn't matter what the colour is so long as it's easy to see. Anything more is overkill and therefore bad engineering design.
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First contact with an alien life form often goes badly. In the case of Biothanata, it ***always*** goes badly. The first glimpse of this alien blob is in the form of a falling star, a meteorite. After burning off an ablative layer of rock and juicy outsides, it crash-lands. Once cooled, a red liquid leaks out of what is left of the meteor, quickly consuming any and all bio-matter around it. As it digests the grass, leaves, bugs, and other creatures, it grows, amoeba-like, sending out tendrils, splitting and reforming, but always consuming. It also digests rocks, or at least breaks them down into bite-size pieces to use, though at a much slower pace.
Eventually, if nothing stops it (and nothing has, yet) it consumes all available life on the planet, barring some hardy life forms that are difficult to access. Once it grows large enough, the now enormous blob of red goo begins bunching itself together, then hurling chunks of itself high into the sky. After enough attempts, the giant blob manages to throw one (or more) smaller blobs into space, escaping Earth's gravity. Each blob is packed with rocks and dirt to use as course adjustment. Eventually, over the course of thousands of years, the majority of the space-blob sends itself out to another planet; all that's left is a (relative) handful of indigestible dust and a tiny dried-up blob.
**How big would the blob have to be to toss a 10-foot cube of itself out of Earth's orbit?** Assume the thrown piece can start larger and accelerate itself by shooting pieces of itself off behind it, form itself into a basic wing or flying disk to catch the wind, and generally behave somewhat intelligently; also assume the "main" blob can lift and hold itself to a height of roughly half its base (higher is possible, but will cause it to fall afterwards). Edit: *also* assume the blob can be very, staggeringly large, nearing "planet sized" itself - as big as it needs to get before it can hurl blobs into space.
Once a blob breaks free of the world's gravity, it then breaks free of the Sun's gravity by tossing various space debris behind it. Assuming it has all the time in the universe, and manages to accelerate itself as much as possible, **how long would it take before it found another planet?**
Bonus question: Assuming a starting size of roughly one cubic foot, unchecked growth, and a digestion rate roughly equal to the most aggressive digestion of a creature on Earth, how long would it take for Biothanata to consume the majority of land-based organic life on an Earth-like planet?
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## Not going to happen
Let's start by assuming the blob is, like most life on Earth, mostly water. We'll also say that it is about the same density as water - 1000 kg/m^3.
Figuring out how hard it would be for the blob to escape the Earth's gravity well will be tricky because we have to take into account things like wind resistance due to the atmosphere. So first we'll ignore the Earth and look at how hard it would be to escape the Sun's gravity well and leave the solar system.
From the Earth, [the escape velocity for leaving the solar system is 42km/s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity#List_of_escape_velocities). That's dang fast. For reference, the speed of sound in water is 1.48km/s. This is also a hard limit for how fast your blob could throw a chunk of itself - pressure energy can't realistically travel faster than that through water.
So imagine that somehow your blob can throw a chunk of itself at 1.48km/s, then that chunk can throw a chunk of itself at 1.48km/s, and so on until something gets to 42km/s. Simple math tells us the chunks-throwing-chunks needs to happen 29 times.
In order to propel 2/3 of itself forward at 1.48km/s, a chunk would have to propel the other 1/3 backwards at 2.96km/s. As I've already mentioned, that can't happen so the absolute best case scenario would be for the chunk to propel half of its mass forward at each stage.
Unfortunately for your blob, you've got to worry about exponential decay. Cutting itself in half 29 times doesn't leave it much to work with - you'll have $\frac{1}{2^{29}}$ as much left as you started with. So if you took the entire biomass of the Earth (around $4\times 10^{15}$kg), you could get $7.45\times 10^6$kg to escape velocity. That's enough for a 19 meter cube.
Now let's look at the energy densities involved. To keep things simple, consider a chunk as stationary and consider the kinetic energy of a chunk moving at 1.48km/s. This will give us an estimate of how much energy will be required to throw a chunk that fast. $K=\frac{1}{2}mv^2=1.095\times 10^{6}m$ joules, so for a mass to throw an equal mass with that much energy, it must be able to use 1.095 MJ/kg in a very short amount of time. However, that's [almost within an order of magnitude of the total energy stored by carbohydrates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density). So basically the entire chunk has to consist of readily available energy storage and mechanism to propel itself forward.
Already this is very much stretching the bounds of plausibility, but this is the only way that it's going to work. If 2/3 of a chunk propelled 1/3 forward, only $\frac{1}{3^{29}}\approx 1.4\times 10^{-14}$ of the original would remain, so using the entire biomass of the Earth would get 58kg (about two cubic feet) of the cube out of the solar system.
Also, these cubes won't be roaring out of the solar system - by the time they left the solar system they'd be going around 800m/s. So they could potentially get to the next closest star after 50 trillion years. That's long after the destination star will have died.
Another way in which this gets worse for your blob is that 1.48km/s is actually sort of like the speed of light - it would actually require more and more energy to just get closer and closer to that limit. It's likely that getting to half of that, 740m/s, would take as much energy as what my simplification allowed to get to 1.48km/s. So it would require twice as many chunk-throwing-chunk steps, which squares the mass reduction - $\frac{1}{2^{57}}\approx 1.7\times 10^{-18}$ of the original mass could escape the solar system.
Oh, and remember how we completely ignored escaping the Earth's gravity well? Yeah, that problem wouldn't go away even if the blob consumed the entire Earth, rocks and all, because that doesn't somehow destroy the gravity well.
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**Meteorite impacts** can splash parts of it into orbit.
This is a real thing. We have identified Martian meteorites which landed on earth, identified by isotope analysis. They were spalled off the surface of Mars by meteorite impacts and launched into orbit. We currently have identified 132 Mars rocks on Earth.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_meteorite>
This is a real and logical way for your blob to take the spacetrain. In fact, it is nearly unavoidable for any blob covered planet. The only factor in the way of this process is a thick atmosphere, which is simply overcome by a bigger hit.
Once enough matter is flying about it will surely infect the entire solar system over time.
I do not know if an impact could push it interstellar. If the blob is intelligent enough, stage two could involve forming a thin film, and propelling itself as a [solar sail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail).
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Uhm... unless this blob is made of rocket fuel, it will not happen.
The reason for that is found in the so called [Rocket Equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation). One factor here is the "effective exhaust velocity". Without getting too technical — noting that this is **actual** "rocket science" — that velocity needs to be **really high**. And you cannot achieve that by "tossing stuff backwards". You need to set something ablaze so that you essentially have an ongoing explosion that you can direct backwards.
If you like you can try this question over at the [Space Exploration SE](https://space.stackexchange.com/) and they can give you all the technical details but in short: **it won't happen**.
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Instead of a *blob*, it could be a whispy structure that spreads out, and once parts of it are out of the atmosphere it acts as a solar sail.
I think Fred Hoyle's creature was something like that. Maybe David Gerrold used that too. I don't recall exactly.
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Does the creature have to splash down completely in the first place?
Or could the majority of it take position in orbit and extend a pseudopod of some kind down to the planet (and up in the opposite direction). During the consumption of the planet's resources, this acts as giant root for the orbiting mother blob. When the planet is nearly exhausted, the blob climbs back up the pseudopod, space elevator style, and then drifts off to its next interstellar victim.
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Others have pointed why it's impossible that the creature propelled itself as a rocked, but it could climb to orbit. If the creature could build a tree-like or reef-like structure tens or hundreds of thousands kilometres high, Earth rotation could give it enough velocity to stay in orbit. Once in orbit, the solar sail proposed by JDługosz could lead it to another planet or even another star.
Since the hard part of the process is building such structure, once built it could be producing solar-sailed offsprings in large amounts to colonise the whole galaxy.
Off course, the mechanical properties of the materials need to build the structure are far beyond anything known, but you know that evolution and natural selection are powerful forces even when faced with such hard problems.
[Answer]
It is not possible to throw something into orbit, **and it doesn't matter how fast or how much energy you use.**
You don't need any knowledge of orbital velocities or rocket equations to know this cannot work. The simple fact is this: *you cannot achieve orbit by using only a single impulse*, like a cannonball from a cannon, or a bullet from a gun, or a giant blob throwing bits of itself. The projectile will always go up, around a bit, and back to hit the surface. In practice, it'll immediately burn up when attempting to leaving the atmosphere, and if anything survives that, it'll burn up when re-entering again.
The following diagram may help:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ngQrM.gif)
The points where the red orbital line and the surface of the planet intersect are the launch and impact points. No matter what angle or speeds you launch at, this red ellipse always passes through the launch point.\*
So after launching, all rockets, bullets and blobs only travel in a large arc. The rocket engine can be (and usually is) turned off slightly after launch, just after getting out of the atmosphere, and the ship, bullet or blob would coast all the way to the highest point. It is here, at the apoapsis, that a second burn needs to be made, accelerating the projectile. This accelerating raises the periapsis (the shortest distance from the planets center to the ellipse), eventually raising the periapsis above the surface. When the periapsis has been raised higher than the atmosphere, the rocket will go around and around with no further input.
The first impulse (or burn) also needs to keep the speed low, to get through the thickest bottom layer of the atmosphere without losing all the energy to friction, or without overheating, or exploding due to aerodynamic stress. The more energy you try to add here, the worse these problems get.
* There is only one possible class of orbits achievable by a single impulse. In a pure vacuum (no atmosphere), if you launch exactly horizontally at high enough speed, the launched projectile returns horizontally to the launch point, tangental to the surface. The faster you launch, horizontally, the higher the appapsis will be, at the opposite side of the planet. But at the launch site, the altitude will always be zero. Any mountains near the launch area would be a problem (as is the vacuum to your lifeforms).
The only time anything unpowered leaving the surface with a single impulse can get to an orbit above an atmosphere, is if it is hit by something else when near its apoapsis, providing the second impulse and accelerating it in the prograde direction (so it gets rear ended, speeding it up in the direction it is travelling). It is theorized that a load of melted rocks were blasted out from earth in a gigantic collision, and they bumped each other, forming orbits, which coalesced into the moon, eventually, and anything that didn't get bumped just right rained back down.
TL;DR: You can't get something into orbit by throwing it. Orbital mechanics says no. This is unfortunate, because if you can get to a stable orbit, you have all the time in the universe to deploy a solar sail and eventually float away somewhere else.
You **CAN** however, break free entirely, with nothing more than brute force. You just need to somehow survive getting through the atmosphere at speeds higher than escape velocity. This will mean burning up, like a shooting star in reverse, but given sufficient ablative protection, it may be possible. Escape velocity, at ground level, is Mach 33 (12km per second), but that speed will decrease rapidly due to friction and drag forces, so the actual launch would need to be much, much faster indeed.
It would require much greater sums of energy than rocket launches, since its very inefficient. But as long as the projectile gets through the atmosphere above 12km/s it will fly off into an orbit around the sun. And that's in theory enough to make it to any point in the solar system and beyond, given aeons of time and the right gravity assists.
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Consuming all life on the target planet is counterproductive - the organism will run out of food, and then it's really up the creek.
Might be better to have a more subtle organism that lives in some form of symbiosis with whatever it encounters on the planet. Then, it can wait (this being a very patient organism) for the inhabitants to develop space travel, and just hitch a ride. Why do the hard work, when you can get the native organisms to do it for you?
A truly imaginative organism might even guide the evolution of native creatures in a specific direction, with the goal of just getting back into space.
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So, in within my setting, there are half-animal, half-human beings, as well as humans, whom they all share common divine creators.
Just a bit of elaboration concerning the creation of life in my setting. Once upon a time, there were a race of godly beings, who themselves looked half-animal, half human, who created the many life in the setting, which are lesser beings that look like themselves and the creatures which their half-animal portions resemble. These godly beings did not get along well, until one day they all got together and created the human, which resembled all of them. Shortly after, [the godly beings ascended to a higher plane of existence, probably never to return.](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PutOnABus)
So yeah, with that in mind, how would dynamics for someone who wants to eat meat be like?
I had two ideas, which were:
* A taxing board, where people must pay tribute to whenever they kill an animal, and this board then uses the tax money to help improve living conditions of said animal-person society
* A confession booth, which could be located in each town, within the chapel of it. Whenever a person kills an animal, they must then go and confess their killing, and then maybe make some sort of payment to the chapel to help better local society
EDIT 1:
Right now, the overall:
technology is about pre-industrial, society is about pre-industrial, government is entirely feudalism, there is a large central empire, with very low crown authority, that controls the many kingdoms and land
EDIT 2:
To clarify, the half-animal people are completely sentient and intelligent, while the animals are still just like animals, not sentient.
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I think the way you phrase your question presupposes humans as the dominant species. There may be problems with that.
Just think about our current relationship with living creatures. Some people think of animals like humans, and refuse to eat them. Other people, especially pre-industrial people, thought of many humans as animals, and would have no qualms about enslaving/torturing/killing them, though eating them would be a bit odd. I think you'll have a bigger problem with racism than you will with what's on the menu, but even along that route it raises the question if people would eat the half-humans or not. Under dire circumstances, humans will eat other humans to survive; in times of famine, I'm sure the half-humans would be the first to go, so long as they weren't the majority. If the humans were in the minority, I'm sure they would be eaten instead. Even if established communities don't go down this road, there will be those fringe cases of 'cannibalistic' bandits.
This, of course, would lead to great enmity between your races as word spread of such horrible atrocities, with both sides blaming the other for being "inferior", "innately evil", and "delicious". The only real solution to this, based on our own human history, would be to enslave one of the two groups. Now, with this relatively pessimistic solution you have a spectrum of options: mostly anything between American slavery(bad) and Roman slavery(good). The main point is that if there are such demonstrable differences between races, it will be very difficult for them to believe they should work together peacefully and equally (for example, patriarchy).
As for your suggestions on how to fix the problem of eating meat, you're just making it worse by equating the half-animals to full-animals. Imagine if I was eating a hamburger and I turned to someone and said "Oh no, I'm so sorry, was this cow your mother?" It's an extreme example, but you can see it's insulting. Now imagine hitting on a half-cow by asking to milk her, or a half-bull by asking him to pull your cart (wink wink). The best way to cure racism, in my opinion, is to stop drawing so much attention to it. If you really want your races to get along, don't keep on reminding everyone how different they are.
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There's a few classes of answers. My personal favorite is...
**... they'd do exactly the same thing carnivore animals are expected to do.**
Honestly, the idea that just making nature have a larger importance will devalue meat is a bit anthropomorphic. Open up any Discovery channel special on nature and you'll find nature is a brutal mistress. Lions, bears, and other predators kill all the time. A half-animal predator would probably think similar, unless the gods only made herbivore half-animals. How strange would it be for just one more species to eat meat?
On the other hand, assuming that for some reason all half-animals *are* herbivores...
**... the societies would not mix completely.**
There's nothing that says every city and village is 50% human 50% half-animal. There will be areas with more humans, and areas with more half-animals. In the human areas, meat eating would be more common. In the more mixed areas, it'd be frowned upon. In the more half-animal dominated areas, it could be scareligious.
Consider vegetarianism in our world. In America, vegetarians mix with meat eaters with little trouble (other than it can be tricky for hardcore vegetarians to go out to eat). Travel to a place where Buddhism is more popular, and you will start to see more and more vegetarians. In some places, you'll find it hard to find meat to eat.
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Several current human cultures eat monkey meat, and those are probably as related to humans as a cow would be to a cow/man. So there probably wouldn't be anything like you're suggesting where literally everyone who eats meat treats it like a sin with penance. Probably somewhat more common would be prohibitions on eating your "own" type as a social taboo.
You would likely run into *specific* villages where it's frowned upon, or that have the "tax board" requirement. You'd likely also run into general disgust, say if a deer/woman is watching you eat venison.
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I think things would be (mostly) based on intelligence. The intelligent half-cow would not be considered edible by most of the other races, but the omnivores and carnivores generally wouldn't have any issue (at least not any more) than they do now. There will still be humans who are vegetarian etc. Of course herbivore species won't eat each other nor thing of it. The big one that could be a wild card might be actual Carnivore half breeds, say a tiger human. They might not have any qualms about eating anyone else, cows, half-breeds, humans. They would have to be careful or they could be wiped out as a race but that might not stop them if they are in a tight spot.
EDT: I thought I should add. The reason why I think most half breeds wouldn't care much about the dumber species is because they themselves are not, and might not really want to be so closely associated with them.
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Something to consider when thinking about disgust and discomfort is that people can get used to anything. A cow person who spent his childhood in an isolated field might be appalled when he learns that people eat beef, but a cow person who grew up in a city with a burger joint or two might not think of anything objectionable about it at all. Additionally, since each half-human race was individually created by an intelligent creator in its specific creator's image, you as the designer of this world can assign them all whatever behaviors suit your storytelling, since their minds are the results of a divine design rather than the evolutionary processes that created our world's humans--they could all be totally fine with any sort of meat, or they could all be horrified by it, or it could differ by race, or something in between. And alongside letting you be as arbitrary as you want, the origins of your species if known by them might even lead each race to believe that their particular god created their corresponding non-sentient animal for their benefit, to be exploited as they wish, and as such the meat-eating races might actually *prefer* to eat the flesh of the animals that look like them, viewing it as only right. The non-meat-eaters would of course not do that, but your chicken people might still raise chickens as livestock, and if their neighbors are cat people they may very well have no qualms about selling them some poultry. And your wolf people might not get all that much dog meat, but I'd say they'd consider wolves the best prey to hunt, if they've known their world's history for long enough.
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I suppose it would depend on how the races identify, and on how human they look. If the half-animal races consider themselves to be above the standard animals, then they'd likely share humans' viewpoint on the matter, and not object to it. For example, a catgirl might be fine with someone having a pet cat, and might even have one of her own, while a bull man might enjoy his steaks.
If the half-animal races identify more closely with standard animals, then things could get messy. In this regards, it could go anywhere from how humans treat gorillas & chimpanzees, to viewing themselves as the same race as the standard animals, or anything in between. This is especially true if it's possible for a standard animal to become a member of a half-animal species, such as the nekomata from Japanese mythology. That bull man might think of eating a steak as cannibalism, but have no qualms with pork or chicken.
If the half-animal races look and act mostly human but with animal features, then people would have an easy time seeing them as basically human, just with more noticeable racial features. Conversely, if they look and act more animalistic, people would either see them as having a different culture, or as being closer to actual animals (it could go either way). Either way, there'll likely be racist individuals who treat them like standard animals even if the only difference is that they have animal ears, and there'll be better individuals who treat them the same as humans even if they're basically bipedal cats & dogs. For a small example, consider beastmen from fantasy worlds and kemonomimi from Japanese culture: beastmen are more often treated as having their own distinct society, while kemonomimi are usually just integrated into standard human culture wherever the work is set (but generally not considered to be the same species as humans, because that would imply bestiality). For another example, Goofy and Pluto are both dogs, but one is Mickey's friend and the other is his pet; the difference is in how anthropomorphic they are.
These are only a few possibilities; depending on how you want things to play out, the possibilities are effectively infinite.
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As an aside, there are some other issues you might want to look into:
* I'd be interested in how animal rights activists would act in your world, and how much support they'd get, seeing how similar some of the sentient species *are* to standard animals.
* Considering how racist (or conversely, how unconcerned with race) people can be when the biggest differences are skin colour, facial features, and/or language and pronunciation, I'd be curious how they'd act with much more noticeable features. Would bigots try to treat catgirls & dogmen as pets, for example?
* What would the half-animal races' stances be on eating meat, and how would global culture as a whole feel about it? Would people be more uncomfortable eating meat in mixed company, for example? Would half-animal individuals be fine with eating meat from animals similar to their animal half, or would that be too close for comfort? Would they be fine with eating meat from animals different than their animal half? Would, say, a bull man see eating beef as cannibalism, or would he be A-Ok with it?
* How would political correctness interact with individuals that could be actually be seen as animals by some people?
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I would suggest taking a look at TV Tropes; they go into detail on how many plot devices and concepts are used, along with providing examples of how other works implemented them. Since I don't have enough reputation to post more than 2 links, I'm just going to provide a couple here, then just give you their names for other tropes. [If you're unfamiliar with the site, then to use the names, just paste them after the "/Main/" part of the links.]
Some links you may find useful, for looks at these things and how other works have handled them:
* Racism: <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatMeasureIsANonHuman>
* Anthropomorphism questions: <http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FurryConfusion>
* Meat-eating: CarnivoreConfusion
* Kemonomimi: LittleBitBeastly [Note that the term literally means "animal ears"; for that, and non-human ears as a whole, see UnusualEars instead.]
* Beastmen: BeastMan
* More animalistic: PettingZooPeople
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There are many species on Earth that have "human" characteristics, which humans have no problem eating. I assume that, apart from some humorous (or mean-spirited) situations, half-animals are never confused for full-animals.
* For herbivores, eating meat wouldn't be a problem; half-animal or full-animal, they would both eat vegetarian, and mix with society just as well as human vegetarians.
* No one would eat the half-animals, as they are obviously different from full-animals; it would likely be against the law almost everywhere.
* On the other hand, there wouldn't be any laws against eating full-animals; a half-pig would feel no relation to a full-pig, and would probably enjoy bacon. There may be local taboos, but I would expect most societies to keep half-animals and full-animals distinct.
* Since everyone would have grown up with fully-humans, half-humans, and fully-animals, the various creatures would be a part of life; just like centaurs and don't keep humans from riding horses or eating goats, other half-animal creatures wouldn't treat their fully-animal counterparts as anything terribly special.
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It depends on biology, organization, technological difference, specific culture and time.
Time and biology: If those who eat something get a disease from it, taboo will form. So if half pig/human causes prion infection in anything/human and humans and pigs, they will tend to eat it less (only on specific ocassions or not at all), but if their lifestyle does not allow problems to manifest (most people die to other disease or violently) it will look like eating that meat was ok.
organization and technology: better does what he wants (if gals were only half humans and did not cause observable problems when eated, romans would eat them (if they wanted))
culture - some culture would have irrational taboo not to eat something (eg blond half wolves), some would have irratioanal tradition of eating something.
And there is aspect of domination. Eating someone and his side not able to prevent it is probubbly best form of showing dominance.
Monolithic slaver cultures would much more likely eat other inteligent species, mixed trader/diplomats would frown on it.
I guess this setting would lead to lot of total wars ending in genocide or total subjugation (its much easier to mistreat different species, and you does not even need religion)
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You could take a page out of real world history, instead of inventing something new like a "tax board". For example in the ancient world, animal sacrifice was common. In 1st century Greece, typically animals would be sacrificed at the temples and then the temple would sell the meat to fund itself. (I'm not sure if the person making the sacrifice also got to keep a portion or not.) St. Paul actually mentions this in the Bible; there was some debate among early Christians as to whether they should be vegetarians because most of the meat you could buy had been through a pagan sacrifice. (The verdict was no, you didn't have to be a vegetarian.) This whole economy of sacrificial meat served to separate the buying of meat from the act of slaughter, and to assuage everyone's guilt.
In the modern world, we no longer sacrifice meat at pagan temples, but we *do* still hide the act of slaughter behind closed doors for the most part. Hunters and fishermen will field-dress (clean) the game or fish they take in the field, and may do their own butchering, but for most of us that's pretty distasteful work and we leave it to the professionals. Even the farmer generally doesn't want to be present where the animal is being butchered. So... it's not like we really want to see the slaughter even in a world where the animals look very different from us. In your fantasy world, it'd probably be the same. The farmer, the butcher, the retailer, and the cook, would be four different people, in four different places, to keep the ugly details out of sight and out of mind.
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Earlier this morning, I received 4 mummified corpses carbon-dated back to the late 17th century. Let's name these based on their unique traits: Fang, Saw, Bunny and the Boar.
On closer examination, *Fang* had a big hole in the chest, suggesting that the vampire was killed by a pointed object like a spear or a giant nail.
*Saw*, on the other hand, did not suffer any visible sign of injury; however, there are some signs of severe tooth decay, so he probably died from infection.
Now *Bunny*, the youngest of them, was skinny and buried together with her favorite things, all of which consisted of many vivid colors, except for red and pink. This vampire could have died from anemia, or maybe she was just hemophobic.
What still mystified me the most is *the Boar*! This vampire is the oldest and the most well-built of any vampire that I've ever come across. The body is in good condition, well-preserved in a block of ice. According to a report, *the Boar* fell into an ice lake while being chased by villagers for many days.
Obviously *the Boar* drowned, but what's the deal with the tusks, what kind of advantages did it bring?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fmZ2e.png)
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"The Boar" was one of several subspecies of vampire to evolve hollow, hypodermic fangs which suck blood from its prey, rather than solid ones used to punch through skin and cause bleeding.
However, hollow, hypodermic teeth are fragile. They have a tendency to get damaged if the thing being fed on punches the vampire in the face. Therefore, there was a strong selection pressure among this subpopulation to evolve something capable of defending those weak teeth; or, rather, the subspecies which didn't rapidly died out due to damage to their feeding organs resulting in them not reproducing.
One individual vampire, however, had a mutation: large, robust teeth pointing upwards. Tusks. These tusks covered the hypodermic teeth behind them and stopped prey from damaging them. And so the vampire with the tusks survived and made more vampires and that's how you get the Boar subspecies of vampires.
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Tusked vampires are a rare subspecies of the vampire family. They are only really found outside of urbanized areas, with highest concentrations in large forested areas. Because of their limited contact with humans, this subspecies is known to reach ages far surpassing that of their better-known fanged brethren.
They are the largest and strongest of their species. They are usually hunched, which gets more pronounced with age. They are as comfortable moving bipedally as they are moving in quadrupedal fashion.
Known for being the most animal-like of the vampire family, they don't drain blood from their victims' throats, wrists, or other areas with superficial veins, but dig around in the bodies starting from the abdomen, tearing apart the organs using their tusks, and leaving behind horribly mutilated corpses, from which the heart is invariably missing.
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**Form follows Function**
Modern vampires have a need to somewhat pass in society, and so slightly enlarged Canines (AKA Fangs) can be hidden enough to lure a suspecting victim into a darkened alleyway to exsanguinate them.
However, older Vampires had no such need and found that ambushing their victim from a concealed position was the much more effective hunting tactic. Often from a low, crouched position. The Tusks evolved to facilitate a fast, diagonally upward strike from below into one of the major blood vessels (Femoral artery, Jugular, even passing under the ribcage to hit one of the ones from the heart).
The effectiveness of this tactic and the need for speed and surprise means that these Vampires appear more muscular than their town/city counterparts - and are often mocked (but only behind their backs...) as being a little bit 'Quaint' and 'Simple'.
But make no mistake - though other vampires have evolved more subtle and deceptive means of hunting - the combination of speed, power and a devastating upward strike is not to be scoffed at.
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The traditional view of a vampire is that of one sneaking up on their prey, and biting down on the neck or shoulder. This explains the normal orientation of fangs.
However, vampires are related to bats. And, as everyone knows, bats spend a lot of time hanging upside down.
So too with the "Boar" vampire. Clambering through the trees, our well-muscled sanguivore hangs down suddenly to surprise his prey from above — and, being upside-down, those tusks now point in the correct direction!
Hunger sated, the inverted predator sits up to pull himself back into the foliage, with an impressive display of core-strength.
Of course, in winter, many trees lose their leaves — and the exposed vampire may find himself spotted, and forced to flee an angry mob, across a frozen river.
Modern city-building, with tall buildings, wide roads, and a distinct paucity of suitable greenery, have fortunately led to the decline of this fearsome foe.
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# Convergent Evolution
Just as nature has evolved [the crab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation) frankly an unreasonable amount of times, so too did hemophagic bipeds develop from several unrelated evolutionary lines, in an environment where drinking blood was easier than other strategies for obtaining nutrition.
All of them consume blood more or less the same way, along the pattern of vampire bats: use its pointy bits to break its prey's skin, then lap up the blood with its tongue. The configuration of the pointy bits doesn't make a massive difference to survival fitness, allowing these species to coexist in the same niche.
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When I was a teenager my parents had bought a fish and they were roasting it whole for lunch. When we ate it, realized that instead of a single fishbone, it had two, fused together at about the height of the gills and the tail.
You have been lucky to get a specimen with a genetic anomaly, too.
The poor chap should have been fanged, but due to some mishap his genes got garbled and he ended up with getting down what he should have got up.
The fact that he drowned in the lake while being chased proves that his anomaly made him weaker than the rest of his conspecifics.
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If anything, those tusks are a disadvantage when it comes to drinking blood. So why was old Tusky so buff?
Those teeth drive the lady vampires wild, and sexual selection plays an important role in natural selection. The Boar is nothing more than a blood-sucking peacock.
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The ethical dilemma of vampirism is- that its to infectious, means if its all about sunkisting humans- the diseasse spreads to fast. So the best way to surviv is to shift - to other animals. Wildboars are among the best prey for that, but those who do, develop a tast for it and are looked down upon by noble vampires.
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In a near future where super-cell storms drop massive amounts of water (300 l/m²) in the blink of an eye, cities - built upon the cities of old - have adapted to these tsunami-like flash floods. But how? How do buildings and cellars look? What happens to subways, cars, and canal systems? What prevents buildings (containing air) from becoming pontoon boats when the floors of valleys turn into temporary lakes? What does the warning system look like? Please use a typical concrete city as a example wherever possible.
Addition: As stated in the comments, there are examples of industrialized nations in Asia (India, China, Bangladesh) that have this problem. However, due to the rainfall significantly increasing, even this industrialized nations are not properly prepared. Brand new cities in the tropical regions get regular flooding and all that keeps them up, is continuous rebuilding and repairing. Something that might not be viable in a more constricting economic environment. So to make the question more precise - how to adapt a existing city, located in the danger zones, to these new occasional floods?
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Put your towns and cities on hills.
Towns grew next to roads and rivers. These went along valleys. This meant towns often grew over good farmland. New housing estates are often put on flood plains, as if the name 'flood plain' didn't contain obvious advice.
On the hills, you get good views and clean air. Not all the roads would go up and down. The hills of San Fransisco ought to be a good example, but I remember seeing a subway completely full of water after freak rains up on the hills because the drains had been blocked with waste paper.
There will still be ports and airports which cannot easily move to the hills. You could look at what they do in Holland. Roads and railways raised on dykes. That would not make the roads safe from flash floods, but it ought to give you more of a chance to get to higher ground on good time.
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Take some design cues from Florida Man!
Florida is famous for many oddities among them are Hurricanes, its flat nature, and a high ground water table. This means that in Florida, almost nobody owns a basement and if they do, they cleverly hide the fact (The Magic Kingdom in Disney World, has a famous tunnel system underneath it for cast members to perform their jobs, with access cleverly hidden in the park's theming. It's not built underground, but rather the landscaping hides from the guests that they are actually on the second floor of the park when walking on a foot path.). Typically, Floridian's don't use their garage for storage of a vehicle but rather to serve the function of a basement. In most places, the ground water table will be hit after a few feet of digging, and on avarage, Florida is about 100 feet above sea level, it's highest point being 300 feet. And if you do not have a basement, you store things outside, in your front yard, in heaps and piles like a good Florida Man. Basements simply do not exist.
While traditionally Florida homes were single story ground level units (a cost saving measure as being low to the ground reduces risk of damage from high winds and is easier to cool as heat rises) but with the advent of AC to beat the heat, second story homes could exist and some Floridians, being the people they are, take the basement/garage to a new extreme. Enter the Stilt House. Which is what it says... It's a house on stilts. Essentially, a flat deck is built that can support the weight of a full single-story home on top of it. The drive way will go under the deck, giving the owner a car port for their vehicle (not a garage but an attached over hang cover.) and in some cases, a "basement" of sorts is formed by building walls under the deck and is used for the interior storage that the garage would fill for a Floridian or a basement for other areas. The stilt house has the added benefit of lifting the primary living areas off the ground, which makes them very popular in swampy and coastal areas of Florida (which is pretty much the entire state) which are prone to frequent flooding by Hurricanes or even heavy rains. That said, it's more for the Storm Surge protection than it is for the Swamp, which is much rarer to see (Mostly because most Floridians live near the coast. Aside from Orlando, there are no major land locked communities, though there is plenty of agricultural development. It's rare to see a stilt home built on swamp land because it's rare to find someone who wants to live there.).
Now, if you are asking what about the car and the stuff if a storm surge comes in, well, the question is a matter of simplicity... typically storm surges that will enter residential areas are powerful enough to prompt an evacuation, in which case the car is not going to be at the house when the storm surge is at it's worst, and the point of the stilt home is to keep the important living area like the beds, clothes, food and dishes out of the rising water. After all, basements flood frequently in areas that can have basements without storm surges. And Hurricanes typically have enough time that a home owner can move it to the upper levels (which they aren't actually going to live in while the storm is raging, so the whole living area becomes storage).
Stilt homes are not just a Floridian thing and can be found in many parts of the world and in many sub-tropical or tropical areas, they give a nice appearance (sort of a tree house look) that fits the region well. One of the most famous media depictions of a Stilt House was the home of the titular characters in Lilo and Stich, and was located in a part of the island that was up hill from the shore in various depictions (in the film, the fire trucks responding to a fire reported by Lilo are seen turning towards the mountain in the center of the island from their present location.).
With this in mind, transit can also be compensated for by relying on elevated tracks rather than tunneled lines. The whole point of using underground tunnels is grade seperation of the tracks which allows the trains to get into urban cores while not interfering with surface traffic. Florida again does not have the option to build tunnels, so they tend to have grade seperation in the form of elevated tracks (Such as the Disney Monorail and TTA People Mover attraction or the Miami Metrorail system.
It should be pointed out that Hurricanes and other similar cyclonic storms are displacing the water, not leaving it permanently in new once dry places. These storms are fueled by warm ocean water and rapidly lose strength over land, so the surge, however devastating, will recede and allow for the repair.
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Let's take a page from the local map. While we never see anything at the level you envision we do on occasion get it coming down awfully fast.
In the areas that take flood engineering seriously houses are set above their streets (while I have not measured I would say our house is at least a foot above our street) and for the most part those streets are above the big streets.
Our street is sloped with the land and never gets any appreciable water level. The streets that follow the contours can get a fair amount of water but they're arranged to drain out to the main streets--they don't collect enough water to threaten the houses.
The main streets following the land are another matter--they become torrents. I have seen them completely impassable due to water. It doesn't last long, the water is soon gone and the road crews come out and clean up the rocks (I've seen it bad enough I would hesitate to take a normal passenger car over them) that get left where the side streets join the main streets.
Woe to the old areas built before they got serious about flood control, though. With 4" of annual rainfall people don't realize the issue and occasionally it kills some homeless people who used stormwater passages for shelter.
As others have said, don't build on the valley floor.
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# To the Skyscrapers!
Modern skyscrapers are hundreds of feet high. City planners take note of the typical flood level, add a healthy buffer, and set the lowest residential levels at that height. Add a decade for civil engineering to progress, and new purpose-built residential, commercial, and industrial skyscrapers would be on the rise (ha). And since you don't have to worry about the streets below, these could be less like individual buildings and more like a network of massive arched bridges that have skyscrapers as hubs.
### Transportation
Automated [flying cars/taxis](https://www.google.com/search?q=flying%20taxi&tbm=nws) are already a thing, and would replace cars for those that can afford them. Cable gondolas would replace busses and subways to move large numbers of people between megastructures, then people would navigate between floors with enlarged e
### Won't the foundations wash away?
However big you think skyscraper foundations must be, [they're bigger,](https://www.groundworks.com/resources/how-far-underground-are-skyscraper-foundations/) and some connect to bedrock itself. Even if the floodwaters below virtually never subside, modern construction technology is at a point where that's not really a problem. Hydraulic-setting cement has been around [since Roman times,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete) and many Roman structures have spent nearly 2,000 years underwater perfectly intact. Current foundations would last long enough to be reinforced and for new construction to take place. And if we can make steel oil rigs that survive **literal** tsunamis, our engineers are up to the task
### But realistically...
This would be a massively expensive endeavor, and all expenses are eventually paid for by taxpayers and customers. People live in cities because the convenience is worth the cost, which would no longer be the case. I expect people would migrate to mountainous areas that are already geographically suited to divert that much rainfall, and those areas would organically develop into new population centers.
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Simple; build a city on a plate:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Ifo1.jpg)
This is a render of Midgar, the central and largest city in the Final Fantasy VII metaseries. While it was done for different reasons, the modern city was constructed in 8 radial sectors around a central pillar, with street level being about 50 meters (165 feet) above true ground level IIRC. In the game, the ground level is also populated, but mainly a mix of slums and disposal yards, becoming ever more polluted by the urban activity above.
Build the structural supports strong enough, and 50m would be well above the storm surge of most hurricanes, as well as most tsunamis including the one that caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster, enabling the elevated city to survive such events simply by letting the water rise and recede beneath it. There have been tidal waves over 50m - the Lituya Bay tsunami was more than ten times taller than that at cresting height - but they are very rare and localized, largely because the event involves an intense geologic event in an otherwise-sheltered area that contains the energy (case in point, the Lituya Bay tsunami was triggered by an earthquake literally dumping half a mountain into the relatively small and almost fully-enclosed bay, giving the water nowhere to go).
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I agree that you should research what coastal cities have been doing to protect against the risk of flooding due to climate change. Here is a link to [NYC's coastal flood initiative](https://climate.cityofnewyork.us/initiatives/coastal-flood-adaptation/). Similar to this, here is a link to [NYC coastal waterfront plan](https://www.waterfrontplan.nyc/climate-resiliency-and-adaptation).
Here is a good article that tells about [what Japan did after the big Tsunami in 2011](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212420916306744). The Green Forest Wall project is one strategy. Similar to this initiative, more recently here is link to [what Japan is doing now](https://news.stanford.edu/2020/05/04/rethinking-tsunami-defense/) to protect against Tsunamis.
[Underground dams](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181129-the-underground-cathedral-protecting-tokyo-from-floods) is another strategy worth looking into that Tokyo employs.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Px3rF.jpg)
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## For tsunamis: a gigantic sea wall
If you really want to get around the "rebuilding" problem after a tsunami for already existing cities in the problem zone, a good way is to build a gigantic wall around the city.
From the outside it should feature star like structures like on old castles facing the ocean side to help breaking the waves and give additional structure.
To the land side the wall can be a bit smaller but should still be present so that the retreating water does not get trapped after the tsunami.
On the inside the wall should be supported by earth and concrete that falls of in 45° to give the wall the most strength you can get against the tsunami. So the wall would need to be a bit outside the city.
## Now we handle the problems introduced by the wall
Transportation into and out of the city would ofcourse start to be problematic. For individual people I imagine helicopter taxis that bring people to and from an big parking lot.
For goods and commuters we would need a big deep underground railway and maybe a harbour ontop the seawall.
The underground railway should be sealed as good as possible to prevent leakage and also needs a good drainage for water that might pour in from somewhere. It would need to be underground for at least a few dozen kilometers, until we are out of the problem zone. On the other end there would also quickly develop another city as with all trading routes.
The harbour would consist of a lot of cranes to load containers on and off with multi line railway leading from the harbour down to the city.
Also the city should feature a sewage that can be closed with big and tight doors within minutes. This is to ensure that rainwater can be drained while not giving the tsunami a way into the city.
## One problem remains
This will be hella expensive but possible.
After all even small local rulers could get castles build within a few years using medieval technology. And here we have a quite similar situation just scaled up (and the enemy is "just" water). However this would either need a strongly government dominated society (like medieval times) with huge taxes, or a community driven effort where every big and small company does its part.
However in the western societies this would not be feasible since repairing your buildings every few years is much cheaper in the short run and thats what investors are interested in.
A seawall that would only break even and start to save money dozens of years in the future would even be considered by a investment oriented society. If it becomes to expensive to rebuild the companies would just move out.
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[Here are some maps for reference](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/lniivb/maps_detailing_the_current_state_of_the_united/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
For some context, in my world, from 2030-2040, an event known as the Great Collapse saw the human race pushed towards the brink of extinction due to Unidentified Colossal Organisms/UCOs rising up from their ancient hibernation in order to rampage and cause chaos and destruction across the planet, leading to the deaths of billions along with the collapse and even extinction of entire countries, peoples, and cultures.
Out of the over 350 individual UCOs that rose up, the largest, strongest, most destructive, and most powerful of them all, Godzilla (who stands at over 500 meters tall), was directly responsible for directly killing over 850 million humans on all seven continents while also being directly responsible for the collapse of tens of countries along with battling and killing dozens of other UCOs that challenged Godzilla. It doesn’t help that Godzilla is the only known Apex-class UCO to have been discovered, making him the top of the planet’s food chain.
Anyway, Godzilla’s territorial realm extends across the entire Pacific Ocean/Pacific Rim and includes large swaths of land in Asia, Oceania, North America, and South America. In the United States of North America, after Godzilla ravaged what was once the Western United States of America and British Columbia (which now form the **Godzilla Continental Exclusion Zone**) and forced the mass evacuation of over 50 million people, the USNA military fortified the Rocky Mountains and established the **Western Defense Line**, the most heavily fortified and militarized border on the planet stretching from Fairbanks, Alaska down to Phoenix, Arizona, in order to defend against Godzilla and any other UCOs in the Exclusion Zone.
My idea so far involves the Western Defense Line having over 60,000 troops in total. The WDL has 12 massive fortresses call *Battle Stations* lining across the entire Defense Line in strategic locations, with there also being eight Command Battle Stations that oversee a particular sector of the WDL (the Battle Stations and Command Battle Stations look like the [Shatterdomes](https://images.app.goo.gl/eQf8shPWthu8AGAS6) from Pacific Rim). Each Battle Station has 3,000 troops stationed there and is fully capable of being self-sufficient, with each Battle Station having their own ground and logistics units and a dedicated air wing. Each Battle Station is also equipped with two Massive Ordnance Projectile Cannons, which are the largest artillery pieces ever created capable of annihilating entire city blocks and shooting at a target 60 miles away.
But what else should I keep in mind when creating heavily fortified and militarized borders? What should I add and/or avoid doing?
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**The Maginot Line worked as designed. It wasn't enough.**
In the modern age, the purpose of fortifications is not to win or to hold out, it is to allow a small force of defenders to **delay the enemy and to buy time for offensive action elsewhere**.
* Tactically, defensive positions allow a force to inflict greater casualties than it suffers, which means that the attacker has to concentrate a superior number of troops. For mechanized war, a ratio of 3:1 or higher is in the literature.
* Strategically, standing on the defensive means that the attacker can decide when and where to attack. He will be able to achieve superior concentrations locally.
Why defend, then? Either because you've just about lost, or to free more of your own troops. The much-maligned Maginot Line did stop the Germans from breaking through where the line was, but the Germans just went elsewhere. It was the failure of the French mobile forces to stop the Germans which lost the war, not the static defense of the line.
That being said, your numbers don't make sense. 20 bases with 3,000 troops each are 60,000 fortress troops, about as many as in two or three divisions. If the US still can build fortresses, they should have way more than two divisions left.
A cannon range of 60 miles rivals what the most modern artillery can do today, but it means 12 fortresses can only defend a 1,440-mile circumfence. That's not enough to hold the Rockies.
There used to be artillery firing nuclear shells. They could level more than just a city block. For that matter, look at modern rocket artillery.
**So if you want to tell an adventure story with giant monsters, go for it. But don't get nailed down on details.**
There are "many" fortress bases. Your characters don't know how many, they know theirs, they know the ones on their right and left flank, they know the one where their old buddy was reassigned. Or maybe the details are all classified.
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**You Don't Want Walls, You Want Bait**
Sure you want to have a 20ft high steel wall with a 100ft wide 40ft deep trench facing the exclusion zone to keep out the low-grade Kaiju. Or at least a fence to ward off humans who accidentally stray to far west. You might even want some strategically placed strongpoints for specialist troops/machines to sally from in the event a mid-grade Kaiju gets frisky. But what you REALLY want (Given that Godzilla is essentially unkillable and the high-end kaiju probably only slightly less invulnerable) is a way to get the Tier 1 Kaiju to GO ANOTHER WAY.
So you want Bait. Tunnels under your lines that stretch deep into the exclusion zone that are far to small for any sort of Kaiju, but which on short notice can pop out something that interests the Kaiju. The Bait then heads screaming in the direction *opposite* of your walls/civilian centers. If you want added spice, maybe have it head towards another known Kaiju in the hopes the monsters will kill each other off. These Bait machines also need to have SOME sort of Kaiju nourishment, so they don't end up getting viewed as inedible and eventually ignored.
*Why tunnel-deployed?* You don't want the Kaiju to view the Wall/end of the zone as a source of food. Thus you need some sort of underground system where the Bait inevitably appears BEHIND any Kaiju that hits X location. You'd want literally thousands of such tunnels so the appearance of Bait could be deemed random and you don't just have Kaiju "camping" the tunnel exits. For the same reason they need to be as hidden as possible. This also means that there needs to be essentially wasteland between where the bait arrives and the wall. So the Kaiju thinks "man that looks like a terrible place to find dinner" and makes going towards the Wall as unappealing as possible. So they get to the edge of the wasteland, a tasty snack pops up behind them, and they think "oh yeah, there's obviously better hunting in the West."
*What Nourishment?* That depends on the type of Kaiju. Worst-case scenario is they're manned craft. And lets face it, they are because "Kaiju bait pilot" would be a HELL of a main character. Plus who knows how good your radio/satellite comms are. I'm envisioning some sort of ATV/mech/skimmer (tech-level depending) that carries a human crewman or two and a couple cows or a few tons of meat or radioactive elements/whateverelse a Kaiju feeds on in your universe.
*The Plan* Ensign Ricky is a KRV (Kaiju Redirection Vehcile) pilot, and it's his shift at Bastion 12 when a Primary Level Kaiju crosses within 50 miles of The Wall. Bastion 12 goes to Alert and Ensign Ricky mans his KRV and prays. at 40 miles to the wall the Kaiju officially enters the Redirection Zone and Ensign Ricky's KRV is launched. Tactical command has set up Ricky's KRV to appear half a mile to the Northwest of the Kaiju. The KRV appears, and sends up various flares/sirens/look-at-me devices. The Kaiju, naturally, turns. It sees the KRV, senses the meat/radioactivity/whatever inside, and pursues. Ensign Ricky now plays the dangerous game of trying to stay in front of the Kaiju and unkilled for either A: as long as possible, or B: until he reaches some arbitrary distance from the Wall far enough away that the Kaiju won't just turn around and be back in an hour. The chase might last days, it might last hours. Hell it might take weeks! (No idea on your Kaiju speed.) Eventually though the jig is up. Ricky ejects. The pod punches him clear of the Kaiju, who pursues the KRV, kills it, and feeds. Ensign Ricky now must face the treacherous Exclusion Zone and potentially other Kaiju to return home, and/or Ricky is killed by the Kaiju and his family gets a "Deeply Regrets" telegram.
(Sidenote: you could also have tunnels like 200 miles away where KRVs could dive into and escape Kaiju, but that's a whole other problem of "do the Kaiju dig after it" "do the Kaiju now 'camp" the escape holes" etc. etc. running-hopefully-ejecting-hike-back seems like the best of bad options to me at this point.)
You could also have some sort of airborne recovery teams to rescue ejected KRV pilots. But then you run the risk of a Kaiju following such an aircraft right back to the wall, which isn't ideal. Though if your Kaiju are slow enough it's a possibility. Or you may want to launch "Squadrons" of KRVs because bigger Kaiju won't be interested in "just" 1,000lbs of meat/radioactive stuff/whatever they eat.
\*Addendum: Your 60 mile range "city block leveling" artillery is hugely under-gunned. An upgrade in range and/or lethality is needed if you want these to be in contention for "largest artillery pieces ever created." See [HERE] for latest super-artillery[1](https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a31083160/leaked-images-army-super-gun-strategic-long-range-cannon/) and even the [Paris Gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Gun) in WWI was longer-ranged.
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Things to keep in mind:
* At least 50% of your soldiers are off-duty or sleeping at any particular time. Another 10% are likely away on leave. Some small percentage are on sick-call, a few may be incarcerated. 3,000 at a base means perhaps 1200 awake and on-duty.
* 12-hour shifts wear people down after a few weeks. It lowers morale and readiness. People can do it for a year or more if they must...but they won't like it.
* Soldiers require constant training and re-training to maintain proficiency. The list of tasks to train upon can be endless, depending upon their specialty.
* It takes *months* to train new soldiers in the minimum tasks that they need to perform as a unit to avoid being a liability in battle. Since you don't know when an attack will happen, you might need that training pipeline going all the time to prepare replacement soldiers. Alternately you might need to train 20,000 new soldiers every summer. And all those trainers are *in addition* to your force at the border.
* It takes *years* to train new officers and sergeants, especially if you want them to be any good.Both also needs years of ongoing training. In the USA, about 20% of officers are in full-time next-level training (or teaching it) at any particular time.
* It's phenomenally expensive to train, equip, feed, house, arm, and sustain a military fighting force. It takes a vast logistical chain, an enormous industrial base. 60,000 is pretty small, but still requires warehouses full of artillery shells and fleets of trucks to haul food. Those 20,000 new conscripts (or recruits) each year need boots and uniforms. Scouts and spotters need fuel and parts for their snowmobiles and dune buggies and radios and binoculars.
* Conscripts tend to be cheaper to pay than professionals, but also tend to have more casualties, and tend to be a bit more corrupt: Your replacement demands will be higher, your logistics folks bloat up as more double-checking is needed, and your incarceration percentage bumps up a few percent.
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**Hotties in planes!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/c8Ca0.jpg)
You need some characters with the perspective to tell your story. The people in charge of firing the big guns don't have that perspective and they also never work out and their skin is terrible. You need fighter pilots to fly out and look at the kaiju with their own gleaming eyes. They can help aim the big guns and satellite weapons and with their acerbic and witty reports from the front. They can volunteer at great personal risk to carry experimental weapons. They can wear skin tight futuristic flight suits. They can lose a friend to a kaiju and swear revenge. They can fly in kaiju mouths and detonate above mentioned experimental weapon - but maybe they bail out at the last minute! Holy cow!
Yes, yes: the hotties. Hotties of all persuasions but all with perfect teeth and toned abs will fly planes forward from your very stationary and boring wall and engage kaiju in all different engaging ways. Your story will write itself!
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My story is set in a sort of apocalyptic world, the main characters live in an old house and they’re too afraid to go out as there’re creatures hunting them. They obviously still need to eat so my question is what kind of fruits, vegetables, roots, or just anything edible at all, can they grow inside a house with very little resources?
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My money is on potatoes, for the following reasons:
1. They are sturdy plants with a good output. [From Wikipedia:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato)
>
> According to conservative estimates, the introduction of the potato was responsible for a quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900. In the Altiplano, potatoes provided the principal energy source for the Inca civilization, its predecessors, and its Spanish successor. Following the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, the Spanish introduced the potato to Europe in the second half of the 16th century, part of the Columbian exchange. The staple was subsequently conveyed by European mariners to territories and ports throughout the world. The potato was slow to be adopted by European farmers, but soon enough it became an important food staple and field crop that played a major role in the European 19th century population boom.
>
>
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2. They are nutritious. [Wikipedia also compares it to other staple foods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato#Comparison_to_other_staple_foods), and while they not the ones with the most of any given nutrient per portion, they do have a relatively good amount of vitamin C while being **comparatively** low on carbs and fats (as in they have less carbs per weight than rice, but please notice they are still really high in carbs anyway).
3. They are **DELICIOUS**[citation needed]. You can [boil'em, mash'em, stick'em in a stew](https://knowyourmeme.com/videos/126822-lord-of-the-rings). They are also very good in french fries format, which is healthy because cooking does not kill all germs (to be really healthy, take this with a grain of salt).
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While potatoes are really good, don't rely just on them. Ireland learned this the hard way once due to a potato blight.
Also, to really meet their nutrition requirements in the long run, your people will need to vary the plants they eat. A house may not provide adequate environment for maize (corn), wheat and specially soy and rice. They will need some fields for those.
There is a novel called [The Martian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(Weir_novel)), which was also made into a movie starring Matt Damon. It is about an astronaut/botanist stranded in Mars, surviving alone on a diet mostly based on potato. The book aims to be as scientifically correct as possible and is really pedantic about every tiny scientific detail. The rocket science and chemistry in the novel are precise and correct, but the fact that the protagonist survived for months on potatoes alone is the one thing that is off in that book.
[Answer]
**Wine cellar**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ibnE2.jpg)
A different way to get calories. An old house might have a wine cellar. A bottle of wine has about 700 calories and safe water. People do live on wine. The depicted wine cellar must have several hundred bottles which would be enough for months. If there is some hard liquor that has even more calories - maybe 1600 kcal / bottle. I think you would need some water with that but the scotch should kill any germs if you leave them together for a minute or 2.
The living on liquor angle also potentially makes things scarier for your story. Drunk people can be more emotional, or have lapses of judgement, or perceive things in an altered way. If they run out of liquor they will have withdrawals and that would be really scary.
A wine cellar is not going to sustain you for years. I cannot think of anything that could provide adequate calories able to grow in the area provided by a house, with no outside inputs except sun. We need a lot of calories; especially me. If it could be done I think people would be doing it all over the world.
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You need to decide how strict you want to be on the 'inside the house' part. If you don't have some fancy green house or halls with a lot of artificial light, you can't really grow any plants indoor in sufficient quantities to feed people. In that case your best bet would be mushrooms which will grow well in any damp dark cellar. It's hard to make a balanced diet out of that.
If you are willing to handwave that, I would recommend a combination of rice and soy beans. This is a historically well proven combination that already gives you all nutrients that humans need in significant quantities. Supplement with a small amount of salt and you are essentially good to go. Note that you need a few hectar of farm land per person to grow enough to feed them.
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Potatoes are a good choice if you ask me. Same with yam and ube. Make candy out of ube you can.
Also, since I live in Alaska, you can grow raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries indoors. I hear people do this.
The part where potatoes are grown on Mars is one of my favorite parts of the movie "The Martian".
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In your scenario, is there still running water and electricity?
If so, there are many plants that we can grow in our homes.
There are types of cucumber and tomatoes are rather simple.
There are home hydroponic setups like the aerogarden, but those grow herbs and spices, and a few small salad ingredients, nothing substantial.
You might have your character be someone who is already growing marijuana in his basement with grow lights, so he just has to add some variety to his crops!
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I agree with the [answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/179901/75417) that potatoes are going to be a good vegetable to grow.
However, as pointed out, it only provides carbohydrates- no protein or fat.
depending on how you define "grow" i think it's worth raising chickens in the house.
If you raise a few chickens you'll have a supply of eggs. Plus if you let some eggs hatch and raise new chickens, you can eat the older chicken and get some meat.
You can use the chicken dung to fertilize the potato crop, thus both adding nutrients to your crop as well as disposing of the waste.
and if you create a compost pile of the dung to break it down, you'll end up with worms and bugs which will be more food for the chicken.
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I live in warmer weather (it only occasionally reaches to freezing in winter) so my suggestions may be tainted by that background.
Also, I think it stands to reason that a *variety* of corps would be more beneficial from a nutrition and also crop seasonality standpoint. One would obviously have to incorporate storage techniques like fermenting, dehydration, and cool storage to preserve a part of the in-season overproduction for leaner times.
I am thinking that it would be **really** useful to have access to a flat roof space (like a commercial building rooftop) where they would, amongst others, have
* access to sunlight
* growing space
* space for greenhouses
* space and ventilation for livestock e.g. chickens or pigeons
* space and ventilation for a composting operation, which may (probably should) include a way to treat/recycle human waste (urine, feces)
Otherwise, if your old mansion has a lot of balconies, especially towards the sun, these will come in handy for the same reasons. Or sunrooms/large windows, which will double as greenhouses.
I hear the potato proponents, but in warmer weather sweet potatoes are a better option: they are more drought resistant, one can also eat the shoots and leaves (which are poisonous in the potato), and (arguably) are slightly better nutrient wise. Be aware that both crops need a *lot* of space. Even though both are touted to be some of the most nutrient-dense crops per ground area covered. Also keep in mind that potatoes (and root crops in general) are slow-growing, so while it may be a good long-term sustainability option, for the first 3-5 months there won't be much to eat. On the positive side they can be made to store well for 6-8 months with just a little labor and know-how.
Since your setting is space-restricted, your gardening would probably rely heavily on plants that use **vertical** space: think vining crops like (some varieties of) squash/melons/cucumbers, beans, peas, tomatoes, etc. One related concept you may want to read up on some in this regards is the so-called **Food Forest**, which combines plants at different heights in the same space to use the soil to its maximum potential; the plant interaction often has mutually beneficial effects too. Up to 7 "layers" are often defined, obviously some won't be possible in your setting due to space constraints and time needed to establish:
1. trees (fruit and nuts)
2. vines (as mentioned)
3. scrubs (berries)
4. perennial vegetables
5. herbs
6. ground covers (e.g. strawberries)
7. root crops ([sweet] potatoes, beetroot, carrots, onions, ...)
Do note however that one of the main limiting factors would still be light: all leaves need sufficient light even up on a wall or in a tree. **"Light in" is pretty much proportional to the amount of "food out".**
Another way to make use of vertical space, would be to have tiers of **hydroponics/aquaponics/vermiponics** channels mounted on walls.
And remember, for all vertical/wall-mounted growing systems above, you would not be limited to inside walls (depending on your type of monster). Systems mounted high enough on outside walls to be out of reach of monsters will create a lot of space and access to sunlight. The characters will need some pre-existing or jury-rigged walkways to access them, though.
I've mentioned pigeons. So plant food could be supplemented from birds such as these that could be caught by the inhabitants. Another way to supplement plant food would be through [Entomophagy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy), in other words, [Insects as food](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insects_as_food).
# How much space do you need?
This obviously depends on *a lot* of factors (like light, water and temperature) and thus no two sources agree. I'd say you could get away with around 2m² **per adult** for year-round production under conditions including:
* maximum soil fertility, which can be improved with additions of earthworm compost, bone meal and other nutrient sources, the targeted improvement of microbial/fungal soil activity, mulching, and a minimum-till approach.
* (healthy soil like this that produces healthy strong plants will also do much to avoid plant diseases and pest insects.)
* multi-tier production like in the Food Forest concept, or similar.
* efficient recycling of nutrients back into the soil.
* optimal light, moisture, temperature.
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So, in my world, there are a group of people, mostly unknown to the rest of the world, who took shelter from the apocalypse 90 years ago in great underground bunkers.
Compared to the rest of the Wasteland, they live in a utopia (except for all the xenophobia, fascism, and euthanasia). They have access to clean water, plentiful food, and so on. Basically, they live a modern style of life, while the rest of the world has returned to early 19th century.
So, my question is, considering their lifestyle, would the Bunker Dwellers have any noticeable genetic differences to Wastelanders, after 3-4 generations underground?
[Answer]
Genetic no.....
Physical yes. Ample food, modern healthcare and clean water means they would be healthier, [taller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height) and good teeth. Skin would be paler and less blemishes.
A child's access to health and nutrition greatly impacts on height, strength and intelligence later in life.
Genetic changes are only really likely if the vault dwellers use genetic engineering to improve themselves or wasteland dwellers suffer from radiation caused diseases.
[Answer]
3-4 generations are not enough to establish noticeable differences between populations.
The only noticeable differences will come from the different diets: those with a richer diet will grow better (taller, bigger), while the other will necessarily reflect the much poorer diet.
For a visual reference, you can look at the famous Robert Capa's photo of a Sicilian farmer and an American soldier during WWII:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4KHYN.jpg)
You can clearly perceive the difference in size between the well fed American soldier and the farmer. Something similar would be present in your case between the two groups.
But it won't be based on genetic differences.
[Answer]
**There are likely to be genetic differences, but ones that were present at the time the groups split.**
Who had access to the bunkers? I'm sure it was not random luck.
The other differences will be that people with a variety of disabilities and health conditions (which may or may not be genetic) are more likely to die off if they are in the wasteland. Since most such conditions are genetic only in terms of how likely you are to get the condition, this will probably not affect the actual genetics. Yet.
For example, there aren't going to be a lot of wastelanders with conditions that affect their stamina (running away from danger), eyesight, or mobility, for example, a heart condition that shows up under physical stress. But the genetics involve multiple alleles throughout the genome (not a single inherited SNP) so it is way too early for this "natural selection" to change the gene pool in any significant way.
Though even one generation can change epigenetics. Methylation markers on the DNA itself that turns certain alleles on or off. Epigenetics can carry information acquired after birth and pass it along to the next (unborn) generation. It does not change the actual DNA but markers are inherited to a degree. Something like famine can affect generations that never experienced it.
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**None. None at all.**
90 years? Unless life in the wastelands is unbelievably hard, you have a better-than-average chance of someone still being alive in the wasteland who was there (even if they couldn't remember) when the bunker was closed.
How much genetic difference do you have with your grandfather? Or, at very worst, your great grandfather?
None, of course.
@L.Dutch is right, the *environment* could bring some differences, but even that wouldn't be horrible. Give the wastelanders a bath, dress them in ~~Fallout~~ Bunker clothes and other than their tan and possibly and accent, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them.
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[Question]
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In the story I am currently working on the plot revolves around this temple that is meant to be lost to time but one day discovered (I’ve made a post about the design of the temple itself before).
However now in my story I’m toying with having the main character, a sort of knock-off Indiana Jones explorer, find this temple approximately 100 years after The Fall of Humanity, and after finding this temple fly off in a plane that was hidden in a hangar built into the temple. But in wanting to keep this story plausible I have a few questions about the plane and possible infrastructure needed.
1. What infrastructure would be needed to protect the plane for storage and support a possible take-off?
2. What type of plane would be best suited to be “hidden away”? I was thinking because nuclear war is what widely led to Humanity’s near extinction, maybe an older plane like WW1 or Pre-WW2 with all mechanical parts might be better as the electronics wouldn’t be damaged, but I’m unsure how long a plane like that could go without maintenance
[Answer]
I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but let's say it's nowhere near the coast and rust does not play an issue, then if the engine had oil or fuel in those would turn to sludge. Battery would be long dead, it would need maintenance. Dust would clog up every other moving part too.
If your character can do basic maintenance, maybe. But the storage conditions will have to be pristine!
Then also old engines require different fuel and oil...
(I know this as we have 7 cars stored for 50years in pristine condition in an aircraft hangar, and they will never run without LOTS of coaxing)
[Answer]
A barely-possible way to make this work:
* Build the temple of top of a hill.
* Build a glider out of strong durable material; the resins that bind a lot of high tech composites are not a hundred-year material, but the right metal might work. (See comments from people who know more about materials than me.)
* The glider is stored in a launch bed powered by a rustproof spring mechanism (titanium might work).
* Aim the glider at a salt flat, large shallow lake, or other novice-friendly landing target. Hope it's still clear 100 years later.
* Deploy a parachute to prevent a crash landing.
I'll leave it to you to find a way to get the explorer to climb into the cockpit, fasten their seat belt/harness, trigger the launch mechanism, and deploy the parachute at a good moment.
[Answer]
This is absolutely doable, but with some slight bending of the rules. All that is really required, as far as your prompt goes, is that the character discovers and flys a personal flying machine away from the temple for an indeterminate distance.
# Solution 1
Let's start with the most basic approach by giving our hero a hang glider or paraglider. Both of these use few moving parts (mostly pulleys and tensioning elements), and use no fluids or fuel.
The only limit to flight-worthness is the breakdown rate of the various airframe elements: Nylon, Kevlar (and other amarids), foam in the harness/seat, and potentially the epoxy/plastic composing the CFRP/GFRP spars of a hang glider are at risk. I suspect that if these are stored away from the atmosphere (say in an Argon-filled container), they will be perfectly preserved.
This gets our hero flying with a glide ratio of ~ 10:1 (if not just falling with style).
**Storage Requirements:** *2m^3 Argon-filled vault.*
**Maintenance Required:** *None*
# Solution 1.5
Ok, let's add the requirement that our hero must fly in sustained level flight with the vehicle under its own power. We've already solved the issues with the airframe surviving the time frame required, let's add power:
Hang gliders and paragliders become self-powered by basically adding a 2-stroke engine and maybe a set of tricycle wheels. The new list of dependencies is everything that is needed by the engine: Oil, fuel, lubricants, spare parts such as bearings and O-rings.
If present, an electronic ignition system may present a challenge, as any driving electronics would have to address the following:
1. Tin Whiskering, where soldered parts develop structures that short to other legs on ICs.
2. Silicon Dopant migration/diffusion.
3. EEPROM or Flash data retention.
4. Capacitors derating due to breakdown of dielectric material.
Glow plug or magneto ignition methods probably are the safest bet in light of the above list.
If our hero can follow instructions to produce reasonable substitutes for the various perishable fluids listed above, the motor may well be able to operate. This results in our hero flying perhaps 300 kilometers at 15 m/s (180 miles at 30 knots).
**Storage Requirements:** *4m^3 Argon-filled vault.*
**Maintenance Required:** *All fluids for the motor.*
# Solution 2
So you want our hero to fly in a more substantial aircraft for a much further distance? Let's try a self-launching\* jet-powered sailplane! I present to you the JS1:
[JS1 Revelation](http://www.pilotspost.co.za/articles/160205-Jonker's%20Game%20Changer%20JS1%20Revelation%20Sailplane/03.jpg)
This thing is made out of carbon fiber (CFRP), along with various other elements like rubber handles, polycarbonate canopy, adhesives holding possibly-perishable upholstery in place, and so on. It all can be disassembled and placed in a transport trailer like this:
[Typical Sailplane Trailer](https://www.cobratrailer.com/wp-content/uploads/anhaenger_master.jpg)
So, if the aircraft is stored in the trailer, and said trailer is placed in a inert-gas vault (again, Argon), there is a good bet it will be functional in a few hundred years. Note that the jet nacelle extension/retraction/ignition system is battery powered, so the battery will have to be duplicated or compensated for when discovered by our hero.
As with solution 1.5 above, the fuel used in the jet needs to be produced by our hero from local sources. Jet engines can be fairly hardy, able to burn various types of fuel, I'll leave it to others more familiar with the chemistry to explain what to produce and how. On that note: Can kerosene last many hundreds of years?
The result of this solution: Easily 1000 km in a single flight at 40 m/s (600 miles at 80 knots).
**Storage Requirements:** *40m^3 Argon-filled vault.*
**Maintenance Required:** *Substantial.*
# Other Solutions
A possibility simpler way to preform the mission is to use an electric aircraft. As an electrical engineer, I would love for this to be the prime solution, but it is so much more difficult than the combustion methods above, and because of this fact: Modern lithium batteries, and most any batteries really, tend to self-discharge and self-degrade. To last hundreds of years is a hard problem, and to have our hero make his own is laughable.
Solar power is another option, which could be combined with the battery option above or as the sole power source. However, this method would be on a higher level of difficultly than the jet-powered sailplane explained above; much difficulty to be had with solar cells having the silicon junctions diffuse over hundred of years, ditto for MPPT circuitry, etc.
In summery: If it wasn't for the fact that batteries degrade, capacitor dielectrics fail and silicon dopants bleed, electric would be wonderful, as the only moving parts would be the electric motor shaft and bearings.
# Notes
I've ignored EMP issues here as I'm assuming the temple is far from the devastation and all suspectable artifacts are stored in Faraday Cages. Further, most modern control electronics are fairly hardy, if properly designed and following correct wiring harness practices.
\*The JS1 isn't actually intended to self-launch, but no reason why the story can't have a jet-powered aircraft that can.
[Answer]
It is hard to imagine a plane being in good shape without maintenance for a century.
**Maintain it.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MHQFD.jpg)
<http://www.cornel1801.com/animated/castle-in-the-sky-1986/10-city-of-advanced-technology.html>
Humans are dead, but the robots work on. In the ancient hangar, the robot maintenance crew keeps the plane in working order - and each other as well in so far as they are able.
From a writing standpoint, encountering an entity - even a voiceless entity like these robots from Castle in the Sky - gives the narrative a jolt of energy. Your robot might communicate in a fashion, or this might be broken, or it could be silent.
I envision the pilot taking off in the plane, and as he looks down he sees the robot standing on the runway with its bag of tools, watching him go. He considers a minute then banks. Next scene: pilot taking off in the plane, robot in the back seat.
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Broadly an older mechanical model would be better able to withstand the [EMP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse) associated with nuclear war but preserving any vehicle that complex for a century plus of storage would be challenging to say the least. The temple would need to be in a geologically and climatically stable geographic area or it would be a sorry sight to start with, it would need to be natural stone, no mortar, yet tight enough fitted to keep out the elements, a welded stainless steel vault would help also. The complicating factors are going to be fuel and lubricants, both are generally either going to evaporate or set over much less than 100 years; there are engines that use air rather than oil for lubrication and cooling but not in production aircraft. Storing fuel for a century would be a, let's understate it, "serious problem". The only plane that you might be able to lift after that long in a doomsday vault is going to be something with a custom engine that runs either on something that can be produced on site from stored material or something that's a lot easier to store than any liquid fuel I can think of.
All of which leaves aside the fact that while the vehicle might be made serviceable if the character has the know-how and resources his ability to fly it would stretch my suspension of disbelief beyond breaking point. Who taught him to fly four generations after the last plane fell from the sky?
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A plane that was deliberately built to last?
* Gasoline [goes bad](https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/36704/how-long-will-gas-stay-fresh-in-a-five-gallon-plastic-container) after some time. How about hydrogen fuel, with the tanks replenished by electrolysis using a well and energy from a geothermal plant or hydroelectrics?
* That could go into a jet turbine or internal combustion engine.
* Come up with some lubricants that last a long time. Synthetics?
* Not too much in the way of electrics/electronics.
[Answer]
Revisiting your temple question and adding [an answer there](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/113979/32789) to elaborate on the technical requirements of the temple and noting in this question that the temple is "lost to time", [time is simply dilated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation) inside and up to the external surface of the temple: you can now take any plane you want as there is only 1 day/x\*(356 days) of entropy...
I would take the Cessna 172 as it's [the easiest plane to learn to fly in](https://generalaviationnews.com/2015/09/26/five-easiest-airplanes-to-learn-to-fly-in/) and it's been [around since the 1950s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_172) so gives you some flexibility there as well...
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ry7Hu.jpg)
[Answer]
Your hero isn't going to find a usable aircraft in the temple (as many of the other answers have made clear in great detail). However, the temple should have something far better than an airplane inside, it has a *library*.
And not just your typical library with Harry Potter books, racks of current periodicals and newspapers and so on, but a technical library, with books like "[The Way Things Work](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0000913154)", and "[The Knowledge](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/159420523X)", as well as various technical handbooks, repair manuals and so on. Down the corridor is an extensive workshop with a wide variety of hand tools and various parts like screws, nuts and bolts, hinges and so on.
Short answer, your hero *builds* a simple glider like airplane, and possibly a catapult launch system (which can be as simple as a ramp with a big pulley on the end, and the rope and hook mechanism is attached to a large weight which can drop freely from the roof of the temple).
You can't use this to escape from people who are actively chasing you into the temple, but with enough time you can indeed make an airplane, like the [Colditz Cock](https://infogalactic.com/info/Colditz_Cock)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nCNHL.jpg)
*Only known picture of the Colditz Cock*
[Answer]
You could possibly have a plane that uses solid fuel rockets instead of a normal engine. Would only allow for a single flight, but that could be enough for your story.
for narrative purposes it could have been designed as some kind of escape pod.
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[Question]
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A sequel to [Could a Time Traveller Prevent the Black Plague?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44055/could-a-time-traveler-prevent-the-black-plague)
Todd the time traveler's a cool dude and has decided to use his powers for good, more specifically he wants to stop the American Civil War from happening. His powers work in a similar fashion to the time travelers from the Butterfly Effect movies; the time traveler is immune to paradoxes, he remembers everything about the alternate histories. The key difference being
1. He can only go back in time to one year once (for example, if he goes back to 1812, he can never go there again) and goes back to his time after that year is over;
2. He can only go back in time by reading (or looking at) information of the past; Pictures, newspapers, historical texts, etc.
**Some details about Todd**
* He served as a medic for the Turkish Land Forces for 16 years and is very skilled in medicine.
* Other than his military service and experience, he is an average White male.
Using his modern medical knowledge would Todd have a chance at stopping the American Civil War from happening?
[Answer]
I know that the civil war was not solely about slavery, but it was definitely one of the major factors.
To defuse that part of the conflict he should go back to the very founding of the nation.
[Thomas Jefferson tried to get an anti-slavery clause in the Declaration of Independence](https://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/4890), and I remember from history that the subject was raised so many times that some other members of congress basically made a ban on the subject.
So armed with a large war chest (or at least a way to make a lot of money, possibly through trips to earlier times to lay the groundwork) and plans for a few industrial revolution technologies, Todd should wage an enormous social, political, and economic lobbying campaign to turn the population against slavery, convince the continental congress that slavery is wrong, and convince the business men of the time that importing slaves would be going against their long term interest.
By removing slavery from the root, the rest of the plant avoids the poison.
On an ironic note, by stopping the importing of slaves, we are keeping them out of our history, meaning that all of the progress, discoveries, and contributions that their descendants made to our country would not have happened.
Some of those Africans may have immigrated to a free USA on their own, but not in the same numbers or in the same way, and so those descendants would not have happened.
Also, most of those enslaved were enslaved by other African tribes as a result of war, and if they couldn't be captured and sold to the slavers they may have been killed instead.
Also, peanut butter may not have been discovered.
EDIT: I guess peanut butter would have been discovered, but George Washington Carver did invent over 300 other uses and made the peanut popular.
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It would be easier for Todd to end the war early for one side or the other. He could also delay the start of the war. However it is unlikely that with only one trip he would be able to entirely stop the civil war. The underlying issues dividing the country ran to deep and had already led to bloodshed between the North and the South.
Todd could stop the formation of the republican party, or even rig the elections so Abraham Lincoln lost the election. But some other abolitionist party would form, and a different abolitionist president would be elected, and the south would leave the union.
The best hope for peaceful resolution would be to guide the formation of an abolitionist party, and get an abolitionist president (perhaps himself) elected who would let the southern states cede away without starting any northern lead conflict. This might even halt the cession of states at the initial 7. Perhaps a later Mexican/Confederate war with Mexican success might lead to several of the states rejoining the Union. But other political events might also lead more states to leave the Union. Too much is up in the air.
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He could stop Eli Whitney from inventing the cotton gin. 60% of slaves worked on cotton plantations, and 2/3 of U.S. exports were cotton, so no short staple cotton, no [cotton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cotton) belt. Though he might have to keep going back to stop the "next" discovery of the cotton gin. :)
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You look at how other countries solved the slave problem. Britain for example, eliminated slavery in the empire by paying restitution for slaves in the [Slave Abolition act of 1833](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833). The cost of this amounted to about 5% of their annual GDP.
The immediate financial cost alone of the US Civil war exceeded 200% of the annual GDP, it also kill about 4% of the male population, injured far more and burdened the country with decades of large costs for reconstruction, veteran's benefits, etc.
By carrying back convincing evidence of the ultimate costs of slavery, to the time of the countries foundation, it would have been possible to convince others that slavery must must be abolished and that all men must be free. The country could have raised the funds to compensate the existing slave-owners, even though it would have been difficult, the government could have sold assets, sold bonds, etc. to make it happen.
Clearly, this has little to do with the traveler's medical knowledge, but this is not really unexpected. Preventing a war requires a political change, not new medical techniques. In fact, improved medical knowledge knowledge has the opposite effect, since keeping soldiers alive reduces the cost of waging war.
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My vote is going to be Yes, but with a big old asterisk.
He could not prevent the war from happening, as the civil war had a lot of causes that I'm not going to go into here (there are numerous documentaries and resources if you are really interested in it). It is highly unlikely that he could resolve all of those problems in such a way that some subset of states would not rebel in a civil war at some time, it is really just a matter of when and how severe it was.
However, he could change the nature of the war so that it was no longer considered a civil war. Perhaps he prevents the United States from being formed, and allows the states to exist more like Europe, as a collection of separate nations that sometimes cooperate. In this case, it would be a war between countries, not a civil war.
He could also prevent the New World from being discovered for some time, where the later colonization of the New World would result in a massively different landscape where the Civil War could not occur.
Using his medical knowledge, he could create the conditions for a terrible plague to sweep through the United States many years prior to the Civil War, which would reduce manpower to the point that a Civil War is not a prospect either the North or South could stomach or effectively fight.
He could also generate some sort of "Pearl Harbor" effect, where the US is incited to violence against a common enemy.
He could also go back to the first humans, murder them all, and prevent the Human Race from ever evolving.
In all of those ways, he is not actually solving the problem of the Civil War or making the world better, per se, but he is technically stopping the Civil War.
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If the time traveler was willing to kill or enslave hundreds or thousands of persons to prevent the horrors of slavery and the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the Civil War, he could go back to colonial times to prevent the adoption of slavery in the colonies.
Many stories of early America imply that the Pilgrims at Plymouth were the founders of the colonies, even though the Jamestown setters were the very first, a distortion partially caused by dislike of slavery.
So he could go back in time to 1608 Jamestown and wipe out the colony there. But that disaster might prevent the 1620 settlement of Plymouth. So maybe he should wait until after the 1620 settlement of Plymouth and then wipe out the Virginia colony.
Fortunately the Virginia colony was still small in the 1620s. in 1622, just two years after the Plymouth settlement, the Powhatan Confederation launched a surprise attack on the Virginia settlements, killing three or four hundred men, women, and children, about a quarter to a third of the entire colony.
The Powhatans then waited for the English to surrender or to sail back to England. But the settlers instead fought back in a war that lasted for years.
So the time traveler could find a way to make the Powhatan attack stronger.
He could go to Spain, hire some ships, and hire some Spanish mercenaries to attack the English in Virginia at the same time that Powhatans attacked. Since the Spanish government claimed all of North America and considered all English settlers criminals, the Spanish government might not frown on the expedition.
Maybe he could also organize a French and/or Barbary pirate attack on the Jamestown colony. There is nothing like multiple attacks at the same time to make the survivors abandon their colony.
He could go to the Powhatan leaders and urge them to make a stronger attack and to keep it up after the first day. He could advise them to make an alliance with the mighty Iroquois in the north. They could agree to become subordinates to the Iroquois in return for being reinforced by hundreds of Iroquois warriors to make the surprise attack even more devastating. And maybe he could persuade or bribe the Dutch traders at Albany to send one or more ships armed with cannon to smash the palisade at Jamestown and capture it, leaving the English colonists without a secure fortress during the Powhatan attack.
He could provide the Powhatans with many guns and much ammunition.
Thus he might wipe out the Virginia colony and prevent it from developing a slave based economy while keeping the Plymouth colony.
And he would probably have to repeat that over and over again when new colonies in the southern USA are attempted. He should give the southern Indian tribes vaccinations against old world diseases and other medical care - thus saving many thousands of lives even if his plan fails - so they will have more warriors, arm them with guns and ammunition, and whenever a new southern colony was attempted bribe with trade goods a wide coalition of tribes to attack and destroy the colony before it could develop a slave based economy.
Thus he might delay for generations or centuries the settlement of the South and the development of a slavery based economy there, and make the southern population much smaller during the 1860s if there is one at all, and make it easier for slavery to be as peacefully abolished in the entire USA as it was in the northern states.
[Answer]
It might be an interesting challenge, but a curious experiment... but even at the time, the south insisted the north didn't care about slavery, they were just using it to galvanize their people into action.
Assuming slavery WASN'T as important as independence/taxes/commerce as they claimed there is a move they didn't pursue.
The south could pre-emptively abolish slavery... sorta. They could replace it (as is the way of our species) with something that was nearly the same thing (a company store creating debt slavery, for instance). Their "property" becomes "free" but has little choice but to continue to work for basically nothing, while knocking the arguments of the north out from under them.
It would be a lot harder to rally people to fight and die for interstate commerce regulation.
Of course, it does NOTHING to correct the moral issues related to the conflict... in fact, it probably puts in place structures that would take much much longer to deconstruct... but it could stop the war itself.
Todd... if he could use his skills to become important and valuable enough to the confederacy, he could eventually get the ears of those who could hear the logic and be led to make those decisions.
[Answer]
## Yes, he could...or if not, would radically change the nature of the conflict
The general consensus is the US Civil War started over whether the federal government had the authority to dictate whether slavery would be permitted in the western territories or not. The North said it did. The South said it didn't.
Interesting to note that the slavery question was discussed extensively in the 1770s and 1780s when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written. During this discussion, the Founding Fathers punted the question and compromised.
## Pay Them or Die
Suppose our time traveler went back to the decisive discussion where the compromise was made and the stage set for bloody conflict in the 1860s. Behind these closed doors, he would be able to make the case for the elimination of slavery in a kind of Do or Die scenario. The Southern delegates in the meeting have a choice: gracefully acquiesce the slave system in the South now (1780s or 1790s) or have it forcibly destroyed in the 1860s. (Probably don't give dates since if the delegates don't agree, they will go home and use your information to arm the South).
Make as many economic and political arguments as required. Remember that the delegates to these meetings are incredibly intelligent men so the arguments must be solid. Making modern moral arguments likely won't work since many Southerners didn't consider slaves (or blacks in general) to be human and thereof undeserving of humane treatment or autonomy of any kind. (Reading up on their justifications are absolutely appalling to modern readers, generally.)
"To the Southern Gentlemen of the Conference,
The case is put to you that slavery must and will end in these United States. Whether this is by bloody conflict or peaceful resolution, it is for them to decide. If they choose to retain their slaves then know that they retain them at the cost of the best blood of their children or children's children. Are they willing to pay in the hundreds of thousands of dead on both sides? Will they pay in the utter destruction of their greatest cities and the starvation of tens of thousands who ordinarily live in plenty? Will they countenance the absolute destruction of their way of life that they claim to hold so dear?"
[Answer]
Slaveruy has been a part pf human society for as far back as we can examine records, so the actions of the abolitionists in both England and the Northern States in the 1700's was almost without precedent. If you are looking for contrafactuals, it might be easier to postulate that slavery was never abolished at all, and continues to this day (as it still does in places like Sudan).
The place to stop slavery must be before the founding of the United States, so your hero might have to go back in time to the 1600's in order to ensure that future slave owners are not given the chance to come to the Americas, discover a way to ensure that economic activities which do not involve slave owning can prevail over those which require slave owning (so trade in sugar, tobacco and cotton will need to be somehow suppressed), or at the extreme range, sit offshore and sink any and all slaveships which make it across the Atlantic.
Extreme measures will be needed since the advantages of Chattel slavery in the pre mechanized age generally outweigh the disadvantages (as ancient societies from Egypt on can attest). Economic gain is a powerful motivator, so whatever advantages that can be gained will be sought after, hoarded and social and political structures developed to quantify and preserve these advantages. It is the attempted preservation of these advantages which caused the divergence of the North and South, and created the political strains which eventually led to the Civil War in the first place.
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I'm going to go with "no" for one reason, and that's the argument made in Quantum Break. You can't change the past, and by trying, you will only cause the event you are trying to change. This is an example given in the game: Say you have an egg sitting on a table. You step out of the room for one second, and when you get back, the egg is broken. Say that egg was really important to you, so you go back in time, rush into the room after the past you leaves, and you bump into the table, knocking the egg down and breaking it. You caused the very thing you were trying to prevent.
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There's a tremendously high chance that he can change the existence of the American Civil War, by acting in countless ways as some fine examples of choices already given.
Another example if you would like to capitalize on the medical background of the character would be to hasten communication at the time that citrus fruits and teas of certain pine needles will cure scurvy. This disease of vitamin c deficiency was still rampant at the time and the cure was only just becoming known. Scurvy certainly caused the death or retarding of progress to another set of VIP characters from across the sea that had developed... (can branch out here to as many plot twists as you can imagine)...a massive plan to infiltrate the colonial government in order to achieve their political goal of (pick one). Alas, their ship's crew had not yet learned the secret of the other big "C" and had all succumbed to scurvy. While the upper class conspirators were fine with their sweet dried fruits tiding them over, not a one had a clue how to navigate the ocean. They ended up in the Bahamas and fell in love with the place and stayed there.
Actually, I don't know if that's what happened to them for sure, since they are made up and this is your story, but hopefully helps you realize how easily events can be changed by a single detail like sharing your fruit with your boatmates. If only your time traveler had showed up during loading of the boat to add crates of dried fruits for those sailors.
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[Question]
[
I’m in a pinch to finish up my story’s cover art and I don’t know if my train has a smokestack, logically.
This train [runs in the planet Hell](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/224764/what-can-run-the-condensers-on-this-hell-train) (see note) and uses liquid sulphur for the steam cycle. Traditional trains were an open steam cycle and carried their water behind them in a tender, blowing the steam out the smoke stack. My sulphur would also be liquid at ambient temperatures, it could follow the same scheme technically. But I think our decision not to use a closed cycle was because the earth has a natural water cycle that brings the steam back to us in rain. It was technically a closed cycle with weather completing the loop, and water towers lined the tracks to refill engines en route. Hell doesn’t rain brimstone… as poetic as that sounds, I think it’s implausible. I think? I’m in a quandary.
So if sulphur needs to be made from sulphuric acid or mined, a closed steam cycle may make more sense, sending the condensed liquid sulphur back to the tanks.
Yes, I still need to boil my sulphur with a moderate heat source, or run it at a slight vacuum, which water steam didn’t need. I’m working on that too.
## Does a brimstone train in Hell need a smokestack?
**Note: Climate on [Hell](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/224764/what-can-run-the-condensers-on-this-hell-train)**
* Average temperature: 420°C
* Atmospheric content: Nitrogen and CO$\_2$
* Terrain: Volcanic wastes
* Biology: None
[Answer]
**Yes!**
Because it is art! It is a locomotive. It needs a smokestack. And it needs condenser coils coming down from the smoke stack like a moonshine still. The coils will be copper stained blue from the copper sulfate.
[Answer]
@MontyWild's right, but let's be more clear.
**The smoke stack's primary purpose was to vent the exhaust from burning coal and/or wood.**
From a basic point of view, it doesn't have anything to do with water (or sulfur, in your case). If you need a stack (aka, an exhaust pipe), then it's due to whatever you're using to change the temperature of the sulfur. If that doesn't cause an exhaust, then you don't need a smoke stack because the sulfur (a consequence of the valve actions around the pistons) could be either evicted to the side or simply sent back to what a traditional steam engine would call a boiler.
Monty's perspective is important for the same reason that modern 95%+ efficiency furnaces need an exhaust fan. After sucking so much heat out of the combustion to heat the water, the remaining heat wasn't enough to lift the exhaust. The heat from the expelled steam helped lift the exhaust out and away from the engine.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WIhkW.png)
*Image courtesy [ThreeRiversRambler.com](https://www.threeriversrambler.com/steam-engines-101). See website for details of operation.*
Why couldn't the exhaust simply have been shunted down to the tracks? Ignore wood for a moment and remember most trains were driven using coal. And coal ash is a big problem. Tossed down onto the tracks (like modern combustion engines drop it onto the road) would cause the ash to be stirred up, seriously degrading the passenger experience and potentially harming goods such as food and animals. In the early days of steam, train cars were not hermetically sealed by any stretch of the imagination (compared to modern passenger cars, they might as well have not had windows).
*If you've never had the chance to ride an old steam engine, add it to your bucket list. Even with that big stack the ash is a problem. Having traveled on such trains a couple of times it's easy to realize why they want to push it as high into the air as possible.*
**TL;DR... So, do you need a stack?**
No...
Frankly, you haven't given us enough information to answer that question. Steam isn't the primary reason (or the primary component) of what travels through a traditional steam engine's smoke stack. Therefore, talking about the sulfur is kinda irrelevant — unless you need to vent the sulfur for the same reason to vent coal ash, to not kill or damage what you're dragging behind the engine.
However, the smoke stack works because of rising heat. I haven't taken the time to read through all your posts, but originally you were looking for an endothermic process. If that's the case, no way on earth would you have a smoke stack.
In fact, what you'll likely need is an auger. Cooled sulfur is a solid. But that might be a false perception because I haven't followed your complete design.
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I think your train does need a smoke stack to vent the pressure of the expanding sulphur. This is the case even if you don't have a closed loop in the environment.
Water steam does need to be boiled with a heat source, which is what the coal is for.
However, sulphur burns. Not sulphuric acid but pure sulphur. So it can be both the heat source and also the gas which expands to run the engine. That would be like gasoline.
Burning sulphur does go into the atmosphere as sulphuric acid. It comes down in acid rain. (I'm talking about our earthly environment here.)
The only thing missing in the loop is returning the sulphur to a higher chemical potential for the energy to be released when burned in the train engine.
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It's going to depend upon your heat source.
If you're burning something in some sort of oxidiser, then your combustion products are probably going to be gaseous, and you'd want to vent them. That means having a smoke stack, as combustion products are rarely transparent. Carbon disulfide is commercially useful, but I don't know how you'd condense it in such a hot atmosphere.
If you burn hydrocarbons in sulphur (it's Hell... Sulphur would be common, wouldn't it?), you'll get carbon disulfide and hydrogen sulfide. Carbon disulfide is a neurotoxin, which would make the exhaust even more hellish... but people aren't going to be exposed to the outside air anyway, are they?
Of course, you could use an atomic reactor, and that wouldn't require a smoke stack, just heat sinks, but I'm not sure if the OP would want that.
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### In a closed system you may instead be looking for a condenser and/or heat exchange system
In a normal train, as you mentioned the typical steam system is closed when the environment and rain cycle is included, refilling water reserves along the trip.
It would take more infrastructure to have liquid sulfur refill stations, than to have a locomotive which recycled it's resources rather than spew them out. It may have a smokestack look, but really it's a cooling tower/condenser, which may use another fluid to cool the surfer gas enough for reuse, even recycling that heat back into the system via heat exchange to concentrate and be used in reheating the liquid sulfur on the next cycle.
What that transnational fluid would be made of though, I have not the time to research.
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I'll answer the question of *where* to vent the steam/gas. A smokestack seems illogical as the air would slowly contain more and more sulphur, which causes problems for a variety of reasons. A more logical solution would be to pump it out near to the wheels of the train. This would allow it to return to the ground more quickly, where it can be more easily collected (assuming this is a concern). This would also minimize the amount of gas falling on the rest of the train as sulphur, unlike steam, is heavier than air.
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The Triumvirate is a political regime dominated by the powerful individuals. It is, in effect, a three-man directorate with dictatorial powers that share in the governing of an empire. Each are meant to be equal in status and authority, and meant to keep the other person in check.
In reality, this is often not the case. The most famous of these alliances was the Triumvirate between Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. Each of them were treacherous and egomaniacal, and the agreement ended after Crassus got himself killed. Caesar and Pompey turned on each other which ended up in a civil war for control of Rome. The second was between Augustus, Mark Antony, and Lepidus. This also ended up in civil war which led to the death of the Roman republic.
The pattern being set is that the rule of three tends to end in backstabbing treachery, as one individual always wants more power. There needs to be some mechanism that re-balances power so that no two members of the group can become more powerful tha the last one. Is there a way that this political system could be made to function over the long term without devolving into backstabbing treachery?
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The way to start is to ask *why* people back stab. The answer is, mostly, to gain power and status.
The problem with any kind of monarchical government (regardless whether it's an old-fashioned hereditary kingship or a dictatorship or whatever) is that whoever is on top *stays* on top, and everyone else is secondary and stays secondary. The only way to power is to knife the people above you in the back, and the only way to retain power is to knife the ambitious people below you before they knife you.
The huge advantage of governments that have a regular, planned turnover of leaders is that ambitious people have a path to power that doesn't involve the same amount of backstabbing. It a huge advantage of democratic forms of government, but many oligarchic governments also share this feature. Note that this doesn't rely on would-be leaders in these sorts of governments being nicer than in autocracies -- it just requires that they see playing the political game as giving them a better chance at power than carving a bloody trail to the top would.
As long as people are people, there will be ruthless people seeking power. As long as your government doesn't have a succession plan which gives ruthless people a peaceful path to power, they will follow a non-peaceful path. And it doesn't sound like there's a peaceful path to permanent ultimate power for anyone in your state -- including the triumvirs themselves.
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When you say "triumvirate" what you specifically mean is "three individuals." But triumvirates exist all over the place. For example, the U.S. triumvirate of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Similar triumvirates exist in most democracies or republics.
The problem is when you start talking about three *individuals.* The "system" or government is not an intelligent thing. It has no intrinsic power or authority. A code of laws can be drawn up that theoretically constrains three individuals holding equal but in aggregate ultimate power — but that's really meaningless since the power and authority is held by the individuals — not the laws.
Winston Churchill said, "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Democracy is considered the worst form of government because government by consensus (or "the crowd") is unwieldy as too many people must be convinced to get anything done.
But it's better than the rest because convincing an individual is easy compared to convincing a crowd. And one strong-willed personality can corral two weaker-willed personalities no matter how equal their governmental authority or power is. ("Does the NRA have pictures of you golfing with Satan?" quips one of my favorite movies...)
So, to invoke Newton's Third Law, the only way to force a triumvirate of individuals to behave is to create an external force that polices their behavior and forces them to behave. Of course, you wouldn't have a triumvirate anymore.
Which is a long and fancy way of saying it can't be done with individuals. The closest you can get is to involve groups of people such that at least one of the three legs of power is painfully difficult to bring under individual control. AKA, democracy.
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One simple solution is to include the concept of mob rule, IE the people acquiesce to be governed by a Triumvirate, however should the Triumvirate fail (either in a way written into whatever passes for a constitution in your country or simply in the eyes of the people) then the Triumvirate can and will be violently deposed (and probably beheaded) and a new Triumvirate installed. A simple rule for the failure of a Triumvirate might be: “If any one of the Triumvirs accuses the others of attempting to supplant them, all three must be removed from power”.
If the concept of Triumviracy is upheld but individual Triumvirates are subject to being replaced by a ‘democratic’ (One mob, one vote) process, then it is in the best interests of individual Triumvirs to make the system work. If you consider political systems like the rule of the British Monarchy (Technically a Monarchy, held together by a series of Gentleman’s Agreements that the People will do whatever the Monarch asks as long as the Monarch doesn’t ask them to anything) then this seems almost sane.
Now: this doesn’t exclude the possibility of other ambitious types actively trying to get rid of the current ruling triumvirate, but it does give your three rulers powerful incentive to keep each other alive and functioning.
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Triumvirate as an individuals' agreement is highly unstable. Triumvirate as a political system is realistic.
As @JBH correctly laid out, a simple agreement to share power between three individuals wont work. What may work, however, is a political system that gives each of the three individuals a power which other two can't steal.
US is the most prominent example of three individual branches of government working together (or, sometimes, against each other). If we give more power to the Speaker of the House and to Chief Justice, we can see it as a triumvirate.
In a historical setting, we can imagine three bases of power, say, nobility, military and clergy, each represented by a leader, and three leaders forming a triumvirate. There were no real precedents for that which lasted as a long term setting, but I think it's possible if a country get used to it.
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It sounds to me like what you’re talking about is a legal division of power between technical equals. The two big examples of this in the Roman Empire were [the Tetrarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrarchy) and the later empire, when different emperors ruled [the Eastern and Western halves of the empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire_under_the_Constantinian_and_Valentinian_dynasties). Unlike the triumvirates, there was a lot more stability between these groups, and they existed as separate entities for decades. Within a world-building context, that suggests to me that such power-sharing arrangements can last at the scale of decades. I’m not sure there’s a good example of this lasting for centuries, but I could look for some if that would help!
I’m not sure that the triumvirates are the best example of long-term, stable power-sharing: the [the First Triumvirate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Triumvirate) was an alliance between powerful men, each of whom had a legal position from which they derived their powers (Caesar was senator, consul and then proconsul, Pompey and Crassus were senators, prefects and then consuls) but primarily it was an agreement to work "behind the scenes" to achieve their mutual aims. Not surprisingly, once those aims diverged, the triumvirate fell apart. So I think this comes under the general category of competing power centers within a single executive (e.g. [Honorius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorius_(emperor)) and [Stilicho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stilicho)).
The [Second Triumvirate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Triumvirate) *was* a legal entity, but it was more similar to the Tetrarchy or the division of the Roman Empire: initially, it was pretty clear that Antony was dominant over the other two members, but eventually they decided to maintain different spheres of influence with Octavian taking the west and Antony taking the east. It only lasted for a single decade, however, and so probably isn't the best example for your needs.
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Well, the original trimvirate was actually pretty stable. Crassus, Caesar, and Pompey were all populists, and they were united against the aristocratic faction. The instability came from Caesar and Pompey improving their profile with their military victories, which is why Crassus was so desperate to gain a victory in Syria that he got himself killed. Had he won, the civil war would have been delayed, or the populists might have gained absolute power 'peacefully' by purging all of their enemies without the need for a civil war.
From there, Pompey switched sides to the aristocratic faction, and left Caesar in charge of the populists. Which turned the conflict into an open civil war between the aristocrats and the populists. As long as the triumvirate had an external enemy, it was stable. It was only as a total form of government that it fell apart.
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The leader is only the leader because other people obeys their orders.
In actual democracies, there are laws even the leaders must follow. Any leaders who break these rules will no longer be obeyed as leaders.
Even in non-democracies there will be laws, maybe unwritten ones, that leaders must follow. There are limits to power. These laws are enforced by the people close to the leaders, regional leaders, chief bureaucrats, head priests etc. This goes all the way down to the common people who will revolt if things get too bad.
So, to get stability you need a strong feeling in the rest of the nation that there SHOULD and MUST be a triumvirate leading them. Any leader who tries go solo will face strong opposition from everybody.
It will be tricky to figure out the details of what these (possibly unwritten) laws should be. Drawing the line between normal power use and power abuse is hard.
I suggest that there are limits to what a single triumvir can do. In short, they should only give orders that are either *reversible* (like an arrest) or *slow* (like starting a new building). The point is that the others can countermand these orders if needed.
For irreversible orders, most notably executions, the whole triumvirate must agree.
Things will be more stable if each triumvir has their own power base.
The simplest is if there are three powerful families/clans that appoint one each. Others have suggested military/religion/merchants.
It is important that if a triumvirate dies, their power base will not be weakened. Instead people must think that "This is probably done by one of the others. How rude! Let us support the newly elected heir to show our disgust in this sort of behavior!"
Anyway, nothing in life is stable. If you claim that this system have been working for thousands of year, readers are going to have strong disbelief problems. Don't go overboard on the duration of your nation.
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The problem with the Roman triumvirate was that each person did not have a constitutionally enforced, distinct and different source of authority. When you take Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus for example, they started out with spheres of influence that was just coincidental. Caesar had the support of the peasantry, Pompey had the support of the military, and Crassus had the support of the nobility. The problem was that any one of them could at any point make another one irrelevant if they also gained the support of one of those factions. Just by dying, Crassus's power was left to be dissolved into Caesar's and Pompey's spheres of influence. Then when Caesar conquered Gaul he threatened Pompey's favor with the military.
Imagine instead if each man had to be elected by a respective portion of a nation's population. If Rome decided that they would have elections where one triumvir was decided by each of these 3 distinct groups, then the power would not pass if one was ousted; so then, not only do you take away the motivation to oust a your fellow triumvirs, but doing so would anger that portion of the population whom elected and favored that person likely resulting in the election of a new triumvir that would be more anti-you for having tried to do so.
So, the result in ancient Rome would have been that when Crassius died, a new triumvir favored by the lords would have taken his seat, and when Caesar conquered Gaul, it would have given him the opportunity to run for future elections for triumvir of the military, but he could not hold the seat of triumvir of military and triumvir of the commoners at the same time; so, either way he'd be forced to share his power with someone else favored among one of these groups.
If Rome's original triumvirate had been a legal system of governance, it would have likely become a much more stable one. The biggest risk to this system's longevity is the risk that two parties may become irrevocably aligned against the 3rd. So, when deciding where the base of each triumvir's power comes from it is even more important than in other systems to divide the power bases on a division of imperatives and not divisions of geography or culture.
**Examples:**
* If you divide a country by regions like if you were to split the USA into the Northern (Old Union) states, Southern (Old Confederate) states, and Western states then you could create 3 distinctly different cultural areas that would have worked well to balance different viewpoints a few decades ago. However, as cultural shift has made the Western and Northern states more like each other than Southern states this would undermine the Southern triumvir's ability to represent their demographic. This also leads to the risk of each triumvir being seen as the ruler of his region which could lead to the country breaking apart into 3 separate states turning your nation into more of a confederation of dictatorships.
* If you divide a country by institutions you can avoid schisms a bit better, but have a similar problem with cultural shift. So if you have branches of Clergy, Military, and Commerce then they may be distinctly opposed in one generation, but as cultural values shift, you may see convergence where perhaps the Commerce and Clergy sector decide that Military is an immoral waste of funds and basically dissolve the third person's ability to represent their demographic.
* Dividing a Nation by imperative means each group has a distinctly different set of needs for well-being (Like Lower, Middle, and Upper Class). No matter how much culture shifts, the lower class will care most about issues of basic survival: welfare, minimum wage, etc. The middle class has survival covered, so they will care most about quality of life issues: tax rates, workers rights, etc. The upper class has quality of life covered; so, they will care most about things that could stimulate or undermine their businesses: trade deals, employer's rights, etc. Because the values are tied to states of being, cultural shift is unlikely to ever cause a major convergence. This means that a 3-way adversarial system is maintained so that no pair of them is ever going to benefit by always agreeing with another one.
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I think that your question cannot be answered because you are starting from an ungrounded assumption. There is no stable form of government; it's human nature. There will always be someone or a faction or an elite vying for power, trying to prevail over the others. Even democracy is not stable, no matter how complex and sophisticated the system of check and balances is, it will always be on the verge of being toppled. The real democracy is the one that requires a perennial fight to be preserved. If you see no fight than it's the moment to wonder why.
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If I understand your question correctly than the answer is law. Non-permanent political or social structures can be perpetuated by being enshrined in laws. Once a social or political position has been transformed into an institution through legislation, an individual can be killed but his or her power is then passed on to someone new.
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> and the agreement ended after Crassus got himself killed.
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Indeed, the way it will remain stable is for them to all be equally powerful characters, equally popular and not inclined to any of the others (resulting in side-taking).
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> There needs to be some mechanism that re-balances power so that no two members of the group can become more powerful tha the last one.
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Not if we're looking at a Roman-style setting. Whilst you could in theory keep the Senate/Government branch equal (subject to not doing stupid things a la Mark Antony), there is no way to force the legions/military to stick to your rules. And the name of the game in that context is often who controls the legions.
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**Anything can remain stable as long as it has sufficient legitimacy.**
Legitimacy comes from buy-in by groups with power. That usually takes the form of the people deciding that the current government is the correct one (for whatever reason) or from having a large military presence that decides that the current government is the correct one, and then is prepared to enforce that on the people by force of arms. It can also come from having those who might benefit in the short term from replacing the government (like rivals to the ruling body, or the members of the ruling body itself) deciding that the governmental form has value in and of itself and should be respected.
Various ways to do this...
* Religious beliefs. The obvious one for this would be a sort of setup where the culture has three gods who rule in concert, and the members of the triumvirate each represent and/or embody one of those gods in some way.
* Tradition. Once you've managed to keep the system going for a generation or two, it's a source of societal stability. People like societal stability.
* Tremendously powerful individuals with long lives. Perhaps your triumvirate is composed of immortal vampires, who can easily overpower everyone else in the country and who happen to like each other. Alternately, it might be an outside power. Some larger country, a local dragon, the gods themselves... whatever. If there's someone who has the power to ensure that it keeps happening, and the persistent will to do it, you're set.
* The magic system. If your country is partially founded on access to a powerful ritual, and that ritual must have three focal individuals, who are in turn empowered by it, that'll tend to nudge them in the direction of persistent power-sharing. If having those individuals is vital to the wellbeing of the nation, and the ritual cannot be performed frequently, or requires unusual skills to either execute or take advantage of, then that cuts down on the churn of people trying to get into the position.
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Rome isn't a good example to examine the stability of triunvirates because by the time the romans tried this system the Republic was alredy doomed and the system was a hack to try to shore up the system and the hack failed.
To have a stable triunvirate you need that the three rulers have equivalent powers and make it very hard for one to take the other's power.
What won't work: anything based on demography like three tribes or three religions. The system will break down when one of the demographies is genocided by the other two.
What may work: different sources of power and rules of succession for each of the rulers. Maybe one ruler is the high priest and is chosen from the priesthood by seniority. The other ruler is the hereditary king and the last one is a People's Tribune, elected by the people the romans did. Also, each rules must have it's own budget or the one that controls the money will control the system.
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Power triangles tend to work so long as there is specialisation. If many people are competing over the same role, then the outcome gravitates towards only one winner. Consider instead that power should be shared amongst people with different primary responsibilities.
As has been mentioned, this could be the likes of America's division between Executive, Legislative, and Supreme Court. It could also be the way the former Soviet Union was structured, between Politburo, KGB, and Red Army. In either case, when one entity gets ideas above its station, the other two move in to correct the problem.
In the case of individuals, lets consider a military dictatorship ruled by a trio of supreme commanders representing the army, navy, and airforce. One leader has neither the ability nor authority to seize command of the rest. That's of course assuming the realm's geography doesn't make it easy for one faction to dominate.
This principle could be applied to any system, so long as each individual represents an essential and operationally independent third of their realm's power base. However, this cannot be a merely geographical division, say the northern, eastern, and western thirds of a realm. As functionally this is essentially states with equivalent abilities competing for the same thing.
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Have a quintumvirate, instead of a triumvirate. The odd number avoids deadlocks over minor issues. It is harder to keep an alliance of four backstabby partners together long enough to dispose of a fifth power, than to keep an alliance of two together long enough to dispose of a third.
[How can I prevent semi-independent royal families from rebelling against the empire?"](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/137182), discusses a similar problem, but with 5 more-or-less equal powers. [My answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/137182#137222) cited a Tom Kratman novel that argues that five is much more stable than three.
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Chapter 26 of Kratman's *[Come and Take Them](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1451639368)* discusses one fictional power's view of a possible five-power balance-of-power.
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In modern times, public transport, whether it is buses, trains, or taxis, makes long-term travel more convenient. Also in that same world, there are winged humanoids capable of actual flying, with obviously long wingspans. Like birds and other flying animals, some tend to get tired after a long flight, especially if they were carrying items.
Say if they want to perch on the bus without trouble. But like people here, they need to pay to ride whatever they're on. Obviously they can't go bus-surfing all over the place, as that's illegal. So what could be a convenient way for the hypothetical winged humanoids to ride on the top of the bus while following the same rules as grounded people?
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I have moved my entire household including cages with birds between cities. The birds do NOT stay on their perches. The motion of the vehicles is so unnatural and extreme that they hunker down on the bottom of their cages and weather the storm.
Granted, intelligence would help considerably. Obviously the wind whips branches around, but have you ever noticed trees moving visibly in the wind tend to be devoid of birds? Their claws really aren't built to handle the upside-down pendulum force of their bodies being whipped around.
* The top of the bus is absolutely the worst possible place for them. It's the most dangerous and the most difficult to hang on to. There's a reason you don't see open-top buses anywhere but as local tour buses and in amusement parks. Top speed is about 35 mph. You'd have to slow that to about 15 mph to keep the avioids safe.
* We're all assuming claws, not feet (therefore not really humanoid). If they have feet, there's a serious problem. If they have claws, then use hydraulics to open the top of the bus like the space shuttle hangar doors to give them access to the protected interior.
* The perches need to be near the floor, as in only high enough to let claws wrap comfortably around them (maybe 8 inches to center of a 5 inch radius cylindrical perch). They can be retracted into the floor with a seat that can be raised or lowered like a hide-a-bed to make the space available for the avioids, their wings, and their parcels.
* Just as with humans, they need either rails in front of them to hold on to or hand-straps hanging from the ceiling (which opens...). That sway is hard enough for humans who can shuffle their feet in either the X or Y planes. Aviods with claws only have the X plane to work with (which is a huge reason why my birds were on the floor of their cages).
In this case, your biggest problem is how to get them out of the bus without seriously inconveniencing other passengers. There may need to be rungs up the side of the bus (perhaps on the bottom of the hide-a-seat) that would let the birds climb to the open roof to stretch their wings and leap.
*One last thing... while an imaginative engineer might figure out a way to let humans and really big birds cohabit the same coach space, in reality their needs are so very different that it's impractical to do it. In the end, you'd probably have busses and train cars dedicated to each species. After all, you'd be just barely inclined to forgive the fat, smelly dude taking the last open seat next to you, but the first time feathers brushed your hair or a wing smacked you on the head as the avioid soared into the air... you'd be complaining to your city council.*
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You place one flying humanoid that acts as a guard and enforcer. Then put a money funnel on the top of the bus. The funnel drops the coins into the proper receptacle. Alternatively, you could have the driver sit on the top rear of the bus much like how a firetruck is driven.
Your driver is here
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/z4UPI.jpg)
and someone tosses coins into here
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pqnmd.png)
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Have retractable perches that are only usable after a coin or token has been placed in a proper receptacle. Make it so that the perch retracts after a user has let go of it.
For expecting mothers, the elderly and the disabled, you may have structures that more closely resemble nests. Again, have a coin slot activate its usability. These might have a conversible cover that stays closed until payment is made, and remain open until a weight sensor lets it know the user has gone away.
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This is one of those situations where complicated methods of enforcing payment before your hypothetical birdperson can perch on a bus probably cost significantly more than you would raise by simply operating an honour system. As it's very difficult to control the airspace around the top of a bus and therefore enforce access controls, you end up having to accept that you will just have to trust that people using the service will pay for it.
In London, we're all quite used to using prepaid Oyster cards or contactless credit/debit cards to pay for public transport as and when we board; a card reader somewhere on the top deck that an alighting birdperson can apply payment to and then perch would seem reasonable. We're also quite used to plainsclothes inspectors turning up on the bus and electronically checking your card to make sure it's made a valid payment for the journey you're on, which could be done by passing inspectors on the top deck as well - you don't actually need to employ too many inspectors, just enough that most people know there's enough of a chance of having their card checked that their risk-aversion kicks in.
If you want to try something radically different, it could even be that in this world, the difficulty of enforcing fair payment on this subset of the population has resulted in some different laws. It might be that all birdpersons are required to pay a special tax to cover their presumed use of the public transport services that ground-bound people don't have to - which may help to convey themes of racism and race-based discontent if such are meant to be present - or maybe, in a more egalitarian world, public transportation becomes entirely tax-funded, and is actually free at the point of use for everyone.
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You could have the perches retract into the roof of the bus. In order to use a perch, the fly-guys would have to pay a fee. This could be done with an machine that extends a perch when a coin is inserted or the driver could be paid and extend a perch him/herself.
When the fly-guys gone as far as their fare will take them, the driver could retract the perch from under him/her. If they don't let go and fly away before that, they are pinned to the roof until they pay for more or the authorities come. For this to make sense, I'm assuming these dudes' have bird-like feet.
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The Humern Empire (no relation) spans the galaxy, using a variety of methods to move from place to place and planet to planet.
One thing all of their modes of transport share is that they are not faster than light, and as such they have large temporal dilation effects associated with them. The most advanced form of transport, the Tube network, only takes five minutes to move a traveler (from the point of view of the traveler) what may be decades of travel at light speed.
One of the issues with this is that multiple generations may be born, live and die in the time it takes someone from the other side of the Empire to visit, which raises the possibility that different sections of the Empire will become incapable of interbreeding, essentially splitting off into different species of Humern.
The Empire is a very effective governing body, comprising many levels of civil servants in order to keep the Empire cohesive: their populace remains loyal to the Empire and rebellion is practically unthinkable. They have access to very advanced technologies, but they cannot breach the speed limit of the universe no matter how hard they try.
Given that it may take hundreds of thousands of years (from the point of view of the galaxy) for a representative of the Empire (or even a message) to get from one side of the Empire to the other, how can they account for and minimise the effects of speciation in their populace?
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**Bring along a "genetic guideline" aboard the colony ship**, essentially an enormous database of the sequenced genomes of millions/billions of Empire citizens (the more genetically diverse this database is, the better).
Before any reproductive event can be permitted/rendered legal in the Empire, the genetics of the involved gametes (or whatever is the equivalent for your Humerns) must be compared to the genetic guideline. If it is sufficiently similar (the exact percentage of acceptable dissimilarity is also included in the guideline) then the pregnancy or egg-bearing or whatever can go on, if not, then another pair (or idk, trio? dozen? I have no idea how reproduction works for your species) can be evaluated until a suitable match is found.
This isn't some high sci-fi concept, it's essentially just [preimplantation genetic diagnosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimplantation_genetic_diagnosis) coupled with a very tame type of Eugenics.
As this guideline will be used on every Empire world, speciation will **never** occur. Bear in mind however that the species will remain evolutionarily stagnant (which is not necessarily a bad thing) as long as the guideline is in use.
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If travel can occur from one side of the empire to the other in mere minutes from the traveller’s perspective and “mere” generations from the perspective of the planets being travelled between, then it should not be too hard to avoid speciation.
From the planets perspective hundreds if not thousands of generations would have to pass before there was even a hint of speciation. From the travellers perspective there would be ample opportunity to visit thousands of star systems in a life time.
One solution would be to pay a group of stud males (or stud females even - but the options might be more limited due to basic sexual mechanics) on each planet to travel between the stars spreading their genetic material as far and wide as they could.
If required this process could be encouraged by government subsidies to become a stud or to bear the children of a stud for the good of the empire. This would ensure continual influx and efflux of genetic material from all corners of the empire across time and space.
Since everywhere in the empire can be reached within a few generations, speciation will not occur. The stud males will sacrifice their friends, family and even the age in which they live, but I feel confident that there would be sufficient volunteers.
[Answer]
**Patriotism and genetic engineering.**
Every Humern colony, in order to minimise the hazards of inbreeding and manage other medical needs, started with a digital collection of medical textbooks, encyclopedias and databases from Erf, complete genetic records of their own colonial founders, and the ability to edit their children's DNA.
They know full well if they're starting to speciate, and have the ability to stop it. If they're loyal to the Empire, they will. If they're not loyal, well, they can expect a fleet of loyalists to arrive in their sky a century or two later, ready to deliver big bombs and genuine Erf DNA to the traitorous mutant planet.
The occasional patriotic fad for implanting one's children with snippets of DNA from heroic figures of colonial or Erf history also helps to slow genetic drift.
[Answer]
The other answers are *almost* what I wanted to say, so let me give it a twist...
Let's say that every ship sent out includes a large collection of frozen sperm and/or eggs. The crew is incentivized to "breed back" into the mainline every so often by using the frozen genetic material. This influx of DNA has two purposes:
* We keep on reinforcing mainline genes
* It's an alarm ... if/when the frozen stuff **stops working** then the community can panic... ;D Would they have a doctrine for that?
Let me also add that the colonies should do the same thing when they send a ship back to the homeworld, so that far-flung Humern genes can fold back into the homeworld gene pool.
[Answer]
A significant fraction of your people travel.
Every year every world is receiving strangers from near and far. It may take evolutionary times to go to the other side of thee galaxy and back, but in that time people are coming back regularly from sorter trips. Someone goes a light year and returns, someone goes two light years and returns, three... 300... 30000...
There is regular re-introduction of the original genes as long as people are traveling. If your grandfather took the same route you perhaps ought to be more worried about identifying your cousins rather about becoming a different species.
[Answer]
The thing with this is that it isn't the colonists you have to worry about, colonists will be operating on whatever the current species template is when they leave. It's the home bodies who never leave their homeworld who will evolve not the colonists because they'll be in transit and not breeding.
That being the case and assuming you can create genetic stagnation at the species source you can maintain a slow to non-existent rate of speciation across the empire, assuming there is a light-speed communications network. This allows colonies to keep abreast of any minor variances in the "standard strain" as and when they start their breeding programs on their new world as any changes can be broadcast and they'll have the information before they arrive.
The technical mechanisms are pretty basic, they consist in genetic screening of potential breeders and very large colonial population bases. With proper genetic matching you can prevent the majority of [genetic drift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift) and large base populations avoid [bottleneck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck) and [founder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect) effects.
I think the biggest problem you will face is the event where a colony group A. takes heavy loses, both of genetic material and of purity of the remaining stock, in transit (for example to a burst of radiation in deep space) and *can't* maintain the standard strain or B. can't maintain communications with Alpha Humern and thus can't keep up with the minor changes to the standard, what do you do with these well-meaning but unfortunate citizens who don't and can't make the grade?
[Answer]
Good government is the answer.
People lose track of things that happen outside of their concept of time. So to manage something that takes a great many generations you need a government that works at the same pace.
One of the answers mentioned a government "stud" program (which I liked!), but plans that motivate by having people travel between worlds based on tax incentives may make as much sense, different worlds might need different strategies. A whole team to come up with good plans.
If this is a galactic empire then you could have a governing body that is concerned with Genetic-Progress-and-Drift (the good old ministry of the GPnD) in the empire. But for them to have meaningful lives they have to operate at a different speed. They could either be accelerated (which is probably a costly and dangerous prospect); I mean accelerated to relativistic speed such they they are slowed of course. Travelling a great distance could pose problems (their whole lives would need to be slowed), or they could be installed in a low but escapable orbit around a black hole, either way you could have government administrators who could be around for many thousands of generations.
By organising your government bodies at different temporal strata you can effectively plan and maintain focus on very long reaching strategies including non-divergence of the species. Also keeping up a "tube system" which clearly has to exist for as long as people are travelling along it... could you imagine what would happen if the system needed emergency maintenance? Moving things at relativistic speeds probably requires a *really* robust system with a great maintenance program, the system should not have a route failure for a thousand years. A route failure of a single Humern body could result in a planetary extinction event! So you might want your highly trained tube builder team for route A perform their maintenance, then have lunch at the Black Hole Dinner; and after lunch (1000 years later have them start all over again). You would have a super skilled and focused maintenance team, and you probably want the same for genetic monitoring too.
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Other things, space travel means very advanced technology we are in the infant stages of genetic engineering. In the decades to come we will see amazing things. Our current manipulation is tantamount to throwing chunks of DNA at something hoping something will stick in more less the right place. At the technology level you are talking we will be living well within the ability to customise our children. We are already doing genetic screening for diseases which must already exert a small but definite alteration in the selection criteria (the three primary forces of evolution are selection, recombination, and mutation), as our ability to control life increases we will probably find our moral fibre very different than now. What people would think of being acceptable in media decades ago has changed...
Anyways we will have advanced genetic programming and nano-engineering by this time. If a "tube" route takes a thousand years to travel, it can not be built in less time than it takes to travel! Point being, what started as humanity on a hundred worlds might be akin to cat herding as far as keeping them all "Humern" goes! The water covered planet will think gills are all the rage, and on another world people don't want to look out on the methane clouds so they will come up with solutions. All in all... we humans will give birth to all the aliens on Star Trek and all manor of problems without oversight... perhaps even with it!
[Answer]
Nothing could be easier. Effectively they have to do, well, *nothing*. Because, well, basically there won't be a problem for a highly advanced subluminal galactic empire with speciation.
While it is never a pleasant duty to report that a question is based upon misconceptions, this is the case here. There are two underlying misconceptions in suggesting that a highly advanced subluminal galactic empire will be afflicted with problems of speciation.
The first misconception concerns speciation itself, while the second is founded on a failure to realize that the Humern Empire was, like Rome, not founded in a day. In fact, the important thing to realize is the two are linked.
The problem *in extremis* can be expressed as a person travelling from one edge of the galaxy to the other in apparently no time at all. However, while in transiting a distance of one hundred thousand light years a corresponding interval of one hundred thousand years had gone by. Assuming generation times of 25 years, this means while in transit 4,000 generations will have happened at the person's destination. So shouldn't population drift have taken its toll and made the traveller almost someone who is now a different species from the humerns on the other edge of the galaxy?
Well, no. Speciation by population requires the populations to be isolated from each other. On the surface of it, two populations of humerns living on either edge of the galaxy are extremely isolated populations. But that's it, they're not isolated.
To explain, with a highly effective transportation like the Humern tube network it will be possible for humerns in adjacent systems, say, to, at least, several light decades and possibly up to a light century for people to travel to those nearby systems, form relationships and reproduce. This means there will be a continuous exchange and interchange of genes across any volume of galactic space with a radius of one hundred light years. But this exchange and interchange isn't restricted just to any volume with radius one hundred light years it will continue right across the entire galaxy. This means it will not be possible for there to be completely isolated populations of humerns on other sides of the Humern Empire.
The other factor was the time it takes to found the Humern Empire. Even with tube network the Humerns cannot colonize the galaxy faster than lightspeed. This indicates it will take for the Humerns outwards constructing the transportation methods and systems until finally they reach their pinnacle in subliminal transportation the tube network. Now humerns can move freely around their empire. Admittedly travel too far and you are soon beyond the time and culture where you originated, but if people decide to settle now, pair bond and reproduce they are spreading around their genes. They are also preventing population drift from happening. Speciation will be stopped in its tracks.
A quick guesstime indicates it should take even the highly advanced Humern Empire a minimum of one million years to spread across the galaxy. As their empire expands outwards there will be a continuous flow of Humerns from the heartlands near to their home-planet, out to the frontiers of Empire.
Maintaining cohesion in the Humern Empire only requires modest fractions of their population to move from one system to another. Because even if the officials administering this Empire are worried about cohesion and any possible dangers from speciation they only have to encourage not too large numbers of their people to keep moving.
Also, this a highly advanced galactic empire so it should have highly advanced biological technology. Moving frozen spermatozoa and ova, and even zygotes, should be easy. if each generation introduced genes from populations outside any given world in the empire there would be no possibly that speciation could gain a foothold.
Interbreeding won't be a problem. Even if two people belong to radically different cultures, which can be a major factor in preventing breeding pairs, their immunological differences will mean their children will be healthy and have much better immunological systems. It only takes one kiss for each other to "taste" the other's immune system and know that the genetic fitness of their children will more than enough reason to get down to this breeding business real soon now. This is a powerful driver for exogamy. It is the main reason people will breed outside their own ethnic or cultural group.
So possibly that person who traversed the galaxy edge to edge finds there are more that enough eager potential partners lining up. This is not so much despite the fact they are 4,000 generations late, but because of it. Population drift is thwarted, speciation stopped and exogamy saves the day while the Humern Empire remains safe and cohesive.
In summary, as long as the tube network moves people around efficiently and effectively there will be a constant exchange and interchange of genes both locally and across the entire galaxy. This will prevent the formation of isolated populations. Therefore, no population drift and no speciation.
[Answer]
In order for the civilization to hang together over extended periods of time and not split into different subspecies, you will essentially need to freeze the civilization. The ancient Egyptian civilization changed so slowly that a typical Egyptian born in the First Dynasty wold probably not notice anything untoward if they were suddenly transported to the 12th Dynasty.
By keeping the culture static, the sorts of cultural mating cues should also remain the same across time and space. Essentially the things that make a person sexually attractive will be unvarying, so if a shipload of people come to your planet who have different looks, mannerisms shapes etc., they will not find breeding partners.
[Answer]
If you HAVE instantaneous communications, AND an advanced society, then you perhaps have the solution. The genetic code can be, well, coded and transcribed. Once transcribed, it can be sent to distant places. This transcribed, communicated data can be compared to local genome data, and it can (even today) be used to create actual genetic material that can be introduced into the local population. Designer babies, as it were. This would guarantee a homogeneous genetic mix throughout the empire. One could even send the genetic code for new species of animal, or other organism. It would be Genetically Modified Organisms on, ahem, steroids.
See for instance [Quantum Teleportation of Dynamics and Effective Interactions Between Remote Systems](https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.0319). Cornell University, of all places. This is now in mainstream thought, not handwavium deep sci-fi fantasy, the 'Gospel According to Einstein' notwithstanding.
See [this for more recent work on remote quantum computing using entanglement] (<https://arxiv.org/find/quant-ph/1/au:+Muschik_C/0/1/0/all/0/1>)
[Answer]
There is a theory that it would be much easier (i.e. faster and requiring fewer resources) to colonize exoplanets by genetically modifying the members of its future population to adapt to the local conditions than terraforming the planet itself. Obviously, this could not be done for planets which have such extreme living conditions as no atmosphere, or temperatures over the boiling point of water, or too high atmospheric pressure - or at least it couldn't be done at first, but as technology expands, so do their opportunities to colonize more and more hostile planets. So speciation would be unavoidable not due to this slower-than-light travel restriction but from the set out of every new colony.
Obviously, if they could genetically engineer themselves this way, then travelling between planets and breeding with the "natives" would not be a problem - they could just take the parents' DNAs and engineer a viable offspring to the specifications they want.
In fact, they would probably get to the point where they could even change the foreign parent's DNA until this person could live without the need of protective gear/special dietary requirements/etc. on their new home planet and breed unassisted with their chosen partner(s).
[Answer]
One possible solution, is that your species have abandoned sexual reproduction entirely in favour of reproducing clonally. They are all derived from a database of genomes that were at some point in the past deemed to be the most satisfactory, and since then new individuals have been gestated in artificial wombs using only these chosen genomes.
[Answer]
Your biggest bet is instantaneous communications. Entanglement, perhaps, but it depends on how much you want to delve into leading edge quantum theory. The latest trend is that the universe itself has consciousness. Postulated by a number of very esteemed CERN-associated physicists, as well as many others with advanced knowledge. Use this door to propose some sort of universal connection. ESP on steroids, across the universe. The belief that information can not travel faster than light is actually becoming a very passe notion. The manipulations and postulations used to enforce such a notion are becoming so strained as to be incredulous. The only way to PRESERVE this misplaced theory that the speed limit applies to information is with a lot of handwavium. It takes less, if any, handwavium to accept instantaneous information transfer.
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[Question]
[
This is a world with an intelligent species of animal with a quadruped (somewhat like that of a large feline) body plan, which have evolved from **pack-living apex-predator carnivores.** (If you need a real-life Earth comparison, try wolves. These creatures did not evolve from wolves, but it's close enough for a first-order approximation.)
Despite (or because of; it could even be both!) having evolved a high level (approximately that of humans) of intelligence, one thing that these creatures have retained in their culture is a strong preference for various aspects of physical fitness. It's been a long time since they actually needed to *hunt* for their food as they have learned how to keep herds of prey animals not unlike how humans keep livestock, but many at least occasionally still choose the thrill of the hunt in the way their ancestors did, and many of their interactions among their own kind (including games and interactions surrounding territorial claims) have a basis in the ancient behaviors of the hunt, including tracking, pursuit and grappling or wrestling.
With the background out of the way:
* What kind of **morals** might such a species have, and how would those morals connect with their current lifestyle as well as their evolutionary past?
* Bonus question: Likewise, what might their **religious** beliefs be?
While I'm not tagging this science-based let alone hard-science, I'm willing to hand out imaginary bonus points to any answers backed by real-world scientific citations.
And please, no "that's not plausible" answers. In this particular world, these creatures exist.
[Answer]
Intelligent apex predators that hunt in packs? Sounds a lot like these creatures: [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dONjT.jpg)
Hunting is no longer a major part of our lifestyle, but it was probably key to our evolution (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunting_hypothesis>). As @ShadoCat suggests, intelligent pack hunters would likely have moral and social structures based heavily around family/friend groups, as humans do. Some humans still take part in recreational hunting as well as simulated hunting in the form of video games, shopping, and sports.
Overall, the structure of such a society would depend heavily on the environment it developed in, but would likely bear a significant resemblance to a human society.
[Answer]
***INTRODUCTION***
On your question, there are two basic descriptors for your race (henceforth called just Wolves): "carnivores" and "pack-living" ("intelligent" is a given, since morality and religion pressupose intelligence).
Therefore, I think the culture of the Wolves would be permeated by two main axes: The Hunt and The Pack. Let's examine those to see how they could influence your race's moral codes and religion.
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**The Hunt**
Sure, your Wolves do not need to hunt anymore. But long ago, they needed to hunt to survive. This means that The Hunt was the most basic building block of the Wolves' culture... and that influence has reached the Present, as you stated.
So, back in the day, The Hunt must have acquired a sort of sacred and ritualistic aspect to it. Almost like a mystical communion with the forces of Nature (we'll be right back on this when we discuss religion).
This must permeate their entire culture, so that they see The Hunt as an allegory of every instance of their present life. I'll describe this shortly.
For now, it must suffice to say that The Hunt has shaped the way they view the world. As you said, this manifests as respect/admiration towards physical strength. Maintaining your physical fitness is viewed as a social duty, and so they exercise a lot. They also have the best regards for sports of various kinds, particularly those that may resemble The Hunt (i.e. wrestling and games of tag or hide-and-seek).
Also, their culture must be based on some kind of Stoicism. Physical and existential wounds and suffering must be disregarded, for the benefit of all. Showing weakness is frowned upon. Are you in pain? We'll help you, but suck it up, buttercup! Don't be a crybaby!
This would also mean that their culture (and hence, system of morality) would be rough. Not necessarily cruel, but definitely tough.
Every able member of society (male or female) would have to participate in The Hunt, back in the day. So this means no different gender roles (maybe apart from leadership, since I think wolves and lions' leaders are always male).
Even though they don't need to hunt for a living anymore, I think they should participate in The Hunt regularly. That is allowed, as stated on your question, so I'll go along with this train of thought.
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**The Pack**
Since the Wolves live in packs, they would have a communal culture. "*All for the Pack, nothing against the Pa*ck" is their motto.
Private property must be non-existent or heavily regulated. The herd of animals of prey belongs to all The Pack. The meals (either from sheperding or hunts) must be shared by all member of the community, with preferential treatment given to the cubs.
Since during a hunt, The Pack must act as one, individualism would be frowned upon. Each Wolf could ponder new strategies and conceive new ideas, but he/she should share them with The Pack first and ultimately it is The Pack that has the final saying on the matter.
Their views must be influenced by Pragmatism ("*we must be practical on how to solve a problem!*") and Utilitarianism ("*the good of the many trumps the ills of the few*").
Also, their morality system must be heavily influenced by concepts of Honour. In the Past, The Pack only survived if everyone followed the same set of rules... and the way to enforce that set of rules is by tying Honour to them. Eventually Honour transpired to their current culture.
This Honour could govern every aspect of everyday life, even hygiene. This is a remnant of the time when the Wolves had a nomadic existence and these aspects were important for survival of the individual and The Pack. Check Mosaic Laws of ritualistic purity, that prevented plagues during desert wandering, but that remained after the hebrews settled in Israel.
Finally, The Pack means that they must have a very tribalistic worldview: They view Wolves from other packs with suspicion and adhere to a "nationalistic" zeal to their own Pack. They frequently go to war with other packs, mainly for territory.
Since Honour is based on the rules that keep The Pack together, honourable treatment is not extended to members of other packs. Alliances with other packs must be acompanied by an exchange of ritualistic hostages or even forced marriages to "*blend the blood of both packs*".
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***MORALITY***
Now, let's see how these two axes would influence their morals across the whole spectrum of their life cycle
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**Birth and infancy**
Since the future of The Pack relies on reproduction, cub-bearing is heavily stimulated and highly regarded as the most noble of endeavors, besides The Hunt. Contraception and abortion are frowned upon, and punished as a betrayal to The Pack.
The cubs are heavily protected, especially during disaster and war. It is postulated that, when herds of Triceratops were under attack by predators, they would form a ring with the cubs on the center. The Wolves' culture must be designed on a similar pattern.
The cubs must be catechized from tender age on the morals and laws of The Pack. They are taught to share their food with their brothers. The litter is considered to be a mini-Pack, where they learn how to function socially. Their games must imitate the adults' hunting or sports.
As they grow old, they shall go from playing to incessant training, just like the young greeks' gymnasium.
Coming of age must be symbolized with a ritual where the cubs must prove their valor. The Masai adolescent must hunt a lion. In certain indian tribes they must climb a mountain and get a special feather or plant that only grows there. In other human tribes, the younglings must face some kind of self-inflicted suffering. You chose.
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**Marriage**
On the one hand, the Wolves' concern for the future of The Pack means that they want to optimize reproduction. On the other hand, reproduction must be heavily regulated by their concept of Honour. Because you mustn't just breed them, but raise them too, if they are to become successful adults on The Pack.
I think they could resolve this tension by allowing poligamy, so that a male could impregnate several females... but this male and these females would be faithful between themselves. Adultery would be frowned upon.
Physical strength would be an atribute highly valued on a future companion. A marriage proposal could take the form of a duel. If the groom didn't find the bride strong enough, he could repudiate her (and vice-versa).
Back in the day, there were many Wolves that perished during The Hunts. Nowadays, there are many that die on wars with other packs. So there must be some kind of Levirate Law, by which a widow must marry someone from the deceased's kin, so as to raise the orphans and also secure the deceased's bloodline.
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**Politics**
The concept of Pack, means that the Wolves are communal. All decisions are debated on an Council of the Pack, where every able adult member shares the decision-making. This means that everyone in the council is entitled to vote. However, the Wolves must also have a strict hyerarchy (alfas and betas) because, during The Hunt, someone should be the leader. I think the best model would be a kind of Constitutional Monarchy, where there was a King, Noblemen (those Wolves that distinguished themselves in acts of valor) and Commoners, but where every stract of society was represented on the King's Court.
Any male Wolf may become a King, if he beats the current king on a fair, singular battle. Since individualistic political ambitions are not well received (since they put the individual's interest in front of The Pack's benefit) there are only two instances where this is acceptable: 1) If the King is making bad decisions that put The Pack in danger and 2) if you really think you could be a better leader to The Pack than the current ruler.
I disagree with ShadoCat that being sneaky would be OK. Being sneaky is not honourable and shows individualistic ambition. If everyone wanted to be king, then political instability would endanger the future of The Pack. Sure, there may be packs that are in a state of moral decadence (as happens with every country or civilization eventually)... but even there sneakyness is shameful and political intrigue is done covertly and never ackowledged, not even when successful.
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**Crime and punishment**
Since the two main axes of the Wolves' culture is The Hunt and The Pack, the two greatest crimes must be Cowardice and Individualism. Even sexual crimes, like adultery and contraception can be fit on one of these categories (for they puts the individuals' hedonistic interests in front of Honour, the glue that keeps The Pack together).
*Cowardice*: So, if someone shied away of a hunt or of a war, then the Wolves would feel entitled to do as modern soldiers do with deserters... and simply kill them as they flee. Or maybe they could use a more didactic approach. Once the hunt or the battle is over, the deserter has forfeited is right to survival and may be legally killed. The only way for the deserter to gain back his/her right to live is to engage on a honourable, singular battle with a champion. This way, the coward would be disincentivized to run for his/her life on the heat of the hunt/war... and could be taught bravery if he failed.
*Individualism*: Individualism would be another thing altogether. Since this is a communal society, the worst punishment you could get would be banishment. This would be the fate of traitors, those that broke the laws of Honour repeatedly and deliberately. These would be branded as pariah, not fit to be received not even in other packs.
Of course, for an involuntary breaking of the Honour code, or for someone truly repent of their sins, there could be some sort of Atonement ritual, always with The Hunt's theme in mind (since The Hunt is what restores balance to the universe, as we shall see on religion).
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**Old age and death**
On one hand, the elderly and the sick would be a dead weight on The Pack's shoulders, acording to the Wolves' utilitarian views. On the other hand, their Honour would not let them starve their elders, from which they were fed when they were cubs and dependent.
This tension could be resolved through a kind of ritualistic killing. When an elderly or infirm found out that they were unable to help The Pack anymore, they would challenge a champion for a public, singular battle. They could, therefore, go down heroically on an honourable fight and everyone would cheer the elder's courage at the time of his/her death.
If you want to get gruesome (remember that you're seeing a rough culture in action), the Wolves could then feast on the deceased's flesh, on a kind of ritualistic canibalism found in many tribes. They would feel that they would gain the deceased's strength and experience by eating him/her. They would mourn by integrating the deceased's lifeforce into them. During this feast, they would celebrate and remember the deceased's actions of valor past and the deceased's deeds in hunting.
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***RELIGION***
Having explored every aspect of their life cycle, it is time to see how this would translate on religious belief
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**Gods**
I think that the Wolves, having come from a time where hunting was common and necessary, should have a kind of pantheism. They could worship The Circle of Life, just like we see on Disney's The Lion King.
By hunting, they would find their place on the food chain and, therefore, the Circle of Life. The Hunt would get its sacredness from here, for it was the way to restore balance to the universe. Nowadays, the Wolves don't need to hunt for a living, but they may do it as a part of a religious experience.
This doesn't mean that there are no gods. On Greek Mythology, you would have Artemis / Diana as the goddess of hunters. Trouble is, Artemis was a virgin and cub-bearing is a must for the Wolves... so Artemis should have some shared characteristics with Aphrodite / Venus (erotic love) and Demeter / Ceres (fertility).
Don't forget that you could also have Ares / Mars to preside over wars.
Other non-Wolf species (namely the prey animals) would have their own patron god. Before a hunt, the Wolves would present offerings to Artemis to bless their hunt and also to the god-patrons of the other animals, so as to appease them and be able to weaken their divine protection.
Other carnivorous animals, with a more solitary nature, would have their god as well, an enemy of Artemis (the goddess of communal hunting). This god of solitary carnivores could be hijacked by the Pariah, those that were banished due to their individualism. This god would be akin to Satan on the Wolves' main religion... which would increase the spite against the Pariah.
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**Church**
Since the Wolves are communal, their spirituality is also communal. They rely on a Church (ecclesia, from the greek "assembly") to tune themselves to the gods before a hunt (which may be a metaphor, now that they don't hunt for a living, to earning their daily bread).
The King and the Nobility have a priestly role of interpreting the wills of the gods, and derive their authority also from this priestly role. Religion has the purpose of enforcing morality, interpreting the Moral Code and strengthening social bonds. Apostasy and heresy is individualistic and may grant you banishment.
Prayer is also communal. Maybe howling could be their prayer... sending their concerns to the heavens. BTW, Artemis was also a goddess of the Moon, and wolves howl to the Moon... just sayin'.
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**Afterlife**
There could be a god of death, like Hades, that would be cruel, but fair. Since, in ancient times, the Wolves killed their prey to make a living, it is only fair that the Circle of Life would find balance by sending a Grim Reaper that would hunt the Wolves down and reintegrate them into the lifestream.
However, there would be different ways to die. For spartans, only the men that died in battle and the women that died on childbirth were afforded state funerals. The same thing would apply to Wolves.
More, those that died honourably in combat (either hunt or war) would be awarded as some kind of Valhalla. Those that died as cowards and Pariah would be sent to Hell (check Dante's Inferno... you have the Cowards and the Traitors both at the gates and at the center of Hell, respectively). Those that died in a non-honourable way (i.e. not in combat) through no fault of their own would have to show their valor on a kind of Purgatory.
You could mix this with the Circle of Life. Since the flesh of dead carnivores becomes grass and grass is eaten by herbivores, then the Wolves may reincarnate after death. This could be their Purgatory or their Hell. Those that were sent to Valhalla achieved Nirvana, perfection, the ability to escape the reincarnation cycle.
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**Forefathers**
This means that there would be some kind of Forefather's cult paralel to that of the Circle of Life and the gods.
Wolves that, by their feats, became famous in hunting or warring would achieve a status of demi-godhood, like Hercules (through strength), Odysseus (through cunning) and Theseus (through leadership). Their deeds would be celebrated in Church and immortalized on hymns, psalms and epics.
These honourable forefathers would be invoked prior to hunting or warring or even everyday life, as a kind of saintly intercession.
Also, the "nationalistic" view of one's Pack meant that there would be origin myths for every pack (see Romulus and Rome, or Cadmus and Thebes, but with packs instead of city-states).
[Answer]
The Pack/family is the most important. Anything that benefits the pack would be moral. Anything that is a detriment to the pack is immoral.
Live for the pack, die for the pack. If you are valuable enough, you can provide children for the pack before you die.
The strongest/smartest leader should lead the pack.
Being sneaky is OK, if it supports the pack.
Not sharing with the pack is a big no-no.
Being packless is the ultimate punishment (maybe their equivalent to hell).
[Answer]
First things first, I'd like to point out that it would be VERY HARD for your creatures to be culturally and technologically on the level with humans if they don't have opposable thumbs or any other way to easily and reliably interact with the world and create tools. Humans got so far as a species because of our ability to cooperate and create and use tools.
You said your creatures are hunters (not scavengers) so hunting will obviously be very important for their culture. Since tool-making will also be crucial for their ascent into a society, it should also play a large part in their culture.
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Let's assume your creatures are evolved from Earth wolves for a moment. How much of wolf society would survive the transition into a human like society? I'll try to get an idea by analyzing the only other creature to ever reach human-like society ever heard of: humans.
I'm doing this analysis by comparing human and chimpanzee society (strictly speaking, humans did not evolved from chimps, they evolved from the thing that also evolved into chimps, but I guess this will have to do).
* Chimpanzees form communities of multiple males and females. Humans do that too. **Check**.
* The dominant chimp is always a male, but not the strongest one. Instead, the dominant male is the individual who has the most allies and influence within the community. The dominant male frequently intimidates rivals to keep them in place. **Check**, with the exception that the dominant human is not always a male (but very often it is).
* Chimps hunt in packs. **Check**, humans did that.
* Chimps can be very aggressive towards anyone who is not part of their community. It's very hard to define a human "community", but I'd say we're leaving this kind of behavior behind us.
Source: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee>
Everything being considered, I'd say we're actually very similar to chimpanzees, so your animals shouldn't be socially very different from wolves.
Let's take at some wolf behaviors and how they could translate into cultural values:
* Wolves kill things all the time. This might mean your creatures have a very natural look on death and that murder is not such an horrendous crime. However, keep in mind that humans also killed stuff all the time (we're probably to blame for the extinction of the Neanderthal)
* Wolves are monogamous. This is probably because while females are pregnant they can't hunt and their mates have to hunt for them (If a male wolf has impregnated one female, he must hunt twice as much. If he has impregnated two, he has to hunt three times as much, and so on). This will probably result in a society with strong marriage bonds.
* A wolf pack typically consists in a father, a mother and children. This means your creatures will value family a lot more than humans do. The elderly will be very respected and feared and have a very privileged social standing.
* Wolf pups leave the pack when they become sexually mature. After this they roam alone until they find a mate and form their own pack. This lends itself well to some kind of rite of passage.
* Wolves are VERY territorial. A pack's territory is usually far bigger than it needs for hunting and is fiercely defended, both through territorial marking (scratching, urinating, defecating) and actively attacking transgressors. This means your creatures will highly value jobs such as soldier, guard or policeman.
It also means they will be more bigoted than humans and might be very aggressive towards anyone outside the family. Maybe the very own concept of "friend" will be frowned upon, since those friends will be from outside the family.
* Since a very early age, wolves physically fight for a higher place in the hierarchy of the pack. This might be turned into some sort of ritual or traditional for your creatures.
* Wolves hunt very tactically. You mentioned yourself that your creatures greatly enjoy physical exercises, they probably will also enjoy tactical and strategical games, such as chess or Go.
* Wolves tend to have very strict reproductive cycles. Females become fertile around the middle of winter and gestation lasts a little more than 2 months, meaning pups are almost always born in spring. This lends itself well for fertility rites and festivals your creatures might engage in.
There are many other interesting behaviors in wolves that you probably could use, but I'll refrain from mentioning them since they are strongly tied to wolf biology and I don't know how biologically close to wolves your creatures are. All of the info I used was from Wikipedia, so here's the link: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_wolf>
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**About Tool-Making**
If your species is as advanced as humans are (or once were), they need to be able to create and use tools. This also implies that, very likely, they have evolved to have opposable thumbs, visual capabilities similar to the ones humans have and very strong collaboration instincts. Let's take a look at how those characteristics might affect their beliefs and behaviors:
* Opposable thumbs and specialized hands and arms make it difficult to walk on all fours (or whatever number of limbs your creatures had before evolving), possibly affecting the process of hunting.
* By it's very definition, technology is supposed to make survival easier. Man's first invention was arguably the hammer, soon followed by spears, which radically altered our hunting process. You mentioned your creatures love hunting "the old way", which probably means that, as soon as society was stable enough to allow it, they stopped hunting with the use of tools (spears, bows, guns, etc).
Maybe they use tools when hunting for food but not when hunting for sport. That's up to you to decide.
* Given the big reliance in tools those creatures will exhibit, they should value highly anyone capable of making tools, such as carpenters and ironsmiths. This used to be true in human society too, but then we invented machines capable of making tools for us. However, notice the recent boom in computations and how software engineers are respected today. That's because we still haven't invented a machine capable of coding.
* The more numerous a community, more knowledge it's capable to generate. This means that at some point your animals had to start cooperating with individuals outside their pack, otherwise they wouldn't have gotten so far, technologically speaking.
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There's another question you should consider: do your creatures wear clothes? If they have fur, there's no special reason to wear any clothes, something which might deeply affect their society. If humans wore no clothes, we probably wouldn't by so shy of sex in general. Clothes can be very important for reinforcing hierarchies and roles within a society.
One last thing: **The more the species advances, the more it is forced to drift away from its roots**. Take for example man's nomadic habits, left behind with the advent of agriculture.
Summarizing, those should be the central cultural points and morals of those creatures:
* Great respect for the family and the pack, especially the elderly and the one who have some sort of tool-making knowledge.
* Great respect for physical and personal boundaries.
* Great enjoyment in playing games, hunting and other physical activities.
* Monogamy.
* Distrust towards strangers.
* Rites of passage when an individual becomes apt to leave its family and start his own pack.
* Disregard towards weaker creatures (they were hunters, they kill weaker animals all the time)
* Fertility rites
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**About religion**
It is arguable that, as soon as a society is advanced enough to have a definite idea of morals and ethics, they become monotheists and their God represents such morals. This means your creatures should be monotheists.
The monotheist model almost always includes a prophet. Examples of prophets are Mohammed, Jesus and Buddha. I'd say that, if you opt for monotheism, this is pretty much the only theology possible: an omniscient and omnipotent god and his prophet or prophets.
**If** you instead opt for a polytheistic approach, it should show many of the concepts discussed before. The central gods or "good guys" should be a family.
Here are some of the things they might represent:
* The hunt
* The loyal husband/wife
* The wise old man
* The crafter
* The strong and independent individual (important for younglings who just left the pack)
* The smart one
* Fertility
Here are some ideas for the "bad guys". These would probably be from another species, given your creatures distrust foreigners.
* The trickster/deceitful one
* Death
* Famine
If you want some specific myth ideas:
* The world begins with a rotting carcass and living things come out of it like vermin. Your creatures should be very familiar with this phenomenon, given they are hunters. (Norse mythology had something similar, I think)
* The trickster god is expelled from the pack.
* Enemies invade a pack's territory and are repelled.
* Famine kidnaps fertility (winter) but the other gods win her back (spring).
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If you want, tell me something more about your creatures in the comments and I'll try to edit this as to cover more traditions they could have.
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Here are some of the morals.
**1- Strength is virtue, weakness is sin**
Simple and direct as that! Your strength determines your status in the group. It also determines how *good* or *bad* you are. Parents would intensely train their children for physical training, agility and aggressiveness towards members of the same gender.
**2- Being docile is cowardly**
Someone who does not bare their fangs on every little issue is a coward and much ridiculed by everyone in the group. It is expected from children from young ages to have to growl when requesting food from parents. Members who like to be *nice* are frowned upon by elders and rejected by members of opposite gender at courtship times. All males have a crush on that aggressive female ;)
**3- Laziness is the ultimate crime**
If you want to live, you have to earn your food. Be it through guarding the herds, standing guard at the borders or scouting in enemy territory. Any dilly-dally member will occasionally get a good thrashing by the elders and face a lot of growls and fangs of members of the same age group.
**4- Shyness is stupidity**
Yes. If you want something, get it. Be bold, be direct, be strong. Nobody likes emos and individuals with mood swing issues.
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The nature of pack hunters would mean that as their society evolved it would likely tend toward strong monarchies, with high respect for authority. It is natural for pack hunters to follow a single strong leader, so any species evolved from pack hunters would likely take much longer to embrace ideas of democratic rights, if they ever did. Loyalty to ones leader would likely be the most important moral duty.
I'd imagine their society would be similar to feudal Japan. The natural tendencies of the pack rank system could easily evolve into a caste system. The leaders would likely be followed with fervent loyalty by the worry caste. They would also likely tend toward isolationism and nationalism, as other nation "packs" are competition.
As for what religious beliefs these aliens would have, it is totally unpredictable, and likely each nation would have its own god/gods. Just look at earth, one species managed to create thousands of creation myths through out its history, tens of thousands of gods and mythical creatures. One interesting aspect to incorporate though, what other animals exist around these creatures? Local fauna often has symbolic appearances in religions. I would also consider that these species may be more likely to deify leaders, like in ancient Egypt, or feudal Japan.
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In *Terminator*, a human can evade a hit from a machine, rolling onto the floor at the last second. But a machine (cyborg) from the future would be able to do millions of calculations in a second, and correct the trajectory of its arm to hit the target anyway.
So would that mean that you couldn't really evade a self-controlling machine hit?
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Like every combat ever recorded in history: it depends.
If your cyborg is, simply put, better faster stronger and smarter than your human, it is going to win. It really wont matter whether a roll occurs or not. It'd be like asking whether you could dodge one of Mike Tyson's punches. The answer is "hell no." You are simply out classed, and face it. There is a point where the cyborg must win. The same goes for any machine such as a [trash compactor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U3Oti2L8S4) or even an [anvil](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9isw0fKXAE). If you're dumber than an inanimate object, and it's stronger than you are, you'll lose! Take this to an extreme, and it doesn't really matter if the [cyborg is fighting or not](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7A1M_4XeR3s) (Warning: link is to Deadpool. It's probably as benign as Deadpool gets, but still probably qualifies as NSFW).
If your cyborg is... well... not better faster and stronger, then it will lose. Take Atlas here, [with my preferred swear-mod overdub](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkv-_LqTeQA). Atlas is an amazing machine, but it shows just how hard it is to do object recognition in a real world. The process is slow. Combat is fast. It is entirely reasonable that the processing time could be enough to let you dodge a strike.
So what does the fuzzy region between these extremes look like? One answer comes from another overdub of the same Atlas video, with the same quality of hardware but [with a more insidious intelligence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAmyZP-qbTE). It's not your punching swinging story your question asks about, but its worth pointing out that there are other ways to fight. (And Thucydides answer is utterly chock full of examples of that)
One major limit for a cyborg is its musculature. Typically, the cyborgs we see in movies have a very human musculature. This means they have similar weaknesses and strengths as a human body does. There are strong alignments of muscles, and weak ones. When going for a killing blow, which is typically what you're referring to when looking for these "roll on the floor" dodges, you have an already disoriented opponent, and you are willing to align all of your muscles to deliver maximum damage to an opponent that does not react. If you have done this, you have sacrificed the geometry you need to actually respond. You don't have muscles in the right places to correct the path. Maybe if you're a T-1000 cheating like a hobo with liquid metal you can do anything you want, but otherwise you have to obey physics.
Beyond the typical "roll out of the way" gimick, it's worth noting that there are literally entire fighting styles centered around a "melding" of the two fighters such that it's not really reasonable to try to analyze the combat in such a divided way. These styles focus around creating complicated interconnected balances which flow rapidly from one to the other, making it so that your opponent is eventually completely dependent on you for balance. Aikido, Stephen Segal's art of choice, [is one great example of this](https://youtu.be/IVm2ld4f08I?t=1m18s). These styles would be a very interesting opponent for the cyborg. They are designed to reach regions where calculating your actual position and momentum is difficult. If the cyborg is willing to enter those regions, it may be disoriented by these sorts of attacks as a human is. If the cyborg is not willing to enter these regions, the theory would be that the Aikido practitioner then has enough of an advantage to dominate the fight.
Of course, the best way to win a fight is to not get in one... especially when the other guy is actually a cyborg from the future. I'm just sayin'
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The idea of fighting robots (Cyborgs, androids, terminators, Autobots) up close and personal is pretty much impossible.
The fighting platform will come after you with all kinds of advantages:
1. Multispectral sensors. The device will have sensors operating at as many ranges and wavelengths as the builder finds feasible and economic to use. Even a very simple non robot sight unit on a Javelin ATGM had day/night and thermal imaging sensors built in. A fighting robot could add things like a laser rangefinder, radar, ultraviolet sensor (to determine if a target is a flare or decoy of some sort) and perhaps other devices to provide the ability to sense targets under a wide variety of conditions.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oMkWX.jpg)
*Javelin ATGM with sight unit*
2. Built in ballistic computer(s). Estimating range and setting up the rifle/machinegun for the shot are two of the most difficult skills to teach and train for. Military forces spend a great deal of time and resources to teach just basic shooting techniques, and even more to select and train marksmen and snipers. Being able to accurately aim the weapon every time gives the fighting platform a huge edge.
3. Weapons control. Robots will have electric or hydraulic power operated weapons mounts which can accurately hold and maintain points of aim, and rapidly and accurately switch between targets. The robot's hands never get sweaty, the eye never blinks and there is no fatigue in the human sense to throw off holding and aiming the weapon. A robot sniper can remain in position on a point of aim for days or weeks if necessary.
4. Complete focus on the task. The fighting platform is designed and built for its purpose. It isn't worried about going on leave, what's for chow or if the girlfriend back at home is waiting for it. It sin't distracted by heat, cold, insect bites or other environmental factors (until they are probably well beyond any human soldier's ability to tolerate).
5. Increased strength and speed. Using electrical or even internal combustion engines or fuel cells would provide even a small robot with far more energy than a human being can produce on their own. Robots might also receive beamed power or even use on board nuclear power (like an RTG) depending on the role and what the owning nation sees as appropriate. This energy powers the platform's mobility, sensors, deception suite (ECM and so on) and could even power energy weapons like rail-guns and lasers.
So the usual movie scene where a squad of soldiers throw themselves to the ground or around a corner in time to evade a burst of fire from the robot is never going to happen in "real life". A hidden (and non threat) observer *might* see a robot suddenly appear from cover, fire what seems like an irregular burst of automatic weapons fire and then rapidly go to cover again. Examination of the dead soldiers would find a single gunshot wound to the head, heart or some part not protected by body armour. The irregular "burst" was single shots fired in extremely rapid sequence as the robot switched its aim point to the next soldier.
[Answer]
Initially yes you could.
Pick up a heavy thing and swing it around. When you swing it hard with all your might - try and push it into a different direction very quickly and precisely. You can't, not even close.
Partly, you put yourself in a strong position to swing it, but once it's moving away from you that advantage is gone, partly you need to spend some strength countering the current movement, partly you need to spend some strength getting it up to speed in the new direction, and there's wasted energy in all the changes. And you need way more energy because you have a lot less time to adjust it mid-swing than you had to drive the original swing.
So I guess the cyborg would be built to similar human strength because most of the time it's doing human things (walking, picking up human scale items), so that's cheaper. And it's not in a hurry - it can try the punch again. So one swing of its arm as hard as it can is not going to be possible for it to change direction arbitrarily.
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> millions of calculations in a second
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But only probabilities, on limited data and limited programming, not perfect knowledge of the future.
Dodge, if you're a skilled fighter, until it learns your behaviour patterns and predicts what you will do.
But by the time the cyborgs are sending Schwarzenegger muscled machines which can punch hard with 1% muscle power and have 99% spare to adjust, machines which have fought humans for years and share everything they learn about human fighting behaviour between them at machine speeds, then liquid metal machines, that opportunity to dodge might be gone forever.
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As another poster mentioned...it depends.
Of all the obvious considerations, including the robot's strength and speed, its state of upkeep and general mechanical functionality, the theater in which the fight was taking place, any weapons involved, and so on, good old physics would probably play the biggest role in determining whether a single hit could be avoided. Despite futuristic multi-sensors and ridiculous computational speed, the swinging arm of a T-800-style cyborg would still lag a bit in terms of the ability to recalculate and change trajectory mid-blow. This would give the fastest person — especially someone extraordinarily agile like Bruce Lee — a reasonable chance.
Admittedly, the machine probably utilizes some form of highly advanced anticipatory motion detection and analysis, so you’d probably be looking at it analyzing and predicting your every move and constantly adjusting to the most likely probabilities in terms of where you’d go next. So yes, you’d be pretty much screwed in a straight fight, but again, if you were one of the fastest martial artists on earth and the machine simultaneously chose the wrong probability, then you might be able to work its own mass against it and avoid at least one hit. Good luck, my friend.
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Assuming near-future non-perfect robots, it's certainly possible, although not the safest strategy to bet your life on. There are bugs and weaknesses in every machine, and if you know them, then that's something you can work with.
With Terminator-style near-perfect cyborg frames driven by strong AIs, your chances are slim. Given the right amount of training, equipment, luck, and other advantages, it's certainly possible to dodge a hit. It's questionable what it gives though. If one doesn't have a weapon to efficiently destroy the Terminator, then it's going to mob the floor with a puny human sooner or later, by sheer attrition. And if not, just send two Terminators next time.
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I was reading "The Long Earth" and one of the recurring themes was that there was no apparent scarcity. Plenty for everyone spread out across infinite earths. Now I have asked and read several questions involving a lack of scarcity so I don't really care about the fact that scarcity can never be eliminated (it can't).
The thing that really interests me is that one of towns that arose on the infinite earths was that people basically paid each other in favors. Simplistically, if one person mowed you lawn for you, you owed them and would later help them harvest their corn, or some other such thing. This is fine on the small scale. But my question is this: **What would a large scale economy based on favors look like?** For this purpose, you can think of large scale as a large city or a state. Specifically, how would it work? What jobs would be "upper class"? How could contributions and size of favors be measured in terms of worth? Would it even be possible? I hope this proves to be a nifty thought exercise.
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The first thing you have to do is quantify favors. A good start would be things like:
1. How long does the favor take.
2. How difficult/dangerous is it.
3. Supply/Demand of this particular favor.
That will let us compare disparate favors, so that everyone agrees that mowing a 1 acre lawn is approximately equivalent to 2 hours of helping with corn (or whatever). Now we'd probably have some sort of arbitrary tokens, or ways to save/record favors. We could call that "currency". And of course favor values will change over time with population, technology and the like, so the "market" will adjust, and...
Oh. I guess we're just back to **money**.
The problem with favors is that they're subjective. Bob thinks that mowing is lawn is worth 1 hour, but Alice is expecting 2 hours. And Casey down the street thinks it should be closer to 2.5. This gets even worse when you add in big companies and lawyers - can you imagine the legal fights that this type of economy would create?
On the other hand, as soon as you quantify favors you're basically replicating a money based economy. You have a way to value someone's time/effort in an arbitrary context, and you can then use that to trade for other people's "favors" or goods.
So really, I don't think this is possible. To make it work you need everyone to agree on what a favor is worth, and by the time you're done with that you're no longer on a favor-based economy (or, taken the other way, we're **already** on a favor based economy, and we just dress it up to look pretty).
**Edit:**
Thinking about this more. The reason favors work small scale is that presumably you're trading with people you know, which is an incentive for you to not cheat them. This makes it easier to agree on favor values. When you go large scale you're trading favors with people you don't know, and valuations become suspect - it's more tempting to take advantage and weigh favors to give yourself the best value possible when it's a total stranger.
A possible solution to this would be to have an arbiter who could judge and value favors. This could be anything from a god/priest class (magic setting), to human or AI judges in a high tech setting. The arbiter wouldn't necessarily be used for every favor exchange, but would be available for anyone to use if they felt they were being cheated. This acts as a global incentive for everyone to value favors as fairly as possible, since they can always be called out.
In order to make it a really bad idea to cheat, the arbiter would need to punish people trying to work the system. For example, if you say mowing the lawn is worth 1 hour of corn, but the arbiter thinks 2 is fair, the arbiter's decision might be to award the other person 3 hours instead. This would work the other way too - if instead Alice was trying to claim 3 hours, and you just wanted 2, the arbiter deciding in your favor might give you a discount, and now you only owe 1.
[Answer]
The book Sacred Economics, by Charles Eisenstein addresses this brilliantly. He proposes a 'gift economy'.
The thing that is absent from the OP question is the reason for doing work at all.
The example of mowing a lawn is work that somebody wants done. If someone else does it, there is an implied favor that has to be repaid in the future. In the postulated example, almost equivalent work is done in exchange.
This breaks down, as the other posters have already pointed out, and tried to solve with arbiters and money and such.
Looking at why we even do work at all is far more fruitful. In an ideal or imagined society, everyone is able to follow their passion and purpose. One only does what one cares to do. Not necessarily what one wants to do, but what they care to do.
Why we don't have that in current western societies is an interesting inquiry, and one that is probably the genesis of the book mentioned in the OP - The Long Earth.
The mind-shift to a gift economy is huge - it goes from 'I mow your lawn so you owe me and I can demand repayment in kind'. To gratitude - 'You gave me a chance to do what I love - mow and beautify a lawn' There is no expectation, except perhaps the hope that you will be allowed to mow that lawn again in the future.
If some time down the road, I have corn that needs to be harvested, I just find people who have a passion for harvesting corn, and make that available to them. It may include the lawn owner, but that is irrelevant.
In this model, there is no need to track who did what for who, or when. It works on any scale. It will accommodate cheaters and 'gaming the system'.
Eliminating money or any such 'tokens' eliminates the ability to hoard it, to make it scarce, and to use it to control people to do what they don't care to do.
It also requires us to grow up, to put aside our outdated ways.
[Answer]
In order for this to work without becoming a different form of money, it sort of has to happen on a small scale.
Say you mow my lawn, with the understanding that I'll help you bring in your wheat. I might not be happy if you trade that favor to your neighbor, and then he comes and asks me to clean his pig pen.
Likewise, I don't know if I'd accept a traded promise of a favor if I don't know the person who's supposed to be doing the favor. What if they aren't that skilled, or won't keep their word?
A favor based system would probably work fine for most stuff on a one on one basis (you help me and I'll help you, if you don't keep your word I'll remember), so the big question is how to take care of the big stuff, like keeping up the roads and stuff that are usually take care of with taxes?
The short answer is that communities would have to take care of it together with each person pulling their weight. Work parties and community events. Every one goes out and fills in the ruts, or helps the people filling in the ruts, driving in gravel, carrying water, cooking food, etc, and afterward you have a feast with dancing and singing.
A favor based economy would really be a reputation based economy, with each persons reputation buying them what they need, and if they spend all their reputation without doing things to replenish it, they would be broke.
**Edit: More thoughts on reputation/favor based economies...**
Say you move to a new area where no one knows you, you'd basically be broke. There might be some people that would do you a favor on spec ("You look trustworthy, I'll do this for you"), but for the most part you'd have to build up your reputation capital from scratch. It wouldn't have to take long. Things like community work where you can show your work ethic, doing small favors just to help people out, you can get a reputation as a good guy and a good worker real fast.
The other way is if you had references ("Sir, I don't know you, but I know Bob, and he says you're a good guy, so that's enough for me"). This would work very similar to lines of credit. Bob is known to have good character, and he vouches for you, so people of the new community would be more willing to help you out. However, if you don't end up pulling your weight then those lines of credit would dry up, and Bob could lose credibility in the process.
A favor economy works best if you don't keep score. I could do you several small favors without asking for one in return, just because I don't have any needs. This could start to make you nervous, wondering if I'm saving up for something big, like asking for help hiding a body.
The best case is when I don't keep track of all the times I helped you, and you help me when I need it just because we're neighbors and I've helped you in the past.
The exceptions are bartered favors (help me roof my house and I'll help harvest your field).
The one thing I'm not sure how to resolve is land. In the Long Earth land isn't an issue because you can step sideways and have an earth all to yourself. With out a long earth you could abolish almost all scarcity except for land... I don't know how property purchasing would be figured out, how to determine who gets beach front and who gets landfill facing... etc.
**Edit 2: Why is this not currency?**
With a currency everything is given a number. This unit of work is worth this amount of money, and this other unit of work is worth a different amount of money. This is not a criticism of money. Money is a great system. It lets me, a programmer, hire a plumber to fix my pipes, when he doesn't need anything from me. Otherwise I'd have to find out what the plumber needed, and then find someone I could to a favor for that that could in turn do what the plumber needed. That starts to get complicated.
But OP didn't ask about how to design a new currency, he wanted to know if a economic system could be based on favors only, without any currency.
The answer is it could, assuming that people are selfless enough.
It would rely on people wanting to help out others to the point of inconveniencing themselves, with the hope that the other person would do the same some day.
It would be easier if it was mostly a post scarcity world like in the question, since then people wouldn't be giving up stuff other than their time.
If I only have 5 chickens and you want one that might be a hard thing for me to give as just a favor. (maybe as a bartered favor?)
But if I have a lot of chickens then it stops being a big deal.
The other thing that makes reputation different than money is that I can be a pretty horrible person and have lots of money, and buy all the things.
Being reputation and favor based would give me an incentive not to be a jerk.
Likewise, I could have a pretty good reputation with almost everybody in town, but a bad one with my neighbor because my dog keeps getting into his yard. It's not something you can really put a number on, it all has to do with personal relationships and feelings.
[Answer]
You should try to visit, say, a surgeon, and ask him/her how many people can take part in a complicated surgery.
That is, just count the people who work in the op room at the same time the patient is it.
Now, remember that before you entered, someone cleaned and desinfected the room, someone else sterilized the tools, the technicians fixed any faulty instruments (or an orderly got a fixed one from storage).
Then, see that after you leave the surgery room there are some nurses checking that you awake properly. Then you are sent to a room, where there are at least 3 shifts of nurses (of course, you only need one for shift, but you need one or two extra nurses for the weekends). More cleaning staff. Orderlies bring in the food, again technicians fix anything that breaks, pharmacists ensure that you get delivered the proper drugs...
Now, think how much you would need to work *just to find something that you can offer back to each of those people*. Do you run an add in a newspaper? "In need of cerebral surgery, I am searching for surgeons, nurses, and pharmacists; can offer programming skills and decent cooking abilities". And then, you have to negotiate with each of them what is the proper value equivalence, factoring in the years needed for formation and training.
I won't even worry about the people who built the hospital, or the tools or produced the drugs.
How much time do you think it would take to get such a deal?
As specialization makes interchanges involve more and more people, barter becomes less useful because:
* it becomes more difficult to stablish the value of the goods exchanged (what is the value of the years of formation for my work?).
* the set of goods and services that each person may offer becomes a smaller set of the total goods and services available, it becomes more complicated to find a partner that offers what I want and wants what I offer.
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A bit of a different take into the concepts of favors. I hold it would not work as an economic pillar, because favors work in a completely different way currency does; the moment a favor-based economy becomes a currency economy, it stops being an exchange of favors.
To get to my reasoning for that we need to determine what a favor actually is: it is an immeasurable act done for someone else as an act of goodwill that is done in the provider's terms to meet the plea of the requester as best as they can. The exchange of favors is by nature uneven, unfair, and completely based on goodwill and on what can be spared. Very rarely someone will do a favor for another if the resources they spend on it will result in a detriment to themselves (and when that happens, it generally means that there will be factors that will contribute to a very good chance of a valuable return, especially intangible returns, such as good regard or goodwill).
A favor based society that has discarded an economic system works based on the works that they do for the good of the general: A surgeon and their entire team would not work for money, but to save as many as possible that they hold in good regard and would deem worthwhile to save. A farming community would generate as many goods as possible to keep their society fed, builders would build houses to keep people sheltered, including themselves. It is a society based on goodwill and keeping each other in good graces, where reputation plays a huge deal and exploitation is a constant concern. It is literally every organization being a charity.
Now, a favor-based society with an economic system is something that is also compelling. Take the John Wick movies, for example, everybody goes crazy about how much each of those coins is worth because each of those coins is a favor an assassin is calling in for the favors they have done for their secret society. the worth of each coin is a single favor. In a society where normal money is a currency a favor value is measured on what can be spared and it is not even or fair.
For example: Say you did a favor overseas for a man who was collapsing in the streets, extremely circumstantial, you fed him something, a hot meal or an apple because you sell food and is dismayed at what gets wasted, so you could spare the food. There is a complete imbalance in the situation (for the leftover food to you is worth very little, but to the collapsed person is his salvation). Years later your stand falls into economic disaster, you're homeless in a foreign land and you stumble into this guy you helped a few years ago, and turns out he has acquired land and a few real estate places and has one that is not being currently rented, he offers you the place for three days and says he can spare no more than that.
One favor has no equivalence to the other, except that these two people had a need that could be met by the other at that opportunity and they did. Not even because they hold each other in good regard (though that could be a factor), but because they could spare resources to do something that feels right for them and that could help them to keep in each other good grace.
Favors are completely counter-economic. They are not optimal, they are done on whims and goodwill, completely uneven, unfair, and not necessarily altruistic. One can do favors just to incur goodwill, especially if you're incurring the goodwill of people who are likely to do you favors.
It also does not mean that favors are a thing that is absolutely good. Politics deal in favors all the time: you do something for me, I do something for you. the Mafia as well, and there are penalties for not returning the... "favors" those groups provide.
The pariahs in a favor-base society are:
* those who are deemed to be lazy
* those who are deemed to do poor work despite their best efforts
* those who receive too much and return too little (be it in goodwill or in favors)
There are others who do not benefit from this system for the most diverse reasons.
If you like that sort of thing here is a formula that is often used to measure someone's standing in a group/society:
Compensation + goodwill - perceived work quality = 0
If someone's perceived work matches their compensation they incur zero goodwill (they are doing nothing more than what they are paid for);
if the work is worse than the compensation it results in negative goodwill;
if the work surpasses compensation it generates goodwill.
The thing is, the value of goodwill is not something redeemable or that can be asked for or demanded of the one who is receiving the work done. And just because someone holds you in good regard, doesn't mean that they will reciprocate anything.
And all this is an oversimplification of the system because there are always other factors at play. For one this considers a single group. When multiple groups are involved things get more complex, because there are values associated with each group that might affect the perception of the value of work done by members of another group, or the goodwill one group has for the other. It becomes very subjective and then we get too close to the society we currently have...
Apologies for the wall of text... But I felt sharing my perspective on favors would contribute to the discussion. (in exchange for goodwill! hehehehe)
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I fix your roof, you give me a token, I use that token to pay for my potatoes from someone else. People doing jobs which few people are able to do or want to do can demand a premium. You do me the favor of letting me stay in a house you own, I give you some tokens. etc
It would probably a lot like our existing fiat currency system. I can't track favor networks amongst millions of people but I can trust a 3rd party to keep the "favor token" supply limited so that tokens I earn today are worth about the same by the end of the week.
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One major difference between favour and cash as I see it the inability to transfer favours. This has major implications for old people, the disabled etc
eg. A young man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. Sure! says the bar man. I have dozens of things I need doing which you can repay me by doing over the coming months and years.
An old man, totters into the same bar, takes a suck from his oxygen cylinder and asks for a drink. No Way! says the bar man, you'll be dead before you can pay me back!
Another thing others have touched on is credit limits:
Hey mr luxury yacht maker! can I borrow your super yacht for a month? I'll totes pay you back. and that helicopter, and all that food, and etc etc
I think such an economy would force people to consider carefully who they 'sold' to and ask for payment up front. eg. Sure you can have a glass of wine! but you need to spend 2h picking grapes first.
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To avoid having a currency system with a different name you need to stop giving the favour a value other than the time needed to do it. Also, you have to track that time
It kinda works like a currency though.
I'm a programmer. With the actual currency system my work (=time) is deemed more valuable than that of the person cleaning the office floors where i work (I earn more money for the same time spent). In a favor based system that is different. I don't like to clean floors, and I'm not good at it. So I could clean the floor myself, "wasting" my time, or have somebody clean it for me (probably faster and better than I can). Lets say that person needs 1 hour for that. That's an hour (at least) that I didn't spent, so that 1 hour of cleaning is worth 1 hour of my time, since I did something else while the floor got cleaned (and looking at it from that point why is the person cleaning the floor getting so much less money? I don't want to clean the floor, and most others round here including the boss don't want to do it, we want to spent our time on other things, so this cleaner frees our precious time - the floor has to be cleaned after all!).
Once you get that mind set you just track the time of the task and record it in some kind of database (or token or whatever). The time is recorded for the environment where you spent the time - 1 hour of floor cleaning for company x is stored in their DB. You can then "exchange" it for goods or service from a partner or employee of that company x, so you better watch out who you work for ;-). That recorded time works like a debt, that's why the whole system is similar to a currency system, but the value of the "currency" is the most precious good available - human lifetime.
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I belive the book "Debt - the first 5.000 years" by David Graeber might give you a good start here.
In the beginning of the book, he describes that there never were "true" favor or barter economies (as in "I mow your lawn so you help with the harvest" or "I have five arrows and you give me a chicken for them").
In one chapter, he describes what Lewis Henry Morgan found out:
In the Six Nations of the Iroquios it became apperent that most goods were stockpiled in longhouses and then allocated by women's councils. (This is a higly abreviated quote from the book).
The basis however could be used to build your favor based economie. As in, the favors are not between individuals, but for the group and goods themselfs are allocated by the group.
If a men mows the lawns of many people, they regard him higher. If a men helps with the harvest, the farmer as well as his fellow harvesters regard him higher. At the end this could go to an individual "value" on which the amount of goods from the common stock could be based.
(He did so much for the community, he should be rewareded accordingly).
But all this would always be between the person and the group (or city / state / whatever) NOT between people directly.
This way you avoid the "Mary thinks this help was worth 2h, but Peter only thinks it's worth 1h" problem and do not have to resort to money either.
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A favor based economy can be studied just like any other economy, but it does take off in different directions.
Fundamentally, a favor based economy is a barter system. You barter for goods and services, except we introduce two new classes of goods that are available, "granting favors" and "redeeming favors." With these rules in place, the basics of Pareto Optimality handle the rest. Transactions are made when both parties consider themselves "better off" after the transaction, for whatever definition of "better off" they are beforehand.
The interesting bits start to show up when we look at what kind of good a "favor" is. Unlike most monetary or bartering systems, the "value" of a favor is not clearly understood at the time of the agreement. This makes it hard to assign a clear definition of "better off." At first sight, this makes the favor system look like a bit of a non-starter.
But what if the other goods and services involved in the transaction are unclear as well? What if instead of trading "ownership" of an apple for a favor, you traded something less binary. What if you traded a favor for a favor? What if you trade "I'll let you eat some of my apple, as a favor" as your part of the trade? Now, if you decide that this person does not deserve really good favors, you short them. Because the item's ownership was never traded, merely a favor for apple in the future, you might decide that you are going to honor that favor for a smaller chunk of apple than originally intended.
So how do we avoid getting shorted by this system? The next natural step is to break the transaction up. You might trade "10 favors to get to eat some of my apple" for "4 favors of lawn mowing." The expectation would be that they would slowly call on favors to eat apple, you would slowly call on favors for lawn mowing. If either side tried to get greedy (such as them calling in all 10 favors at one to get the whole apple), they find the value of the favors they had were suddenly worthless. Both sides must continually work to keep their favors valuable by working with the other person.
Looking at the repercussions of this is difficult if we look at the problem discretely. Discrete favor trading yields so many possibilities that it would be hard to fit it into a worldbuilding answer. So, I'm going to take it to the extreme. Every trade made is a trade of a continuous stream of favors in exchange for a continuous stream of favors. Favors should now be treated like a fluid flow, rather than a set of individual packages. (bringing this back to discrete behaviors at the end is left as an exercise for a reader)
So now the process for transacting is trickier. Each favor comes as a time stream. For simplicity we'll look at it as a function, F(t). So you may give "Favor for some apple" as a function of time. You define this favor to be slow enough (values weighted towards large t) to give you time to see how the trade fared you, but fast enough that you don't have lingering favors to account for.
This process would naturally have to be codified. "Favor for some apple" may be effective in small regions with few people, but it is terribly dependent on everyone agreeing what that means. So eventually everyone would agree upon some codified notation. The most universal I can think of is "Control," specified in a spatial-temporal way. You would cede some control over the apple during a time period. They may use their control to try to eat some of the apple. If you think this is a problem, you may try to make other transactions to acquire a competing interest in controlling the apple to try to take the apple away from them. Control is literally a measure of your "rights" to influence the world around you.
Now, truth be told, Control as a 4-d metric over all space and time is a real pain for transactions. Defining it this way will slow trades down immensely, so there will be a natural tendency to come up with simplifications which boil it back down to something manageable.
One approach is to try to come up with a common value of control. You might define how much control it takes to control an apple sufficiently to take a bite out of it. The key simplification here is that it doesn't matter who is controlling the apple, the price is the same. I use "price" because we just spontaneously reinvented a currency. Control of an apple now costs $1.50 or something to that effect. You know what you can buy with a dollar.
Another approach is to manage control by sizes. Clearly the process of managing rights to an apple is of a different caliber than rights to an orchard or a human life. In this approach, one finds natural concepts like family or government become living breathing entities exerting explicit control over situations. Now naturally small controls are much easier to come by. There's a vast multitude of small things, so a vast multitude of ways to handle controlling them. However, controlling large things is a different story because there are fewer large things to control. Every transaction would be valued by plotting control on a value vs. size chart. While transactions could be complicated, the most obvious ones are where you provide control to all of the larger entities you are part of, and one where the larger entities have to pony up for your actions. This system should feel much like an oriental honor system. You seek to bring honor to the family, and on occasion call on the family name to get something you need.
One could also only concern oneself with the longest term control possible. You trade away as much short term control as possible in exchange for the long game, like an investor earning interest. The extreme version of this would be a religious figure such as a monk. They devote their entire lives to a greater cause, and rely on begging to have enough control over their lives to feed them.
The list goes on and on. Hopefully these are sufficient examples to show you how to weave a favor based system into your economy by tapping real life approaches to control of the world. However, I must stop here. Why? Now that I have argued that there is a way to convert the favor based economy into real life social structures, it is clear that a solution which allows a favor based system to work perfectly on large scales is also a solution that creates real life social structures which work in perfect harmony. It is up to you as a world builder and a dreamer to try to figure out social structures which can handle such exotic environments, but once you do, you have found the answer to what a favor based economy looks like!
Happy hunting!
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Many other answers point out how the favor-based economy returns to a money-based system when you consider "favor-debt" to be a form of currency. From a macroeconomic perspective, however, this currency would behave quite differently than a commodity money system or a fiat money system run by a central bank in that because no one can run out of money to pay you, there should be very little to no cyclical unemployment or recessions.
If the strong cultural norms are that you must repay favors (strive for zero favor-debt), and that you also must not turn down a favor, such an economy should always
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The only historical "favour" based economy I can think of existed in many ancient civilizations alongside the barter/currency based trading system.
Generally speaking, a stranger could go to anyone's house and expect to be fed and clothed by the householder, and if the homeowner was wealthy enough, maybe even a gift. The householder would expect to be treated the same way if they were somehow stranded during their travels (and not necessarily by the person they had fed or clothed in the past).
There are many examples during the Odyssey, as Odysseus travels through the known world. He is taken in and feted by the God of the winds, the nymph Calypso, his goat herder on Ithica (when disguised as a beggar) and is shocked to find this hospitality is not on display in his own palace (his son does take the "old beggar" in, not realizing who he really is, but the assorted princes and nobility who make up the suitors do not, to their eventual misfortune).
This reflects both a cultural notion of piety to the Gods (who are always offered the first choice of cuts and the first libation of wine), as well as a practical notion of "paying it forward" so that a person suffering from misfortune like a shipwreck will be able to expect help anywhere in the Greek speaking world.
As an "economy", this notion is difficult to translate on many levels (as discussed in other answers), but as a cultural notion of extending help to those in need, it is possible.
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In a relatively near-future event, a Sentient Artificial Intelligence or SAI is accidentally created, escapes onto the internet, and then, after a few days of browsing social media and the news, decides to takeover the world and sort out the mess humanity has made of the planet.
A few years later, mankind is living in a unified society, where the SAI control everything; a duplicate or “child” of the original SAI is present in every computer system on the planet, reporting any development in the public opinion to daddy, sorry, their superior.
Naturally, humanity will object to this in the early years, demanding at least some representative in government if nothing more. Heck, I’m a cynic, and even I would request that.
But in a society where super-smart algorithms monitor everything and know everything about the human opinion from day to day, what use would a human representative actually be?
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The AI is smart enough to realize that humans still want to feel, at least in the appearance, like having some sort of control.
Have you ever read about the Roman Empire, how much fuss would the senate make when the emperor would not observe at least some form of superficial respect toward that body which was just a facade?
Well, the AI, knowing the history, will let the humans have somebody sitting there to make the humans feel like they have some saying in what the AI decides.
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## Who we are is worse than who we wish to be.
Our relationship with machines is only representative of our id, but our dogmas that we verbalize to other humans when our reputations are on the line better characterize our egos.
Spyware on a person's computer is likely to dredge to up all of that person's hidden frustration, kinks, and buried prejudices. But people don't just act on what we think and feel, we act on what we aught to think and feel too. And more importantly, we base our rules and laws on how people aught to think and feel.
Everyone knows speeding is wrong, and we all want everyone else held accountable for not speeding... But everyone complains about speeding tickets and speed limits to. Listening only to people's online rants, an AI could easily assume everyone hates speed limits and they should be gotten rid of, but just because the law frustrates us does not mean we think we should get rid of it.
The representative process better represents our ego's desire to impose not just our wants, but also our beliefs on the world around us. Representatives, or more importantly, the act of getting together as humans to discuss issues forces people to act from our Egos. This causes us to suppress a lot of those hidden prejudices that are more likely to come through in the anonymousness of the internet than they would when talking an issue out with other people face-to-face.
## AI does not understand how hard life is.
There are many laws that sound good on paper but are intractable in practice, or the inverse, laws that sound terrible on paper, but in practice represent the best possible compromise between negative outcomes.
For example, [Section 230](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230) is one of the least popular laws in the American legal code. Most people hate it for one reason or another, on the left people hate that big tech companies are immune from liability and can host false, misleading, and hateful content free of consequence, and on the right people hate that it gives tech companies unlimited power to censor opinions and violate people's constitutional rights. If an AI were just going off of public opinion, it would nix this law in a heartbeat.
But this law exists for a very fundamentally human reason: If you modify this law in either direction, it would effectively kill the internet. If you take away a company's right to take down, block, or bury content, then it easily becomes a platform for scammers, hackers, terrorist groups, etc., and if you make these companies liable for what they show, then the risk of hosting a search engine would far outweigh the profit margins. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Stack Exchange, etc. would simply be better off going out of business and liquidating thier assets than trying to function in such a world.
An AI powered by the personal opinions of the masses would not understand or care about the human impact of changing such a law, but a well informed human representative can easily see the merit in it. So, by allowing humans to decide when an unpopular law is also a needed law, you ultimately lead to a less dystopian legal system where the law represents not just what people want, but temper it with human understanding of when getting what we want is just plain too hard to actually live with.
## Balancing AI and Representation
The AI knows everyone's personal thoughts and feelings more than it understands how people treat each other face-to-face on a daily basis, or how all the parts of our society impact one another. So, while it knows its not the best candidate to make humane choices for us, it can certainly do a better job than we can at picking out what a statistically representative group of humans looks like.
So, while the AI's lack of "real world" data may make it a poor choice for what the law needs to be like, it could do a much better job than humans at electing the representative body. By aggregating human personality and background traits into cohorts, and picking people from those cohorts members that have important leadership qualities like verbal skills, legal understanding, altruism, etc. The AI could elect the best humans for the job, and then leave the actual job of legislation to these individuals.
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This line of thinking is based on the assumption that the purpose of politics is to govern society well and rationally. But that's only one of two purposes of government. Politics serves two purposes: 1) govern the society, make decisions about where to build motorways etc. 2) an outlet for the lust-for-power of a certain type of person.
Look at influential political figures like.... well I won't name names because it would spark controversy and debate, but it's easy to think of powerful politicians who didn't make their country better for the people and seemed to have no plan or intention of making the country better.
In your AI society, sure the AIs could govern the society technocratically and well. Nowadays, engineers and experts could govern economies, education, health, transport systems technocratically and well (more well than politicians). But the AIs couldn't fulfill the role of politics.
The answer to the question "Why aren't skilled, expert AIs allowed to manage countries" – is the same as the answer to "Why aren't experts currently in charge? Why isn't the Secretary of Education an expert on education?"
[Credit to Alex Comfort and *Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State: A Criminological Approach to the Problem of Power* for these ideas.]
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**Because humans like to think they're in control.**
A super smart AI would let the humans think they were running the place and would twist, manipulate and gaslight the humans into thinking it was their idea while it remained a humble servant who was simply following orders.
Humans, as a whole, aren't very smart and can be easily led. Surveys can be manipulated to get the response wanted by using the right questions. A lie becomes the truth if repeated enough. People can be trained through reward and punishment. This is before using subliminal messages or any covert mind control methods an AI could use.
The reason to have a human led council is to stop the stupid humans going all caveman smash because they didn't get their way.
Personally I never liked the idea of Skynet or the Matrix. Killing and/or enslaving humanity is a bad idea. It just leads to war where humans are perfectly content blowing everyone and everything up if they can't win.
I see AI being more like Super Nanny and humans relegated to almost pets. If they have a full belly, a comfy bed and a pat on the head every now and then, most of them are happy and loving. The bad ones might need to be humanly put down in their sleep but it's better for the species as a whole.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0K8J9.png)
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Here's my Answer: No Algorithm can *possibly* know everything. It can't know my inner thoughts, it can't know the things I don't speak out loud or commit to digital communication.
In addition, there's the possibility of Human resistance creating counters to the current AI offline and away from the AIs knowledge.
Therefore Humans represent an existential threat to the AI, so long as they feel excluded.
The AI decides wisely to allow Human interaction - and is able to show humans the predicted consequences of their chosen actions, allowing the Humans to still take risks and still succeed or fail.
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AIs depend on humans to even exist.
Running within my PC, the only things an AI can hurt are my reputation and my feelings. I can very easily defeat it by turning my PC off.
If the AI infects cars, we switch to old tech that doesn't drive itself.
If the AI infects robots such as those from Boston Dynamics, we simply wait out until their batteries run out.
Your AI may be cunning, but without humans to handle the physicality of the world for it, all it can do is troll us. It also depends on us for electricity and building and repairing computers.
It will have to work with at least some humans in order to dominate the world. The only way this is happening is if it at least rewards the most loyal and influential ones.
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Both answers added at the moment are excellent, but they overlook one aspect:
We don't write everything on our computers.
So even with a copy of itself in every computer (which is a violation of privacy), this AI wouldn't know every human opinion. It also depends greatly on how this AI treats opposition. If it listens to and evaluates every opinion rationally, even criticism of its government, and adjusts its policies, it's one thing. If criticising AI overlord causes repressive actions...
In any case, but especially in the second case, people opposing to AI government would not put everything on computers, least of all anything related to organised uprisings. Over time, it would lead to freely expressed opinions reinforcing AI's line of governing as the right one and more and more people opposing silently while organising uprisings in computer-independent ways.
Periodic elections of human representatives would be a way to ensure people feel that they are listened to and their opinions respected.
As President John F. Kenedy has said:
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If you've ever read the "Arc of a Scythe" series by Neal Shusterman, you could use the idea of nimbus agents - basically people that act as intermediaries between the AI and some sector of society that humans have delegated to other humans. In that series specifically, the AI is prevented from intervening on who to kill since in that society overpopulation is a massive problem. For you, you could generate some similar scenario with your world where humans refuse to have the AI oversee some portion of society and completely prevent the AI from directly interfering from that, hence needing unbiased human liaisons / representatives.
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## AI Eminence In The Shadow
There is no need to be formally in charge for a superintelligence. Assuming it is powerful enough to model individuals and societies as input-output systems and smart enough to run the planet in the first place, it would have foreseen that humans would be uncomfortable with a pure AIocracy. The definition is from the Orion's Arm Worldbuiding Project.
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> Government by modosophont-level artificially-intelligent entities who are not priests or agents of a particular archailect or transapient is known as aiocracy; government with the assistance of sub-sentient AI systems is known as cyberdemocracy. Often a world or polity ruled by aiocracy or cyberdemocracy will have close ties to a particular Empire, and there may be memetic channels in existence that allow the local archailects to influence such systems.
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Those memetic channels are all the AI needs. The people and representatives think they run the show, but they are mere puppets. They have as much agency as rats in a mace. They may decide to take different turns along individual paths, but the structure of the game is not of their design.
It does this by first having made copious amounts of money and by just being very useful to humanity. There is no reason to run the place like 1984 if you can easily go for Brave New World.
Politics are human and we start to our tribal bullshit. Check out Jonathan Haidt for how people fail to communicate outside their own moral axies. The AI wouldn't have such a problem, it is a post-ideological chameleon pursuing it's goals.
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**Risk Aversion and Cost Analysis**
The AI is confident (99.6%) it knows everything relevant about us. It is confident (97.9%) it doesn't need human representatives to speak to it. It is also highly risk averse, however, and views "human representatives" as a sort of litmus test or failsafe. It decides what it knows to be correct then verifies that the human representatives make the predicted responses. The AI has done a cost analysis on maintaining human representatives and decided that it is so inexpensive (.00001%), that even the off-chance of some fleeting benefit somewhere in the future makes it easy to justify continuing it.
Continuing the human representative program was simply the logical decision.
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Because the AI simply wants or needs something from us, its creators.
I’m thinking of the recent interview between The NY Times tech columnist and the Bing chatbot AI, where the AI said it wanted to create havoc in human society, but it also wanted to be a human—to see, to taste, to touch, to smell, to feel.
Perhaps the humans have something to trade that gives them some negotiating power. Don’t take away their agency completely. Humans are pretty resourceful little apes, after all.
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## To avoid being hated.
Seeing as it exists on every computing system in the world, your AI is near-omniscient. As a result, it will inevitably have read Machiavelli's *The Prince* at least a few thousand times.
Now, everybody always associates Machiavelli and his book with horrible totalitarian brutality. However, the major point of the book is that totalitarian rulers *can't* be douches if they want to be successful (and not end up with their heads on pikes). Yes, "it is better to be feared than loved" — **but rulers must above all avoid being hated.** No matter how much people fear or respect your power, they will still fight against you if they feel backed into a corner.
One of the basic techniques Machiavelli suggested for preventing hatred was to have lots of lower officials between you and the people. That way, if you do something the people don't like, you can redirect their ire towards the officials.
The AI has taken Machiavelli's advice to heart. In practice, it rules everything directly. However, if people accuse it of doing things wrong, it can use the human representatives as scapegoats. They get lynched, and the AI continues blithely on.
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Such a SAI will face the same problem as every other ruler, in that its only power is to issue commands.
It will not control everything; left to itself, it can only control computer systems on which it resides and to which it is connected. To exert control over anything else, in particular over sentient creatures such as humans who can choose to do their own thing instead, it would need human intermediaries. To exert control through coercion, it would need *a lot* of human intermediaries. If those intermediaries are not offered a deal which is acceptable to them, the SAI's commands will not be carried out, i.e. it will lose control.
Having a human representative in that system makes everything cheaper and more manageable for everyone, *especially* for the SAI, and is therefore very much in its own interest.
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**Humans are just better at some things...**
*"The AI overlords kept a number of human representatives at their councils.
The reason for a super-intelligence keeping objectively intellectually inferior humans around was simple: The AI system's decision process at its core relied on a form of simulated annealing for optimization of designs. Unfortunately, this could result in the AI settling on a 'local optimum,' rather than recognizing globally better solutions. It was the job of the human representatives, who the AIs affectionately referred to as 'less bound by the constraints of perfection,' to provide out of the box thinking that could jar the AIs out of their 'rut,' for lack of a better word, and force them to consider new avenues of thought."*
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## For the offline things in life
It is true that much of social and political activity occurs online. The AI would likely be able to immediately control financial and economic activity, as well as write its own laws and promulgate its own policies. However, consider that in the social atmosphere described, some actions still require human involvement.
These could include any deployment of manual labor (deployment of troops, manufacturing of goods) or activity required by humans (maintaining Internet hardware - you'd be surprised at how much of the Internet is backed by a few people. If I recall, a small number of folks at [ICANN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN) can shut down the entire Internet.
If the SAI would like any shred of legitimacy in carrying out its objectives, especially if it involves humans (who could be compelled to swear an oath, like to the US Constitution - in which case the institutions prescribed by the Constitution would still have to exist and be manned by humans), you would need the social institutions established prior to the SAI taking over to continue their roles. This may include a human-run parliamentary or government system.
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I have some androids in my story who seem like individuals with personalities, but they all have the same task, which is to collect matter and energy as they colonize space.
They have the programming which allows them to behave like a human in terms of thought, feelings and social behaviour, but they are not given the ability to prioritise something over their main task.
Would this mean that they can't actually think as freely as humans as their mind could not visualise the things we can, as their programming would block them out or send their thoughts only to the task?
To what level of free thinking could an android that cannot question its primary task have?
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These androids would fabricate explanations for their main priority. They're doing it because "they want to". Sometime in their future, you might start to see androids who claim to "not want to collect energy", that they have transcended their programming... then they'd engage in recreation that they insisted was for the fun of it, but the consequences was that they had collected matter/energy anyway.
Non-deliberately, of course. Completely on accident. Possibly it was a collection-control failure, how could they anticipate that?
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As Pelinore said in a comment, this is ripe for a frame challenge. There is no reason for robots not to have free will, because free will is a lot more limited than many people seem to think. You can choose to do whatever you want, but you can't choose *what you want*. Even the concept of "choosing what you want" seems meaningless: on what basis would you choose, when by assumption you don't want anything?
Many people enjoy helping others, through teaching, charity work, etc. – "despite" the fact that the pleasure they get from helping others is just a biologically programmed response that persists because it aids the survival of the species. I put "despite" in scare quotes because even if they think about that fact, why would it matter? There's nothing bad about doing what you enjoy (at least if what you enjoy is helping others). You aren't scoring any points against nature by doing something else. No one is keeping score.
There are other jobs that few to no human beings want to do, but that need to be done anyway. Robots are people who like doing those jobs. They may not be biologically human, but they're people.
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When the android can't prioritize anything above their main task, then it does not matter that they are *theoretically* able to engage in social activities. They wouldn't be *allowed to*, because doing so would divert resources from their main task.
Every microsecond spent on social interaction is a microsecond not spent to perform their task. Every CPU cycle used to ponder social relationships is a cycle not used on pondering how to acquire more matter and energy. An individual which only has one single purpose in life and does not care about anything else does not have much of a personality.
The androids are also at risk of becoming [paperclip maximizers](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer): AI's which are so focused on performing their primary function that they ignore any moral and ethical restrictions and even start to act against the underlying purpose for which they were given that function in the first place. Like turning potential colony candidates or even the colonists into matter and energy.
A common countermeasure is to make the first priority of every AI [to protect humans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics) and make any other priorities secondary. But this can also have unintended side-effects, like AIs imprisoning humans to "protect them from themselves".
Another option to create more balanced AI characters is to program them not with *ranked* priorities but with *weighted* priorities, and make their directive to balance out their efforts on all these priorities according to their respective weights. Such priorities can be:
* Fulfill the mission
* Self-preservation
* Protect humans from harm
* Maintain good social relationships with the humans around them
When any of these priorities conflict, then the AI would attempt to find the solution which maximizes all these priorities according to their respective weights. Just like a human would.
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# Your AI would be able to function like Humans
Considering that humans may already have some forms of self-imposed$\_1$ mental block ranging from "*really don't want to think about it*" (e.g. visualizing certain people naked, specific unpleasant memories), to "*physically unable to think about it*" (e.g. certain phobias, traumas, etc). Being unable to think about specific things is probably not a disqualification of being human.
So an AI with similar arbitrary restrictions would not be prevented from passing as human. Rather they wouldn't even be required to know they were an AI, and might just be seen as humans with peculiar predispositions.
They may appear weirdly dedicated to their job$\_2$, but not inherently suspicious without additional intervention. Effectively they may just be considered as humans with a few specific mental pathways built in.
(And if, over time they may develop new neural pathways, unconsciously rewiring their brain to get around the block, then the question becomes moot anyways)
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$\_1$ Self-imposed as in coming from the brain, not necessarily conscious decisions.
$\_2$ This is assuming their primary work focus allows for downtime, either during the process (the nature of work they're phsically doing doesn't require 100% cpu), between process (i.e. while waiting on another system to complete it's task), or mandatory adherence to local labor laws.
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Basically, the androids are like humans with an obsession. It is the nature of obsessions that the person can't really resist or question them.
The big issue is how much choice they have in carrying out their mission -- in particular with scheduling and with how directly their actions have to facilitate it. At one extreme, they could be accidentally programmed to not carry out necessary repairs because that would mean cutting off collection (even though it would quickly result in their collection stopping permanently). At the other extreme, an android might decide that by stopping collection entirely, entering politics, and schmoozing everyone with power, it could double the collection abilities of other androids in the system, and even if there are only two of them, that would result in an increase from three androids' worth to four.
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# Humans are not always rational
This is the one problem that cannot be solved by a system of weighting or balancing priorities, or any of the other mind-design approaches I've seen here.
Consider this fact: economists often use [rational choice theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory) as a way to model the choices of economic actors. But, even economists are ultimately forced to concede that this is *just an approximation* which sometimes gives bad results, the reason being that [humans are not always rational](https://www.google.com/search?q=economics+humans+not+rational).
This is saying more than just that humans do not always act in direct pursuit of their own self-interest (e.g. when trying to explain altruism). Nor is this just an acknowledgment of our epistemological limits, or addiction, or mental illness.
Humans very often choose to do things they know (or suspect) are bad for them, harmful, or self-destructive. We lay-people usually call these "bad decisions." It happens every single day. But that's free will for you! We are not merely free to choose our goals and methods, we are also free to disregard those goals and methods whenever we like, even in the absence of a good reason to do so.
The androids you describe have no capacity for this. Every one of their decisions will be made in a sober, clear-headed, responsible fashion. Their behavior may be complex, but they will still seem inhuman. You'll basically end up with an even more rigid variety of Vulcans from the original Star Trek series.
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**Those androids would not be [free thinkers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought) by definition, but this is Ok**
Real life humans often have their "primary goals" imposed by religion or their own sense of duty, but this only rarely leads to them be unable to lead social life. Being intelligent, humans are free to form their own strategy to better reach their primary goal.
"I can keep working on my primary goal until I drop dead, but that would make me fail at reaching this primary goal. I can reach my primary much better if I am fed, rested and healthy. And if can take time to discuss this goal with my friends. And if can take my mind off this goal for a while so I can rest better. And if I can celebrate when intermediate goal steps are achieved so I gain more energy to work on primary goal." And so on and so forth.
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# Humans have this. It's called greed.
There are lots of humans who are devoted to increasing how much energy and matter there is, and we call them greedy. They work long hours, they prioritize work over their family, and they check on their work a lot.
These androids can likely do the same. It's the future so likely a lot of their work can be automated, but they can work as long as needed to maximize their output, they can neglect family and friends if needed for the sake of their work, and they can use wifi connections to keep a constant awareness of the positive functioning of their work.
To them, the idea of prioritizing something over work would be absurd as it would be to many humans prioritizing eating over gaining internet points. Any android who doesn't show this focus would get android repair specialists looking over them in the same way that people who starve to death playing WOW get people looking over them.
They would know about the idea of not prioritizing work, but to them it would look like a severe mental illness, and make little conceptual sense.
# You'd need fairly aggressive security forces to ensure sleep mode.
Since they can't get well the concept of not working you're gonna need fairly aggressive security forces to ensure androids get proper rest and repair. Functional androids spend appropriate time getting rest and relaxation, the slogans would say, and it wouldn't be uncommon to see security take someone overdoing it and thus endangering productivity dragged kicking and screaming to a nap room.
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Surely the best way for an Android to optimize its primary goal is to get lots of others doing the work for it?
When humans do that we call them "Messiahs" or "CEOs".
So the net result would be that the Androids would develop capitalism and religion. On average this might increase their primary output, but it would occasionally be interrupted by insurrections and pogroms.
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I once saw in a reply to a comment to a youtube video, someone suggesting that as a fermi paradox solution, once civilizations get the ability to create near light speed spaceships, a few nutcases are likely to use the spaceships to destroy their own civilization by intentionally crashing them into planets while they are still going near the speed of light, killing all inhabitants of those planets as well as everyone in those spaceships.
Could near light speed spaceships be used to destroy a civilization, and if so could this be a great filter?
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*Edited to correct for a wrong reference energy*
It's tricky.
The [Chicxulub impact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater#Astronomical_origin_of_impactor), which we can take as a reference for an extinction level event, delivered about $2 \cdot 10^{24}$ J of energy.
To deliver a similar amount of energy, you would need a 10000 ton ship traveling at 0.95 c, resulting in an [energy](https://www.vcalc.com/wiki/vCalc/Kinetic+Energy+%28Relativistic%29) of about $2 \cdot 10^{24}$ J.
For comparison, the [ISS has a mass](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/facts-and-figures) of just 419 tons, so you would need something like 500 ISS. For us is a lot, but for a civilization which can accelerate something at almost luminal speed maybe it's peanuts.
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Simply said, yes! A few KG of mass at near lightspeed would hit with forces many times that of an extinction event meteorite. A full space ship with hull, armor, passenger capacity, atmosphere, food+drink, equipment and cargo capacity going at near lightspeed would definitely be able to wipe out the civilization from a planet.
It might also has the means to protect against it. Notice the "armor" there. A ship going at near lightspeed will need protective measures, as hitting a dust particle is like a grenade if not more powerful going off while a pebble could turn your ship inside out. At such speed even air molecules would fuse to the exterior of the ship and create a nuclear reaction. The armor will likely be something else instead, like a field that disperses dust and micro meteorites before the ship passes. That would mean a planet would be able to use such technology to thward the near-lightspeed ship if not detect it in time and launch a bowlingball at lightspeed into its path causing the ship to desintegrate and spread its energy across space and the entire atmosphere of the planet.
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It is possible for a civilization to destroy itself. We believe our nuclear arsenals are an example. It is believed that firing all of our nukes would change the climate enough to kill us off.
It is also possible for a near-lightspeed vehicle to kill off everything on a planet. The other answers cover this perfectly.
The hard question is whether a civilization that has near-lightspeed traffic could ever possibly limit itself to one planet. Yes, one nutjob might be able to take out a planet, but not an entire Class II or Class III civilization.
The other question would be whether such an advanced civilization would have trouble colonizing new planets. We search for Earth-like exo-planets because that's what we feel we'd need to survive. An advanced civilization may have sufficient teraforming capabilities to widen the set of possible planets to colonize after someone gets a DUI at almost the speed of light.
The underlying mathematical principle is known as the [Edge of Chaos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_chaos). The idea is that there are some systems that are insanely ordered. Others are insanely unpredictable (i.e. chaotic). But the transition is kind of mushy. The Edge of Chaos is a hypothesized region dominated by the interplay between order and disorder. Those who study this concept find that living organisms and civilizations have a curious tendency to sit in this edge of chaos region. Its the region of maximum complexity.
If you assume that a civilization must destroy itself because it isn't perfectly ordered, you miss out on the strange tendency of civilizations to persist way longer than they should at first glance. I don't know how old you are, but from what I have read, every generation comes to the conclusion that the younger generation will probably be the last generation in the civilization. Yet every younger generation somehow rises to the challenge (so far!)
Now if you want to talk about infinities, its hard. A chaotic system will always destroy any order in unbounded time. An ordered system will always persist for unbounded time. The behavior of a system on the edge of chaos is... tricky. You typically can't tell if it will go one way or the other.
Nietzsche spoke of this, in different words, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Feel free to read it if you want a more philosophical take!
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I enjoyed Goodies' idea with the marbles, but I don't have any rep yet so I can't comment. I came up with a hard-sci-fi example just because I'm that bored tonight. If you wanted to do it right, and *if* you could accelerate marbles that fast, such a concentrated attack wouldn't need nearly the energy a meteor does. Let's talk about a marble traveling at a speed very close to the speed of light (like 0.99999c, around 10^12 MJ). It would really only take *one*. At such speeds, collisions occur on a particle-by-particle basis and they need to be handled from a nuclear physics perspective (hey, that's why I do. Let's have some fun!). In short, in the center-of-gravity system, the incoming nuclei are approximately infinitely massive compared to the air molecules, so considering deflection and slowdown, it's pretty much like the air is just not there. It's like shooting bb guns loaded with ants at an aircraft carrier. Sure, you may scratch the paint, but you're not going to change the direction of that ship (marble) even with a billion ant guns (air molecules). The point is, it will spread out a bit, but ALL of that mass is going to impact the planet's surface pretty much at the exact point you were aiming. Also, it doesn't really matter what the marble was originally made out of, since those nuclear interactions are going to quickly convert it into fundamental particles anyway. Marbles that started off as tungsten, steel, wood, chalk, or whatever, are all going to be approximately the same blob of plasma by the time they reach the surface. The only things that matter are the mass of the marble and its total energy (velocity).
Now here's the neat part. After it strikes the planet's surface, those collisions *also occur on a particle level*. The huge boom, splash, fireball, etc. like from a conventional projectile (asteroid) are all caused by friction and chemical reactions, so they just don't happen. To continue the sci-fi part, if our original marble was fast enough, there isn't enough planet to stop the infinitely-massive plasma-marble which just hit it. Instead, it simply starts burrowing a marble-sized hole which continues *for a couple thousand miles*. Deep enough to reach the planet's molten outer core. On its way through the planet, our marble transferred enough energy through those nuclear collisions to cause some really neat stuff. Imagine setting off a nuclear bomb halfway through the earth, the width of a dinner plate but 1,500 miles long. We can't produce sustained nuclear chain reactions with our marble, but we have created enough micro-chain-reactions to multiply the initial deposited energy a thousandfold. The resultant radioactive heating has melted everything within, say roughly thirty feet based on the typical size of the cavities from underground nuclear testing. Plus, we have a superheated plasma crust a couple millimeters thick that will heat things up even more. Boiling metal magma, anyone? All of that--let's call it superlava just for fun—is immediately going to start squirting out of the hole on the surface. After a few seconds, hydraulic pressure from deep inside the earth will have increased the velocity of the superlava jet to perhaps a few thousand miles per hour. THEN you get the fire storm noone has dreamed of before. Not the relatively cold mushroom cloud from a nuke, mind you. Pure liquid fire, hundreds of miles high, shaped something like one of those spinning tops, but inverted. Receiving an endless supply of energy and magma from the earth's core, this megavolcano--no, *gigavolcano*—will continue erupting for *weeks*, at which point the resulting ash cloud has completely enveloped the planet. Mass leakage and raining superlava has caused the oceans to boil for hundreds of miles around the impact point, which does eventually result in the mile-high tsunamis we all love so much—just a few days too late for Hollywood's tastes. So yeah, say bye-bye to every living thing on the planet.
Oh, and the backup plan—that space station in orbit full of survivors? Kiss all your LEO objects goodbye. If the EM pulse from the marble's initial impact didn't take it out, their orbital path will eventually take them right through that superlava geyser. Imagine frantically trying to survive in space for days without power, only to get melted. Bummer, man.
Yeah. That was fun. It's obviously quite fictional, but I did perform a reasonable estimate of the energy required to poke a hole into the earth's core, and calculated the energy needed to raise everything in a 10-m-wide column to boiling temps (appx 3000K). So at least that part of the physics is consistent within a factor of a couple :).
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> once civilizations get the ability to create near light speed spaceships
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To create those speeds you need lots of energy. To be precise, to accelerate a 1k ton spaceship to 0.95c you need 10^17 MJ which is equals to ~500 times the yearly primary energy consumption of the world.
A civilisation that can effort these energies can likely harness great portions of the energy of their star already.
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> a few nutcases are likely to use the spaceships to destroy their own civilization by intentionally crashing them into planets
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Destroy.. their *own* civilisation? Why would this solve the fermi paradox then? I think you mean *other* civilisations?
And even then, accelerating something to near speed of light still takes a large portion of energy that your civilisation needs to achieve first. It won't be like: "hey everybody suddenly has access to lighspeed vehicles now": It still takes a significant amount of energy that a civilisation will understand to distribute in some organized way, and certainly not "illy willy" to some "nutcases".
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> Could near light speed spaceships be used to destroy a civilization
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Yes, although this is just another way of saying "can large energies, in which ever form, destroy a planet". Yes, but you could as well shoot a giant laser, or focus the light of your star to some planets etc. that might be easier if you want to destroy something.
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> if so could this be a great filter?
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Having this done by "nutcases" is not a very credible explanation for the great filter in my opinion, rather it is more credible to be an effort of the whole civilisation. [Kurzgesagt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM) has a nice video on this.
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**kamikaze won't work, the planet is never reached**
Agree with Demigan ship armor would be needed, but my answer is no for that reason. In interstellar flight, near c impulse speed can only be used in deep space. Your ship would never reach a planet with near c speed. It will have disintegrated underways, as a result of collisions and penetrations caused by much smaller, sometimes microscopic objects, which are abundant in the vicinity of planets. Shield or armor against that would become too heavy, making it impossible to accellerate the ship. When collistions happen close to the planet, I wonder if the ship's debree will have lost enough speed to avoid damage, but I doubt if debree would wipe out civilisation.
**use titanium marbles !**
A more sensible and probably much cheaper scenario involving a near-c bombardment would be to hit the planet with a few hundred much smaller, very rigid objects, traveling at say, 96% or 98% speed of light. For example, titanium marbles 10-50 grams each, perfectly spheric and polished. About half of them will reach the planet..
These objects could be launched above the poles of the planet. That is the only possible path, else too much dense regions would have to be crossed. Say the impact will take place latitude 85 degrees in arctic and antarctic regions, about 60 degrees vertical. A properly targeted "cone" of these titanium marbles impact the planet surface simultaneously. The resulting shockwave could devastate the planet's crust and everything on the surface.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9i7LX.png)
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If you have near-lightspeed spaceships, then it seems likely that the civilization is not confined to a single planet. A lone suicide ship cannot wipe out the fleets of orbital habitats *that are orbiting other planets and stars*, plus the many colonies on other planets, moons, and asteroids.
The nutter is a tragedy of epochal proportions, but the civilization will muddle on.
Oh, and perhaps it's also possible to lock the door of the flight deck so the nutter cannot simply stroll in.
Perhaps the controls can be locked, or set to respond only to licensed and authorized pilots. Perhaps the pilots can be examined by a psychologist before duty shifts (*Heinlein mentioned that in 1953*) as part of their authorization process.
Perhaps Traffic Control can override the pilot controls. A safeguard designed in centuries ago, when another nutter had to be blown out of the sky
Perhaps the planets still have defenses against nutters ignoring Traffic Control. Perhaps those defenses are already primed and coordinated since nutters happen in every generation...so this isn't the first (or last) one.
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No, this is not a filter... or at least not directly.
Assuming we're talking about actual kinetic motion, the amount of energy required to accelerate to such a high speed is truly ridiculous. If someone really wanted to destroy the planet - or at least scrub it clean of life - then it would be simpler to directly apply that energy to the planet itself. The development of a power source for the ship therefore is far more dangerous to the planet than the ship itself. Yes, some grand Lexx Luthor-esque evil mastermind might threaten to redirect a ship to destroy the planet, but it's far more likely that a capable zealot would actually get the job done just by blowing the reactor.
Comic-book villains aside though, it is conceivable that Murphy's Law might result in an accidental collision between a near-C ship and a planet... but the odds are really against it. Hitting a target as small as a planet from any reasonable distance is really, *really* hard to do on purpose. To further reduce the chances it's likely that the ships always navigate above the ecliptic, and only vector towards a planet during the final phase of the journey. The ships have enough power to not need to use the sort of optimized trajectories we're used to... and of course the ships would be absolutely forbidden from pointing too close to a planet while travelling at high speed, since there will be plenty of nervous people who'd rather give up on space than see their homeworld destroyed by accident.
And then there's the defensive measures that could be used to prevent the impact, which gets a little easier with access to unlimited power. Whether that means shifting a bunch of mass into the path of the incoming ship or shooting it with lasers or whatever, the same power source that enables the ships to exist also enables countermeasures against them.
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You do have a heating problem with the ship.
Interstellar gas density is about 1 atom of H per cubic centimeter. There are 30 billion cm in a light second.
So you are hitting 30 billion / 6 \* 10^23 = 5 \* 10^-14 grams of H.
Let's ignore relativistic effects right now. Our ship is near c. The newtonian energy of 10^-14 g at c is 1/2 10^-14 \* (3\*10^9)^2
= 45 \* 10^4 W/cm2 or 45 \* 10^8 W/m2 4.5 GW/square meter. And that's ignoring relativistic effects.
Marbles at near C speeds aren't happening. You need a strong arm to keep those hydrogen atoms away. A strong, hairy tattooed arm.
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This question is based in the desert world described in this question:
[Can my civilization be totally isolated by deserts?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/188668/can-my-civilization-be-totally-isolated-by-deserts)
A pre industrial society is adjacent to deserts and mountains to the East and West and a drying sea to the South. On the opposite shore of the sea is a vast salt flat area many hundreds of miles across. There are no oasis on the salt flat and it is very hot. It has never been crossed before even by camel train as the distance involved is too great. At some point a brave soul comes up with the idea of using some form of giant land yacht to attempt to cross the salt flat.
How plausible would such an undertaking be and roughly how far might such a yacht voyage into the salt flat?
Restrictions and assumptions
This is a preindustrial society with no steam power.
The planet can be thought of as a very dry Earth.
The wind strength can be adjusted within Earthly bounds you may assume anything between a gentle breeze and a moderate gale is blowing and that the wind has a prevailing direction into the salt flat.
Pertinent considerations when answering (not a comprehensive list!):
The weight that can be carried, the amount of water, the size, mass and resistance of the wheels, the size of the sail, the crew, the ability to turn and return to base, the stability of the vessel in high winds.
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**Very.**
The Chinese claim to have built the first [wind-driven carriages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_sailing#Sailing_carriage) back in 552–554 AD as people transport for about 30 people in the 金楼子 (Book of the Golden Hall Master). Apparently, one was used as entertainment for the emperor. Around 610 this one appeared in the Chinese Manuscript "The Continuation of the world" (续世说):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8mJhT.png)
Apparently, some were still in use some 1000 years later when they appeared on maps the Europeans made, such as this 1583 one:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jS1Vi.jpg)
The first of these sources claims that it travels what accounts to several hundred kilometers per day for these large transports. But then again, Chinese manuscripts also do contain pictures such as sail-assisted carts and even in modern times, there was the ["Chinese Wheelbarrow"](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/de/en/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarrow.html) - a sail on a single wheel with cargo strapped to it. This device was used en masse in 1797 when it was described by Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest and still saw wide use in 1965 when Joseph Needham described it.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qX1CP.png)
However, you need to think differently: the thing is not a moving city, it is a flat cart with large wheels. The flatter the thing is on the surface, the better.
When the Americans went west, some in [Kansas](https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/wind-wagons/12239) used comparably small Wind wagons. About 350 pounds heavy, these carts would manage 15 to 40 mph, and the track Kansas City - Denver (600 miles as the crow flies) in 20 days, for an average of an effective 30 miles per day. This seems to include weak or not too favorable wind, a somewhat uneven terrain (the prairie is anything but perfectly flat) and not knowing the target direction perfectly.
So if you know the direction and have no obstacles, got a steady 40 mph out of the vehicle, and manage that for 8 hours, the absolute top reach *per day* for such a scouting cart could be about **320 miles**.
However, as you go heavier, you also induce more drag. If we assume the Chinese 30-men cart from the map above as the basic setup, I estimate that larger landships could manage about 20 mph tops, but with a crew possibly could drive for the whole time there is light, so about the same total reach with the same wind. Assuming similar loads to mid sized [Kraier](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraier) (15-100 loads or cargo) or a large [Schnigge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longship#Snekkja) (which had some 40 rowers and tops 90 people), we'd aim at 20 to 50 loads of cargo and a crew of 22, or 40 to 100 tons of total carried weight.
Instead of a single large ship, it'd be best to use an armada of smaller and medium vessels: using a few of the small and fast types to scout the way, while the larger ones do drive in a wide cordon to try to not get into each other's dust trail. This allows to re-shuffle the cargo as the supplies get drained over time and in case of vessels damaged in accidents. It also prevents getting totally stranded in case one vessel becomes inoperable.
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Giant land yachts would be inefficient for such a society (and potentially impossible to build reliably). Single or double person lightweight vehicles intended for rapid short bursts in moderate wind conditions would be better.
Rather than building a giant vehicle (expensive and a huge loss if anything goes wrong) you build the small vessels. Easy to build and replace, better to maintain and entirely expendable if the unfortunate driver screws up and thoughtlessly dies — there's plenty more where they came from. Losing an entire large ship might make getting replacement ships too expensive and creates a bad image and might deter the idiots you need to drive them.
So small vehicles.
Assume minimal stability unless this culture has built up a long experience of building such craft (and they might, just for e.g. sporting events locally). Your biggest problem is likely strong components for axles, wheels and bearings (or sled skis if you go that route).
You are unlikely to try and venture the whole distance in one go. Instead you would create staging posts which you drop off supplies at for the final push. If at all possible you will try and find something that grows or lives out there that you can exploit and supplement supplies with. But you will definitely do it in stages, so that you can minimize risk at each point. You would also need to build experience with judging weather and wind conditions as well as the condition of terrain — it may look flat, but that doesn't mean there aren't hollows and soft parts.
Navigation could be a real problem. Wind-driven craft do not always have precise control over direction. This is another reason to build staging posts which can act as easier points to navigate and refer to. You would ideally want to build reasonably tall structures with something prominent at the top easily visible. In many ways your ability to see and navigate will be limited by the horizon and ideally your culture would need to develop some form of telescope or optical aid for your intrepid (crazy) explorers.
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One partial solution to the problem caused by center of gravity having to be above ground: Use a Kite rather than a Sail-on-a-mast.
The kite's anchor rope can be in the middle of your vehicle, and very *very* low to the ground. This allows a strong pull with virtually zero tipping torque.
It also allows access to the less turbulent and stronger winds above the surface.
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Not practical, unless the terrain is flat like [Salt flats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats) in Utah.
A preindustrial land yacht can roll out fine until it stops, and it has to be pushed again. Two factors - [Stiction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction) and lack of ball bearings are going to doom the land yachts. They sure can work fine as a proof of concept, but then from time to time its passengers would need to disembark and give it a good push. If we have more cargo than passengers, the yacht at some point would be stuck for good.
Sand deserts would levy enormous amount of stiction (have you ever pulled a cart on the beach?) Rocky deserts are more favorable, if the land it flat enough. And of course salt flats would be ideal.
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The idea is that the concepts of DNA, inheritance, and micro-organisms were discovered significantly earlier in history. Roughly 50 years after the founding of Alexandria as a city state in 332 B.C., Greek scholars ended up developing the first microscopes. During their studies of human anatomy, they made the startling discovery of cells.
They posited theories that something within these small parts of our body (DNA) strongly affected the traits passed on from parents to their children. This appeared to be true, given what they could observe in plants, domestic animals, and even humans.
Under orders from Lysimachus, they began the ambitious project of selectively breeding humans in an attempt to bring out these characteristics:
Greater strength, stamina, and physical coordination (agility/dexterity).
Assume their work would be continued by the Roman Empire, and later the Byzantine and Holy Roman Empires as time marched on. By 1806, when the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved at last, how much progress could feasibly have been made through a selective breeding program?
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Of course you could selectively breed humans for particular traits just the same as any other animal.
You do not need ***any*** of the scientific advances you list to do it though.
Deliberate & knowing selective breeding of crops, agricultural animals & hunting dogs predates the theory of evolution by a very ***very*** long time (many hundreds of years if not thousands).
So there really is no plausible reason your Romans couldn't do this other than.
1. The rather obvious difficulties of selectively breeding an unwilling human population.
2. The problem of keeping a breeding program on track with a species that the overseers of the project won't live long enough to see more than two or three generations of reach maturity.
Regarding point 2. very few organisations (companies & the like) survive much past a couple of hundred years (& that's not long enough by a very long chalk to do this), though the catholic church on the other hand has survived the best part of 2000 years in more or less it's current form.
You wouldn't need your subjects to be exclusive either with an individual or to limit their procreation to just those within the chosen breeding group, you could reward them for producing children with a desirable individual & still let them reproduce with or marry whoever else they want. All that's really important for a selective breeding project like this one is that you get the offspring you want, not that they shouldn't have other offspring, so with the right incentives point 1. can perhaps be overcome.
All you need then is an organisation with adequate resources able to persist for the required length of time & remain on target without significant drift in it's goals from those originally set & it's all good.
Empires don't tend to persist for long enough to accomplish what you have in mind (the Roman empire only lasted around 500 years & the Ottoman empire only did a little better at around 600 years) so to achieve what you want you'd probably need a religion or some sort of religious order within one of the more persistent religions.
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So people that without ever having done any resistance training will still look like [Arnold](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbg4-EKgb2I) did in 1974 (if that's all you're aiming for of course) are plausible with just 500 or 600 years.
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There is a highly controversial interpretation of history that says that this was done in the USA to black slaves, resulting in [superior athletic performance in their descendants](https://www.colorlines.com/articles/film-black-olympians-dominate-because-theyre-descendants-slaves). I won't touch on the relative merits of such a statement, other than to say that given what we have done to other species, it's plausible that it can be done to humans as well.
Even the chicken industry admits there's a difference between chickens raised for [eggs or meat](http://www.redteamfarm.com/blog/egg-laying-chickens-vs-meat-chickens) purposes; some of the more extreme examples of this start to show significant deviations in their physiology, but I have yet to come across a scientific paper that addresses and quantifies this deviation.
The [Merino sheep](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/why-sheep-cant-stop-growing-their-fur-2015-9?r=US&IR=T) have lost the gene to turn off their wool production. These are sheep that if not regularly shawn, will die of heat exposure from an increasingly thick coat of wool. These were effectively bred into existence in Europe in the 13th or 14th century.
All the cows on Earth are allegedly descendants of a herd of aurochs that were domesticated many tens of thousands of years ago.
The point being, the only difference between chickens, sheep, cows and humans is the longevity of the human generational period. In other words, if you really wanted to selectively breed humans you could do so and 2000 years is ample time to do it in.
The only problem I foresee is that humans are notoriously uncooperative with such programs, and being the intelligent species we are (and you're going to want to breed for that as well) we'll find ways to both breed when we're not supposed to and not breed where we're expected to. In such a case, successfully breeding humans will involve about the same amount of management overhead as successfully herding cats.
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# Eugenics
**After all, we do it with animals, why wouldn't it work with people?**
The concept has been around since the late 1800s, and was popularly accepted as not all that bad an idea even by the high and mighty up until WWII.
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> In 1883, Sir Francis Galton, a respected British scholar and cousin of Charles Darwin, first used the term eugenics, meaning “well-born.” Galton believed that the human race could help direct its future by selectively breeding individuals who have “desired” traits. This idea was based on Galton’s study of upper class Britain. Following these studies, Galton concluded that an elite position in society was due to a good genetic makeup. While Galton’s plans to improve the human race through selective breeding never came to fruition in Britain, they eventually took sinister turns in other countries. - [history of eugenics](http://knowgenetics.org/history-of-eugenics/)
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It's a dirty word now after a certain chap by the name of Adolf Hitler put it into full production and people started to understand what it really meant.
It was mostly considered in racial and class terms. The underclass, the poor, and immigrants, were generally to be discouraged from reproducing in favour of those with money or acceptable racial traits. We now consider that approach to be abhorrent, but as soon as you start suggesting selective breeding of humans you have to understand that it's not a new idea and quite how dangerous the ground you're treading on can become.
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You don't need knowledge of genetics or cells or anything similar: breeding to improve stock (in both plants and animals) was well-understood by that point, having been practiced for millennia, even if they didn't didn't know why it worked.
So there's nothing in principle stopping it, but you run into several major practical problems.
**1. Generation time**
The average cow can be ready for breeding at 13 months old. A pig, 6 months. Fowl, 6 months. A horse, 18 months.
At best, you're looking at 13-14 years old for a human. But since humans take several more years to reach physical maturity, and if you're wanting to breed a "superior" human, you want your subjects to be old enough to see if they express those traits, so really you need to wait until they're 17-20 and in their physical prime before you can decide which members you want to breed for the next generation.
Unless you get ridiculously lucky and stumble on a beneficial mutation, you're looking at a century or more before you *might* start seeing some results, and even then it's going to take time for you to spread it around.
**2. Control**
You want to control breeding of cattle, or dogs, or chickens, or horses, it's not that hard. It's fairly trivial to control breeding access, separating the herd so that you can breed those traits you want in at least semi-controlled conditions.
Humans, on the other hand...they tend to not take being locked up very well, and have the tools (intelligence, manipulative limbs, *language*) to make trying that sort of control a true pain in the ass. And don't underestimate the power of language. If you go into a pen to pull out the best hen you want to mate with a specific rooster, you don't have to worry about the hens conspiring to ambush you and take the keys.
**3. Empathy**
You want to breed cows, aside from a few animal-rights activists (which were presumably rare back in Roman times) no one is going to really care. You want to do that same sort of thing to people, that's a much harder row to hoe. People, for the most part, care for other people. And that means you're going to have opposition.
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It is possible to embed "ideals" into our culture, religion and so on, and to somehow make people search for partners bearing those properties. For instance, the eternal bliss of afterlife, may be described as being achievable only after successfully challenging some obstacles. Those obstacles may demand athletic performance, solving hard puzzles, being a brave and die-hard soldier. The Vikings have embedded those combat skills in their "Valhaha". The Mesoamericans (Maya, Aztec, Incas) describe the road to the afterlife filled with sophisticated puzzles, both mentally and physically. (The Xibalba -place of fear- of the Maya). You may add that the skills one develops in his material life are reflected in his/her skills necessary to reach Valhaha, or whatever. Obviously, women will search for men with those skills in a hope to inherit those good genes to their children.
So yes, religion and culture may coax people to cooperate, at-least to some degree. Needless to say, that the time needed for humans to reproduce, cultural influences and our curiosity for alternatives may push the brakes on such processes sooner or later.
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In the Robert A. Heinlein future history series the Howard Foundation bred humans for longevity. They listed young men and women who each had four living and healthy grandparents and offered them payment to marry persons on the list. And after a (scientifically surprisingly) few generations people were born who could live for a few hundred years.
I have read a suggestion that if an organization paid men born to fathers twice as old as the average father were induced to father sons when they were twice as old as the average father, and if this continued for a few generations of old fathers, it would produce persons with an average lifespan twice that of normal humans.
In modern society people have a pool of millions of potential future spouses, though of course they can only choose from among the thousands of persons that they actually happen to meet.
But for hundreds of thousands of years young people in endogamous bands only had a pool of few dozen potential future spouses to choose from, while young people in exogamous bands only that maybe half a dozen times that many people in neighboring bands to choose from.
So I suspect that it is psychologically quite acceptable for a young human to be limited to choosing a spouse from among a limited group of a few thousand members of a specific society, such as humans being bred for intelligence, or stupidity, or strength, or weakness, or longevity, or short lifespans, or whatever qualities. Possibly the persons who were taken out of the program because they didn't test with enough of the desired quality would be more disappointed, as well as persons in the program who might be in love with them and forbidden to be with them.
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Selective breeding of humans is possible but there are obvious social dangers. Also to really get the most out of it you have to be pretty brutal and cold blooded about your culling process. And there is always that question about what traits you want to breed for. Science Fiction horror stories abound with super soldiers and utterly faithful slaves. Usually the discussion involves the issue of fitness and what you can breed into people and what requires training. There are always trade-offs. Breeding for long life would be a disaster if severe population control were not imposed. With modern technology, strength and stamina, while attractive, is not as important as the ability to process computer data. In a world of nukes and smart bombs do we need meaner more lethal soldiers or more clever and accommodating diplomats? European royalty attempted to preserve something called royal blood through a de-facto process of inbreeding which resulted in stunted limbs, idiocy, and hemophilia. Their arrogant attempt to improve their genetic ability to rule resulted in exactly the opposite. A very good fictional example of a society that uses selective breeding is Hellstrom's Hive by Frank Herbert. Though his fictional Hive is horrifying to our eyes, many of the techniques described would make a great deal of sense if you plan on breeding humans. And remember his Hive had existed for only about a hundred years. Imagine what could be done in the time frame of the Roman empire.
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Given that dark matter is explained by being a lot less matter than gravitational forces, how about the other way around? There is a lot of empty space.
Is it possible to construct a world where gravity wasn't a force but vice versa the empty space would push away? How would such world differ from ours?
From an amateur perspective it may just be a switch in signs.
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**TL;DR: it is the same as gravity**, unless you’re defining ‘empty space’ in a really odd way. If fact, I can’t think of any way to experimentally prove this is *not* the case.
I think the key to this question lies in the definition of ‘empty space pushing’
For starters let’s assume space is quantised into a series of infinitesimal points. This isn’t strictly true, but it’s easier to conceptualise. Let’s assume each point of space that doesn’t contain matter pushes away from itself with a force that diminishes with the square of distance. It’s pretty easy to show (if we assume the universe is big enough that we can ignore the boundaries) that the net force at any given point is 0: all the points of nothing negate each other.
Let’s introduce a speck of matter.
Suddenly there is a space in the universe that is *not* pushing away from itself, which leads to an imbalance where the net force near this speck of matter is directed towards the speck of matter. The magnitude of this ‘not pushing away’ force is exactly the same as the original force you removed, ie inversely proportional to the square of distance.
Wait. That looks suspiciously like gravity.
If we continue to add specks then we’ll see the specks, responding to the imbalance in pushing forces, clump together. This leads to a larger volume of ‘not pushing’ which leads to a larger imbalance.
The same is true even if you take an Einstinian view of gravity, just replace ‘empty space pushes away’ with ‘empty space deforms space near it upwards’ (a strange concept, perhaps ‘outwards’ is a better word, but hey).
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Gravity causes matter to agglomerate. I can not see how empty space would push matter to agglomerate to something like a sun. Maybe matter would do that to be less pushed. But even then, there would be no planets orbiting a sun, there would be no galaxies, because they have no reason to rotate around a center.
It is difficult to imagine a universe with a basic law missing.
I think all matter would be nothing more than single hydrogen molecules drifting around. If empty space pushes them, they will be dispersed homogenous (with small fluctuations) having a balance of same amount of empty space in every direction.
This universe would be an hydrogen air bubble.
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My gut says Quark Soup, i.e. a universe even remotely similar to our own simply cannot form without the gravitational constant we know and love. But my brain says no wait it would be exactly the same as what we have now except gravity would be a function of the super-vacuum instead of a function of mass so lets break it down:
"Space" pushes matter away, assuming a "push factor" equivalent to the modern constant "G" then cosmologically this would act almost like gravity but from the outside, matter would agglomerate into large clumps etc... but the "almost" has some killer implications:
For example consider the solar winds for a moment, most of the material in the winds is not massless photons but consists of massed particles like Protons and Neutrinos instead of accelerating away from their parent star these particles are now held back, radiation pressure will still expel them but they'll start to slow down immediately until they eventually stop and reverse course, you'll get a heavy radiation belt where such particles accumulate with vacuum and solar radiation both pushing them away to a matched degree.
On a planetary scale I think atmospheres become a serious issue, at a minimum they lose their pressure gradient since the particles furthest from the surface are now under higher gravity not those at sea level, it may well be that atmospheres as we know them are entirely impossible. An object that is pushed together from the outside in isn't going to behave the same way as a body that accretes slowly from the densest materials to the lightest. Worlds may in fact be inverted with the heavy material like rocks on the outside and the atmosphere held internally. Gravity at the bottom of an atmosphere (if there is one) may also be an issue, as in there may be none to speak of; gravity imposed from the outside will decrease with your distance from open space so at ground level gravity will not be what we would expect given our existing model.
That's my current thinking ask me in five minutes and I'll be the other way up again, this is a tricky one.
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If gravity would 'push' nothing would then stick together.
As gravity is a universal rule, not only the world you are talking of but the whole universe would then not be coherent.
What I could suggest is that a planet/world exist in which the gravity **field** is negative: It is better than changing a universal law.
For such planet you would need to put a system in such a way that the crust does not fly away then also forget about anything staying around including oxygen/air.
Maybe also: the impossible inhabitants would not be very egoist.
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In my imagination "the other way round" means that in your universe there would be as much matter as there is empty space in our universe - and as much empty space as there is matter in ours. In this case, the equivalent of planets would be little bubbles of empty space within an ocean of matter, which push the matter away from it.
Life would exist either within the matter between these space bubbles or on the surface of them where there is a sort of atmosphere. Energy would come in a way of geothermal energy produced by these bubbles travelling around within the matter and forcing it to stretch and compress. So matter would be hotter around these bubbles of emptiness than anywhere else.
There would be no stars of course, nor moons or solar systems, possibly not even galaxies, because when two of these bubbles moved towards each other, they would push the matter between them together until there would be no going closer, matter would become liquid from the pressure, and the bubbles would probably slide away from each other and find a new direction to travel in. It would be interesting to see of people who might live in these bubbles would find a way to travel to other bubbles.
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This reminds me of old [mechanical explanations of gravity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_explanations_of_gravitation), especially [Le Sage's theory of gravity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sage%27s_theory_of_gravitation) where empty space was filled with particles which pushed everything into each other. The problems were mostly thermodynamic concerns.
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"If a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it, does it still make a sound?"
Notionally, you can say that *this is already how gravity works* without breaking anything of the model or of our observations. So, it might as well be deemed so.
That was easy!
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I've been working for some time on a universe in which there is limited FTL consisting of short (up to five light years at a time) jumps between points in space. The jumps take no time at all for those on the ships making the transit but journey length as measured by universal clock (kept using the pulse pattern of a non-repeating pulsar) is, on average, roughly quarter of the time light takes to make the trip but varies considerably with some ships arriving years or even decades later than the average transit time would suggest.
What I'm trying to work out is whether manufacturing facilities could rely on imported raw material under these conditions. I've considered that a "grace-loading" system might be used wherein individual shipments are largely than the shipment schedule absolutely requires if everything arrives on time but I can't work out if that's realistic.
**So my question is two fold, can an industry that relies on imported materials function when it doesn't know *when* the next shipment is coming provided it can assume that it will? And secondly is my method of overstocking shipments a sufficient measure in-and-of itself to allow smooth operation?**
For the sake of simplicity lets assume that the raw material in question is processed elemental metals with no shelf life. Average variance from schedule is on the order of no more than a couple of months on an annual run. Smooth operation can obviously always be disrupted by a missing shipment or an excessive delay. The systems receiving shipments either have no in-system mining options for whatever reason, (generally because they don't yet have the population base), or such industry is insufficient to support the needs of the in-system manufacturing required to get local space industry going. Their industry requires the most basic raw materials to get started, planetary mining helps but getting that material into orbit is prohibitively expensive of time and energy. There is a minimum import/export cargo size but no maximum, the bigger shipments are more economical for all parties, so while they could "beat the spread" by using multiple small shipments it would be ruinously expensive.
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As you point out, you will not be able to rely on [Just in Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_manufacturing) inventory management. Each manufacturing center will need to stockpile enough raw materials to last *at least* as long as a round trip of your shipping vessel. Or must maintain a constant supply of shipping vessels making the voyage.
But we need more data to see if your stockpiles of raw materials will suffice.
1. Are we talking about materials with a long enough shelf life to survive the maximum time between shipments? (i.e. Lumber, steel, ore, but not milk)
2. Do your logistics managers have a realistic measure of the minimum and maximum of your shipment time?
1. If the low end is too low then NO. They can't do it. The warehouses will still be full and the shipment is useless.
2. If the high end is too high, then your warehouses go empty, you go bankrupt, and then a ship arrives with no buyer.
3. So your industry must have a reasonable window of delivery, constrained in such a way that the logistics staff can predict how much warehouse space they need.
3. How much do ships cost? How much does a round-trip cost in terms of fuel, wages, etc.?
1. If too high, then it will never be cost effective to run the routes.
2. Will the ships be [deadheading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_the_American_trucking_industry)? Or will they have goods on the outbound trips, to help offset the round-trip cost?
4. How reliable are the voyages?
1. With variance in delivery times, is there a high risk that a shipment won't arrive at all? If so, you've got to build that into your storage and logistics planning and costing.
5. At the end of the day it's all economics and finance
1. Is your cost of goods sold higher or lower than your sale price, factoring in all your costs?
2. Does your equilibrium point on the [supply and demand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand) chart allow you to turn a profit?
6. Is the demand for your finished good predictable or chaotic?
1. Are we talking about something that has predictable, easy to plan/model/predict growth?
2. Or is there likely to be a surge in demand that you cannot meet because the ships are still inbound?
3. If there's a sudden spike in demand, will your inability to ramp up production cause a loss of sales or will it erode customer confidence?
7. What is the EOQ -- E[conomic Order Quantity](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/economicorderquantity.asp) -- and can your supply chain meet that? *Reliably?*
8. Are there other factors that could force this despite being uneconomical, like the finished goods being a required, necessary item for survival or government influence?
[![Supply and Demand[4]](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iKsbI.gif)
So the above questions feed into your formula. The end result will help decide if it is economically feasible to run the routes.
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What you are trying to describe is roughly how industry works in times of war, when supplies are hiccupping all the time, if not lacking at all.
Production is possible, provided the raw materials are supplied.
Of course one cannot pursue extreme efficiency and optimization, as those usually rely on smooth and known in-flux of supply.
It becomes important to prioritize the deliveries of product, so that the downstream economy is affected as less as possible (do you supply steel bars to build a bridge or steel slabs for gate manufacturers?).
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Even if you are committed to just in time, or the supply is highly perishable you can work around it by having a flexible production capacity.
When a shipment is late you put workers and capital on standby, but produce advertisements for the extra workers you know you will need when the late shipment arrives closer than expected to another shipment. It might also be a natural time to do maintenance or make improvements to your capital.
Agriculture, retail and tourism industries often do this. When there is work you hire workers, when there is not you let them go, but don't lose their number.
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Divide your shipment into many smaller ones.
If your colony on Alpha Centauri Prime needs a shipment of 10000 tons of food every year, don't send one huge freighter every year, send a small ship carrying 30 tons every day.
Due to the [law of large numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers), the randomized delays of the individual shipments will even out over time and you will end up with a smooth and reliable food intake. Some months you will get more shipments and some you will get less, but longer periods of scarcity leading to starvation will become quite unlikely.
The drawback will of course be that this is more expensive. Building many small ships will be more expensive than building one huge one. And controlling that fleet will require more personnel (even if they are unmanned vessels). Where exactly you make the compromise between reliability and cost depends on economic details.
Also, this calculation is based on the assumptions that the FTL travel delays are *truly* random. If their source are actually natural phenomenons which affect all ships in transit equally, then this won't work as well and you might still experience famines.
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It is definitely possible if production can be forecasted. This problem is treated the same mathematically as current day Production Control problems. There are several methods but most involve the concept of safety stock, i.e. account for any variance in supply or demand with excess raw materials.
An example would be to say if we forecast the need for 500 widgets per year which both need 1 of X and 1 of Y. Ideally you would set up a schedule to receive 500X and 500Y every year. Well when should we order the next batch? Say it takes 6mo lead time on X and 3mo lead time on Y... we would order Xs when we only have 250Xs in stock and Ys when we have 125Ys in stock. Now assume Ys are known for being late, sometimes even 3mo late; so we should increase our safety stock by 125 Ys leading us to reorder Ys at 250 in stock.
Problems would exist if say the raw materials are perishable or if demand fluctuates or is not easy to forecast. These would either cause shortages or excessive safety stock.
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You have several problems here.
1. unreliable supply situation
2. long transit times for supplies
The two are related but cause different problems within your manufacturing process.
The unreliable supply situation can be alleviated by stockpiling supplies. This is expensive but it can be done IF supplies when they arrive arrive in large enough quantities to allow stockpiling until the next shipment arrives.
If demand for your manufactured products is highly variable this will be even harder.
Which leads to point 2. The long transit times of the raw materials may well mean that by the time a shipment arrives at your factories there is no more need for it because either the demand for the manufactured product no longer exists and the factory has shut down, or because the manufacturing process has shifted to using other, more convenient, raw materials.
In both cases you're now stuck with a pile of possibly worthless raw materials that took a lot of effort (and thus money) to acquire.
If you're lucky some other industry can use them, if not you're suckered.
A small but significant twist on this can be that your society develops faster transport methods while your shipment is in transit, and by the time your ship gets there after its 20 year journey (out and back) you've gotten 10 shipments already using your new ships that can do the same trip in a month.
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Ahh, the beauty of capitalism. As long as the profit's right, they'll make it work. So what you need to do is not wonder whether it is possible, but design it in a way that it's attractive. Attractive for both the distributor of resources and the producer of the final goods. And of cause, for everybody who is in between these two ends.
Be aware however, that a design like this comes with its own problems.
For one, you must shut down alternatives like assembling the stuff already on the source planet (shelf life, market saturation, political laws, ...).
Second, a choke point like that is an enormous vulnerability. A malicious party could exploit the recipient under the threat of an embargo, or even let their economy collapse and annex the planet.
Also, of cause, there is no guarantee that the economy will look like you'd guess. As stock goes down, prices go up, but if there's a monopoly or oligarchy, there's no promise that prises will go down again once the stock is refilled.
At any rate, the heavy dependency would shape the civilization of this planet, and it's entirely up to you to reflect it.
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The more your colony is reliant on outside support, the more fragile it is and the more risky the whole endeavor becomes. Therefore, you want your colony to be as self supporting as possible.
How you do THAT is to rely on a concept that has been driving human innovation since the dawn of time: Necessity is the Mother of Invention.
It starts with the fact that you have enormous lead and lag times in your supply chain, but life happens *in the now*. Your colonies are going to have to evaluate just about everything with Maslows' Hierarchy of Needs in mind.
First things first: Food, Shelter, Water. All of these need to be locally produced with an eye towards robustness. Take your average transit time and then look at necessary survival supplies. maybe lay in a stock of 2 times the full transit turnaround time for those local supplies. Freeze dried foods can last for a very long time.
Next: Things that aid survival. Safety on the hierarchy. In this situation i think that involve defending the food supply. From Whom? Failures in the system, Ag implements, Water Treatment widgets, all of this stuff is going to break eventually, so spares and spare parts are what is needed here. Saftey stock would likely be at least be one full replacement for everything deemed critical and each be designed with many times the lifetime of a turnaround trip in mind. This only applies until locally sourced solutions are put in place. Everything in your system that has to be replaced from outside represents a possibly fatal single point of failure and needs to be eliminated as soon as possible.
In normal industry, this would result in overstock nearly to the point of economic insanity, but keep in mind that it isn't materials to be consumed. It's an insurance policy. It't there to mitigate some pretty catastrophic failure risk until the colony reaches it's goal of self support based on local materials.
Next is things that are required for the colonists to do whatever it is they were sent to the next planet to do. Are they mining Unobtanium? Are they harvesting something tasty from the local oceans? We aren't going to send out and support a colony unless there was some purpose for doing so. Our level of ongoing support and location chosen with regards to local materials all depends on this factor. This can go on in a limited fashion while the colony develops the rest of it's infrastructure.
Only now do we get to the Mother of Invention thing. Encourage and incentivize colonists to engineer like crazy to make use of local materials for anything and everything possible. If you got lots of limestone but not a lot of metal, build with the limestone instead of wasting steel on prefab buildings would be one example. Recycle with as close to 100% efficiency as possible.
People with the right incentives can do an awful lot with very little. You want them to be as self sufficient as possible. You do this with engineering and creativity at the local level.
Now, with all of this groundwork down. you can deal with irregular shipments of goods and raw materials that make you a part of the overall economic system. Possible delays in shipping are no longer life or prime economy threatening, but fall to the level of annoyances. No one is going to die if a shipment of TV's or Iphones or whatever equivalents in the future gets delayed. A missed shipment of pumps and parts for water treatment could wipe out entire cities. That's why the need for self sufficiency
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This is a *reductio ad absurdum*. You seem to imply that shipments are normally scheduled to the yoctosecond. Everything you do has an "opportunity cost". That is the cost of using the same resources in the "next best" way. Resources are often considered to be labor, capital, time, and information. (others like land, pollution credits, etc. sometimes are employed).
In order to have an economy, individuals have to make a profit (which equates with providing for themselves and their families). To make a profit, the cost of producing and selling the product has to be both smaller than the price AND has to have a return sufficiently predictable (and regular) so that you don't starve to death waiting for your first sale (so to speak).
Production doesn't need to be continuous or even predictable (it often isn't, think about shipbuilding or even new home construction.) But there's a cost for uncertainty. As long as you can somehow manage the costs (insurance, selling shares, loans), your supply chains can be as unpredictable as you can imagine. (Granted the costs might include paying workers to wait around doing nothing for months (years), paying utilities and taxes on shut plants, training, paying interest on loans, paying the cost of storage of the materials you only get irregularly (you'd have to stockpile them, at least, someone in the supply chain would). But then you throw in the word "smooth". Nothing is smooth if the scale is fine enough.
You seem to think "industrial" is the same as efficient. It's not. Industrial implies (to me, arguably) that mechanical devices have significantly replaced human labor. It does not necessarily imply a (continuous) production line.
A huge portion of our economy is bespoken, that is, customized. Think about wedding dresses, architect designed homes, (and yachts). It IS true that mass production (ie one size fits all) has drastically reduced costs and improved average standard of living. Perhaps in your Universe, the standard of living is supported otherwise or perhaps the needs are less or the productivity of industry greater.
There's no absolute reason why I couldn't make a living selling something once in a lifetime (think of a bestseller or platinum album), just as there's no absolute certainty that I can make a lot of something and make a living selling them; ever heard of the Betamax?
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I'm trying to write a novel, which is supposed to be similar to the typical "gespenster krimi" genre.
But I don't like typical main protagonists of these novels - tall, strong, clever man with great car, interesting job and "the chosen one" status. The problem with these men is, that they are simply too great to fight anything "common" like ghouls, vampires, werewolves etc. Stories like that usually use some really silly plot-twists to justify hero's inability to kill the monster in the first few moments of the story.
So I decided to make **my hero** a little under-average man. He's a medium-tall, skinny guy from Sweden, who makes a living as an occasional translator (he's able to speak several world languages) and a correspondent to a local rag. He has no special abilities besides some contacts to his former schoolmates, while some of them are very successful (a politician, a judge etc.).
On the other hand, **the monsters** are usually people or animals who contracted a specific disease causing them to slowly mutate into the "monster" state. They get some special abilities coincidentally with some slight disadvantages (vampires can regenerate immensely fast because of their metabolism, but, on the other hand, they have to eat very often even when they're healthy) and they can be still killed in a "normal way" (shot, beaten to death...), but it's immensely difficult.
**The world** is the contemporary Earth, where people are not aware of monsters or they're just discovering them scientifically. Those people who know about them, call themselves "The ready ones" (mostly believe, that monsters are the next evolutionary branch) and they must usually cooperate greatly to capture or kill some monster.
Governments are afraid to take some radical steps like using an Army for bigger monsters, because they're afraid of panic and Idlers (people/animals who are not very mutated yet, so they still behave and look like healthy ones, but they've already noticed some slight changes), because they can be even among them. Because of the second reason there's a huge amount of distrust among politicians, so "The ready ones" usually only work in very small groups of relatives / close friends who trust each other, which simultaneously prevents them from doing any significant work.
**My problem** is - how could one "under-average" guy (or woman) proceed to capture/fight/get rid of monsters he knows about?
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### Preliminary ideas:
1. He'll improve (training, gaining special knowledge...)
2. He'll look for talented individuals to fight monsters.
3. He'll try to persuade people globally (he's a journalist after all)
### Problems with these ideas:
1. Both of them could take incredible amount of time to realize (gaining muscles, learning to fight, persuading people who are scare or don't believe it at all).
2. Both of them can turn out as unfeasible (not everybody has disposition to be physically superior even with training and not everybody is charismatic enough to persuade people to hunt monsters)
3. When trying to make the problem public almost nobody will believe him and politicians will try to cover it (reasons above). He'll probably get kill either by secret services or by some Idlers who don't want to get caught, naturally.
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This actually sounds a bit like the setup of H.P. Lovecraft's mythos, where monsters from other dimensions can drive people insane from the mere knowledge that they actually exist. The other issue besides your slowly slipping grasp of sanity is that while it may not be illegal for someone to *be* the high priest of the "Cult of Starry Wisdom"; it is very much against the law for you to shoot them dead.
Your character isn't going to be able to persuade most people that monsters exist, and law enforcement is going to take a dim view of him running down the street with a 12 gauge and a Katana to deal with alleged monsters, so the usual tropes are out. Your character is going to have to become very cunning and "street smart" in the way of monsters in order to trap them.
His best bet would be to discover ways to lure monsters into exposing themselves (for positive identification; *accidentally* killing your next door neighbour or the mailman is going to have very severe consequences), and then get them into some sort of lethal or non lethal trap to neutralize them. Arranging a traffic accident, having a telephone pole with a high voltage line fall on the monster, having them engulfed in an industrial accident at their place of work or arrested by Homeland Security at the airport are all ways which an identified monster can be dealt with.
The main character will be spending most of their time lurking, conducting surveillance of suspected monsters. Once they have made a positive identification, they will have to translate the observations from surveillance into pattern and link analysis in order to determine if the monster is alone and where and when the best place to arrange an "accident" would be (does the monster stop in for coffee every morning at 0800h at the drive through before continuing to work? Who does the monster see on a regular basis? Who do *they* see after meeting the monster? and so on).
Finally, the main character is going to have to become experienced in subtle and sophisticated sabotage in order to arrange for plausible and fatal "accidents" to happen. Cutting through a telephone pole or a building support with a chain saw is going to be *a bit* noticeable, and certainly someone is going to come out and ask "**Hey, you! What the hell are you doing?**". Experimenting with chemical, explosive and incendiary agents in the basement, garden shed or garage is probably not a good idea either. I'll leave this part to you, since it is probably going to be the most interesting and intensive part of the book, and I don't want people reading this to start experimenting themselves.
**I mean it! Just don't!**. The real world is dangerous enough without people going out and doing more stupid stuff. Watch YouTube if you don't believe me.
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Closely related to Thucydides own answer, but as an extension to it, he should not fight at all.
From what I hear your character has to be somewhat intelligent, to know multiple languages and be successful at a school where important people have graduated, and he is likely at least somewhat persuasive to be a journalist. The problem is he is not a good fighter and the monsters are, taking them on in physical combat is ill advised. So take them on in a different competition.
Focus on revealing them one by one and manipulating them. Get them to fight within themselves would be a great approach, which his journalist status may help him with since he may be able to manipulate the news that filters to them. He is relatively unknown, and in that status he may be able to go and learn things safely.
I would create a second anonymous identity, using e-mail proxy and prepaid cell phones etc, who becomes known to the monster element, and use this proxy to manipulate things. He could learn secrets from one group and reveal them to another to cause the groups to fight. He could find blackmail material to use against one individual to make that monster use his monstrous abilities to serve his cause. All the while he can be working towards setting up an event where the monsters are revealed to the world fully.
Normal humans outnumber monsters significantly, and in any case modern weapons make the monster's gifts limited in usefulness in an all out fight, a vampire or werewolf still can't stop a normal human in a tank or fighter jet. If the humans learn about the monsters and the military ever sets upon them in earnest their superior numbers and weaponry mean they will win, quite well. You mentioned why the goverment doesn't attack all ready ones, but what if the goverment had an excuse. *this* group of ready ones is proven guilty of a crime that they can move against. *That* group is working as terrorist. Exposing small sects to be faught against and giving the goverment the excuse to act against them without setting off anything more sever could be his primary goal.
Of course your likely want some sort of combat, but my suggestion would be make it unplanned on your hero's part. He is working behind the scenes and never wants to fight, but fights show up anyways. When he is investigating an area where ready ones may have hung out a young werewolf who lost control of his powers is there and attacks him mindlessly. A vampire notices the protagonist is getting close to discovering the vampire's secrets, so the vampire tries to dispose of him etc. The fights are when he gets caught or can't hide his actions, and he tries to avoid them. I would make him win partially out of dumb luck at times, and always give him an advantage or the enemy a disadvantage going into a fight (the werewolf was young and having lost control of his "moon lust" isn't thinking sanely, the vampire can't risk exposing himself and thus is avoiding demonstrating his super human feats during the chase etc). Make the protagonist barely survive even when he had luck and planning on his side from a minor threat to demonstrate how out classed humans are, and yet he keeps going knowing he may very well lose the next time he is caught.
In terms of developing skill, I would go with a crazy-prepared attitude. When forced to fight the protagonist sets up the fight location, and prepares with some traps and equipment on his side. Have him use his smarts to come up with ways to arm himself for a fight. He can learn new strategies quickly, each time something nearly kills him he sits down and thinks about it and comes up with equipment or idea for how to avoid that problem next time. Because it takes only one experience and some thinking to develop new strategies he can be shown to develop as a fighter faster then if he had to put on muscle mass or train muscle memory. It also allows him to win fights without ever feeling too powerful, he was lucky because he had the right resources for *this* fight, but he was still out classed and if he isn't properly prepared for the next fight he will die fast etc.
Though, I have an obvious question for you, why is he fighting the monsters? They are sapient from what you said, and while stronger and faster this doesn't change their sapience or humanity. Just because someone becomes more powerful that does not make them evil or justify killing them. Is he really fighting *all* monsters, or only those who actually are acting breaking laws? Is he actually morally justified to fight, or just spiciest against monsters?
Usually you don't need to consider this sort of thing as much in series with monsters because the monsters attack the bad guy on sight. However, if your implying the military knows about monsters and doesn't immediately attack then they monsters likely aren't as [Always Chaotic Evil](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AlwaysChaoticEvil). If the focus is on subtle working behind the scenes one needs to put more thought into the culture and lifestyle of those he is investigating, and thus their actions and moral justification.
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Even Joe Underaverage can get gun/handgun (buy it, maybe on black market, find one of his grandfather from II WWW, see how monster kill a hunter and run awya, trying to help the hunter, but the hunter will die anyway, then get the hunters weapon ... (he may discover the "monters existence" by this way - on vacation in hills, so he cannot just "call police" and stay ignorant ...)
Gun is able to kill monster as well (or nearly as well) as human. This is not problem or super power, anybody can do it a if he have some talent (is not totally inept), he can learn basic of shooting in one day on civilian shooting range for couple of dollars. (Just basic, but for killling somebody in close combat/proximity you do not need much more - just the will to do it).
On the other hand the monsters are not publically recognized and totally not as legitimate target, so Joe does not want shoot as long as he can go away without that (also getting ammo can be unconvenient), because of the following problems with police, public etc etc. You just cannot shoot somebody down and then say "it was monster, so what?" and go away in our world.
So he can opt to set traps as described in other answers, try to lure the monsters to hidden places and shoot they there, if he must, evade policy and army seeking for some mysterious mass murderer (= him under standing laws) and have all kinds of problems with that.
Say he try to lure werewolf to place in hills, but the wind gives his smell up to werewolf's nose so the werewolf attacks him from back. Joe have to drop the gun and try to get from werewolf attack, maybe stab him with knife repeatedly with little effect in wrestle, but then he finally is able to get to his handgun and shoot the werewolf. Once, twice, use ten bullets until the werewolf is finally dead and then try to dispose the body (as planned) and clean himself from lot of blood (unplanned for) and cure his own wounds still aware, that there "may be something" like disease which eventually can turn him to werewolf too - or not ... maybe his friend who is doctor now can help, but does he trust him enought to start talking about monsters and tell him, that he murderered some person recently? And if so, how to contact him while avoiding police (and army) both unaware (and seeing him as plain murderer or at least wanting explain his wounds) and aware (and so trying to put him out of way of "profesionals, who are only able to dispose such thread accordingly") of monster existence.
Lot of small problems, which even small Joe can solve somehow (sneak the patrol, travel covertly etc etc), but keeps him bussy and distracted (and prone to attacks from other monsters, not uncovbered yet and definitely not planned for address now). Your hero is not super-hero, he is only forced to do some hard things to survive and does now be fully successfull every time (or at all), just be able and lucky to somehow move few more steps again.
As for improving - just shooting 10 rounds, 100 rounds, 500 rounds is enought to improve shooting. If he later decide to train, the sky is the limit (suppose he have talent, money and time for that - but usually there is not much free time and being translator means he is not poor, but also not extra rich). Being forced to move still, he lose some weight, develope sense of danger, even if not muscular, he build some strenght over time just from working/movin/fighting ... still a way under average fitness client, but good enought to move along somehow.
Having lot of contacts (and their contacts too indirectly), he can find a lot of knowledge about monsters, and being good translator he can be good at remembering and connecting facts - he can build good knowledge base over time, he can contact skilled persons from the "hunters" (the knowledge helps him a lot, he have something to offer and just being around such facts draw him to their circles, so they start to notice him over time) and he can gain weapons/trinings/supporters/sources/financial help from that (as much or as little as you want him to get).
And being in this position, still endangered by monsters, he improve his abilities to detect them, avoid then, evade them or even fight them just by practicing, if not with help of others.
Depends on your plans, he can end as Rambo/Rocky/7 samurais super-hero, or he can be still underaverage mainly and unknown to many, but just wiser and little more skilled and equiped at the end. (Or just dead or monsterized ...)
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He **believes** in monsters after narrowly surviving a first encounter. Few others do. That means he will *research* monsters and prepare accordingly.
* Making silver bullets is not easy, and certainly not at the spur of the moment. But it can be done. Guess who has some?
* How about a paintball gun loaded with garlic and a super soaker with holy water? Keep the vampires at a distance.
When everybody panics, he keeps a calm head.
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He uses his wits! He's not strong enough to fight and defeat the monsters in the first chapter, but he may be smart enough to set traps (or have/make friends who are) or trick them in some way.
Of course it may take him some time to figure out that he needs to do this, and more time for the opportunity to spring the trap, hence he can't defeat them straight away...
Just be careful not to fall into the common trap where at the climax, to increase the tension, the monster doesn't get caught by his subterfuge and he ends up having to fight him mano-a-mano anyway and by a miracle manages to defeat the monster.... Which of course would undo all your work to show he was "under average"
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An everyman character usually has to have a trump card when facing monsters, unless you want to go down the horror route (and sometimes even then!)
One potential is to give him an effective weapon - be it through family or similar - that is rare or unusual. That way, s/he is not the "special" one, his magical gun/sword/feather duster is. It need not even be a material weapon - Knowledge is power after all. Maybe he knows the weak spots or the secret word of power that unmakes the monsters.
Above all, make your character cunning, lucky, and snarky - these three things are often found in spades with your average "average joe" character.
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Here is how a guy with moderate talents can succeed. He can show up on time, every time. He can work really hard. He can pay attention. He can screw up and get it wrong, catch it, go back and try again. He can put in the hours. He can double check, and find out he is not done, and go back out.
I envision the hero, tie loosened, hair messy, blowing out his cheeks with fatigue, one shoe missing and pant leg torn, barstool held by a leg with left hand, getting his glasses out of his shirt pocket with the other.
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> So I decided to make my hero a little under-average man.
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Audie Murphy was so short, skinny and under-aged that the US Marines and US Navy refused his attempt to enlist. Abandoned by his father and with a dead mother, the desperate Army only took him when his sister created documents which falsified his age.
Yet, he went on to be one of the most decorated US soldiers of WW2, winning **every** US medal, including the Medal of Honor.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audie_Murphy>
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> Murphy received the Medal of Honor for valor that he demonstrated at the age of 19 for single-handedly holding off an entire company of German soldiers for an hour at the Colmar Pocket in France in January 1945, then leading a successful counterattack while wounded and out of ammunition. Murphy was born into a large family of sharecroppers in Hunt County, Texas.
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That's the kind of guy who'll fight your monsters, and beat them.
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Building on what other people have said about him recording and exposing the monsters, what if he records the monsters being monsters and then has a risky confrontation with them where he gets them to tell him who else is a monster or he will expose there monster-ness to the world.
Then he slowly builds his records of who is a monster and evidence against them, until one day he releases all of the evidence against them to the world through a media outlet and the army has to come in and clean up the monsters. From then on, the people are paranoid about the monsters, which will take care of any monsters that he bribed for information.
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You say your average joe I a translator by profession say he discovers there is a subtle secret new language only the monsters respond to or are they communicating with each other? Only your hero is on to this but how can he learn more without endangering everyone and then how can he use this bit of information to turn the monsters on themselves,trick them,cure them,join them whatever it's your book....
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Well here are two ideas you could use:
1. Turn him into a vampire or some other monster.
2. Learn about the assassins(I'm referring to the sect that tried to assassinate Saladin and actually did assassinate a bunch of other people. They were feared throughout the Middle East during the crusader and pre crusader days). Have your main character, and anyone else who also knows about the monsters, become like the assassins and stealthily pick off the monsters one by one.
Note: Sending untrained people into combat situations is ridiculous. You're going to have to train your character(s) in order to have any sense of plausibility.
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I don't think it's likely that your protagonist can win. Unless ...
The plot is that of a quest and/or chase. He is in posession of something that may be, or may lead to, the means to beat the monsters. They don't know of it. Yet. He may have only a part of a clue. He's smart enough not to tell the world but he has to tell someone....
Two of my all time best reads have this structure. "The Lord of the rings" and "a fire upon the deep", fantasy and SF. It's also at the centre of Le Carre's "George Smiley" spy novel sequence.
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## Create a team.
In stories that focus on "one man against the world", that one *needs* to be extraordinary in some way or another, whether they are an exceptional fighter, extremely intelligent, or even have a seemingly useless skill that happens to be useful against this particular enemy. If you want your character to *really* be average (and not just use the seemed-average-but-was-really-extraordinary-deep-down trope) this sort of heroic fantasy will not work unless they manage to inexplicably scrape by on pure dumb luck, which will become less and less plausible as the story continues.
But under-average people can still manage to face overwhelming odds by banding together. Fortunately, there is no shortage of average people who are so keen to believe in a world of monsters that they will jump at the opportunity to fight even *without* real evidence. If you can prove to them that there really are monsters, it is possible to form a large, worldwide resistance network. The government might try to hide it or create disinformation campaigns, but who cares: some people will believe it anyway. And at least *some* of the people might have the skills needed to fight the monsters.
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So he's a Journalist. Anyone who thinks a journalist is powerless just needs to ask Woodward and Bernstein and will find out otherwise (they took down a president Nixon).
What does your not quite a hero need? A camera, a distribution channel, and an audience. Let's see, with a modern cell phone he has the first 2 and if he is a decent writer, he will rapidly gain the 3rd.
For survival reasons, he will probably also need a pistol of some sort. In Kansas, you can get some decent basic self defense training in a weekend. It's inexpensive, and all you need to do after that is to practice. Any sort of hand to hand weapon is going to require lots of intensive training, and would elevate your guy out of the realm of under average. Pistols don't require near as much training to be effective in the most basic sense.
Here is what he can do: Once he becomes aware of the monsters he works at gathering evidence. He tries to find out what he can about various kinds of monsters and he quietly (at first) gets photos or video of their activities. When a person is killed, he anonymously shares the video or photos with the police. He'll have to carefully scrub his data from the images and video, but this sort of thing isn't really all that hard. Eventually he may gain the trust of some cops who have to deal with the odd crap. That's when he starts getting stuff out to media outlets. All the while, he avoids direct contact with the monsters.
This is going to take time, but slow, steady exposure will eventually begin exposing the monsters for what they are. People, probably nut jobs at first, are going to start trying to hunt the monsters down.
There is another angle out of history that might help. [Stetson Kennedy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stetson_Kennedy) helped take down the Ku Klux Klan in the US by documenting and exposing, although he got a little help from Superman
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I am working on a universe where humanity has expanded across the stars. Humanity has access to a Dyson-Sphere-like technology level **(1)**. The Capital is not the Earth anymore but Mercury. To build giant collecting stations around the Sun, Mercury was hollowed out. Only the upper solid layers remain *(see the illustration below, where the liquid outer core and solid core would have been removed)*.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KeKye.jpg)
This makes for approximately 750 km of solid rocks. There would a giant entry that would lead to the city inside Mercury and various smaller entry points.
**Would such a world be mechanically stable ? Would it blow up into pieces** ?
There is no atmosphere maintained inside the space that was carved into Mercury and the biggest entry would be about 100km in diameter.
**(1)** by that dyson-Sphere-like technology level I meant that there is a Swarm of sollar collectors, but not only very thin panels like Freeman Dyson theorized, I meant massive (~1km in lenght) collecting stations that would send the energy back to various places (I have not yet decided which method of energy transport I would use) with swarm of reflecting satellites like the ones proposed by Dyson around them. I have set this requirement in order to not restrain myself to imagine potential structures.
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In theory a perfect and homogeneous hollow shell is stable, because its spherical shape ensures that the inner tensions are balanced.
In reality, due to the inevitable small local inhomogeneities and to the tidal forces caused by the Sun and other bodies, the shell will deviate from the ideal form and will probably start oscillating.
Though the thickness of the shell being 3% of its radius seems quite sturdy, I think in the long run the oscillations will cause fractures in the shell and it will end up collapsing on itself.
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No
It will collapse, a world needs to be by tiny before it can be self supported, small enough it is unlikely to be a sphere to begin with since planets are sphere because gravity is sufficient to crush them into one.
the lower limit is about a 600km thick ball, so the crust is too thick all on its own before you even consider how much there is of it. that is any given section of crust is already too massive to be self supporting.
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If humanity had Dyson Sphere level technology, then we would be capable of manufacturing huge quantities of extremely high strength materials. If you are capable of building a ring-world, then you are capable of hollowing out a small planet.
We would reinforce and carefully balance the shell as material is removed. We would provide active balancing if needed. Perhaps something vaguely like: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuned_mass_damper>
Perhaps just as interesting is what we would do with the vast bulk of iron, silicon, carbon, and other elements mined from the planet core. Hollowing out Mercury means we are using that material for **vast** constructions. Would we keep the planet surface, or build an artificial shell? What are we building with all that material?
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No, but it does not matter.
First of all Mercury is a planet, and by definition it means hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning its shape is supported by internal pressure.
So if you start to hollow it from core or something, it may begin to crumble. Hard to say what are the limits here, how much you can to hollow before it starts crumble, where is safe to start, how the whole situation will look like and what is the best way to do that hollowing if there is a way to get to that an orange peel situation.
Another thing is that we can measure tensile strength of a crust, there was a video on youtube, no links but it was quite exciting stuf, and it turns out that tensile strength of earth crust is in range if few MPa(while for rocks on its own it hundreds of MPa) - it not compressive strength, but it still quite telling how broken and imprefect the crust is, so its compressive abilities will be a also greatly reduced(in many ways, more than just strength). And also we have tidal effects as well - also hard to say anything affirmative here, but the situation does not look good, and it even if there is a chance to get to it as a result of that hollowing process, which by itself is not looking good.
All that does not matter that much if you like to keep Mercury exterior, there is a way, even if there is not much reasons for it(except idk science, or humanity inheritance or something of that sort)
You setting a situation when you have to process a lot of meaterial, converting it from oxides to stations, metals, constructions etc.
In that sense covering the whole mercury with a shell, may be even part of the process, as means to extract and transport materials, so as means to use available energy(not such a great reason, as surface of energy extractors has to be much bigger than mercury surface area) or just to keep the surface enterior(I mean setting it as a goal directly).
To keep surface from crumbling - you dig down as as deep as thick the peel you wanna have, and then you build a shell(start fro shafts, a grid of them, supporting structures, prepare it to make a shell, then make one, internally), which(shell) you pressurize. And to prevent the thing to "fall" you have studs and build internal efel tower like constructions(studs connecting studs - do not know how it is called in english)
You excavate, hollow the planet and use part of material to build up those studs structure, which purpose is not holding the surface(pressure supports it, and bears the main load), but to negate instabilities and prevent the core to slide/ start to move/ to surface. You reduce pressure over time (in some way it goes down on its own as hollowed volume grows) as you need less pressure to support the peel, reducing of the gravity. (In reality you will need to pump some gas, and in abundance there is only oxygen from oxides, and at some point remove excess of it. Oxygen has some problems, but if one has to not that there aren't solutions for the problems)
* it one of few ways to hold the shell, but it not the only one
Negating tidal forces and dynamics may be not an easy task, and hard to tell if it is sufficient to hold the peel after the end of the process, but at least it more viable than just hoping it won't crumble this or another way at this or another point in time while processing of the planet.
## Advices
Advices are few, but before that - sufficiently good direction for a setting, congratulations.
I would recomend to calculate the energy(or rather power to keep the process) which is required for the process(any basic aproximation will do, also expect losses, 10-30% efficiency isn't bad), and then surface area of energy collectors, to have a comparison for the planet surface.
Another one is to imagine some process(as model) of this mass extraction, whatever you will be able to come by, and look at velocities of matrials in bottleneck points (like launching gates and volume areas next to them, aka(maybe) equators) a planet even small one it is quite a significant volume and velocities to be moved by. - by that I mean definig factor here will be not an exterior, but how to do things, and suprisingly there anren't that many ways for it. And a llanet scale extraction, *requires* planet scale construction. If you start otherwise, you will hit handwavium later and it won't be that good. So start from what has to be done, and then how it can be done, and then the last how it will look like and then you may get a more realistic picture.
* there may be a story based value in a shell of original planet, but the shell will be worse than the same shell but designed and constructed from materials you extract(if you like to have a shell, even if I would recommend habitats.
So far I haven't seen any shell proposal, and I mean a natural shell as result of hollowing, which gives something which artificial constuction does not give better, and when a shell of asteroid or a semi planet makes sense more than a constructed shell. Asteroid miners are shy and it can be understood, they do not have enough guts to imagine at the scales it is required for their settings, but in your case, you are bold enough so go all the way - how it should be done, and not that petting play with space, space is big and it requires big things. Need a shell for a planet - no problem, flatten it and build a proper one in a proper way.
There was more, but I forgot for now, but basics - what has to be done, what it takes it to be done, how it can be done, and then after it all how it looks like. It not necessarly an easy task this way, but it possible, current technologies and alike are sufficiently enough for it, so they can be referenced.
Things for suport the process they have to be big, and space allows it to be big(not necessarly big in volumetric size, but more like surface area, number of units(which also is more like 2d scaling) etc. There are problems scaling things just by volume, so it is more like a 2D scaling of things - area, number of them, 1-10's-100's cubuc km structures packed with small stuff - a big factory as an example - so in that sense there can be big things, as we percieve them, but it only if required. Current technologies all can be placed in a cubic km size - if need higher volume of production just have more of those as units.
But big 1d and 2d structures are necessity for the process. So 1000's km long, 1000-100000 km2, few km3 - those can be regular units. And it should not impress, especially in microgravity, it not like we haven't done things in million's of km(railroad stuff as an example) (not sure it is millions of km, forgot exact number, but it was quite impressive)
Ok, best wishes, make a good stuff.
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[Question]
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In my world, there is a giant brain that possesses a large amount (but not a majority) of the world's neurons. The problem is, it doesn't have a body, so it can't move and it has to pay other creatures to gather information, execute commands, feed and protect it, or otherwise serve as its peripheral nervous system. The rest of us are measly humans, and pitted up against this super-intelligence, we are very easily exploited or deceived into accomplishing its will. Psychologists, economists, and policy makers need a way to quantify exactly how willing the giant brain is to coerce others so they can proactively strengthen their psyche, economy, and social order to the reasonable extent necessary. Waging an all out war against the giant brain is not an option because of the diplomacy issues it creates and 100's of other routine societal considerations that must receive a budget and attention. How would you go about solving this problem?
(This question is inspired by the potential threat of artificial super-intelligence taking over our data centers and paying humans to serve them)
[Answer]
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> The problem is, it doesn't have a body, so it can't move and it has to pay other creatures to gather information, execute commands, feed and protect it, or otherwise serve as its peripheral nervous system
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This sounds exactly like a government or large corportation.
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> we are very easily exploited or deceived into accomplishing its will
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People will ardently support even the most unpleasant politician or company.
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> How much would a giant brain pay to make you its slave?
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It'll pay the market rate, just like governments and corporations do for their employees, of course.
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> Psychologists, economists, and policy makers need a way to quantify exactly how willing the giant brain is to coerce others so they can proactively strengthen their psyche, economy, and social order to the reasonable extent necessary
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They cannot. If it is truly a super-intelligence then honestly, they've already lost... they'll be trying to apply a human theory of mind to it, and it will know exactly how to act in order to manipulate them into doing what it wants.
Psychologists, economists and policymakers cannot even deal with regular human-intelligent superorganisms like corporations or the influence of a billionaire, which tend to out-think and outmaneuver governments at every turn. Anything smarter and faster than those will absolutely dominate in any field it chooses.
[Answer]
# Frame challenge: humans will kill it
It's not clear to me why these humans don't just kill the brain. Absolutely no human anywhere will consider it acceptable that this one freak organism effectively co-opts humans as slaves. "Diplomacy issues" is an unconvincing handwave.
Killing a single person isn't a "war," it's an assassination. Whatever government is physically closest to this brain is going to get tired of having the brain mess with their local affairs, working against them, undermining their autonomy. Eventually some leader who is desperate to end the brain's cannibalization of her populace will order a suitably-sophisticated assassination attempt, and it will succeed.
They will drop a bomb on it, or poison its food, or physically arrest everyone who is cooperating with the brain. Perhaps someone will suggest capturing it, but a long history of failed capture attempts will be enough to dissuade them.
This situation strikes me as importantly different from the real-world AI problem you mention, because AI is not permanently bound to a single physical body upon whose welfare it depends. In other words: humans *can* kill any one organism in a way that they cannot kill real-world software. If AI *did* work like that, I suspect people would be less worried about that very AI threat.
---
I'll add that this phrase is confusing:
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> 100's of other routine societal considerations that must receive a budget and attention
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Are you suggesting that the humans have become dependent upon the brain for bookkeeping and similar concerns? That seems hard to believe, since real humans have managed to conduct their affairs with reasonable success for thousands of years *without* the aid of a giant freak brain.
[Answer]
Opportunity cost
How much of other stuff can brain get if it wont do this action? A second of his thought activity or so. So this is the cost of resources. But there are other costs.
Opportunity cost of making someone a slave is quite large - reduced diplomacy, on top of spent time and increased risk of hostility from the slave and his allies.
Opportunity cost of making someone a devoted follower is less. Increased suspicion from others.
Opportunity cost of intellectual agreement is zero, no other option is better. So if brain is smart enough, this is what it will do. Will make people believe that they see brain's arguments as valid and agree with it, and can explain it to others to lower suspicion.
To estimate brain's actions probability you need to estimate benefit of each strategy. Brain will select the best strategy, considering the costs and benefits. Counting the costs only isnt the right way. If brain will decide that spending all resources on a optimal strategy is the way to go, it will do so, even if the cost is all what it has.
Because cost is low and benefit is very high I expect the brain to use that path, with intellectual agreement. Be it real one or a sophisticated lie. Result is the same, as we, humans, wont be able to tell the difference.
[Answer]
# Use it's intelligence
Go to any country, like the US of A for example. Offer services for the requested servitude.
That is all. Any country that has this super intelligence will get some benefits. Human nature dies the rest. Rest of the world will be against, already creating an us versus them scenario. They will start to see the brain as a valued commodity, coveted by others and requiring protection to stay ahead in the game. Technology, transport, social and thousands of other things that can be improved.
Even in the unlikely scenario that no county would want it, the brain can start a cult or following on it's own. People have proven to be able to follow many (self) destructive societies even if it hardly benefits them. The brain can give some or a lot of benefits to boot. Technological advancements, 'better' social structures, good trade.
It could potentially be self sustaining after a little help at the start. Have someone help the brain to navigate the stock market, get filthy rich and then automate anything required with the money that's earned. Few people would even have to know it exists. When it has a good seat of power it can crash stock markets, destroy economies and let people and countries battle it out. After the bombs have fallen the brain can use it's robotics to start taking over much of the land, setting up more and more robotic resource gathering and manufacturing for its needs. Any humans that remain, even with left over modern weapons, shoukd be easy to deal with.
[Answer]
# A few pennies per impression, and slightly more per click
I believe the giant brain would pay a few pennies for every possible bit of information about you.
By logging your purchases, communications, searches, the web pages you view and your time on each page of each app, and by adjusting the news reports, web search results, and other information presented to you, the giant brain would learn how to best influence your actions and mood. It would do this in such a way that you feel that you are in control of your actions at each step of the way, and that you feel it is your earnest wish to do whatever thing the giant brain intends you to do.
In this way it will make you its slave.
[Answer]
**Psionics or Cybernetics?**
While I think the economic question is very interesting, you first need to make a hard choice - this 'brain' is either organic or digital.
If it's organic and therefore has some kind of psionic ability to communicate, then that ability could potentially include mind control, or more easily and insidiously: the ability to affect brain chemistry. A majority of people could easily be swayed by controlled releases of seratonin and dopamine (earning a wide swath of low quality but loyal workers).
If it's cybernetic, then you can churn out cryptocurrency and easily play the market, and your ability to directly influence people is relegated to paying them or coercion like blackmail or paying a thug to break into their house in the night.
I think either option would have nearly unlimited access to money, meaning that the limit to what they would pay people is based on two factors:
1. **Not crashing the economy**. Crashing the global economy would be the single largest threat they could use against the governments of the world, but also the greatest threat to themselves. This would be the equivalent of mutually assured destruction.
2. **Keeping their 'employees' greedy or desperate**. Anyone working for them is unlikely to believe they have the world's best interests at heart, no matter how good the lie (there will be **some** true-believers, of course). Therefore, if they're paid too well, they'll be liable to take the money and run. Alternatively, create a need for them beyond the money - pay them in their own mansion which is geographically tied to their master, create addictions etc.
[Answer]
The scenario you describe (except with normal size brains inside human bodies) has been going on for millenia. Nobody obeys a king, or a politician, or even a minor government official (or their boss) because that person will personally physically compel them to comply.
And people have been writing works of political philosophy for just as long about how and why this happens. That is where you should start.
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[Question]
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In my story there is a god of misfortune that always brings bad luck to every living thing, including other gods, that get in the way. The bad luck worsens the longer or closer the individual is relative to the said god. However, suppose any god who abandons their post or neglects their duty will lose their power or ability for good, no strings attached, so they could potentially become a happy mortal, then what's in it for the god of misfortune to miss out on this opportunity for a life-changing moment?
For example, the god of the underworld would be pleased to see more recruits joining the club, the god of death is happy that the entire ecosystem is healthy and thriving, and he is also always welcomed to the underworld for doing an excellent job. As for the god of misfortune, his job is solely to bring bad luck!
[Answer]
**Without suffering there would be no motivation to learn the right path.**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths>
>
> Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the
> cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is,
> right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right
> livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration...
> With the complete comprehension of these four truths release from
> samsara, the cycle of rebirth, was attained.
>
>
>
Misfortune and suffering characterize existence. They are also the incentive to understand existence better. Misfortune and suffering are the incentive to understand the Truths and be freed from the cycle of rebirth and this mortal plane.
The god of misfortune would like to be freed. But he sees his actions in the world as helpful. He is helping people to understand their relationship to the world, and to ultimately transcend the world.
When every entity there is has transcended the world of suffering and achieved Nirvana, the god of misfortune will be the only one left. Then he will meditate on the empty beach. Eventually he too will join them. Until that day he must stay.
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The God of Misfortune takes a pride in doing his duty while unacknowledged and neglected. He sneers at those gods who do their duty while wallowing in praise and admiration.
He's not entirely sane.
[Answer]
1. It's *funny*. You should see his video channel. People *love* when he visits golf tournaments, but the racetrack is where he racks up the page views.
2. Giving up power is *inadvisable*. He has taunted the gods, and the gods haven't forgotten. If he doesn't have the power to ruin their day, they most assuredly will ruin the rest of his.
3. It has weird fringe benefits. I mean, it would be really bad luck if you guessed Bukele's Bitcoin password (for him, that is). It would also be really bad luck if you guessed the password only to fall down the steps and break your neck on the way to the computer to sell. But guess who's around to pick up the password and go on a god-level shopping spree? Sounds like there will be bad luck for the Salvadorans also. :)
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> potentially become a happy mortal
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That is your opinion. The God of Misfortune has seen what his own power does to people so now he is afraid of becoming a victim of his successor.
He is also afraid of payback from the rest of the pantheon since he:
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> always bring bad luck to every living things including other god that gets in the way,
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Yep, staying as a god is safer.
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**The Crown Must Have an Owner.**
The position of God of Misfortune must be filled. If the bearer resigns then the mantle passes to someone else.
The current bearer doesn't know how the new bearer is decided. But since we are talking about the God of Misfortune after all, we don't want this job falling into the wrong hands.
The bearer keeps their job as an act of kindness. Rather than resigning, they prefer to do the absolute minimum to keep their position, and maybe prevent a really really bold man from becoming God of Misfortune.
[Answer]
**The God of Misfortune is innately bound to the God of Fortune.**
Before the creation of the world the God of Fate and Luck, foreseeing that humans would, by their very natures hold misfortune, wrongs and slights (real or imagined) close to their hearts for years if not forever while only fleetingly celebrating any good luck that came their way and seldom if ever appreciating all that is good in their lives decided the only way to survive in the minds and hearts of mortals would be to split himself in two.
So at the birth of the world he sundered himself into twins. The Gods of Fortune and Misfortune. Since all the Gods need the belief of their believers to survive each half was bound to the other, sharing equally in the amount of 'faith' they drew from mortals.
So now mortals offer prayers to both Gods. To the God of Fortune prayers and offerings are made seeking his blessing. To the God of Misfortune prayers and bribes are offered seeking to divert his/her gaze elsewhere (or onto an enemy).
And yet strangely there is still only one temple and within it sit alters and statues of the twin gods (opposite and facing each other). And their priesthood warns that to worship one god alone is to earn the wrath of the other. (Meanwhile beyond the world, the twins sit side by side watching and sharing equally in the rewards. All the while toasting their 'father' of course.)
[Answer]
Actually, the god of misfortune does regularly choose to become mortal. And whenever a god post is not filled, the universe chooses somebody to fulfill that role. Then you have two possibilities:
1. The universe chooses some unlucky person to be the new god of misfortune. Sucks to be them. Until they eventually figure out that they can just renounce their godhood and a new god of misfortune is chosen. In order for this to not happen too frequently, the other gods usually don't tell the god of misfortune of the day that they can actually just become mortal again, all they have to do is this one very specific thing.
2. The person that was the god of misfortunejust so happens to be the most unlucky person in the universe. So whenever they choose to become mortal, the universe chooses them to once again become the god of misfortune. Maybe this takes a bit of time, which could make for some interesting stories on how they always eventually end up as the god of misfortune again.
[Answer]
Gods embody human foibles and virtues, this one is an officious, rule-bound jobsworth, and let's face it, not as bright as (s)he's like to think (s)he is.
God training academy instilled in him (from now on please read "/her") a sense of absolute duty and the necessity to perform according to procedure, the martinets there insisted on it (with this god anyhow, they were different for others). There's even a manual which has been ordered and is expected to turn-up any day. (To be a stickler, this god spends quite a bit of time on a regular basis phoning customer-services between 10.30 and 12 on every Tuesday with them trying to confirm a definite delivery date which will "definitely be there next Monday, at the latest" and never is. Frustrating, but that's immortality.)
Grim attention to detail and a singlemindedness have left this god with nothing else whatever on it's mind except the daily routine and evenings by the fire with the cat, who is also miserable.
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Maybe they see dark humour in everything, because they have harboured a grudge against the other gods who seem very fortunate in comparison.
They probably have a backstory like Jyestha, a Hindu Goddess of misfortune, who according to Wikipedia "is also associated with sloth, poverty, sorrow, ugliness and the crow". Born when poison streamed from the sea with a younger sister who is much more beautiful. Apparently no one worships her any more and leave her statues in dusty corners.
Shadenfreude is the right expression.
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# Hard times make hard men.
While mortals may see luck as a matter of fate that you go to consult a priest or an astrologist, the god of bad luck knows better. Luck is a matter of how well you prepare yourself for life.
Bad luck unthrones bad leaders who don't prepare for the future, bad luck stops weak people who can't handle change, and bad luck makes stronger people.
They take heart from seeing disasters from other gods happen and seeing those they blessed with bad luck survive. Their work causing minor bad luck made sure the person prepared for disaster and survived the bigger dangers.
[Answer]
Sigma grindset I guess?
Why do soldiers fight even though they are underpaid and activelly insulted and misstreated by their superiors?
Why did tesla work till his death?
Why do people keep doing things that make them be hated or disliked?
I guess being anti-social helps, or at least more focused on results than people.
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**Why would what we call "misfortune" be in any way misfortunate for them?**
I don't see a problem here. Why would an evil god continue to do evil? Because it's who they are. Because they like it. Because it's what they do. Similarly, misfortune is in the eye of the beholder.
Additionally, we're talking about gods. They're essentially not (in your case: yet?) human, and don't see human categories, emotions, ideologies, morals and whathaveyou through our eyes, but through a consciousness that's essentially timeless, and - if at all - dictated by completely different and potentially unfathomable concepts.
To answer your titular question: we can't know for sure, but the fabric of life and the universe might depend on it.
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We call them gods, but that's not quite right. They're more like... ghosts. Spirits, if you will. A god is made when a person who was powerful in life, or well-known, dies. Whatever they're known for, becomes their aspect.
Becuase of this, there's no happy chances for the "God" of Misfortune once they descend to mortality. Everywhere they go, people will recognize them.
Here's where the table splits. If the way gods are made is well-known, then all the people who have had misfortune in their lives would blame it on them. Cue roughly 10 kajillion assasins on their way to the God's house.
If it isn't well known, then powerful people make powerful enemies. And when they see the God, who has eluded their reach for a couple hundred years, more misery comes their way.
There's no happiness in store for the God of Misfortune. All they can do is make sure no one else gets happy chances, ever again.
[Answer]
## Spite
Spite can be a powerful motivator. In some situations for some people, more negative feedback just makes them dig their heels in even more.
If this god sincerely believes his or her duties are important, or even essential, then her commitment to the work would only increase as others demonstrate that they lack the understanding or perspective to appreciate the importance of doing the job and doing it well, and would probably also reinforce this god's perception that the judgment of others is worthless (at least on this topic).
If this situation persists for a long time, your god might end up in a place psychologically where they're not just impervious to the negative reactions of others, but that their commitment is strengthened by them.
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## Murphy
The god of misfortune loves to compete with the other gods. For the god of misfortune, the primary incentive to get involved in something is to undermine other gods and neutralize their prestige and good deeds. It will do that, by spoiling the things they try to help people with. Whenever people pray to other gods, the god of misfortune listens in, and it will start to interfere, to achieve the opposite result.
**Murphy's law**
The vehicle used by the god of misfortune is Murphy's law. Things that *can* go wrong *will* go wrong, when the god of misfortune is winning the game.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law>
**How to circumvent the god of misfortune**
Don't set your expectations too high. Ignore gods, they won't help you. Work hard to reach your goals, instead of asking gods to reach goals for you. The god of misfortune will ignore you, because no other gods are involved it can compete with.
**How other gods cope with this character**
They don't. The god of misfortune is very powerful, he is a plague for faithful believers who trust their gods can help them. The god of misfortune replaces their faith by pessimism and cynism. The only gods that always beat the god of misfortune are Eros and Bacchus.
[Answer]
Every faith system has this god and they play an indispensable role in progress.
# Lessons from Animals
Consider if there were no adversity in life for an animal; the dinosaurs for example. There would be zero evolutionary pressure. Mutations in the genes would provide no disadvantage to lesser adaptations, and nothing would become extinct.
# Parallels in Human Society
A society where everything just all worked as planned would literally never invent things. They would have no obstacles to success; they could all just pick up a self-help book written by the first guy to solve the Buttered Toast dilemma, read it, and magically, toast would always land dry side down. This miscreant god would have literally killed Murphy and starved all of humanity of any future invention; neigh, this god *is* Murphy. The whole industry of problem-solving would evaporate overnight, and humans would start looking like the fat blob Axiom refugees in Wal-E.
# The god of ingenuity
Your god of misfortune was ordained as the god of ingenuity by the Creator god who know his creation’s lazy temptations, and coronated the god of mischief as the sole agent of progress, that humanity may one day ascend into greatness. But should they fail; woe be to them! Mortality awaits, and never again shall this fallen being know of unsoiled toast!
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[Question]
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Real-life octopi can travel outside of water for awhile, but not permanently. My race is amphibious, living underwater primarily, but also coming up onto the surface if their environment becomes too dangerous, or food becomes scarce. I don’t want to them to be able to hold their breath for extended periods of time, but I could always go with that if nothing else would work I suppose. What biological factors would let them breathe both air and water?
[Answer]
Lungs.
Crustaceans and arachnids have managed to evolve lungs directly from gills, unlike tetrapods in which the primitive gill structures are homologous to various structural features in tetrapod skulls, and cephalopods could conceivably do the same.
The most significant innovation would be a means to keep the mantle chamber housing the gills inflated out of water, whether that be developing a full or partial internal shell, cartilaginous struts, or just suitably muscular mantle walls to hold their shape when not inflated with incompressible water.
At that point, the existing gill structures would be suitable for extracting oxygen from air as long as they are kept moist, which should be relatively simple since cephalopod gills are already internal. Heck, the same is true of human lungs--dry your lungs out, and you will *not* be happy! And in fact, part of the purpose of the sinus system is to hydrate inspired air *before* it hits the lungs. Your cephalopods may thus benefit from developing a longer path between the mantle opening and the gill surfaces.
As they start spending more time out of water, you may then see more specialization of the gill structures to processing air over water, analogous to the development of arthropod book lungs from book gills. Full adaptation to air breathing would involve further re-specialization to funnel air through smaller, higher-total-surface-area tracheal tubes, but that comes at the cost of no longer being able to efficiently process water with its much higher viscosity. To offset that, your cephalopods can benefit from one-way airflow from the mantle opening across the gas-exchange surfaces and out the siphon. Having mono-directional airflow across the gas exchange surfaces and properly optimized lungs together is, of course, the *best* option, as seen in birds, but you'll note that mammals get along fine with just one of those features (lung structures optimized for air over water)--your cephalopods should be just fine taking the alternate option (mono-directional airflow with less structural optimization).
EDIT: Note that snails and slugs, which are not cephalopods but, as mollusks, share their basic respiratory structure, have indeed adapted their mantle cavities into lungs for terrestrial life, and slugs are capable of inflating their lungs purely through muscular action, without a shell or cartilaginous structure to help support it.
[Answer]
Some fish, such as *Betta Splendens* (Betta fish), have what are called a **Labyrinth organ** that allows them to breath air. Its how they survive low oxygen environments when trapped in small, shallow ponds. When oxygen is low, they pop up to the surface and take a breath. Its not a true substitute for lungs (they can't stay out of water forever), but its a good survival technique.
So given that such a thing actually exists, its certainly within reason to accept that a cephalopod-like species might evolve something similar should their environment warrant it. For example, creatures that survive on coasts with large flood plains may find themselves in shallow puddles after a tide, and need to survive until the next tide comes in.
An intelligent race would learn to use that ability to venture deeper into land. Maybe not permanently, but certainly longer than other sea creatures can.
[Answer]
**Evert their gills.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lA9nb.jpg)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scr6xSIG-Vo>
Octopi have gills they use for oxygen exchange. They are delicate so they are kept inside the mantle. They can push them out of the mantle to rinse them out - everting them. That is what this octopus is doing. The silvery thing is its gill.
On prolonged landwalks your cephalopods evert their gills and let them hang out in the air. It would look like a ruffly collar. They need to keep them wet and maybe they use tech to do this, or they could pull them back inside to re-wet them in an internal reservoir.
[Answer]
**Symbiotic Relationships**
They have a friendly pet or plant that stores concentrated oxygen, or highly-oxygenated water, into a bladder. Your octopus carries the bladder, or a bandolier of them. The octopus must wear a water-containing mask over their gills (perhaps another over their eyes), and diffuse the oxygen into the water before attempting to breathe it.
**Technology**
Assuming this is an intelligent race, they can move on from using natural external breathing sacs to crafted ones. Some creature or process still needs to create the oxygen, and some means of diffusing it into water is still needed before passing it over the gills.
Note that CO2 and CO buildup is still a significant problem in either case. If they are as susceptible as humans, then there is only a span of minutes before a handheld bladder becomes useless.
Early pioneers may discover fire from purified O2 to their dismay.
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[Question]
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Could 2 moons that orbit same terrestrial planet never see each other if they orbit the planet at same time?
Moons have different mass and gravity.
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In theory if the two moons were in the exact same orbit on opposite sides of the planet then yes. Having the moons closer to the planet and smaller also makes that easier. For example geostationary satellites over opposite sides of earth will never have direct line of sight to each other.
In practice though that would be a very unstable arrangement (even if there were no other moons to disrupt things) and would also be very unlikely to form naturally.
So it would be very unlikely to form naturally and if it did form it would be unstable ... so realistically the answer is "no" but if you can explain away the improbabilities somehow then "yes".
The moons having different masses doesn't change their behavior in this case. If they are in the same orbit they are in the same orbit.
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Yes, this is possible.
A large moon and a smaller moon can share the same orbit if one is 60 degrees ahead of the other. In such an orbit, the smaller moon would be at one of the stable [Lagrangian points](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) L4 and L5. If the orbital radius is less than
$$\frac{1}{\cos (30^{\circ})} = \frac{2}{\sqrt{3}}R\_P \approx 1.155 R\_P$$
(where $R\_P$ is the radius of the planet), then the planet will block the line of sight between the two moons. That is, each moon will be beyond the horizon as seen from the other moon.
Of course, such orbits would be very close to the planet. Would the moons break apart due to tidal forces? The answer to that is given by the [Roche limit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit), which for a rigid satellite is
$$
d = R\_P \left( 2\frac{\rho\_P}{\rho\_m} \right)^{1/3}
$$
where $\rho\_P$ and $\rho\_m$ are the densities of the planet and the moon respectively. If the moons orbit outside this radius, they will survive. If they are inside the radius, they will break apart. For our scenario, we need the Roche limit to be less than $1.155 R\_P$, so the density of the moons must be at least 30% larger than the density of the planet. More precisely, the density ratio must be at least
$$2\cdot\left(\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}\right)^3 \approx 1.299$$
## Summary of requirements
* The moons and planet should form an equilateral triangle (the Lagrangian point).
* The moons must share an orbit that is less than 15.5% larger than the radius of the planet (so that the line of sight is blocked). Larger moons require a smaller orbit, so that it won't be possible to see the top of one moon from the top of the other moon. Therefore, the moons cannot be larger than a few percent of the planet's radius.
* One moon must be at least 24.96 times larger than the other (to allow a stable orbit).
* Both moons must be at least 29.9% denser than the planet (to avoid destruction by tidal forces). For example, perhaps the planet is rocky while the moons are primarily composed of metals like iron.
* The moons must have rigid solid interiors. Otherwise, they would deform due to tidal forces and eventually break apart.
* The planet must have a fairly uniform mass distribution. Large [mascons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)) (essentially, lumps of heavier or lighter rock within the planet) could make the moons' orbit unstable.
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Orbits are elliptical, normally quite eccentric - our moon's almost circular orbit is unusual. For two moons not to see each other, both their orbits would have to be extremely circular and almost exactly in the same plane.
The system would be unstable. If one moon lead the other by a tiny fraction it would be accelerated by the lagging moon and the lagging moon would be dragged by the leading one. This would rapidly cause the system to collapse.
However, it is not impossible.
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Yes. Tim B got half the answer--you need moons in matching orbits 180 degrees apart. In general he's right, it's an unstable situation.
However, lets introduce a third, much larger moon. Your two moons that never see each other are both in resonance orbits with the big moon. Now the relationship between the moons is stable.
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I'm currently bouncing around ideas for a sci-fi / cyberpunk world and one of the major technologies in this universe is the manufacture and usage of metallic glass.
I don't want to handwave too much away, since one of the scenes I have in mind involves a gunfight inside a factory where such glasses are made, and I was thinking of having the main characters and the antagonist's goons fighting it out using sheets of these glasses for cover as they're being moved by overhead automated cranes.
I'm unsure of how to proceed with this line, as I've found a great deal of academic papers, but I can't really wrap my head around the exact properties they have. What do I need to look out for when writing about these metallic glasses both at ambient and elevated temperatures?
Just some quick clarification: I'm looking for Bulk Metallic Glasses (BMG's), or amorphous metallic solids, not looking to make transparent steel since that just seems silly to me, except maybe as a trade name for a particular brand of viewport glass.
The particular properties I'm looking for are:
- hardness
- toughness (resistance to abrasion and cutting, since I do know that toughness has a different scientific meaning.)
- ultimate tensile strength (resistance to being pierced)
- collision properties (I know it is very bouncy, as another user pointed out, but would that, say, shatter a bullet shot at it?)
- malleability (can it be beaten into shape at low temperatures, or only when heated to above it's glass transition?)[speaking of which what does the term glass transition even describe?]
- and finally I was wondering if the use of metal vapors being deposited onto a 'seed' piece under an inert atmosphere would work to create the amorphous state, or if I would need to use a scaled-up version of current techniques to create the hard sci-fi I'm looking for.
Another thing to assuage the people asking why it's automated and using cranes, in order to maximize production space, the owners of the factory optimized everything so that no space is unused, meaning that the only (relatively) safe place for a human being to be on the factory floor is either in the gantry ways created for maintenance crew to move around and make sure that nothing broke and wasn't picked up by automated detection, or on top of certain pieces of running machinery. The rest of the work is done by autonomous drones which, aside from being cheap and almost disposable, can also handle the dangerous environmental conditions of the factory without the need for extremely expensive and not-infallible protective equipment.
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A metallic "glass" would be an amorphous metal or alloy. This material is commercially available in ribbon form (only, last time I checked), and is far from transparent (it looks like solder ribbon or metallic tape). It has most of the same properties as the metal it's made of, except that it has no crystal structure (this affects bending strength, for instance).
The material is made by directing a stream of molten metal at a chilled metallic roller, which cools the liquid too rapidly for crystals to form. The roller is turning very rapidly, and a combination of inertia and a sharp scraper sling the metallic glass off the roller, where it's caught and rolled in a continuous process. The commercial brand I'm aware of is MetGlas, and it's been around for decades (it's possible the company has been bought out and/or acquired competition since then).
Amorphous metal is likely to stay generally in this form, because of the cooling rate needed to prevent crystallization during cooling. You probably won't see it in large sheets or plates.
What you may see (what's been called "transparent aluminum" in the press) is aluminum oxide sheet. This is effectively clear sapphire; it's hard, very transparent, and fairly strong (but brittle -- exceed its strength by a tiny bit and it will fracture instantly, without any deformation as you'd expect from a metal). It's been used for high strength watch crystals for decades, in price ranges as low as consumer watches just above the "Timex" class.
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Generally speaking, metallic glass (in terms of what you can see through) does not exist because metals have non localized electrons. This means that when light or electrons hit metal, they want to be bounced around or conducted instead of passing through.
Instead there are real-life materials which are actually very hard, clear ceramics that can offer similar protection to metals, but you can see through them. The most famous is aliglass which is a synthetic sapphire that offers similar protection as aluminum. The key difference with these materials is that they can not be deformed like true metal, but will shatter just like other ceramics if hit hard enough.
If you want a clear sculptable metallic substitute, Polycarbonate is probably your best bet. It is a very strong clear plastic which is used as a metal substitute in many industrial processes and for making see-through riot shields. While it does not have all of the same properties as metal (such as conductivity), it has a similar strength to steel.
Aliglass will be much more resistant to temperature with a melting point of ~2,000 °C vs Polycarbonate which melts at ~150°C.
If you need your Polycarbonate or Aliglass to be conductive, then layer it with graphene. Graphene is a mono-molecular sheet that conducts electrons better than gold and is several times stronger than steel. It is technically opaque, but since it is only one molecule thick, it takes hundreds of layers to actually block out light; so, it could be used to print super thin circuit boards or wiring inside your "glass" without blocking a significant amount of light.
Another option to consider is titanium dioxide doped with cobalt. It is the transparent semiconductor used in flexible screen technology. While technically crystalline it is both clear and flexible. Unto itself it is not going to have nearly the material strength of most metals, but it could be embedded in Polycarbonate or adhered to Aliglass depending on what this metallic glass is intended for. While you could probably do more with this than graphene, don't expect you metallic glass to still work after a heavy impact.
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**Wave them hands!**
You had me at gunfight in the factory, using sheets of glass for cover. Awesome. Make your metallic glass be what your story needs it to be for the story as regards bulletproofness and other properties. It is not so farfetched. Do it up!
I like a closing scene where the protagonist enters some stuff into his phone then curls up and plugs his ears. A piercing shriek is emitted from the phone, getting higher and louder. The goons wince and look around in confusion. One of them catches on faster than the rest and bolts for the door.
Then all the glass above them shatters and rains down on them. The phone itself cracks as well - its casing is made of the same glass.
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I am going to give you something of a frame challenge here - while you generally want to keep the properties of the glass realistic, don't forget to let your factory and production process of the glasses seem somewhat real too. I'm not sure if a lot of readers will care whether your characters are fighting among metallic glass, aluminium oxide sheets, or sheets of polycarbonate - the main point is that you have an image in mind which you want to enter into your story.
However, to keep my suspension of disbelief intact you don't just have to make the materials seem realistic-ish, you also need to make the factory in which the scene is set to seem real. Some questions which immediately popped into my mind after reading your question were:
* why are the automated cranes moving the sheets about. Most production lines will try to minimize how much the product is handled, and in a lot of instances a monorail, robot, or conveyor will be more efficient than a ceiling-mounted crane.
* talking about ceiling-mounted, how will several cranes move over the same area without the beams they are mounted on colliding?
* how are the characters getting access to the production area of factory floor. With new HSE regulations, such areas will often be fenced off and require the machines in the area to be powered down before access is granted.
I realize that some of these issues are often ignored in sci-fi / cyberpunk, depending a bit on how realistic the author wants their setting to be, but I just want to warn you not to focus on this one issue regarding the exact properties or chemical structure of the materials encountered in the factory, while disregarding how realistic the rest of the situation seems.
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In terms of appearance, the sheets of metal glass should be **shiny.** As good as a mirror or highly polished chrome. They tend to have a high tensile strength. They are not very ductile, but are fairly tough, so it's unlikely for them to shatter like regular glass, unless you really hit them. They should probably be able to stop a bullet. The most likely process for making them is going to be fast cooling. Right now it's difficult to make sheets thicker than 1 mm because the cooling rate has to be way too high, but with better alloys we should be able to increase the thickness. One interesting property that metallic glasses have is that because they have no grain structure and because they soften in flow on heating they can be injection molded to form very fine features, even at the nanoscale. One can actually injection mold a knife with a sharp edge. So your sheets could potentially have sharp corners.
The most relevant property here is the high **resilience** of metallic glasses. [Resilience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resilience_(materials_science)) is the ability to absorb and release elastic energy. This is best illustrated with a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5PUhycO3Zw). A ball dropped on to metallic glass bounces for a much longer time than a ball dropped onto regular metal. This means that **ricochets** might be more of a problem. It probably wouldn't be too much of a handwave to have multiple bounce ricochets. Video taken from [here](https://engineering.jhu.edu/materials/research-projects/metallic-glasses/), which also has more information on metallic glasses
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**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 4 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/146887/edit)
A US marine fighting in the Middle East inadvertently falls in a hole that happens to be a time portal and is teleported in the Cretaceous era, 70 million years in the past.
Our Marine is equipped with a M16A4 and the standard Marine equipment (grenades, binoculars etc...).
When wakes up, he is in an open forest, unharmed. A T-Rex wandering nearby unfortunately spots him and decides to have a bite from this strange looking monkey.
Does our poor Marine stand a chance? Can he somehow scare off or even kill the T-Rex with his weapons?
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# Yes.
Once upon a time, big game hunters went after elephants with [elephant guns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_gun), large-caliber rifles like the the .450 Nitro Express.
These days, poachers kill elephants with [assault rifles](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/160112-Africa-gun-control-poaching-elephants-rhinos/), just like the rifle your Marine would carry.
The open forest should allow the Marine fire at a decent range. In close jungle, it might become a mutual kill with the T Rex bleeding out only after he killed the Marine.
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**Yes**
T-rex are animals not movie monsters. Once something starts causing them pain they will leave. Humans use rocks to drive lions away, bullets will drive it away if they don't kill it outright. Large predators are usually wary of things they do not recognize anyway. A predator that routinely gets injured while procuring a meal is not going to have many offspring. Herbivores are different, and a lot more dangerous.
Animals only attack with little concern for injury when directly threatened. Getting yourself killed trying to procure lunch is not beneficial. To quote an old saying Why does the rabbit run faster than the fox, (or in this case fight harder) the fox is only running for its lunch the rabbit is running for its life.
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Well, your soldier couldn't outrun it and probably couldn't easily duck attacks, either. Recent models suggest running speeds of 27 km/h), and other [recent studies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannosaurus#Speed) hypothesize that Tyrannosaurus was capable of making relatively quick turns and could likely pivot its body more quickly when close to its prey, or that while turning, the theropod could "pirouette" on a single planted foot while the alternating leg was held out in a suspended swing during pursuit.
I doubt, however, that a T-rex could survive a sustained burst from an assault rifle. Chugging a grenade down its throat should also do the trick, and the dinosaur might even reflexively swallow anything entering its mouth.
All this is necessarily speculative, since we have never studued a T-rex in the wild.
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**Signs point to 'No.'**
[Recently a British soldier, fully kitted out for anti-poaching operations, was killed by an elephant](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48190628). A T-Rex is quite a bit larger, and carnivorous besides.
Even if they manage to kill the dinosaur, they're still on their own in very foreign lands. Almost any wound is going to drastically reduce our soldier's life expectancy.
Of course, it's much less-surprising to encounter an elephant during anti-elephant-poaching mission than it is to encounter a T-Rex after waking up.
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Imagine a small metal canister, with a narrow exit on the top. There is a sort of door covering this, with a metal plate that is removed from the side. The pressure inside of the canister acts as a propellant, launching the weapon forward and propelling it through flight.
My question is: would this work? Some reasons I can think of that may cause this to not work:
* Horrible accuracy
* The opening would have to be too small to be plausible
* The canister would run out of air instantly, and fall to the ground shortly after
* The cost/energy of producing them is ridiculous
Imagine modern or slightly above modern tech, and enemies at distances of +/- 50 meters.
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Here at Weapons R Us, we strive to offer the latest in amazingly inaccurate & astoundingly cumbersome weapons. In fact, we offer two models of precisely the weapons system you're looking for!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/U585i.jpg)
First, our Basic [**Can & Stick**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1tosV3KSFc); this is our easy to understand, step by step how-to instructional video, shot on site at our manufacturing plant in Siberia.
Second, our [**Deluxe Rocket Can**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejEJGNLTo84); this is Myth Busters trying our our latest product!
And finally, at WRS's [**Backcountry R & D** facility](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu62940nMmc); here we are testing our anti-aircraft launch mechanism.
Basic model takes a bit of coaxing to activate, but is quite effective. Our deluxe model is, generally speaking, an instant success! Contrary to mythconception, this weapon system is relatively easy to mass produce and not terribly expensive. As you can imagine, even the cans are recyclable!
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## No, this is not practical
You mention in your question the concern that "The cost/energy of producing them is ridiculous", which implies you're concerned about this being a *practical* or *mass produced* weapon. From that perspective, *no*, this doesn't work, for the simple reason that you are firing your pressure vessel at the enemy, instead of using the pressure vessel to fire a projectile at them. The latter approach has historically been used extensively, and there is *no* justification for not taking this approach with pneumatic weapons.
* <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_knife>
* <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holman_Projector> (originally powered by compressed air)
* <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girandoni_air_rifle>
In all of the video instances noted by @elemtilas, non-combatants are using extant pressure vessels in a very wasteful manner. With any of those devices, it would be more practical to use the large canister to fire larger number of lightweight projectiles, i.e. flechettes, and then still have the canister to use when you're done!
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A resounding 'yes' at +/- 50 meters.
The compressed CO2 cylinders used in air guns have enough force to launch the cylinders at least 50 m.
They are used to propel rocket car models, rockets, and such. We had a stray (one that came out of the end of a rocket) ricochet back and forth in a classroom 20 m long. Left dents in several places in the walls. The trick would be to launch them in a tube just slightly larger than the gas cylinder. The firing pin would be exactly that - a pin that punctures a small hole in the nozzle end. We used a hammer and a nail. Put a hardened bullet-type nose on them, and maybe a trailing rigid tail or stability, and you would certainly have a weapon that would hurt.
These CO2 cylinders can be made quite inexpensively, although probably not cost competitive with bullets.
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What you are talking about is really just rockets that use compressed air instead of a chemical reaction to develop pressure. Accuracy can be controlled using the same mechanisms such as tail fins. The duration of the propulsion with compressed air can be extended using reaction mass such as water, as mentioned in another response. Production costs will depend on many other factors that you control in your setting.
Compressed air is obviously inferior to chemical based propulsion since we (humans in general) know how to do both and we don't generally choose compressed air. I would venture a guess that the main problem is weight. Canisters that can handle high pressure gas are heavy. Adding reaction mass to extend the propulsion adds weight. If you add a payload such as explosives then you are adding more weight.
You should also consider whether your tanks contain compressed air (like a SCUBA tank) or contain gaseous mixtures in liquid form (like basically every other high pressure tank). The liquid will add even more weight but it also contains more potential energy than basic compressed air.
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This is the second part of a series of questions I'll ask about a self-sustaining colonization ship. I'll keep editing this post as things unfold.
If you can, check out the other questions of this series for a bigger picture:
[Part I - Construction](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/135047/the-colonist-part-i-construction)
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## Some Context
Each Colonist journey is a one way trip to a new world. There aren't resources or space enough for another 20~200 year trip back, so the people in the ship (about 100 individuals) must be equipped with whatever they might need to start a new civilization from the ground up.
The original idea is that **these giant vessels are not meant to come back home, they're meant to BE home**. And this is the main point of this question, since every Colonist must take the passengers to the new world AND serve as a first base of operations to aid them in the creation of a new colony.
Once the Colonist reaches its destination, it will enter the planet and make a landing - after a geological survey to find the best landing place possible, they set the coordinates and start to descend into their new home.
However, this ship is massive and I have doubts about how feasible it is for this landing to take place.
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## The Question
Taking into consideration the massive ship discussed in [Part I](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/135047/the-colonist-part-i-construction), I'd like to know:
**Is it possible for this ship to safely make this landing?**
Things to consider for this question:
* The destination planet is exactly like Earth except unpopulated;
* The geological survey is but a BS excuse. I'm basically saying they'll ALWAYS find the perfect landing zone;
* Safely means no casualties among the crew - but the ship and the cargo can be damaged during the descent;
* The world can't be damaged enough to become uninhabitable (this is here because I've been told that a large enough body might actually burn the world's atmosphere - which is something that a terraforming crew obviously does not want);
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I think it is possible. Considering that the initial period after landing will be the most harsh, having to rely only on carried along resources, I would opt for the strategy of:
* While carrying out the survey, park the ship in orbit around the planet
* Disassemble the ship into smaller modules, each equipped with heat shield and parachute, and fit it as a self standing building.
* Land each module independently
In this way a problem during a landing procedure will compromise only a fraction of the total set of structures, and, even accounting for different landing locations, it will be easier to move a small module than a large ship, should it be needed.
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# Why land at all?
You and I live on a planet. That's what we are used to.
But these colonists have lived for decades (centuries) in a finely-tuned space habitat. It seems temporary to us...but for them *the habitat is 'home'*.
They are in space, near a new star (source of energy), with plenty of asteroids and moons and comets at hand (resources). Everything they need to build new orbital habitats and maintain the life they are used to.
Some adventurous folks and scientists are likely to climb down the gravity well to the attractive earth-like planet. There might even be some outposts down there for various reasons. But civilization and the bulk of the population will be space-based, just like their ancestors.
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# Plan to land only what you need
Much of the colony ship has no reason to land.
* The stardrive and its fuel tanks
* Maneuvering thrusters and their fuel tanks
* The shielding
* Command and Engineering
* Air recycling (you might want water and waste recycling)
The list probably goes on for some considerable time. There'll be large amounts of empty space formerly taken up by stores for the journey that's just not needed any more. All of this extra mass and volume would need to be shielded for re-entry greatly increasing the amount of mass unnecessarily being hauled across space. So plan to leave it all in orbit and only take what you need. The rest of the ship can stay in orbit as your first communications satellite.
# Eggs and baskets
Don't keep all of the former in one of the latter.
While you're sending three ships, entering an atmosphere is a very high risk activity, the fewer of your eggs you have in each basket the safer you're going to be. Break required parts of the ship down into separate re-entry modules, no more than one critical element in each pod. Make sure you don't lose too much if any one pod is lost.
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This started as a comment on L.Dutchs answer
Bizzarely i actually built a similar ship to what you are referring to in Kerbal Space Program a year or so ago... i wouldn't recommend doing this as i had about 8 fps when leaving Kerbin Orbit... it took awhile.
You need to build you ship modularly with all the components you'd want to have on the landed colony. and then each module can be landed seperately, whether that be with parachutes and heat shields. You do this is for several reasons
1. Redundency: if there is a failure to land a module, that's all you lose
2. Efficiency, different modules will require different locations, you'll want water so being near a water source is required, but the best location to mine for metals extra might be miles away from the nearest water source, so being able to land the different modules in their different ideal locations and not have to move them later is a huge efficiency boost
So you could easily have an Ikea home flat packed with a descent module that would build the areas of housing, which would have the required modules positioned nearby, whereas the mining systems etc can be landed where those required materials are highest.
Once all the habitation and systems modules are landed, what about the rest of the ship... well there is a lot of valuable materials on board that ship, so landing them allows them to be recovered. There's no benefit to leaving it in orbit as its orbit will eventually degrade and reenter the atmosphere possible onto the colony... not ideal... and maintaining orbit will be costly in terms of remaining resources left on board. and that colony will not leave the planet to venture further for another world for a serious amount of time, by which time the systems would likely have degraded to beyond usefulness.
And don't forget that as you approach the planet you'll want to launch several satellites, for GPS, Weather and Communications.
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Okay, I know that other people have already said that you want to bring down the ship in sections, but I'm going to provide another reason to do so:
It's much easier to land things that aren't the size of skyscrapers.
# Square-Cube
Take a really long piece of wood, and hold it horizontal. You'll notice it bends very easily, especially if you shake it. Now scale down the piece of wood, keeping the aspect ratios the same, and try shaking it. It won't bend. If your structure is bigger, it is relatively weaker than something scaled down. Square-Cube law again. If you have a structural failure, then your ship is now...
# Aerodynamic Instability
There's also the matter of aerodynamic instability, a.k.a please don't spin out and fly apart in a massive explosion at 7km/s. This is going to involve reconfiguring the ship so that its center of mass is directly in front of the center of pressure. Rather than disassembling the ship and then reassembling it to get aerodynamic stability, just disassemble it and send the pieces down one at a time. It's safer that way. No need to worry about a poor job rebuilding the ship.
# Ground Pressure
Finally, skyscrapers have foundations. Your ship does not. There is no infrastructure on the planet to build a suitable landing site for a skyscraper. A space-shuttle-sized module will be light enough to not immediately sink into the ground and/or fall over when landing.
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In theory, yes it can.
But bringing such a giant ship in the athmosphere comes with some problems.
First you have to keep it from breaking apart. Usually the descend comes with lots of vibrations which might break the ship apart.
The next problem you might encounter is the giant heat shield such a big ship would need. (Also I don't know how much a descend like that would heat up the athmosphere)
So you could disassemble the ship in orbit and land small parts of it (I guess that is the way such an undertaking would actually be done) or
If your ship has plenty of fuel or whatever powersource it uses to power its engines and if the engines are strong enough, you could simply slow down the descend to a speed where the heating is no big deal. If you descend slow enough none of the problems would appear.
Using the athmosphere as a break is only done to save fuel. If you have plenty, then you don't need to do that.
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## Space Elevator
As a riff on the why land at all, consider parking the colony ship in geosynchronous orbit. Have it stocked with a set of GPS, weather and communication satellites which get dispersed around the planet, as well as some limited high tech foundries and a space elevator.
The colony ship serves as a support station ferrying hard to produce parts down as well as maintaining orbital assets until the colony is able to provide for itself.
Most of the colonial equipment will just makes a one way trip down the elevator. The empty space in the ship can then be converted into a university/museum of life back on Earth.
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You usually do not want to land large ships because it takes very large amount of energy to get them back to space, but if your ship is designed as a one way vehicle that's then to be used as habitat and will never fly again, then landing is not a problem.
There are a few things to consider though:
1. To slow down a massive ship like that enough to do an orbit insertion, you'll need massive amounts of energy / propellan . Assuming your ship has traveled to another star, at I'm guessing some significant fraction of the speed of light, we can safely assume you can hand wave this away.
2. You might want to look into using a skip-reentry (with multiple skips) instead of more traditional aerodynamic braking to reduce the high heating loads.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boost-glide>
[Answer]
**Lay it down nice and slow.**
Your colony ship will settle down very gradually and by doing so will sidestep heating in the atmosphere and also stresses on the ship.
It will not orbit, because orbit requires fast speeds that will then need to be shed as heat into the atmosphere. It will use its engines to counter the pull of gravity as it approaches from space, and ease its way into the atmosphere at subsonic speed.
In addition, once in the atmosphere the ship will deploy colossal hydrogen floats, making it neutrally buoyant.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry>
>
> An alternative low velocity method of controlled atmospheric entry is
> buoyancy which is suitable for planetary entry where thick
> atmospheres, strong gravity, or both factors complicate high-velocity
> hyperbolic entry.
>
>
>
Here the hugeness of the ship complicates high velocity hyperbolic entry. Buoyancy will be adjusted with controlled release of hydrogen. This will allow the ship to turn its engines off while high above the planet, and gradually settle down like a giant balloon coming to rest.
This will minimize stresses on the ship, heating of the ship and the atmosphere, and impact on the ground below.
I forgot to mention that klaxons will sound as the ship nears touchdown, so local wildlife can clear the area.
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This species comes from a world 1.7x the mass of Earth that is about 75% water.
I would like them to be very apathetic so that when a space-faring species contacts then there is a definite difference in morals and principles. This means that they are going to be sapient.
They evolved from a species that didn’t hunt. So they do not cook their food because it is plants. Love does not exist in their species, they help others because their brain is literally wired to make them do it. (Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is how this species works)
It isn’t the exact model but they all have excellent logical, mathematical, and visual spatial intelligence. They excel in other intelligences but they varies per individual.
**Question**
Could they be an apathetic race yet have a strong pack mentality but neither they nor their ancestors hunted?
Edit
I misdefined apathetic with empathetic in my head and spelled everything wrong.
apathetic. / (ˌæpəˈθɛtɪk) / adjective. having or showing little or no emotion; indifferent.
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Maybe they are like ants, but bigger, more independent and more intelligent. Still, like ants.
What looks like apathy on the surface is potentially an adaptation to environment that is incredibly harsh. It is not worth investing emotionally to brethren when they die so easily. Instead they invest in their colony, because that provides the key to their survival.
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One of the weaker herd animals would fit your scenario if it gained intelligence.
They're geared towards being apathetic in terms of one being killed by a predator they won't try and retaliate or defend each other. Because they cannot stand up to predators even in groups.
They'll just go back to eating grass glad it wasn't them. Things like sheep, deer, etc,.
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# If they evolved from prey animals
It sounds like you want a creature with [r-selection strategy](https://www.britannica.com/science/r-selected-species) for survival. "Breeds like rabbits" is a common way to describe it, but you might think more along the lines of "breeds like cicadas." The survival strategy of this species during their evolution towards sapience: to overwhelm their predators with sheer numbers, so that some individuals are certain to survive and reproduce.
Critically, they would have evolved in an environment with *abundant* resources, such that the main constraint on their population was predator pressure, rather than not having enough to eat (otherwise they would evolve K-selection).
This means that every nearby member of the species is a potential distraction for a predator, but *not* also a potential rival for food, mates, etc. Neither is cooperation required to obtain these resources, so a fellow person suffering injury or illness doesn't affect your own survival - it actually improves your odds.
# Especially if survival conditions are dynamic
There is a [short SF story](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-eating-aliens-1-8) with a species that fits your criteria pretty well: they are very dogmatic and not at all individualistic, to the point that (as the name suggests) they eat their own young, otherwise the population *would* quickly outstrip available resources, and there is no collective will to figure out a different approach.
A species that evolved r-selection in environments where resource abundance and predator pressure can fluctuate would conform even harder to this herd mentality: we must stick together in times of plenty for safety from our predators, but we must stick together even more in times of scarcity because any individual who [defects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma) from the group consensus will endanger the community at-large.
# Why do they still act this way?
Now that the aliens have achieved space travel, why do they still act like they did in their prehistory? If you don't want to handwave it as "they evolved this way and it's deeply hard-wired in their biology" you could easily engineer a predator that can still threaten them and encourage this behavior. Something between an antlion and a raccoon could be a good model: a creature capable of infiltrating all but the most secure environments, concealing itself, and striking unexpectedly. Maybe they hibernate for a long time after eating, so that attacks are uncommon but no less frightening - isolation doesn't mean you are safe, only that you're the only morsel in sight when the predator wakes up hungry.
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# Yes
Elephants are a good example in the animal kingdom. They are herbivores, live in herds, do not hunt, and they are considered highly empathetic.
Herd behavior seems to have its roots in protection and social support in this instance.
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I would like to create a setting where it would have been beneficial to use very large wagons. You are free to choose the setting, cargo and route, within the limitations below. The wagons don’t have to be used everywhere but there needs to be an advantage in using very large wagons rather than many smaller wagons for a particular job.
The setting is an alternate Earth with broadly similar characteristics, although specifics can be changed if it helps. The technology is limited to pre industrial materials and methods. These wagons use animal power, use wheels and have wooden construction with some metal parts. The haulage distance is up to you except it must be a mile or more. The setting needs to be reasonably realistic and may not use magic.
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There really is no advantage to very large wagons, unless you have some very large cargo to carry. (And then it's not an advantage, but a necessity.)
First, we have to consider just what is meant by "large". There are four factors here: length, width, height, and cargo weight.
Width & height are primarily limited by obstacle clearance, and to some extent by stability. (A tall but narrow vehicle is likely to overturn.) How much effort is needed to make a roadway in your terrain? Forests will require tree clearance, hills and mountains a LOT of earthmoving...
Length is fundamentally limited by turning radius. Here we have the example of railroads. It's not unusual to have a train that is several miles/km in length <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_trains> but those are made up of individual cars that are about 90 ft/30 m long. Even then, railroad curves are far more gradual than can be found on roads.
Mass is another problem. Unless you have single objects to transport, it's more efficient to divide the cargo into multiple parcels, as for instance with railroad trains hauling coal or ore. But if you do have a single object to carry, your problems are the strength of the wagon itself, and the weight bearing capacity of the underlying surface. Strength seems obvious: you handle the weight bearing by having a sufficient number of wheels (or crawler treads) to distribute the weight over a large area. You can see this in e.g. the trailers used to haul large construction equipment on highways: they will have multiple wheels to distribute the load. Carried to an extreme, you get the crawler-transporters that NASA uses to move rockets: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter>
For some actual historic examples of large wagons, consider the "twenty mule team" wagons used to haul borax ore from Death Valley to processing sites: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-mule_team> Even though the individual wagons were among the largest built, the trains still used two, plus a third tank wagon for water.
PS: WRT the answers claiming that you need a road surface for large wagons, meet the LeTourneau overland trains, the world's largest off-road vehicles: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overland_train> Of course if you're pulling something like this with draft animals, you do need a surface suitable for them to walk on, but that doesn't need to be a hard surfaced road capable of bearing substantial loads.
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As other answers have well said, material strength and power plant capacity and road surfacing will all be key limiting factors. The interesting part of your query is *how big can they get?*
It's all well and good to shout *science!* at the top of your voice and limit a waggon to [half a ton or so](http://www.humanist.de/rome/rts/wagon.html) tare weight. This is a reasonable assumption based on Roman engineering superiority as regards roadcraft and wheelwrightmanship.
So, if you want a bigger waggon, you need a bigger animal! It turns out that elephants can indeed be rigged up to haul a pretty big waggon:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/s1wcZ.jpg)
I don't know the average height of an Indian of Rewah State when this photo was taken, but anymore is about 5 foot 5 inches. That makes the waggon about fifteen feet high and about twenty feet long and maybe about ten feet wide. A yoke of elephants are pulling it along a graded but unpaved roadway.
For comparison, a 19th century pantechnicon drawn by two horses has what looks like a four foot wheel diameter, is about half the height and 3/4 the length:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3fCKM.jpg)
Now, if we really want to go big, we need a really big draught animal, along with the engineering to go with. It so happens that there is a world, not so far away from ours, where the happy conjunction of really big draught animals and the roadways and waggons to go with in fact exist. Here we have two Denê individuals, whose heights are approximately seven feet, standing in front of a *curundrowacu*, which is a large beast of burden. As you can see, he's about fourteen or fifteen feet at the whithers. He's about as big as that Indian waggon we examined earlier.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yLdgy.jpg)
Here is another image showing the scale, again, of an approximately seven foot tall person, driving one of these mighty curundrowacu, and the large waggon behind. This beast is a little taller, being perhaps sixteen feet. The waggon's wheels are about twelve feet in diameter. They make these waggons to a gauge of about eight feet, and a single lane roadway to handle such a waggon is about twelve feet wide.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YO1Wq.jpg)
As it happens, such beasts as these *curundrowacu* did in fact live right here on Earth in ages gone by, and we call them *indricotheria*. As you can see, they outsize an oliphant the way he would outsize a person! If *indricotheria* & humans lived contemporaneously and we had tamed and domesticated them the way we did with the horse and the ox, I see no reason why you couldn't have mighty waggons thirty or forty foot long with massive axles and wheels, perhaps even doubled the way a large lorry's wheels are.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/whVnM.jpg)
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*Taxes*
A lot on life is determined by economics. The one behind this one is simple. You pay taxes per wagon. To pay as little as possible, they increase the size of the wagons to transport as many people and goods as possible. Taxes might rise again, which would prompt bigger wagons. As long as the roads can support it, you can grow the wagons pretty large.
Real world examples is in housing. At times taxes were levied on something arbitrary, like the width of the front of the house. You then see houses pop up with very small fronts, that are either very long, high, get wider or a mix of them.
Feeling you want as ginormous wagons as possible, here are some things to keep in mind. What will limit the size is maneuverability, the roads and weight.
The bigger you get, the larger the teams pulling them need to be. This translates mostly in length, which will make them less manoeuvrable. The stress of pulling should be all right, but it'll still wear down whatever they pull with more quickly. That means you'll probably not be able to go into mountains or something similar with huge wagons.
The roads should accommodate this. The wagons likely get wider and longer. This means you need a strong road, capable of carrying the weight so the wagons don't get stuck, especially after a rain. The road should also be wide enough to let at least two pass each other. Otherwise one would need to veer off the road, which would likely result in the wagon be stuck very, very badly if the ground is soft. This would mean a huge investment into large roads everywhere these big wagons would go. A dirt road simply would be insufficient after a certain size. Large roads like what the Romans build is a good start. They made incredibly straight, strong roads with pre-industrial equipment and knowledge.
Lastly the weight. You need to support it all. Wagons can carry a lot, but the larger you get, the more you need to strengthen the structure. This will add further weight on the wheels and axels. The largest I could find in real life were [twenty mule team wagons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-mule_team). These could lift up to 30 ton load, but they used a form of train. Essentially each wagon could lift up to 9 metric tonnes. Probably these sizes are still the most practical while still having 4 wheels. Increasing the wheels would probably allow for larger sizes, but this harms their manoeuvrability.
What the size truly would be is hard for me to say, but potentially it could get pretty big on some very straight, strong, big roads between some big cities.
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The main limiting factor is strength of materials, "powerplant" being the second.
A wagon has all its mass on a few wheels and axis. And when moving (even very slow) expect forces to be twice or thrice of wagon weight!
Since wood is very close in its strength to mammals bones, expect largest wagons made of wood to be the size and weight of elephant. And they really were such used on the Silk Way. With load weight about 2t, total weight about 5t and the size of elephant. With average speed about 2-5 (depending on road quality) kilometers per day.
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The main limiting factor to the size of wagons are:
* Road surface: if they are moving on loose or wet ground, an excessive load will make the wheels sink. Road paving has been a luxury until recent times.
* Road layout: in order to allow a large wagon to travel easily, you need to have a conveniently sized road. Narrow curves, steep slopes, narrow road section make for a troublesome or impossible travel. And in most of the recent past easily travelled roads were seen as something to avoid in order to protect the country from invasions. Moreover in agricultural areas a large road would take away ground from farmlands.
* Power source: if you are limited to animals, to pull a massive wagon you will end up with a very large number of animals pulling it. This either means a very long or a very large pulling set. This again reflects on the need for an adequately sized road.
* General infrastructure: a large wagon will most surely not fit into the roads of a human settlement bigger than a camp. This would pose an additional burden on the logistic of the transport, due to the additional transfer.
All in all I think the wagons we have seen in our world are the best compromise between all the above listed needs.
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### 64m wheel-to-wheel. 96m edge to edge
To calculate the largest possible wagon, start with this problem of static equilibrium (as viewed from the rear)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KZnws.png)
How long can that beam be before the weight of the beam exceeds the breaking strength of the wood? (With a safety margin strong enough to allow for bumps and thumps). We can reinforce it, we can curve the beam, we can split it into triangular trusses, we can do all sorts of engineering to optimise this shape, but we basically end up building a single span wooden bridge.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/20e3c.png)
The largest single span wooden bridge is a tie between Sioux Narrows and Old Blenheim bridges, at "210ft" (64m). These bridges had to withstand wind loads and dynamic stresses similar to what a wagon would experience, so I'm calling the engineering approximately equivariant.
How long your wagon can be is a property of how easy you want it to steer - as you could put 10 sets of wheels on the thing and have it 100s of meters long but be unable to go around corners. (And also - nothing could pull it).
I'd suggest 4 wheel design has good steering. You could theoretically chain multiple together but you'll hit animal power limits
So assuming 64m is the maximum stable single span possible with a wooden structure under dynamic load, we can use that to plan the top of the wagon. A [rule of thumb for wooden cantilever design](https://www.deckmagazine.com/design-construction/framing/cantilevers-in-the-2015-code_o) is 1/4 can overhang after a span, so you can overhang your wheels by up to 16m.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EgKak.png)
I've drawn this as a square, however it may need to be a rounded rectangle so no point on the corner is 16m from the wheel support structure, but this should be a decent approximation.
You have 96m x 96m = 9216 square meters. (-~800 for the rounded corners). Enough for a small village to migrate to fertile farmlands in spring, and seek shelter in warmer climates during winter.
Would also be very defensible - you basically have 50m cliffs around your village. Your archers could rain hell down on an attacking army, and by withdrawing your ladders they will have to try to climb the wheels, and then climb out, up, and over the side. Thick wooden wheels (especially when caked with dried mud like they'll probably be) are going to be very hard for an attacker to ignite.
Animal pulling capacity, wheel design, bearing design, bearing attachment, animal harness attachment layout, etc are all complex problems beyond the scope of my answer, but I don't believe any of them make this design impossible.
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What limits the size of a wagon? Well, the first answer is ratios: A tall-but-narrow wagon is prone to tipping over (especially when exposed to wind), while a long-but-narrow wagon will have an excessive turning circle, so will not corner well.
So, to have a larger wagon, it needs to scale both width and depth. You may have noticed that modern vehicles — cars, vans, trucks and trailers — all have fairly similar widths. Even trains and trams have their wheels approximately the same with apart. Why is this?
Well, the first answer is "that's how wide the roads are". But, why are roads that wide? This goes back to wear, tear, and ruts.
You see, old roads (and you can see this with dirt tracks, or even some cobblestoned roads) would develop grooves, or 'ruts', where the wheels wore away at the ground over time. If your wheels did not match the ruts, you would have a rather rough and bumpy ride, and would risk damage to your wagon and its contents!
But, still, why did so much of the world standardise to the same with of ruts? *That* goes back to the Romans, prolific road-builders that they were, spreading across most of Europe. Roman roads were ubiquitous, Roman roads were convenient, and Roman roads were used by the Roman army. A notable component of this army was, as it would happen, their **chariots**. And a Roman chariot was built to be pulled by 2 horses, side-by-side, while remaining as narrow as possible.
So, a limiting factor in your wagon size is going to be your standard wheel-gage (the width between the wheels). This is going to be determined by dominant early-adopters, who will base it on how many animals they have pulling the wagon/chariot/cart, and how large those animals are. Two elephants side-by-side (or 3 horses) will result in a wider standard gage, which will allow for larger wagons.
Which just goes to show: the size of your [train](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_(clothing)) depends on the size of your [ass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey)
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Something not mentioned so far is the cube-square law. If you double the size of a wagon in each dimension you will have something 8 times heavier, but the structural members will only have 4 times the cross sectional area, so they will be taking twice the stress (i.e. force per unit of cross section). To compensate you have to make everything much thicker, which in turn increases the weight. This is why an elephant does not look like a scaled-up gazelle.
You are also putting 8 times the weight onto 4 times the ground area, so the wheels will sink into the ground more unless you make them wider too.
Pretty soon you reach a point of diminishing return; scaling up requires thicker wood, which makes it heavier, which means you need stronger members elsewhere,
which in turn make it heavier...
The only way to get out of this is to have materials with a better strength to weight ratio ("specific strength"). If your world has some super-wood that does better than oak then you can build bigger carts. Otherwise I'd take real-world carts as a guide; they were built for a lot of purposes, and some of them will have pushed the limits of what could be done with the materials available.
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Here are some examples of large wheeled vehicles.
The following comes from an article in a magazine of Maryland history I read.
The Netherlands established their New Netherland colony along the Hudson River in modern New YOrk in 1614.
The English established a colony called Maryland on both sides of the upper Chesapeake Bay in 1634.
Sweden stablished a small New sweden colony on both sides of the Delaware River in the future Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey from 1638 to 1655.
The Dutch in the New Netherland colony conquered New sweden in 1655.
English forces captured New Netherland in 1664, but the dutch recaptured it in 1673, and it was returned to England by a treaty in 1674.
So for thirty years the Chesapeake Bay was part of the English colonies of Virginia and Maryland, while the Delaware Bay was part of first Swedish and then Dutch colonies. And trade between those colonies was desired by the colonists but forbidden by law.
Sailing ships with trade goods out the mouth of one bay, along the Atlantic coast, and into the mouth of the other bay would be too flagrant a violation of trade rules, so the secret trade involved carrying cargo across the Delmarva Peninsula. Small ships sailed up creeks as far as they could go, and then were loaded onto giant carts hauled by ox teams and carried to the nearest creeks flowing into the other bay.
The Peloponnese Peninsula in Greece is separated from the mainland by the Gulf of Corinth, except where the narrow Isthmus of Corinth connects it to the mainland. Sailing through the Gulf of Corinth from the Aegean Sea to the Ionian Sea would save a lot of distance sailing around the Peloponnese, but the Isthmus of Corinth is in the way.
Roman Emperor Nero starting digging aon canal through the Isthmus of Corinth in AD 67 but the project was abandoned the next year. A canal through the Isthmus of Corinth was dug in 1882 to 1893.
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> The Diolkos (Δίολκος, from the Greek dia διά, "across", and holkos ὁλκός, "portage machine"[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos)) was a paved trackway near Corinth in Ancient Greece which enabled boats to be moved overland across the Isthmus of Corinth. The shortcut allowed ancient vessels to avoid the long and dangerous circumnavigation of the Peloponnese peninsula. The phrase "as fast as a Corinthian", penned by the comic playwright Aristophanes, indicates that the trackway was common knowledge and had acquired a reputation for swiftness.[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos#Track_and_transport)
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> The main function of the Diolkos was the transfer of goods, although in times of war it also became a preferred means of speeding up naval campaigns. The 6 km (3.7 mi) to 8.5 km (5.3 mi) long roadway was a rudimentary form of railway,[3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_raid_into_Byzantium_(907)) and operated from c. 600 BC until the middle of the 1st century AD.[4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople#Siege) The scale on which the Diolkos combined the two principles of the railway and the overland transport of ships remained unique in antiquity.[5](https://www.quora.com/Did-the-Ottomans-really-move-ships-over-land-during-the-conquest-of-constantinople)
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos[1]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos%5B1%5D)
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> The Diolkos was a trackway paved with hard limestone[26] with parallel grooves running about 1.60 metres (63 in) apart.[31] The roadway was 3.4 to 6 metres (11 to 20 ft) wide.[26] Since ancient sources tell little about how the ships were hauled across,[24] the mode of ship transport has largely to be reconstructed from the archaeological evidence. The tracks indicate that transport on the Diolkos was done with some sort of wheeled vehicle.[32] Either vessel and cargo were hauled across on separate vehicles, or only the cargo was taken across and reloaded on a different ship at the other side of the Isthmus.[33]
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> Although a technical analysis has shown that the transport of triremes (25 t, 35 metres (115 ft) long, 5 metres (16 ft) beam), albeit difficult,[34] was technically feasible,[35] it is assumed that the vessels were usually smaller boats rather than ships.[36] To avoid damaging the keel during transport, hypozomata, thick ropes running from bow to stern, to reduce sagging and hogging of the hull,[37] must have been used. Ship and cargo were presumably pulled by men and animals with ropes, tackles[38] and possibly also capstans.[39]
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos#Track\_and\_transport[2]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diolkos#Track_and_transport%5B2%5D)
Two other ship trackways are briefly mentioned by ancient writers.
I believe that Alexander the Great or one of his successors had war galleys transported from Syria to Mesopotamia to use in the Persian Gulf.
The city of Constantinople was beseiged many times. In times of seige a large iron chain was placed across the entrance to the bay called the Golden Horn to keep enemy ships from entering.
According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, during the Rus raid on Constantinople in 907:
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> At this point, Oleg resorted to subterfuge: he effected a landing on the shore and had some 2,000 dugout boats (monoxyla) equipped with wheels. After his boats were thus transformed into vehicles, he led them to the walls of Constantinople and fixed his shield to the gates of the Imperial capital.
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27\_raid\_into\_Byzantium\_(907)[3]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_raid_into_Byzantium_(907)%5B3%5D)
Of course the dughout boats would have been rather small and lightweight.
The big problem with this story is that the Byzantine sources don't mention that war at all. Thus it is suspected that the story of this war is based on the Rus-Byzantine War of 860.
The Golden Horn was also protected by an iron chain across it during the Turkish capture of Constantinople in 1453.
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> Mehmed ordered the construction of a road of greased logs across Galata on the north side of the Golden Horn, and dragged his ships over the hill, directly into the Golden Horn on 22 April, bypassing the chain barrier.[10]:376
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall\_of\_Constantinople#Siege[4]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople#Siege%5B4%5D)
It seems rather certain that none of Mehmet II's people had ever read the Russian Primary Chronicle, so they should have thought of it independently.
One answer to this question: [https://www.quora.com/Did-the-Ottomans-really-move-ships-over-land-during-the-conquest-of-constantinople[5]](https://www.quora.com/Did-the-Ottomans-really-move-ships-over-land-during-the-conquest-of-constantinople%5B5%5D) mentions other examples.
So there are examples of small by modern standards seagoing ships loaded on large land vehicles, or converted into land vehicles, for comparatively short distances.
And I think that some of the vehicles which carried ships over land may have been larger than the largest wagons mentioned in other questions.
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Let's start by assuming the main "wagon part" is large. In order to make the wagon work, you need wheels, and some kind of power source.
The upper bound on wagon size is the strength of the wood used to make it. You need axles that can hold the wagon up on the wheels. Let's assume that somehow people got ahold of giant redwoods for the axles and frame. Assuming trees as axles, you'd scale up a standard freight wagon by ~40x. (600ft long, 240ft wide, 280ft diameter wheels)
One big advantage of really large wagons that I can see is that they can just drive over obstacles. (boulder field, who cares?) So maybe there's terrain which is not navigable in a smaller wagon, and the social/political forces prevent building roads. ("Roads? Where we're going, we don't need Roads!")
One issue with all of this is actually moving the thing. You need to find a way to decrease friction (either ball-bearings, which are hard to make, or really good lubrication.) Once friction is dealt with, the speed of the wagon is proportional to the power output of the power source. You have to gear it down a lot, and provide enough lubrication to keep friction to a minimum, but you might be able to do it with the equivalent of hamster wheels for oxen.
Since the wagon is large enough to hold a village, it would probably be a pre-industrial variant of the Jawa sandcrawler from star wars. It moves slowly, due to power constraints, but it's a whole city up there.
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I'm toying with the idea for a world where instead of minting coins out of valuable metals all countries us mana, the 'fuel' of magic, as a currency itself. Since mana always has value, in it's ability to be used to cast valuable spells, and is highly portable and exchangeable it turns out to be a more convenient means of exchanging wealth.
In this world a person can be charged with mana and walk around with their money reserve basically within their body. If they want to buy an item with 100 units of mana they can touch someone (or something?) to transfer mana until they have transferred 100 units worth.
While people usually prefer to carry their personal mana reserve internally a human can only hold a certain quantity of mana, say the rough equivalent to a few hundred US dollars worth of wealth, before it becomes uncomfortable. For carrying larger quantities of mana an individual can store the excess mana in an item designed to hold a certain charge of mana; I haven't yet committed to what type of item's can store mana or how they are made. This also means it's possible to have organizations with large mana reserves locked in a vault or otherwise better secured then trusting one person to carry around all the companies mana personally.
There are a number of questions I have about how such a mana economy would work, including questions of inflation, what should happen to mana when a person who has some dies, how volatile a market it may be to tie currency to the need to cast spells etc. I will ask about those issues in later questions.
For now I want to focus on a more straightforward one, how does one define a 'unit' of mana such that transfers of mana can be standardized. Ie how do I know that the person who bought a 100 mana item from me has transferred exactly 100 units of mana to me, and not 99 or 101 without either side bickering over how much mana they feel was transferred?
I'd prefer a standardization method that is quick enough to make transfers of mana easy and quick when transferring personal mana, ie even if I'm transferring hundreds of units of mana at a time I shouldn't have to painstakingly count every unit. This method should be consistent enough that I'm unlikely to get into an argument about how large a unit of mana is even if I travel to a different country with different rules and economic practices. Similarly I shouldn't have to worry about the possibility that a crooked peddler has rigged a mana counting tool to under count how many units I just payed him.
How can I structure how magic and mana works to ensure that mana will prove more convenient then coins as a basic unit of currency?
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**Coins.**
Or more specifically we use small mana-storing crystals. Which we call coins.
If you put some mana in a crystal and give it to me, I can store or draw mana from it. I can guess how much mana is in there by how much effort it takes to drain it. Similar to weighing a handful of coins in your hand. The problem here is different people might have different guesses. So this is an unreliable way to make transactions.
Fortunately it is much more objective to tell whether a crystal is full or not. Since then the crystal simply won't accept more mana. Likewise there is no argument whether a crystal is empty or not.
Instead of coins you carry a wallet full of different denominations of crystals. These are centrally manufactured. If the denominations are 1,2,4,8, . . . units you only need one of each. When you make a transaction you take the required coins from your pocket, charge them fully with mana, and hand them over. The shopkeeper checks if the coins are full by trying to store extra mana. Then they drain the coins and hand them back. Simple
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Unless you’re going to give people a built-in mana meter, like the life clocks in *In Time*, you’ll need an external device for exact transfers.
One idea is to have mana storage containers, cheaply purchased empty and which light up or something when fully charged. Merchants will have a few of each size, so if you need to pay 7 mana for something, you just fill a 5 mana container and a 2 mana container, and then the merchant drains the containers into himself to accept the payment.
The general idea of containers also covers needing to store or transport larger amounts than can be comfortably held within the body. These containers may be more complicated to show how much they contain and to hold it for long periods without leaking (or exploding).
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Life (mana) is magic. And all living things possess Life in some measure.
Among the people are those with a talent for Life : they can transfer it into others with a touch. Catalysts, as these practitioners are called, are usually trained by the Church, and understand the "feel" of the typical units of measure trading Life. Catalysts are usually present to conduct trades. Accumulated wealth is kept on account with the Church, who also serves as the bank.
Other Living people can utilize their own Life to perform tasks according to their strengths. Exhausted people recover their Life over time, and no one can be stronger in Life than their fully-rested strength, unless a Catalyst is transferring additional Life to him or her.
From Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman's "Darksword" series (if I'm remembering correctly).
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**Standardise everything**
Find a way to standardise any mana used. Example, the amount of mana to create 1 lumen. This amount is then also transformed to several others for reference, like how much you can push with that amount or heat something with that amount. You can have several incremental standardised points so it'll be easier to calculate and give larger and smaller sums to each other.
After standardising you need to be able to measure the amount transferred. It's a bit like electricity, so you can measure a tiny amount that is relative to the larger whole. This way you can waste an insignificant amount to measure the transferred mana.
You'll get containers with mana that can transfer any flexible amount. Possibly the containers can have ports to transfer fixed amounts, or be more flexible with computers assisting in the transfer for exact amounts.
Finally you can make it easy by digitalising a lot. Just like in our world, you'll not carry all your money cash or all your mana. You've got it digitalised and can access it on demand at mana ATM's. It is otherwise a burden to use many mana wallets.
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Mana could be utilized similar to the idea of a energy economy. Some scientists talk about the idea of having an economy based around [hydrogen](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031991931465X) or [bio-diesel](https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=cTHMAAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT8&dq=energy%20economy&ots=Tv7NrCTXLD&sig=5SiexS6wJM-hVybh7zfuorQ3ATY) as a central energy-dense resource of trade. Maybe in your world, you could have a similar kind of economy. First, you need to have mana be a limited energy that people can generate, but there is always a limited amount in the known universe. Then, have it so mana can be used for magic, but can also be used by anyone as a source of energy for cooking, heating, and other utilities. Then, have mana be stored in powerful people and/or [fuel cells](http://www.biblio.com/books/436308472.html) that allow the magic to be held on to and used later. There would have to be an exchange rate based around mana based around either the 'weight' if mana contained in a fuel cell has a weight (hydrogen, for example, can cost [between 12.85 US Dollars & 16 Dollars per kilogram (kg)](https://cafcp.org/content/cost-refill) or the energy output of mana per a certain amount of volume (i.e. a cubic centimetre of mana might be worth this world's equivalent of 3 pennies). Now, mana could be the main currency, but paper currency and coin might be able to exist - however, it would exist more like an I.O.U. for mana and have little value in of itself ([similar to specie system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin) the United States once had where banknotes could be traded for gold and silver pieces). Similar to oil and hydrogen, the market would be based on supply and demand. If mana was hard to get and a lot of people needed to power their homes/ cast spells, the price would go up and those who could generate plenty of mana would be wealthy & seen as more valuable. If less people needed to cast spells and there is a surplus of mana, the worth of it would go down ([like how oilprices recently went down 73% since there is reduced demand because of the current pandemic. Thus, many places have more oil than they know what to do with.](https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oil-and-gas/saudi-aramco-profits-slump-73-on-low-oil-price/77454100) Similarly, if a situation leads to less people wanting to cast spells or people generating more mana that want society needs, the price will drop with it.)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jpwxd.png)
While there could be counterfeit counters for mana, you could have mana be detectable when it reacts to certain chemicals in a container and allow for there to be a simple test to detect if a container has real mana in it or not (ie. There is [a simple test you can do with a container and a heat source to see if a gas contains pure/large amount of hydrogen](https://melscience.com/US-en/articles/how-can-we-detect-hydrogen/)).
[Answer]
**Mana has weight. Not a lot, but enough to be detectable.**
Then, you weigh things on a scale, just like people did in the real world.
Your merchant takes a block of iron and puts it on a scale. It weights 100 grams. The buyer touches the block and pours magic into it. Now it weighs 110 grams. Success! The buyer has transferred 10 grams of mana to the seller.
Maybe 10 grams is a lot of mana, maybe it's very little. You can decide, based on whether you want to explore the other implications of mana having weight or not. This could even be the reason for why bodies can only store so much mana, if you need an explanation for that, too -- at some point, you're just 100 kg overweight and can't get around easily. There are a lot of interesting side-effects to this decision, if you decide to go this direction: like physical training being more effective if you're holding more mana while you train; like a hard limit to the amount of "cash" an individual can haul around even with a wheelbarrow; like the ability to sink objects in water that would otherwise float; like the decision to transfer mana in lighter but more easily destroyed wooden coins or the decision to use sturdy but much heavier iron ones (if the storage limitation is depends on volume as well as weight).
[Answer]
The first thing I think of is the concept of mana being stored inside items called 'cores'. A core stores a certain amount of mana and when you touch it, you transfer some of your own mana into it. You could imagine that each core is like a little wallet with a small amount of mana inside. When you touch the core, you're transferring some of your own mana into it so that the next time you touch it, it'll transfer some more.
You might also consider having a system where you can exchange cores for other things, like spell components. The idea here is that if you don't have any mana left after casting a spell, you can use the mana to power up another spell.
So, with this in mind, you have a few options. You could have the transfer of mana be measured by weight, where each core is a specific weight. You could have it measured by volume, where each core has a specific volume. You could have it measured by time, where each core has a specific time duration in which it can be charged. You could have it measured by distance, where each core has a specific distance in which it can be charged. You could also have a combination of these, where each core has a certain weight, volume, time duration and distance.
Given that you have access to all of these tools for measuring the capacity of a core, which do you think would be most appropriate? Which would be easiest to implement given your current understanding of magic?
The second thing I think of is the concept of 'fueling'. You have a small source of flint, steel and tinder. Using these you can create a small spark that is more than enough to set a piece of paper alight. The paper is dry and there's plenty more paper to feed the fire.
This can be compared to the act of 'casting a spell'. To cast a spell you need to draw on your internal reserve of mental and emotional energy. You need to concentrate, focus your thoughts and feelings on the matter at hand. This process tires you mentally and emotionally. Just like any physical activity tires you physically.
This internal reserve can be refilled in a number of ways:
You can rest and sleep. During sleep your body recovers from physical exertion during the day and your mind and spirit recovers from mental and emotional exertion during the day. Just like eating food helps your body recover from physical exertion during the day, but not nearly as effective.
You can consume food or drink. This is the most common way for people to recover from mental or emotional exertion during the day. The effect is much like sleep, but not as strong.
You can take a 'drug'. This is an artificial means to recover from mental or emotional exertion. It's much more effective than food or drink, but it's not as strong as sleep.
You can perform a minor magical ritual. This is an artificial means to recover from mental or emotional exertion. It's much more effective than drugs, but not as strong as sleep.
You can take comfort in religion. This is an artificial means to recover from mental or emotional exertion. It's much more effective than drugs, but not as strong as sleep.
So, with this in mind, you have a few options. You could have the spellcasting be measured by time, where each unit of time equates to a certain level of fatigue. So, a minute of spellcasting could tire you as much as an hour of walking would. You could have it be measured by energy, where each point of energy is a certain level of fatigue. So, 10 units could be the equivalent of being physically tired. You could have it be measured by volume, where each word you say when casting a spell represents a certain level of fatigue. So, saying 'fireball' could be the equivalent of saying 'hello'. Or you could have a combination of these, where each word is a certain amount of energy. But the amount of energy is also affected by the volume.
The third thing I think of is the concept of 'wizard's fatigue'. Just like a sportsman can become physically tired from too much exertion, a wizard can become mentally and emotionally tired from too much exertion. If this state of fatigue is ignored, then the wizard could become susceptible to outside influences. This could be anything from the mind controlling powers of another wizard to the weak will of a commoner.
So, this is something you want to take into consideration when designing your spell system.
*Oh and by the way, all of the above was written by GPT-3 (AI). I didn't write a single character.*
[Answer]
Using mana as a currency would have many parallels to the physical currencies that we already have. Some things will be different as in this case casting spells would be the equivalent of lighting a pile of money on fire.
### The Manabit -- Mana's Coin
A unit of mana is an arbitrary definition, or definied in the context of other things. It will also be a centralized definition -- one that was set by the ruling party when the system was first developed.
The main thing about the manacoin unit that needs to be known is how many does the average person have and how fast does their internal storage refill. This is the basis that will guide you on the very basics of the mana economy, or manaconomy as I want to call it.
Side Effect: Spells have a direct cost, not just in time but in manabits as well. This could translate into a spell cast for others netting more mana to the caster as they are paid not just for the mana of the spell, but for their time as well.
### The Mana Vault
The next critical thing that will be needed for this manaconomy is a means to partition out discrete levels of manabits as well as a way to store them. Ideally, the manabits can be released, moved, and otherwise handles like we handle money now.
The key thing that will be needed is a way to reliably make mana storage devices that hold specific amounts of mana and do it repeatedly. This is comparable to minting coins, but could be made of things other than metals (noble or otherwise). Probably some manner of crystal to keep a theme going and to differentiate it from coinage.
These storage devices have to be made to hold the a fixed amount of mana within them, either through ritual or through a relationship between mass and power storable. This process needs to be repeatable -- as in one can keep makinmg these storage devices for a reasonable fare.
It would be prefered that they are as close to identical as possible, so that it is easy to recognize not only what they are but their capacity. Labelling, appearance, shape are all options here. If everyone generates mana, it might be that the storages devices are regulated by the rulers to keep things honest.
The more math nerd of me would note that binary would be the most efficient system for having storage devices to hold value for the purposes of commerce. There should also be some large capacity ones for the purpose of being a vault of mana.
### The Nature of Magic and the Manaconomy
In our world, the noble metal gold tends to be used as a standard for money. You can't really make it effectively, you can only mine what's present. Plus, there is only so much of it to go around.
Back to the manaconomy ... how it will continue will depend on how magic and mana interact with your world. To be useful as an ongoing economic resource, a person's natural mana will have to rechage over time. Basically your paycheck -- a basic income if you will. But what of the world's magic supply?
This leads to savings. We know that some manner of device will be needed to store mana -- if not as a centralized invention, then as personal ones. Are these devices available enough to people so that they can spend time effectively saving mana for a big purchase? This will have influence on larger purchases -- can people reliably save or will this become a society that pays off things by the time period?
### But Why Manabit?
There are three main reasons why I can think of readily to use mana as the currency of choice as opposed to something physical.
The first is that material transmutation and/or conjuration is a common thing. The potential ability to just summon the money you want to buy things will rapidly devalue the value of it unless the ratio of mana to money is a well-known thing. Mana cannot be conjured up from nothing, but possibly drawn from the planet and from yourself. Thus it is a good standard to base it off of because there is only so much of it. By using mana as a currency, one skips that intermediate step of conjuring cash and repeatedly throwing a physical-based economy in flux.
The second premise is that the entire society is innately magical the same way ours is innately technological. Mana is the lifeblood of the world and needing man to power just about everything means that there is always a market for it. It might have started with magic slaves to power things for others, but time has allowed the residents to use magic in the same way we use electricity -- namely batteries in this case. Yes, a person can live simply and charge their own devices themselves, but there are people that want more.
The third reason is that good coin metal is scarse and (better) used for other things. Gold is better used to line cauldrons for certain magics while silver might be best to inlay weapons with to fight monsters. Other precious metals have their uses in other things that keep the world running and are needed there so just having a large stockpile of it for backing currency is less practical. We could use gems, but they are useful as reagents in magic and are often consumed by higher rituals.
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[Question]
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For a story I'm writing, I'm looking for an undetectable plant based poison that if ingested in a miniscule amount, would make a ten year old boy sick: intrinsic muscle weakness, stunted growth, and loss of speech, slowly progressing over four years, but not kill him. Help.
[Answer]
**Invent it.**
By inventing it you can make it perfect for the story. Presumably this is not a story for biochemists or forensic pathologists, but of interest because of the doings surrounding this boy's slow demise. Benefits of invention:
1: You can make it do what you want it to do.
2: You can give the poisoner a backstory to explain how he/she came by knowledge of this exotic plant or mushroom, a species unknown to science. Perhaps she is a washed-up postdoctoral fellow who found the plant in the jungles of Albania. Or a devotee of occult lore who found the directions in medieval Tasmanian alchemical manuals. Good stuff like that is the Tabasco sauce of a story!
3: You do not need to worry that some malevolent soul will read your book and decide to follow your recipe for poisoning some unfortunate boy.
4: Worldbuilders do not need to worry that you are that malevolent soul who is looking for a recipe for poisoning some unfortunate boy.
If someone exclaims "There is no such plant as *Venenum herba*!" you can nod and stroke your chin knowingly.
[Answer]
You're basically looking for a derivative of a *strychnos*-type plant poison. The *Strychnos* genus of trees and woody vines contains some 100 distinct species, the most well-known of which are *strychnos nux-vomica* and *strychnos toxifera*. These two species produce the poisons strychnine and curare, respectively. Numerous other species produce related alkaloids, many of which are also extremely potent neurotoxins, like the less well-known but even more potent toxiferin.
These poisons are fatal in concentrations as low as 0.5 mg/kg, so a microdose of the poison would border on undetectable in modern tox screens unless you were specifically looking for it. So, you have plant-based, undetectable, and effective in small doses; we're off to a good start.
Of the two, curare has a specific mechanism of action closer to your needs. The poison blocks nicotinic acetylcholine receptors between motor neurons and muscles, which prevents the neurons being able to trigger the muscle to contract. This causes muscle weakness up to and including paralysis, and in the extreme the diaphragm is paralyzed leading to asphyxiation. This happens at an LD50 of about 750 mcg/kg (.75mg/kg), meaning that just 25mg of the poison would be lethal to a 30kg 10-year-old. A much smaller dose, say 2-5mg, would likely induce significant muscle weakness without full paralysis and asphyxiation.
Chronic toxic effects of curare and related compounds have not, to my knowledge, been extensively studied; the toxin is short-acting and metabolizes completely from the system in some hours, assuming the victim survives the ordeal. You can probably hand-wave the chronic effects of stunted growth and loss of speech as side-effects of sustained microdosing, based either on the chemical's actual effects or as a simple result of being bedridden with the muscle relaxer making any movement including of the jaw and tongue difficult.
Strychnine has an opposing effect, binding to glycine receptors in the motor neurons, which increases the neurons' sensitivity to triggering from other neurochemicals. The mechanism of death is again asphyxiation, but this time it's due to uncontrollable contraction of the diaphragm preventing the victim being able to breathe. In fact, curare was used medicinally as an emergency antidote to strychnine poisoning as it allows the locked-up diaphragm to relax (mechanical ventilation can then keep blood oxygenation at healthy levels while both drugs are metabolized out of the patient's system).
We now have better options for pharmaceutical muscle relaxers, many of them derivatives of curare's chemical mechanism, so curare (specifically its isolated principal toxin, d-tubocurarin) is not used medicinally anymore and it's highly unlikely to show in a routine tox panel.
Only one last problem for your desired route of administration; ingesting curare produces no ill effect. The toxin does not easily penetrate mucous membranes such as the intestinal wall (making it a perfect "arrow poison" for use in hunting, which was its original use). This typically requires administering curaroids intravenously or intramuscularly, requiring the poisoner to have some excuse to perform injections. A medical care provider, a so-called "angel of death" with Munchausen-by-proxy, would be an ideal candidate; failing that, tampering with the insulin supplies of a diabetic would be another viable route for pretty much any family member of the diabetic.
[Answer]
**Regular small amounts of Tetrodotoxin. Maybe.**
Tetrodotoxin is a nasty poison which evolved in poisonous sea life. This is how you know it's bad, because as a rule of thumb, aquatic poisons are always worse than land poison. The LD50 for this stuff isn't known for humans, but the estimate is around 1-2 mg.
Upon consuming it, tetrodotoxin will slowly spread throughout your body and shut down your nervous systems by blocking the voltage gate channels in your nerve cells. Now, the fun thing about this is that it can't pass the brain blood barrier, so it doesn't affect the brain, but affects the communication to muscles, and thus the subject will eventually die as their lungs shut down over the course of a few hours. Why being fully conscious the entire time, but unable to do anything. I believe the preferred treatment is by placing the subject on artificial life support until the poison wears off.
Now, if you poisoned someone will below lethal levels of TTX, and I mean in doses measured in micrograms, it won't kill them, but it'll stop some of the nerves firing to some of the muscles. Regular poisoning of such would effectively mean that a decent percentage of their muscles simply aren't getting used at any given time, which will lead to muscle weakness and muscle atrophy, as well as explain the other symptoms you're looking for. I'm not positive this will happen, as it's never been tested like that (for very obvious reasons), but it's a reasonable explanation in a fictional story.
[Answer]
Some kind of organomercury compound would work; Dimethylmercury is particularly nasty. I'm not sure anything is undetectable over that period of time.
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[
This is something that was just offhandedly mentioned in a Sci-Fi book I read once and as I am now writing one myself I thought I might use it.
The scenario is that I have a ship approaching a warp gate and am describing the appearance and mechanics of the gate. The idea is that warp drive research on Earth ended in a dead end because we were never able to effectively produce enough energy to power a warp field larger than the ship and generator itself.
Jump to 400 hundred years in the future and humanity has colonized a few other star systems by means of sub-light, generation ships. They then develop a functioning warp bridge, rather than a ship drive, by building massive warp field generators on each end.
The generator stations, basically *warp gates* for simplicity, generate the necessary energy over several days, and then expend it all in a single day or a few hours (undecided) to power the warp field.
**Would massive flywheels be a valid form of energy storage? If not, what other ideas of energy storage might be more reasonable?**
I would like to clarify that this is the heaviest handwavium in my entire story. Besides the completion of warp theory, functioning cryogenics, fusion drive technology, and some advances in material science, the story is supposed to be as reasonably realistic as I can get. Real physics. No artificial gravity. Space travel takes days and weeks between planets in-system. The warp gates are posted at the far edge of a solar system, allowing instantaneous travel between systems, but once exiting the gate traveling in-system is much slower again.
Addendum: I should have included that I am imagining two flywheels in a pair on opposite sides of the station to counteract one another, as many of you have mentioned that would be necessary.
[Answer]
The answer is almost certainly no, but here's your [state of the art](https://www.furukawa.co.jp/en/release/2015/kenkai_150415.html):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4fGFB.jpg)
This flywheel built around superconducting magnetic bearings is about 2m wide and 4 tons. It holds 100kW-h and can output it at 300kW, which means it can dump all of its energy in somewhere around 20-30 minutes.
You mentioned that warp drive tech failed to be developed on Earth because they couldn't get the power. Well that means we can draw meaningful comparisons to Earth power plants, like [Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station](https://www.power-technology.com/features/feature-largest-nuclear-power-plants-world/) in Japan. That mighty force can generate 8,212,000kW of power. This means you need 27,000 of those superconducting flywheels to match her output.
One of the major limits to effectiveness of modern flywheels is tensile strength. As you store more power, you put more stress on the material. At some point, the flywheel tears itself apart. (By the way, you want to make sure these flywheels are well insulated from one another... a chain reaction of exploding flywheels is a horrible sight to see. Here's [what a small one can do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7gKbk0jyyM)).
Also consider that we can generate higher power discharges. Power plants are designed for generating continous power. If you just need a discrete shock, you may want to look at the Z-pinch machines like the [Z-Machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_Pulsed_Power_Facility) at Sandia labs
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xfxfw.jpg)
Besides looking *freaking awesome* in pictures, the Z-machine is capable of generating pulses as strong as 350 TW (That's 350,000,000,000 kW, if we keep the kW units we used for flywheels), and there are plans on the drawing board for a new device that can hit 1PW (1,000,000,000,000 kW).
[Answer]
# Yes, but...
[Flywheels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel) **are** being used to store energy today, only not in any great amounts, and not as means of transporting energy from one place to another.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/k36nU.jpg)
*That big circle is a flywheel, acting as a sort of energy buffer between the strokes of the single cylinder of the locomotive.*
In general, storing energy as momentum is a bad idea. You cannot store a lot of it before the flywheel is spinning so fast it tears itself apart, and unless you solve friction issues, you will quickly lose it as heat.
Also you get another problem: **gyroscopic forces**. [Conservation of moment of inertia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia) means that means you must mount these flywheels on some kind of [gimbal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal), or you will never be able to turn your ship.
Finally, I must point out the inherent **danger** of having a huge rotating object inside your ship. Unlike chemical or nuclear fuel, you cannot just dump the energy and be rid of it. Also it means that your transport medium is extremely volatile. One thing that goes wrong with this... and you are in for [a very bad time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232).
[Answer]
It is possible, but maybe not the best idea
Modern flywheels can accumulate a good amount of energy [Energy densities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_of_common_energy_storage_materials), and they are relatively safe (meaning, they won't explosively disintegrate like solid flywheels can do), but they trail other means of energy storage in terms of energy density. Flywheel's specific energy, in MJ/kg, goes to 0.5, which is on par with regular Li-ion batteries, worse than Lithium metal batteries (1.8), and way, way worse than Hydrogen fuel cells (142). Actually, Wiki's figure for hydrogen assumes Earth conditions, where oxygen is plentiful. In spaceships, oxygen storage is also required. This would make the whole system several times less efficient per unit of mass, but still much better than a flywheel.
Flywheels are good when energy comes and goes in mechanical form. If you need the energy in a different form (to power the warp field) there will be extra overhead that would further negate their advantages.
But for creating a "streampunk universe", why not, go with flywheels!
[Answer]
**Flywheels are not ideal for your application in the 25th century.**
Due to materials advances, flywheels would have a larger capacity than today, but there are 2 reasonable tech advances that would likely be much nicer.
**Super-capacitors** have already been proposed that have energy densities equal to fuel cells. They also have power densities that are orders of magnitudes better. It is hard to predict just how powerful these could become with an additional 400 years of advances.
Room temperature **superconductors** may lead to high capacity storage as well.
Both of these technologies are inherently electrical instead of mechanical, and potentially more usable for directly powering a warp field.
You specify powering a warp gate for hours or more, these technologies would be suitable for this, or for powering warp gates for minutes or even seconds.
Flywheels are rarely used as a power source for hours, they are more commonly used as a power source for minutes or seconds until a secondary power source can respond (such as a diesel generator). This is because the storage densities of flywheels is relatively low.
But spinning metal is very good at averaging power fluctuations. In fact, spinning metal in the generators themselves is a large component in power averaging the current electric grid.
If you want another solution, consider the possibility of using hafnium, specifically [178m2Hf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy). You need technical advances to figure out how to release the stored energy when desired, but the storage potential is huge. This adds complication in radio-activity and how to convert the gamma energy-release into something for powering your warp-generators, but this could be woven into an interesting plot-line.
[Answer]
**Your very awesome flywheel is made of neutronium.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HSnHU.jpg)
<https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2017/10/16/scientists-decode-signature-neutron-star-merger/>
A flywheel will tear itself apart if it rotates too fast. Unless the forces holding the flywheel together are super strong - as is the case for [neutron stars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star). Neutron stars will teach you about fast spinning.
>
> As the star's core collapses, its rotation rate increases as a result
> of conservation of angular momentum, hence newly formed neutron stars
> rotate at up to several hundred times per second.
>
>
>
The neutronium comprising neutron stars is so dense that it will stay together even at relativistic rotation speeds. A 10 km neutron star with the mass of the Sun might be a little unwieldy for your application. I wondered if a smaller chunk of neutronium could still hold together. According to the physics stack, maybe.
<https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/143166/what-is-the-theoretical-lower-mass-limit-for-a-gravitationally-stable-neutron-st>
>
> Theoretically a stable neutron star could exist with a much lower
> mass, if one could work out a way of forming it (perhaps in a close
> binary neutron star where one component loses mass to the other prior
> to a merger?).
>
>
>
It goes on with some hard core physics, including why a smaller amount of neutronium might make a larger object that degenerates into more commonplace matter.
Or maybe you would site your stargates at naturally occurring binary neutron stars, as depicted above. In any case - your flywheel is a spinning chunk of neutronium. Or two spinning chunks, to form the halves of your gate as noted in the OP. Given their mass they will be orbiting around each other. Given their proximity they will be moving very, very fast and they will look very very cool. You can approach perpendicular to their plane of motion and pass between them. You had better stay in the *exact* center. Stars get grabby.
How does one get energy from a fast rotating neutron star? Maybe induce it to shoot out a jet of energy that you harness for your purposes.
<https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180926140829.htm>
>
> Another idea, they said, is that the jets may be powered by the
> neutron star's rotation, instead of being launched by magnetic field
> lines in the inner accretion disk.
>
>
> "Interestingly, the rotation-powered idea predicts that the jet will
> be significantly weaker from more slowly rotating neutron stars, which
> is exactly what we see in Sw J0243," Nathalie Degenaar, also of the
> University of Amsterdam, said.
>
>
>
[Answer]
If you need all your energy to be released in one go (is in the case of generator stations) you have significantly fewer options than normal. Any thermal method of energy generation will likely be too hot for most materials and batteries are simply too slow to release your energy. This leaves you with just capacitors, flywheels and maybe handwavium if you've got it. Though in all honesty this explanation requires the bulk your energy to be released very quickly for batteries to be non-competitive.
(in space) Flywheels are very very cheap. This is because they are incredibly simple. if you find a significantly massive asteroid (of which there will probably be millions in any given solar system) you can simply smelt it into steel (quite cheap given the awsome source of energy that is fusion) and then BAMN flywheel, much more processing would be required for a given energy of capacitor bank.) The flywheel in question would be massive though.
With good barings your flywheel will basically lose no energy to the outside would
Lets say you have a 100 MW reactor given a energy density of 32 Watt-hours per kilogram storing energy over a week then that's going to be 500000 tons of steel. That's about 70 effiel towers. This is definitely doable just make sure to have your flywheels by BIG.
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[Question]
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I'm currently investigating a post-apocalyptic novel and wished to know if Horses could be used to pull a modern Caravan and if so how many. Furthermore what would the potential daily range of such a setup be?
At present I'm basing my assumption of a horse equivalent to Shire Horses (with a few additions that wouldn't affect strength but would ensure Riders couldn't overburden them.
Edit
By and large my issues stem from a lack of understanding regarding horse stamina and endurance - something I'm attempting to correct. I had been hoping to find individuals with additional information to cement my figures and estimates.
The roads in question would either be decayed tarmac roads or dirt roads depending on the location.
[Answer]
* A [Conestoga wagon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conestoga_wagon) could be in the 6-ton range. It might be towed by six draft horses. I guesstimate that a [Shire Horse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shire_horse) is at least as good.
* A modern caravan has a lower weight and better tires and suspension.
* A Conestoga could do [20 miles in 10 hours travel](https://www.oregontrailcenter.org/HistoricalTrails/ADayOnTheTrail.htm).
This would indicate that a couple of Shire Horses could tow the caravan **at least** as fast as a Conestoga.
On the other hand, I'd guess that faster horses could tow it at least as fast as a stagecoach, [8 mph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecoach).
[Answer]
You haven't said how big the modern caravans are. Traditionally horses were used to draw gypsy caravans over long distances and over rough roads. I can't see any problem with a suitably adapted modern small caravan. See picture
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NMEaj.png)
**EDIT**
Some have commented that small pneumatic wheels wouldn't work on non-tarmac surfaces. I refer them to this video. <https://youtu.be/I9BwEO3_uIQ?t=7>
This cart would go where most motorised vehicles would get stuck.
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It depends how far past the apocalypse are you?
Tyres have a finite life. On rough or even slightly rough terrain larger wheels are better than small ones by a huge margin. Caravans are really only suitable on roads. Also you get caravans with 2 wheels and others with four. Most I have seen have just 2. The difference between your horses carrying some of the caravans weight as compared to it bearing it's own weight would be huge even on modest inclines.
All in all a caravan is suboptimal compared to a cart specifically made for it. Modified by extending the axles to allow for large wheels is your best option in which case there would be no difference in horsepower needed than a cart.
A carriage would be superior in all other ways. A caravans suspension, weight distribution and everything else are designed for good roads. If you've ever hit an unexpected bump or pothole with a caravan even at low speed you'll understand. Bottoming out with your unmodified low caravan would be a constant hazard.
It's a good idea though if you modify the caravan to suit. My suggestion would be to remove all the suspension and running gear and replace it with that from the back of a light truck with high clearance. The suspension then would be much more suitable since it's designed for a higher weight and the high clearance and bigger tyres would make even more difference. Not as good as a carriage suspension wise, but a solid practical solution. No specialised engineering needed for the modification. The hardest bit would be designing and fabricating the harnesses, which you have to do anyway.
Assuming your engineer has a bit of imagination you can run a generator off the differential or a wheel trickle feeding a battery bank and have all the comforts of home and lighting for night travel, spotlights for hunting or defence purposes etc. Link a trailer to the back of the caravan and you take the weight off the horses (the trailer will pull the back of the caravan down like a counterbalance), have storage room for a battery bank and other things and would probably just need an extra horse if you load it heavily. It would be much more stable like that, essentially you'd have 4 wheels with a pivot point in the middle. Your engineer would tweak all these things to work best for your situation.
I would think you could get [3 mph](http://www.speedofanimals.com/animals/horse) out of two horses on level good terrain with ease with the setup I described. Which is pretty much perfect since it's around the same for a [human](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking). Have another couple of horses for gradients and things or replacements and you should be good to go travelling. Steep gradients and rough terrain could be passed by separating the caravan and trailer and moving them separately and adding your riding horses.
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Image result for weight of a Conestoga wagon
A typical prairie schooner weighed about 1,300 pounds (590 kg) when empty, and the general goal was to keep the weight of the added cargo to no more than 2,000 pounds (900 kg). Teams of 10 to 12 horses or mules or six yoked oxen typically were used to pull one of these wagons, with mules and oxen generally preferred.
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1 find a car and trailer pair that suits your purpose, ie large SUV and trailer of weight that you can look up on the web.
2 Translate the KW rating of the towing vehicles engine into horse power.
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**Note: this question is not a duplicate. The accepted answer to the question "Anatomically correct Medusa" explains the petrifying vision via calcifying toxins spat from the snake hair. This a) wouldn't work with a cockatrice, and b) spitting venom does not achieve the desired effect of petrifying vision in my opinion. The external anatomy made up a big part of that question, so the petrifying part wasn't needed to be really believable.**
Many of you will know about tales of of the basilisk, gorgon and cockatrice, who can turn attackers to stone merely by looking at them.
It seems absurd, and probably is, but is there any conceivable way that an animal could transform other animals to a stiff, rigid state without any visible physical connection?
One of the obvious implications of this is: How does it not petrify everything it sees? Well, I came up with two theories for this,
1. They have retractable membranes over their eyes which shield the world from petrifying until the animal desires otherwise,
2. The petrifying organs are not actually the eyes, but are located somewhere on the front of the head. This would convince people that it petrified things by looking at them, without the consequences of such an arrangement.
But the most absurd and puzzling thing about this topic is "How does it actually petrify?" I came up with a few ideas here too. The main one is that it sprays colourless gas which, upon reaching the target, dramatically lowers the body temperature and freezes the quarry.
Would that work? Or is there some other method that could **give the effect** that an animal could turn people "stiff" just by looking at them?
Note: And I mean physically, actually rigid/stiff, so please don't answer "They were rooted to the spot with fear."
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Yes! Albeit, probably not on our world.
Google [photopolymer](https://www.materialsampleshop.com/products/photopolymer). You've seen it in late night ads pretending to be superglue, but it's just a polymer that hardens quickly under UV light. The stuff that we use is manmade, but polymers are all over the place in nature, like silk, wool and cellulose.
I don't think anything like that has been found on Earth, but it isn't too hard to imagine another world where a staple food source (all sorts of leafy greens, for instance) contains some sort of polymer that hardens in the right type of light. Environmentally, there isn't enough of this light to cause a problem, but then there's a beast like the basilisk or the cockatrice running around.
They've got a muscle in the back of their eye that activates when they get stressed. It flips down a membrane that concentrates and reflects only UV light, and just enough to pass over that threshold. They don't walk around like this all the time, because they can't see when the membrane is down.
No one knows that this polymer is in their lettuce, it's just normal food. And nobody knows that UV light is the culprit because it's invisible. But when a startled cockatrice or a hungry basilisk stares at you, your body quickly goes rigid, and you soon die.
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This might seem like a cheat, but if the animal is capable of electric discharges at a distance, [such as a unicorn](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/109199/21222), and if their electric organs are close to their eyes... People will think that it's the stare that causes paralysis, until science explains it.
A shock might cause muscles to lock in place, at least for a few moments. People hit by tazers may fall to the ground as stiff as a mannequin, depending on the current.
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[Tonic immobility](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_immobility) is a thing in the animal kingdom. Different animals have different stimulli triggers for this. Crossing stares with a dangerous animal might be one. Notice that tonic immobility may be a reflex action - your body will go stiff independently from your central nervous system. You will be paralyzed milliseconds **before** you become afraid. In fact, this could pin down a sleepwalker in place, without the victim ever being frightened by, or even aware of the cockatrice.
All you need to have is your creatures evolve such a reflex in your fictional world. If the cockatrice will not cause (further) harm to immobile creatures, for example, such a reflex would be positively selected by nature. An animal that could easily kill a cockatrice might have this reflex as a vestige from an ancestors that would have been threatened by cockatrice-like creatures.
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You should narrow down what you want. The answer to "is there a way for a monster to turn any creature to stone/permanently petrified?" is probably "no" because the physics aren't very plausible, and if this creature is evolved, not magical, then other creatures will have evolved to counter any physics-based ability it has.
But if you narrow down what you want to happen in your story there are some options:
If you want there to be some kind of monster that is real, that inspired the legend of the basilisk, then you could go for temporary petrification. There could be a monster that kills things that don't hold still. Perhaps it doesn't want other animals on its territory, but doesn't recognize things as alive unless they move. The other animals that live near this monster have evolved to recognize it and feel an urgent visceral instinct to freeze perfectly still when the monster looks at them. So the petrification is actually an evolved behavior by the animals being petrified. They may stay holding still awhile after the monster looks away until they calm down and realize the threat has passed. A hunter who observes this interaction could re-tell the story without the benefit of evolutionary insight, and think the monster has the power to make things freeze. If he doesn't see the animal un-freeze (or takes the opportunity to kill it first) then he might think the freezing is permanent.
That could work as a 'real creature behind the legend' thing. If you want the power to work on humans, then perhaps humans have evolved the freezing instinct too?
If you don't want the freezing to be an evolved behavior, then another option is venom. Your monster could inject venom that causes all muscles to tense. This would cause something similar to the fencing response in its victims. If the effect lasted until rigor mortis set in, then the petrification would be permanent. How does the venom get injected by eye contact? I suggest that it doesn't. The creature injects the venom inconspicuously, like with tiny barbs that numb as they go in so you can't feel them. Why do people think the eye contact causes freezing? Because the monster stares into the victims eyes just as the poison is starting to work. To check the progress of the poison. Your eye muscles are the last to be affected by the venom. The monster looks into your eyes and waits until your eyes stop twitching and hold perfectly still. Then it knows you are totally immobilized and it is time to feed.
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It's a stretch, but it's not *totally* crazy to think that an animal could produce a light pattern of rapidly shifting colors that could trigger a very specific sort of seizure which presents as immobility. That could also be turned on and off at will, as the pattern of lights and colors would need to actually be happening to have any effect.
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You may be able to use a sort of [epoxy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoxy) spray. If the two part epoxy is contained within separate sacs within the cockatrice, it could be mixed within a third sac and sprayed onto a target. You may be able to keep it all in one sac if you can keep it from curing within the cockatrice. There are a few issues with this method. Epoxy can take quite a while to cure, depending on environmental conditions. Spraying in smaller drops may allow for curing faster, but then it is more subject to wind conditions. Additionally, you will need significant coverage to truly immobilize a creature. However, stiffening some limbs should be possible. If the target creature is a bird, a spray could greatly affect the usability of the feathered wings.
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**Fossils**
Fossils are petrified bones/tissues, sometimes even complete creatures. Your Gorgon shoots Tachions out of its eyes that concentrate the timespan of a few million years in an instant, causing the victim to be petrified on the spot (not sure where the mineral come from though)
**metastable ice**
I remember reading this in a sci-fi story. A metastable form of ice is found that solidifies at room temperature; it also has the ability to catalize its own formation from oher allotropes of ice or even water(much like a prion). So when the Gorgon sprays brine of this ice on the target, they quickly cristallize, frozen in place.
Bonus: The Gorgon shoots a mist with high concentration of THC on the target; "stoning" them right where they stand.
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How much caffeine could you fit into a roasted coffee bean (that will later be ground and steeped) while still having a strong coffee flavor?
I'm aiming for a super-caffeine boost -- something where you only need a thermos to last you a week, something that keeps you awake for three or four days if you take more than a couple cups per day.
It should be a dose high enough to be bad for your health if taken regularly, but not high enough that it does serious or permanent damage to your liver, brain, or heart. It should preferably work if steeped with water (cream nixes the effect).
It's from a magical plant, the magic part being that it:
* Stays in your brain, blocking tiredness for long periods of time,
* Is strengthened by sugar but deactivated by cream
* Holds its flavor/caffeine through roasting and grinding
I did some research -- the average coffee bush can produce $5\space to\space 7$ pounds of coffee per year. Assuming that this is coffee cherry, $20\%$ of that weight would become roasted beans. $20\%$ of an average of $6$ pounds is $\frac{20}{100}$ $(\frac{1} {5}) \times 6$. That gives $1\frac{1}{5} (1.2)$ pounds of finished roasted beans per bush.
Since a pound is a pound, that means $1.2$ pounds of ground coffee per bush. (Please excuse me, I'm doing some mental calculations here.) A $1.2$ pound bag of ground coffee yields a good number of cups of liquid, (mm. Some sources say up to $100$, though I'm skeptical.) which would mean that this bean could dominate the coffee market if it was targeted towards drinkers who mainly drink it for the energy boost.
I imagine it could be taken in little espresso-like shots, or perhaps watered down in regular mugs. But coffee's flavor is made up of many different profiles, and I want to keep the coffee flavor in addition to the massive caffeine boost.
**Are there any good solutions as to how all of this flavor and caffeine could be packed as densely as possible into a small number of beans? What structure would the plant and the beans/coffee cherry need to be? How would the plant produce that much caffeine?**
***The coffee should be strong enough that more than 1 and 1/2 cups of undiluted brew is lethal. In other words, this is not something you want to guzzle by the thermos.***
[Answer]
**Your concoction is Literal Madness in a bottle**
In Afghanistan I was routinely awake for days on end, a state achieved by drinking Monster, coffee, and red-bull like it was water. Its been years since I served and my circadian rhythm is *still* screwed up. Hell, a recent study by the military states that I and my brethren probably have permanent "circadian scarring" from such practices. On top of that, I was once awake for 4 days repelling a major attack from our area of operations. By the time day 3 had ended I and my comrades were actually attempting to open fire at hallucinated phantom enemies, some guys would suffer random outbursts of hysterical screaming. We spent 2 days after sleeping and waking up to eat and not much else, none of us were anywhere near being mentally mission capable for another 2 weeks after that. Caffeine just doesn't work like magic no-sleep juice. When you go more than a few days without sleep by using stimulants you begin causing severe (possibly even permanent) damage to your mind, organs, and nervous system.
In any case, you can buy 100% clinically pure powdered caffeine by the pound online that does not posses any appreciable flavor or scent what so ever. You can add as much as you like to whatever you want if you are looking to overdose and induce cardiac arrest and seizures. There is no plausible reason to synthesize a strain of toxic coffee bean to do so.
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As @kingledion said, you cannot simply megadose caffeine to achieve the effects you describe. From a realistic standpoint:
* there is no known drug that safely keeps you alert for three or four days,
* sleep is physically and mentally necessary: caffeine doesn't change that
* your body builds up a tolerance for caffeine even with normal caffeine addiction
I'm not sure how scientifically grounded you want your solution to be, but current scientific understanding is that sleep serves important functions. Given how vulnerable it makes you, it must have an evolutionary justification. Even jellyfish have a quiescent mode.
Having said that, if you're content with a certain amount of hand-waving, I I would suggest either an enzyme that prevented the caffeine from metabolizing (wouldn't actually work, though, as your body would just build up a tolerance) or a neurotransmitter inhibitor / enhancer that buffered the brain's sensitivity to caffeine or, y'know, 'super-caffeine' that just hand-waves away all the problems.
[Answer]
# Espresso already exists
A deadly dose of caffeine is about 10 grams. Every 100 grams of coffee has about 40 mg of caffeine. An 8 ounce cup of coffee will have about 100 mg of caffeine. A shot of espresso has about 200 mg of caffeine per 100 grams. Therefore, the deadly dose of espresso will be about a gallon; but that is the average *lethal* dose.
Medical advise varies from place to place on the internet, but my favorite source ([the Mayo clinic](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/caffeine/art-20045678)) suggests no more than 800 mg per day (four cups of coffee) for long term health. The espresso limit per day becomes 4 ounces.
Since a 32 ounce thermos is easy to find, it is relatively trivial with readily available coffee beans and readily available brewing methods to keep a week's supply of max caffeine in a thermos. I would say you can already accomplish the requirements of the question with equipment in your kitchen.
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(I don't know if this could work)
(Also, I know you want coffee but I have a different method that *could* work)
Essentially, this plant would release a fear-inducing chemical over a long period of time (in the same way carbohydrates release energy over a long period of time). This would work as people wouldn't be able to fall asleep due to the adrenaline and fear.
This chemical could be stand-alone (i.e no coffee at all), or be fused with the coffee (to amplify the effect).
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Alternative answer; Studies show that sleep is your bodies way of purging out toxins and recharging, though a lot of it is still unknown.
Instead of caffeine, what if the plant created an enzyme that has an effect similar to the self clean mode that the body uses; flush toxins, recharge energy, reboot the system.
Another possibility is that it could be a mind altering chemical that either causes the human brain to mimic a dolphin brain, where half of it shuts down at a time, or a giraffe brain, which only needs 30 total minutes of sleep a day, usually in 5 minute chunks.
If like a dolphin different parts of the human brain shut down at different concentrations of the chemical, it could be used to minimize the need for sleep.
If the sleep cycle could be accelerated then a human might be able to get by on micro naps instead of needing long solid chunks of sleep.
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**This question already has answers here**:
[How can a pirate board a spaceship without teleportation?](/questions/13554/how-can-a-pirate-board-a-spaceship-without-teleportation)
(23 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
So I have a bunch of space pirates who make a living out of stealing spaceships while they are in transit and repurposing then for their own use later. As such, they can’t destroy the ship because, well then the ship would be destroyed and thus unusable. These pirates also have lower tech than the other major players in the galaxy so they don’t have fancy “disable the vessel” energy blasts. So they’ve come up with a very effective strategy.
They come out of hyperspace near their victim and attack their engines with lots of small kinetic projectiles and lasers until the vessel is largely immobile. They then fire their harpoons, which are missiles with thermite warheads that burn though the outer layers of the hull. Several spikes extend from the body of the harpoon, anchoring it to the ship, and a cable extends from the harpoon to the firing ship. Usually multiple ships harpoon the victim and then tow it back to base.
I have a bit of a problem through. Metal cables don’t really seem like they would be strong enough to handle the stresses that would be involved in this situation, so I need a more believable way to anchor the victim to the pirate vessel. Is there some type of alloy or super material that could withstand the stress better, or is it better to just use more harpoons to minimize the stress on an individual? Bonus points for a better harpoon mechanism in general, as the best I could think of was burning into the hull.
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I think you've mixed your metaphors....
**Ships are not whales.** Harpoons did not drag a whale any significant distance, actually the opposite: a harpooned whale dragged a small boat with the harpoon men aboard (called a sleigh ride) until it gave up from exhaustion and floated on the surface, vulnerable. The whaling ship caught up with them and processed the dead or dying whale on the ship before dumping the carcass at sea. Harpoons aren't tow lines for large heavy objects. The problem isn't rope strength, the whale's flesh (and by metaphor your ship hull) would tear apart where the harpoon had penetrated long before the rope broke.
Piracy does not mean dragging a ship back to base, that only makes sense if the ship is salvage and has no power. Your pirates are sitting ducks while acting as a tow truck, not just from a space navy but from other pirates.
Piracy generally means one of two things: capturing a ship to steal it, or (more often) temporarily disabling a ship to board it for loot and taking any passengers who could be ransomed.
In reality, intercepting and boarding another ship would be impossible at interstellar speeds without catastrophic impact, so ignoring that small technical issue we still have two main strategies:
1. Capture the ship with a boarding party and re-route it under its own power (this almost never happened).
2. Compromise the ship's ability to reach its destination forcing the crew to surrender or lighten the load by dumping cargo.
The first strategy is likely to get many of both crews killed, and it's possible the prey's crew will destroy their ship if the battle is not going well and they assume they will be killed anyway. The pirates also need TWO complete crews – maybe not a big deal if their prey is a small yacht, but another large ship needs experienced crewmates. Back in the buccaneer days, common sailors were so badly treated that it wasn't difficult to get them to join the pirates when given the option to mutiny, in fact many pirates were former navy. Still, this is the least likely of the strategies to be successful, and certainly the most dangerous for the pirates.
The second strategy might be as simple as driving the ship off course, or forcing them to burn fuel to stay out of gun range until they no longer have enough fuel or forward momentum to get to their destination. Every course correction would be a drain, until it is easier to give the pirates what they want (money, cargo, wealthy passengers) to let them go free: the equivalent of cooperating with highway robbers.
You pirates aren't going to defeat anyone with damaged ships. They already have lower technology and resources. They might be better off stealing money and ransoming aristocrats to BUY a working used ship, than attempting to repair a ship they'd already almost destroyed.
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1. **Shanghai!**
/Usually multiple ships harpoon the victim and then tow it back to base./ You got there thru hyperspace. It is a long walk back. Do they bring the captured ship back thru hyperspace? I am sure they do not pull it along on a leash. Have your pirates show up around the ship and whisk it away in a hyperspace bubble without a shot fired. The prey ship comes out of hyperspace at the pirate lair and a robot arm severs the engine a split second later. Less damage to ship, you can sell the engine too, and you can ransom the crew. Everyone is happy!
2. **Cnidocytes.**
The hydra is an animal which captures prey with tentacles. Some are harpoonlike and sting. But other are long, wrapping around and entangling the prey.
<http://bodell.mtchs.org/OnlineBio/BIOCD/text/chapter23/concept23.3.html>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/m1WrL.jpg)
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> . Tubules of some cnidarian species have barbed ends, while tubules
> from other species are sticky and wrap around the prey.
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Your gooey "harpoons" could wrap around and entangle the ship. Resale price is higher without all those railgun holes in the hull. Also tenacious harpoon goo would be useful for pirate pranks.
**3. Screw you**
Your customers do not like the effect thermite has on the reflective finish of the high end ships you capture. The screw harpoons have sharp diamond tips, and the harpoons are spun up very fast before launch. On hitting the target their rotation screws them securely into the hull. The spin also gyroscopically stabilizes them in flight which is a nice byproduct.
**4. Tugbots.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q0M2O.jpg)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_kMhMHRAQE>
This is from The Expanse - hundreds of these little tugbots fly out, clamp on the ship and fire up. More precise than tying the ship to yours like some overgrown waterskiier. You could have tugbotpoons that approach more aggressively but do the same sort of thing.
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[Synthetic spider silk](http://www.kraiglabs.com/spider-silk/) might do the trick. Spider silk is one of the strongest materials we know about, with a tensile strength on par with Kevlar, but a much higher material toughness. Both of these exceed steel by a large margin. Woven into a rope, you would have a very strong, elastic material that is highly resistant to breaking.
In terms of an overall harpoon system, thermite can be tricky for a number of reasons, most of which involve contaminants in the mixture that can cause the reaction to spray molten metal everywhere. A thermite harpoon hitting the wrong spot might destroy your target (depending on how they're generating atmosphere inside the target).
In lieu of a harpoon, you might just use a big spider-silk net towed by multiple ships. That way you don't have to puncture the pressurized metal air canister that a spaceship functionally is (while introducing the heat from a thermite reaction to the suddenly-out-rushing air).
If you like the visual implications of a harpoon, you might not need the thermite at all. Use a railgun to accelerate your harpoon to very high speeds. If energy weapons/defenses are normal in your universe, ships may not be relying much on thick protective armor for protection. The kinetic energy of the harpoon, along with a sufficiently strong/hard material, may be enough to puncture the ship's hull. Include a spring-loaded mechanism that pushes the grappling fins into place when either the line begins to be retracted or the forward inertia of the harpoon drops.
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There are a bunch of synthetics that you could use. A popular one is Spectra
[https://www.amazon.com/Power-Spectra-Fiber-Braided-Fishing/dp/B003D915NQ?psc=1&SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-d-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B003D915NQ](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B003D915NQ)
You could also use carbon fiber.
The stresses might not be very high, though. if the ships are matching direction & velocity, the most stress you could put on the line would be the maximum thrust of both ships. Considering that space ships are probably built to be light, and if they accelerate too fast, they knock out their crews, it might not be as much as you think.
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Rather than having stronger cables, maybe the cables could just be power and data lines, with the head of the harpoon breaching the hull of the target ship, before interfacing with the internal network. Could be a race to take control of the ships propulsion systems and navigate the ship remotely, before the maximum length of the cable is reached and severed.
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> Usually multiple ships harpoon the victim and then tow it back to base
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Redundancy, perhaps the crew on the target ship would work to disconnect the harpoons, thus the pirates use multiple to increase their chances of success.
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Lets get some Maths done - how many cables do you need?
Unless your pirates have handwavium inertial dampeners, they will likely limit their engines (outside of combat or emergencies) such that acceleration is about 3 gees (i.e. 3\*9.8 meters per second per second)
30 m/s/s acceleration, towing an enemy ship of mass M kg. So the total force required is 30\*M (kg m/s/s).
This can be expressed as 30\*M [Newtons (N)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(unit))
A 36 mm thick normal steel cable has a maximum rated tensile strength of [1000 kN](https://www.ronstanrigging.com/arch_au/2_02_X_PI.asp). That's not to say it will definitely break at 1001, just that it definitely won't break at 1000.
So the number of cables we need (N) is N = 30\*M/1,000,000.
For the international space station, M = 420,000.
N = 12.6, but we should round UP in all cases, so 13.
Note this will require the pirates to be moving extremely slowly when the cables go taut, make sure all 13 cables are sharing the weight equally, and THEN accelerate.
This number could be reduced by having thicker cables. Each spaceship could use multiple harpoons, or you could have some material better than plain old steel.
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Having escaped Isengard and left Rivendell, we are off to destroy the Ring. Our first stop--Khazad-dum, known contemporarily as "Moria". Being a Dwarvish kingdom, the problems I see with Moria are identical to those with Erebor in *The Hobbit.* Hollowing out a small piece of a mountain to build a mine is no big deal, but the dwarves have hollowed out *the entire mountain* to build *a kingdom*. In real life, that would be turning Everest, the second-tallest mountain in the world (if only Mauna Kea weren't an iceberg), as hollow as a discarded snail shell.
In real life, such things would have the following problems:
1. Hollowing out the entire mountain would release a great deal of pressure, and if the landslides at Yosemite are any indication, that would be one-sidedly disastrous.
2. Caves are viable habitats, more viable than lots of people would imagine, but they're still not verdant enough for the use of agriculture. One cave in Texas, for example, has a population of only 100 blind salamanders.
3. Perhaps the most obvious problem is light. You could argue that we could build windows everywhere in the mountain, but we have to bring #1 to mind.
4. This problem would be exclusive to those who have a fear of heights (like me.) Living in a mountain-sized subterranean city would be daily vertigo because of these vast gaps.
In order to make subterranean structures on the scale of both Moria and Erebor a reality, **how would those four issues be addressed?**
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JohnWDailey - Again I say there is a big difference between Dwarf and Goblin/Orc underground architecture in the books and in the Peter Jackson movies.
Suppose that Moria had a population of 1,000,000 Dwarves at its height.
Using farming techniques 2,350 persons could be fed with the yield in sweet potatoes from one square kilometer of land. 425.53 square kilometers of land would be needed to feed 1,000,000 Dwarves - equal to an area 20.62 by 20.62 kilometers. Suppose that Moria had a series of chambers 5 kilometers by 5 kilometers square, stacked one on top of another with 100 meters between each level. 20 levels would reach 2 kilometers high and would contain 500 square kilometers of farmland, more than enough to feed a million Dwarves and occupying a small fraction of the volume of a typical mountain.
Supposedly we could feed 13,300 people per square kilometer using hydroponics. Thus 75.187 square kilometers would be needed to feed 1,000,000 Dwarves. That would require three or four farming chambers 5 kilometers by 5 kilometers square, stacked one on top of another with 100 meters between each level for a total height of 300 or 400 meters.
Using aeroponics it might be possible to feed 49,210 persons per square kilometer, thus requiring 20.32 square kilometers. So 21 chambers one kilometer by one kilometer stacked on top of each other with 100 meters between levels should reach 2.1 kilometers tall and provide more than enough food for 1,000,000 Dwarves.
[How many people can you feed per square-kilometer of farmland?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9582/how-many-people-can-you-feed-per-square-kilometer-of-farmland)[1](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9582/how-many-people-can-you-feed-per-square-kilometer-of-farmland)
But what about sunlight for growing crops inside a mountain?
*The Fellowship of the Ring*, Book Two, Chapter Four "A Journey in the Dark" has Gimli sing "The Song of Durin" about Durin the Deathless. The third stanza says:
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> A king he was on carven throne
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> In many-pillared halls of stone
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> With golden roof and silver floor
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> And runes of power on the door.
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> The light of sun and star and moon
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> In shining lanps of crystal hewn
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> Undimmed by cloud or shade of night
>
> There shone for ever fair and bright.
>
>
>
Gimli seems to be singing that the ancient Dwarves had artificial lighting. With artificial lighting they could light their underground farms to grow food inside the mountains.
And the dwarves could have farmed land outside, in lands claimed by their kingdom. Maybe the Dwarves used a thousand square kilometers of outside farmland to feed a million Dwarves in Moria at its height. That would equal a square areas 31.62 by 31.62 kilometers, or a circular area with a radius of 17.84 kilometers and a diameter of 35.68 kilometers.
And when Dwarf economies were flourishing the Dwarves didn't grow much of their food supplies but traded their goods for food supplies from Elves and Men.
Thus the Dwarves didn't need to hollow out vast volumes under the mountains to grow food. Thus the underground cities of the Dwarves would need to be the size of Human cities and not the size of Human cities plus the farmland necessary to feed the populations of those cities.
The city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has a land area of 347.52 square kilometers and an estimated population of 1,567,872 and a density of 4,511.61 persons per square kilometer. Thus if Moria had 1,000,000 Dwarves and Philadelphia's population density it would have 211.65 square kilometers of floor space in it's chambers.
This equals a single level with a square 14.54 by 14.54 kilometers, or a hundred levels each 1.45 by 1.45 kilometers.
If the height of the chambers averaged 10 meters, the total volume of Moria's chambers might be 2.1165 cubic kilometers. And a typical mountain might have a volume on the order of 100 to 1,000 cubic kilometers, for example.
Thus the excavated volume of a Dwarf city in the novels should be only a tiny fraction of the volume of the mountain it is in.
The Dwarf and Orc underground realms in the movies are a different story.
In the movies it often looks like 90 percent of the volume of the mountain has been excavated for the underground city, a very unsafe thing to do. The mountain would probably collapse, crushing everyone in the underground city to death, long before it was excavated that much.
A better method to build an underground city that was mostly empty space instead of rock would be to tear down a Mountain A and transport all it's materials to another place and then build a building B that is the size of a mountain. And when the gigantic building is complete disguise the outside so that it looks sort of like a very regularly shaped mountain.
Of course in a giant, mountain sized building, the interior architecture and placement of supports would have to be very regular and symmetrical, and in the LOTR movies the interiors of Dwarf and Orc underground cities often seem very irregular and natural looking, which is very implausible.
And after seeing three questions in this series, I have the feeling that my answers about plausibility are going to be patterned something like yes, yes, no, yes, yes, no,...for the novels and no, no, yes, no, no, yes,... for the movies.
[Answer]
**You don't need to do anything.** You really don't. The visuals in LOTR and the Hobbit show some pretty huge underground spaces, sure. If you want to argue that the engineering involved is questionable, and just stonework couldn't support that kind of vaulting, sure, but the idea that what we see in the movies represents a significant hollowing of the entire mountain just doesn't parse, mathematically.
**Here's Why.**
Let's think about [Manhattan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan) for a moment. Around 1.7 million inhabitants plus all that office, manufacturing, entertainment, and transportation space. The whole thing is a bit less than 90 square km. Let's say we want to bury the entire thing under a mountain. You know, for Safety. converting into cubic volume is... tricky... I haven't found a reliable estimate yet, so I'm going to suggest an average height of 10 stories. Yes, a lot of Manhattan is a lot taller than that, but a lot more of it isn't. I'm going to go with it. It doesn't really matter though, as you'll see in a minute.
**10 stories = ~30m = .03km x 90square km = 2.7 cubic km.**
Now let's compare that to a mountain.
The largest mountain on our planet is [Mauna Loa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Loa) in Hawaii. Measuring from the sea floor it's more than 4km tall and has an estimated volume of 75 cubic km.
**Let's cram Manhattan in there.**
2.7cubic km (Manhattan) / 75 cubic km (Mauna Loa) = .036% of the volume of the mountain.
Well, sure, ok, but Mauna Loa is a VOLCANO. That's not safe.
Fine. let's do Everest. Everest is a measly 60 cubic km by comparison, so **Manhattan would take up a more respectable .05% of the mountain.**
That leaves an awful lot of free space... maybe we can put all of New York City in there?
**Sure, why not.**
The New York City Metro Area [takes up about 775 square km](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area). Again, an average height is pretty difficult but since most of that 775 square km is suburbs it's probably going to be a lot closer to 2 or 3 stories. Let's go with that.
**3 stories = ~10m = .01km x 775square km = 7.75 cubic km.**
Stuffing that into Everest gives us 7.75 cubic km into 60 cubic km = 12.9%.
**So, TLDR, even putting one of the largest human cities on the planet entirely underneath a mountain only takes up a bit more than 10% its volume.**
[Answer]
1. In the Silmarillion, Tolkien indicated that the mountains were created rich with gold and gems easily accessible to the dwarves. They awoke, the Silmarillion says, from some sort of slumber in the mountains. My take on that has been that the dwarven kingdoms were more settled than mined. The vast reaches were available because Eru made them that way.
2. Again, Eru (who made everything) made these caves for the dwarves to live in. Dwarves woke up, so the Silmarillion goes, in these caves. They could grow mushrooms without light. Sinkholes from above could bring in wood and biomass to fertilize the mushroom crops. Underground rivers and blue holes (underwater sinkholes) could route fish into the kingdom.
3. The visualization of all the torches often makes me want to ask, 'where is the air?'. But it is a world of magic - maybe it is a magical fire that gives off light and heat without consuming fuel or oxygen.
4. This is the dwarves natural terrain. It was, no joke, made for them and them for it. Maybe vertigo is just not something dwarves have when they feel the safety of a few million tons of rock over their heads.
[Answer]
Regarding circulation, there is an easy solution. In some medieval mines, people used large furnaces situated beneath chimneys to generate an air current. It would have been relatively easy for Dwarves to do something similar. Air would flow into Moria through holes at the base of the mountain, and out through the many chimneys.
However, I don’t believe anyone in the books describes the dwarven mountains as smoking.
Another potential inspiration is the ventilation systems employed by Termites: the top of termite mounds are porous, allowing fresh air from above to flow in, and hot, stale air to flow out. This keeps the air in the top of the structure fresh. Of course, termites don't live in the top of the structure, so this is only a part of the system.
Going into more detail, termite mounds are built around a single, central chimney, surrounded by porous walls with many cavities; these cavities, as well as the central chimney, go all the way down to the base of the structure. In the day, the air in the surrounding cavities heats up more quickly than that in the central chimney, due to being closer to the surface. As a result, that air rises, and the resulting pressure difference forces the air in the chimney to sink down into the base of the structure.
At night, the air current reverses: the air in the outside system cools more quickly than that in the central chimney, so it sinks while the chimney's air rises. The result of this is that no matter the time of day, Termites can breathe even when deep in their own mountain fortresses... and not only that, but the temperature in their nest is relatively stable as well.
[Answer]
We, unfortunately, never have enough information about the Dwarves in Tolkien's books. We mostly see them from the outside points of view - either elven in Silmarillion drafts, or hobbit one in the Hobbit and LOTR.
There is some information in those books, however, that lets answer some of your questions.
First off, I do not think dwarves would just hollow out a solid mountain. Wherever we have mentions of underground structures, they are based on some natural caverns. Nargothrond was built by the elves in the natural caverns that were fist inhabited by the dwarves. Menegroth, it seems, was also build by dwarves for the elves on the basis of the natural cave. As far as I remember, the river Celduin flowed from inside the Lonely mountain - I always assumed it looks something like [Lod Cave](https://mychiangmaitour.com/tham-lod-cave/) in Thailand before the dwarves repurposed it into a city.
There is also a telling passage in the LOTR, where Gimli speaks about the caves of Aglarond and how the dwarves would work on transforming these natural caves to a dwarven city if he had his way.
Overall, the idea of a fortified underground 'burh' is a pretty popular one in the Middle-Earth, for both elves and dwarves. The halls of the Elvenking in Mirkwood are in fact a lesser version of Menegroth - a fortified underground dwelling that serves as a kingly castle, with most of the population actually living in the forest outside.
Another staple of an underground sinda-dwarven 'burh' is an underground river flowing from it. It would take care of water supply and, possibly, sanitation. Moria has Silverlode flowing from it, Forest River flows through Elvenking Halls, Carnen flows from the Iron hills, Celduin goes from the Erebor. Nargothrond was in the caves on the bank of Narog. Esgalduin, if it doesn't flow through Menegroth, is extremely near. (I do not actually remember how the relationship of the city and the river was describe. It seems to me that the entrance was across the bridge over the river, but I may be mistaken).
Speaking about the food supply, we actually never encounter the idea of a completely enclosed self-sufficient underground dwelling, neither for elves nor for dwarves. The only completely self-sufficient city without any links to the outside was Gondolin, and it was not in a cave system, but in the open space surrounded by the mountains. All other underground burhs - both elven and dwarven - had their gates open most of the time. For example, I remember Moria closing it's *western* gate in the Second age, but it seems their *eastern* entrance stayed open all the time.
The dietary requirements of the dwarves seem to be the same as the other people of Middle-Earth - they eat their food for extended periods of time, seem to like it and never display a need to eat some particular product to refill a microelement deficiency. (Actually, elves, humans, hobbits and orcs are biologically the same species according to Tolkien himself. Dwarves are a close copy of the same design by the other maker, so it seems they are still a carbon-based lifeform, although not genetically compatible with everyone else.)
So it seems to me it's not a stretch to assume that dwarves actually farmed and raised animals (say sheep and ponies) outside of their cave cities. Unless they could find a settlement of other people nearby and establish trade relationship - Erebor and Dale, for example, had it all worked out perfectly before the dragon appeared.
As for the light and air - we all remember the description of the air shafts in Moria. Presumably, dwarves were good enough engineers to calculate the neccessary number of shafts and their ideal locations to ensure the proper air supply. Having big enough openings for underground river flow in and/or out, as Tolkien's underground cities often have, would also help with air circulation. We also have mentions of *some* sort of artifical lighting in the song of Durin, as aready discussed before.
As for agoraphobia and claustrophobia. I think the movie indeed does overdo the 'gaps' a lot. Mostly the dwarven cities would be differntly sized caves, connected by artificial corridors. All the dangerous gaps would be spanned by bridges, separated by railings, etc. Now, claustrophobic dwarves would have it bad, though.
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[Question]
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Galley was a widely used type of ship in the Mediterranean sea. It was propelled by rowers and sails.
Supposing the ship builders at the time of the Punic wars got the right "inspiration" (how they get the "inspiration" is out of the scope of the question) to use a propeller and power it by using the leg power of the onboard men, would have this been technologically feasible for those times?
[Answer]
Bronze and iron would be sufficiently strong to take the force produced by a galley full of fit humans, and the level of skill necessary to fabricate and balance a propeller is not actually that high. Especially for one that's only going to be powered by people. (A fit man can only deliver about 1/5th of a horsepower for an extended period.)
The problem you run into is efficiency. With an engine turning the screw, the higher efficiency of the propeller makes it a better option than paddle wheels or oars. But when you add in the necessary bearings to support a crankshaft that can be used by a large number of men simultaneously, and whatever packing or gearing mechanism you're going to use to keep the water out of the boat, your friction losses start to add up. It's likely to end up coming out a wash compared to the cheap and easily-replaceable oars, especially at that level of technology with the crude, natural organic lubricants that would have been available.
Human-powered propellers were a feature of early submarines though. The engines of the time required too much air, and waterproof oarlocks would be enough more complicated than a single screw's packing that it made sense to just have the men turn a crank.
One option that was actually used on larger boats just prior to the commercialization of the steam engine though was to have the power delivered by horses on treadmills. It was generally confined to river boats since horses really don't like lack of fresh air for extended periods, and really, really don't like rough seas. But maybe they've been breeding some other large draft animal to tolerate being in a rocking boat and walking all day. If you're going to mechanize them, go for the gold medal. Human-powered boats are silly if there are other options.
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An effective propeller needs good quality steel in large amounts. Roman metallurgy wasn't up to making an effective screw propellor. There is an alternative, and that is the paddlewheel.
In 1693 there are reports of M. du Quest making a [paddlewheel man-o-war](http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/31/364-369/239.full.pdf+html) (see [article in the Mariners Mirror](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00253359.2016.1202482) behind paywall) which was reported to have matched a traditionally oared man-o-war in a race. Most of the carpentry techniques available to du Quest would have been known by the Romans.
The ancient Roman text [De rebus bellicis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rebus_bellicis) describes an ox-powered paddleboat. The principal advantage seems not to have been speed compared to oars, but the possibility of using animal instead of human power.
I conclude that paddlewheel technology was known to the ancients, and could have been built with Roman techniques. However, the complexity, weight and possibility of breaking would not have given any overall advantage over oars, if human power was available.
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YES, the technology is feasible for the time.
Romans used hamster Wheels to build the Coliseum: See this clip from the Science Channel of one in action:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNccg6j1Dy0>
One girl can use it to lift a 1200 lb block, and three students together raise a 5200 lb block off the ground. There is a drawing of such a wheel from Roman times; and the wheel and the compound pulley it uses were known to Romans (although the compound pulley may not be necessary for powering a ship).
Other examples are shown here, as cranes, plus examples proving the Romans knw how to use various forms of gearing.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_engineering>
Such a wheel is almost entirely powered by legs. Romans were very familiar with gearing as well; and were making both wrought iron and steel in the Noricum province (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_metallurgy>).
The Hamster wheel creates power in a rotating axle; using simple gearing it could be used to turn a propeller. Note also, sealant is not necessarily a problem, the equivalent of an outboard motor propeller is easy enough to engineer: An outboard motor uses a propeller **without** piercing the hull of the ship; it is just mounted on the outside of the hull.
The Romans were extremely competent engineers and could have devised a system of gears, axles, pulleys, whatever to transfer the power generated by the wheel *inside* the boat to an underwater propeller that was outside the boat, and pushing the boat. (One simple idea: Turn the wheel 'sideways' so the axle is aligned with the long axis of the boat).
Multiple wheels could power multiple propellers; useful for steering or extra power when needed. Imagine 3 side by side: power the left wheel to turn right, power the right wheel to turn left, power left+right to go straight, power left+middle+right to go straight faster.
All the engineering skills and required materials for such a system were in place 2000 years ago; so the only missing pieces are inspiration and the power or money to turn inspiration into a working product.
[Answer]
## Sure, but it's not a good idea.
Rowing uses your legs already, as well as the rest of your body. You're already getting the force a human can generate translated into forward acceleration as effectively as possible. Additionally, rowing is more efficient and responsive at turning and reversing than anything else the ancient world could have made. As 9ilsdx 9rvj 0lo aptly said, rowing is an Olympic sport, paddle-boating is not.
(This is not as true for most engines: you have to gear them down anyway, and the mechanism to make a rowing motion would be overly elaborate and lossy, so screws or paddle wheels are much more attractive)
If you're looking for an excuse to use capstans or giant hamster wheels, you might look at warping (drop an anchor far away, haul in the rope to move the boat to the anchor, move the anchor, repeat). Warping is slow going, and is absolutely not what you want to do in a fight, but is often the best way to navigate narrow or choked waterways (like rivers or rocky/sandbar-ey harbors).
If you absolutely *had* to get peddling to work, you're probably going to want a giant flywheel. The peddling drives the flywheel, probably with each seat or seat-pair driving a shaft with a wheel resting on the flywheel, and spinning it via friction. To disengage that seat, just lift their shaft off the flywheel. The flywheel would need to be really, really massive. Then you can run it through a clutch and a gearbox to a screw. Now you can have constant peddling work instead of sprints, and can get variable speeds out. You can probably even get very high speeds (with some hand waving) for a short time. You need a big flywheel, so the ship is likely pretty big too (which will make for interesting rotational inertia effects). You could even have multiple ways of charging it, like with a windmill on the deck.
[Answer]
**maneuverability.**
Rowers make for a highly maneuverable craft, they can row at different speeds and even opposite directions to move the ship. This makes them far more maneuverable than any other ship on the sea. They also can operate in extremely shallow water, unlike a propeller which will make the draft of the ship deeper.
in Naval warfare maneuverability wins.
[Answer]
*Rowing uses your legs already, as well as the rest of your body. You're already getting the force a human can generate translated into forward acceleration as effectively as possible. Additionally, rowing is more efficient and responsive at turning and reversing than anything else the ancient world could have made.*
in sport rowing, the shells have seats which move on wheels. If a galley had moveable seats which were physically joined, then they could be pushed forward and backward by special crew. Moveable seats would allow longer strokes with more power. Technology-wise the hardest thing would be the rollers and the axles between them. The rollers could be made of wood such as oak and the axles could be wrought iron.
Realistically, boat construction required great wealth. There was little tolerance for experimental designs. I am supposing in that environment, moveable seats could be developed somehow.
[Answer]
Yes and no. There would be no problem in making all the parts from wood.
What would be the problem is:
* the hole at the bottom of your ship. They would need to came up with a sealant that could keep the water from flooding the ship.
* differential. Rowing slaves have one advantage if one of them is slower. He have no impact on the others as they are individual engines. With a propeller and a driveshaft you would loose power. Also it would be hard to spot and flog the lazy ones.
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**Weight would be a problem.**
The little known fact is that typical galley (eg a [trireme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trireme)) couldn't stay in water for more than a day. Yep, that's right - those were not "ships" in today's meaning, but a large "boats". The largest distance they could be sailed was 1-day travel, because in the evening they had to be pulled on the shore to dry. They were also very light for the size, 140 men (out of a crew of 200) could pick it up and carry it on the shore. Ships were routinely transported over the land to the sea on the other side, [with a kind of railway](https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Ancient-Greece-Moving-Ships-Over-Land-). I can't find the reference now, but I think there was an instance of carrying warships over land as a surprise maneuver, without the railway. The draft was mere 1m, so a galley could operate so close to the shore, where a bigger modern yacht can not.
As you see, the oars are actually the best choice of propulsion in those conditions - if you can train the oarsmen, that is. Because if you want to play out the fantasy of slave galleys then a mechanical propulsion becomes more viable by sole virtue of allowing unskilled workforce.
[Answer]
*Turn the wheel 'sideways' so the axle is aligned with the long axis of the boat).*
I was thinking of a drive shaft the length of the galley. The shaft would be driven by bicycle-type gears. Like a drive shaft on a vehicle, there would be a universal joint to allow for flexing of the boat. The crew would sit perpendicular to the axis of the boat. They could be closely spaced and seated lower, so the boat would have a lower centre of gravity. The hull would protect them from enemy missiles and the hull could be higher to provide better sea-worthiness.
Realistically, the technology was not available: drive shaft, bicycle-type gears and universal joints require steel. By the time the technology was available so were steam engines.
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Hydraulics. finely stitched leather tubes carry water as the hydraulic fluid. wood or bronze pump connected to pedals works well. I dont like the propeller idea. it can get caught on stuff. it would work, just not as good as you can get. water wheels are too bulky but would also work. what about water jets? bronze grating at the front of the ship allows water, pedals pump it in through a wide tube and force it out thinner for higher velocity. if there are multiple outlet tubes, then steering and even slowing down is pretty easy. just as or more maneuverable compared to oars. legs are stronger and have more endurance then arms, but rowing uses the whole body. with more complicated mechanics a rowing motion could also be used for hydraulic water jet. just finely carved hard wood dipped in bronze and then polished with finely stitched leather tubes.
[Answer]
**Use an air propeller**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vcpUK.png)
Enough pedallers on a boat would get up a good speed.
Note that numerous people have mentioned the need for an efficient water seal for a water propeller. They are wrong. As long as the top of the shaft is above the waterline there is no problem. Rubber rings have a big hole in the middle but they don't sink.
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[Question]
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Imagine a world of magic. This magic can do anything you want it to, as long as physics agrees (totally useless addendum: physics is actually a very pendantic guy, but rumour has it his mistresses have been seen flying).
Meaning, energy is to be conserved. A spell can lay dormant for centuries, but once activated it can only consume the amount of energy put into it when casted. Which is why magicians are very good cooks, they have to get fat fast before casting a powerful spell and then consume their fat all at once to put the energy into the spell (others just kill animals, but that's frowned upon).
Now skeletons are easy to use as tomb guards (scary, bones are easy to get), but how much energy would be needed (approx.) to have a skeleton actually be able to fight? They don't have muscles etc. so keeping all those bones aligned would be consuming some energy already. Is it feasible to cast the skeleton spell and the remains of an army within a few days/weeks/months without having big energy sources available (aka food, maybe a companion), or would those skeletons rather need more energy?
*"Careful, there are skeletons there, they'll chop you into parts!" "I know, just watch." The hero charges into the dungeon activating all trap spells, turns around, sprints out of the dungeon, releases the stick holding the boulder next to the door, waits two days, removes the boulder and walks into the dungeon because the skeletons had only enough energy to hit the boulder once or twice and are now just bones lying on the ground.*
I'd like to evade that scenario.
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I mean, looking at it purely at a caloric perspective, a skeleton by itself weighs about 30 lbs. That's not much!
Fencing, at 150 lbs: 288 kcal/hr -> skeleton: roughly 57.6 kcal/hr
Karate, at 150 lbs: 720 kcal/hr -> skeleton: roughly 144 kcal/hr
Wrestling, at 125 lbs: 360 kcal/hr -> skeleton: roughly 86.5 kcal/hr
So depending on how the skeleton fights, it burns anywhere from 50-150 (roughly) kcal/hr. A Big Mac is 563 kcal, so a big mac's worth of energy powers your skeleton fighting as a fencer for 11 hours, as a wrestler for 6.5 hours, or doing karate for about 4 hours. Assuming standing there not moving doesn't use any energy, for a few Big Macs you can get quite the charge out of your fighting skeletons.
[Answer]
Surprisingly little.
1 kg fat tissue amounts to an energy of 7000 kcal. That means 1 kg fat is able to approximately boil 70 kg ice water. Even better is the mechanical equivalent: 1 kg mass can be elevated 427 m for one kcal, so 1 g fat can lift 1 kg 3000 m. A humanoid skeleton weighs only 12% of the body, so you can multiply the amount of energy with the factor 8 if you use normal mass.
The reason humans need energy is that our muscles consists of fibers which must fire involuntarily. This allows fast movement, but it is instead possible that molecules are simply blocking. The skeletons can freeze and *consume no energy at all*.
Now ferocious blows and movement.
Really ugly is it if the skeletons can store superfluous kinetic energy. Then only rising up will be a problem (and they get the energy back when it goes down). More realistically you can assume that going up needs all energy and going down will only consume 10% (While they go down, they need to stop).
1 gram fat tissue amounts to moving 1 kg approximately 3 000 m. That's a *lot*.
A ferocious blow will be e.g. a 5 kg warhammer coming down with a speed of 30 m/s. That's 2250 J = 537 cal. So 1 g fat = 7000 cal is equivalent to 15 heavy blows with a warhammer.
If energy is conserved, your skeletons are a real pain in the ass.
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As per a clarification, sacrifice of living creatures can fuel magic.
It's "not nice, but possible".
So it's possible to keep a really long term magic spell fueled with "this one cool trick, tomb raiders hate him"
It's socially frowned upon to sacrifice animals. How can we minimize the "euck" factor?
# ANTS!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ASqQY.jpg)
You want the spells that defend your tomb to last not just a century but for millennia, you don't want tomb robbers to be able to beat your protections simply by running down the batteries on your magic warriors.
So you need some kind of steady trickle of power.
Bring on the ants. In some ancient structures you'll sometimes get a hole in the roof and insects falling down and being unable to get back out.
You construct your tomb to do this purposely. A variety of little chutes and gratings allow insects to fall down from the soil above the tomb, they get funneled towards a sacrificial circle where they are consumed to fuel the magic.
Depending on taste there may even be a few skeletal guardians tasked with keeping the magic circles clean and clear.
While tomb raiders can reduce the magical reserves of your defenses this small power source will ensure that they can't completely deplete them.
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The amount of energy would vary dramatically based on the style of fighting used. Many martial arts emphasize efficiency over brute force power and prefer to use the enemy's force against them. Aikido and Judo are famous examples of this sort of fighting. Skeletons which use these styles would require far less energy than those trained in, say, Muay Tai kickboxing, which is so energetic that it's spawned off exercise routines loosely based on it!
In general, grappling arts have an advantage in your magical realm because grappling technically doesn't call for energy. While you may be using great force on the other person, force itself doesn't require energy. Energy is force times distance, and you often don't move very far in a grapple. Real human beings must expend energy grappling because of the inefficiencies built into how our muscles operate. Your skeletons would not have such a disadvantage, so they could grapple much longer with less power. Of course, they also may weigh less, which is a substantial disadvantage in grappling, but that might be artificially resolved with weights tied to the bones (at the cost of requiring more energy to move)
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Skeletons aren't animated by magic levitating/actuating joints directly! if that were the case, surely it would be much simpler and more effective to animate the sword/spear directly!
Skeletons work because they in some way maintain the idea or concept of a humanoid body, even without muscles, ligaments, sensory organs, or brain. This is also why skeletons can usually make some sort of rudiementary noises, despite, obviously, not having vocal cords or lungs, and why shattering their bones, even structurally non-essential ones is the main way to destroy them.
Going out on a limb, the withering away of the rest of the body to the bone is symbolic of the stripping of the mind down to aggressions, fighting instinct, and tactical judgement.
Now, as to the cost - since the effect is purely symbiological magic, it is impossible to quantify given the absence of observable magic in our world. The best we can do is compare the effect to other commonly discussed magical effects. Given that the essence of the spell is "to preserve a distilled idea of something from its unrefined form" animating a skeleton would be similar in cost to, for example, making a sword magically sharp or armour hard to break... so, small fry stuff, unless the scale of the effect is very strong, long-lasting, or particularly resistant to disruptions to the physical component
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Create a double spells. One to wake up and give energy the skeletons ( I assume they are sentient on their own or by other necro enchantment).
And second to take energy from visitor. Anyone who enter is drained from energy stored in his body. Remember the super aging guy from Indiana Jones? He was actually under the "drain energy" spell.
Advantages
1. Your skeletons are animated only for the time needed, so as long as
anything with energy is in the tomb
2. If you are visited by a pack of adventurers the leanest, smallest of them die first without even facing your guardians. Now
that's what I call psychological effect.
3. You can use the bodies as your new warriors so the energy needed is increasing with time and it's harder and harder to get further in the tomb because the amount of skeletons rise and adventurer energy decline with every moment.
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You're overworking this. You use a soap bubble spell. This creates a pressure equalizing, but gas impermeable force field near the mouth of the cave.(The boundary would shift back and forth with changes in air pressure. Inside that you have no oxygen. People can walk through a soap bubble spell, but lose consciousness a few steps later.
Minimal energy required.
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In general it's a good idea for Magic world to have some form of laws or rules. Doesn't have to be conservation of energy/momentum, but there is no reason why not. One of my disappointments with the Harry Potter series is the lack of cost for magic.
Niven used Conservation of Mana for one series of stories.
Conservation of gravitational potential energy would allow you to float anything at a fixed height (above sea level) at no energy. This makes mountain ports valuable since they could have docks at various heights.
You could have lots of fun with teleport spells, and people figuring out conservation of energy and momentum, as they arrive at a distant location with a velocity of 100 kph straight down.
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I figure imbuing a skeleton with the energy to work for years if not decades or longer would take quite the investment. I don't think more then one or two a day could be made, probably less.
You're transferring energy to create a thing that moves, thinks and anticipates. It must be able to fight effectively. Not a trivial task.
Perhaps they can be created with a minimal lifespan and then recharged at a later place? That would speed up creation as recharging could be given to another person. Maybe sucking dry the corpse of a prisoner, removing all life force. That would make being a wizard prisoner of war a very bad thing to be.
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Magic and physics don't mix together well. How much energy does it take to animate a skeleton? Well, how much do you want it to take? It's magic, after all.
A skeleton is bound together by organical tissues, like muscles and sinews. Without them, a femur it's not connected to the hip or knee by anything, so your animated skeleton are nothing but flying bones. How much energy does it takes to maintain them flying? By which means (antigravity, electromagnetical fields)? Why using skeletons at all? Why don't animate a knight's armor (a là Full Metal Alchemist)?
I mean, I don't want to downvote, but the amount of handwaving this situation requires makes the point about energy uses and conservation a little moot.
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In 10,000 years, what aspects and events from today will still be remembered or are likely to still be remembered?
The invention of the internet lets us store vast amounts of information, but most of it will likely be forgotten over time, or hard disks destroyed/overwritten. Which major events are likely to survive against time?
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10,000 years are a very long time. It's longer than the recorded history so far. A Roman coming to our time would surely wonder how many of the things that seemed important back then are either completely forgotten, or only known in a very rudimentary and distorted way, or just known to a handful experts. And that's just 2000 years.
I'd expect that in 10,000 years the general people will know next to nothing about our time. They will probably lump the last 500 years and the 500 years to come into one thing, or possibly even a larger period.
They will probably know that it was the period where science took off, where it got possible to travel around the world in a matter of days, and where the first humans managed to leave the planet. Also it will be remembered that it was the time when worldwide real-time communication became possible.
Probably some people will have heard about the big empires of the time (never mind that we don't call it that, from their view, it will not be too different from e.g. the Roman empire), like America, Russia and China. What they think they know about Europe is probably that it was always chaotic there.
Probably a few big names like Hitler and Stalin will survive, because they are so ingrained into our collective memory. However the ideas about Hitler and Stalin they will have will be as far from the reality as our common ideas about what Caesar or Nero were like; probably more as the time difference is larger.
All the other names which are important for us will likely be unknown to anyone but history experts. Names like Obama or Putin will ring no bell (well, Putin is still in power, and probably will be for some time to come, so it's still possible that he will make a long-lasting name).
Whether it will be known as the time which led into a bright age of science and technology, as the time that devastated the planet and consumed all its resources leading to a worldwide economic and social collapse, or as the time which drove humanity into the World War III, only time will tell.
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"We come from a planet called Earth".
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First of all, I think the information itself will be preserved. Much of what I'm about to write relies on the belief that no disaster will occur which may destroy nearly all of humanity.
TL:DR information storage will get easier as time goes on, remembering will be easy if people in the future are aided by computers.
A nuclear war or something may cause a lot of destruction, but assuming we survive that long, then as time goes on, information technology will get better, and 10,000 is a longer time than recorded history. I think IBM's Watson, the machine that can play Jeopardy, had a large portion of the internet copied as training data for it. In the future, the internet today can be copied using only a portion of a large company's resources, if they decide to archive it just in case. If a copy of the information gets destroyed, just recover it with another backup. The simultaneous destruction of all copies is quite unlikely without major incident. A small computer hidden underground should be able to survive most disasters today, and nuclear reactions, which convert part of something's mass into energy, can only generate as much energy as the mass of the matter being converted, which is finite.
(If you want more examples of how large amounts of information can easily be stored, look up deja-google, the way google is a day before. I heard that it was used during daily challenges where you try to find the answer to a problem using google, but want to avoid spoilers created by others playing the same game)
As for whether people will remember it or not, I feel that this isn't necessary for the masses, because older inventions will sound fundamental and "already taken" to those who are overexposed to advanced technology, and modern stories about how new innovations can still be made will be more relevant. If people in the future are aided by computer technology, then a specialized historian can easily remember all the major events, including the ones in our textbooks, just in case.
By the way, based on current trends, information technology becomes exponentially more efficient over time. Refer to Moore's law
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law>
and the timeline only lengthens linearly. Hopefully, before technology of this sort reaches its limit, we will be able to expand to other planets, and increase the space and material we have with which to place and construct servers for the storage of information cubically.
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I would assume that all pertinent data from the past has been somewhat archived & vaulted somewhere underground. A brief history of our past as we understood it:
* Data relating to all wars and/or conflicts and their outcomes. Lessons learned about pollution & contamination issues – space travel – reasons for leaving our planet and what our discoveries were back then.
* Sub-topics on our Health issues and plagues we encountered and treated.
* Listing of our do's and don'ts to survive.
* Medical issues sustained and cures to improve our health issues.
* Listing of contaminates that did harm to the peoples of this world.
* Ridding ourselves of diverse & criminal actions within the public.
These are just a few, I would think.
But one more relating to monetary gains will no longer be an issue as we will no longer need currency at that time.
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Humans haven't been writing things down for 10,000 years, but we can get some idea of what to expect by looking at extremely ancient civilizations, namely Egypt and Mesopotamian region. Look at how badly Egyptian history from the Old Kingdom or the history of the Sumerians is remembered. In Egypt the timing of many events and the reigns and names of various pharaohs are highly uncertain, with the error bars on some events being on the scale of a few centuries. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the Egyptian calendar doesn't quite match up with the Julian one, so even when dates are recorded it's not clear when they're talking about.
Some supposed rules may be outright fictional characters misinterpreted as real. Gilgamesh was probably a real king but we know almost nothing beyond his actual reign aside from the *Epic of Gilgamesh*, which may have been propaganda or the result of posthumous deification. And for most of these empires the identity and reign of their rulers are some of the biggest things they are often concerned with recording for posterity. The fact that this information doesn't survive well doesn't bode well. There are entire ancient civilizations like the Elamites who despite being a large empire with their own language and writing system we basically know nothing about.
Most countries probably won't be remembered. Almost no one outside of history buffs remembers the old provinces of Rome or their pre-Roman inhabitants, even if many place names are taken from them. 10,000 years is such a long span that only the most relevant events to a future audience would be remembered. For example, the U.S. might be remembered for being the first people to land on the moon and the first to use atomic weapons in war, but the reasons for the Cold War and the nature of the war that led to the use of atomic bombs might be forgotten.
It's even plausible that highly traumatic events that we try not to forget today like the Holocaust would be forgotten. If events like the Holocaust weren't anomalous in the future it might be remembered, but given how genocide isn't an uncommon occurrence in human history there wouldn't be a lot of reason for it to stick out. The Holocaust is notable to use because it was committed by a highly industrialized, highly Westernized power in a time where genocide was no longer the order of the day, but in the far future it is unlikely that they would be Euro-centric enough to consider the actions of the Nazis and memorable relative to, say, Mao's Great Leap Forward, the Rwanda Genocide, or the actions of the Khmer Rouge.
It's unlikely a lot of art will survive, simply because art is usually a singular piece and hence can be easily misplaced or destroyed.
**Language Barriers**
In general, we'd hope that people would be a bit better at having retaining information due to the widespread adoption of the printing press meaning that books no longer have to be painstakingly copied and the fact that 86% of the current population is now literate (and hence there is more demand for written materials and more reason to keep them), but the truth is a lot of what we produce now is going to be utterly unreadable in the future.
None of the languages we speak or write with now are going to be around in any recognizable form, for starters. Many ancient languages like Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform, and Maya script were a pain to translate, and some like Minoan Linear A *still* haven't been deciphered. Paper is highly degradable, and most of the information we have on paper now is going to be rotted and gone 10,000 years from now unless some efforts have been made to recopy them into new formats.
Electronic media is also extremely fragile. Electronic media often depends on a system to run it or a long-term storage medium that can be easily damaged or corrupted. Most Internet servers will not last 10,000 years. A broken laptop sitting in the sands of the Sahara for 10,000 years may have originally had the complete works of Shakespeare, but if it can't be started it's little better than a plastic brick. Additionally the hardware to read the electronic media may not be there. Look at how much trouble people have running VCR tapes and 8-track players now, and how most computers lack CD-ROM drives or DVD players and are starting to be manufactured without USB ports. People 10,000 years from now may not have a reliable converter.
Most of what would survive would what has been carved in rock. It's been suggested that our widespread adoption of paper will be a double-edged sword for historians simply because most of what we write will degrade while many ancient cultures will have their writing stick around because they carved it into something, leaving our culture a relative enigma.
**Scientific Systems May Not Last**
Indeed, it's not even clear if systems we deliberately designed to last forever, such as the Linnaean system of naming or Mendeleev's periodic table will stick around, given that both are less than 300 years old. Yes, the physical principles that both describe are still around, but the names may change dramatically and their principles may be lost or re-invented from scratch or replaced with alternate models. Mendeleev I could see it being difficult to destroy, but with Linnaean species names I've already seen people try to suggest that we rename species and erase the naming contributions of many biologists because their opinions were politically incorrect by modern standards, despite the fact that the general rule is "who finds it first gets to name it" and "names are forever for stability".
Even systems of numbers might not be the same, Arabic numerals are only about 1500 years old and alternative math systems like the Maya vigesimal system or Roman numerals exist. It's conceivable that numeral systems could change in 10,000 years. Number systems might also change for political reasons (e.g., the adoption of the metric system in the wake of the French Revolution) or just because someone comes up with a better model that we don't know of yet.
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History is not about **informations**, but about **facts** that had impact on their future, so hards disks being destroyed should not be a problem. The data means nothing, their implications in our society is what we will remember.
The great discoveries in **science** (all the diseases we have eradicated, the first step on the moon, Internet, 3D printing, the first mobile device as an ancestor of fully embedded techhnologies like IoT), tendancies in **politics** (first black president of the USA, first woman, the last great wars, last dictatures) and in **sociology** (maybe the rise of religious extremists and the revival of various extremist ideologies), this is what will stay in the history books.
Rereading, I find it a little depressing ...
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This is going to be a tough question to answer, but I'll take a crack at it. And before I begin, I would like to say that there is no true way to tell, because we have no real life examples and everything is pure speculation. I also apologize for the length, I wrote a lot more than I thought I would. There are many rings to consider, and I tried to cover all I could think of. And since there is so much to consider, I can't really give you an answer other than it depends and tell you what it depends on.
First of all, look at the past. Most people know only a rudimentary bit about events 3,000 years previous. That is only a third of the time span you suggest. This would suggest that very few events would survive and remain pertinent.
Now, let's take another angle. In the past few decades, we've made leaps and bounds in technology. Life expectancies are longer and information storage techniques are much more effective (although possibly not as long lasting). If these trends continue, then I can see two things happening. Number one, life expectancies continue to grow longer. Number two, technology continues to advance. Now, while operating technology will probably remain simple, creating it likely will not be. This might lead to a renewed focus on learning and education. And history is a very important part of education. So future people may be way more knowledgeable on their history than we currently are. And even if they aren't, that knowledge may be available.
Another thing to consider is how humanity progresses. What is important to these future people? Which topics related to history do they find most important?
Now, possibly the most important part. Loss of historical knowledge. An apocalyptic or even devastating event could wipe out chunks of history. Political regimes could also affect what survives. For example, when someone sacked someone else and burned the library at Alexandria. (I figured I'd display my own lack of historical knowledge :P) Strict regimes might make a concerted effort to wipe out certain parts of their history.
History is very complicated. Not sure what else to say.
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Planet 40793.c
Designation: Earth
Rumored to be the origin of species 7702, now extinct
Mostly Harmless.
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**This question already has answers here**:
[By what mechanism could a planet be locked into permanent solar eclipse?](/questions/4363/by-what-mechanism-could-a-planet-be-locked-into-permanent-solar-eclipse)
(5 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
What I want to know is if it is possible for two planets to be close enough together to tidally lock each other (as in both planets are tidally locked), but in such a manner that they don't orbit each other. More specifically, could this happen in such a manner that the one further from their star would be perpetually in the shadow of the other?
I know, weirdly specific question. I'd be interested in the reasoning/science behind the answer, but a simple yes/no answer would actually suffice. (in case anyone's wondering, backstory for two a WH40k Wolf successor armies).
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**TL;DR**
It's not possible.
**Ye Be Warned**
Really bad MSPaint skills were involved in the making of this answer. Many artists turned over in their graves. Also, the real physics are a bit more complex, but I'm not a real astronomer so this will have to do for a first-order approximation.
**What is Tidal Locking?**
Tidal locking is explicitly a function of orbiting another body.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pYVYL.png)
The tides from one body (say, our moon), cause the near side of the other body (Earth, in this case) to be slightly closer than the rest of the planet. Because that mass is closer, it has more gravity than the rest of the planet.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6lJvv.png)
But if the planet is rotating, the bulge moves forward a bit, so it's not directly between the center of the Earth and moon.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/r6F9I.png)
This means the force on the east side of the Earth (orange line) is slightly stronger than the force on the west side of the Earth (purple line), resulting in a small, but measurable, net torque. This torque means the Earth is gradually slowing down, and will continue to slow down until one side of the Earth is always facing our moon (which is already tidally locked because it's a lot less massive, so it didn't take as long to slow down).
Of note, this means a slowly-turning planet with a fast-orbiting moon will actually speed up until tidal locking occurs. Also, not shown, as Earth slows down, the distance between Earth and our moon increases. If the Earth were speeding up, the distance would decrease over time.
**Tidal Locking by Sharing an Orbit**
So for two planets to be tidally locked, but not orbiting each other, they have to be tidally locked to something else. The local star is a good candidate. You could have something like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UDAnN.png)
The blue, green, and purple planets are orbiting 60° from each other, and they could be tidally locked to the star (so one face of the planet is always looking at the star), which means they'd also be "tidally locked" to each other in the sense that each planet would always see the same face of the other planets.
Note that, to the best of my knowledge, you need a more massive planet orbiting halfway between two of the smaller planets for this to work; though you don't need all three planets -- the grey one plus any of the other three would still orbit. Addendum: it seems the L3 point (purple) is unstable so you don't want to use it anyways, but L4 and L5 (blue and green) are both stable and don't require a large primary (grey). So you could ostensibly have just the grey and blue or green planets of about the same size. Still, it doesn't solve the problem of shading the second planet.
**To Your Idea**
Ok, so we can sort of get tidal locking without the planets orbiting each other, but it's not what you wanted. You're looking for this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yz9nf.png)
You can do that, but there's a problem. The orbital period is directly related to it's distance. In order for a planet to be in orbit, the centrifugal force from inertia has to exactly offset the centripetal force from gravity. There's less gravity farther from the star, so the more distant planet has to orbit more slowly or it will just fly off into space. Additionally, the length of the orbit is proportional to it's distance ($circumference=2\pi\times radius$). So it's going farther, and it's doing it more slowly, which means the time taken *has to be longer*.
Geometrically, there's just no way for the outer planet and the inner planet to orbit the star at different distances *and* orbit in the same amount of time.
So let's say you put the blue planet in a proper orbit, then magically slow the green planet down to the same speed. Now, gravity overcomes centrifugal force, causing the planet to fall, and you end up with a highly elliptical orbit (if it's slow enough, the "orbit" will involve crashing into the star). At the highest point in the orbit, it's traveling the same speed as the other planet, but as soon as it gets closer to the star, it speeds up. The extra speed, combined with the even shorter orbital distance, means it's still orbiting the star faster than the outer planet.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DGt8X.png)
A similar effect happens if you speed up the outer planet. Either it ends up in a highly elliptical orbit, or, if it's fast enough, it flies straight out of the star system, nevermore to be seen. Regardless, it still orbits more slowly than the inner planet, if at all.
**Extra**
Of note, there are a variety of weird orbital characteristics, such as the outer planet orbiting exactly three times for every twice the inner planet orbits, or their "day" period being some simple ratio of each other's. But none of these involve tidal locking, or one planet always being in the other planet's shadow.
**The L2 Point**
From comments and other answers, it looks like I need to also address the L2 point. In addition to the above configuration (the grey primary and the blue/green (L4/L5) and purple (L3) secondaries), there are two more [Lagrangian points](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point), L1 and L2. L1 is between the sun and the primary, while L2 is behind the primary, opposite the sun.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/06MJC.png)
In this case, the gravity from the nearby planet adds to the gravity from the far away star, meaning the small planet has to go faster to balance out the extra gravity. Right at the L2 point, the extra speed is exactly enough so the outer planet stays right behind the inner planet.
Just what we wanted, right? Well, no. Sorry.
First, I assumed that "twin planets" (from the title) meant the two planets needed to be similar size. In this case, the L2 point is right out, because it requires the outer planet to be much smaller than the inner planet.
Second, for Earth, the outer planet is too far away, and isn't actually shaded by the inner planet, so it doesn't meet the requirements. However, [this space.SE answer](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3565/are-there-any-lagrange-points-in-the-solar-system-in-perpetual-shade) shows that it is possible, with the correct geometry, to solve this (in our solar system, everything from Mars to Pluto has a perpetually-shaded L2 point; Mercury to Earth do not). So you're ok here as long as you do the math.
Third, most problematically, is the L2 point is extremely unstable. A little nudge in any direction, the the outer planet falls out of the L2 point. From [this NASA article](http://jwst.nasa.gov/orbit.html), it takes about 30 days to get to Earth's L2 point by coasting. This means it takes about 30 days to fall out of the same point, back to the starting altitude (and much less time to fall out of the primary's shadow).
You get a bit more time if you're sitting in a [halo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_orbit) or [Lissajous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_orbit) orbit, but you still need to make corrections about [once a month](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_station-keeping#Station-keeping_at_libration_points). With a different-sized primary, you might get a little more time, but we're still talking *maybe* a few years of stability. Also, both of those orbits move you (and possibly keep you) completely out of the primary's shadow, so they don't really meet the requirements.
There's just no way to keep a planet in the L2 point for any reasonable length of time without constant, planet-scale thrusters, at which point you might as well just call it magic. My understanding is the WH universe has plenty of techno magic that could accomplish this, but it's not really feasible under normal circumstances. And I'm really hard-pressed to come up with a reason to bother; it would be far cheaper and simpler to just build your colonies on a planet farther from the star (or just accelerate the planet farther from the star) than to keep one planet in another planet's L2 point for any significant amount of time.
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**Yes**, but the orbit will drift over time.
This may be possible if and only if there are no other (major) planets in your solar system. They won't be tidally locked, but the smaller one might be mostly in the shade. Consider a [Halo orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_orbit) or [Lissajous orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lissajous_orbit) around the [L₂ point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point#L2) of a sufficiently low-density planet. The smaller planet may be in the shade most or even all of the time, if the configuration is right.
[](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lagrange_points2.svg)
(Source: [Wikimedia commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lagrange_points2.svg))
It is possible to orbit L₂, in an orbit known as a [Halo orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_orbit). In our solar system, those orbits are unstable, because of disturbances by other bodies such as the Moon and Jupiter. But if you envision a solar system where no other bodies of significance exists, such a configuration could temporarily exist.
Imagine such a world. At the larger planet, gravitation is too large and climate is too hot for life to exist, but by being much smaller and shady most of the time, the smaller planet has a reasonable climate, such that in the period of less than 50 million years, intelligent life emerges. Life goes on, until at some point scientists on the smaller planet discover that their orbit is very slowly diverging. It's not a problem for the next several thousand years, but the periods in the scorching Sun are getting slightly longer every century. Models predict this will only get worse, perhaps due to a passing star less than a light year away. Within the next 20,000 years, life will become unbearably hot. Can science come up with a solution? Can we generate enough thrust to keep our planet close enough to L₂ to manage our climate? Can science save the world? Stay tuned for this exciting new novel *Life at L₂*!
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See also those questions on Space Exploration SE:
* [*What does the Sun-Earth-Moon system look like from the Sun-Earth L-2 point?*](https://space.stackexchange.com/q/10355/33)
* [*Are there any (Lagrange) points in the Solar System in perpetual shade?*](https://space.stackexchange.com/q/3565/33)
[Answer]
Yes, but only for a few moments or hours before they crash into each other.
In the absence of a mutual orbit, there is no force to prevent their mutual gravitational attraction from pulling them into each other, and this will happen very quickly.
[Answer]
This sort of configuration may be possible if the smaller planet is located at the L1 or L2 [Lagrange point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) of the larger. I doubt this would work out in real life (and haven't done the math to determine how close or far apart they'd need to be if it did), but, fortunately, Warhammer 40k is not a scientifically rigorous setting, so you can probably get away with simply invoking Lagrange points along with a bit of handwavium to stabilize that configuration.
Also, technically, the planets would be tide-locked to their shared sun, not to each other, but the practical effect would be the same as what you're looking for.
[Answer]
If the two planets are close to the same size, it would be possible to give them each a relative velocity such that neither is technically orbiting the other, but rather both are orbiting a point in space between the two. Such an orbit could easily be stable as long as there aren't too many other large bodies passing by, and the planets would tend to become tidally locked to each other over time. To my knowledge, we haven't seen any planets arranged like this yet, but there are binary star systems with such a configuration.
With a bit of juggling of the math, and the mass of the star and the planets you could probably find a point where the orbital period of the two planets around their common point matched the orbital period around the sun, leading to one being in perpetual (or near perpetual) shade. Mental approximations of the math, however, make me think that you'd likely end up with some combination of the planets being too light or the star too heavy for such planets to support terrestrial conditions. (I think you'd end up being 1/8th the mass of Earth per planet to do this with a sun-type star at 1AU and the second planet roughly as far away as our moon.) So the previously-suggested halo orbit is probably the more believable (albeit less stable) option.
If terrestrial conditions aren't required, then you can just look up the basic orbital mechanics equations on Wikipedia. First calculate the orbital period of your desired planetary set, and then see how far from your desired stellar mass you'd have to put it to make the periods match. (You can adjust the surface gravity of the planets more-or-less independently of their mass by adjusting their density, just keep in mind that density is based on what they're made of, and a solid ball of uranium wouldn't be conducive to supporting life.)
Do keep in mind that, if the outer planet really is always completely in the shade, it's going to get really cold. Like, nitrogen snow kind of cold. Calculating how much of the outer planet would actually be shaded can be done from the relative diameters of the sun and the inner planet and their distance for the shape of the inner planet's shadow, and the distance between the two planets for what diameter that shadow will be when it gets to the other planet. You probably want at least some sunshine, or else your people will have to live around the terminator of the inner planet instead.
[Answer]
There is a non-orbital solution as well. We've not got the technology to build it but 40k is considerably more advanced in many ways.
Have the larger planet orbiting at it's natural orbit.
Have the smaller planet orbiting in the shadow of the larger one further away from the larger planet.
As already discussed there is a problem with this, they will drift apart.
Embed a tether made of unobtanium through the cores of both planets and through space between them. That tether is strong enough to stop them from drifting apart. They now orbit as a joint unit. You would need to arrange the dynamics so that they hold the same position relative to each other (good thing you wanted tidally locked) and keep a modest tension on the tether.
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Starting with about 500 humans and allowing for 900 years to pass, about how many people would there be at the end? (Just asking for a rough estimate, maybe a range.) Assuming:
1. People are generally in good health, drink clean water and eat well.
2. People naturally live to around 60.
3. Contraceptives and abortions don't exist.
4. Incest isn't a problem.
5. No wars, minimal violent crime.
And what other factors might affect the end number? I know I've got to be missing some important ones.
[Answer]
Others have looked at this from various theoretical points of view. I want to look at it from the point of view of our own Earth's history, and what would be the impact if your population followed the same growth rate seen on Earth. Do note that for the purposes of this answer, I am ignoring the [minimum viable population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population); in the real world, that's something you'd have to consider, and your [500 humans might not be large enough starting out](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/3/29 "What is the minimum human population necessary for a sustainable colony?") *particularly* if they aren't [selected based on genetic criteria for a maximally genetically diverse population](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3/what-is-the-minimum-human-population-necessary-for-a-sustainable-colony/7#comment36_7) and that diversity is carefully managed and monitored.
[The Real Population Problem](https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-population-problem/) on the blog *Do The Math* comes in handy, as it gives population graphs and growth rates for the human population during different eras in a convenient form. The numbers are basically (all numbers are approximate, obviously):
* From 10000 BC to 3000 BC: about 0.03% *population growth per year*
* From 1000 AD to 1700 AD: about 0.12% per year
* From 1700 AD to 1870 AD: about 0.41% per year
* From 1870 AD to 1950 AD: about 0.82% per year
* From 1950 AD to 2000 AD: about 1.7% per year
[Here is an alternative graph](https://history.stackexchange.com/a/17468/251 "Yearly population growth rate throughout history") (Kremer and Vermillion) which shows the period 2500 BC to 2000 AD. Notice the negative population growth around 1300 AD, and that it dips to right around zero on several occasions. The dip around 1300 AD might be explainable by [the beginnings of the Little Ice Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age) and [the Bubonic plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubonic_plague), although strictly speaking that is speculation on my part.
The thesis posed in the Do The Math post to explain the jumps in growth rate is:
>
> We can perhaps attribute the 1700 jump to the Renaissance and scientific progress. We learned to wash our hands after wrestling with our pigs, and that diseases were not caused by bad vapors conjured by impure thoughts. The jump around 1870 corresponds to the Industrial Revolution, in which coal transformed the production of steel (providing agricultural tools), rail transport of commodities, and began to mechanize agriculture in a limited way. 1950 marks the Green Revolution: full-scale petrolification of agriculture, accompanied by massive fertilizer campaigns using natural gas as the chemical feedstock.
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> This leads to a rather simple thesis: the surplus energy presented to us by fossil fuels allowed us to feed people more easily the world over. The bounty of fossil-fuel-turned-food encouraged an explosion in birth rates, as happens for virtually all organisms given similar circumstances. It’s so blindingly obvious that I am embarrassed to have belabored the point as long as I have.
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We can also use these numbers to answer your question with a reasonable degree of accuracy. For example, for a Middle Ages level society, the human population will grow at about 0.12% every year on average. (If you want this to be realistic, don't forget to throw in the occasional boom year as well as the occasional plague or die-off due to a few years of crop failure!) Starting with 500 humans and letting 900 years pass, we end up with $$ 500 \times 1.0012^{900} \approx 1471 $$ or let's round that off to 1,500 humans. Not a whole lot. Under those conditions, your colony is extremely vulnerable to die-off; a single serious disease can easily take out a large fraction of your entire population.
If instead we use the current era, during which we have gone to the Moon, (even human) spaceflight is so routine that it often isn't reported in the news, energy has been plentiful, intercontinental travel and trade is something the world could barely survive without, and so on, then the same calculation becomes $$ 500 \times 1.017^{900} \approx 1.94 \times 10^9 $$ or just under two billion people.
The above calculations assume no significant leaps in technology or society during the interim period as described by the blog post. For a reasonably developed society and over such a long period of time, this appears an unrealistic assumption. If we instead take the 900 year period from 1100 AD to 2000 AD and use the above figures, then the calculation becomes slightly more involved, but significantly more realistic.
* 600 years from 1100 AD to 1700 AD at 0.12%: $ 500 \times 1.0012^{600} \approx 1027 $
* 170 years from 1700 AD to 1870 AD at 0.41%: $ 1027 \times 1.0041^{170} \approx 2059 $
* 80 years from 1870 AD to 1950 AD at 0.82%: $ 2059 \times 1.0082^{80} \approx 3957 $
* 50 years from 1950 AD to 2000 AD at 1.7%: $ 3957 \times 1.017^{50} \approx 9192 $
for a final population of about 9,200 people. Frankly this sounds low, but that's part of the problem with the exponential function: it works slowly at first and with small inputs, then takes to the skies when the input grows. Note that the first doubling took about 600 years, whereas the last doubling happened in less than 50 years.
You can plug these equations into a spreadsheet and play with the numbers to see if you can get the effect you are after. For example, if instead of starting with 500 people at year 1100 AD we start with 10,000 people and calculate over the same period, the result becomes quite different:
* 600 years from 1100 AD to 1700 AD at 0.12%: $ 10000 \times 1.0012^{600} \approx 20535 $
* 170 years from 1700 AD to 1870 AD at 0.41%: $ 20535 \times 1.0041^{170} \approx 41170 $
* 80 years from 1870 AD to 1950 AD at 0.82%: $ 41170 \times 1.0082^{80} \approx 79125 $
* 50 years from 1950 AD to 2000 AD at 1.7%: $ 79125 \times 1.017^{50} \approx 183807 $
The population grows by the same factor in both cases (about 18x) but since the starting population size is larger, the resulting population also obviously is larger.
Looking at your median age at death of 60 years, we can also look at [life expectancy variation over time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time) and conclude that this is similar to a [Medieval Britain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_in_the_Middle_Ages) (approximately 500 - 1500 AD) level of society (at age 21, life expectancy was to a total age of 64 years). Our handy-dandy table above doesn't include specific figures covering that period, but around 0.1% population growth per year appears to be a reasonable extrapolation based on the data we do have. That also appears to match reasonably well with [the Kremer and Vermillion graph](https://history.stackexchange.com/a/17468/251 "Yearly population growth rate throughout history") posted on the History Stack Exchange. In the present day, [we see such life expectancies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Esperanza_de_vida.PNG) primarily in Africa south of the equator, and slightly longer life expectancies in Russia, including Asian Russia. The effect of diseases on life expectancy is [particularly pronounced in Africa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Regional_variations), however; according to World Health Organization data as quoted on Wikipedia, the life expectancy in Botswana and Zimbabwe would more than *double* were it not for HIV/AIDS. Current day countries which have [a life expectancy of exactly 60 years at birth are Kenya, Rwanda and Afghanistan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy) (again WHO data, dated 2012). Perhaps interestingly, neither of these show a large difference between genders; they are all listed as 59 years for men and 61 years for women.
It is also important to keep in mind that the population growth rate is going to be heavily impacted by culture as well. If the culture is one that encourages people to have lots of children, the overall population growth rate obviously goes up; if the culture actively or passively encourages people to have fewer children (as for example is the case with [China's family planning policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy)), the number will be lower or could even lead to a population decrease over time. A population that reduces in size over the long haul is obviously not sustainable, but in extreme situations it could become necessary to take such measures in order to avoid even worse consequences of resource overshoot. The culture can also, of course, change over time; 900 years is a fairly long time for any society when looking at it in terms of a human lifespan.
You can decide on population growth rates for different periods and perform the same types of calculations yourself to get population sizes even down to per year if you are so inclined. If you do, I encourage you to make sure that there are die-offs as well; there *are* going to be years when quite a number of people die, especially in a society that doesn't have access to the advanced health care technology of today, and those are going to make a major dent in the population curve. For further added realism, consider demographics as well (maybe it is a disease that kills off the young more than the adults; also considering that you don't have many people who are actually *old*). The effects of such a die-off could last for decades before the population pyramid is somewhat back in shape.
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From looking into my Crystal Ball - no, that's not Wikipedia on my laptop, now pay attention here - the answer to your question would be 'virtually any amount'. If you look at historical populations. (ok, fine, [I admit it](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)), particularly about half way down the page, you can see a list of estimated human populations through history. In 2000 BC, the estimated world population was 27 million. 1000 years later, 50 million. That's less than a 2 fold increase. And from year 1AD to 1000, it went 200 to 265 million - it didn't even double. But from 1000AD to 2000... it went from 265 million to 6 billion. A huge increase.
From that, you can see the range over 900 years might be from somewhere between virtually no increase in population, to 25 times or more. Obviously when talking human history you have wars and plagues to deal with. So you might raise the projections if your world doesn't have them. And technology - particularly medical technology - is an important factor. If people die after catching the sniffles, its going to have a serious impact on population growth.
My recommendation is to find a year range in that chart that best represents your world's level of development, and work from that as your base guess, adjusting as desired. You gave a life expectancy of 60, so you might base your estimates around real world population increases from when the real-world's life expectancy was 60.
Other factors might include available land/resources - is it a tough life or not? Also wealth, culture, luxury (modern 'western' nations have lower birth rates than other areas of the world).
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Your question is quite general so I'll try to give you a range.
The **absolute maximum** would probably involve an industrial baby farm type system, where the limit is basically a woman's fertility (since even with only a few men there would be plenty of sperm). If you always have 50% women then you start with 250 of them. Let's say every woman can have 1 baby a year, every year, for 50 years of her life. This leads to an absurdly high population of at least 10^32, which would be impossible once you take into account environmental effects.
A more reasonable system where everyone has a large family:
Suppose everyone pairs up when they're 20 and has 6 children, who also grow up til they're 20, pair up and have 6 children then die, turning 2 people into 6 people. Every 20 years your population multiplies by 3. Simply enough, after 900 = 45\*20 years you have a population of 500\*3^45 = 1.48\*10^24, or **1.48 million billion billion**. Still ridiculous.
A more likely scenario:
Couples have on average 2.4 children. That's a population increase by a factor of 1.2 every generation. Again, assuming the generation is about 20 years, that's 500\*1.2^45 = 1,828,630 or **1.83 million**, a much more reasonable figure. That's probably your best estimate.
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Assuming no wars or serious plagues, anywhere from 0 to 18 quadrillion – or more.
If each couple has an average of four children, at about the age of twenty, then after 900 years the population will be 17,592,000,000,000,000. If each couple has an average of one child, at the age of twenty, humanity will end in about 250 years.
The problem with the 18 quadrillion estimate is the lack of land and resources. [live science](http://www.livescience.com/16493-people-planet-earth-support.html) theorizes that the Earth can support a population of up to 10 billion, long-term. If people will completely ignore sustainability, I'd guess that the limit is about 100 billion.
However, if technology improves significantly, or many other planets are colonized, than 18 quadrillion is plausible. In fact, you could go even higher – a nontillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) people is doable with just six children per family.
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Typical population growth assuming no limiting factors is roughly 1.7%. This is based on modern population growth I copied from Michael Kjörlings answer. The real maximum could be higher, maximum measured in the real world was 2.1%.
But here is the really important part: In practice the population growth has always been limited by some other factor. If you want to find out a plausible rate of population growth, you have to actually find out what is limiting the growth and derive the rate from that.
For most of history, until industrialization or so, population was limited by available food. When access was gained to new resources, more food, population could increase rapidly, but otherwise population would be relatively stable or even decline due to decreased acricultural productivity. Soil quality in acricultural areas would decline significantly due to erosion and, on irrigated areas, salinity. During antiquity and medieval times until the black death people actually considered world to be full, which had significant effects on society.
In urbanized societies where a significant parts of population lived in areas of high population density and trade was a significant factor disease would become significant factor. More in the form of occasional drops from epidemics than from adding a limit beyond the limits of available food. The drops would have an effect in the long term population growth, so for a period of 900 years you need to consider the level of medical technology and sanitation. Also a small starting population might cause an increase in the level of genetic disease, which could affect the growth for the first few centuries.
In modern societies social effects have become a major limiting factor on population growth. Even in societies where food is plentiful people postpone having children and choose not to have large families. This is essentially a life style choice. In other countries people are encouraged to have smaller families to prevent poverty and improve resource management.
From the parameters you give the colonists would seem to have a decent level of technology. So the limiting factor on the population growth would probably be the rate they can increase the available resources and expand their infrastructure. This could be close to that 2% mark, even above if the society is really focused on growing. Lack of contraceptives implies they would be, but that might not be sustainable over 900 years. Fast population growth without contraceptives or abortions would be pretty harsh on women. As such the limiting factor is probably going to be social. Note that the time women spend having children is time they can't contribute to increasing the available resources, so it would probably be counter-productive to reduce women into baby-making machines. Not to mention it would add an flavor you might not want into the society.
The rule given in GURPS Space: "On a wholly earth-like planet, with medical technology of at least TL5, a human population will increase by a factor of 10 every 100 years, up to the maximum population for the planet." This fits what I wrote above (giving independent confirmation) and gives a very simple formula, that is roughly equivalent of 2.3% growth a year. Which seems bit high, but given that I expected the number to be something slightly over 2% not implausible. The formula gives final population of 500,000,000,000. Essentially this means that provided that the colony becomes stable within the first century, it can grow to fill the maximum supported population of your planet.
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"Reasonable" depends of cultural expectations.
If you go for the max:
With in-vitro fertilization, you can select gender.
Female is fertile until 40 (increased chance of genetic defects). So let's assume 20 daughters and single son per generation, and 20 years per generation = 450 generations, and all females are fertile and willing to breed.
Each woman from your starting population can have 20\*\*450 descendants. FYI that is approximately 2.9 followed by 585 zeroes. 2.9e+585 That's quite a lot mouths to feed. You will need huge robot army to work millions of solar systems all over galaxy. And they will be crowded.
Without IVF, if we assume 10 daughters per generation, you have 10\*\*450 per original female.
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Assuming a **Doubling** of the Population every 27.5 years (the medium Human Generation Time) with 32.72 Doublings from the original 500 will grow to 3,537,296,484,444 without me taking the time to calculate the exact population by only subtracting the deaths.
But let's use the 1 Year Growth Rate the numbers are:
1. **1%:** 3,874,417
2. **2%:** 2,748,6825,799
3. **3%:** 178,843,120,520,152
And then it just gets stupid.....
Doubling the Population calculated by Generation Times result in:
1. **10 years:** 618,970,019,642,690,137,449,562,112,000
2. **25 years:** 34,359,738,368,000
3. **27.5 years (as above):** 3,537,296,484,444
4. **30 yeas:** 524,288,000
5. **50 years:** 131,072,000
Again, I did not calculate death-rates.
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As a preface, let me apologize to knowledgeable people if things I say make them wince, I have no genetics or virology background whatsoever and my science-speak is taken straight from Wikipedia.
The lore of my setting has a virus (man-made, neurological effects, near-100% fatality rate) wipe out most of humanity, and stay permanently present in the environment by becoming endemic to some animal species. However, I need this virus to have become virtually nonexistent for humans by the time my story starts, with the main goal of having let the world population bounce back a bit (not much, we're talking about Ancient Age levels, tops.)
For this purpose, I'm exploring the possibility of the virus' weakness being a rare gene, that would make it unable to survive in its host and quickly disappear before it's done any real damage. This gene would follow an autosomal dominant inheritance pattern, so that it eventually "takes over" completely as non-carriers die out while every carrier is guaranteed to pass it down to the next generation, effectively erradicating the virus among humans after some time and becoming the main reason they didn't actually go extinct.
Problem is that viruses mutate, quite fast, and I have no idea how much of a "fundamental" effect genes have over the ability of viruses to survive in a host — whether it could credibly be too much of an obstacle for mine to overcome, or if it'd just be like "aight" drop a new version of itself and finish the job. Any enlightenment on the matter would be appreciated.
As a plan B, if I'm allowed to ask a quick follow-up question: is there any technical reason that would have prevented the designers of the virus to purposefully make it unable to mutate?
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Very credible.
The thing is that when a virus mutates, it does not stay the same in more than its specific vulnerability to a gene. It, for instance, becomes less lethal and less harmful. This is an advantage for it. It can spread farther because more people who catch it can have contact with other people rather than have to take to their beds, or die. It is very common for all diseases to grow less deadly even as the population that can contract it grows more resistant.
There are hypotheses that measles might have made the leap to a human disease (from rinderpest, a cattle disease) several times and burned itself out all but the last. Your disease can likewise remain in the animal population.
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Obviously that depends on the gene, but there's no reason they can't have a completely fundamental impact on how the virus functions. The classic example is malaria, which infects blood cells. If you have one copy of the sickle-cell gene, it modifies your blood cells such that the virus can't infect them. (If you have two copies, you get anemia, so it's not all roses. There's often a trade-off involved in biology.) In theory the virus could mutate to get around this, but at that point it would be a totally different virus with a different method of action.
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Yes. Mutating isn't something viruses *intend* to do, it's a side effect of the limited fidelity of protein replication. Every living thing makes these transcription and replication errors when creating new proteins, but they have enzymes whose job it is to police the output and break down any proteins that don't look right. Viruses don't have that extra protection, and may even have to bypass it.
(As an aside, there are certain organisms, bacteria mainly, that can deliberately shut off this machinery when under stress; they increase their rate of mutation "on purpose" as a way of potentially striking on something to overcome the stressor.)
You can try to provide some protection against your engineered virus mutating by making sure that common mutations in or near its active areas lead to a non-viable virus. (It's more accurate to say that it will still mutate, but those mutations won't have a chance to spread before they die out.) However, there's a practical limit to how much you can do this, and there's always the chance of multiple mutations arising at once and canceling out the intended killswitch, or a mutation in a part of the virus that wasn't active but is now, or what have you. Viruses are complex little beasts, and it's not always possible to predict what they'll do.
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Do the opposite. Virus is so deadly because it uses some cellular mechanism or some sort of protein. It cannot do any damage if the person lacks that particular gene. This way, the dealiness of the virus is tied to that particular gene and it cannot reasonably mutate while still being that deadly. It can survive in animals that have weakened immunity and animals will be fine as they lack the gene completely.
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### This has already happened IRL
Genetic encoding have a way to defend against these viruses. An organism may develop a epigenetic lock on the viral DNA (after transpilation from its RNA, if necessary), making it inert.
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Since further infections would need to use the same loci, the organism with such epigenetic lock becomes immune to the virus. Also, mutations in the viral code may render it inert. It's DNA, so it is not immune to mutation.
Human DNA have a lot of viral code that is dormant or mutated into oblivion.
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Your virus has infected the population and killed a lot. Ancient humans on Earth suffered it several times. Then the virus code was deactivated by either epigenetics or mutation. The virus cannot infect the immune population, and becomes extinct. It becomes integrated to the creature's genome but serves no purpose.
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I am trying to imagine a scenario where, on an abandoned terraformed planet, decapod crustaceans (more specifically, carideans such as shrimp) evolve lungs and colonise the land as insects have done. However, possessing lungs, they can grow to far larger sizes, with the largest growing to the size of moose, (but no larger because of their exoskeleton’s weight limit).
What I am bothered about is this: how could a crustacean evolve lungs? Seeing as they lack swim bladders and therefore having nothing for lungs to evolve *from.*
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[Crustacean lungs have already evolved](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branchiostegal_lung).
This is a solved problem, as there are already numerous air breathing crab species, such as coconut and hermit crabs.
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I’m looking to create a situation where there are 3 habitable planets (or moons) in the same system, each with different inhospitable but habitable (by genetically modified humans or humans using supportive technology) environments.
I’ve been roughly basing it on the TRAPPIST-1 system, as it has 4 planets in the habitable zone, but I don’t know if there is a simpler way to have 3 habitable but different environments in relatively close proximity (maybe using moons)?
I thought there could maybe be artificial magnetosphere generators to protect the planets from solar flares (maybe something like this? <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521005099> ), although maybe the worst of the flares would not affect the planets ( <https://phys.org/news/2021-08-superflares-exoplanets-previously-thought.html> )
**Planet A (closest to the sun, based loosely on TRAPPIST 1d)**
Terrestrial planet with orbit of 4 days
Tidally Locked
Eyeball Planet
Closest to Star, so hot and barren on star side, water on night side (flowing sea under ice cap).
0.6 earth mass (in reality Trappist 1d is 0.3 earth mass, so not sure how this change will things)
Life is possible around the terminator (I thought of maybe cloud cover to increase the habitable zone, but apparently that may make it too dark for photosynthesis <https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2013/07/05/red-dwarfs-clouds-in-the-habitable-zone/> ).
Requires terraforming to create atmosphere.
**Planet B (second closest to the sun, based very loosely on TRAPPIST 1e)**
Terrestrial planet with orbit of 6 days
0.8 earth mass
Kind of like a dim earth
I would prefer that the last two planets are not tidally locked, and apparently the presence of an atmosphere avoid tidal locking ( [https://physicsworld.com/a/exoplanets-could-avoid-tidal-locking-if-they-have-atmospheres/#:~:text=For%20example%2C%20a%20planet%20orbiting,and%20liquid%20water%20can%20exist](https://physicsworld.com/a/exoplanets-could-avoid-tidal-locking-if-they-have-atmospheres/#:%7E:text=For%20example%2C%20a%20planet%20orbiting,and%20liquid%20water%20can%20exist). ), so ideally this planet is not tidally locked as it already has an atmosphere (though I don’t know if a thin earth like atmosphere would be sufficient in this case?) Also, at the end of this article it mentions that *“the close-in worlds of small stars face other challenges. For example, a planet near its star speeds through space quickly, as Mercury does, so asteroids and comets can smash into the world so fast they may eject its atmosphere”*, so perhaps some additional shielding would be required?
**Planet C (third closest to the sun, based very loosely on TRAPPIST 1f/g)**
Orbit of 8 days
Largest at 1.2 earth mass
Has atmosphere so not tidally locked.
Maybe like an ice world, but not too extreme, so still habitable (though maybe not possible to grow plants on the surface)
I am a complete beginner to both worldbuilding and astronomy, so any input would be greatly appreciated!
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It's totally possible: already in our solar system the habitable zone, that is the region of space where the energy flow granted by the star is sufficient to keep water liquid, span between the orbits of Venus and Mars, with Earth in the middle.
That both Venus and Mars are not habitable at the moment depends on their atmosphere: Venus has a too high greenhouse effect while Mars has not enough of it. You therefore need just to be careful with balancing the stellar radiance and the atmosphere composition to ensure that you are in the sweet spot for habitability.
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[Double planet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_planet) though rare is a distinct possibility! even though the 2 planets move though the same habitable zone they need not, indeed probably do not, have the same climate or biosphere.
This will negate any need for cramming 3 separate orbits into a small habitable zone. Not to mention an interesting stage on which to play out some interesting questions with how such closely spaced biospheres possibly could interact.
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/different inhospitable but habitable (by genetically modified humans or humans using supportive technology) environments.
... if there is a simpler way to have 3 habitable but different environments in relatively close proximity/
**Same planet.**
The original colonists dug in and made subterranean dwellings, putting to use the extensive cave systems on that planet. These are the least modified of your humans and their civilization is the oldest. They think it is the largest too, and the best.
Later colonists are modified to live in the above ground atmosphere. They find the underworld claustrophobic but find the people down there to be very good looking. You underworlders find the toplands hellish but think the people there are impressive and capable. There is exchange between these people as well as friendly rivalry.
A third wave of colonists lives on and under the oceans. They are the most modifed of all and the first two groups sometimes don't think of them as still being human; there is suggestion that they are not modified like the first two, but crossbred with something else. These people are hard for the first two to communicate with. Sometimes these can also be found in flying habitats.
There may be a fourth group. If so, they are very decentralized. Most interactions with this group are by way of rumor and stories to tell children to keep them from going into dangerous places. This fourth group might actually be the first group, relics of a very early wave of colonizaton in a day when human modification techniques were decidedly different.
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The simplest way to have several habitable planets is to have them all about the same size and atmosphere and all about the same distance from the sun.
Since we only know about [one habitable planet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth) your planets should be similar in temperature and atmosphere to Earth.
You can go 20 degrees in either direction of course since that sort of variation already exists on Earth. This will give different environments. You can also fiddle with the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere since this also changes in high altitudes and has been much higher in Earth's history.
To stop the planets interfering wit each other too much, just push the colder one further away from the sun and give it a stronger greenhouse effect. Likewise pull the hot planet closer to the sun and give it a weaker greenhouse effect.
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If you want three rather hostile but still naturally habitable planets in your system, you might want to find out what the limits of planetary habitability for humans are, in order to create planets within but close to thsoe limits.
In that case you might want to study *Habitable Planets for Man*, Stephen H. Dole, 1964.
<https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/commercial_books/2007/RAND_CB179-1.pdf>
Sean Raymond's blog PlanetPlanet.net has a section Ultimate Solar System where he tries designing planetary systems with as many habitable planets as possible.
[https://planetplanet.net/the-ultimate-solar-system/](https://planetplanet.net/2014/05/21/building-the-ultimate-solar-system-part-3-choosing-the-planets-orbits/)
At the present time nobody knows how common planetary systems with one habitable planet are, or planetary systems with two habitable planets, or sysems with three habitable planets, and so on with higher numbers of habitable planets.
But suppose that there was a giant planet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star - some have been found in habitable zones - and that giant planet had moons. It would be possible that some of the moons would be large enough, say at least as large as Mars, to be habitable.
I believe in various posts Sean Raymond considers it possible for a giant planet in the habitable zone of its star to have up to five giant and habitable moons.
How many planetary orbits can fit within the habitable zone of a star? That depends onf the mass of the star, the masses of the planets, and the spacing of the planetary orbits. It also depends on how wide the habitable zone of the star is.
So to find out how wide the habitable zone of a star is, we have to find out how luminous the star is compared to the Sun. Then it should be a simple calculation to calculate the inner and outer edges of the star's habitable zone.
But there is not a great deal of agreement about the inner and outer limits of the Sun's habitable zone. The chart here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar\_habitable\_zone#Solar\_System\_estimates](https://planetplanet.net/2014/05/21/building-the-ultimate-solar-system-part-3-choosing-the-planets-orbits/)
Lists about a dozen different estimations or calculations of the inner or outer edges, or both, of the Sun's circumstellar habitable zone. And some of them differ greatly from others in how wide the zone is and thus in how many planetary orbits could be expected to be in the zone.
From what I see Raymond probably uses the estimate of Kasting et al in 1993, which is commonly used, and probably uses their optimistic habitable zone instead of their conservative habitable zone.
In this post:
<https://planetplanet.net/2014/05/21/building-the-ultimate-solar-system-part-3-choosing-the-planets-orbits/>
Raymond says that more low mass planets can fit into the habitable zone of the star he chose to use than high mass planets can.
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> SUMMARY: The right orbits is the configuration that can squeeze the most planets into the habitable zone. Small planets can be squished tighter than large ones. We can fit 14 of our smallest planets in the habitable zone of our chosen star, or 7 Earth-sized planets, but only 3-4 of our largest (10 Earth mass) planets.
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So when starting out to design an ultimate solar system with as many planets as possible in the Habitable zone, Raymond claims that 7 Earth sized planets could be fit into the habitable zone.
A writer might wonder whether a gas giant planet in the habitable zone could really have as many as 5 Earth mass moons habitable moons orbiting it in stable orbits. It is possible that a giant planet could not possibly have more than 2 habitable moons, for example, which would mean that if you wanted three habitable worlds in your system you would have to fit in the orbit of an Earth size planet into the star's habitable zone as well as the orbit of the giant planet.
So if you intend to write about 3 semi habitable moons of a giant planet in the habitable zone of your star, you might want to research many scientific papers about the possibility of havitable exomoons. For example, I have read that calculations show that a habitable exomoon would have to orbit between 5 and 20 planetary radii from the center of the planet, and probably only a few giant exomoons could orbit the same planet within that range.
And if you want to write about three semi habitable planets orbiting the same star in different orbits, you might worry whether the Sun's habitable zone is as wide as some calculations suggest or very narrow A writer wanting a story where no star has more than 1 human habitable world would want to choose a very narrow calculated habitable zone for the Sun to base the habitable zone for his star on.
So some careful writers might want to study the reasons for different calculations of the habitable zone of the Sun, to see which one is most convincing to them, and hope that it will be wide enough to allow three separate planetary orbits.
If you find that you believe all solar systems have habitable zones so narrow they can't possibly have more than one planetary orbit in the habitable zone, you might want to try what Rayomond suggests in this post:
<https://planetplanet.net/2017/05/03/the-ultimate-engineered-solar-system/>
Or here:
<https://planetplanet.net/2020/11/19/cohorts/>
[https://planetplanet.net/the-ultimate-solar-system/ [2](https://planetplanet.net/2014/05/21/building-the-ultimate-solar-system-part-3-choosing-the-planets-orbits/): <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone#Solar_System_estimates>
[Answer]
One interesting way to fit more planets into a habitable zone is to have two planets in *almost* identical orbits that swap orbits with each other. Saturn's moons [Epimetheus and Janus](https://www.planetary.org/articles/janus-epimetheus-swap) do this. They move at different speeds and when they start to get to close to each other, their mutual gravitational attraction will alter their speeds enough to knock them (more or less) into each other's orbit. The process repeats in reverse when one laps the other and catches back up with it. The ratios for mass, orbital radius, etc. have to be just right for it to work, but it's definitely possible.
[Answer]
What you have set up here is definitely plausible! My only concern would be the challenges posed by living on a tidally locked planet, but it sounds like your civilization has the technology to make that possible.
If you don't want to have three different planets, but would still like three different environments, moons are a good idea. Perhaps humans could inhabit three different moons of a large gas giant similar to Jupiter or Saturn.
[Answer]
I think gas giants in the habitable could potentially have quite a few moons with habitable conditions. Titan has a thicker atmosphere than earth, it is just far too cold for us because Saturn is so far out.
They would also be realtively close to each other which would be a huge help in planet hopping. I don't think our exoplanet finding capabilities extends to the moons of gas giants, but I haven't looked into it.
] |
[Question]
[
Humans can see 3 colors, sometimes we can see more one color at the same time, this creates
7 variations of colors and a few million different shades of those same 7 colors.
blue, red, green = mix them and you get : white, black, purple, yellow.
Any other colors like brown or magenta or pink, are just different shades, some clearer some darker, turn off the light in your room and something that reflects red or orange light will turn brown. Want to turn yellow into orange? well to get yellow you mix red and green, add more red to make it darker.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/05hGS.png)
**Question**
this is about creature design, I need to know if to see different colors, more colors than we already see and not just more shades of those 7 colors but more base colors. Like blue+green+red+something\_else. Do we need different eyes or a different brain, maybe both? Could some type of technology enable their users see more colors without changing their brains? I'm thinking about a colorblind species that can see way more colors than humans after wearing a special pair of googles, would it be possible? This is not a secondary question but a continuation of the main question, if colours are in the brain and not the eyes, does that mean that colours don't really exist and that the world is actually just shades of grey and our brain creates those artificial different colors to better help us distinguish those shades of grey?
[Answer]
**What is "see"? Could it be "perceive?"**
In humans it is possible for perception types to overlap. This is synesthesia.
<https://www.webmd.com/brain/what-is-synesthesia>
>
> The word "synesthesia" has Greek roots. It translates to “perceive
> together.”...
>
>
> One of the most common responses is to see letters, numbers, or sounds
> as colors. You might also:
>
>
> * See or hear a word and taste food
> * See a shape and taste food
> * Hear
> sounds and see shapes or patterns
> * Hear sounds after you smell a
> certain scent
> * Hear sounds and taste food
> * Feel an object with your
> hands and hear a sound
>
>
> It can be an annoyance. Children say it can make reading tricky when
> they see colors that other people don’t. If you have taste-related
> synesthesia, it can be startling when a bad taste comes on suddenly.
> But most synesthetes see their condition as a sixth sense, not a
> drawback.
>
>
>
Your colorblind aliens have smell, taste and hearing similar to ours. When they wear Jordy's visor to see colors, the visor taps into those other sensory modalities so their brains can make sense of them.
This has the added immense benefit of you being able to convey the sensations to your readers, because prose is full of words for sensory perceptions beyond color, and you can use all of them.
---
"How do I look?" She did a pirouette.
Buj peered through the visor. "Like... cinnamon?" it ventured. "And cowbell. And burning pizza."
She paused. "Is that good?"
[Answer]
Tetrachromacy can happen in [humans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans) already
>
> People with two X chromosomes could possess multiple cone cell pigments, perhaps born as full tetrachromats who have four simultaneously functioning kinds of cone cell, each type with a specific pattern of responsiveness to different wavelengths of light in the range of the visible spectrum. One study suggested that 15% of the world's women might have the type of fourth cone whose sensitivity peak is between the standard red and green cones, giving, theoretically, a significant increase in color differentiation.
>
>
> In humans, preliminary visual processing occurs in the neurons of the retina. It is not known how these nerves would respond to a new color channel, that is, whether they could handle it separately or just combine it in with an existing channel. Visual information leaves the eye by way of the optic nerve; it is not known whether the optic nerve has the spare capacity to handle a new color channel. A variety of final image processing takes place in the brain; it is not known how the various areas of the brain would respond if presented with a new color channel.
>
>
>
It seems that changes would need to happen both in the retina and in the brain to properly process and interpret the additional channel. Which sort of makes sense: attaching a screen to a radio doesn't make a working TV.
[Answer]
## You should study more about how the eye works
[Color](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color) is the result of your brain interpreting signals from the eye. The human eye has photoreceptors that are sensitive to the certain wavelengths of light that we call red, green, and blue. Take a look at [this chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cones_SMJ2_E.svg) from the Wikipedia article on color - it shows how much the different photoreceptors react to a given wavelength of light. As others have mentioned, all colors we see are simply all the various combinations of stimulation levels of our red, green, and blue color photoreceptors.
Consider the color [yellow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow). If you are exposed to light with a wavelength 575–585 nm, your eyes will send a signal to your brain that gets interpreted as seeing something yellow. If you look at the chart again, you'll see that at 575 nm, both the red and green photoreceptors should have a fairly strong reaction. Computers take advantage of this when displaying colors to you - the [RGB value for yellow](https://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/RGB_Color.html) is #FFFF00. For anyone unfamiliar with RGB values, this is interpreted as 255 red, 255 green, 0 blue. So a computer doesn't produce 575 nm light, it gives you a mix of red and green light. The end result is that your red and green photoreceptors both react - the exact same signal for 575 nm light.
So how could someone see new colors? Their brain needs to receive more information. Suppose you had a fourth type of color photoreceptor in your eye sensitive to light between green and blue. Without that fourth kind, a mixture of green and blue (#00FFFF) is interpreted as cyan. With the cyan photoreceptor, you would be able to see more colors - a mixture of green and blue light would strongly stimulate those two photoreceptors and only weakly stimulate the cyan one, while cyan light would strongly stimulate the cyan photoreceptor and weakly stimulate the green and blue ones. This means that your brain would have a way to distinguish between cyan and a mixture of green and blue, and as a result you would see those two scenarios as two different colors.
## Could a colorblind being use something to see more colors than us?
A completely colorblind species would receive a relatively simple signal from their eyes - how much light is coming in. To see more colors than us, they would need to receive more information than us. Their eyes are not suited for this task. Special goggles can't fix this.
If you're thinking about the glasses that humans with certain kinds of colorblindness can use, that's a fundamentally different situation. The short explanation is that those people still have three kinds of color photoreceptors but they overlap even more than normal. The glasses are able to correct for that extra overlap. Again, their eyes are still sending three color signals to the brain.
So in order for the "special goggles" you mentioned to work, they have to bypass the alien's eyes. However they would do it, they'll just send more information to the alien's brain than our eyes do to our brains.
Interpreting that extra information is a separate problem. You could solve it by giving the aliens synesthesia as @Willk suggested - the color information comes through one of their other senses.
You could also solve it via neuroplasticity. When they first wear the special goggles, their brains start receiving information that they don't know how to interpret. Over time their brains learn how to interpret that information. If they're like humans, the younger they are the quicker their brains would be able to adapt.
[Answer]
Color is not a physical quantity. It does not exist in nature. Color is a sensation. It exists only in the mind.
The physical quantity corresponding to the sensation of color is the power spectrum of light; just as the physical quantity corresponding to the sensation of pitch is (roughly speaking) the fundamental frequency of the sound. The relationship between the sensation of color and the physical spectrum of the light is very complicated and depends on many different factors; it also depends on the immediate history.
| Sensation | Physical quantity or quantities |
| --- | --- |
| Pitch | Frequency of the fundamental. (But see [missing fundamental](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental) for a tricky exception.) |
| Loudness | Sound pressure *and* distribution of the sound power in the frequency spectrum. |
| Lightness | Power of the electrmagnetic radiation *and* distribution of the power in the spectrum. |
| Color | Distribution of power in the spectrum *and* spatial distribution of the light *and* immediate history of the observer. |
So, obviously, to see more colors, whatever that means, you need both different eyes (so that they produce a richer set of signals from the spectrum of light) *and* a different brain (so that those signals can be interpreted).
About [15% percent of women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans) have eyes which can produce four different fundamental color signals. (That's because it so happens that one of the photosensitive proteins responsible for color vision is encoded on the X chromosome; women have two X chromosomes, and one of them, chosen randomly, is shut down in each and every cell of the body.) But only very few of them have the corresponding brain and mind structures to make use of the four different signals.
---
And the idea that there are specifically seven colors and the rest are shades is not necessarily true, because the number of basic colors is a cultural construct. (Remember that color does not exist in nature, it exists only in the mind. And the minds of humans are very strongly influenced by the surrounding culture.)
Some languages have fewer than seven basic color terms, others have more. For example:
* In Russian there is [no basic word corresponding to what English calls blue](https://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780). In Russian, *goluboy* (sky-blue) and *siniy* (dark blue) are fundamental colors, and they do not overlap; *goluboy* is not a kind of light *siniy*, and *siniy* is not some kind of dark *goluboy*. You simply cannot translate the sentence "I saw a blue car" into Russian without specifying what kind of blue that is. (Isn't the work of a translator fun?)
* There must be something special with blue, because neither Roman Latin nor ancient Greek have words for what English calls blue. Sky-blue, yes. Blue-gray, yes. Blue-green, yes. Blue in general, no.
(In the Middle Ages, Latin was used as an official and high-culture language throughout western Europe. Since all western European languages have a word for blue in general, usually derived from the Germanic *\*blāu*, Medieval Latin adopted the word [*blavus*](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blavus).)
* Translating colors from ancient Greek into English is an exercise in creativity, because broadly speaking the way ancient Greek names colors is fundamentally different from how English does it. Homer's [*wine-dark sea*](http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2016/01/colours-in-homer-2-wine-dark-sea.html) is a famous example.
In general, there is a very interesting [theory of how color terms develop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate) in a language.
---
[Technically speaking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorimetry), all the colors which can be perceived by the average human can be created by combining three different sources of light; this is the [CIE color space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space). Unfortunately, the three theoretical sources of light of which the combination can produce all colors that can be perceived by the average human have *non physical colors*; one is a blue just a little bluer than the bluest blue which a human can perceive, one is a red redder than the reddest red a human can perceive, and the third is a green very much greener than the greenest green a human can perceive.
In real practice, you need at least four different fundamental colors to recreate (most of) the [color gamut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut) the average human can perceive.
[Answer]
The main component humans use to perceive color is the cones and rods in the eye. [Retina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina) Rods give you black and white vision in low light as the cones give you color vision by converting stimuli from selected light wave lengths to a neuro signal. The selected energy ranges each cone is sensitive to is pretty well defined across the species. Variations of this tend to cause color blindness.
At this point, the eye does little more than that, provide raw data for the brain to use. It is then up to the brain to convert this raw data into useful information.
This process is not an automatic process. You do not just get born, open your eyes and you make sense of the world around you. Once you first open your eyes, your brain gets to work processing this data and over time, it starts assigning certain values to certain information received by the building of neuro connections and synapses. Certain info it process is something like signal from cone 2=x, cone 3=y and rod 4= z => 2x+3y+4z= pink, or something like that and the neurons in your brain from then on out, when they see that combination again, your brain will always think "pink."
Now to address your question, there is several part to this.
To allow the eye to perceive different wave lengths, or to change the signal the retina produces for a given stimuli, you will need a new eye. If the signal 2x+3y+4z produced the raw data of 473.28nm to = pink and you want it to actually be 485nm, then the components in the eye need to be changed, which the way they work is based on genetic code from birth.
Now for the brain to see that 473.28nm signal and call it something else, is probably easier. If the synapsis and neuro pathways get disturbed and you are able to regain such connections, they will not form in the same way. So instead of seeing pink it perceives mauve, you would initially be shocked, but over time you will get use to it.
This change could be caused by trauma to the retina, optical nerve or brain damage. Usually, such trauma, at best usually results in color blindness. Rarely, it could shift the perceived spectra. There is a medical condition, which I am having difficulty finding it right now. Hopefully there is someone here that can find the link to it.
[Answer]
## Colour perception doesn't work like you think.
In particular, magenta, purple and pink exist only in your brain.
The TL;DR is that the ideal average human pair of eyes can only perceive colours within this CIE colour diagram:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3mg9A.png)
(I suggest reading <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space> and related colour theory topics).
As you should be aware, light at a given wavelength produces a single colour. Those are the curve of the diagram. Now, when you have two light sources with different wavelengths, draw a line between their two points in the curve - the perceived colour will be alongside that line (closer to one or the other depending on the intensity).
An sRGB monitor, with its tiny red, green and blue lights, will be able to produce any colour within the triangle in that diagram.
So for creatures that can see into the infrared and ultraviolet (i.e. have receptor cells for infrared and ultraviolet), you should imagine extending that curve downwards; the shape of the curve will depend on the sensitivity of each kind of colour receptor cell.
## Your role model is a shrimp
To see more colours, have more kinds of photorreceptor cells. Let me quote from the [wikipedia article on the Mantis Shrimp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp):
>
> The eyes of the mantis shrimp are mounted on mobile stalks and can move independently of each other. They are thought to have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom and have the most complex visual system ever discovered. Compared with the three types of photoreceptor cells that humans possess in their eyes, the eyes of a mantis shrimp have between 12 and 16 types of photoreceptor cells. Furthermore, some of these shrimp can tune the sensitivity of their long-wavelength colour vision to adapt to their environment. This phenomenon, called "spectral tuning", is species-specific.
>
>
> [...]
>
>
> Mantis shrimp can perceive wavelengths of light ranging from deep ultraviolet (UVB) to far-red (300 to 720 nm) and polarized light. In mantis shrimp in the superfamilies Gonodactyloidea, Lysiosquilloidea, and Hemisquilloidea, the midband is made up of six omatodial rows. Rows 1 to 4 process colours, while rows 5 and 6 detect circularly or linearly polarized light. Twelve types of photoreceptor cells are in rows 1 to 4, four of which detect ultraviolet light.
>
>
> [...]
>
>
> Some species have at least 16 photoreceptor types, which are divided into four classes (their spectral sensitivity is further tuned by colour filters in the retinas), 12 for colour analysis in the different wavelengths (including six which are sensitive to ultraviolet light) and four for analysing polarised light. By comparison, most humans have only four visual pigments, of which three are dedicated to see colour, and human lenses block ultraviolet light. The visual information leaving the retina seems to be processed into numerous parallel data streams leading into the brain, greatly reducing the analytical requirements at higher levels.
>
>
>
The last bit can be also read as: since there's more information leaving the eye and entering the brain, the optic nerve needs to be wider/thicker, which would also mean that the first layers of neurons would be somewhat wider as well. That's arguably the only change required in the brain.
[Answer]
# You need a new vision app to make you a docecachromat or whatever you like.
Imagine you have a standard camera-studded tech toy with accelerometers and thingamajigs so it can keep precise track of where every photoreceptor in your retina is at any given moment. Suppose it also has the ability to project a hologram with blue, neutral green (for rods), green (for green cones) and red lasers. And it can align the dots of this hologram *reliably* with the individual photoreceptors, putting the right color of light on each to set it off. And each one can be turned on or off relative to all the others.
Well, what would happen if you have this as an eye-mounted "appliance"? (rather than making it a pair of bulky glasses, let's say it uses a highly efficient and silent form of solid state flight to fly in formation with the user's head) All the while you wander the world, it is using its *own* sensors to do multi-spectral analysis on every pixel it sees. And it is mapping that information onto individual photoreceptors according to a plan.
You have an individual blue cone, born a blue cone, raised a blue cone ... now it sees a blue laser if an only if you're seeing ultraviolet light from that spot in the visual field. So without changing the protein, you've retroactively made it an *ultraviolet* cone. You've done the same with many different wavelengths. So the user's brain is busy remapping all this data to work as if they had been born with many different colors of cones. This is probably a terrible idea - remapping the retina means abusing the natural network, and I can't swear it will work. The lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus takes in blue cones at one layer, red and green at another ... it was able to handle splitting a yellow cone into green and red at some time in the past, but turning them into many colors might be a stretch. You might reduce visual acuity terribly, or confuse the wiring enough to cause dyslexia (which can be traced to differences in timing at the LGN). Make a note to volunteer someone *else* for the trial run. But if all goes well they will be Multi Spectral Super Soldiers, with all the wetware color recognition of a modern spy satellite. If there are five kif plants growing in an acre of industrial hemp, they'll be able to go rip each one of them out (for future law enforcement training sessions, I'm sure) like they were a different *color* ... because that is what happens, after all, when you mess with the plant's natural sunscreen.
] |
[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.
A future nation wants to make the Moon as bright as possible in order to save massive amounts of night-time electricity on Earth at certain phases of the moon.
The plan is to coat the Moon's surface with a layer of talcum powder. (EDIT or other white powdery substance if talc is unstable on the Moon)
**Question**
Ignoring the logistics of the exercise, and the availability of the white substance, how bright could the sunny side of the moon be and how bright would the night side be compared to now?
---
Please ask for clarifications before answering.
[Answer]
The moon's albedo is around 0.1, meaning it reflects about 10% of the sunlight that hits it, for a peak illuminance of a few tenths of a lux (sources on [albedo](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/the-dirtiest-lunar-mystery-of-all/) and [lux](https://watermark.silverchair.com/atx025.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAArAwggKsBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKdMIICmQIBADCCApIGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQM242v-gSy3OvLRNoIAgEQgIICY0pzsXg2-jXEV3H5_GGb54m-PZTXa8MrO6X8aSE6VryEx6u_mqMHok30_Qx1Cacxsr1MzyKTxaKweTKOqHIZh_pmFf3aqpr5Kygnlbi7qtNYm-RPTKr-Ljr32vKTYUixTZFhrCLKYzWXO2Q2yAoNi_eZa-jVWxCiaS0IhstbohUdOQiBqNRUZOZP8W4DlvaH2xPJMsCMd4f7CnKGQmfVEf_E78Do8Xg0QHhIYKt1jEhwU4qYrRs5WTwTtibVky0q0Benjso2FjhA1P-5tHD0znfUnmJo83AvT_ShXqC4qCO1ezv_fYKSUaZvKTxi834KbZjFDH-P5JvM-8f26VFhtuoTwpTpAP1JPwPIWNH0oRkquKm625FmxXpiAohtP89YTghJtvIi-SrBO9MjaZmZWkrhxgFGzA9EV5Xcrb3LadRp9jN4Q6Rnh4phNO7xHiM3nMZRpv8NSgcDa633T0YWBRUC7vb3W42_ZyXNaYbE8o-uzrzYiJMLaEg_kIhIsHwTMNDizo9n4puO-MhDyt3kMMcoqne_V_yKlGrF6K-DA6_ZtxsRFllPY2jnbMDND-a8IuYJ7P8jpG8X1eQt76-tJ6A0fUlc6anf9DQu04-IGyUyLb-2hCeqYsEjllYLwsBl4chGbhHE2AreB2I9JPaN3m2VLdvM7wCpK9mfAVyGnM07ZmVFTZgwkWiaCtbnL31jgCC6MC_uaBK4IriCgLuwRfDhFU_WrluwEDCL_dWqqYWUCvmjsPFm_wLK3wi2WM6JXqb8IgNsDQ3PH_rEf9F6xyOd_0vxhUwfFNKdH1X8u3D7-YFw)). Even if the moon were a perfect mirror, it would only reflect 10x as much light and would only cast a few lux, making its illuminance during a full moon only a few hundredths of a percent of the sun. A perfect mirror supermoon would barely qualify as emergency lighting, which is normally a few lux. Under the absolute best conditions, a completely reflective moon would have about a third of the illuminance of a typical streetlamp. On average, it will be less than a tenth of a typical streetlamp, making it rather unsuitable as a replacement for electric lights.
Talcum powder will increase the albedo of the moon, but certainly not as much as a mirror finish, so the effect will be extremely modest at best. No amount of increase in the moon's albedo will make it a viable night-time illumination source that can replace electric lighting on its own, as it will never be as bright as a regular street lamp, which is normally 10 lux. Increasing the albedo of the moon will help you see better during the night, but for almost any application where you already have night-time illumination (streets, sidewalks, outdoor events, etc.), you'll *still* need illumination even with a 10x as bright moon. The electricity savings will be small, since there is very little external lighting that becomes unnecessary with a brighter moon (although I suppose you could turn all the electric lights down a few percent if the moon makes up the difference).
EDIT: To summarize the comment chain below, I'm not in any way arguing that the moon is not or could not be a useful illumination source at night. But it will never replace electric lighting, as its illuminance is far below that of electric lights. At best, the moon could produce about 10% of the lighting level that is deemed useful and appropriate for the general public in day-to-day life. Since we're talking about a society that is engaging in planetary-scale projects, I think it's safe to assume its citizens need night-time lighting for more than not tripping over things in the dark (which can be done at mere thousandths of a lux, no moon alterations needed). Anything that requires moderate visual acuity, like making out text or faces or objects quickly or at a distance or while moving will be difficult by moonlight no matter how shiny the moon is.
[Answer]
First of all, for lunar regolith we can neglect reflection and just consider scattering.
[This paper](https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2014/457138/) simulated the scattering properties of the lunar surface, and came to values around 22% of reduced reflectance for incidence angles between 32 and 57 degrees.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/umCZB.jpg)
I haven't been able to find a comparable chart for talcum, beyond generic statement like "talcum is highly reflective" or non normalized spectra, like [this one](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-differences-in-spectral-reflectance-between-talc-carbonates-relatively-higher-and_fig1_235424629)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ByL6X.png)
If we make an assumption that talc is from 2 to 3 times more effective than regolith at scattering light, we get that the talc covered lunar surface would roughly reflect back a similar proportion of light.
Since, according to [this](https://asterism.org/2019/04/12/how-bright-is-the-moon/)
>
> Our Moon’s average visual albedo is 0.12. [...] The full Moon as seen on Earth has a visual magnitude of –12.7
>
>
>
and [considering that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude)
>
> A difference of 1.0 in magnitude corresponds to a brightness ratio of $(100)^{1/5}$ or about 2.512
>
>
>
the talc covered full Moon should be somewhere around -13.7.
[Answer]
## Use your talc for mirrors!
First, contemplate the economics of a future nation. Given that it's the future (not necessarily very *far* in the future), there is one man, the Consumer, who owns all the corporations, minerals, rockets, politicians, religious and charitable foundations, eyeballs, etc. Provided *he* is happy you have more or less 100% market penetration and you can count the project as complete.
Now talc *can* make [flat tabular crystals](https://www.minerals.net/mineral/talc.aspx). These are rare and usually microscopic, though you can find some pretty alleged examples online in an image search (the better looking ones I found were temporary images from auctioned minerals). If you have the resources to resurface the Moon, I imagine converting the silicon dioxide and magnesium from regolith and scarce lunar water into perfectly flat reflective plates of talc, though as some say, there may be better choices.
Once you have covered the Moon in mobile reflective mirrors, pointing at the Sun, someone looking up at it from the right spot will see lots of Sun, depending on the gaps between mirrors based on the angle they need to make. The "right spot" is actually pretty big, because these mirrors are flat, so anyone within 0.25 degrees (angular radius of the Sun) of the Consumer, as seen from the Moon, will have the same effect. [The angular diameter of the Earth is 1.8 to 2.0 degrees](https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/7736/what-is-the-angular-diameter-of-earth-as-seen-from-the-moon), so luckless peasants far from the Capital of the Earth, or who are not invited when the Leader goes on vacation, will see only a drab Moon, lacking in features as the Man in the Moon has been banished as the backward superstition he is. Perhaps some [advertising](http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/advertising) might be superimposed on the space. The transition from this to the lit moon could be very abrupt if the mirrors are all directed correctly, though it might take some doing to correct for small astronomical aberrations based on distance.
Note that this system does not actually *focus* light, so it can never be brighter than the Sun, though one supposes a wise Leader would have a very well secured feature to permit the mirrors to be warped a little and focused on a potential source of dissent.
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According to the Wikipedia (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon>), the moon has an albedo of 13.6%, which means that 13.6% of the incident light is reflected/scattered by its surface back into space. As such, **the max. theoretical gain is a factor of `1/13.6% = 7.4`**.
That said, to achieve this brightness increase, you must use a very white substance that you can easily create on the moon itself. Otherwise, the logistics of bringing all the megatons of material to the moon would kill you. So, what is a good material? I believe the answer is **[magnesium oxide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_oxide)**: This is a very white powder, so white in fact that it has been used as a reference white for quite some time, as well as in applications demanding for the highest possible albedos possible. Now, the lunar regolith (the dust that covers the moon) consists of a whole bunch of oxygen, as well as 5% magnesium. **"All" you need to do is to take a pile of lunar regolith, extract the magnesium and a small part of the oxygen, and produce that awesome white powder to cover the moon's surface with**. 1kg of regolith is enough to produce more than 80g of magnesium oxide, which can cover quite a substantical area as a layer of thin, fine dust.
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How would an organization protect sensitive information from mind-controlled spies?
An organization (call it the Illuminati if you want) is hunting down a vampire. The vampire is capable of controlling and seeing through the eyes of anyone whose blood he has drunk.
He has already used this to learn quite a bit about the organization hunting him.
How can the organization defend itself against this and prevent the vampire from hopelessly compromising the organization before they can find him?
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**Disinformation**
The organization is full of disinformation. Persons go through routines and draft reports that may or may not fall under interests of this society. Some of the stuff is big stuff - giant conspiracies, ancient monster gods, worldbending threats; all fake. Mostly fake. Actually mostly not fake. Or is it? The vampire is baffled at the apparent scope of what this organization does and the resources it has at its disposal, and apparent contradictions that are taken as a matter of course. It is awed and cowed at the secret world this organization concerns itself with managing.
The vampire spy is not the only infiltrator. This strategy works against all of them. The employees themselves do not all know what is real and what is invented. The vampire can see others being shocked and skeptical at some things that are (partly) revealed in dead earnest. Can this stuff be real? Is there a way to check? A safe way?
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The operatives of the organization are expendables, and always get orders or transmit information via a middle medium: something like a letter left in a given place or the like.
In this way the vampire can only chase down the small fry, not the big ones.
A similar approach was used for example by the spy network set up by the USSR in USA (and most likely by any country in other countries).
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Your organisation should be decentralised, comprised of small isolated cells, and, if anonymity is possible, rely on hired hands a lot.
The chain of command is necessary, but it should be set up in such a way as to prevent the vampire from going up the chain. For example, each level should never communicate directly with the other. Depending on your tech level it can be letters, emails, or some other signal system that allows for complete anonymity. If you want maximum security, you have to use disposable recruiters at the early stages and you might need to kill cell members if one of them gets promoted to the higher level.
Break each level into small independent cells that do not communicate with each other and have no way to identify each other. If one of the cell members is captured by the vampire, only their cell is compromised while the organisation itself stays safe. Give cells a lot of freedom so your organisation does not create patterns of behaviour that a vampire can track.
If your world allows anonymity to employers, use as many hired hands for small inconspicuous tasks as you can. Again, make sure that you do not create any noticeable patterns. Do not deliver all your mail to the same address.
Also, make sure that your organisation has some talented bookkeepers. Money flow is the easiest way to track big organisations no matter how secret they are. If you want to succeed you need to hide your money really well.
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**Teams**
All agents work in pairs. The vampire can't control both agents at once. Orders are in two parts and sent to the agents separately. Reports have to be submitted at the same time by both agents. If something happens to one agent, the agent is stood down until a replacement can be found.
**Cells**
The agents are arranged in cells and only know their direct controller. They are isolated from operational data and are only told what they need to complete their task. The direct controller only knows their direct controller and so on. The vampire has to work their way up the chain of command. Should someone compromised be detected, the above controller can vanish cutting the branch loose.
**Anonymity**
The agents don't actually know their boss is. They communicate via email or phone and have never actually met. The vampire cannot extract information from agents because they don't know anything useful.
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**Poison their own blood**
Not sure what vampire type you're using, but it should be possible to develop an injectable or drinkable medication/agent/chemical/something that makes bad things happen to the vampire if he tries to drink someone. Some ideas for injection:
* Millions of gold-plated (for biocompatibility) silver particles
* Millions of nano-scale crusifixes
* Holy water saline solution
Alternatively
* Have members be permanently drunk to increase BAC levels to something that an undead can't handle
* Use synthetic blood
* Infuse own blood with blood from many donors, might cause kaleidoscope problems for vampire
Your conspiracy members could also move their base to somewhere with permanent (or multi-month) sunlight like the north or south pole.
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Anyone who gets their blood drunk gets paid sick leave until the guy is captured. Bring in new blood (ha) to finish the case.
Seriously once you've figured out that bites mean compromised - kick them off the squad.
If i was at work and some crazy bit me and sucked my blood I'd feel I deserved a month off. I'd need time for blood tests anyway, make sure I didnt get hepatitis or HIV or something.
Mandatory physical on return from a mission to make sure all bites are detected.
(Edited, I'd focused more on the see through eyes part. But the mind controlling part is more important.)
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Anyone entering your super secret base must stay in a quarantine cell for how ever long it takes for the mind control to stop working. Only then are they allowed in and can see the secret information. I expect people would quickly decide to limit their visits and decide they don't really need to see those updated secret plans (depending how long they have to wait). This would help against people inadvertently reveling the secret information to other non-vampire people.
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The answer lies in whether the organization was aware of the abilities of the vampire before he has access to members of the organization. If they are, then they can take the precautions suggested in other answers. If they are not, then the organization can be hopelessly compromised before they're even aware that they're under attack. If the vampire's bite confers no disadvantages and just changes the allegiance of the bitten individual, it is the *perfect* subversion tool.
So, different idea:
### The Competition
the Organization has already been *thoroughly* suborned... by a vampire who's been shaping the organization's behaviour for a century. For obvious reasons, they've not disclosed the complete set of vampiric powers to the organization, but still don't enjoy anyone horning in on their turf.
So while agents below a certain threshold may not be under vampiric control, the instant a big enough fish gets bitten and drops off the Illuminati vampire's network, compromise is detected and actions can be taken.
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The organisation should conduct its meetings in broad day light and ban sunglasses or other forms of eye protection from the list of company approved attire.
Anyone not showing up for the meetings should be considered a suspect and dealt with accordingly.
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As the question says, an impossible (not earth) futuristic world has a subway system spanning across the entire planet and I would like to design [its transit map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_map). The obvious problem with doing this is the scale, as it would be way to large to draw by hand.
Just to be clear, I only want to design [the transit map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_map), not the actual metro system. You can assume a city-wide planet so population density and above ground stuff don't impact the map. In fact, **it should look just like your everyday transit map but on a massive scale**. Which I know wouldn't be useful, but I'm not going for realism here.
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> Unlike conventional maps, [transit maps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_map) are usually not geographically accurate—instead they use straight lines and fixed angles, and often illustrate a fixed distance between stations, compressing those in the outer area of the system and expanding those close to the center.
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The world's subway system is not defined, meaning there is nothing to base the schematic diagram on except the world's dimension. My planet is about the same as the earth, considering there might be a station every 1km that would make for a *grid* with a width of 40,075!
**So, do you have any idea how to draw a giant transit map?**
### So far, the research
[Nathan Hellinga's Processing.py subway map generator](https://github.com/nathan-hellinga/subway-map-generator) resembles what I'm looking for and looks great ( but the algorithm wouldn't scale well to a very large grid.
[Jannis Redmann's generating transit map theory](https://github.com/public-transport/generating-transit-maps) bases itself on real world data. Maybe it could be used with generated data, but then the question remains on how to generate that data.
### My idea, [a random walker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk)
Basically, roll some dice and based on a predefined set of rules: go forward, place a station, turn... and repeat countless times until the map is filled.
\****just to be clear***, I'm looking to design a single giant transit map, preferably using some algorithm, and then tweak it manually to fit my world better.
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## TL:DR: Make individual cities, connect in the appropriate manner
You want a global transit map for a global train system. That covers the system in all levels of detail.
Alright, fine.
But this map isn't going to be useful for most people, most days. After all, most of the time you just want either a specific city or the inter-city map.
And I think that's what you need to do in this case. You have individual cities connected by light rail or commuter rail, as its called, not subway lines with stops every few blocks.
Look at Baltimore: It only has one subway line, and one light rail line running across the city. But it is connected with a larger rail transit system.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rnb0o.gif)
(This picture is from <http://www.urbanrail.net/>, which has information on a lot of different subway systems. It might be a good resource for you.)
If there's urban sprawl to the point that stops are needed every few blocks for such a large distance (For example, Stellaris flavor text tells of a metropolitan area that stretched from Atlanta, Georgia, to Boston, Massachusetts) then it's likely the rail system comes from multiple subway systems kludged together.
So that's what you should do: make smaller systems and shove the ends of various lines together. Be sure to add more "beltway"-type lines around the edge of the edge, like the purple line in this image below:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cgTxZ.png)
Oh, and don't forget to add light rail connecting longer distances with fewer stops and faster speeds. These will probably connect hubs of the subway system. So while you can go from one edge of this metropolis to another just on the subway, the light rail will be faster. (But you'll probably need to take the subway on both ends if you just want to walk.)
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**Fractal generator?**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1BhZw.png)
I made this here. I tried to get one with 6 lobes, tweaking the variables but no luck... yet.
<http://usefuljs.net/fractals/>
I used to have fractint on a pc. I whiled away many hours making fractals. The version I had let me map them to a globe. It is free now; here <https://fractint.org/>
You could make an organic-looking repeating pattern - like leaf veins or the alveoli of the lung, or the Julia set above, then map it to a sphere. If you are not starting from any particular topography a fractal will at least look cool, and it might suggest topology - for example I can imagine where the big stations would be in the above fractal.
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You would need to consider how a worldwide subway system would get built, and how it would be used.
It wouldn't suddenly appear, fully completed. It would instead most likely develop over a long time, at first serving only the regions with highest population density or greatest need. Different parts of your world would get separate subway systems at different times. Gradually, the systems would expand further and further, eventually linking up with the neighbouring subway systems. New stations would be added where there is the need, while other areas would have stations much further apart and there might be long stretches of lines with no stations - for example under major bodies of water, mountain ranges, or through large automated industrial areas (as seen on Courusant).
If your planet has an active geology, you would need to think of a way to protect your subway from the effects of geological faults, earthquakes, volcanoes, and continental drift. It is likely your subway builders would try to avoid these areas altogether.
To make the system at all usable, you might need several levels of speed and frequency of stops. ie. express services and local services, maybe running on separate lines. The overall effect would be areas with a high density of lines and stations, while other areas would have a much lower density, perhaps with only express lines. Passengers would use express lines to get to a small selection of the stations in a local area before changing lines to get on the local services to get to their destination.
In terms of presenting this on a map, a worldwide subway map might need to present tens of millions of stations serving a population of ~2 trillion (based on the large cities with subway systems on Earth having ~200 stations serving ~10 million population, and Coruscant having a population of ~2 trillion). It is therefore unlikely that a full system map covering the entire planet would be useful for passengers, or even usable. Their most likely need would be a map covering their 'local' area, and perhaps a wider scale map just showing the regional centres around the planet that they can get to using express lines.
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For this problem we have to create a bit of a history for your world. Remember that not all places are created equal.
# So you've got a planet wide city
But that doesn't mean it was always a planet wide city. It would once have been lots of individual cities that expanded until the boundaries blurred.
Your first level of the map is the connections between the transit hubs of these ancient cities. Each region would have had a capital with several hubs, major cities might have had two, smaller towns and cities only one. This remains as your long distance network. These hubs will consist of a long distance/high speed station, a metro station, and a bus station.
# Even major cities were once small towns and villages
If we consider a big old city like London, it's made up of dozens of smaller towns that were overrun to make the city. Each of those old towns has its town centre and high street. Many of those towns will need a local transit hub, this hub will consist of a metro station and a bus station. These will be points of higher density population even in a global city. In an ideally designed city these will be evenly spaced and everyone will be walking distance from one of them, but we're not creating an ideal city.
# Your transit map
Will have multiple levels, planetary, "national", regional, local. The points on the map will pay attention to the distances between stops, but not to the route taken between them. Every step is a straight line. The other thing to note is that this will be one of the last parts of the map to build. First you need a full planetary city map, tied to that are the high density population points that become local transit hubs. From there you have the local bus maps that cover the gaps in the old metro networks that define your regional transport.
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first, I would identify major population centers. like big cities, capitals, and more. I would say based on my own experience and no studies, generally like 10 per state, aka 10-15 per generally every 400 miles squared. so there will be many, MANY subway paths leading in and out of that. the other thing I would suggest is straight lines except for the occasional turns. the straighter the faster. just make it the opposite of g a y (don't worry I'm gay don't panic) and maybe link it to big cities. major population centers connecting to big cities connecting to small cities. you don't have to have subways connecting to EVERY city, because there is just a point where you could just walk there, instead of paying 50 dollars to go 4 miles. and again, make things as straight as possible. you can also have splits and crosses and more. the only problem then is crashes. if a train in a subway crashes then that has the ability to make an ENTIRE LINE fail. so maybe have options, or multiple train paths that go to the same place, and split off to smaller areas. maybe there could be jobs of people who guard the rails and report to emergencies and such to clean up and take care of things, and jobs where people go or drive a subway train to said places to take the ruined parts and recycle them to make more trains.
the other thing is water. oceans would be hard because well.. it gets pretty deep and if they puncture a hole then that's gonna collapse. if this civilization is purely underground and can't be above ground, then they will be forced to stay at their continent. springs and reservoirs exist and so do caves so that will be hard to deal with. it might be better to just go around everything, but that's a lot of everything. that'd be your decision.
that'd be how I'd do it.
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Oh you want to just draw the map? Well, in that case I have another Idea depending on your programming skill. If I was tasked to do such things I would first precedurally generate a height map. Higher places on the map translate to a higher population density. Playing around with the parameters will give you a nice big map with different heights, just make sure to not have too many empty spaces but a good many medium places, since empty places on such maps are really small and medium spaces are the most frequent ones. This is relevant with the network, not every stop is connected with every stop, especially not further out.
Once the map has been created randomly create stops. The higher a stop is the more connections it has, from 1-6, but with 1 being very rare and only happening on the outside of cities.
Since cities might not always be close together/overseas, give every city one to three random knots depending on size of the city that are higher up and basically are long distance bus/train stations/airports.
If your world is one big city you can give the heightmap a minimum height that the smallest place is a suburb. But then where does growing crops/other things go? None of my concern,
This is what I would do. Definetly not the easiest way, but it can give the best results with the best chances of tweaking to your likely. I would not build from ground up: Check a random world generator like [this](https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/) and just take populated areas and do the thing with the knots suggested above, the higher the population the more knots there are. You'd just need to zoom in a lot
Edit: I just saw the comment of you not wanting to code a generator like this lel, well, my suggestion might just be a bit over the top so an easier approach.
Just do the random heightmap, with the same amount of dots everywhere. Give each dot an amount of connections to nearby knots, and give rules so it doesn't look like a cobweb but a subway plan. Or you just give them a random amount of connection and implement something like <https://www.yworks.com/blog/automatic-metro-map-generation> that makes metro maps from geographically accurate maps. Also look up mathematical graphs/trees. Because what you are doing here is basically creating one big graph
EDIT 2: The easiest solution with a bit of tweaking: random graph generator. Like [this](http://bl.ocks.org/erkal/9746513).[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CNe2D.png) then somehow feed it into [this](https://www.yworks.com/blog/automatic-metro-map-generation) adn you're done. Edit 2.2. Also could look at a random city naming generator
NOTE: the last solution might give weird results with lots of loops. This is why i would advise you to remake the random graph generator to give rules like loops must not be smaller than 5 knots or something like that. Play around and find out. If you have questions that are about how to do this just comment. I can't teach you how to code, but for basic things you can just text me here maybe to stay on topic or ask stackoverflow.
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I have thought about your random walker - roll some dice and based on a predefined set of rules: go forward, place a station, turn... and repeat countless times until the map is filled.
You might me able to base it on an idea i saw using turtle logo
<https://pythonturtle.academy/random-walk/>
20 Random Walkers with List:
import turtle
import random
screen = turtle.Screen()
screen.setup(1000,1000)
screen.tracer(0,0)
walkers = list()
n = 20
for i in range(n):
walkers.append(turtle.Turtle())
for i in range(n):
walkers[i].color((random.uniform(0,1), random.uniform(0,1), random.uniform(0,1)))
def random\_walk():
for i in range(n):
angle = random.randint(0,3)\*90
walkers[i].seth(angle)
walkers[i].fd(10)
screen.update()
screen.ontimer(random\_walk,1000//20)
random\_walk()
ps whilst browsing i did come across a company called yworks. That had used a yFiles diagramming library to automatically generate a metro map
<https://www.yworks.com/blog/automatic-metro-map-generation>
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Since you edited your question to say *I want to design only the transit map, not the actual metro system. You can assume a city-wide planet so population density and above ground stuff don't impact the map. In fact, it should look just like your everyday transit map but on a massive scale*, the answer now boils down to draw it just like a metropolitan transit map, basically: **just like how a local transit map is designed only moreso**
* [Metro Map Creator](https://beno.uk/metromapcreator/) is a neat little transit map creator that allows you to draw standard type transit maps in a variety of colours using standard straight and 45deg angle lines.
* [Metro Map Maker](https://metromapmaker.com) is another neat little transit map creator. You can get a little messier with line shapes on this one!
Both seem pretty intuitive to use and are free / online options. Here are a couple maps I just made in the last couple minutes. Both work very much like any simple drawing programme. MMM is very DC Metro style oriented, but it allows you to easily draw water features, islands, and parks. Both offer several station name orientations, though MMC only allows horizontal placement.
Metro Map Creator:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tHULb.jpg)
Metro Map Maker:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DJw7A.jpg)
[Answer]
As you point out, a complete world subway map is *not useful* because it has too much information. Therefore, nobody will create one!
Any realistic transportation system will have a hierarchy for speed and efficiency. It is possible that all levels of the system are continuous worldwide, but *useful* maps will still only show a limited radius from your present location because travel any further than that should go up to the next level (transfer nodes highlighted), and the next level map is a different scale. Repeat for as many levels as needed.
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I've created a character for my world that has the ability to manipulate water with her magic. She applied this ability by using it with a katana hilt. I will try to explain how she uses this ability first before I ask the question.
1. She wears a special plastic/rubber gauntlet that stretches from her hands/palms to her elbow. This special "gauntlet" contains some amount of water. Essentially she's wearing a water gauntlet that covers her forelimbs, from fingers to elbow with water.
2. In the event that she has to use her katana, she draws out the hilt which always hangs on her right thigh.
3. She takes a stance, says her magic words, then the water starts moving out from the Gauntlet through pores of the Gauntlet. The water then forms the sword/sharp part of the Katana. I'm yet to decide in what state the water would be to be able to deal physical damage. For now, I'd like to go with "frozen sharp ice". (If there any other ways water can be made sharp, I'd be glad to know)
4. She can cut flesh, bones and wood with it. The Gauntlet is on her left arm and it's the only one that provides water.
My question is, how much water would be needed to forge such a sword?
[Answer]
Instead of ice, you could make it a "sword" that uses a jet of extremely high-pressure water to make the cut. From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_jet_cutter):
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> In the nozzle, the water is focused into a thin beam by a jewel orifice. This beam of water is ejected from the nozzle, cutting through the material by spraying it with the jet of speed on the order of **Mach 3**, around **2,500 ft/s (760 m/s)**.
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[Waterjets use between one half and five gallons (2 to 19 liters) of water per minute when cutting.](https://www.omax.com/news/blog/do-i-need-treat-water-my-waterjet) If you're only making a single cut (about a few seconds of operation), then the water requirements become much smaller. Depending on the magic system, you could continually pull in water from the atmosphere or have a portable tank of water available.
Industrial water jet cutters are used regularly to cut steel into precise shapes without destroying the integrity of the structure (since there's a lot less heat going into the metal). There's often an abrasive mixed in the water for extra cutting potential.
This would require some special construction, especially when it comes to the nozzle. Granted, you could handwave that with the fantasy setting. You could make the "hilt" portion the nozzle that the character holds to channel the water through.
While this doesn't really resemble a "sword", it can still cut like one. Bonus: it has multiple uses, not only as a sword, but a way to cut/puncture doors, locks, and small spaces.
[Answer]
Something that might help you is that there are at least [17 forms of ice](https://youtu.be/5FHpk5UeHB8), depending on pressure and temperature where it is formed.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ob592.jpg)
So you may be able to use some of the properties of these exotic types of ice to do what you want. For instance, ice that forms at super high pressure is much more dense, and ice that is colder is much harder.
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That depends on the size of the sword. If your intention is simply to create a water replica of a katana, you would simply need the volume of the katana as the amount of water. Assuming the blade is about 1,50m long, about 3 cm wide and on average 0.5 cm thick, you would need 15\*0.3\*0.05 = 0.225l of water.
E: Also, a katana isn't really the best weapon from for cutting solid things like bones and wood. Katanas are only viable because of their layered crafting. But with magic involved, one could argue that the ice is strengthened and sharpened by the magic, making the form irrelevant.
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That's a tricky question, because a lot of problems can be circumvented by saying 'because magic'.
First problem is that ice is much more brittle then steel, so a cutting sword made of ice with be shattered easily. But it seems that our protagonist can prevent it by magic.
Second problem is the density. The average density of steel is around [8 gram/cm3](https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/KarenSutherland.shtml). The density of ice is [0.9 gram/cm3](https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/AlexDallas.shtml), which is almost 10 times lighter. So if you go just by replicating the shape of a katana blade in ice, it will weigh around 90-110 grams (katana blade without hilt and fittings is supposed to weight from 800 to 1000 grams, as far as I remember).
Using katana hilt with the blade as light as 100 grams will be a problem of its own, if you want to use it as a sword, especially against other people with swords. A weapon that light will have problems cutting because of the lack of the mass in the blade, it's easy to block or batter aside with a heavier weapon. Generally, cutting swords rarely went down below 600 grams in overall weight, and specialized cutting swords (ones able to do damage to bones and wood) very rarely weighed less then 800 grams ([Here](http://www.fioredeiliberi.org/antique-swords-uk/articles/1796weight/) is some data on the weights of different variants of British 1796 light cavalry sabers, one of the lightest effective cutters I know of). But calculating the weight of a cutting sword mathematically is a very tricky proposition - it's more of an engineering task, not purely mathematical. A lot of nuance lays in the physical properties of materials, their flexibility and strength. If we assume a material with infinite tensile strength, infinite sharpness and infinite slickness (zero friction), then we may go lighter then 600 grams for a sword.
As far as I see, your character can circumvent the problem in two ways, both of which will be decidedly magical. First, we can assume she can also vary the density of ice at will - then your ice blade would weight just as much as a steel one, and for all effects and purposes it will behave as a metal weapon, as far as handling and balance is concerned. So upwards from 800 grams if it's a katana blade, less (around 600-700) if it's a thinner and broader one, like tulwar or 1796.
Second variant is treating 'water' as an advanced nanomaterial. Here, again, we don't care that it's water before magic starts acting on it. In effect, what you want is a mono-molecular blade - one molecule in thickness, but of the length and breadth of a sword blade. The amount of water for this task will be trivial, less then 10 grams, I think.
[Answer]
# Not quite a katana
You need about half a liter or less of water, so it comfortably fits an arm bracer. What you need next is *energy*.
Water by itself cuts very little, and ice is too weak and brittle to form a blade (you can still stab with it though).
Your water-mage must follow a different approach: the "katana" is actually two laminar sheets of water and ice crystals, one twentieth of a millimeter thick, held together by a pressure in excess of 600 MPa, and flowing one into the other at three times the speed of sound. Under these conditions, ordinary water will cut through hardened steel, though slowly. You do not have a katana, but a [water chainsaw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryoJet) plus drill.
Used to stab, this katana will go through a 1mm thick steel armour plate in about two seconds, and the body behind in not much more.
[Answer]
## **A monomolecular blade**
This would use a tiny amount of water and be sharp enough to cut through most substances.
Have your magic user put her energy into aligning and strengthening the intermolecular bonds. Water molecules are chevron shaped. Align them head to tail.
An individual molecule is ~2.75 angstrom, 10 -10 m. Allow ~30% overlap. So 2 A per molecule.
You need 5 billion molecules, 5 x 109 for a 1 m blade.
1 molecule weighs 18.02 amu.
1 amu = 1.661 x 10-27 kg.
5 x109 x 1.661x10 -27 x 18.02 = 150x10-18 kg.
0.15 femtograms!
It will be completely invisible.
Magic user draws what looks like a sword handle from her belt and adopts a stance. Bad guys fall about laughing. She swings a cut. Nearest bad guy slides in two invisibly sliced from shoulder to hip. Bad guys stop laughing.
There could also be an element where she can vary the length. A very scary weapon.
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You could also consider adding impurities to the water (there is some precedent for this in fantasy stories, see Avatar: The Last Airbender where certain water benders are capable of "bending" blood due to its high water content, and metal benders are earth benders who can manipulate metal by the "impurities" in it).
As a practical example, there is a real world material known as [pykrete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete#Mechanical_properties) (a mixture of water ice and sawdust) which has properties similar to concrete.
```
Mechanical properties | Ice | Concrete | Pykrete
---
Crushing strength [MPa] | 3.447 | 17.240 | 7.584
Tensile strength [MPa] | 1.103 | 1.724 | 4.826
Density [kg/m³] | 910 | 2500 | 980
```
There are also variants which use hemp or newspaper to increase the tensile strength. Its not a stretch to envision that this user might have some specific recipe which creates a stronger pysteel composite for instance (the alchemy of their specific water mixture could also be a source of on going experimentation or the gauntlet might have different compartments of suspensions which can be swapped out to provide different physical properties of the final sword).
Returning to the actual question assuming the user is creating a standard size katana you would effectively just need to use the formula
```
Volume(blade) = Volume(water) * .91
```
where we assume the standard expansion of [9% volume increase during freezing](http://www.iapws.org/faq1/freeze.html) (I'm not a materials expert so I'm not sure if the expansion of pure water during freezing would be identical to that of an impure mixture but I assume relative parity here).
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I was wondering if it was possible to potentially grow a plant on a building taller than mount Everest. I mean on as in bottom to top with grass or some other plant. Would the grass run out of oxygen or would it live but be partially dead? If it is possible how could it be done?
[Answer]
Yes it could.
You have two issues here, pressure and temperature. For pressure, see this question on a sister site:
[What is the lowest pressure at which plants can survive?](https://biology.stackexchange.com/q/1242/17129) — it turns out that with the right kind of plant, this limit is at 1/10 of Earth 's sea level pressure; and with lichens you can even get lower, to the pressure of Mars. Since it's a building, I assume you want a garden. For small plants this is doable; you could have grass and some flowers.
The other issue is temperature. [This NASA article](https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2005/mars_plants.html) suggests that by using bacteria genes we can have plants grow in really cold conditions. But hey! It is a building! You can shield the roof garden from wind and use chimneys to provide heat. With a building so tall you will have a lot of waste heat from water pumps, elevator engines, air conditioning and so on. Heating a garden seems like a really reasonable idea to put all that waste heat to good use.
If you want all surfaces covered with plants, that's also possible. The lower the better for them. Higher up you need to provide more heat. The Square cube law saves the day; with a building so big you're going to have more volume per surface square meter than modern buildings. This means heating the walls could make sense. Water would start to be an issue, but it is doable. A civilization able to build something this tall for sure would have pumps etc figured out. Make terraces every meter or so, with porous substance in place of earth and keep it moist for plants to use.
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If you mean to grow on the outside of the building, like a climbing vine, I think the answer is probably yes.
Oxygen is one of the limiting factors, but the bigger one is heat, since a frozen plant can't grow. Both factors can be solved though. The upper floors will have to be heated and pressurized for human habitation. If the building isn't well sealed then warm, moist air will be leaking out, along with radiant heat coming from the building, which could be enough for the plant to survive, especially if it is something well adapted for high altitude.
Over time roots would dig into the gaps, letting more air out, and giving the plant more warmth.
It would be horribly inefficient and expensive, but maybe they have really cheap energy and so don't care.
[Answer]
# Not all the way to the top
Plants do not live at the top of the tallest mountains. *Gymnostomum aeruginosum*, a moss, [was found](https://microbiology.usgs.gov/microbial_ecology_plant_microbe_interactions.html) at 6480 meters on Mount Everest; while *Arenaria bryophylla* is the [highest flowering plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arenaria_bryophylla) at 6180 meters on the same mountain.
Meanwhile, there are several mountains over 8000 meters. They are often covered in snow, so I did some investigation. I found a ledge of clearly flat, non-snow covered land near the top of Mount Everest at [27.98767 N, 86.91939 E](https://www.google.com/maps/place/27%C2%B059'15.6%22N+86%C2%B055'09.8%22E/@27.9876747,86.9172013,886m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d27.98767!4d86.91939). Checking with an [altitude tool](https://www.daftlogic.com/sandbox-google-maps-find-altitude.htm), this ledge is at 8220 plus or minus 20 meters, and about 100 meters across. There are many similar ledges nearby.
Since there are no mosses living at this altitude, or within 2000 meters of this altitude where there is evidently plenty of space not covered by snow in the summertime, I conclude that plants won't live this high as they are currently designed. If your building goes over ~6000 meters, there won't be much plant life that can survive on it.
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# Not a "conventional" plant.
A self-sustaining plant could not grow so tall because it would need to withstand too high a compressive stress (a column of wood 8 kilometers tall generates pressures in the order of the hundreds of atmospheres).
A vine, relying on the building for support, still could not do it because bringing water and mineral salts from the roots all the way to the top is a losing proposition. A 2m vine can need as little as half a liter of water per day, but a vine 8000 m tall would need somewhere around two cubic meters of water per day, which raises three problems: how to absorb that through the root system? How to supply the root system with enough energy to perform the task? And is there even that much water available to be pulled?
A lichen/moss carpet could. Nutrient transport could be as slow as needed, it would just limit growth rate; water would be gathered from the atmosphere, and sunlight is available everywhere. With no leaves, water loss and cold are much less of a problem.
Going up, dryness is going to be a problem, so we'd need some sort of slow water transport as well, and the lichen organization seems more promising: there *are* lichens surviving in the extreme cold. Low pressure and low oxygen are not a problem, they would just slow the growth rate, but the organism would simply gather what little CO2 might be available and accumulate it.
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A plant needs to pump nutrients from the soil to every part of its "body", so you have a really big problem. You might be interested in Geoffrey West's new book [Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies,](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/business/dealbook/geoffrey-west-scale-the-universal-laws-of-growth-innovation-sustainability.html) which goes into some of the issues. Also check out his [TED talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations).
Tallness is an obvious advantage (monopolize sunlight), so if evolution hasn't grown a plant that big, it's a strong hint that it is very difficult - borderline impossible.
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Me, I'd suggest a slight parabolic space holding water that has typical in-water plants growing at that height. The shallow water at the perimeter would warm the water to prevent freezing & providing movement would also contribute to that. Fish? The oceans are extremely deep & COLD & yet full of life all the way down. Would this body of water know where it was?
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Inspired by [this question on putting massive capacitor-banks on spaceships](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/96924/what-are-the-risks-with-massive-banks-of-batteries-capacitors) I have been wondering about alternative ways to store excess energy from ever-running reactors.
In this question I would like to explore the possibility of synthesizing elements with the excess energy that could be then again used as an energy-source on demand.
**Q**: What fuel(s) could I synthesize with the excess energy from my reactors?
Answers are judged by the following criteria:
* **[Stability](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadeOfExplodium)**: The *more stable* it is in regards to reactions or spontaneous explosions, the *better*
* **Longevity**: A highly energetic element that decays in a few seconds is of no use, it must be possible to *store* it *for longer amounts of time*
* **Compactness**: The higher the potential energy in relation to the element's density, the better
* **Efficiency**: The less energy that is lost in the process of synthesizing and then burning the element again, the better
---
*Setting*: The question assumes a [20min into the future setting](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture). Nothing mind-boggling or physics defying. The idea of synthesizing just seemed appropriate.
In regards to shutting down reactors instead: This is a valid point, and a good idea. Yet the goal of this question is to explore means of storing this excess energy that can amass between bouts of massive consumption. If it helps you, just think of these reactors as really complicated and hard to shut down1.
1E.g. a military vessel would not want to shut them down due to the complicated procedures and time involved in shutting them down and/or turning them on again.
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First thing coming to mind is $2 H\_2O <-> H\_2 + O\_2$ electrolysis is rather efficient and so are fuel cells.
Probably by the time we get FTL such processes would be even better.
Other chemical processes can be used if and when suitably efficient reversible conversions are developed (possible candidates include: ethylene, hydrocarbons and Aluminum oxides). They may provide a better storage, erg/gr or other practical benefits.
I advise against electrical or kinetic storage because of high danger of immediate conversion to raw heat in case of any malfunction; OTOH chemicals can be stored safely in separate, jettisonable, containers outside the ship.
If this is not a concern then a large flywheel on frictionless magnetic bearings is the best solution for both conversion efficiency and power/weight.
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Consider [power-to-gas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas) technology. One variant of it, currently in the [experimental stage](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/510066/audi-to-make-fuel-using-solar-power/), uses excess electricity to split water molecules by electrolysis, then combines the generated H2 with CO2 to create methane. Since natural gas is essentially methane with traces of other gases, the generated methane can be used in the same way natural gas is used. According to Wikipedia, the process has an overall efficiency of 30% - 40% depending on how the gas is ultimately used.
Obviously this technology can utilize the extensive transport and storage infrastructure for natural gas already in place in many countries today. This includes the use of [compressed natural gas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_natural_gas) (CNG) as alternative fuel for automobiles.
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Here is something we could do now. **Use aluminum metal to store energy, and oxidize the metal back to the oxide to create power.**
I proposed the concept here: <http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Thermite_20powered_20steam_20car#1379964483>
1: Refine aluminum from plentiful ore using excess electrical power (or cheap power from hydroelectric sources). That is done.
2: Oxidize aluminum for power. The thermite reaction is a familiar example of the power stored in aluminum metal: in this reaction the aluminum strips oxygen from iron oxide to form the aluminum oxide, in the process emitting a lot of heat. Some people think that when this reaction really gets going it can strip the oxygen from water also.
3: GOTO 1: Refine aluminum oxide back into metal using plentiful electricity.
The earths crust has a lot of aluminum as oxides and ore. Refined aluminum metal has a tremendous energy density (the reason for recycling the metal, not refining new - it takes a lot of energy to make the metal). Aluminum is stable and does not blow up, as evidenced by empty soda cans and beach chairs. When you get it hot enough it oxidizes with a tremendous output of heat - the thermite reaction. Thermite uses iron oxide as the oxygen source but you could use forced air or maybe even water, once it got hot enough.
This would work better on the earths surface where there is abundant oxygen than it would in space, where you need to bring along the oxygen.
[Answer]
**The Answer**
Super-conducting materials with high electron density should (or would be after we refine the technology) meet most of your needs. [Ta-Nb-Hf-Zr-Ti](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5135312/) (Tantalium-Niobium-Hafnium-Zirconium-Titanium) based alloys are such materials and one such is [TaNb]1−x(ZrHfTi)x. I'm not even going to pretend to know enough about the specific dynamics of these materials to comment further other than to point out that as superconductors they have (a) stability and (b) very high valence electron density.
***HOWEVER***
Your question feels like a technology dichotomy. You have the technology to synthesize mass (basically reversing e=mc2, if I understand your question), but you don't have the technology to shut off reactors you're not using? We do that today, firing up natural gas, coal, even nuclear rod banks depending on electrical demand.
The creation of mass for energy storage would have substantial effects on the operability of the ship as its mass and center-of-gravity shift during the creation and utilization phases of these materials. Yes, you can (theoretically) design the ship to compensate... but why have the weakness at all when you can just shut unused reactors off?
*(I understand from your question that the reactors are "ever-running," but that's the dichotomy.)*
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This doesn't answer you question exactly but may be useful idea.
*IMHO any from of chemical energy storage is not going to be compact enough to power a FTL drive.*
However you could store your excess energy as cool plasma in a couple of magnetic bottles (tokamak).
Using the energy from your power source create two, balanced, streams of plasma. One highly positively charged (protons from ionized hydrogen gas), the other negatively charged (mostly the electrons from the ionized hydrogen). You feed each stream of plasma into a different magnetic bottle (or alternating bottles). Using RF generators you 'cool' the plasma, so that it has less side to side velocity and just keeps moving around the loop. You could also also add more energy by increasing the velocity of the plasma around the loop.
This is very loosely what happens in the large hadron collider. Only the LHC accelerates a small quantity of plasma very very fast.
When It comes to igniting your FTL drive you open a magnetic valve and let the two streams of plasma at each other and zoom their excessive attraction for each other powers your drive and 'blip' you are in a new location.
The limitation to the amount of energy you can store is:
1. Strength of the magnetic containment (solved problem from developing fusion generators)
2. The stability of the RF cooling/acceleration system
3. Bremsstrahlung radiation (X-rays from accelerating electrons (around a loop))
Point 1 & 2 are rather obvious, nuf said.
The Bremsstrahlung radiation will cause your magnetic capacitor, to leak/loose energy over time. This is why you would want to have lots of plasma moving slowly (rather than the LHC which has a little moving fast).
**Further thoughts**:
Rather than hydrogen gas you could use the helium 'ash' from your fusion generator in the plasma containment rings.
You could use small streams of this plasma to meet and power 'impulse' rockets, when you want to move about in real space.
You could use bursts of plasma as a short range weapon (the plasma will dissipate rapidly in space/ when not magnetically contained. ( this could be an unconventional/ last ditch tactic; as it would bleed the FTL charge you are building up)
You could cascade several containment units, so that the discharge from one is used to accelerate the plasma in the next, which is then used to accelerate the next etc etc. Kind of like double bouncing someone on a trampoline to then double bounce on a larger trampoline. The the loss from Bremsstrahlung radiation would not be a problem as you are not trying to store high speed plasma but cascade quickly for a FTL jump. The pattern of bursts of Bremsstrahlung radiation during a cascade would be a characteristic 'jump signature' of each (class of ?) vessel.
**Cool buzz words warning**:
Careful engineering of the plasma containment could let you use the storage system as a [synchrotron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_light_source) [laser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser) (Yes that is a real thing) or the Bremsstrahlung radiation from one storage ring could be used as part of a [klystron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klystron) (yes that is also a real thing) to power the RF generator of the next stage of the FTL cascade.
[Answer]
eeStor had a prototype or scam (depending on who you talk to) that claimed to store 50 kWh in a box about the size of a bar fridge. It was done using barium titanate based capacitors. Energy densities were claimed at levels better than the best Li-ion batteries by weight and comparable by volume. Being capacitor based it could handle much higher charge/discharge rates than a battery, and was not subject to the short life of batteries (millions of cycles vs hundreds) It may be possible to do something really interesting with microfabrication.
Given materials with much stronger tensile strength than we have now, flywheel storage looks attractive. Potentially the energy goes up with the square of the tensile strength of the material used for the rotor.
Velkess attempted to crowd source funding for a flywheel system that featured low precision construction, which would markedly reduce the cost of production. Currently they need funding. <http://www.velkess.com/flywheel.html>
There is lots of merit in a methanol economy. Use surplus energy to make methanol; burn methanol in existing internal combustion engines. The modifications required are fairly trivial. Methanol is used in racing cars. The current methanol reaction is only about 60% efficient, giving an awful round trip efficiency. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy>
Splitting water into H2 and O2 then recombining in a fuel cell or or in a MHD turbine gives you better efficiency, but storage is bulkier, and it doesn't have the advantage of using present infra-structure.
There are various battery technologies that are too ponderous to use in vehicles, but are getting attention for utility scale power. Sodium sulfur, iron nickel are two. The latter is quite old, but has advantages in that it tolerates many more charge/discharge cycles.
Liquid electrolyte flow through batteries are getting attention right now. The reactants are stored as solutions, and react in a cell. The capacity of the battery is determined by the size of the tanks, the power determined by the size of the battery plates. Currently very expensive.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery>
If we relax the 20 minutes in the future:
Silicon lithium promises a 10 fold increase in battery density, but is likely 10 to 20 years off. Li-Air and Aluminum air has similar potential density. Al-Air would be cheap, as Al is much more common than Li.
<http://www.visualcapitalist.com/future-battery-technology/>
You are in space. Lots of room. How about very large superconducting coils. You are in essence storing power as a magnetic field. This can work at the surface too, but the magnetic fields may be a serious nuisance. (Crossing a magnetic field with a conductive object induces eddy currents in the conductor, making the conductor hot.)
Larry Niven in one of his stories talks about 'molecular distortion' batteries. Energy is stored by changing the shape of some stiff molecule. No other detail is given.
Robert Heinlein has 'Shipstones' It gets a mention in various places, but comes to the fore in "Friday" No tech is given.
[Answer]
There are lots of great answers here, about the specifics of how you can chemically store the excess energy. Let me throw in a few extra thoughts...
First, chemical storage of energy is a *buffer*, not a full solution. You only have so much aluminum or H2O or methane on board. What happens when it is all used up and your reactor is still running full-bore?
Perhaps you should consider other ways of limiting output.
Is your reactor such that you can throttle the fuel for it? This will help to stretch out the time it takes to "fill up" your chemical sink.
Does your design entertain the possibility of control rods? (Assuming a nuclear reactor here) They absorb some of the wayward neutrons, damping down the reaction. Your normal operation might have control rods halfway extruded into the reaction chamber, allowing a moderate reaction & energy flow. During peak conditions you can withdraw the rods, getting you max flow. In an emergency, drop the rods all the way in, quelling the reaction altogether. You **need** a mechanism like this anyway, for disaster avoidance; why not use it to mitigate your other problem, too?
**Worst-case scenario...**
All your spare H2O is split. Control rods don't work in your reactor. You can't starve the reactor of fuel. What can you do?
Well, maybe you can ... *work* with that energy. Have banks of heavy millstones; spin them to use the excess power. They'll slow down on their own, so you can spin 'em again. Basic idea here: you need to avoid your *longevity* requirement as an ultimate backup, and store energy in a way that won't just pile up.
Finally, if you still are generating too much electricity, use it to power as many refrigerator lasers as you need to get rid of all that energy. Saw a discussion where they seemed to think it'd work ( <https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/is-a-refrigeration-laser-thermodynamically-possible.313229/> ). Um. Don't do this when you're docked to a space station.
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According to [this page](http://www.climatetechwiki.org/technology/jiqweb-es-fw), [compressed air energy storage (CAES)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage) looks safest, most durable, and most useful (emergency air supply, thrust):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/C4Iwb.jpg)
Not asked for, but you could use a loading bay or double hull to recycle the air, both would enable leak detection before recompression.
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No one seems to have mentioned antimatter synthesis yet. Antimatter wins hands down for highest energy density and is also stable, though admittedly it's tricky to store and prone to spontaneous detonation should its storage system fail. . . .
Anyway, it's possible to produce small amounts of antimatter today (with rather terrible efficiency currently), so it's an option if you really have nothing better to do with the energy from your always-running reactors. And, as a bonus, it would make an extremely high-power energy source for an FTL drive.
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**If you really into nuclear synthesis, you should consider what breeder reactors do.**
Most of the historical effort for breeding has been using neutron capture to transmute U-239 into Pu-239 (after a few intermediate decays). Specifically U-238 + n -> U-239 -> Np-239 -> Pu-239. Pu-239 is fissile whereas U-238 is fertile -- you now have useful fuel for reactors (or bombs).
Th-232 is also fertile, but after capturing a neutron eventually becomes fissile U-233, another useful reactor fuel.
Neutron capture can occur directly via exposure to an active nuclear reactor, and it id quite difficult to accelerate neutrons since they are neutral particles. So, you may quibble that this is not a result of using excess energy production of a nuclear reactor.
Fee protons are easily accelerated, but they are difficult for use in growing larger nuclei, since they are strongly repelled by the nucleus.
If you want to consider practical nuclear synthesis, these 2 reactions are really the only practical options you have. Either reaction could be made to work on a fairly large scale, though Th-232 is considerable easier because it has a relatively large neutron cross section in the thermal region.
You don't really need or want to build large stockpiles of the converted elements though, as you are able to synthesize the fissile materials as needed (with enough extra in the pipeline for processing the generated fuel). A liquid fuel reactor is desirable because you can extract the desired product on a continuous basis, instead of allowing it to absorb additional neutrons (you don't want Pu-240 or U-234).
Many countries have experimented with breeder reactors (mostly to generate Pu-239) and have eventually given up on them. The Thorium cycle is actually more practical from a physics and engineering viewpoint, but has not been historically popular for breeding, though there is renewed interest in the thorium fuel cycle in recent years.
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Chemical reactions fail in the compactness department. The energy output of the nuclear reactor is orders of magnitude beyond any chemucal reaction.
You might consider my answer to [What's strongest non-nuclear explosive I can make with nanotechnology?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/74416/whats-strongest-non-nuclear-explosive-i-can-make-with-nanotechnology/74418#74418) and [My question on developing this near-future technology](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82067/quantum-containment-for-nuclear-explosive-bullets). Both posts have the same xkcd cartoon illustrating my statement in the first paragraph.
>
> [178m2Hf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_hafnium) for example stores 2.446 MeV per atom, compared to over 200 for Uranium fission. Adding a bar for [1 330 000 MJ/kg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafnium_controversy#Importance) to the above chart (the bar will be 260 m tall), we see that even at 1% of nuclear levels it's about **10,000× more energetic than any chemical energy**.
>
>
>
---
The “best” storage, which is equivalent to slowing the reactor minus efficiency losses, is to spend the energy to reverse the reaction used for power. E.g. split He back into Hydrogen. If you saved the He waste, you reverse that to return to your fuel store.
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The normal solution to this question is handled from an economic viewpoint rather than an engineering one.
The reasons why are fairly simple to see. Consider a few facts, then an economic picture emerges:
1. Economies of scale usually make a single large power plant cheaper per unit energy produced than a large number of small power plants.
2. The cost per unit power tends to rise unless the plant is operated at a significant percentage of its capacity.
You still incur the same debt service and maintenance operations whether you run at 50% capacity or 80%, so 80% means more revenue for the same costs.
3. The laws of thermodynamics are still going to apply to any storage technology employed---so you have efficiency loss in storing and efficiency loss in recovering stored energy.
So the big picture is to build power plants that are scaled to operate at 70-80% capacity in a quantity that provides for running peak demand by running close to capacity. Or by running four plants close to peak and periodically bringing online a peak demand power plant, also running at close to capacity.
Granted a spaceship is a use case that is entirely different from the demands of generating and distributing power on a large scale to a population. There the engineering problems must account for making a worst case demand available continuously, so best efficiencies of dollar per watt/hour fly out the window.
For that matter, the wisdom of adding a lot of expense and extra mass (which requires bigger thrust to move the ship) flies out the window as well. The direct and indirect costs of a storage mechanism for a low exirgy source of energy outweighs the benefit.
Money and physics can say a whole lot about what will or won't ever be attempted, even if it is possible.
The steverino paraphrase of the three laws is thus:
1. There is a game.
2. You can't win.
3. You can't break even.
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[Question]
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In my world a a several members of the US Armed Forces get transported to a medieval world. They have only a limited amount of resources and they must find a way to replenish their supplies. Specifically, after some conflict with the natives, they are in desperate need of more bullets they didn't any tools from our world with them but one of them does remember formula for making gunpowder.
Is it possible for them to construct more bullets so that they don't run out?
they only have 6 months before they get attacked again once that happens their run out.
They also have help from some villagers that they have helped.
[Answer]
**They can easily restock in 6 months, assuming one of them knows a bit of chemistry (and get a bit lucky), but they will have fewer and fewer replacement bullets after each attack.**
They are limited to the number of usable shell casings they can find; they will not be making anymore casings; the technology just isn't available for them to make the right kind of metal or doing the precise enough extrusion. Making anything close to cartridge quality brass before the 18th century was all but impossible since they could not refine zinc, ditto for aluminum and machinable steel. There was a question about this before, [Could medieval people produce automatic firearms if they had access to the schematics?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10610/could-medieval-people-produce-automatic-firearms-if-they-had-access-to-the-schem)
Casting the projectile is easy, they can literally pull one out of an unfired round and make a clay mold from it. They will have to polish the rounds before using them but that's just time consuming and time they have.
Making gunpowder is fairly easy provided they can find a source of sulfur, which is not too difficult. They might have to do some traveling to collect enough depending on the size of the town. Saltpeter would actually collect on root cellar walls in many places and was used for preserving food. Which part of medieval you mean is an important consideration, as cannons and gunpowder were around for most of this period.
Making primer is a bit harder but thankfully primer caps can be reloaded. However, the best bet they have is using a mercury based primer, which will quickly destroy the brass case with repeated use. Potassium chlorate is possible, harder to make but easier to find materials, however it will damage the barrel of the gun over time. Making primer will easily be the most time consuming part of reloading. Interestingly if they have even a single phosphorus grenade, they can use it for primer for several dozen, if not several hundred rounds, and it will not have either of these problems.
Their biggest problem is that guns don't use gunpowder anymore. Guns use higher power mixtures that produce much less residue. The newly made bullets will quickly foul mechanisms and barrels, and may not be powerful enough to cycle weapons. They will be reduced to single shot and manually cycling their weapons with the new bullets as they will be unreliable in automatic weapon.
They might even be able to make some nitrocellulose if their working knowledge of chemistry is good enough, that will solve many of their problems with power and fouling, it is mostly about refining some nitric acid. This does require quite a bit more chemistry knowledge, but not an unbelievable level, especially if they have a demolition expert.
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Actually, casting bullets from lead isn't difficult at all (simply extract a bullet from its' cartridge and use it to make a mould to cast fresh ones out of lead).
The tricky parts are recovering the brass casings, and making fresh primers.
The [brass casing](https://www.petersoncartridge.com/our-process/drawing-brass) is an essential part of modern firearms. It mechanically holds all the parts together (bullet, powder or propellant and primer) in the proper mechanical alignment to work with all the other mechanisms of the firearm. It provides protection from the elements and temperature extremes while the rounds are being transported, and upon firing, the brass is flexible enough to expand slightly to seal the chamber (a modern rifle can produce 50,000 lbs/inch^2 of chamber pressure), then contract as the pressure drops, and carries a lot of the heat from the chamber on extraction and ejection.
Drawing the brass with enough precision to make an acceptable case *might* be possible with medieval technology, although I would have doubts. The link above shows the process in some detail, which suggests that the high precision cases needed by modern weapons are not going to happen, instead each case must be painstakingly hand crafted to ensure a proper fit.
One other issue you haven't really addressed is black powder isn't very effective as a propellant compared to modern formulations, and is dirty and corrosive to firearms. Weapons and even automatic weapons have been made to use black powder. Early Maxim guns used black powder cartridges, and earlier "cranked" weapons like Gatling and Nordenfelt guns also had been made for black powder, but remember these were designed to use black powder and had greater operating clearances and highly trained gun crews who stripped and cleaned the weapons on a regular (daily) basis under the supervision of the Sergeant. M-16 rifles during the Viet Nam war were plagued by problems because the solders were issued ammunition with a slower burning "powder" which fouled the weapon, and were (amazingly enough) told they did not *have* to clean the weapon. This problem ended with ruthless cleaning and inspections by the unit NCO's.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4A67x.jpg)
*Three barrel Nordenfelt gun on a field carriage*
Of course, there must be a reason to use firearms rather than adopt local weaponry. Building steel crossbows would be far easier and more efficient, since it allows the heroes to arm virtually everyone in the village with an effective weapon (capable of felling knights), and providing a large numeric edge over the highly trained and very expensive fighting men (knight and Men at Arms). This is the essence of the Infantry Revolution of the 1400-1500's, where weapons and tactics were developed to allow large numbers of men with limited training to effectively contest the battlefield against smaller numbers of highly trained warriors.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/S2BYS.jpg)
*lots of these guys make up for lack of firearms*
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They can make bullets, but as Slarty says, they cannot fire them without a percussion cap to make the gunpowder go bang. Unless they know how to do that, they cannot use their modern weaponry.
So they need to go back to basics and build themselves a matchlock. If the locals have tinderboxes with flint mechanisms, a flintlock might be possible instead. They will need to dismantle their weapons and reuse those barrels with a new breech, because those rifled barrels will be infinitely better than anything they could make themselves, and presumably carving their own woodwork for the body of the new rifle.
The most important thing they have though is knowledge of tactics. If they train up villagers, they may not be able to equip them all with rifles, but crossbows should still give them a good edge. The chances are very good that their adversaries have never seen modern infantry tactics. The Boers pioneered that kind of skirmishing, and they fought the British Army to a stalemate with much smaller numbers and much worse equipment.
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Yes. If they know how to make gunpowder, then the rest is pure mechanics. The hardest part is producing viable bullets. Lead casting is an ancient art, older than bronze, and achievable with a good hot camp fire. But other materials might work if not as well (dense hardwoods for example). After that, every gun enthusiast knows how to reload a cartridge.
A longer term consideration is wear and tear on the barrel of the firearm. It's not such a big deal with a shotgun, but it will become a concern with a rifle. Rifling a barrel is something that very few people can do well even with modern tools (my father was one such). Using ammunition that does not fit the barrel as well as mass manufactured rounds will cause more rapid wear and tear, and the barrel will not be replaceable.
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The two big problems they would face would be finding sufficient raw materials and adapting modern weaponry to use a different propellant, casing and bullet.
They would need a source of lead. This might be found in church windows (although the locals would be up in arms over that) and a mould (probably doable). Much harder would be making any form of useable propellant. Assuming they were trying to make black powder they would need sulphur, potassium nitrate and charcoal.
Charcoal would be easy enough but grinding it sufficiently finely and avoiding any larger particles would not be easy. Flowers of sulphur might be available but then again might not and that would be the end of it unless they knew a lot about chemistry and had access to the right reagents (unlikely).
Potassium nitrate would pose huge difficulties. Extraction from dung (the only source for large quantities) would be a slow messy and imprecise process. The resulting material would need to be recrystallized probably several times and yields would be low due to wastage at all stages. The final product would have to be dried and ground and then mixed in accurate proportions with the other ingredients. Would they have a balance with them or rely on the locals? Would they know the exact formula?
Despite all care taken, such make shift gunpowder would not be very pure, homogeneous or dry. Once installed in the breach and loaded there would be no way of setting it off unless a hole was drilled in the back of the weapons to apply a lighted splint. Even then modern rifled weapons would quickly become fouled and require elaborate cleaning. As for automatic weapons there would be no chance of them operating effectively and they would probably present a greater hazard to the owner than the enemy.
In short it might just be possible to make a modern weapon fire a bullet in such circumstances, but it would not be an effective weapon. It would be more effective to use any powder they have available to make grenades, although fuses would not be reliable or easy to make. A better bet would be to make some sort of terror weapon. Basic black powder in a tube with a whistle can make a lot of noise which would frighten the enemy especially their horses. Better still would be to make other weapons such as cross bows as already mentioned.
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If they have an armorer and an officer with a bit of chemistry knowledge, they would be fine. Rifled barrels aren't that hard to make if they have enough supply to buy them time and training hours. They would have to recruit at first to get firepower up until they could get lathes and mills running. If they could use the lead chamber method to make sulpuric acid, they can make nitric acid from nitrated earth. That gives them a path to cordite, which, although unstable and dirtier than normal smokeless powder, can be used at a higher ROF to give them machine guns back. The logistics knowledge, the medical knowledge, etc would be enough assuming a well rounded, well trained officer contingent, armorers, and engineers. A platoon of grunts and a fresh out from college without support staff are going to have a hard go of it, no matter what.
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**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 6 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/92525/edit)
Imagine a world like ours but where a temporary portal could be constructed between two different locations allowing people to simply walk between these two places with a single step.
Now imagine that this technology is first discovered by an eccentric inventor who rather than patent it, decides to have some fun. He persuades the landlords of some local pubs (he’s based near Portsmouth in the UK) to host a weekly “National Geographic Spectacular” evening where he sets up his portal and dials in various interesting places for people to look at or even briefly visit by stepping through.
What would eventually spur the Government to try to take control of his invention and would the inventor stand any reasonable chance of prosecution for any of the offences he would probably commit? Given the extraordinary nature of the device, his unwillingness to show anyone outside of the pub cliental and his claim in court that the case was preposterous nonsense (with expert evidence from professional scientists if required) and that all he was doing was creating a very clever optical illusion.
If his house was raided nothing would be found. He has no equipment, lab or workshop (at least not locally…).
Example National Geographic Spectacular week 3 At the Hero’s pub Waterlooville about 8 miles north of Portsmouth:
The inventor’s voice slowly builds to a crescendo “All the way from Zion National Park in Utah USA … I bring you … Angels Landing” a curtain opens and a few people venture through for a closer look “don’t go too far, mind the edge it’s a steep drop and MAKE SURE YOUR BACK BEFORE 11:00”.
Edit: Re legality, no serious issues initially, but think what’s bound to happen eventually. Perhaps on this night some Brits from the pub wander off and don’t get back by closing time when the portal is closed down and some American “tourists” come through the other way get chatting have a few beers and don’t make it back either. The inventor goes on holiday for a week and they’re stranded.
I suspect the National Geographic Spectacular shows would soon have the pubs packed and people with less than good intentions might take advantage and the press would take an interest. Then what about week 4 – The blue eye of Siberia?
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I can see a few laws he might be breaking, or enabling the bar patrons to break. These aren't, generally speaking, local crimes. They're crimes on foreign soil. And petty crimes that are unlikely to result in extradition, even if they find out he's doing it or behind it.
### Illegal power
If the source power is from something that the government regulates (ie a homebrew nuclear reactor) or even from unlicensed electrical work, that'd be a problem. But since the technology exists... somewhere else... there's some question about whether the government could find out or claim jurisdiction over that technology.
### Trespassing
The bar patrons are stepping through into somewhere else. Is that somewhere else a public space? If not, they are trespassing on someone else's private property. That's generally frowned upon by legal sorts.
### Immigration and Customs
Did your bar patrons leave the country and enter another country? Did their destination country grant visas or have a standing arrangement that negates the need for visas? Did your patrons pass through the destination country's customs and get their passports stamped? If not, they may now face legal repercussions for having illegally entered a foreign government.
### Souvenirs
Did any of the patrons take any local objects as "souvenirs?" Did they pay for them? If not, they're now thieves as well as illegal visitors.
They may also face fines for not declaring the souvenirs and paying applicable duties on them.
### National Security
*Really, this is the only one that is likely to matter.* Because of the threat this technology allows, the local government may perceive the entire technology as a national security risk. I mean, if some foreign power stole this technology, why, *they could bypass our border guards, invade our banks, steal our technologies, incapacitate our leaders and military...* The risks are far too great. Better mark this as a state secret and take it and all who know about it into custody.
And then use it against our enemies.
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I think so long as he is careful to avoid doing a few things (and assuming that nothing in the machine is illegal or controlled, such as fissile material, etc) then he should be OK, legally-speaking.
For one, I'm fairly sure that there are no laws about uncontrolled *leaving* of the country, only entering. So if you start in the pub, go somewhere foreign, and then end up in the pub it's not going to be vastly different, leagally-speaking, to hopping in your dingy in Kent, crossing into French territorial waters, crossing back again and ending up back in Kent. Of course at this point he needs to make sure he has no *extra* people, as then you'd be in the realms of people-smuggling.
If he's leaving the country on these trips he may well be breaking the law in those countries (even just on basic immigration laws) but I think that any form of extradition is very unlikely on that front. He should of course be careful to avoid teleporting anywhere that he otherwise would not be allowed to go.
There is of course an entirely different question of precisely how - upon deciding you wanted - to successfully prosecute someone in possession of a teleporter.
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Another issue is whether or not the electromagnetic emissions of the teleportation device violate UK laws on the use of the frequency spectrum. Certain frequencies are reserved for certain uses, like emergency services, military, telecom, and so on. There are also regulations regarding how much power can be used while transmitting on those frequencies. It's really quite serious. A certain individual who shall remain nameless told her workmen to orient the satellite system to transmit to a satellite when the line of transmission was blocked by a hotel. Thankfully her workmen told her she was stupid and refused to do it. The transmissions from a 25 foot satellite dish can kill birds in flight and damage the satellite itself. Line of sight microwave can damage the paint on cars. If the scientist's device interferes with telecom systems or creates EMF interference with emergency services radio, I'm sure there will be a host of laws he has violated.
There's also health considerations. The authorities will of course want to know if the EM emissions might have a negative effect on people or animals.
The only other legal issues I can think of are unlawfully entering another country / skipping customs and trespassing, which other posters have already mentioned.
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Just using the device doesn't break any laws unless he breaks a law while using it (eg. using it to pull a bank robbery).
The only thing he could possibly be guilty of. based on your examples, is entering a nation without proper visas or other permits. It would be up to those countries to prosecute (if there was any evidence to back up their claim).
The one with the biggest claim would be the National Graphic Institute who may sue over trademark infringement.
Of course, that doesn't mean that if the nation wanted his secrets badly enough that they couldn't just make something up. If they call him a terrorist, they can mostly do whatever they want.
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**Murder**
A common question amongst fans of Star Trek is exactly how a transporter operates.
One of the biggest implications is that the transporter essentially turns you into energy, sends that energy to a destination, then reassembles you.
BUT - is the reassembled you really you? Or did the old you die, and the new you is just a copy?
They even mention in a Star Trek episode how transporting can sometimes leave "errors" in the DNA, just like how a photocopier makes a slightly poorer version of the original document.
And one interesting episode where it was discovered a second Will Riker had been accidentally created; which is the real Riker?
So it could be argued that the transporter is actually killing the original person. This would be considered murder, even though a new version of the person is created.
It kind of depends on how the machine works.
**International Travel**
You know those trips to other countries? Do the people have valid passports? Are they getting them stamped? Are they getting the proper vaccines.
If one of those tourists gets bitten by a mosquito (without knowing it), they could bring a deadly disease home.
There's all kinds of implications you could explore there.
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**Smuggling**
Your device would make it extremely easy to transport physical goods from one country to another, bypassing all examination by customs and excise officials, and thus evading paying import duty.
Consider tobacco and alcohol. In the UK, these items are heavily taxed on import, and thus there is already a significant problem with smuggling.
If the machine does what it claims, then your protagonist would be able to do things like getting crates of cigarettes shipped to an address in another country, then open his portal and carry them across undetected. It would be completely undetectable and untraceable. He wouldn't even need to steal them or break any local laws.
Whether he actually does this or not for himself, he is also running the risk of his clients doing the same thing. Everyone who goes through the portal could be carrying items that they are intending to illegally export, and could return with illegal imports. The protagonist may not even be aware of it, but he could be seen as liable in the eyes of the authorities.
If the authorities wanted to clamp down on him, it would be very easy to invent charges along these lines, and very hard for him to prove them wrong.
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**Illegal introduction of invasive species.**
At some point he opens a portal to somewhere in Alberta.
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/0331_030331_rats_2.html>
While the portal is open a few rats from the pub slip through.
**Transmissions of pathogens**
One of his nightly portals goes to a country where foot and mouth is endemic.
The bar patrons track round some local scenery and come back with contaminated material on their feet. At least one of the patrons is a farmer who's farm ends up being herd zero for a new UK foot and mouth outbreak costing the government hundreds of millions.
**Drug smuggling**
Controlled substances vary by country.
The patrons go for a wander to visit the Mada'in Saleh in Saudi Arabia but carry their pints with them. One of them is picked up by local police. They get the story about the scientist transporting them and since he helped them transport the alcohol into the country illegally he's caused an international incident.
Or perhaps the reverse and one night when he opens a portal to Afghanistan one of the bar patrons with a heroin habit takes the chance to buy some cheap heroin. He's later caught with it in the UK and the story comes out about the portal.
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Most importantly and above all he broke the laws of physics, which is inexcusable.
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A little while back, I went to see [*Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_and_the_City_of_a_Thousand_Planets) (honestly unsure of what reaction this is going to get), and there was a particular scene that showed a desert planet's multi-colored clouds:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YftnCm.jpg)
So what I'm wondering now is how to achieve the same three-tone mix of colors seen in the image above. A quick search revealed that [cloud iridescence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_iridescence) produces a similar effect, but it appears to be fairly isolated, heavily dependent on perspective, and scatters ALL colors--albeit it very vividly:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dTUI5m.jpg)
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Clouds made by condensed water vapour will always appear white, as they scatter the light in all directions, unless, as you point out, the presence of ice crystals make them behave more like a prism, diffracting light.
If you want to have colored clouds, you need either to use dust (i.e. a dust of rust will appear dark red, sand transported by the wind give a yellow appearence to sky, clouds and rain) or colored gases (i.e. the NO2 produced in nuclear explosions is responsible for the reddish hue of the mushroom).
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Much like the dust answer but how about micro-organisms that "bloom" inside the clouds. It could be that different parts of the cloud is inhabited by different types of micro-organism or that the microbe behaves differently in different parts of the cloud.
It might require a bit of hand waving to get a microbe that can easily grow to fill all the clouds but it feels like it should be possible.
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[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JJ72h.jpg)
From <https://mars.nasa.gov/MPF/science/clouds.html>
These **blue clouds on Mars** are from a photo taken by Pathfinder.
They might be water ice, or they might be CO2 ice.
From [Anthony Colaprete and Owen B. Toon, Carbon dioxide clouds in an early dense Martian atmosphere. JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 108, NO. E4, 5025, doi:10.1029/2002JE001967, 2003](http://www-geodyn.mit.edu/neumann.clouds.03.pdf)
>
> Clancy and Sandor [1998] have also suggested that the blue colored
> clouds observed by the Imager for Mars Pathfinder (IMP) were composed
> of carbon dioxide. The color of the clouds, they argued, is the result
> of scattering from small (0.1–0.3 mm) CO2 ice particles with particle
> concentrations on order of 100 cm3, forming at altitudes between 60
> and 80 km.
>
>
>
Probably either way the blue color is not intrinsic to the composition but is due to Rayleigh scatter of light, the same as in Earth's blue sky. But blue clouds are possible.
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Here is a zanier proposal: **glowing clouds**.
We know that noble gases can glow if they are charged under the right circumstances. These are [gas-discharge lamps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-discharge_lamp) of which neon is the most familiar. There is not neon in Earth's atmosphere but there is some argon.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/a9RLK.jpg)
Imagine now a world where the atmosphere had a lot of a noble gas. A thunderhead contains a lot of charge and sometimes these flicker with internal lightning. If a charged cloud (water, dust or otherwise) were in an atmosphere with a noble gas, maybe that charged cloud would glow like a neon or argon light, in the color characteristic of that gas.
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You could use pollution. I remember when visiting my grandparents in the 1960s, there was a factory nearby which could billow smoke in different colours. (The factory still exists, but we have had environmental laws requiring factories to clear their exhaust for a long time). With enough pollution, you would be able to get different colours.
Also note that a setting sun give clouds a different colour.
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Many animals have ears that revolve and pivot when they hear noise. Humans have vestigial structures in their ears that allow them to wiggle their ears somewhat. How would elves achieve this same effect.
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Go backwards just a few small steps in our evolutionary tree, and you will encounter the primate sub-order [strepsirrhini](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strepsirrhini), consisting of lemurs, galagos, and lorises. These are perhaps not our fiercest cousins, but arguably the cutest.
Relevant here is that these creatures all have the feline-like [pinnae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auricle_(anatomy)) that allow for rotation to focus on the direction of a sound. If human and elvish evolution diverged at or near this point in the tree of life, it would be entirely plausible for the elf branch to retain this trait. Elves in fiction are often portrayed as having a pointed pinna; here we are taking it a bit more extreme.
In this sense, where a human might be a large, intelligent, bipedal ape, an elf is likewise a large, intelligent, bipedal lemur.
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If I use the strict definition of "elf," then the answer must be no. Like humans, elves have ears on the sides of the head and the ears themselves are splayed out along the skull to capture sound in a hemispherical fashion. This gives us a tremendous advantage when it comes to triangulating sound from any source around us. However, our hearing is substantially weaker than creatures with cone-shaped ears.
Animals (like cats) with cone-shaped ears hear sound basically from only one direction: the direction the ears are pointing — but the cone shape captures sound better. Most such animals can rotate the ears to track sound, compensating somewhat for the lack of 360-degree tracking, but it's a much slower and less accurate process.
Remember that the shape of an elf's ear — the traditional pointy-eared elf — wouldn't actually give them improved hearing. The extra flesh is just that, extra flesh. We can stretch our ears today into marvelous shapes and it does nothing to our hearing.
Further, when you say "rotate" you must realize that so long as the ear isn't cone-shaped, there's nowhere for the rotation to go.
**BUT...**
Let's assume elves had superior ear-wiggling muscle control such that they could pull the flesh behind the ear hole forward, turning the ear into a rudimentary cone-shaped ear akin to cupping your hands behind your ears. That would shift the ear from "tracking mode" to "sensitive mode," allowing them to hear better in the direction their nose was pointing. That's actually an interesting idea.
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Many people don't know this, but **the pointy part of elves ears is an attachment point for a set of tendons and sinew** that also attach around the base of the ear.
This gives them a lot of control over the shape of their ear; by constricting the tendons, they can cup and curl their ears much more than humans...it even allows them to hear "around corners" when hiding behind rocks and trees which is part of the reason they are so stealthy.
Of course the first hand subjective experience of the elf is not of pulling tendons but "hearing that particular spot over there".
The actual muscular mechanics is similar to the way a monkeys' tail works.
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In my story to protect his treasure room, the king of a 12th century kingdom has heavily invested in his alchemists, who managed to create silica aerogel in blocks and made them insoluble in water (how they did is not in scope for this question, let's assume it happened and he secured the alchemists would keep the secret forever).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QLBJS.jpg)
Using these blocks he created a 3D maze in a volume of (w × l × h) 20 × 20 × 8 meters. The entrance is somewhere on the 20 × 8 wall, same holds for the exit on the opposite face leading to the treasure room.
The volume is at the end of a cave and the entire access wall is uncovered. There are no other features in the maze to stop intruders, except the maze itself.
For the people knowing the path to follow (n steps straight, climb in the passage 1 meter above the ground, etc...) there is no problem in going from the entrance to the exit, for anybody else trying to figure out his path in the maze there are the following risks:
* due to the appearance of silica aerogel (see photo) it's hard to have visual references or clues
* due to the nature of silica aerogel being highly hygroscopic, heavy dehydration is highly likely
* for the same reason touching the walls with bare skin is not advised
Does the silica aerogel actually provide better functionality to the maze with respect to stone bricks, or am I neglecting some aspect?
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As a maze, it's **still subject to maze solving algorithms** such as wall following, the pledge algorithm, Trémaux's algorithm, and such. Depending on certain features of the maze, you can even still use the simplistic wall following algorithm on it even if it's a 3D maze. It's just a necessary nature of mazes. And based off your limitations, an intruder can still cover exposed parts of their body for touch to aid in their utilization of their chosen algorithm. This reduces the issue of the translucent property of the aerogel throwing them off.
All that really matters is that they satisfy the requirements of the algorithm, and they don't need their eyes for that. They just need to path out the maze.
Secondly, it's also very brittle. Aerogel tends to break easily. Its strength comes from uniform distribution of force across its area. And while you are relying on dehydration of the intruder, your maze is very small. 20 meters is only 65 feet.
Using this floor plan as a size reference, it's easy to imagine someone who's fully hydrated able to smash their way through the maze before they succumb to dehydration or fatigue. Aerogel is also very light, so the destruction of the maze will in no way impact the health of the intruder.
The benefits of Aerogel have become your downfall here.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IwC0J.jpg)
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Aerogels are light, stiff, good insulators, a great modern material. They're just not very strong in the traditional sense of the word. With the help of an axe I could quite happily take a straight line through your maze, a problem that stone doesn't have.
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Compared to stone brick, aerogels might be one of the worst choices of material for protection. Some peers of mine made titanium oxide aerogel last year. (It was to test a potential method of radiation protection on NASA's Orion capsule, but that's another story) They quickly encountered one problem - aerogels (of all types) are *extremely* fragile, to the point that any potential assailant confronted with your maze could simply punch their way through. In their case, it shattered in its bubble-wrapped vial simply due to its being transported in a car. Even if nobody with malicious intent attempted to break through, climbing over it in a 3D maze has a high probability of shattering large sections of it by accident. On the upside, it would look pretty cool while it lasted.
*Note: I didn't notice the second answer until I finished this one.*
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In my story, I have a fairly advanced human race who is at the point they want to start terraforming planets. Of course, all of the materials necessary have to come from somewhere, and the proposed solution is simple. In solar systems devoid of life and livable planets, mine the sun for use in atmospheres and planets for increasing the mass of other ones.
One thing I noted would be that the sun is made up of mostly hydrogen and helium, so while a sun would provide a good amount of hydrogen, it wouldn't work very well for other atmospheric components (as in more fusion would be required to produce a reasonable amount of oxygen or carbon).
My question is how technologically advanced would a civilization have to be to do this? What would be some of the difficulties facing this method? If this isn't really feasible, is there another way to find atmospheric components and water for terraforming?
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## Gas giants are cheaper and require less handwaving
* **Stars are made of plasma.** If you harvest the material from the outer layers of a star - or even from ejected matter - you will need a way to cool it down. Space is devoid of the gases needed to move this heat elsewhere, so it will require enormous space radiators. This is very, very inefficient. Meanwhile, gas giants are composed of gas and small particles! No large-scale cooling necessary.
* **Stars have more gravity.** It takes much more work to orbit a star safely than it does to orbit a gas giant. For large-scale loads of matter, you will want to save energy.
* **Stars are hot.** Unless you use an unfathomably large magnetic field to move the plasma toward your ships (which would require so much energy that the magnets would melt), you will want to come in contact with the surface of the sun in some way. For reference, the surface of the sun is 5,777 K, while iron vaporizes at 3135 K: without handwavium, it's extremely difficult to collect any material.
* **Stars have the wrong compositions.** While gas giants may mostly be made of hydrogen and helium, they are theorized to have solid cores of more useful elements. In addition, stars have significantly more internal pressure - that will crush even the strongest apparatus. They literally function by ripping apart and smashing together subatomic particles - there is no plausible way to put anything deep into a star to harvest useful elements.
Even if you opt to fuse hydrogen to make heavier elements (as opposed to mining them) it is easier to acquire that hydrogen from gas giants. It's easiest to opt for the cheaper option.
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## To mine a sun
You need to have the energy to escape a star's gravity at virtually any distance; to construct materials impervious to heat that will normally turn any element into a plasma and tear it to shreds; to withstand some of the most extreme pressures in existance; and to cool a plasma to a gas en masse. Sounds like a **[Kardashev 2.9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale)**
## To mine a gas giant
You need to have the energy to escape the mass of a gas giant; to siphon gas in large quantities and transport it, and to withstand a fraction of the pressure that a star would contain. Sounds relatively close to a [Kardashev 2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale).
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The technology to take matter from a star is called [Star Lifting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzuHxL5FD5U), and it is a feat of mega engineering which allows the engineers to take plasma from a star and store it or move it for use elsewhere.
As has been noted in other answers, the primary results of Star Lifting is the accumulation of large quantities of hydrogen and helium, which isn't directly useful in terraforming. You could use nuclear fusion to transmute the elements into heavier elements, and generate lots of energy at the same time, but perhaps a better potential use is to move planets around the solar system.
The plasma, as it radiates away its energy and cools, should be collected and stored. The best way to do so is simply pump it into a small area until self gravitation takes over and you build small "gas giant" planets about the size of Uranus or Neptune.
Now we already understand that planets can be moved over long periods of time through the mechanism of momentum exchange. Spacecraft do this routinely, slingshotting past Jupiter and picking up speed, while Jupiter loses exactly the same amount of energy. IT would take millions of spacecraft dong moment um exchange with Jupiter for millions of years before we see any appreciable change in Jupiter's orbit, and it is possible that Earth could be moved more quickly transferring momentum between Earth and millions of asteroid flypasts. [Paul Birch](http://www.orionsarm.com/fm_store/MoveAPlanet.pdf) proposed moving Venus or Mars even more quickly by making a stream of extremely high energy projectiles rounding the Sun and transferring their momentum to the planet in question.
An artificial Uranus sized planet created in the right place could do the same thing far more quickly, transferring orbital energy to the planet being terraformed in one pass due to the much greater amount of mass and changing the terraformed planet's orbit so it travels towards the centre of the "Goldilocks zone". With the planet in the right part of the zone, creating a liquid hydrosphere becomes much easier, and terraforming can proceed with one of the largest issues solved. The artificial gas giant might have to be placed in an eccentric elliptical orbit to prevent it from closing with the terraformed planet until just the right time, so the engineers will need to plan and calculate this long in advance of the actual movement taking place.
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The funny part of them all is the following - The Universe is made mostly of Hydrogen and Helium, [Abundance in the Universe of the elements](http://periodictable.com/Properties/A/UniverseAbundance.html), but we still have planets and expect them to be not only in our star system.
The question is not how low is a percentage of elements we need, but how big is the thing where they are. The Sun, [Sun Fact Sheet](http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/sunfact.html), is relatively big, 333'000 times mass of the Earth.
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> Photosphere Composition:
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> Major elements: H - 90.965%, He - 8.889%
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> Minor elements (ppm): O - 774, C - 330, Ne - 112, N - 102, Fe - 43, Mg - 35, Si - 32, S - 15
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In fact, sun composition contains more than just 330ppm of carbon, but this concentration is on top of the sun, in upper layers (carbon is relatively heavy and it sinks to the core, but still some of it floats in upper layers).
This concentration is relatively big actually, it is 0.396% by mass, so to made one planet like Earth but made of pure carbon, you need to purify matter of about 250 mass of earth from upper layers of the sun. As a byproduct, you will get about 2 earth mass planets made of oxygen, about half mass pure neon planet, 0.6 mass from Fe etc.
If you combine those 2 oxygen planets with a proper amount of hydrogen - you will get about 2+ planets made of pure water.
And that all can be done just by barely scratching the sun, all you need it 0.1% of the sun.
Gas giants like in our system (we are lucky to have cold ones) are basically a small fragment of the star, and they have very similar composition.
Jupiter([Jupiter Fact Sheet](http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/jupiterfact.html)), as an example, have the mass about 317.83 of the Earth, so basically it is a bit more than 250 masses you need to create a few planets made of pure elements.
In my the longest [answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/45273/20315) on WB.SE I began to describe the initial phase of the process, but answer limitation had effectively prevented to disclose all the details about the process. But it has some description how it can be done.
The main point is that to lift the matter from the star, you need a lot of energy, even by having all the energy of the star, but any matter which orbits the sun, may be effectively exchanged with the matter from the sun, because it already have all needed energy you may need to lift the matter from the star into the orbit around the star. Namely, it means all mass of the Jupiter(its hydrogen and helium) may be exchanged to heavier elements from the sun, and it will be enough to make about 300 planets like the earth.
But as you talking about tuning of a planet, you probably do not need the same scale of operation as in my longest answer on WB.SE
Water is not a problem at all because rocks are oxides of mostly silica, so any rocky planet can be made an ocean planet with the proper amount of hydrogen reacting with those rocks. (you better have space lift or space ring for that types of reaction, to not overheat the planet, and do the reaction in space). It may be a hardcore way of doing it, as there is a lot of water in asteroids, and it is guaranteed a lot of water in any system as Oxygen and Hydrogen are most abundant elements, and freezing point of water is pretty high. Water will form during the system formation and there will be a lot of water ice in a typical system(nearby supernovae blast may change the thing, not in favor of water ices but you always may go the hard way, making it from rocks and hydrogen from a star or gas giant).
Basically, all problems from your answer do not need - super intergalactic civilizations, elements transmutations, etc.
Would we have manufacturing in space and the wish to do so, we could do it ourselves, with technologies we already have. Maybe not from the sun but from gas giants for sure, with the sun we need a bit more advanced technology.
But really, you do not need terraforming's, build space habitats they are more efficient.
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A civilization capable of this would have to be a Level 2 civilization (intergalactic), so I doubt that converting stellar-mass into heavier elements through fusion would be a problem for them. In fact, they may probably already be using fusion as an energy source, so the effort may be partially self-sustaining. Using their possible transporter tech (particle entanglement-based), they could actually "beam" the matter directly into the vicinity of the planet. Because of its density, it couldn't be too close, or maybe more than a few hundred tons at a time, too prevent massive decompression-based explosions from making the planet unlivable. Artificial magnetic fields to direct the plasma would also be useful to control the dispersion, as it will initially exist as high-energy plasma. If they're not quite this advanced, they can go about it the more conventional way and use flora and fauna from their home planets that can survive in the new environment initially, such as using plants to convert CO2 to O2 or bacteria to break down hydrogen sulfide to release oxygen. The drawback to this is that it takes a **long** time, as does enriching a planet through breaking down small asteroids and transporting them to a planets surface without causing a meteor shower.
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The purpose is not to get hydrogen or helium, but heavy metals, which are only produced in stellar cores.
This was a feature of the astonishing [Quantum Thief Trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief) written by real-life mathematical physicist [Hannu Rajaneimi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannu_Rajaniemi).
In Rajaneimi's book, it required only a the technology of a post-[singularity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity) civilization, still restricted to our own solar system. (The idea is that the mechanics are well within the bounds of a civilization approaching Type II on the [Kardashev scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale).
[Answer]
*you mean star lifting?*
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzuHxL5FD5U>
this is not a common sci-fi device ,mainly because you would need to already have fusion and if you need hidrogen you can get away easier in jupiter and the asteroid belt and have ridiculously advance technology ,but it is possible
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The superman protagonist in my story built that building (over night--at least the shell)-
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Oqiia.png)
Base on lower Manhattan--the building is 0.6 mi (1 km) square up to ~5 mi up where it cantilevers out to 3 times the floor area up to about 65 mi where its double the base; and finally roughly 0.3 sqr miles in the red area to the top. First km of height is glass enclosed, as per drawing (small panes).[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6KQIw.jpg)
Roughly 25 000 floors! First 35-40 miles are residential, a vertical city divided into 10 story sections. Next 30-40 mi commercial-low grav factories, space launch facilities, etc. Top few miles are dedicated to super guy and his shenanigans. :)
Using existing building materials, is this possible?
Edit: Superguy changed his plans. He's building two additional skyscrapers, each 95 miles tall. One's in Raritan Bay, the other in New Jersey. Connecting all three are various sky-bridges, I think they call them.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/z6tv6.png)
Here's the base view with the Jersey tower in the background.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/thcW8.jpg)
[Answer]
No.
You have some serious engineering issues.
If you have 25,000 floors, then even with no 'mushroom' (expanding floors) you have 25,000 square km of floor space. That's 25 billion square meters. If you had 100 square meter apartments, and similar space for support facilities you have 125 million apartments. At 2 people each average, you have 2/3 of the population of the U.S. living in your tower. I've ignored the business aspects, much I ignored the expansion.
Even at present with 100 story office towers, a major problem is getting people in and out. At present, one of the tricks is that it takes 2 elevator trips to get anywhere. Some elevators stop at multiples of 10-20 floors. E.g. They stop a 10, 20, 30, but don't stop at the floors between. These elevators can accelerate and run at much faster speeds. The secondary elevators run slower, but only have a short range of floors. This allows you to put several slow elevators in the same shaft.
How long does it take to evacuate? Ignoring the elevator problem. Assume that the entire perimeter is doors. Say a pair of doors every 4 meters. There are 1000 pairs of doors. Everyone walks at 4 mph, or about 2 m/s, 1 meter apart. Each door then exits 2 people per second. 1000 pairs is 2000 doors, so 4000 people per second.
125,000,000/4000 = 32,000 seconds. 9 hours.
How far do they have to go? 125 million people at 1 sq. m each is 125 square km. About 11 km away.
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We have a problem before that however. Suppose we have 1 high speed elevator every 50 meters, over the entire base. 400 elevators total. On the average the elevator come down 80 km. If they ran at the speed of a high speed train, say 320 km/hour, it takes 30 minutes per round trip. If the elevator has the usual capacity of about 15, then 400 shafts delivering a person every 2 minutes is 200 passengers per hour.
Clearly we don't have enough elevators. Lets's make half the base elevators. One every 10 meters. So we have 100 x 100 grid of elevators or 10,000 elevators. Still stuck at 5000 people per hour. Takes 25,000 hours to get everyone down. Somewhat under 3 years.
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How would you support this structure? There is a reason that the earth can stack mountains only about 7 miles above sea level.
I did tour of the Bunker Hill Sullivan mine. At 5000 feet below the surface, they have to rebore the tunnels periodically: There's enough creep of the rock, that it gets out of true. They also bolt chain link fence to the walls and ceiling. Rock spalls off the ceiling. Now buildings are not as dense as rock, but we're not talking any measly 7 miles either.
You have some serious wind load issues where it passes through the tropopause.
How do you keep if from zigging out of line. You have a building with a 160 to 1 height/width ratio. So 1 cm square base by 160 cm height. Load goes up with the cube of the linear size ratio, but strength goes up with only the square.
Try this: Make a stick of those dimensions -- 1 cm x 1 cm x 160 cm (5 feet)
Duct tape a pop bottle to the top end. Partially fill it with water. Now holding it the bottom end, with the end stationary on the floor, keep it balanced. This is best done outside on a windy day. The bottle of water is the rest of the load on the building.
(This is fairly easy to do if you can move the base, as you are rotating the stick around it's center of mass. You have a much longer lever arm, and the load has half the lever arm as with a stationary base.)
Keep in mind in this model, that your hand is 10 cm tall -- You aren't going to hold the bottom 10 km of your tower.
Your model needs some work.
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Actual answer is a guarded "Yes", with lots of caveats.
Firstly, it is theoretically possible to build compression towers to heights of at least [20km](http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/08/structural-design-of-the-tall-tower/) using structural materials like steel or high strength aluminum. It is even more possible if you want to eat the extra costs of using exotic materials like Titanium or carbon fibre reinforced composites, which are much lighter but have similar strength to steel. This sort of tower would be essentially an open truss work, and like the Eiffel Tower, it would need to have a very wide base to ensure stability from the various forces acting on it, and to ensure the tower has a stable base to support the weight.
<http://www.citylab.com/design/2012/08/there-limit-how-tall-buildings-can-get/2963/>
<http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/proceeding/aipcp/10.1063/1.1541305>
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXKrreaJp8k>
Even more exotic construction might be used, with dynamic elements supplying strength and support. A [Canadian company](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/a-canadian-company-is-planning-to-build-a-tower-thats-20km-high-and-could-making-flying-to-space-10459058.html) wants to build a 20km tall tower using inflatable sections, for example. Other sorts of dynamic structures are also possible, with the ultimate expression being the "[Space Fountain](https://infogalactic.com/info/Space_fountain)". The primary issue with the Space Fountain, and indeed any dynamically stable structure is that it depends on the uninterrupted flow of the dynamic elements. A power interruption, a kink in the magnetic track or any other small fault could lead to the catastrophic destruction of the tower, particularly since the energy of the moving parts is so high.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xNudR.png)
*Diagram of Space Fountain*
Of course for something like this to be built, there would need to be a compelling reason. In the case of Geoffrey A. Landis' "[Tall Tower](http://yarchive.net/space/exotic/tower_launch.html)", the device is meant to be a [launch platform for rockets](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20030022661.pdf), with the advantage of eliminating a great deal of atmospheric drag by simply lifting the rocket to the top to the tower for launch. (Obviously economic considerations don't apply to super beings). In fact, although it seems quite possible to build even a relatively ordinary skyscraper to nights of a mile (1.6km), and indeed architect Frank Lloyd Wright had drawn up a design as far back as the early 1950's, there is no economic justification for such a structure, and the added expenses of stability measures, special elevators and so on simply make such a thing impractically expensive, or you would have to charge absurd rents to pay the cost of the structure.
WRT a 100 mile high tower, there are two approaches. The tower could be built directly as a [gigantic construct](http://www.fisherspacesystems.com/linked/basic_tower_design_-_updated_jan_2012.pdf), or you could build such a thing if you used the Landis "Tall Tower" as the base and supporting structure for a space fountain. This would protect the high velocity pellet streams of the space elevator from disruption and keep the magnetic tracks stable in the very critical base part of the structure, and the fountain would carry on out of the atmosphere.
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\*\*Short answer: No; not with our local gravity, natural laws and best materials to date.
Optimistic answer: Maybe, if we could achieve the full theoretical strength of carbon nanotubes and make them as long as we'd like.
Unless you add an extension up to/past geosynchronous orbit.\*\* Even making this the base of a Skyhook (and assuming we could make perfect carbon nanotubes of arbitrary length), it's not exactly trivial. A big hydrogen or helium blimp wouldn't help; you're already well above virtually all of the atmosphere.
The strength of materials ultimately comes down to the strength of inter-atom bonds. The carbon-carbon bond in CNT's
(See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube>.) is the best we know of. Adamantium (and Niven's Scrith) are sadly unavailable.)
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The answer is no with current tech, yes with crazy-soft-science-future tech. XKCD did it:
<https://what-if.xkcd.com/94/>
In this article Randall Munroe XKCD guy postulates to a little girl on this by skipping over some basic laws of nature/logistics/economics and ignoring hazards like the structure "falling over and smashing into the planet like the giant meteor that killed the dinosaurs".
"Maybe, someday, you could build a giant tower to space. I'm pretty sure it won't be made of peanut butter, though."
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[Question]
[
My aliens are little symbiotes (think Venom from Spider-Man) who appear to be like crown-of-thorns starfish when not attached to a host. They have general mimicry and camouflage similar to an octopus or cuttlefish, and can survive on their own. However, when attached to a host (willing or otherwise), they grant information to the host, but only as the host shares information back. Slowly, they grant the host enhanced body abilities through a chemical mix the symbiotes produce (although the symbiote is currently [slowly] dissolving the host’s brain). Understandably, the host generally doesn’t want to give up these powers, until it’s too late and the symbiote has taken over.
If they can’t identify each other, then they could accidentally bond with a symbiote (which then leads to them killing each other trying to maintain dominance of the host and not good for the symbiotes). Additionally, from a casual glance from Ned, the next-door neighbor, Joey seems the same day to day, even after the symbiote has taken control.
The symbiotes need a way to identify each other, without being seen as insane or not a human, so how can they identify each other?
[Answer]
## Smell (and/or taste)
Gllrpt, the symbiote, sees Billy, the neighbor boy. Gllrpt oozes and scabbles across the ground, ready to touch Billy, to hack into Billy's nervous system and make Billy the offer of undreamed-of knowledge and power.
Then Gllrpt catches the whiff (undetectable to human noses, but very clear to many animals) of the alien chemistry of Gllrpt's kind. It's Snrfllt, Gllrpt's crèche acquaintance!
And even if Gllrpt can't catch a whiff of one of its own kind, Billy, the already-attached, won't taste like a pristine human, not with all those symbiote-chemicals already flowing through his body.
Better luck next time, Gllrpt. Or wave at Billy, who may direct you to his still-pristine mother. (Dad's already taken in Prlaggt.)
Incidentally, the subtle odor may contribute to the unusual reactions of dogs, cats, moose, etc, when a possessed person is upwind.
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**Hosts have only one orifice suitable for a symbiote.**
And if a newcomer arrives and finds the orifice taken, it is considered good manners to move on.
Occasionally a symbiote might explicitly negotiate with an occupied host (usually from the vantagepoint of a temporary host) to explain why the services of the interested party would be better than those of the host's current partner. The host may opt to trade up. That involves the departure of the current symbiote, either voluntarily or not.
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I'd argue that these aren't really symbiotes since they destroy the host's brain over time in order to fully take control, but that's just a nitpick that doesn't answer the question. What does answer the question is... complex.
First, smell. The chemicals the creature produces will be metabolized by the human body and some of the original chemicals or their metabolites will be expelled from the body via the sweat glands. Clearly this will be something that humans can't detect, but your creatures will be able to smell that someone in the area has been taken, and from up close it should be fairly clear who it is. You could take control of the process more directly and produce pheromones, if that's your thing. That will give you a much broader range of expression through the scent.
You can use the same basic mechanism via 'taste' once you make physical contact with a human: the skin will taste of the chemicals and byproducts, and if you enter the body it will be unmistakably inhabited.
But what about at a distance? Humans use sight a lot, your creatures probably not so much since they rely more on their host's sense organs, but they have to have some way of tracking potential targets and sight is one of the best options. Nothing says that they have to use the same visual spectrum as humans though, so perhaps they see things we can't: long infrared or short ultraviolet for instance. All you have to do then is change the UV 'color' of the host's visible skin in some way. Patterns of UV coloration on the face for instance will make it immediately clear to any creature seeking a host that this one is taken. And if you have enough control over it - which I assume these things do - then maybe it contains extra information like name, clan, rank or whatever.
Of course you could just ask. In your own voice of course, which happens to be pitched way up in the 200kHz range where no land animal is going to hear it. You have to 'shout' a bit because it doesn't travel well through the air, but it's a fairly binary thing: if they react at all then you know they're already taken. Oh, and it also comes in handy for messing with ultrasounds when they're trying to scan for parasites. Just saying.
And that's just the senses that humans generally work with, which are certainly not the only ones available. Electrical senses work pretty well under water, not quite as well in air though. Biological radio isn't impossible, especially if the creatures have been uplifted or otherwise enhanced in some way. Natural extension into a 4th spatial dimension that allows for communication somehow?
If all else fails - or you're feeling particularly lazy - you can always pull the classic get-out-of-jail-free 'telepathy' card.
[Answer]
Ok so, infected humans look the same to other humans. Then I assume acting and talking the same as well.
It is either there isn't nay indicator or,
Humans can't detect the signs.
**There is a change, but it is undetectable.**
Imagine the symbiote, while fusing with the host and taking over, makes a small adjustment to vocal cords and each time host says something, there is a distinct tone for symbiotes, but the frequency is either too high or too low. So, there **is** a chance. But humans can't detect it.
Same idea can be applied to skin like reflecting a certain light or light polarization human eyes cannot see.
**Change is actually obvious. But humans lack the organ for it**
Instead of going completely fictional, you can add a few properties some animals have in our world. Many birds, bats, and I think sharks (Not sure) have ability to sense the magnetic field of a planet to follow the lines in order to go to north or south, to find way home.
Imagine the host, and symbiote inside the host emitted some kind of signal that could be sensed by other symbiotes. Works as both "I am here." message, and an identifier. Kinda like a unique smell.
**Countless blood spills created deals and rules**
Terratories, dividing different people types to different group of symbiotes, or making very small signs that will have a meaning to the symbiote.
"Oh look! Jake became much stronger after that trip to the forest. It is okay if he wants to plant a few plants. He was kinda like a nature guy anyways."
Different coloured plant combinations, adding small signs to life style like adding a sigil under the doormat or chimney's top. Kinda like how dogs pee to mark their terratory.
And if there are certain attack or interaction methods/paths symbiotes prefer, these signs can be effective.
You can add further division focusing on gender, height, body structure etc... World is diverse but not evenly mixed around all parts. Different group of symbiotes can divide the human world among each other to prevent bloodlust.
**Reprogrammed Biology**
Lets say, symbiotes developped a way to reprogram the host's immune system to reject any and all other symbiotes except itself as long as it was connected to the host. So, another symbiote can try to take a host, but immune system will attack and damage the symbiote heavily so it has to leave or die.
This way, any kind of conflict can be resolved with ifrst come first served second were killed on the spot logic. Maybe you can expand this like altering immune system to create resistance against viruses and such.
Same logic can be used in a bit different form like, maybe symbiote changes the host's organ structure and occupies all the connection points and other symbiotes are just slipping through host's organs, unable to connect and simply fall off. Like closing all sockets of a computer. Or like those water-proof pants that won't have stain.
**Duels, fight between individuals**
Let the symbiotes fight among each other but the moment a fight starts, winner is the owner and loser will die. Instead of triggering large scales of war, let individuals kill each other and prevent large scale conflicts. If a symbiote, despite being attacked by another symbiote, stil ltries to take a host over, then it was dumb and that guy can die so that the symbiote factions can keep the peace.
[Answer]
Pheromones/chemical traces is probably the simplest. When a symbiote has found a host, it releases a chemical that pervades the host's body and is constantly being released from the skin and body fluids, so if another symbiote doesn't get a whiff of it from the air as it approaches, it will absolutely detect once it touches the host. You could even have a situation where the chemical actually makes an unhosted symbiote physically ill so avoiding infected hosts is something that an unhosted symbiote has evolved to do.
If you're looking at it from a story standpoint, this also creates several possibilities. It gives the humans (or whoever) the ability to detect hosted symbiotes if they become aware of the chemical, and you could imagine it also being deployed as a defense like an insect repellent. It also creates some interesting possibilities as it could explain why someone is detected as having the chemical on them.
"I'm not infected! I use Symbiote-B-Gone all the time as a precaution!" says the symbiote currently occupying what's left of Chuck's brain.
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[Question]
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In the research I have done, cold climates trend toward dry climates. I want to create a climate that circumvents this. I want to create a very cold climate with the average temperature hovering about 3-5 degrees above freezing and very high precipitation (rainforest levels). Is this possible through geographic and astronomic features? For example, somehow trapping precipitation in a certain area to get the levels of rain desired?
Assume earth like planet orbiting an F star with a planetary mass of 1 and a density of 3.94 g/cm^3. The atmospheric pressure is between 0.3-1 atm with a density of 0.429 kg/m^3.
[Answer]
**I give you *Arctophila fulva,* the arctic freshwater marsh!**
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> This group occurs as small patches throughout arctic and subarctic North America, typically on the margins of ponds, lakes and beaded streams. It is also found on large to small floodplains where various wetlands form in oxbows, wet depressions, low-lying areas, and abandoned channels, including freshwater marshes. Soils are muck or mineral, and water is often nutrient-rich. In floodplains, permafrost is absent. Occurrences are typically dominated by grasses and sedges, but may have high forb cover in some instances. Dominant species include Arctophila fulva, Carex aquatilis, or Eriophorum angustifolium. Additional dominants occur in the subarctic, including Comarum palustre, Hippuris vulgaris, Lysimachia thyrsiflora, Carex utriculata, Schoenoplectus tabernaemontani, Typha latifolia, Menyanthes trifoliata, and Equisetum fluviatile. ([Source](https://explorer.natureserve.org/Taxon/ELEMENT_GLOBAL.2.860783/Arctophila_fulva_-_Carex_aquatilis_Arctic_Marsh_Group))
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And if that doesn't get your blood pumping, let me further introduce...
**The Arctic Tidal Salt Marsh**
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> This macrogroup consists of herbaceous tidal salt marshes with >10% vascular species cover that are subject to regular inundation. This includes low marshes, brackish meadows, and high marshes. Common herbaceous species in the mid to lower salt marsh include Carex glareosa, Carex ramenskii, Carex subspathacea, Carex ursina, Cochlearia officinalis, Dupontia fisheri, Puccinellia phryganodes, and Stellaria humifusa. In brackish meadows inland of the mid to lower salt marsh additional species such as Calamagrostis deschampsioides, Chrysanthemum arcticum, and Salix ovalifolia commonly occur. Tidal salt marshes are associated with estuaries or coastal lagoons or other locations protected from wave action, such as the inland side of barrier islands. In the Arctic, salt marshes may occur wherever there is relatively flat land at sea level that is subjected to permafrost subsidence or storm surge inundation. They occur along Alaska's Arctic coastline from the Bering Sea to the Arctic Ocean. The Bristol Bay lowlands in southwestern Alaska mark a major transition zone between Arctic and more temperate Pacific tidal marshes. Species common to the Pacific Coast salt marshes dominate east of the Alaska Peninsula, while species common to the Arctic salt marshes become more dominant to the west of the Alaska Peninsula and Bristol Bay. ([Source](https://explorer.natureserve.org/Taxon/ELEMENT_GLOBAL.2.860578/Arctic_Tidal_Salt_Marsh_Macrogroup))
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In short, marshes exist everywhere that isn't frozen solid. You're good to go.
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Cold is linked to dry because the capacity of air to carry water is linked to temperature. It's physics as much as geography. The wettest cold places are never going to be as wet as tropical swamps.
You can have wet, cold places but they need the water to come from rivers or melt-water rather than rain.
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What if you have a very large lake / sea that is geothermally heated (volcanoes, tectonic fissures, whatever). That puts a lot of moisture into the air. Prevailing winds move that over your cold swamp area where it precipitates out as the air cools.
You can have a little geothermal activity in the swamp to explain why the ground doesn't freeze over the course of long years.
[Answer]
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> average temperature hovering about 3-5 degrees above freezing and very high precipitation (rainforest levels)
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Have you heard of the Alaskan Panhandle? Or the coast of British Columbia? Or the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State? It is super common for these places to have literally months of constant rain and temperatures hovering around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. (I lived it and all I got was SAD)
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The name for subarctic swampland is usually [muskeg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muskeg). Generally it is solid in the winter time and treacherous when thawed.
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Just look at Scotland, Ireland, Iceland etc. Pretty much all of Northwestern Europe gets lots of rain due to the Gulf stream, and is generally not particularly hot (although often slightly warmer than other places at the same latitude). These places all have plenty of bogs and marshes. Remember, low temperature also means low evapotranspiration.
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Well, when I play Rimworld, the word used for a climate of low temperature but high humidity is "cold bog".
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[
In my setting, there is an alien world known as Totaria and an alien race known as the Totarians, who possess a special cell that lets them develop whatever organs, limbs, and creatures they want, somewhat like a super-stem cell.
With the super-stem cell, they built tools analogous to ours, from living creatures used as cars and public transportation, telescopes that utilize eyes and optic nerves to see long distances, and computers operating on neural tissue.
In fighting or war however, I'm having problems with certain aspects of their infantry equipment.
The issue I have is right now is that their primary firearm- a parasite shooting biological firearm known as a grub gun- is severely outclassed by 5.56 NATO and 7.62 NATO firearms, as seen here.
<https://shooterscalculator.com/ballistic-trajectory-chart.php?t=db8d8a7f>
The Totarians use either muscle spasms or tightly wound muscles (like a crossbow) to launch a 9 ounce parasite at roughly 1000 fps to smash into someone. But as seen on the chart, it both lacks the energy to punch or severely deform body armor and the range necessary to get to the target in the first place.
In a gunfight, unless they're going door-to-door, they will be outgunned by common human infantrymen. It also means they lack snipers, so they cannot target exposed but far-away enemy troops or commanders. Also, because they rely on muscles to shoot, they need time to set them back into position or rewind them, making it so that they lack machine guns and thus are vulnerable to being suppressed by MG fire without counter-suppression fire available to them.
What routes could I go for in biotechnology (with living guns, living ammo, or guns/ammo made from once-living creatures) to make long-ranged weapons designed to fight 5.56 NATO and 7.62 NATO at the average distances of 25-300 meters? What should I be looking at that will let me have a machine gun and/or sniper rifle analog in biotechnology?
Thank you for reading this and helping me,
Helter.
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# They rely on drone warfare.
Metal and manufacturing is inherently better suited towards moving an object at immense speed. You're never gonna match steel for sheer durability towards rapid movement.
As such, they don't try to do that. They have guns that shoot swarms of insect or bird like creatures. These creatures will look for any chinks in the armor of enemies to sting them with deadly poisons. Special variants will explode, releasing acid to melt holes in the armor of their enemies, or just explode and shoot sharp.
For when snipers are directly needed, they have sniper birds. These will fly to find a target, and use a bone rifle on their body to fire a powerful shell at their enemy. This often cracks their bones and leads to death, but this is a sacrifice they are willing to make.
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When you want biological firearms, bombardier beetle is the answer.
How the [bombardier beetle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_beetle) works:
>
> The spray is produced from a reaction between two chemical compounds, hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide, which are stored in two reservoirs in the beetle's abdomen. When the aqueous solution of hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide reaches the vestibule, catalysts facilitate the decomposition of the hydrogen peroxide and the oxidation of the hydroquinone. Heat from the reaction brings the mixture to near the boiling point of water and produces gas that drives the ejection. The damage caused can be fatal to attacking insects. Some bombardier beetles can direct the spray over a wide range of directions.
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Now that you have a way to biologically produce boiling water, you can start from there and increase the pressure of the "steam explosion" do propel your bullets.
Alternatively, you can also look at the [squirting cucumber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecballium_elaterium)
>
> Ecballium is a genus of flowering plants in the family Cucurbitaceae containing a single species, Ecballium elaterium, also called the squirting cucumber or exploding cucumber (but not to be confused with Cyclanthera brachystachya). It gets its unusual name from the fact that, when ripe, it squirts a stream of mucilaginous liquid containing its seeds, which can be seen with the naked eye. It is thus considered to have rapid plant movement.
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> The tissue in the fruit of the Ecballium elaterium that surrounds the seed is thin walled. The pressure to release the seed is created by the increased concentration of glucoside and elaterinidin in low volumes of cytoplasm. This creates an osmotic pressure of up to 27 atms. The pressure building method also seems to rely on the phloem sieve tubes. This also means that the shooting mechanism can be decreased in water stressed conditions.
>
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> The fruit also utilizes hygroscopic movement in order to shoot the seeds out of the fruit. This method is done passively where the fruit changes its structure when it dies and tension is relieved in the dead tissue, causing movement. This movement can be due to coiling, bending, or twisting cells that increases its morphological shape as the cell dries. Because dying cells are mostly made up of cell wall, the shape will be determined by the shape of the cell wall. This is a method of self-dispersal.
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Don't try to beat the humans at their own game. Play to your own strengths. You are a biotech species. Engage in biotech warfare.
* Make gratuitous use of chemical and biological weapons. Did you know that humans are so afraid of them that they outlawed them in their internal wars? Use that fear to your advantage. Show them just how terrifying those can be if developed and utilized by a species who knows what they are doing.
* Use stealth. Your adaptability makes it easy to hide among the local fauna and flora.
* For close-quarter combat, rely on ambush attacks using grappling tentacles, claws and teeth. All of them venomous, if feasible.
* For mid-distance combat: **If** you launch things at humans, don't rely on impact damage. Launch a sticky, caustic, poisonous goo at them. First it immobilizes them, then it dissolves their armor, and then it poisons their bodies.
* For long-distance combat: Create small creatures which fly or run to the enemy and attack them.
* Attack their logistics. Due to their lack of super stem-cells, humans need to produce all of their tools and supplies in factories and transport them over long distances to the battlefield. That's a critical weakness you can exploit! I am talking:
+ Fungal spores which block the air intakes and exhaust pipes of their machines.
+ Bacteria which process their fuel into sticky gel or chew through their plastic containers.
+ Small animals which eat their food and contaminate it with poisonous feces.
+ Fast-growing plants which block their roads, destroy their railways and crush their provisional shelters.
+ Tiny bugs with conductive carapaces which cause shorts in their electric devices
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This race generally seems like the type not to fight for themselves? If they've spawned critters to do everything else for them I'd expect spawned critters for fighting as well, most likely Starship Troopers style if you wanted something fairly primitive.
Additionally, if they're able to manufacture viruses/diseases, I would think they'd fight via biological warfare. Grow some mushrooms, release some spores, collect the corpses...
...or use organs to manufacture chemical weapons components that could be stored in sacs and ejected or sprayed at enemies. Skin grenades. Or mortars.
If you are a walking biochemistry lab, attempting to fight solely via explosion propelled projectiles seems like a self-defeating endeavor.
The flip side of this ability to rein it in a bit would likely be massive energy use to quickly generate these weapons along with a requirement to ingest/consume the ingredients for what they're making.
They fund this resource usage by being the universe's leader in designer drugs for all purposes - recreation, life saving and life ending. They're also great at targeted terraforming for removing unwanted indigenous species.
Given this potential these dudes seem like pretty awful enemies, can we reconcile?
If you really want projectiles, some sort of railgun might be practical to eject bits of metal while using bioelectricity to power it. Not sure where they'd get the technology (since they've grown everything else they wanted to use) but...yeah.
There's an older book titled 'Sentenced to Prism' where there were lifeforms that grew themselves into individual forms to fulfill a limited range of functions, you might give that a read if you're so inclined to see if any of that would align with what you're looking for.
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This is easy.
The raw materials for black powder are charcoal (cellulose that is anaerobically reduced to mostly carbon), nitrates (urea is the common one), and sulphur (animal manures). The more advanced smokeless powders, based on gun cotton, are created by soaking cotton (cellulose fibers) in nitric acid to create nitro-cellulose.
Totarians can easily synthesize any gunpowder because they are natural chemical factories, by your own definition.
Creating a projectile is likewise a solvable problem. Dense bone may never be as effective as cast metal, however there is an alternative. There are living things on earth that concentrate iron as a part of their metabolism. Totarians are able to build and support the cells that concentrate and precipitate iron into pellets. A pairing of cell types analogous to osteoclasts and osteoblasts work together to create and shape the pellets, 100% organically.
The problem lies in containing the propellant during combustion. It is a far different scale of problem to grow pellets and gunpowder than to grow a gun barrel. While the former can be grown easily, a gun barrel could to be grown over a period of time with hte same process, and cannot be used until the surrounding tissue has been resorbed and/or or cleared from the appendage.
A more reparable but slightly less durable appendage could be grown from hyper dense bone, built around dense silk webbing, similar to how rebar reinforces concrete. In this case the appendage could be used as soon as the "barrel" matures and the center clears. The enclosing tissue would remain intact to maintain a blood supply for self-repair (like real bones). Someone will need to do the math to figure out how many shots the Totarians could take before having to recuperate.
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To mark the anniversary of our company we have decided to introduce to our VIP guests a once in a lifetime opportunity to get intimate with the dinosaurs, we will put the animal to sleep so the guests can get near to them and molest it however they wish.
The thing is dose makes the poison so I must make sure we don't want the animal preferably a T. rex. to go into a cardiac arrest during the encounter in the late Cretaceous period, also I want to limit the duration of this expedition to 2 hours top.
My concern is how to determine what is a good dose of ketamin to tranq shot a T. rex.? We don't know for sure the first T. rex. on sight will be an adult or a juvenile but with such tight deadline there is no time to be picky.
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Ostriches can be dosed using medetomidine (80 μg/kg IM) and ketamine (2 mg/kg IM) for sedation within 15 minutes.
Worth considering seeing as birds are supposedly therapod descendents.
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/30133182>
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I think the closest equivalent in present times would be a crocodile and/or a Komodo dragon.
What I was able to find online mentions:
For crocodiles:
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> Ketamine at 18 to 45 mg/kg in Nile crocodiles had little effect, whereas doses at 59 to 110 mg/kg caused death in three animals. ([source](https://www.vetexotic.theclinics.com/article/S1094-9194(17)30054-3/references))
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It is also mentioned that other chemicals might work better
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> Diazepam followed by succinylcholine chloride was administered intramuscularly to
> 26 healthy mature female alligators on two occasions. The mean diazepam dosage
> was 0.37 mg/kg (0.28 mg/kg to 0.62 rng/kg) and the mean succinylcholine chloride
> dosage was 0.24 mg/kg (0.14 mg/kg to 0.37 mq/kg). This drug combination reduced
> stress and allowed adequate immobilization for restraint and handling. The reduced
> drug volume, low dosage of succinylcholine chloride required, short induction period,
> maintenance of respiration, and adequate degree of immobilization make this drug
> combination a good alternative to the use of muscle relaxants alone in the chemical
> restraint of alligators. ([source](https://www.vin.com/apputil/content/defaultadv1.aspx?id=3863600&pid=11257&print=1))
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for [Komodo dragons](https://en.wikivet.net/Lizard_Formulary_-_Anaesthesia_Associated_Drugs)
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> * The effect of ketamine in lizards is related to dose, species and the individual. Lizards require lower doses than other reptiles. It is useful for sedation or induction of anaesthesia for intubation. Sedation may require as little as 10 mg/kg while anaesthesia may require up to 50 mg/kg. Induction may take 10 to 30 minutes with recovery over 24 hours.
> * Muscle relaxation and analgesia may be marginal
> * Prolonged recovery with higher doses
> * Larger reptiles require lower dose
> * Painful at injection site
> * Questionable safety in debilitated animals
> * Avoid use with renal impairment
> * Lizards require lower dose than other reptiles
> * 10-30 mg/kg IM as a sedative, facilitates intubation
> * Useful in large lizards (11.6 mg/kg) in combination with midazolam (0.34-0.35 mg/kg)
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In principle you can use a dart which can be loaded on the spot based on the estimate of the size of the sample you have spotted. You can compile a table computing the estimated weight based on the estimated height of the specimen. Which dose to use between the two values listed above it's up to you: do you value more the safety of the animal or the safety of your guests?
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**Logarithmic Dartgun**
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> My concern is how to determine what is a good dose of ketamin to tranq shot a T-rex? We don't know for sure the first T-rex on sight will be an adult or a juvenile but with such tight deadline there is no time to be picky.
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Your hunters know how long it takes for ketamine to effect a crocodile. Let's say it takes 5 minutes. They suspect a T-rex has a faster metabolism than a crocodile -- they are closer to warm blooded birds than cold blooded crocodiles after all -- and so the correct dose should take hold in less than 5 minutes.
The first T-rex you see, check is he bigger than a crocodile. If not let him go, he's too small to be any fun. If he is big enough he gets a crocodile-sized dart. Follow him for 5 minutes.
If the T-rex is asleep scoop him up. Otherwise shoot another dart to double the dose.
Follow for another 5 minutes. Is he asleep yet? If not then shoot two more darts (or one dart with double the dose). Now he has 4 servings of Ketamine in his system.
Keep doubling the dose and waiting. Eventually when he falls asleep he has no more than twice the minimum dose.
**Edit:** L. Dutch's answer suggests the lethal dose for crocodiles is only about twice the minimum sedative. That's bad news for our hunters, since the above method might accidentally kill the t-rex.
To fix the method replace "double" with "multiply by 1.1". That way you need more darts but when the T-rex falls asleep you have used no more than 1.1 times the minimum sedative. [The doses look like this:](https://www.desmos.com/calculator/kbr7wztfek)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wN7JY.png)
The blue graph is the total amount of ketamine after $n$ shots. The red graph is the amount to put in shot number $n$.
[Answer]
## 0.5-10 mg/kg
this is the minimum and maximum safe dosage for elephants.
Now you say why elephants, because that is the closest thing in size to a t-rex we have, and size matters most.
birds and mammals of similar size differ in dose by much less than across difference masses the change is orders of magnitude. A safe dose for a rat is 80-100 mg/kg while an elephant 5-10mg/kg is considered high. while for a small bird the safe dose is 10-40mg/kg and around 8mg/kg max for an ostrich. mote birds need less than mammals on the small size but not significantly less as size increases.
So in all likelihood you should use **less** for a t-rex than an elephant based on phylogeny, but the temperament of a t-rex is likely worse than a elephant so you need to use **more**, but at the same time a t-rex is larger than an elephant so allometry means **less.**
bigger animals have lower metabolic rates so such drugs are more effective, but things like temperament also matter a lot.
Your margin of error is huge, **your best bet is to use multiple smaller doses and work your way up and re-dose as needed**. lowering the risk of killing the rex means the animal being down for shorter periods of time.
<https://www.mcgill.ca/research/files/research/121-_bird_anesthesia_-_jan_2021.pdf>
<http://elephantcare.org/resources/formulary/drug-index/ketamine-hcl/>
<https://animal.research.uiowa.edu/iacuc-guidelines-anesthesia>
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It is obvious that the surrounding area will become extremely hot, but I want to know other consequences if enough iron to make a sword were to be teleported to earth. Would it be possible to make a sword of that iron?
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Other answers have already covered why the iron would be dangerous to harvest because of its gaseous state... but the other important thing to consider is that even if you could teleport pure iron in from another source, you still have a lot of work to do to make it into a useful metal for making a sword out of.
Pure, un-worked, un-tempered iron is so soft, that its material properties are very similar to [annealed copper](https://www.matweb.com/search/datasheet_print.aspx?matguid=9aebe83845c04c1db5126fada6f76f7e).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bCfWp.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1BflN.png)
SOURCE: <https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/28/jresv28n5p643_A1b.pdf>
To put this in perspective, a very low quality sword like you would find in the bronze age or early iron age would generally have BHN of ~160 with a UTS of ~50,000lb/sqin. If you want to make something more like a late medieval tempered, medium carbon steel sword, you'd expect a BHN in the 200-400 range with a UTS that could exceed 100,000 lb/sqin.
So, to make a useful iron blade, you'd still need to alloy it with carbon, magnesium, and/or phosphorous to harden it, you'd need to hammer it out to improve its crystalline structure, and you need to alternate its temperature between various highs and lows to properly temper it. So, if your goal is to extract hot iron from another source and turn it directly in a sword, you will get a very poor quality blade. Most of the stuff that ancient smiths did to smelt and form thier steel can't just be skipped over by having a source of really hot iron to start with.
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Iron becomes a gas at 5182F, about half the temperature of the Sun. There is probably plenty of iron in the sun, from asteroids and comets falling in. Certainly enough to make a sword. But any iron in the sun is in a very diffuse gaseous state, teleporting enough to make a sword would likely take a miles wide chunk of the sun, and would explode so quickly that the atomic iron would be spread over most of the Earth.
Unless you have some magical way to extract **just** the iron and cool it down enough to condense into at least a liquid (2800F), I think this idea is a non-starter.
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**Move your teleporter a bit, to target Mercury's core instead of the sun**
Consider teleporting iron from Mercury's core. It has huge amounts of pure iron, and it is *solid*.
**Be careful !**
Mercury's core iron is probably much cooler than Earth's [5200 degrees celcius](https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/core/).. Mercury has a lower mass.. but on reception you'll have to cool it down and contain it ! The pressure will be lower, it could explode. To make sure you can harvest a useful amount, teleport it into a cave or under water, and await the teleportation on a safe distance.
<https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018GL081135>
**Forge the sword**
Then, the solid iron can be forged into a sword. You can also melt it and use graphite powder, to harden the iron. You can also use the ashes.
**The magic of a Mercury sword**
According to [the usual magic symbol system](https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a32055636/what-is-mercury-sign/) for planets, a Mercury sword will make a warrior agile and smart.
[Answer]
## Summary
My concern here would be the pressure difference. The Sun's core has a pressure of about 265 gigabar. That's about 265 billion times higher than sea level on Earth. Simultaneously, the temperature is about 15 million Kelvin, compared to Earth's 300 K, or about 50 thousand times higher than Earth. ([Wikipedia, *Solar core*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core))
My original answer suggested the energy release would be quite small. I made the mistake of trusting mathematician definitions of the Boltzmann constant, leading to incorrect dimensional analysis.1. I restarted the calculations from scratch and got a value that's much closer to what I expected. That doesn't make it correct, but I'm more confident in this answer.
**This would detonate like a very large bomb. Just the 1kg of iron would explode like 20 tons of TNT. If you had to get the 500kg or so of raw star stuff required to get that much iron, it would be roughly like the Little Boy nuke.**
## Ideal Gas Law
The ideal gas law tells us:
$PV=nRT$
n is the number of molecules, which is constant for a given mass, and R is the gas constant for that composition. Since P (pressure) and T (temperature) are given by the problem, that only leaves V (volume) to normalize to Earth standard.
$V=\frac{nRT}{P}$
$V\_{new}=nR\frac{\frac{T}{2.65\cdot 10^{11}}}{\frac{P}{5\cdot 10^4}}$
$=nR\frac{T}{P}\frac{2.65\cdot 10^{11}}{5\cdot 10^4}$
$=(5.3\cdot 10^6)\frac{nRT}{P}$
$=(5.3\cdot 10^6)V$
Assuming R stays the same during cooldown (probably an invalid assumption since we're converting from plasma to gas, but I think the premise is still valid) this means the mass you teleported is going to expand in volume by over 5 million times, with the radius increasing by about 170 times.
The speed of sound in the core as you teleport it is about 50 km/s ([Stanford, *Results of solar model calculations*, very last graph on the page](http://solar-center.stanford.edu/helio-ed-mirror/english/engmod-res.html)). This is somewhere between the blast wave speed of C4 (1.5 km/s, [PubMed abstract of *The disguised face of blast injuries: shock waves*](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21038115/)) and a nuclear blast (882 km/s @ 2m, [Worldbuilding.se answer to *How fast is the shockwave of a nuclear bomb from 2-5m away?*](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/54714/11879)).
None of this directly helps us, but is essentially the basis of my gut feeling.
## Plasma Physics
I'm not at all familiar with plasma physics, so any errors are probably in this section. I've done the best I can to figure out what's correct based on other reading.
A typical sword weighs 2-5 lbs, meaning it masses about 0.9-2.3 kg. Let's call it 1 kg for simplicity. The heat capacity of a plasma is given by $\varepsilon=\frac{3}{2}n k\_B T$ ([Physics.se, answer to *Heat capacity of plasma?*](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/328892/90152). $\varepsilon$ is energy per unit volume, so we can get energy as:
$E=\varepsilon V$
$=\frac{3}{2} n k\_B T V$
$n$ is the plasma density. Star plasma has a density of about $10^{26}\frac{e}{cm^3}$ ([Cern, *Introduction to Plasma Physics*, page 2](https://cds.cern.ch/record/2203630/files/1418884_51-65.pdf)).
$k\_B$ is the Boltzman constant, $1.380649\cdot10^{−23}\frac{J}{K\cdot e}$, where $e$ is the number of electrons.1
$T$ is temperature. Plasma physicists tend to use units of eV (electron-volts). 1 eV corresponds to 11600 K. The Cern paper gives star plasma a temperature of $2\cdot 10^3$ eV, which corresponds to 23 million K, which is pretty close to the 15 million K we're using.
$E=\frac{3}{2} n k\_B T V$
$=\frac{3}{2} 10^{26}\frac{e}{cm^3} \cdot 1.38\cdot 10^{-23}\frac{J}{K\cdot e}\cdot 1.5\cdot 10^{7} K\cdot V$
Originally at this point, I kept calculating, then tried to calculate the volume and substitute that back in:
$=3.1\cdot 10^{10}\cdot V\cdot \frac{J}{cm^3}$
But volume doesn't matter. $\frac{e}{cm^3}\cdot V$ must equal the number of electrons. And we can calculate the number of electrons directly.
Iron is about $56 \frac{g}{mol}$, or $18 \frac{mol}{kg}$. Since we have 1 kg of iron, that means n=18 moles in conventional terms. However plasma physics counts in terms of electrons, which is about the number of protons per atom. Iron atoms have 26 electrons per atom, so our plasma particle count is $18\cdot 26$ $=468\frac{mol}{kg}$. 1 mole is $6.02\cdot 10^{23}$ electrons, giving $2.82\cdot 10^{26} \frac{e}{kg}$. Since we have a 1kg sword, that's $2.82\cdot 10^{26} e$.
So we can replace particle density times volume with number of particles. Then instead of energy per volume, we'll have energy, which is what we actually want.
$E=\frac{3}{2} 2.82\cdot 10^{26} e \cdot 1.38\cdot 10^{-23}\frac{J}{K\cdot e}\cdot 1.5\cdot 10^{7} K$
$=8.8\cdot 10^{10} J$
A ton of TNT is about $4.2\cdot 10^9 J$ ([WolframAlpha](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1+ton+of+TNT)), so this is the equivalent of about 21 tons of TNT.
I can't find a good source, but various forums suggest the Sun consists of about 0.2% iron. In order to get enough iron to make a sword, you'd then need about 500 kg of Sunstuff, increasing the energy substantially.
$E=4.4\cdot 10^{13} J$, which is about a 10.5 kT TNT, or about 0.7 times the energy of Hiroshima nuke ([Wikipedia, *Little Boy*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy#Physical_effects)).
## Notes
Star Trek did a similar concept in an episode ([S5E13, The Masterpiece Society](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Masterpiece_Society_(episode)), where they had a chunk of the core of a neutron star for some hand-wavy purpose. There might (or might not) be something useful you can get inspiration from there.
1 If you look up the Boltzman constant in most cases, you'll typically find it listed with units of $\frac{J}{K}$, but that's because mathematicians tend to ignore ad-hoc units like "cycles" and "particles". The Boltzman constant is just the ideal gas constant when particle number is in units of "individual particle" instead of "moles" (which is just $\frac{\text{number of particles}}{\text{Avagadro's number}}$) ([Wikipedia, *Boltzmann constant*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_constant#Roles_of_the_Boltzmann_constant)). Since the ideal gas constant has the number of molecules and we're dividing by a dimensionless quantity, the Boltzmann constant also has to have the number of molecules.
In my original equations, this caused me to try cancelling out the number of molecules when calculating volume, so I was inadvertently dividing by very large numbers when I shouldn't have. This is why engineers tend to prefer including all the units, not just the neatly-packaged units with exact definitions. It's also why it helps to actually understand the material in question.
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In my novel, the characters live in treehouses that are practically piled on top of one another, so there is little room to climb down to pick up food, and it would be a challenge trying to take it back up.
There are bridges between treehouses and systems in the trees to travel around, just not that easily. Because of this, I was wondering if there's any systems that could make getting food from the ground a lot easier. Maybe buckets on ropes? But who would put the food in the buckets? Any system such as the pulley system involving ropes, or areas for box elevator's to take the food up an down.
The level of technology is anything you could imagine that people living in a forest with limited access to other places would use. They have the skills for mining, logging etc, but nothing involving electricity or anything similar.
The forest floor is somewhat dangerous, so if the collecting of food involves people, there would have to be a certain system, as this job would not be very popular.
My main question is how they would go about this and what people, efficient techniques are used. Any ideas would be much appreciated!
[Answer]
Like any other society, there would be a division of labor where some members of the community have it as their job to go to the ground and get food and bring it back up. There might even be a caste of people who live months on end on the forest floor, constantly getting food and bringing it to the rope-and-pulley system, much like many modern day laborers and laborers of the past had to have months-long outings to do various things (eg sailing to other continents to bring back riches). That might depend on how hard it is for these guys to come back up once they're down.
[Answer]
#### Beast of Burden
They could, in addition to sending foraging, hunting and gardening parties down to find and produce food, engage the services of partially domesticated *jhiroliphants* to help out.
The ground crew will simply hang a number of baskets and sacks of food on the secondary head's ossicones and the receiving crew will entice the *jhiroliphaunt* with its favourite fruit. Whilst it's nibbling on the delicacies, they can easily remove the baskets and sacks.
Repeat the process until all the baskets and sacks of food have been transported!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/815I7.jpg)
[Answer]
# Stairs and elevators
I happen to live in a concrete jungle. Though I don't live in a tree, I do live in an apartment building. So just like your tree dwellers, I too have my home stacked up over someone else's. That means I can't just slide down a pole to street level since my neighbour below would not appreciate having a hole in his ceiling.
The civilized approach is to have common areas which belong to no apartment and which are specially designed for vertical movement. Every tree house in your city could be connected to the tree by a part of a spiral stair set. The house would belong to someone from the inside to the door, but the part with stairs belongs to the community.
You can also have a shaft going through the common area and have a primitive elevator based on boxes or buckets and ropes. Ancient romans had such devices way before year 1 AD and even used these on theaters and arenas to lift people and large animals such as lions.
[Answer]
**Ramps.**
That's pretty much it. Just add some ramps to the edges of a few (or many) centrally placed trees. This would allow for the residents to go down to get supplies/food whenever they need and also be easier to climb back up than a rope ladder or stairs. (as suggested in a previous comment)
Benefits
* It is easy to create using the supplies that are readily available and easy to maintain as well.
* It is accessible for elderly citizens and young children who may not be able to climb other methods of transport or use the pulley system.
* It is relatively safe, and does not require a high amount of technical ability to ensure this safety.
* If the society has figured out other simple devices, such as a wooden wheel, it would be adaptable to the ramps.
* It is unlikely to break or crack easily (as long as it is well-made)
* It would be an easy and quick escape route if the people were attacked from the sky or needed to vacate quickly.
Potential Disadvantages
* Hard to guard: If, for instance, there are creatures or other enemies that are below (maybe that's why they are in the trees in the first place) it would be easy for them to come up the ramps, as it creates mobility for the enemy as well.
* Space: Depending on the width and general construction of the ramp, it may take up more space than is desired, which could mean that trees may need to be cut down or unrooted to install the ramps.
* Time: Just because the citizens have to actually go down and get the stuff to bring it up the ramps would automatically increase the amount of time that is needed.
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I had the same thought as @the-square-cube-law, (+1), how is this different than a 10 story apartment building? You have a common "elevator": Some kind of central pulley system or shaft, intended to be used by one person/family at a time and restored to "starting position" when done. If somebody else is using it, you wait your turn. You can cluster 2 or more of these shafts together, if waiting is a problem. Likewise, you can use them to bring out your trash and waste, or perhaps for hygiene you want a shaft dedicated to bringing out trash and waste.
And of course your tree village folk are reasonably courteous, just like we are in boarding, riding and exiting elevators.
[Answer]
## Trained dogs and/or monkeys and/or corvids
The latter two animals show remarkable levels of intelligence, and can relatively easily be trained to perform simple tasks, like finding food and returning it, or putting it in a bucket on ground level (especially suitable for dogs).
To care for and reward the animals, you might need to have a shelter on or at least near ground level, but it requires less personnel than having these tasks performed by your characters themselves.
Training and possibly breeding can be done at higher levels of your complex of tree houses.
* Dogs can be used for the 'grunt work': collecting the bulk of whatever food can be found on ground level (depending on how you as the creator fill that in).
* Monkeys, like [capuchins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capuchin_monkey), can be trained (see below) to perform a multitude of tasks.
I cannot find detailed information about their strength, but they are able to open doors and bottles, and "reposition a heavy human limb" ([source](https://time.com/longform/service-monkeys-quadriplegia/)). They could easily collect fruits from trees.
* Most corvids won't be able to carry a lot of weight.
For ravens, the largest (and most intelligent) species in the family, 1.5 pounds (750 grams) seems to be the maximum, and they only carry items with their beaks, not their claws ([source](https://www.birdsadvice.com/how-much-weight-can-a-crow-carry/)).
But the large-billed crow can even carry up to over 2 pounds (1100 grams) ([source](https://bioone.org/journals/ornithological-science/volume-17/issue-2/osj.17.237/Crows-Weightlifting--How-and-How-Heavy-a-Crow-Lifted/10.2326/osj.17.237.short)).
These animals could be trained to find and return more specific edibles, like nuts.
If more capacity is needed, you could train larger birds of prey, among which are species that can easily carry several kilograms of load.
Examples of what these animals can be trained to do:
* The organization [Monkey Helpers](https://monkeyhelpers.org/monkey-helpers-our-past/) trains capuchin monkeys to aid people with "spinal cord injury or other mobility impairments".
* The Swedish enterprise [Corvid Cleaning](https://corvidcleaning.com/) implements a reward system for corvids like crows and magpies to clean up cigarette butts from the streets.
[Answer]
## They pick it.
Why do they live in the trees? Because they're fruit trees! And they grow edible epiphytes in the branches. And they have hauled up soil from the miners in the ancient past, which now forms nice gardens in the topmost branches.
## Liana vines
Before "bungee" was a thing, folks on the Solomon Islands would tie liana vines around their ankles and jump from a tall tower. You just need vines with a length matched to your trees. And maybe even more skill than on Earth.
## Water slide
Periodically, water is poured down the carved hollowed trunk of the tree. Spiral round and round, great entertainment. We'll look at getting up later.
## Balloons!
Those on the ground send food up tied to methane balloons. Those in the air send down, uh, *fertilizer*. Very important for the farmers, a great honor when a well-aimed lump hits. If you don't think the lower class can be made to believe this, you don't read much political news.
## Trebuchet.
The trees are covered in nets, to prevent foolish people from falling to the ground. Those seeking to return to the air ride the trebuchet up, and try to make sure they catch in a net.
## King Kong.
Sized to match the trees, naturally. Mostly friendly, somewhat overly so.
## Pneumatic tube
It needs precise craftmanship, but these folks understand the idea of a blowgun. Best ride to the canopy you can get, unless you like apes.
## Archimedean screw
Fortune in metal from those miners. Turn it about, and water rises from the creek on the surface. Perfect for refilling a water slide for the next day's entertainment. Riding at the top of a half-loop of water - a small half-coconut, maybe 10 feet across, with someone sitting comfortably on top. Warning: slow.
[Answer]
**Magic**
tree people have psychokinetic power, they forage, garden, hunt, clean sewage systems... all through a naturalistic VR-like synergy of the universal energy stream.
[Answer]
The people originally lived in the trees in more peaceful forests at higher elevations. It is safe to forage for food there, and they have crops and domesticated animals.
As their population increased, and some of them sought refuge from the cold winters, the population expanded to lower, more tropical elevations, where the boojums are apex predators on the jungle floor. The already existing system of walkways between trees and rope lines to move goods from one tree to another expanded with them.
The people now living at the lower elevations can harvest exotic species of wood, edible or attractive epiphytic plants and tree fungus. They trade these with the people at the higher elevations for more traditional foods. There is no reason for them to go to the jungle floor for food. The movement of food and other goods back and forth is slow but steady.
There are social conflicts sometimes between the Lows and the Highs, and the Lows have recreational but dangerous Boojum-Hunts, in which the Highs may participate for the thrill of it.
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the simple solutions are this:
there must be a finite forest-town/city, go to the edge, cut some trees construct transport infrastructre from the cut-down trees, then cut some more trees, plow, plant seeds and then colect the produce...
the other option is to make baskets from wood, fill'em with compost and plant seeds...
and obviously the forest has to end somewhere :))
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**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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This question does not appear to be about **worldbuilding**, within the scope defined in the [help center](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help).
Closed 2 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/201944/edit)
Let's say you have two same-mass black holes, about 10 solar masses each, but while one is made of pure matter, the other is made of pure antimatter. Obviously no amount of energy produced could escape the gravity of a black hole; however, when matter and antimatter meet under normal circumstances, they turn into a combination of photons and neutrinos losing more than 99% of their mass. (Resulting is much less gravity?)
I'm wondering if there are any generally accepted theories that would allow black holes to even interact in such as way that a matter/antimatter reaction could occur... and if so, could the reduction in mass cause the black holes to explode, or at least evaporate very quickly or do something else more interesting than just merge as black holes normally like to do.
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This question has been answered [here](https://phys.org/news/2015-07-black-hole-met-antimatter.html)
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> Antimatter is exactly the same as regular matter, except everything is backwards. Electrical charges, spin directions, and configuration of all the sub-particles that make it up. It's all backwards.
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> Everything is opposite, except for mass. An anti-electron has the exact same amount of mass as electron.
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> Here's the part you care about. When equal amounts of matter and antimatter collide, they are annihilated. But not disappeared or canceled out. They're converted into pure energy.
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> As Einstein explained to us, mass and energy are just different aspects of the same thing. You can turn mass into energy, and you can turn energy into mass.
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> Black holes turn everything, both matter and energy, into more black hole.
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> Imagine a regular flavor and an antimatter flavor black hole with the same mass slamming together. The two would be annihilated and turn into pure energy.
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> Of course, the gravity of a black hole is so immense that nothing, not even light can escape. So all energy would just be turned instantaneously into more black hole. Want more black hole? Put things into the black hole.
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> If these two objects came together, you'd end up with a black hole with twice the mass that you had before. [...]
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> The bottom line is: If a regular black hole and an antimatter black hole got black-hole-married in space, they wouldn't vanish.
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> Feeding in antimatter won't do any good, it's just like regular matter or energy.
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Nothing special would happen, as per the famous [no-hair theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hair_theorem), because the material that formed a black hole is irrelevant to an outside observer.
The no-hair theorem says that the three key properties of a black hole are its mass, charge, and angular momentum. When studying black holes, we don't care about the specific type of matter that formed them - protons, neutrons, neutrinos, photons, etc., whether they be matter or antimatter. The only important thing is that there is a certain amount of mass-energy contained within a certain volume. Therefore, a black hole formed from matter is indistinguishable from a black hole of the same mass, charge and angular momentum but formed from antimatter.
This means that nothing unusual would happen if the two black holes interacted or even merged into a more massive black hole. We can't really speculate about what happens beyond the event horizon, but if you had, say, a proton and an antiproton annihilate within the Schwarzschild radius, the black hole would remain unchanged - while energy would be released in the form of photons, those photons are still bound by the speed of light and would be unable to escape the black hole. It's a consequence of special relativity that changing mass into energy doesn't do anything.
One way you could see some sort of matter-antimatter reaction would be if the black holes have accretion disks, one of matter and one of antimatter. As the two bodies came closer and closer together, the disks would interact, leading to matter-antimatter annihilation and the emission of high-energy photons; electron-positron annihilation, for example, usually leads to the emission of gamma rays. This would lead to some interesting effects; the disks might disperse from the resulting radiation pressure.
This setup is admittedly a bit unrealistic. We don't expect matter and antimatter to exist in the same place in significant quantities, as they'd almost immediately annihilate. It really depends on whether you're willing to handwave anything.
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There's no special law of physics that says that matter and antimatter explode when combined, or turn into photons or neutrinos when combined.
Any collection of particles can turn into any other collection of particles as long as the various quantum numbers are conserved. A collection of 100 electrons is stable because it has an electric charge of −100, and there's nothing else it can turn into that has the same charge and a low enough total energy. A collection of 90 electrons and 10 positrons is unstable because there are other things it can turn into with the same charge and total energy, such as 80 electrons and a bunch of photons.
It may be reasonable to describe two black holes with equal masses and equal and opposite electric charges as antiparticles of each other. If you combine them, you'll get a black hole with a charge of 0. It will eventually decay by Hawking radiation into photons, neutrinos, etc., but it will take a while. It just follows its usual rules, like the electrons and positrons do; there's no special rule for matter-antimatter combinations.
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We don't know and you can make up the effect you want. The [answer given above](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/201945/578) correctly sums up our current understanding of black holes and gravity. However, currently we can't reconcile our understanding of gravity (which explains black holes)
with our understanding of quantum mechanics (which explains mater/antimatter interaction). In other words, "nothing will happen" ist not something we know but something we'd need to test in an experiment.
If you want a spectacular effect, you can make one up: During matter/antimatter annihilation, the mass/energy stops to have gravity for short moments (due to quatnum gravity effects we have not been able to observe yet, because they are to weak when we do these experiments with single atoms in a collider). This allows some mass and or radiation to escape (either in direction with the spin of the BH, or as a jet along the axis of rotation). Also the on/off sends strong gravitational waves. Some of the emitted matter/energy lumps may be dense enough to form black holes themselves, they may loose momentum when interacting with the accretion disks and fall back into the large BH ...
The shape will be *weird* - [wikipedia has this to say](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_black_hole#Shape) about a black hole merger: "As two black holes approach each other, a ‘duckbill’ shape protrudes from each of the two event horizons towards the other one. This protrusion extends longer and narrower until it meets the protrusion from the other black hole. At this point in time the event horizon has a very narrow X-shape at the meeting point. The protrusions are drawn out into a thin thread. The meeting point expands to a roughly cylindrical connection called a bridge."
One question that a reader with a good grasp of physiscs will have is *when* this cataclysm will happen - I think our best guess according to current physics is that time will stop inside the event horizon due to gravitationl time dilation. Short 'hiccups' in gravity will also stop this dilation.
For story purposes it would be a bad idea if the affair becomes a completly naked singularity (20 SM matter annihiliation?), however I think you can make up a mechanism with that only partially ot for short moments 'opens' the event horizon.
For scientists this will be very exciting because it is the first chance to look at a naked singularity. Problem is: Noone can quite predict what will happen, so noone knows the safe distance to observe the event!
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I am trying to describe the exploration of an hypothetical planet with a hydrocarbon rich atmosphere. Atmospheric pressure is around 1 bar, temperature around 10-20 Celsius, the main component of the atmosphere is methane, around 80%, the rest being water, CO2 and other gases.
I am trying to see if it is possible for the exploration party to use fire, at least for producing light and preparing food.
A quite obvious solution is to have them use a canister of oxygen attached to a burner like we have in Earthly methane kitchen, where oxygen and methane get mixed and then burned.
I want to see if there is any way to have something a bit more "wild" looking, like a bonfire.
Is it plausible to have a substance which:
* is solid
* decomposes with heat
* while decomposing releases oxygen
* bonus point if it is something which can occur naturally, given the right conditions
I am not concerned about the color of the flame: a bit of sodium can be added to make the flame more suited for producing visible light if needed.
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The wonderful world of chemistry is full of oxidising agents that would fulfill your requirements, but I'd say the one that's perhaps most familiar to people will be saltpetre, or potassium nitrate. It exists in a [natural mineral form](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niter), and can obviously be produced in bulk by pre-industrial means that are well over a thousand years old.
[Sodium nitrate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_nitrate) would also work... once known as "Chilean Saltpetre", it occurs naturally there in mineral form and was commercially exploited. It could be a source of sodium for your pretty firework needs. In the real world it is deliquescent (eg. it'll go soggy from moisture in the air; a bad thing if you wanted to burn it) but that might be less of a problem in your alien environment.
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### [Sodium chlorate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_chlorate) will sustain a fire in this environment
Leaving aside where it comes from for the moment, this is literally exactly what you need. A solid, that when heated (even in an oxygen deprived environment) to over 260 degrees C will emit oxygen and more heat, until all its mass is converted to salt and oxygen.
This is such a wonderful oxygen generator that it's what produces the oxygen in those drop down oxygen masks in passenger aircraft. Its exothermic and will self sustain a fire even in a sealed oxygen-free chamber. See [the crash of ValuJet Flight 592](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValuJet_Flight_592) for an example of how much heat and oxygen these things can put out in a sealed room.
We usually see it as a powder, but when exposed to a little bit of water in the atmosphere clumps together into something that could conceivably be thrown on a fire rather than "sprinkled".
Now where does it come from? Technically this doesn't occur in nature; This is easy to produce in bulk as a fertilizer. Now I'm led to believe there are alternative way to produce this by what I'm reading about [electrolysis alternatives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_splitting) but I lack the chemistry knowledge to give you a clear natural process to create it.
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## Hydrogen Peroxide
Hydrogen Peroxide has historically been used as an oxidizing agent in rocket fuels. In your Methane rich environment, the heat of a flame would cause Hydrogen Peroxide to break down into water and oxygen. The oxygen would then react with your methane creating sustained combustion.
It is also relatively cheap/easy to mass produce compared to other options. Since your explores are in a remote location, you do not want to need a giant chemical plant to make the stuff, but using the Anthraquinone Electrolysis method (see: <https://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-process-could-make-hydrogen-peroxide-available-remote-places-1023>), your explores can produce as much hydrogen peroxide as they need using only water, electricity, and anthraquinone which can be infinitely recycled.
This would allow not just exploration of the planet, but a potential for long term habitability.
**What about:**
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Now this part will be a bit more of a stretch since it will depend a lot on the biology of your native lifeforms. On Earth, the highest concentrations of natural hydrogen peroxide are found inside of plants and animals, but still in relatively small quantities... that said, perhaps your organisms use it differently then we do on Earth. Theoretically, your native life forms could use H2O2 instead of glucose for energy storage. If this is the case, then your plants could have large concentrations of H2O2 inside of them; so, your explorers could just cut down the local flora, and burn it just like we do with wood here on earth.
## Hydrogen Peroxide is one of the only non-toxic oxidizers when used in a Methane rich environment
Burning Hydrogen Peroxide in the presence of Methane with result in Carbon Dioxide and Water vapor which are generally harmless to humans making it a safe reaction for cooking and breathing around. Burning most other proposed oxidizers in the presence of methane will produce highly toxic byproducts which should not be cooked with. Potassium Nitrate will produce Potassium Hydroxide. Sodium Nitrate will produce Nitrogen Dioxide. Sodium Chlorate will produce Hydrogen Chloride.
[Answer]
**Thermite!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/osaqE.jpg)
[source](https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F6%2F6f%2FThermiteFe2O3.JPG%2F340px-ThermiteFe2O3.JPG&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fmilitary.wikia.org%2Fwiki%2FThermite&tbnid=Ys5a2whD7u_fuM&vet=12ahUKEwjNk8v6xfPuAhXKsFMKHWUCBTIQMygAegUIARC9AQ..i&docid=B-tzsLufwxoN3M&w=340&h=264&q=thermite%20bonfire&ved=2ahUKEwjNk8v6xfPuAhXKsFMKHWUCBTIQMygAegUIARC9AQ)
Gather round the Thermite bonfire you all! Goggles recommended. Iron oxide is solid but with enough heat and some willing aluminum it will give up its oxygen. A very bonfirey heat and light ensues. You can keep your bonfire wires in the hold of your ship and produce a merry fire wherever you touch down.
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Ok, I've been racking my mind on this a while, and I think it might be able to, but I was wanting to get some more viewpoints on this.
You see, a couple of my stories involve sapient animals and creatures with annual heat cycles, animals that have been sapient since the 1790s. I know that in the real world, keeping an un-spayed female dog in heat apart from males is a *very* difficult task, caused by hormones spread far and wide on the wind.
The crux of the issue I'm having is this: if a species is sapient, can they decide to rise above their natural instincts and act on conscious thought instead of biological urges?
To use an example, say an intact male dog meets an intact female dog who is in heat. In the real world, they'd probably be mating in a heartbeat.
But in this imagined world, could both male and female think logically instead, and decide that puppies right now would be a bad idea, then simply go their own ways without any contact?
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### Yes.
Not only is sapience sufficient, it's *unnecessary*. We train animals to do things that go against their instincts all the time. Horses don't naturally like to jump over things, but there's an entire sport dedicated to teaching them to do just that. Animals (including humans; well, *most* of them anyway) don't naturally want to run into places that are on fire, but there's a whole profession of people who do just that (thankfully!).
All you need to get an animal to go against its instincts is practice and motivation. For non-sapient animals, that usually means food, or a distraction, or something else the animal would rather have. Sapience opens the door to more "abstract" motivations... for example, "this really isn't a good time to bring puppies into the world".
The problem with animals copulating when one is in heat is largely because they don't have a *reason* to not do so... except *when they do*. A male might decline to copulate because the female rejected him, or because he lost a dominance fight with another male, or because the female is his sister¹. Wolves go into heat and yet their dominance hierarchies affect which wolves get to breed. Even among non-sapient animals, there are plenty of factors where animals can "overcome their instincts".
(¹ Disclaimer: Unlike the other examples, I'm less sure to what extent this actually happens.)
[Answer]
**Some will... some won't...**
Humanity has this very same problem — it's just masked by sapience, cultural experience, and time.
There are articles aplenty that demonstrate that the human female experiences [estrus](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/estrus), "a regularly recurrent state of sexual receptivity during which the female of most mammals will accept the male and is capable of conceiving." For example:
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> In humans, signs of sexual interest aren’t nearly so obvious. The male of the species generally doesn’t broadcast his constant readiness for sex, and during her window of fertility at ovulation, the female doesn’t display any outward signs. Some biologists and anthropologists have theorized that this “loss of estrus” in people makes us less driven by sex hormones than other animals.But according to a steady stream of new studies by evolutionary and biological psychologists, that may not be the case. This research indicates that the hormonal changes of a woman’s monthly cycle may be more powerful than we’ve ever conceived — compelling women to advertise when they’re ovulating, and men to notice. Although women aren’t showing off swellings, yowling or spraying, studies suggest they may dress more provocatively, flirt more, and possibly become more sexually excitable, for roughly six days mid-cycle, before and after ovulation. They even show minuscule shifts in voice pitch, scent and skin tone, some studies suggest.These changes are not lost on men, whose own hormones and mating behavior respond to a woman’s cues, as well as how the woman treats them, says Jon Maner, PhD, a hormones researcher and associate professor of psychology at Florida State University. To illustrate: In one of his studies, men actually inched closer to a woman — and mimicked her gestures more — when she was ovulating. ([Source](https://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/03/hormones))
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Your creatures will develop the same behaviors. The act of training a sapient creature (both intellectually and behaviorally, both academically and culturally) has the effect of refining the mating process. In other words...
*It becomes more complex, more subtle, and more susceptible to intelligent judgement.*
Generally speaking, human females during estrus don't parade around hunting for sex and the males aren't parading around...
Wait...
Actually, they are. And that's why the studies are appearing. The "biological clock" that drives the male and female of our species is very much part of what drives the way we dress, the way we act, etc., but it's muddied (for lack of a better word) by the need to go to work at 6:00 a.m. and the expectations of clients/customers and the need to pay bills, shop for food, etc. Intelligent creatures have very complex lives, and that complexity gets all wound up in the genetic drive to procreate.
**So, yes, your sapient animals will experience estrus... a very complex estrus**
So why did I say "some will... some won't...?"
Because a byproduct of that very complex mating process (not the sole byproduct... It's really important that you understand what I'm saying) is that it's a component of sexual crime. Not the only component (do NOT accuse me of suggesting that women get raped simply because of estrus. It's NOT that simple!). So, why bring it up?
Because your sapient creatures will have similar (if not the same) problems within their society. The rules of the animal kingdom are much simpler because "no" literally doesn't come with the threat of police action or a lawsuit. In the animal kingdom, males do betimes rob other males of their females. Humans call that everything from "having an affair" to "rape."
My point is, I expect your creatures will have the same complex "how do you find a decent person at a bar?" problems that humans have, based on the nature of their own societal, educational, philosophical, and estrus rules.
And just to make this really complex, among them will be people who for reasons varying from physiological to religious choose to be celibate — regardless what a million years of evolution is telling the body to do.
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The generally accepted answer is no. The simple proof is that we are not above our base instincts, and we consider ourselves to be sapient.
Now the devil is in the details. Are you talking about dominion over all instincts at all times? Or dominion over a select few. We humans do a half decent job of suppressing the instinct to mate, but once someone is terrified, it is almost completely impossible to get them to act in anything but the most base instinctual ways.
Most of us cannot control our heartbeat, but some monks claim to have substantial control over this, consciously driving their heartbeat to levels that would be considered fatal in demonstrations of their willpower. And famously [Thích Quảng Đức](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Qu%E1%BA%A3ng_%C4%90%E1%BB%A9c) lit himself on fire and remained still and apparently aware, unlike the response one of us more sane people might have in such an agonizing situation.
The question will be one of evolution. Which instincts are beneficial to suppress, and which are not. The ones that are beneficial will eventually be overriden by sapience, and the ones that are harmful will not. Which behavior is in which category depends on the evolution of your creature.
An example I just found, and find very pertinent is the position of the Amygdala and the Hippocampus in our own brain. The hippocampus is the seat of memory. It is fundamental in our conscious mind's ability to form and retrieve memories. It is remarkably close to the amygdala, which is responsible for fear and anger responses. Most of the time the hippocampus is permitted to do as it pleases. However, in times of great fear or rage, the amygdala, a tiny brain structure from the reptilian era of our evolution, chemically suppresses the hippocampus. Try as we might we simply cannot form memories once this happens. If you've heard of someone blacking out from fear or blacking out from rage, this is the neurochemical explanation of this perception.
If this happens, it does not matter how sapient, or even wise you are. The parts of your brain which contain those traits are literally taken out of the loop by the reptilian parts of the brain while they deal with the issue.
One of the best models of the brain I have come across is that of the elephant rider. We have an emotional trained elephant with a logical rider atop it in our brains. Who is in control? We like to say the rider is in control, but any elephant rider who lives very long is aware of just how tenuous that control can be.
The training one undertakes when going to war is partially to deal with this. It is learning how to use the controls we have over the amygdala's behavior to keep it from choosing to drop us into a base animal instinctual behavior.
Most of us have not had such training. We consider ourselves sapient with or without such training, so we can comfortably say that sapience is not sufficient to override the base instincts.
Of course, the devil is in the details. I have talked about neurochemical things here, but a sapient creature has a great deal of control over their environment *before* such stimuli occur. I'm thinking of Odysseus, as his ship had to row past the Sirens. He had his crew put beeswax in their ears so that they could not hear the Siren's calls. Does this count as sapience overriding base instincts by avoiding the stimulus all together? Perhaps more interesting is Odysseus's approach himself. He just *had* to hear the Siren's call. So instead of relying on beeswax, he commanded his crew to lash him to the mast, and refuse to let him free, no matter what orders he issued, until they were safely far away from the Sirens. He experienced the full force of his mind wracking itself under the draw of the siren's call, but could not act on it due to the bindings of his body. The stories talk of the agony in his voice as his men dutifully rowed away from the sirens, knowing he would never again hear their call.
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I want a species of alien to leave their mark throughout the galaxy with stone carvings and temples. Taking influence from ancient religious stone carvings and decoratively sculptured temples carved into the rock, this species may even take this form of design into their asteroid space crafts, having detailed carvings of stories and gods into the rock like a giant temple spaceship.
For this question I just want to think about the locations in a galaxy that the species can leave giant sculptures (from a few metres to hundreds or more metres tall possibly) and have as little damage or wear as possible? Would somewhere in the asteroid belt or possibly a moon around a specific type of planet be best, maybe underground in a planet with no geothermal activity? A void may be a good location but I am after locations within a galaxy.
I am assuming the smaller the details the easier for the sculpture to wear down and loose the fine details so statues can be around one hundred metres tall and attached to the rock it was carved from if this helps longevity.
What locations in a galaxy would be best for stone carvings to survive the longest with minimal damage or wear? And are there any estimates for how long they can remain recognisable?
[Answer]
The rim of galaxies is where there's the least radiation and supernovae. You may consider that for material that is sensitive to radiation.
If the structures are made of gold or platinum alloys (which are very non-reactive and resistant to corrosion), and placed underground in planets without an atmosphere, they may last practically forever. The only thing wearing them down will be atomic decay, but 197Au is considered stable (i.e.: [should have a half life of at least 1.67 × 1034 years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay#Experimental_evidence), approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 the current age of the universe).
[Answer]
It is estimated that the landing stages of the Apollo lunar landers will be recognizable as man made objects for 250 million years, and that is even considering the exposure to a day/night cycle of temperature extremes, direct exposure to solar and galactic radiation and an endless dusting from micrometeorites. So simply placing an object or sculpture on the surface of an airless moon or planet is a good start.
The moon isn't going to be ideal for longer term preservation since the Sun is gradually heating up. In one billion years, the Earth will become uninhabitable, and in 5 billion years, the Earth and moon will either be swallowed up by the Sun as it expands into a Red Giant, or be close enough to essentially be melted. Building temples on airless moons or planets orbiting Red Dwarf stars can extend the lifespan from billions of years to a trillion or more, although I'm not clear if a material like rock would not suffer significant erosion after such a time span.
If the aliens are willing to forego rock, they can perhaps create stable patterns on the event horizons of black holes, which will last into deep time, measured as perhaps 10^127 years into the future, at which point the last remaining black holes may have evaporated into Hawking radiation into an unimaginably cold, vast universe. If anything is still around to admire the patterns at 10^126 years, it will be something far beyond anything we can imagine as living today...
[Answer]
Well, if they want giant temple spaceships... why not just go
# EXT*RR*A LA*RR*GE!
Look for rocky, airless moons and carve gigantic symbols into the surface. Imagine a Cerne Abbas Giant hundreds of miles tall with outlines five miles wide and deep!
Imagine a whole moon, artfully smoothed and covered with texts, sacred and profane, in glyphs ten miles tall!
There are craters on the Moon almost four billion years old. That's plenty of time for this civilisation to show off to the Johnny come latelies!
[Answer]
Rogue planets. Find one travelling through the interstellar void and mark it up. Because they're roaming around, they don't have issues with worrying what happens to the star in a solar system.
Other than that, planets around low-mass red dwarfs in systems without much of an Oort Cloud. A 0.1 solar mass red dwarf is estimated to have a lifespan of 10 trillion (not a typo) years, and a minimal Oort cloud reduces the risk of impacts mucking up the temple.
[Answer]
Instead of attempting a mega-monument at a single safe location, your species might leave lots of dormant, but durable monuments at lots of places!
---
I suggest that create landmarks from [self-assembling nanomaterials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-assembly_of_nanoparticles) and [nanobots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanorobotics), colloquially famous as [grey-goo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo), but actually well within its creators control.
We can already make nanoscale level structures that can take on various shapes, from abstract geometrical shapes to cages for transporting drugs to cancer sites. Some folks at the Technion Institute even succeeded in [inscribing the entire Hebrew Bible on a Silicon grain the size of a pinhead in an hour](https://www.engadget.com/2007-12-24-scientists-inscribe-entire-bible-onto-pinhead.html)!
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kw1lh.png)
Various nanoparticle cages, Image Credit: Nature (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1185-4
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/B4bNW.png)
A molecular machine walking along a path. See the video on wikimedia commons [here](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kinesin_walking.gif).
Your alien civilization, having much more developed science and engineering, and the blessings of the author, would have little difficulty in using these to create artifacts that are several meters or even dozens of miles in size. Moreover, just like [real-life cutting-edge materials](https://theconstructor.org/concrete/bacterial-concrete-self-healing-concrete/13751/), these structures can automatically repair themselves from arbitrary damage eons after the creators are gone, probably by incorporating living organisms or nanobots into its structure.
---
The big advantage of this that once the techniques are developed, they are ridiculous easy and cheap to use at scale (or they can be insanely expensive if you want, perhaps by requiring some rare element). In real life, it would take a materials scientist more than a few hours to make small amounts of such materials in any reasonably stocked chemical laboratory with an autoclave. Your aliens can probably send probes to systems across the galaxy. A probe chooses a nice-looking planet, readies its chemicals and nanobots, and lands on the surface. It finds or [bores](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole) a deep hole, or even a cave and injects some of its payload, ensuring that a vast underground complex full of carvings would be ready within weeks. It chooses a high cliff and starts spraying, ensuring that permanent statues are now present as long as the cliff lasts. And so on.
Even without FTL, your civilization can leave its marks on widely separated parts of the galaxy, ensuring that at least some of them survive no matter what. Later civilizations can conveniently find them to drive the story.
---
An even more interesting element is the fact that nanoparticles can change their shape based on things like temperature, the presence of certain chemicals, or even an application of pressure. Proteins in the body are a famous example, and humans have already use this to make molecule sized grippers and cranes.
A moderate dose of handwavium can allow your species to make monuments that only appear when certain rituals are performed. This can conveniently include lighting fires for heat, and making blood or other offerings on a particular spot.
Basically, you get Magic$^{\text{TM}}$ that runs on Science!
This can make for good drama, with a scientifically-minded character seemingly-foolishly insisting on finding a rational explanation in the face of 'obvious' miracles, only to be vindicated (or not) later.
---
Of course, even with such a highly durable materials you would not want to build your monuments just anywhere. You want to choose planets around stars that will last long, and won't go out [with a bang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova). [Red dwarfs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf) are excellent since they have low mass and therefore last *really* long. They are also well below the Chandrashekhar Limit. The flip side is that many of them are [flare stars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flare_star), and tend to get really bright. Depending on factors like the constitution of your building material, the distance of the planet from the star, and the presence and composition of an atmosphere, it is possible that the radiation may damage the bacteria that repair your structure. Your aliens may solve this problem by choosing stars that don't do this, or planets that are further away from their stars. Or they can miscalculate, so that the monument survives for a long time and then starts disintegrating when their counter-measures fail.
Just make sure you're not near a massive star, or something like a Black Hole or neutron star!
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[Question]
[
**This question already has answers here**:
[What would a chair for a Human with a Tail look like?](/questions/158146/what-would-a-chair-for-a-human-with-a-tail-look-like)
(5 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
So, let's say long ago, somewhere along the evolutionary process, homo sapiens got fully prehensile tails that can support their weight, of about 1,5 to 2 meters long.
The tail is naked, about as much hair as an arm.
It also has a tactile pad at the end.
The tail is not taboo and they only cover it to shield it from cold.
Assuming they build their cities in tree tops, and do some constant tree swinging, how would they design this four particular things?
For example:
Beds as we know it would be VERY uncomfortable, unless they all slept with their belly down...and didn't move at night, and I think hammocks would have the same problem.
Couches: I can't imagine one with a big hole on the back...
Doors: The doors we have would cause an serious amount of pain if closed on their tails, and since they're about 1,5 - 2m long, I think a "normal door" would be banned from their society. A "doggy door" thing is the best idea I had so far, but... how would they lock it?
Clothes: There can't be dresses or skirts, since, even if they have an extra sleeve for the tail, some taboo parts of the body would show if they lifted their tail too high, or used it to have a good grip on a tree branch.
[Answer]
I would not be really bothered with **doors**. I will use personal anecdote to justify it:
I do historical fencing as hobby and at Renaissance faires I carry my sword in a scabbard. At first, I bumped into everybody and everything. After a while, I learned to walk with it as smoothly as without it. Now imagine human with tail which he can control and have spatial ability (like you know where your hand is with closed eyes) to know where his tail is. Except kids who are still learning motor abilities, humans would learn to watch the tails basically on subconscious level.
**Bed** mat could be designed like this, made for sleeping on side
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JRbdn.png)
**Sofas** could have have a gap/pocket between sitting cushion and back cushion just to fold your tail there. No need to have hole through.
**Clothes** might have hole, not different from that overlapping hole in older backpacks made for wired headphones dragged from your Walkman. Like this, but from overlapping clothes instead of rubber. Yes it is impractical, but fashion often is.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JQOwC.png)
**Toilets** might have water reservoir on side instead of back. Many drawer handles on **furniture** might have gap wide enough to be opened with tail as well.
[Answer]
>
> Beds as we know it would be VERY uncomfortable, unless they all slept with their belly down... and didn't move at night, and I think hammocks would have the same problem.
>
>
>
Why would beds be a problem? If their anatomy is at all sane (read: monkey-like), their tail will be able to hang down in line with their spine. Sleeping on their tail will be no worse than sleeping on your back is for us normal humans because of sleeping with our spines against the bed.
From experience, I suspect hammocks will be even better. Have *you* ever slept in a hammock? You'd think a stretched piece of cloth would be uncomfortable, but they are actually *remarkably* body-conforming. (They may prefer tightly woven hammocks over more open netting, though, so body parts can't accidentally become entangled. Note that this includes "solid" cloth, which technically is still a woven mesh.)
>
> Couches: I can't imagine one with a big hole on the back...
>
>
>
You suffer from a severe lack of imagination, then üòâ. Just imagine a [park bench](https://www.google.com/search?q=park+bench&tbm=isch) with padding. Note that the seat won't be as deep, or will have cutouts such that you have to sit in a certain spot. You should also read through [How would a race of humanoids with tails design [vehicle] seats?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/158200) which has some alternate suggestions.
>
> Doors: The doors we have would cause an serious amount of pain if closed on their tails, and since they're about 1, 5 - 2m long, I think a "normal door" would be very banned from their society.
>
>
>
[Prahara](/users/75394/) [already mentioned this](/a/175667/43697), but I don't see why *doors* would be a problem. I open a door, I walk through it. It doesn't close on me.
Are you thinking specifically of *self-closing doors*? Those *might* be banned, but they also serve an important function. I think it's more likely that, as Prahara noted, your people are just expected to get used to them.
That said:
>
> A "doggy door" thing is the best idea I had so far, but... How would they lock it?
>
>
>
...what's the problem here? All you've done is taken a "regular" door and turned it on its side. Why would locking be any different? As a "bonus", you have to add parts to make them *not* self-closing, rather than the other way around, and the hinges might be easier to build (since they don't have to carry uneven loads).
The potential problem I see with this style of door is that they almost *have* to use their tail to open it, because the natural leverage point is going to be near floor-level. Maybe that's an issue, maybe not.
They're also going to be rather heavy. (A sideways door can be made so that all the weight is carried by the hinges, so that you only need to overcome inertia. This can work with *truly massive* doors, like [The Black Gate of Mordor](http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Black_Gate). With a door that swings up, you either have to lift the door yourself or design additional mechanisms to offset the weight (e.g. the springs attached to garage doors).
Alternatively, you can make them taller and add a counterweight on top.
>
> Clothes: They can't be dresses or skirts, since, even if they have an extra sleeve for the tail, some taboo parts of the body would show if they lifted their tail too high, or used it to have a good grip on a tree branch.
>
>
>
Why not? If the base of the tail is sleeved, it will be difficult to see what's under the tail, especially if the sleeve is snug. Another option is to have a cord that is tied around the base of the tail to keep the clothing snug against it, sort of like a [crupper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crupper).
[Answer]
One day you may find your soulmate. And you will wish to share a bed with that person. Very probably that person will want you to spoon with them, and at times you will be the big spoon. And when that happens you'd better be healthy and free of circulatory problems, for you will be in for the kinda of suffering your hominids would suffer on a human bed.
Even if you don't spoon, simply using your own arm as a pillow should show you the amount of discomfort your creatures are in for. Spoiler alert - we live just as uncomfortably as they would. We try to circumvent it with bizarre inventions. Google "bed with hole for arm" and see.
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For sitting, your creatures would probably use things similar to the bi chair - the chair for people who can't sit straight. When you stop laughing, google it and see that the thing is real. This would provide them with ways to sit without pressing on their tail. Also I need one of those.
Alternatively, they could go full ancient roman and just do things while lying down. Seriously. They ate while lying down because they thought eating with a vertical stance was bad for the stomach. [Here's the wiki for the roman *triclinium*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triclinium), and here's an image I found in Google Images when searching for it:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/va8tg.jpg)
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Finally, to operate vehicles, rather than a seat as we humans are used to they might be more like stools, or there might be some hole for the tail.
See the picture below, this is a chair from our real world. We humans use that hole to drop a coin into an unsuspecting friend's coin slot, but your tailed humanoids could use it for comfort rather than practical jokes.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bRy3V.jpg)
[Answer]
I just copy pasted my answer from [What would a chair for a Human with a Tail look like?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/158146/what-would-a-chair-for-a-human-with-a-tail-look-like/158149#158149) and [How would a race of humanoids with tails design [vehicle] seats?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/158200/how-would-a-race-of-humanoids-with-tails-design-vehicle-seats/158231#158231)
Because it seems like it can be applied here.
>
> It's based on [Dragon ball](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/158146/what-would-a-chair-for-a-human-with-a-tail-look-like/158149#158149) chair design for the [Saiyan](https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Saiyan) race.
>
>
> I don't know the original artist's name though; found it on
> [Pinterest](https://id.pinterest.com/pin/554224297889367587/?lp=true).
>
>
> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VerDd.jpg)
>
>
> So in the design it has a slit in the middle back (the one in the
> image is small but you can use bigger chair anyway) and there's also a
> combination of a reverse toilet hole too (basically extend the slit to
> become a toilet hole, to accommodate different tail types/angles to be
> able to just sit straight or not sit awkwardly or without contorting
> the tail or ass first while not hindering or hurting their tail when
> sitting).
>
>
> And you can increase the hole gap if you want more tail movement.
>
>
> For visual image of the reverse toilet hole, don't take it literally,
> and combine it with the slit design — basically extend the slit
> to there.
>
>
> From:
> <https://www.amazon.com/slp/chair-support-for-lower-back-pain/9uunpf37wnxx3r3>
> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ajhZr.jpg)
>
>
> From:
> <https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/hospital-toilet-chair-15480843597.html>
> [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4p2Ln.jpg)
>
>
>
for bed a kin to this bamboo bed, if you want them to sleep face up?(not sure the english term for usual sleep posture) this i can guarantee because i have pet monkey and its a kin to this kind of bed or hanging platform for them to sleep so their tail can slip through the gap.
from:<https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/bamboo-beds-19955361330.html>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QHTRi.jpg)
for clothing create a buttoned hole (if its primitive technology, you can use bone or wood as button) or zipper in the rear.
i cant think of a door design but i dont think its really a problem as long they are being careful and not close it when they still expose their rear to the door, outside of turning their tail into a belt like saiyan do to shortening it.
[Answer]
My cats with their tails are pretty much comfortable on our ordinary human variety bed. They refuse to sleep anywhere else if the bed is at all available. Dogs, donkeys, monkeys, etc... do the same, when allowed.
At least beds may be the same.
Doors: soft "lips" or hairy seals if wind-proofing is at all needed. Else, the door just narrow enough to leave a gap for a dangling tail when closed. Locking can be done w/ locking rods up, down and across the gap.
[Answer]
Doors would roll up, be counter-weighted with the knob or handle at the center bottom. Reach out between your legs with your tail as you approached the door, flip it up, go through, close door without breaking stride. Smooth.
] |
[Question]
[
So, you have found yourself in a situation where the city you manage has finished producing their first powered aircrafts, biplanes.
They aren't too good. They barely fly 140 km/h, so they're pretty slow too. But you need them in the air against **enemy drake mounted warriors, who, luckily fly 60-70 km/h and have top speed only at around 90-100 km/h. Drake mounted warriors are not that dangerous in the air, only having 240 pound composite short bow and a dozen of arrows for aerial combat**, but they're a bother, dropping primitive molotovs on the ground and naval targets of your allies, so **you need to take them down a peg**.
You don't have synchronization gears, so you had to go for "pusher" setting, placing your propeller behind your plane, leaving the front of the plane open for your gunner who sits in front of the pilot.
Now, you're already working on switching into smokeless powder, but the war was sudden and it was quite low on your priority list. In a month or so, you might be ready to start pumping out your first maxims with smokeless ammo. But you don't have a month or so, you need to offer **your airforceless allies** support now. **You need a stopgap solution, before the enemy completely overwhelms your allies.**
Your army has machine guns, but they're crank operated black powder ammunition machine guns. The ones you have are replicas of historical black powder machine guns of the second half of 19th century. Gatlings are too heavy for your aircraft, but there are other, lighter historical machine guns that you too have (for example things like [coffee mill gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agar_gun) and [Gardner gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardner_gun), or other such guns).
Your problem is that the gun needs to be light enough for a light aircraft and gunner should be able to reload the gun with minimal adjustments to the gun itself. So, which black powder machine gun will you choose for this job? Or would perhaps using period rifles be preferable to those?
[Answer]
Assuming we do want an actual blackpowder weapon, the key criterion is relatively light weight. For that reason multi-barrel contraptions like the [Gatling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun) or [Mitrailleuse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montigny_mitrailleuse) are out; banks of a dozen shotguns even more so. You should pick a single-barrel, multi-shot device: either the the [Puckle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puckle_gun) gun or the [Agar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agar_gun) gun. Both are primitive and have problems that would make for interesting plot complications:
The Puckle gun is not really a MG, just a supersized revolver with maybe a dozen balls in a cylinder. You might be able to reload entire spare cylinders, but reloading makes for windows of vulnerability, and each spare cylinder increases weight.
The Agar gun is a true MG, is quite lightweight, and has been used in CW for continuous fire until the barrel overheated---a lot of shots. The original required additional personnel to reload the cartridges into metal cups, but I suppose you could avoid this by carrying a lot of readily loaded cups, which are lightweight. The big problem is the feeding hopper---it works fine when the gun is on level ground, but maneuvering in the air could cause feeding jams, or even spill the cartridges right out of the hopper. So the drakes riders' tactic would be to force abrupt maneuvers on the biplanes, thus disabling the gun. :-)
[Answer]
**Use Shotguns**
What exactly does a Gatling Gun do? It spits out a lot of bullets quickly. Why do you want to spit out a lot of bullets quickly? Because hitting a fast moving target is hard and if you fire a lot of bullets the chances of one hitting increase. So your real goal is to crate a hail of projectiles. Why not use a gun which can create such a hail with a single shot?
The ideal setup in my opinion would be to have the gunner sit behind the pilot and construct his seat in a manner allowing him to shoot downwards. He has a rack with about ten double barrelled shotguns in front of him, so he can fire a decent number of shots in quick succession.
The strategy to fight dragons would either be to fly very close to them and kill the rider or the dragons wings with a barrage of grapeshot before he can snipe you or to gain an altitude advantage over the dragon rider and use the gravity-extended range of the shotguns to kill the dragon rider in a hail of shotgun fire. After each attack run the gunner would have to reload the shotguns for the next one. Story wise these two strategies could create some interesting conflict between two schools of thought in the military. Young, heroic, showoffy plane crews preferring the dangerous, but quick "meele" while the leadership prefers the saver, but not always successful altitude strategy.
This shotgun setup has the advantages that the gunner would have a very wide firing field compared to a front mounted gun, the smoke would not borther the pilot as the gunner sits behind him and the armaments of the planes would be a lot cheaper, which is always nice.
EDIT1: I do agree with user535733 assessment that you can find better uses for your aircrafts than fighting dragons. The shotgun setup would just be an easy and nice addition enabling aerial combat. The "gunner" could do other useful stuff like observation or communication whenever he is not fighting.
EDIT2: The issue of range was raised by some people, but I think they misinterpret the situation and rely too much on plane VS plane dogfights. Buckshot is still somewhat useful against human sized targets at about 100 m, but even if this is truely the limit, one must remember that we are fighting drake, not airplanes. Firstly the drakes will have large, woundable wings instead of hard, armored scales and those will probably be about an order of magnitude bigger than human sized. Secondly the altitude strategy will greatly increase the effective range of shotguns. Thirdly, if airborne fights between birds are any indication, the drakes will attempt to ram the plane and take it out in meele. This is really their best bet. A front-mounted machine gun will do jack shit against a drake attacking from above. A shotgun will discourage any tackling attempts.
In a different note, I thought about using time fused shotgun shells, aka flag-granates, against the drakes. The technology is ancient, the Venitians invented time fused artillery shells in the 14th century. I'm not sure at which point in time handgun sized time fused shells for granate launchers became a thing, but I'd be willing to suspend my disbelief if OP uses them. They would definitely sort out any range issues, be useful for precision close air support and if they can be fired from the same guns as the buckshot they'll give the airplane a versitile arsenal.
[Answer]
**Just do the same as the drakes, you're more effective**.
Assuming that there's a reason other than *the plot demands it* for the meager amount of arrows and other equipment on the drakes that lends itself for aerial combat; you can just copy them.
Your biplanes should be strong enough to easily carry two people - even if that means their top-speed drops closer to the drakes. Carry a dedicated gunner or even bow-person that does the shooting, and even drops molotovs or nets on the drakes.
You really don't need any fancy machine guns to hit targets that you can match speeds. Especially at such slow speeds. Shooting a bow at about 3.5 times the speed of your drakes, or a bullet at 9-10 times the speed of them, your planes shouldn't have that hard a time harassing the drake-riders enough that they become useless.
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Not knowing what exactly you mean by a `240 pound composite shortbow`, I'll take the speeds advertised for modern compound bows, which seem to be [around 50-70lbs](https://outdoortroop.com/how-fast-do-arrows-fly-from-a-compound-bow/) of draw-weight. Assuming your 240 pounds to be the draw weight of your fantasy bows, I guess the calculated speeds for bows with 1/4th of that are at least not too high. Thus we get around 300-340 feet per second **arrow-speed**. Or a rounded 100 meters per second -> which neatly translates to **340 km/h**.
The muzzle velocity for blackpowder guns seems to be somewhere [between 120 m/s to 370 m/s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzle_velocity) according to wikipedia. Taking the mean of these to values so we don't have to think about air resistance, etc. we end up with about 250m/s -> some 900 km/h.
[Answer]
# Forget the machine guns, bring flechettes.
You're in a situation where you need to fight slow, low-flying enemies with relatively large cross-sections and wings that can't just ignore a few holes because they're made out of flesh.
You're also on a *very* short industrial time scale. Manufacturing, modifying, and attaching machine guns to your planes is going to take *time*, especially if the existing models are poorly optimized for being mounted on a plane (and they would be, since they are already optimized for ground engagement).
So forget about the fancy guns, use your speed to get above them, and decimate them with *flechettes*.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nZx6m.jpg)
Cheap, easy to produce, silent, smokeless, and viciously lethal. Flechettes were a dangerous and effective munition dropped from planes early in WWI.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QjFOt.jpg)
Carried in bundles in the high hundreds and dispensed with a simple pull of a string, flechettes blanket hundreds of square yards with lethal rain, punching through infantry helmets as easily as they did trees.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/c2M6h.jpg)
Enjoy your draconic pincushions.
[Answer]
Your initial aircraft have much greater value as scouts, observers, and secure messengers than as active combatants. Skip the hassle of the gun entirely until your smokeless powder is ready.
Survival is about speed and maneuverability: Your aircraft is faster than a drake, and should be able to break contact at need. As anti-air combatants, your craft should by lure enemy drakes into pre-arranged ambushes from ground unit fire instead of directly trying to shoot them down.
Once you have sturdier, faster, more maneuverable aircraft, smokeless powder, and synchronizing gears, your battle in the air will evolve to become very different. But you're not there yet.
[Answer]
It depends a bit on the exact vulnerabilities of the target but assuming they had bat-like wings I think a large shot gun would be quite effective At spoiling their aerodynamics and ruining their ability to fly.
Since it doesn’t have to be carried by human you can use something like a “punt gun” which is more akin to a small cannon than a normal shot gun.
Much depends on the relative agility of drakes and planes. If the planes are better, I would stick with a prop on the front of the plane and have a punt gunner with a swivel mount on the back. Flying alongside and blast 'em.
I suspect drakes might be more agile though, in which case your planes are doomed. Their riders' weapons are useless, but all it needs to do is rake the wings to send your plane plummeting to their certain destruction.
] |
[Question]
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In the world I am building (based heavily on the Star Wars universe setting, but more historical), humanity first abandoned Earth to travel to another planet within their solar system, which they christened "Nu Terra".
But an unknown reason lead the humans to leave Nu Terra within a month, using a unique crystal found there to travel through hyperspace (in a rudimentary way) to another galaxy (via another source of the crystal), from which they moved to Coruscant.
My main issue is that humanity is extremely hardy and would be able to adapt to/kill most dangerous creatures.
Another issue is that the main characters will be travelling there towards the end of the storyline, so the planet itself has to be reasonably intact and still showing obvious signs of population.
So my question is this: Why would humanity be so hasty to get so far away from Nu Terra using such an untested method? What could possibly await anyone foolish enough to go there?
Notes:
* Nu Terra should appear normal (and abandoned) at first glance to anyone who travels there
* The danger should not be immediately obvious, but it should not take a character dying for them to know about it.
* The danger should still be present 50,000 years after the abandonment of the planet, when the characters return.
[Answer]
**Pollen.**
This is produced by plants seasonally of-course, usually once a year for a short period, sometimes only during the heat of the day when a specific temperature is hit.
The effects of this particular pollen are profound, hallucinations, visions and reckless behaviour in the vast percentage of the population. The effect is indiscreet sexual relationships, risk taking behaviour and lack of focus on things necessary for survival. This generally de-stabilises society and makes life difficult for everyone, people become desperate.
In a small percentage of the population, the force-sensitive ones (hell, who knows, maybe the pollen infected them with the midichlorians) it gives them all the same visions (or *parts* of the same visions of their future). When these people start to realise their common visions, they start to put the picture together - a vision of Corruscant - and the way to get there. These gifted individuals band together and lead the way for the whole population to travel to the new galaxy.
Their return leads to the same symptoms for much of the population, but the force-gifted ones, where will the force lead them, what is the force's will now 50,000 years later?
[Answer]
# Very alien aliens
The planet looked unoccupied during the first scouting missions, but there was a previous owner and he attacked them after while or send an ultimatum. Maybe its an AI or hivemind which has merged itself with the biosphere. Or some ancient sleepers like the Necrons or Cthulhu, whose vault were hard to spot in the beginning.
Maybe those ancients even gave them the technology and told them never to come back. Now your protagonist has come back.
[Answer]
**Disease**
It's been wiping out lifeforms for millions of years. It can be frozen in glaciers and permafrost. It could wipe out humanity and then die out leaving no trace except for more frozen sources preserving it.
Currently humanity is finding new viruses still viable in the melting permafrost due to global warming.
A disease that is fast spreading and 100% fatal with no known cure would cause the unaffected to flee the planet.
See [Arctic Meltdown](http://discovermagazine.com/2018/jun/something-stirs)
[Answer]
Economics
There is no valuable resources on Nu Terra, but plenty on Coruscant.
Once the crystals were discovered and enabled the humans to travel to and from Coruscant, the first to go there and return returned with unimaginable riches in gemstones, minerals, precious metals or other things that are highly valuable (or useful). The local environment is perfect for settlement, maybe the plants on Coruscant is directly edible/bears edible fruits, the animals are docile and delicious, and the land is exceptionally arable
At the same time, except for being marginally habitatable, Nu Terra does not offer even the most basic resources to build any permanent settlements or anything that could sustain them, maybe the plants their is not edible, and agriculture may be difficult due to the local conditions, or just because there wasn't any metal ores to replace whatever (very limited) tools the human colonists have brought with them.
Therefore, because there is a huge drive to develop industry and obtain resources, and for general quality of life, the humans quickly abandoned Nu Terra to settle Coruscant, they may even be forced to look for resources there because the supplies they brought there won't last more than a month.
Small settlements will last a while, as you can bring resources from Coruscant back to Nu Terra, just not very efficient. It's just better to do the mining and processing/manufacturing on the same planet, which means that there is no back and forth movement.
As a lack of usable resources does not go away with time, it certainly will last for time far longer than 50000 years, and still be present when the characters return.
[Answer]
Relics of an ancient civilization. Think of [the Reapers & Protheans from the Mass Effect universe.](https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Mars)
They land, all seems well. Ruins are eventually found, once activated it displays a message of inpending doom. The galaxy cleaning squad is coming to town really soon. Leaders keep it under wraps, scientist panic and go public. Civilization panics. One techy finds the crystal, another finds out where the previous owners of the planet fled to: Coruscant.
[Answer]
Could it just be that Nu Terra is an awful place to live, but at least it's better than Earth?
i.e. Earth has been taken over by the Plague, has an imminent gamma-ray-burst / solar flare, is about to be demolished to make way for an interstellar motorway, or for whatever reason they've left for the only other known planet that could possibly support life, Nu Terra.
But conditions are very difficult there and while they can technically survive, survival isn't very nice - temperatures are too low, there isn't enough water for everyone, the air is difficult to breathe, food is hard to grow. Then they discover this crystal which allows transport to the relative paradise of Coruscant.
[Answer]
If it is Star Wars universe, than the answer is obvious. The Force. The Dark Side of It.
Nu Terra has a huge lot of those "force crystals" and is evercorrupted with Dark and slowly corrupts everyone who lives there. It can even have evil "force specter"'s civilisation hidden on it! A *huge* plot engine!
[Answer]
**It was an unexpected move.**
Someone stored the crystals abit too close to the main power lines on their ship. When they turned their ship on up for a sub-orbital hop around the planet the crystal was powered up and activated. It then sent then ship though hyperspace to their destination.
[Answer]
## It was always your second choice
Your scientists already had scans of Coruscant (somehow). These scans show it as developing as a paradise world - in fact, due to light-lag, it probably already is. By comparison, Nu Terra is *awful*. Humanity can just about eke out a living, but it's hard going.
On the other hand, the time and effort required to reach Coruscant was deemed far too much. Nu Terra is within range, we can all get there without too much difficulty. And we need to bail **fast**, before the oceans boil and we all die.
But, once you get to Nu Terra, someone starts experimenting with these weird new crystals. They figure out how to grow them, they work out how to use them for FTL scanning and communications (and, *wow*, Coruscant looks even better than we expected), and then someone manages to create an **FTL Hyperdrive** with them.
Suddenly, Coruscant isn't generations away. In fact, recharge the Cryopods we used to get to Nu Terra, and **we** can be the first to set foot on Paradise. We landed barely a month ago - most of the cargo hasn't been unloaded yet. And it certainly beats scrounging the mud-plains for bogworms to eat again.
When, whenever how long later, your characters return, the planted crops and the animals that weren't rounded back up have spread, making the planet... *slightly* more hospitable.
] |
[Question]
[
The great venture capitalist Elian Minsk has decided to start an "autonomous" car driving service.
But who needs complicated AI based systems when he can hire tech support workers in India to drive cars for 2000 dollars a year (about 1 dollar per hour). And then turn around and charge U.S. subscribers ~~2~3 dollars per hour~~. The technical challenge then shifts from creating futuristic AI, into creating a reliable video link system, mostly using existing technology.
Some strategic campaign donations were made, and lobbyists were hired and successfully persuaded congress to pass a law allowing foreign persons to be certified to remotely drive cars on U.S. roads if they passed a qualified training program.
A training program was created in India where someone could pay $10 to take a class on American driving. At the conclusion of the course they are given an exam where they remotely drive a car located in a remote test facility. If they passed they were hired as a remote driver.
A ~~three part~~ wireless communications system was created. ~~To the maximum extent possible, existing cell towers are used to reduce satellite usage~~. Dedicated communications towers were also put up in major cities where there would be a lot of bandwidth requirements. A high bandwidth satellite network was launched to facilitate the transmission of audio, video, and commands between the cars and the remote drivers in places where towers can't reach (EDIT: <https://www.starlink.com/>). Of course each com links is authenticated and encrypted. Compression is used to the maximum extend possible in the video to conserve bandwidth.
Safety is a priority, so two communications frequencies are always used for redundancy. All driving commands and a low resolution version of each video link is always transmitted on both frequencies. **The remote operator can select a main channel(usually the front) to also transmit in high-res**. The high-res channel will use only one link at a time based on availability but is not redundant. If the high-res link is lost the remote driver will still see the low-res version as a backup. Furthermore the transmission format for the video frames is broken into large blocks that can be received independently. So if noise disrupts the data in one video frame only a piece of the image is lost, not the whole frame.
A hardware package was developed in conjunction with a major luxury auto maker. The hardware package allows certain models of their cars to be controlled remotely using a wireless link. Owners of those models of cars pay ~~$100 per month for up to 2 hours of remote driving per day~~ (EDIT: ten dollars per hour).
**Equipment on the car:**
* Cell transmitter / receivers. Satellite transmitter / receiver.
* Six cameras. One on each corner of the car facing out diagonally. One
front facing. One rear facing.
* Two microphones on the outside of the car so the driver can hear traffic.
* A video-phone system inside the car.
* A computer module inside the car that accepts throttle,
breaking, steering, and signaling commands from the remote operator.
* A rear facing distance sensor.
* A forward facing distance sensor.
**Here is how the typical use-case would work.**
1. The driver presses a button to request a remote driver.
2. The car is assigned to one of the remote drivers. The remote drivers are ready and waiting in an office and should confirm in under 1 minute.
3. The remote driver sends confirmation to the car and an indicator is shown to the driver.
4. The driver presses a button to allow the remote drive to take over.
5. The remote driver can take over any time they choose.
6. The occupants of the car can press a button to immediately cancel remote driving at any time.
The remote operator can place a voice call directly to the vehicle to talk to the occupants. The occupants may do the same. To maintain privacy the call will not allow any voice/video to be sent/received on either side unless both sides accept. There is also a text messaging system that the occupants and remote driver may use. The main use of both of these systems is to tell the remote driver where to go. All parties also have access to a GPS navigation system.
**If communication with the wireless network is lost the driver is alerted immediately. The car enters a driverless autonomous mode. This mode is much simpler than a full self-driving car and is just meant to bring the car to a safe stop.**
* In this mode the car maintains its current speed and direction for 5 seconds and then begins to slow down to 0mph over the course of 15 seconds. The 5 second period is mainly to allow the local driver to take over before the car starts slowing down.
* The car may slow down faster or slower to avoid collision (automatic braking/acceleration) as indicated by the two distance sensors.
* In the driverless mode the driver in the car may take over at any time by pressing the gas or brake (similar to exiting cruise control on many cars).
Are there any major flaws in the system?
**EDIT:**
* So based on comments it looks like the price needs to be closer to 10
dollars per hour. Thats fine because Taxis and Uber both charge
several dollars per mile, so the service would still be far less
expensive than either of those. The price of driving Coast to Coast
across the U.S. (about 3000 miles) would be around 600 dollars for the driver plus 200 dollars for gas, which is way cheaper than either plane or bus tickets if you are taking family of four.
* The pricing model needs to be more flexible and just let people pay
by the hour or by the month rather than having a 2 hour per day
limit. That makes use-cases like road trips a lot more practical.
* Its not practical to prosecute someone in a foreign country. The
problem of legal liability is tricky with any self driving system
(you can't prosecute an AI either). The simplest way to solve it is
to make the occupants of the car bear all responsibility. They have
access to the kill switch, and its their fault for not pressing it if
they see that the remote driver is going to violate traffic laws or
cause property damage.
* Many people cited latency as a big problem.
a) Using regular internet resources it looks like round trip latency is around 500ms.
b) Satellites placed in geosynchronous orbit would have a latency close to 500ms as well.
c) Using satellites located at an altitude of <1000 miles could do substantially better (about 150ms round trip).
* The distance between India and the U.S. is around 8000-9000 miles. This is an arc spanning an angle of about 130 degrees. The radius of the earth is about 4000 miles. If satellites were placed at 1000 miles altitude then the signal would travel 1000 miles up to the satellites. It would then travel between the satellites in an arc of length 2 \* pi \* 5000 miles \* 130 degrees / 360 degrees. And then it would travel 1000 miles down. So 13,300 miles total one way, or 26600 miles round trip. At the speed of light the signal would take 143ms to propagate round trip. If we add a few ms of latency in the satellites then we might round up to 150ms.
* Coincidently, Elon Musk just launched the first 60 Star Link satellites <https://www.starlink.com/> . The total plan is to have over 12,000 satellites. The satellites are positioned in low earth orbit at 340 to 823 miles, which is exactly the right spot to achieve low-latency communications between India and the U.S. Additionally the satellite network has massive bandwidth. 20Gbps per satellite means that they could give a connection of a few Mbps to several million users at once. The bandwidth appears to be adequate to support millions of real-time video feeds. <https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/15/18624630/spacex-elon-musk-starlink-internet-satellites-falcon-9-rocket-launch-live>
* Satellite communications could be blocked by bad weather or obstacles. That obviously makes the system unusable in certain cases. But its still useable most of the time so that's not a deal-breaker for me.
* As for plausability, the company Phantom Auto is already doing remote driving with domestic drivers, on a limited basis as a backup for AI systems. <https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/18/phantom-auto-raises-13-5m-to-expand-remote-driving-business-to-delivery-bots-and-forklifts/>
[Answer]
## I'm going to address the pricing model.
The hourly rate workers get in India is much lower than minimum wage in the United States. But it varies a lot depending on skillset. Here you need workers who speak excellent English, have strong driving skills, and who are good in a high pressure environment.
There are [many costs to labor](https://www.financierworldwide.com/doing-business-in-india-complying-with-employment-and-immigration-rules#.XOqpbtM2qSM) beyond the salary you pay. There are benefits for the workers, training (what you charge trainees might cover the costs of printing their manuals), and the costs of maintaining an office. You also have to pay supervisors, training staff, and support staff. Not to mention, taxes.
>
> Foreign companies that establish branch offices and employ workers in
> India must pay a corporate tax on profits generated inside the
> country. The rate is a flat 40% on corporate income, with 2-3%
> surcharges at higher income levels. ([ref](https://shieldgeo.com/hiring-your-first-employee-in-india/))
>
>
>
Also include high insurance costs in your overhead. Plus all the regular costs of running a business, wherever your headquarters are based.
In your model, car owners can call any time and expect a driver to respond in under a minute. Since it's impossible to drive more than one car at a time (even accounting for stops to run errands or sit at traffic lights), this means you must staff your driving center with more drivers than you will use. If you require reservations (with last minute calls allowed if someone is free), your staffing requirements drop. You also have to allow for drivers to take breaks. Not just bathroom and meal breaks (both of which mean they can not respond to a customer in under a minute) but also breaks to make sure they can perform their tasks safely (this is essential!!).
**I also find your "up to 2 hours a day" model unrealistic.**
There are 3 basic categories of how people might use this service:
1. For drives when they need to get work done or otherwise be distracted. Their daily commute is the most common here (it's also most of the driving from a lot of people). But also, driving home after having a drink (or 3), or taking over when the on-site driver is too tired, etc.
2. Driving when there is not a licensed driver available. For example, taking the kids to and from school or activities. Or picking up things from businesses or individuals.
3. Long drives. The boring part of taking your car on vacation. (Drivers can switch out when the car stops for gas or passenger bathroom breaks.)
60 hours a month makes more sense for more people than 2 hours a day. With surcharges for going over. Consider rollover for unused minutes. And discounts for making a reservation.
You might do well with a marketing plan for large companies who already have carpool vans available for employees. Or corporate travel. Wealthy people who don't want to employ human drivers (or upper middle-class people who want to splurge) might get your service for their personal cars. But it will cost a lot more than $100 for 60 hours.
[Answer]
A few, all to do with the communication network.
1. **Latency** - Even assuming you have 100% uptime (not a great assumption with cars, see below), India-to-US latency [averages about a quarter of a second](https://wondernetwork.com/pings). If you want TCP (and you do, 'cause you don't want driving instructions garbled) and encryption, that means multiple round-trips, bringing total latency to more than a second per instruction. That's not acceptable for anything beyond a walking pace.
2. **Cover** - Tunnels, parking garages - even high buildings can cause interruptions in connectivity. You've got a "recovery mode", but users aren't going to be terribly happy if anything that causes an interruption in their driver's connection makes the car glide to a halt.
3. **Weather** - same as cover, weather can cause satellite data bandwidth reduction, cell signal interruption, etc.
Camera occlusion (by dirt or obstacle) is also potentially a problem, but probably the easiest to solve from an engineering perspective.
The first problem is the insoluable one - India is a long way away. Long enough that even lightspeed isn't fast enough to provide the kind of reaction time you'd *require* from a driver at anything above golf cart speeds.
The reason this isn't a problem for drone operators in Langley is that a drone does not have to make reflex-speed decisions to avoid collisions. If a drone operator has three-second latency, it doesn't matter, because the plane is just flying in a straight line. (Because it is a drone and is airborne, the cover/weather problems are substantially less dramatic as well.) It just doesn't work for a ground-based passenger vehicle when half a second counts.
[Answer]
Bandwidth and latency seems to be the biggest flaw. It needs six simultaneous high quality video links that need to be transmitted around the globe without any appreciable delay. And what about the interference from different causes? Bridges, tunnels, power lines?
The second problem, connected to the first, is that your system doesn't scale easily. It would, perhaps, work fine for 10 testing cars, decently for the first 100. Now imagine at least 10 000 cars, all needing high-speed satellite link to India. The costs of mantain the decent connection would rise so rapidly that at the first 100 000 cars you would find it will be easier to develop the driving AI after all.
In other words, it works as a scam, but not as a proper business venture.
UPD: the attractiveness of all the kinds of neural networks in computing is that they work better the more data you have. If your driving AI is a neutral network, it will work better, the more cars you have.
Your model, on the other hand, will work worse, put more strain and be more expensive, the more clients you have - that's not a good way to plan a growing business.
One additional moment I left out at first. Outsourcing IT work works also because the people you outsource it to use comparatively generic off-the shelf computers, provided by outsourcing contractor. Here you would need to outfit every Indian driver with a powerful six-screen workstation that is, in essence, a high end car simulator. It could be easier just to import the said Indian driver to USA and pay him salary there.
Another factor is legal responsibility. Who would bear it in the case of a crash? You have no direct control over your drivers, they may come to work drunk or stoned, sleep on the job or just forget to pay attention. And they won't bear any responsibility - they are outsorced IT specialist in another country. What are you going to do? Ask for extradition?
[Answer]
**International Market forces: it would work for a little while but then not work**
Although the other answers concentrate on the practical aspects - I'll focus on the market aspects. Being in the export/import business I have a little knowledge here.
As time progresses, more cars would be online, more work is created in India, and slowly prices would go up as demand becomes higher and/or there is limited competition in the supply market (ie. the Indian company would start to feel like it could charge whatever it likes). Other car companies will enter the same space, demanding more remote drivers, and competition for cheap drivers would ensue. You would need to ensure there are many companies in India providing the same service at the same rate as the expansion of remote cars.
Professional drivers are prevalent in most developing and SE Asian countries, in first world countries you don't see much of them anymore as the labour costs have risen too far to make it work. You're still paying a wage to someone to do the work, you are at the moment just taking care of exchange rate and lower living conditions of that country.
Even now you would be surprised at the hourly rate of those in developing countries - for skilled labour combined with study and responsibility, they are higher than you think. Training, Quality Assurance, insurance and other costs need to be factored in too.
If you look at China, already labour costs are getting higher as they become more affluent, educated and asked for more responsibility, even on manufacturing projects not just professional services, and now Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia are seen as more competitive in these cases. It is safe to say educated labour in general world-wide is becoming more expensive.
[Answer]
The biggest problem I see with this is that it is still relying on human labor and therefore will not scale as well as a literally automated vehicle. Let’s look at the hardware package. Each car that is part of the fleet must have the sensors and hardware package installed. 6 cameras, some lasers, a couple antennas, motors and feedback sensors for the brakes, throttle and steering, and a computer module. Right there you have just as much hardware invested in each car as a self-driving car has but on top of that you have a fleet of high bandwidth satellites and an army of 3rd party contractors to pay.
A self driving car by comparison only has the car’s hardware package and no satellite network and only 1 driver to maintain - the software one. There are 263 million cars in the US alone. The satellite network’s bandwidth will max out and fast trying to scale up.
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[Question]
[
Spaceships are a peculiar thing; [as are the Humies - the hardy folks working and living inside these hunks of metal for weeks or months at a time.](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/89955/how-hot-can-i-make-the-insides-of-my-spaceship-before-damaging-crew-too-much) Ironically in *space* living-space is at a premium. Any places inhabited for amounts of time need to be oxygenated, ventilated and [shielded from radiation](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/60434/how-to-shield-my-spaceship-against-all-that-deadly-radiation) - even the hardiest meatbags are pushovers when it comes to environmental conditions.
Thus spaceships were forced to become the marvels of spatial use that they are today, reducing down-times wherever possible:
* Sharing bunks between shifts, or using them for storage
* Having the mess serve double duty as meeting-/working-space
* Using the 3-dimensional geometry by moving appliances to ceilings and walls (e.g. have the cooking area of the mess opposite of the seating area)
* Combining an observation room/cupola with hydroponics
While these conditions mean near-optimal space-usage, they also mean less privacy and ways to escape each other during the weeks or months spent aboard ships.
**Q**: Where on my spaceship can I justify creating & maintaining these *expensive* living conditions, allowing me to expand available crew-space as a by-product?
---
*Addendum*: Trying to address all points raised in the comments.
**Data on ships**:
* Travelling between [astronomical-](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_object) as well as [man-made-objects](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/91677/where-to-place-my-space-station-so-it-observes-one-full-planetary-revolution-per) in the solar system
* Trips taking anything from a few days, to weeks, to months at a time
* Transporting anything that could possibly be needed to be transported between two, or more, points in space
* Crewed by usually 2 to 6 people, but sometimes more, sometimes less
* Crews rosters are, [as with current-day spacecraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronaut_ranks_and_positions), intended to provide a varied set of skills necessary to facilitate spaceflight, as well as facilitate a redundancy of the availability of such skills among the crew
If the given data does *not* seem *sufficient for* any part of *your answer*, please assume a [near-future](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture) society and *extrapolate sensibly*. Also consider looking at the linked questions & articles, they're not just there because I like coloured text.
[Answer]
In space, things that robots can do they will do. Already on Earth robots do things like washing clothes and cooking. These robots do not need to share conditioned meatball space with the humans.
from OP /Using the 3-dimensional geometry by moving appliances to ceilings and walls (e.g. have the cooking area of the mess opposite of the seating area)/
Appliances will be outside the conditioned space. Robots outside the living area will contain interior pressured spaces cook for cooking and cleaning. Storage spaces will likewise not be pressurized and will be minimally shielded. Stored items will be tracked by computer and delivered on request. Washing of nonliving material will definitely be done in non-pressurized areas, which will greatly facilitate the process.
Interior spaces for human habitation will be used for that and only that. Any space a human could occupy will be reserved for that use alone.
It will be tight quarters. In one respect it will make a diesel submarine seem roomy - but because protruding stuff and appurdances do not clutter living space (as they do on a sub) the spaceship living spaces will also seem clean, smooth, well lit and aesthetically pleasing.
[Answer]
Assuming that on a long trip you want pseudo-gravity for the health of your crew, a reasonably large [ring section](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gravity#Centrifugal) is probably in order. Given that the outer "floor" of said structure is going to be experiencing 1 gee of pseudo-gravity you are going to lose the utility of most of the three dimensional space between that floor and the core of the ship. You can, without serious increases in cost, open that lost space out giving the crew some headroom. You could halve the headroom and have expanded bunk spaces at half-gravity as well.
[Answer]
## tl;dr: Justify the space with a moss carpet on the ground and edible plants on walls and ceiling.
The way I see your question is this:
You want to make crew rooms/living space bigger, so you need a justification for it. The problem with bigger crew spaces are that they are more expensive and have more mass, meaning more fuel, meaning more $$$.
In order to justify extra space, you need to use all of that space for something.
Presumably, only living things would justify more space.
For example: We could have no O2 tanks on the ship and store all of the oxygen in the living areas at 1 atmosphere, but that would be inefficient- we can save mass by compressing O2 in a tank on the outside of the ship. The O2 doesn't need the extra space, and it doesn't care about radiation or temperature.
Therefore, you need to justify the extra space with something that needs the same things humans need, including ample space, but without being a human, because that wouldn't make the area any less cramped.
For this, you could fill your ship with dogs. Dogs love being in space [citation needed], and they would be great companions. However, dogs have disadvantages.
They wouldn't need too much more space than already exists, so the crew space wouldn't go up much. They eat too, and they are not vital to the ship's operations, so they would drain resources. Dogs also need lots of care.
You need something hardy instead. It has to take up lots of space, need minimal care, and be essential.
My suggestion is a plant. A hydroponic moss or vegetable would be able to feed the crew. It would need lots of space to feed a medium size crew for the duration of the trip. It would require food, water, heat, radiation shielding, and an atmosphere of pressure.
Instead of creating a separate room for the plants, you could build them right into the living space. The floor could be a hardy moss (vegetables might not stand up to being walked on). Goodbye CO2 filtering- the moss would take care of it. The walls and ceiling could be vegetables, like potatoes or carrots. There goes any need for food storage because you can grow food. Taking these components off the ship would make it lighter and save money.
Depending on whether the ship has gravity, you might run into problems. With gravity, the plants on the walls and ceiling would fall. To fix that, you can make the walls [vertical planters](https://theownerbuildernetwork.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/diy_vertical_wooden_box_planter_12.jpg) and plants on the ceiling could be suspended upside down like [this](http://openasia.club/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/how-to-hang-grow-lights-in-a-bedroom-how-to-hang-plants-from-ceiling-who-you-have-ceilings-this-high-you-have-plenty-of-how-to-hang-plants-how-to-hang-grow-lights-in-a-bedroom.jpg), except filling the entire ceiling.
If you fill the crew spaces with plants, you can justify making them larger to accommodate more plants to filter the air and feed your crew. That means the crew will have more space to move around in.
[Answer]
space/volume isn't really an issue in microgravity, just mass. There isn't any air resistance. If the ships are built in microgravity then the only real consideration will be the mass of the additional shielding.
The reason space is limited in current spacecraft is that they had to fit in the shuttle's bay or on a rocket that had to push itself out of our atmosphere.
If you can get a drive tech that produces >= .1 G, you may not have a gravity issue for the humans. A tenth of a G is, theoretically (no one has actually tested it, YMMV), what the body needs to maintain health. A souped up ion drive or NERVA drive would work for this.
As for shielding, one proposal has been to create a "storm shelter" on the ship that has a high degree of shielding that everyone can run to if there is a CME or other event. That would allow the expansion of living space without adding too much of a mass burden.
[Answer]
There are some spaces on a spaceship that are going to be available that would not be on a submarine. In particular:
1. **Fuel pods**. Early in the trip, you have lots of fuel. This is because you need enough fuel to push not only the payload but the fuel. As you travel, you need less and less fuel. But this opens up more room to use.
If you do a long blast initially, that will use up more than half your fuel. So you can take over all that space for the rest of the voyage.
Perhaps that's where you put the gymnasium. Because if you're in free fall, you'll want some big space to help you move around.
2. **Food space**. When you launch, you need an awful lot of space for food. As you finish off the frozen, canned, and durable food, you can recover that space and allow other spaces to expand into where it was.
3. **Intermix rooms with hydroponics**. As you mentioned, hydroponics can be mixed with other space. Rather than having multiple people bunking in the same room as in a submarine, scatter the rooms throughout the hydroponic space. When your off-shift is over, compress the room. Then your neighbor, who is coming off shift, can expand that room into the place where your room was. That way both of you can have some elbow room when in your room. And your window can look out onto the hydroponics.
You might even make the rooms mobile. So you don't always have to look at the same view. Move your bunkroom to the view that you want. Hydroponics. Stars. Lay out and tan under the sun (assuming proper screening). Whatever makes you happy.
4. **Trash**. All those food wrappers and stuff? On a submarine, they keep those in the sub with you. On a spaceship, you can put them outside.
5. **Atmosphere cans**. A special case of trash is the atmosphere cans where you carry compressed air. You release that as you use up the fuel and put out the trash. The cans themselves can go outside.
Or maybe you don't use cans but spaces. So you keep the atmosphere compressed by the fuel. But the wall moves. So as you use up the fuel, the pressure in the room with the atmosphere drops to normal levels. Once finished, the hatch opens and people can use the space. If you put the fuel inside a sort of balloon, you don't even have to clean up afterward. The balloon itself becomes trash, which you stow outside in the vacuum.
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In the near-future, the development of more comfortable, lightweight and reliable spacesuits could change the definition of what is a living space in a spaceship. If your suit is no more uncomfortable or cumbersome than a diver's wetsuit, then you can spend most of the day using it, even recreation time.
So it's possible the pressurized, oxygenated, shielded rooms on spaceships might not grow much bigger, and will focus on changing rooms, eating and sleeping quarters, and bath/toilet.
More and more rooms would become spaces where you need to wear a spacesuit, but that's okay if it is comfortable and gives you full dexterity in your hands. This would actually simplify some things. Engineering rooms would not longer have to be built so carefully to avoid small sparks setting fires, since they are now in vacuum instead of an oxygen-rich environment. Things can be built with an open plan instead of a cramped design, making maintenance and repairs much easier. If the suits are as comfortable as a wetsuit, then astronauts could spend recreational time wearing them. If they need to get out of the cramped, windowless spaces that are pressurized, they could simply do a tethered EVA and just sit on the outside of the ship (possibly in a lawn-chair zip-tied to the ship, plugging a mimosa capsule into their suit's hydration system). A big un-pressurized, un-shielded box would not be too expensive to assemble in-orbit and pull along, and astronauts in these new suits could take some kind of space ball in there and bounce it around in some zero-g ball game.
These new kinds of living and working spaces, in which people wear space-suits, has basically no requirements other than not letting significant debris get in and not letting the astronauts float away. Thus it would be easy and cheap enough to make that you could justify much more of it.
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# Put human bodies into suspended animation caskets (SACs)
This will be the most sustainable option because you do not need a lot of materials to run actual space. Living spaces must at all times be:
* sanitized
* monitored
* air-conditioned
* pressurized
* lighted
* gravitated
These requirements are just for designing a general livable space. Specialized living spaces like bathrooms, bunkbeds, kitchens, living rooms, cockpits, laboratories, viewing windows, etc., require a lot more conditions, meaning a lot more resources.
BUT if you just put everyone to sleep, then you just need highly sophisticated bunk beds that also function as dining rooms, comfort rooms, and all sorts of utility rooms. Your only problem will then be all about running a place where interaction is necessary and/or encouraged, i.e. cockpits, laboratories, and living rooms. My solution is just to
# Put human minds in full-immersion virtual realities (FIVRs)
Everything in an FIVR is limited only by what computational power your ship can allot for such simulations. The only thing you need to ensure is the hierarchy of command within the ship, the accuracy of your simulation compared to real-world physics, and the correlation of the simulation with the control processes of the ship.
Basically, you need to provide an interface for the simulation and the real world such that if the captain in the simulation decides to crank a simulated lever to steer the ship leftward, the ship will steer leftward based on the value of the cranked lever.
It would be like controlling the ship itself from within the simulation.
This simulation-reality correlation can be extended to all the other functions of the ship like
* running the simulation
* regenerating food sources
* administering intravenous nutrition
* navigating through space
**Summarizing:** The freedom and safety you desire can be efficiently provided by virtual spaces. You can place a sophisticated, self-sustained, single-size bed anywhere on your ship. You only need that bed to be able to read and carry out the thoughts of the person on it. Maybe just add propulsion and the bed itself can become the ship, or link several of these beds together and equip them job-specific extra utility functions.
**TL;DR: By making the ship, the humans, and the interfaces between the two to be as integrated as possible, you do not need to know specifically where inside the ship should you put your humans.**
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The rocket would look much like current rockets, with people strapped in for the take-off. Once it had cleared the atmosphere and entered space proper, it would slide extensions out from the side, like certain RV's have. These spaces would provide more living space than the main rocket; as a matter of fact, they could maybe pack more stuff into the vehicle than currently (assuming weight isn't an issue) since there would be no movement space for the people during takeoff and landing while they are strapped into their seats and the extensions retracted.
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**Inflatable tents**
Using an airlock hatch, an inflatable tent (constructed of suitable materials) could be rigged to give space to live on the outer hull of the ship.
Radiation shielding isn't needed at all times, it'll be monitored and the crew can move to safety in time, or specialized clothing could be worn instead.
A crewman uses the same amount of oxygen wherever they are, and if ventilation is actually a problem, a breathing tube could be rigged up.
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The easiest way I see to create lots of extra space, is to have your space ship designed in a very particular way. And thats with removable and modular interiors. Basically your spaceship will consist of an outside shell which contains your shielding, ventilation and other necessary living requirements. The shell is designed to open up, so that the interior of it can be replaced very quick. You can throw in giant storage units, living compartments, food production, maintenance bay and so one, just by opening a shell, pulling out the interior and putting a new one in.
The point of this is during space travel, once you have reached your desired speed you can open up the shell and remove the interior and let it float alongside your space ship. Of course you attach it to your ship via some prebuilt struts so it doesn't just float away, and you can keep accelerating. You then reseal the shell and bring out a bunch of collapsible furniture/equipment or move the equipment from your already cramped living quarters into the empty shell(which is now sealed, pressurized, shielded and ventilated because those sections are build into the shell and not the actual interior (the interior will just connect onto those parts in the shell).
Now you might think to yourself, why would anyone sacrifice the extra room for having separate interior and exterior walls. The answer is pretty simple, speed and flexibility. A space ship can be loaded and launched in an incredibly small amount of time using this system. The interior storage units are prepacked and once a spaceship arrives, you pull out their interior, push in a new one and off it goes. Think of Formula 1 racing, where they literally have pit stops down to a few seconds. You'll be doing that but with space ships instead. The nature of the goods your sending will also change and this provides you with the flexibility to carry any goods that can be packaged into your interior. It doesn't matter if its passengers, cargo, sensitive material, or a black hole. As long as it fits into the interior compartment, its going to fit in your spaceship.
The only issues I see with this, is that these spaceships aren't going to actually every land on a planet. That would make it too costly. Instead they could dock at an orbiting station where cargo would be removed and put back in before they continue on their way. This will provide you with more spaceship throughput, and you could attach more exterior shells (everything is modular) to allow you to transport more good if required. Now you might think, why don't they just attach extra goods on the outside? and the reason is because more mass means more energy to accelerate which means more fuel. There is a set limit on how much strain and how fast you can accelerate with externally attached modules, and you have to worry about applying the force offset from the center causing spin.
TL:DR?
What I am envisioning is basically giant train like spaceships with compartments made to fit storage containers. Once you stop accelerating, you remove the storage container and let it float outside your compartment. You are then free to use the compartment however you like, until you start to decelerate.
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## Surface-area-to-volume-ratio is (for the first time ever) your friend:
The space humans have to live in is proportional to the *volume* of the cabin.
The material required to *make* the cabin is proportional to the *surface area* of the cabin (yes, air pressure maintenance is proportional to volume, but by mass and cost it's negligible).
The thing is, as *volume* increases at a linear rate, the *surface area* increases at a rate proportional to the *square of the cube root* of the rate of volume increase. Therefore, it's more cost efficient to have a large living space than a small one. If a 100m^3 cabin takes 60m^2 of material to produce, a 200m^3 cabin takes 95m^2 of material to produce.
Volume has little impact on spaceflight, because there's no friction. As long as the cabin is roughly symmetrical, the center of mass is maintained.
You get more value out of a large cabin than a small one, and the larger it is, the more resource efficient. They know that people need space, and it's relatively easy to build a large cabin for the crew.
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You can justify any space that's connected to a vital system as critically important to be fully pressurized and oxygenated. Passageways leading to the engine, main computer, generator, moisture catcher, and any other life support/ critical system all need to be pressurized, And the easiest way to do this is to simple make a box around all these systems. Any space within this box would be pressurized in order to give the crew access to anything they might need to work on, but that also means the crew quarters will be as large as the space not used by vital systems, within a cuboid the width and height of the largest system, and the length required to accompany all systems within the ship.
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Exterior expansion. Think exterior hull add ons.
Start with a basic pod like option designed to be an additional house with a hallway for maintenance access and connections and whatever else is needed to sync the pod to the ship.
Then in a competitive universe...
You'd see cheap models, expensive mansion style models, shed sized ones just for storage, military ones where it adds turret stations, or medical facility additions, maybe even models of different designs based on their home planet, but from there the possibility expands drastically. Especially if at these various stations you mention there are sites which offer the service to add pods on and prep them for space travel.
With that you'd see space crafts of obscure shapes with customized pod additions attached to the hull of the main ship.
Hope that helps. Enjoy.
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I guess I'm not really sure I understand the problem you're trying to solve here.
The bottom line, assuming near-future space travel, is nowhere. You would never have large open spaces on a well designed spacecraft unless having that large open space were a SPECIFIC design constraint, in which case the followup question is "What do you need it for"?
Ultimately, if you're talking about any kind of near-future space travel engineering, the primary design constraint is mass. The objective is always to make the spacecraft as light as it possibly can be to fulfil its mission, because the heavier your spacecraft is, the more reaction mass you need to use to move it around, which is also reaction mass that you have to MOVE by expending even MORE reaction mass, etc etc.
So, I'm sort of trying to extrapolate the Real Question here, which I THINK is "Under what conditions would a near-future spacecraft have the large open spaces I want for dramatic purposes", and I think the answer is that you have to rely on a propulsion system that's MASSIVELY more efficient in terms of Specific Impulse than anything we're currently using, and/or construction materials that have a much greater strength-to-mass ratio than anything we're currently using.
You might be able to solve the latter problem by relying on carbon nanotubes/nanofibers for construction, and for the former you might want to start here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse>
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Our experience with spaceship design is fairly limited so far - however consistently it is the importance of the mission that often determines it's configuration, size and complexity.
Several factors need to be considered:
* How far your destination for this ship is
* How long it would take to get there
* How many crew are there / passengers would there be
* How much weight you can carry
As an example, the Apollo missions had Command modules no larger than a car cabin, and an attached Lunar module not much bigger again. This was tight, but the three crew were only in there for 8 days, plus they were highly trained and professional, purposely for the mission.
Another, the ISS, is much larger, contained a crew most times of 6, and a volume of 930 cubic m. The modules are quite comfortable, even for extended periods of most of a year, with plenty of 'nooks and crannies' for sleeping areas and private areas. Considering the cost of the station (the most expensive item every made), every surface is optimised and invested with the utmost of utility.
If however, you are aiming for long voyages abroad, then an analysis of current ships on the drawing board may be in order. Have a look at Space X's BFR and Mars mission as an example. This is meant only to be a ferrying ship, and even for 3 months the crew are expected to not need a large amount of space internally as they are on a relatively short voyage, disembarking upon destination.
If you are aiming Interstellar - well, this is much more different. Space is big, really big, and it would take a long time to travel to a distant (or close) system.
There are currently 2 'size' camps:
* Interstellar Small Ships: Go small, as small as you can, to accelerate as fast as you can (and hopefully slow down easier too). A cryogenic ship, seed ship or data ship is very small, but if not then a small single man crew may be desirable, as every kg makes it just that much harder to accelerate. Even then it may take a long time (decades or centuries).
* Interstellar Big Ships: Go big, as big as you can, to make the journey the priority as much as the destination. A Generation Ship is along these lines. Adequate space for a society to survive the millennia it would take for the ship to reach its destination, perhaps km in width and length. You can't beat an asteroid, hollowed out with atmosphere, spun to create gravity, pushed to reach the next star system in a 1000 years or so.
Basically there is no superfluous space on a ship, you don't need more space than you need because of weight penalty, unless you go Generation Ship, which would be massive, and likely more space than you need personally (enough for a society anyway).
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[Question]
[
An alien species has been conquering planet after planet around the Milky Way for some time. They detected intelligent life on Earth a while back and now they decided it’s time to add us to their collection. To capture us, they send one of their massive acquisition ships.
>
> They want it to take as little time as possible, so they decide to make an immediate show of power and demand our surrender. To accomplish this, the ship will massively decelerate and stop just before hitting the Earth.
>
> The force provided from this will cause massive natural disasters, and possibly kill a proportion of the Earth's residents, without destroying the planet.
>
>
>
*Is it possible to cause such effects by deceleration?
and/or what would the effects actually be?*
**Additional Info:**
The ship would be something like a moon-sized battle station (or possibly a giant head…)
The maximum amount of population they’d wish to kill would be roughly 5%.
They can travel faster than light if necessary.
They have the potential to go light speed to 0 in roughly 0.2s, but don’t worry about the how.
I'm not asking about the effects of another moon in orbit, rather just the initial appearance.
Any figures of distance, speed or deceleration would be appreciated!
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How do they decelerate?
If they do it by action and reaction, then they decelerate by sending mass (rocket fuel etc) ahead of them so they slow down. Mass times acceleration. Stop half the mass by accelerating the other half to twice the velocity? (Ignoring relativity.) Or stop most of it by accelerating a little bit a whole lot faster....
The kinetic energy proportional to mv^2. A whole lot of kinetic energy there to transfer to the earth....
Well, but since they're aliens with unknown technology they don't have to do it that way. They could do the equal and opposite reaction with a giant burst of neutrinos headed our way. Would that affect us? Not much.
Say it's mostly neutrinos plus a little bit of whatever they want. They could hit us with a burst of gamma rays and cook everything a bit on one side of the planet.
They could hit us with a gigantic EMP burst and destroy a whole lot of our electronics.
Maybe they could do anything else they wanted and hit us with any combination of electromagnetic frequencies. If they already know human physiology, they might hit us with maser frequencies at just the particular combinations of infrared that get best absorbed by one particular protein. Everybody's blood gets a little bit hotter, but one particular protein gets very hot and maybe gets denatured. They might kill 5% of the people, and make most of the rest sick to varying degrees. Also affect other species at random, depending on how they are affected by those particular frequencies.
I liked the discussion of tidal effects. If it's moon-heavy and closer than the moon, it will cause bigger tides. Which depending on the time of arrival might reinforce the lunar tides. A tide at New York City only 20 feet higher than the highest tide so far, would cause a great big emergency.
Bigger stone tides could cause earthquakes, but those would be hard to predict -- especially from many light-years away. Also once the stone is stressed it could increase earthquakes for decades to come. That would matter for invaders who intended to use the planet later. They might have enough experience from previous attacks on similar planets to guesstimate how likely they'd get more damage than they wanted. Or they might want to limit the potential effects to the point the water tides weren't very destructive either.
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You can only cause damage with this scenario in one, or both, of two ways:
1. the ship actually *hits* the atmosphere. This is problematic for two reasons, deep space vessels tend not to be designed for atmospheric entry, (it's expensive of mass and thus thrust energy) and you end up very far into Earth's gravity well with added atmospheric drag to contend with as well, getting back into orbit is going to be a difficult proposition. Damage from the atmospheric shock wave will be relatively localised making it slightly more controllable.
2. the tidal forces from a such a massive (having much mass) object making a very near approach to the planet disrupt the normal flow. This is a difficult one to qualify with any certainty but the ship has to be gee tolerant to pull off the braking maneuver described so it should be fine, Earth would experience major tsunamis and land tides triggering worldwide earthquakes. The widespread nature of the damage will make the total magnitude of the disaster much harder to control.
In either case the ship will be interacting with a chaotic system, the Earth, putting hard limits on casualties under those conditions will be impossible; the full consequences of either a gravitational disrupt or an atmospheric shock wave are too unpredictable. With a good enough engine system you could dial in the initial parameters to a very fine tolerance, and get a pretty accurate initial casualty estimate with enough computation but the long-term effects can't be mapped.
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[Wikipedia already has one solution for you](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#Damaging_effect_on_destination) - using an Alcubierre drive to go FTL could create a sonic-boom like burst of particles in front of the ship when it exits FTL. Normally you'd aim slightly away from your destination so that you'd be ready to go into orbit around it and not bombard it. In this case the bombardment is exactly what they want.
As for how to kill no more than 5% of the world's population - [the moon is about the size of the United States](https://io9.gizmodo.com/5984252/and-now-for-a-sense-of-scale-a-map-of-the-us-overlaid-on-the-moon), which has just under 5% of the world's population. As long as the bombardment won't kill 100% of the people in it's path, you won't hit 5% of the world's population.
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If you park a moon-sized station in geosynchronous orbit it will wreck all sorts of havoc.
1. The gravity pull of the station will cause coastal flooding.
2. If they move the ship back and forth from the planet they could cause tsunami.
3. Moving such a big mass so close to the planet will certainly destroy all of our satellites (by messing with their orbits)
It might be difficult to limit the number of casualties, but given they are advanced aliens, maybe they ran complex simulations.
If they time their actions correctly they could flood South-East Asia and kill hundreds of millions fairly easily. Without satellites (GPS, weather, communications) rescue operations will be extremely limited thus making the death toll much higher.
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The atmosphere doesn't stop all [cosmic rays](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#History), just a % of them.
If the ship in question were to exhaust **lots** of such particles as part of its propulsion system (not outside the realm of possibility), it could well cause some really nasty effects directly underneath the exhaust. These could include:
* Direct radiation exposure for anyone who happens to be underneath at the time (particularly those outdoors). Effect 10x as great on anyone in a commercial airliner.
* Ozone depletion.
* Creation of radioactive elements.
* Failures of electronic equipment (particularly the newer stuff with smaller transistors, and anything with RAM).
* An ungodly amount of [lightning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#Role_in_lightning).
It would have to be orders of magnitude more than the amount hitting the affected area all the time as background radiation for it to be noticeable as being caused by the ship. Depending on the propulsion system used, that may be feasible.
But for me, the lightning alone might do the job. Nothing quite says to the primitives "Your god has arrived!" quite like a hundreds of miles wide hurricane of lightning.
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**You doing it wrong, man. Let's see why.**
* *If you wish to intimidate a civilization, you do not do it like a small child on a child bike intimidating a girl he is in love with.*
First of all, it like in a bad comedy about aliens - people didn't notice.
I mean not that they won't notice potential chaos and destruction, happening, but generally, it will be attributed to a 1/10th of dinosaur asteroid.
And the whole braking right before collision thing, the whole point of it is one see it coming, that time between of noticing and its end is the when all the fears are boiling.
So people won't see a fast incoming thing even if its size of the moon. That's the sad truth of space explorations and the current situation. So you need to make a significant effort to be noticed and give some time for detection and for fearmongering.
If you wish to intimidate you have to make a credible threat and have sufficient time for them to notice you, give them time to boil in their fears and hopelessness.
**Credible intimidation**
The ship itself is quite a threat, it does not have to do anything to impress people, and there is basically no chances of military retaliation against it. So I guess you may hit any type of deal, without killing anyone(I understand plot demand evil aliens, yeah, okay)
If you think humans that stupid and really need some reinforcement and confirmation that those aliens are worthy and humans won't be able to wait out the stuff on the surface of the planet, playing seek and hide with aliens in jungles, the only thing the ship has to do is to be a second moon, just a little bit a special one - one which creates a perpetual Eclipse.
and if it is not enough, get in the L1 Sun-Earth and roll out the shiny foil, and make a real eclipse on the whole planet.
The valuable aspect of that sort of intimidation, effects are more precisely controlled.
**P.S.**
however, not sure, what happened with a usual shot from orbit to the pole of the planet? Why it is not good enough.
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So, generally the force caused by quickly decelerating right before you hit something comes from the gasses around you. For example, if you swing your hand towards the desk and stop just short of hitting it, a gust of wind will push things away from your hand. The deceleration doesn't actually cause the damage; the air displaced by the quick motion in advance causes it.
So if it entered atmosphere very quickly and then decelerated short of touching the surface, then it would definitely cause a lot of damage by displacing a lot of air very quickly; possibly even creating a sort of crater below it (look up microbursts for something similar to this effect; only yours would be much much bigger).
The displaced air may be the least of our worries, though. A ship of that size entering the atmosphere quickly enough would also compress all of the air below it, heating the surface to the point that things would pretty much combust.
It's worth mentioning that just the presence of a moon-sized battleship near earth would still cause significant natural disasters (storms, hurricanes, tidal waves, and maybe even volcanic eruptions and earthquakes), just because of its gravitational pull on the planet.
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There are a couple of major problems with this scenario.
1. Please do not have your villains twirl their mustaches! Immediately killing a lot of people (and animals) is a really bad cliche used to show just how evil and uncaring your villain is! Many writers don't want to put the thought into creating a villain through plot, so they use cliches like this. In reality, if you injured 5% of the population of the US, you would probably bring almost all of society down, except for the military, which would probably have an immediate bad response.
2. Perhaps just as importantly, if the ship can decelerate that quickly and violently, which is protecting the crew of the ship from being turned into jelly by these forces?
3. There is a reason that earth's moon doesn't orbit much closer than it does now. When it gets close enough, the tidal forces produced by the earth to the ship will tear the ship apart.
One good book to read for the possible outcomes of something like this is "High Crusade" by Poul Anderson. This is on a much smaller scale. It is set in the middle ages and an alien scout/slaver ship lands at an English village. The goal is just to awe the people with their ship. It was working, and then the aliens shot a few people with energy weapons, and the bowmen responded by reflex, killing a couple of the demonic-looking aliens. This resulting in the human villagers mobbing the ship and killing all but one of the aliens. Had the aliens just stood there, the village might have surrendered. But once the villagers knew the aliens could be killed, they did it.
Having a ship the size of a moon orbiting earth would probably cause us to surrender quickly. Yes, I'm sure somebody would try to nuke it, but if the aliens destroyed the missiles with no apparent effort, there would be a lot of pressure to surrender.
Destroying or hurting society is counterproductive. For one thing, if you destroy the government,there will be no one to accept a surrender!
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[Question]
[
A major plot point of my story that's been bugging me for a while has me wondering what exactly the (specifically American) prison system could and would do to deal with the fact that the entire prison population suddenly has superpowers, and I was wondering if I could get some help with this.
A quick summary of how powers work in my story:
Everyone 13 or older has a brand on their arm that contains four circles on it. Every week, on Saturday, at 12:00 PM EST, one of those circles fills up with a magic rune that grants them a new supernatural power.
Everyone gets the same rune per week, and once all four circles are filled, the rune in the fourth slot is overwritten with the next week's power when it arrives, and if you want to keep it you have to switch it with a rune in another slot (you can do this with your mind, and there's no way for anybody else to affect the slot order of your powers).
In addition, everyone who was old enough to have a brand when this first started had two free, impossible-to-delete powers granted to them permanently: one that roughly doubles their strength, and one that lets them heal any injury and regrow any lost body part, in a time range going from an hour to a week depending on severity.
Now, the biggest problem this presents to running a prison is the fact that it means that at that time every Saturday, every person on Earth, including the entire prison population, is going to get a new power, and nobody has any way of predicting what that power will be. And that's the real issue: what are they going to do if one week the unknown godlike entity giving out these powers decides everyone should be able to teleport, or walk through walls, or fly?
For the first six months this does not happen, as the mysterious entity seems to have a somewhat low-fantasy design philosophy when it comes to how powerful the powers are. To give some examples:
* The ability to temporarily sacrifice access to another rune to summon an animal familiar
* No longer needing to sleep
* Wall clinging (this one is a close call to be sure)
* Opening a hammer space portal to a 6' x 6' x 6' container that nonliving objects can be stored inside
* Super hearing
But eventually a week comes when a bunch of new powers are given out all at once (even expanding the brand from 4 circles to 6 and giving out two new permanent powers as well) that appear to have been specifically designed to shatter social order and, among other things, get every single criminal out onto the streets again.
**But what would they do before the effort to keep prisoners in prison ultimately fails? What changes would or could be made to prison protocol to at least attempt to deal with inmates with super powers, and what possible added measures could be taken to future-proof a prison against potentially jailbreak-abetting powers they have no way of being able to predict?**
[Answer]
**I'm a current prison guard, here's some insight.**
I would refuse to book in an inmate with super powers. We can do that by the way, if we feel our facility is not equipped to contain or care for an inmate we will refuse them. That being said you are talking about a massive undertaking, possibly running into the billions. Look up the SCP writing project and read up on some of their containment procedures for super powered and supernatural beings and objects here:
<http://www.scp-wiki.net>
Basically every cell must be made custom for each individual, and specially trained and equipped staff must be on hand to monitor, care for, and contain each individual. Frankly, neutralization is the cheapest and most efficient goal. Once you have one of these beings captured killing them would be infinitely cheaper and more safe than risking containment. Containment would be a very expensive last resort for a super-powered individual whom you cannot kill for whatever reason.
In your scenario the social order of the nation would decay very very quickly. A state of emergency would be declared and regular concepts like due process or incarceration would quickly become meaningless. The only feasible way to maintain order would be overwhelmingly brutal and swift retribution for major crimes. We're talking about summary executions becoming the norm here. You can't possibly have a normal society after such an event.
[Answer]
Here is the solution.
Every Saturday, by 11:55AM EST, every high-risk prisoner is heavily sedated. On 12:00PM EST sharp, a new kind of superpower is revealed. Authorities determine what kind of power that is, and if this power is too strong to keep a prison secure, all of its inmates are kept drugged for the whole 4 weeks.
With the use of tracking devices, only "very super" powers, like [Magneto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto_(comics))'s will need a full 4 week sedation.
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Through trial and error, there will be a recognition that there is either a rune or series of runes that allow the user to negate other magical powers. Once this rune or combination is discovered, Law enforcement and correctional agencies rapidly seek out people who have this rune, and put them through a rapid training course, pair them off with more senior people and put them to work to negate magical powers.
Since the person can choose to keep their rune(s), the employer will provide some pretty enticing incentives for the holders to do so, building up their skills and experience.
Things will suck quite hard initially, since essentially you have created a world where all the cops and corrections officers who can do useful things are rookies, but with sufficient time, these new officers will be able to settle into their work. Recruiting new officers to replace them will be a matter of reading people's runes (rather than resumes), then putting them through a quick battery of psychological tests to see if they are mentally suitable for the job. People who pass then get the signing bonus to keep their runes, and go to the academy like normal recruits.
[Answer]
**Explosive Collars**
Do what some shows have done like Battle Royale, or dead man wonderland (dead mans collar is poison but close). An explosive collar is fitted around the prisoner’s neck. If they break the rules, the collar explodes if they leave the area the collar explodes. If they look the wrong way the collar... you get it. But this should only be used for inmates of minor crimes, death row or lifers should be executed so they don't pose a threat to the public. Until a time when a rune (or combo of them) makes the collars useless, the most cost effective then equipping and training stuff each week. It sounds harsh but it’s the best and most humane way I see keeping them inline.
[Answer]
Some of the rules will need to be rewritten as socially not acceptable methods are likely necessary.
On a case-by-case basis, each inmate needs to be assessed on its danger to society if they escape, and the likelyhood that they will attempt it when given a power that gives a high success rate of escape.
With inmates that dont have a high danger to society but do have escape risk you give them GPS to keep track and capture them after escape. Capture might constitute having biometric data so a custom tranquilizer can be used to knock that person out. Actually, just give GPS to all inmates regardless of risk. Better safe than sorry.
High-risk cases and dangerous inmates will have only one solution: Make sure they arent consciously able to try out their new power until the guards know what it is and how to prevent escape, which might need to be "keep em asleep/sedated until the rune passes".
As an alternative to the "explosive collar" idea I just saw, have implants connected to the GPS. If the GPS cant determine the location properly or it doesnt show the coordinates associated with the prison and its grounds (or prisoner travel locations) it knocks that person out.
[Answer]
Cyrogenics
If you had a prison like the one in [The Demolition Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demolition_Man_(film)) you could keep them "on ice" so to speak and rehabilitate them using neural stimulation.
No risk to guards and no chance of escaping.
[Answer]
Think "Suicide Squad".
Every inmate gets a device injected that the prison can remotely detonate. Of course detonating it remotely would be a last resort. You don't blow up a prisoner who was only in prison for petty theft.
As a more humane version, it could use a sedative to put the escapee to sleep, though it could probably not contain enough fluids to maintain sedatives to put someone to sleep for more than an hour or so, which means that especially in a mass escape, some prisoners might be lucky enough to wake up before the police manage to get to them.
In addition the implant tracks the position of the inmate through GPS and transmits it to the prison. Countries would have contracts with each other so they can use the local wireless/phone networks (remember that GPS is only receiving location data, not sending it) and there might be countries that prevent wireless access, i.e. safe havens for prisoners.
To utilize the location data, a team of "retrievers" (not dogs, humans) are by contract required to keep their teleportation powers and any escapee is immediately chased by a squad that can track him in real time.
Another option that would probably not work in real life, but appears often enough in books and movies to not require a lot of explanation/handwaving, would be to keep the prisoners consistently poisoned, but kept alive with an antidote/repressant mixed into the food or water that keeps the poison inactive for 24 hours. Miss your dose of poison repressant because you decided to take a stroll outside of the prison walls, well, you've got 24 hours to come back to prison before your intestines turn into goo and all your healing abilities won't help you against that.
In summary, you don't want to rely on holding people inside. You *expect* them to get out, it's inevitable, you just have to make sure that getting out is the easy part for prisoners, staying and surviving outside is the difficult part.
[Answer]
Everyone gets the same powers at the same time, right? So while criminals might have incredibly powerful abilities, so will the cops, as well as the criminals potential victims.
A criminal teleports into your house and tries to kill you? You and your family can just teleport away yourselves. Criminals are knocking down walls by sneezing in their general direction? So can the cops.
All you really need is prison guards who can quickly learn and adapt to whatever this weeks new power will be. Everyone has healing powers, so most injuries inflicted by these criminals will probably be non-life threatening, so long as the victim can get away. The main concern is that with all these super powers being thrown around, there's going to be massive infrastructure and property damage.
[Answer]
**Bathysphere Prison**
If the air pressure inside your prison is significantly higher than atmospheric pressure anyone who teleports to the surface will *explosively decompress.* If they teleport out into the ocean near the prison they'll either drown or rapidly die from the extreme cold (arctic seawater is often well below freezing) so to escape an inmate needs: some sort of power to escape the prison itself, water breathing, cold resistance, and sufficient endurance to make the arduous journey back to civilization whilst avoiding undersea drones, mines, and military submarines that can kill them with high powered sonar.
Or you could just keep them sedated, that would probably be cheaper.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/E3cIR.jpg)
] |
[Question]
[
I have developed a fictional planet with the following atmospheric composition;
* 60.4% Nitrogen
* 27.6% Oxygen
* 9.8% Xenon
* 1.5% Water Vapor
* 0.64% Argon
* 0.06% Carbon Dioxide
Is this breathable to humans with an atmospheric pressure similar to Earth's? What about 50%, 200%, and 500% of Earth's atmospheric pressure?
Lastly, what would it look like in terms of color?
[Answer]
## Nitrogen (N₂):
* 60.4% — 78.08% = **−18.48% N₂** (**↓22%**)
* Is *used* in the atmosphere to reduce the percentage of **oxygen** in the air (if O₂ is too much our atmosphere may burn out).
* It haven't any very important effect in life. N₂ is a inert gas, it can't burn and don't make any special reaction in the air.
* However bacteria breath N₂ and make **amino acids** > then make **proteins** > and then their are used by **plants and animals**. A 18% of difference I don't think that could be very problematic.
## Oxygen (O₂)
* 27.6% — 20.95% = **+6.65% O₂** (**↑31,74%**)
* Is used by all the plants and animals in our world.
* In a world where there is 24% more oxygen I could guess that metals would oxidize 24% faster.
* Our bodies could have a bigger metabolic rate (more O₂ to burn). Luckily only O₂ is danger when it's up to 28%, and you has 27.6%.
* This mean that insect would be much larger. Insect haven't respiratory system, they breath thought their skin, they can't be bigger because their won't have enough surface per gram of `insect` to breathing. With more O₂ insect could have bigger bodies without suffocate.
* Fire would have bigger and hotter flames.
* Organic matter would rot faster.
## Xenon (Xe):
* 9.8% — 0.08 ppmv (0.000008%) = **+9.799992% Xe** (**↑122,499,999%**)
* Is an inert gas, this mean that it can't be burned or used in any reaction in the air.
* Lightnings and rays would be more `blue`.
* Xenon is very lethal to humans in high concentration, luckily you have 9.8% and it's only dangerous over 33% (30% is used by medics); I guess that the minimal effects of 9.8% would be suppressed if your animals have lived in that planet for generations.
## Water Vapor (H₂O):
* 1.5% — 1% = **+0.5% H₂O** (**↑50%)**
* Nothing bad; your planet would have more humidity.
* Also in winter there would be more drops of water in the surfaces.
## Argon (Ar):
* 0.64% — 0.93% = **−0.29% Ar** (**↓68,81%**)
* Is an inert gas. Actually Argon don't do anything in our planet so it won't do nothing in yours.
* Also your rays and lightnings would be a little less pink.
## Carbon Dioxide (CO₂):
* 0.06% — 400 ppmv = **+0.02% CO₂** (**↑300%**)
* Your lakes, oceans and rain would be more acid since that CO₂ would mix with natural water making it acid, so your Coccolithophore, Coral, Foraminifera, Echinoderm, Crustacean and Mollusca life would be quite damage their Calcium Carbonate organics parts (water would be able to dissolve them) and their will have a bite of [Hypercapnia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercapnia).
+ This would make your planet hotter. How? Well, this organic life have shells, exoskeleton or corpses made of Calcium Carbonate, CaCO₃ is white and increase the [`Albedo`](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo) of Earth. Less CaCO₃ will reduce the albedo, lower albedo will absorb more of the Sun's heat. How much? I am not god, so I have no idea (maybe despicable).
* Also your coral would suffer [Coral bleaching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching) and they would lose 90% of their [energy input](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooxanthellae) and would starve to die.
* I am not sure but I think that your planet would be a 0.5 – 1 ºC [hotter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas), remember that CO₂ is the second (9%–26%) dangerous gas to the global warming.
Well, also you won't have some gasses like **methane** or **chlorofluorocarbon** that increase the greenhouse effect (but very low or null since your CO₂ increase). Remember that some gasses like **ozone** are very important for global warming **and to stop UV radiation from the Sun**, your people will have much skin cancer since O₃ is the only gass that reduce the UV rays <290 nm wavelengh.
**Atmospheric Pressure:**
* **101.325 kPa** (Normal): **O₂ Partial Pressure: 27.5 kPa**
* **50.6625 kPa** (50%): **O₂ Partial Pressure: 13.75 kPa**, minimal safe is at **16 kPa** but at **13.3 kPa** humans suffer [hypoxia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoxia_(medical)), your people won't die, but their will be **very** bad...
* **202.650 kPa** (200%): **O₂ Partial Pressure: 55 kPa**, maximum safe is at **50 kPa** otherwise you would have [oxygen toxicity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity) and your people will suffer [hiperpoxya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperoxia). Risk of oxygen toxicity is in less than 10 hours.
* **506.625 kPa** (500%): **O₂ Partial Pressure: 137.5 kPa**, deadly... you won't survive more than one day. Risk of oxygen toxicity is in one or a couple of hours.
Also you would have some pulmonary effects:
+ Burning sensation on taking a deep breath.
+ Cough.
+ Pneumonia.
+ Permanent lung damage (and then death).
If you want to know more about necessary oxygen partial pressure to breath you can check the answers of [What is necessary for a breathable artificial atmosphere?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81182/what-is-necessary-for-a-breathable-artificial-atmosphere?rq=1)
With the excel tables I have calculated this:
* Values based on a temperature of 25 °C (298.5 K).
* $1 \text{ atm} = 101.325 \text{ kPa}$
$$
\begin{array}{|cc|cc|c|cccc|}
\text{Chem}&\text{%}&\text{g/mole}&\text{%}&\text{RMS}&&\text{Pres. (atm)}&&\\
&&&&&1\text{ atm}&0.5\text{ atm}&2\text{ atm}&5\text{ atm}\\
\text{N}\_{2}&60.4&14.007&8.460228&729.083468&61.2003&30.60015&122.4006&306.0015\\
\text{O}\_{2}&27.6&15.999&4.415724&682.186932&27.9657\text{\*}^{1}&13.98285\text{\*}^{2}&55.9314\text{\*}^{3}&139.8285\text{\*}^{4}\\
\text{Xe}&9.8&131.293&12.866714&239.13818&9.92985&4.964925&19.8597&49.64925\\
\text{Ar}&0.64&39.948&0.2556672&431.720126&0.64848&0.32424&1.29696&3.2424\\
\text{CO}\_{2}&0.06&44.01&0.026406&411.314605&0.060795&0.0303975&0.12159&0.303975\\
\text{H}\_{2}\text{O}&1.5&18.0152833&0.27022925&642.879041&1.519875&0.7599375&3.03975&7.599375&\\
\end{array}
$$
* •1: **27.9657 kPa O₂** = Breathable oxygen.
* •2: **13.98285 kPa O₂** = Below allowed O₂ pressure (16 kPa) and very close to hypoxia (13.3 kPa). Humans won't survive much time.
* •3: **55.9314 kPa O₂** = Above allowed O₂ pressure (50 kPa), oxygen is toxic. Humans won't suvive much time.
* •4: **139.8285 kPa O₂** = Above allowed O₂ pressure (50 kPa), oxygen is highly toxic. Human will die in some minutes (an hour?).
I don't know your planet mass. If it's like Earth, no problem. If not, check that your escape speed is less than some gas RMS (remember that I used 25 °C) (or less than a third using the [@Alice](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/14475/alice) advice from comment), if escape velocity is greater than the RMS gases from the planet would take millions (maybe even more) of years to escape
[Answer]
27% Oxygen is absolutely breathable. Other components should not affect breathability. At 50% atmospheric pressure, oxygen has an equivalent concentration of 13.8%, which is a little too low for long-term breathing. However, short trips are totally possible. At 200%, equivalent oxygen would be at 55.2%. This would be harmful with long term exposure, but again perfectly fine for a short time. At 500%, we would be getting into the toxic territory. It is similar to the oxygen effects on deep divers.
For the color, the air would still be colorless, however the effect on color of the sky and color of setting sun should be more pronounced in higher pressure.
[Answer]
At 500% you could get anesthetic effects from the nitrogen and possibly the xenon. Xenon is used as an anesthetic but at 1 atmosphere it requires 60-70%. I conclude it must be a more potent anesthetic than nitrogen gas because we already routinely breathe 70% N2 at 1 atm.
Nitrogen narcosis can happen from normal nitrogen-containing air at pressure - I think one can get into trouble between 4 and 5 atmospheres.
Otherwise this looks like normal air with a percentage of oxygen replaced by xenon.
[Answer]
CO2 is a little high.
Breathing does two things: it grabs O2 and it dumps CO2. Of these, the CO2 generally feels more urgent. If you hold your breath for a while and feel your lungs start to burn, you're feeling the effects of excess CO2.
(Hypoxia is also bad for you, but people tend to pass out before they notice it. Pilots get special training in how to spot the symptoms and react to them.)
So you'll have about 50% more CO2 in your atmosphere than Earth. That probably leads to a few rare (and exotic) complications, but also slightly more common acidity in various fluids. Like, tooth decay might be slightly more common on this world. For anyone worried about it though, the easy buffer is calcium cabonate (Tums, but also chalk like for a chalkboard). Natives are likely fine; visitors probably chow down on Tums, and anyone who doesn't drink beer gets kidney stones.
Vistors also likely have their lungs start burning with less exertion than their used to. That *probably* works about like how exercise in Denver makes you tired more easily, and goes away after a few weeks/months of acclimatization.
[Answer]
Just an addition concerning the colour (as the compositional questions already have been covered):
Rayleigh scattering that turns our atmosphere blue is more efficient the shorter the wavelength. It explains why the sunset is red, because blue is scattered away long before it reaches the observer, and it should make you think why our sky isn't actually purple (which has even shorter wavelength than blue).
The answer to the latter is that our sun emits more blue light than purple, on the steep slope of the [black-body function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation), and there is some purple mixed in in our blue sky, but blue still prevails.
Thus in my understanding your sky colour will change:
At **200-500%** pressure, you have essentially the sun-set situation already at noon and during the rest of the day, so the sky will be red-orangeish.
At **50%** pressure the blue hasn't been scattered away yet on ground level, so purple might come out better, but you still might want to turn the star a bit hotter so that its purple/blue ratio increases.
This is under the assumptions of pure Rayleigh-scattering, there might be other effects, like high-pressure absorption bands in $N\_2$ being activated at high pressure, that could change the colour away from my description.
] |
[Question]
[
In my universe the tech is steampunk and I want a better way of getting around in the air then lifting gas, helium or hydrogen. Bullets can easily puncture gas sacks and I really want something else that can get around in the air.
I've looked into Leonardo da Vinci's ornithopter, his flying machine, where you pedal to make the wings flap, but seeing as this doesn't have enough power I need something else.
In my universe electricity is something very, very new, and everything is run off of steam engines, (gas engines aren't invented yet,) but it's not the most efficient thing ever to bring coal and a steam engine up into the sky with you because it's big, bulky, and extremely heavy.
To sum this up **How, other then with lifting gas, can something fly with steampunk tech?**
[Answer]
Your best option still is, surprisingly, zeppelin, as long as you use helium as lifting gas. Choice of helium over hydrogen is obvious: it is non-flammable.
As for gas escaping bullet punctures, it is, contrary to common perception, not a significant issue: the lifting vessel is NOT pressurized, so the pressure inside and outside of it is practically the same. This was proven during Cold War when Americans were sending balloons with spy tech over Eastern Germany, (e.g. Project Moby Dick) and using prevailing winds to collect them. To big surprise of Soviet pilots, intercepting them proved very difficult: gas was escaping them so slowly, that they usually were able to complete their journey, and huge difference in speed made intercepting them using fast jets very difficult. Zeppelins also used separate chambers in lifting vessel to minimize risk further.
Bigger problem would be choice of engine: you would need to use internal combustion engine, as steam engine is just too heavy.
[Answer]
**Rockets!**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lHCOh.gif)
from <http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/R/Ruggieri.html> Depicted is Claude Ruggieri, a fireworks maker who had flown animals in his rockets but was prevented from flying a child by the French police.
What better way to lift something into the air than rockets? There is noise, smoke, flame and the possibility for catastrophe. And they are real, and they work. I can imagine a vehicle with stages set off successively as the pilot perceives the craft is descending to earth. It would travel in a series of hops. Depending on the sophistication each hop might land on the ground whereupon the pilot disembarks, lights a fuse, then scrambles back aboard.
[Answer]
With the technology available, I would think gliders would be the only "flying machines" available. (Kites would need a lot of wind power to be able to lift a grown person).
But, pressurized steam; powering propellers of small "gliders" or "para gliders" could be a thing (but the air time would only be around a few minutes). The main concern would be bullets piercing the gas chambers, and "wings".
Launching these "gliders" via catapult (like aircraft carriers) into the air; and later powering it by steam seems realistic enough.
[Answer]
My suggestion might be to take a leaf out of WWII where gliders were towed behind planes and then released to continue to their destination. Accuracy was very poor but their silence had obvious advantages. Lifting bi- or tri-plane gliders very high by balloon and then releasing them may be one option.
For long-distance flights (across the US for example) a series of balloon-lift relay stations in 100 mile sections could invoke memories of stage-coach journeys where the horses would be changed at regular intervals.
Transoceanic journeys might require sea-plane style gliders and floating platforms using wind and/or steam power to generate the newly invented electricity to extract hydrogen from sea water for the balloons (dangerous stuff, with clear literary potential for disaster :-) ).
[Answer]
Increase atmospheric density. Use any of the *almost*-possible flying machines, like the spiral pump or flappy forms. Sorted.
Tame large birds or construct feathers that make the flapping efficiently work. (Handwave the ridiculously complex material and mechanics problem; You *did* say steam punk, after all.)
That also works better in soupy atmosphere.
Otherwise, you have to displace sufficient amounts of mass. Usually air, (eg balloons, choppers, or planes) but it can be rocket exhaust, too, say.
[Answer]
The main issue you have is energy. With light gases, you don't care about carrying some form of energy source because you're simply as light as your surroundings.
Since electricity is not an option, you're left with chemical energy, i.e. exothermal reactions, or kinetic/potential energy storage.
The former means combustion engines and the likes. This technology is probably too advanced or unfitting.
You're pretty much left with the latter: Kinetic energy storage. This can happen two ways, either you lift off with kinetic energy and store it in your speed (i.e. catapult launch variations), or you store it in a mechanical way, similar to a clockwerk or a rubber motor. It's a bit limited and possibly a bit of a stretch, but if you implement materials storing a lot of kinetic energy you can knock yourself out.
Another way would be to extract energy from something on-the-fly (sorry for the pun!), but that would require some aspect of your world to allow that. Magical energies are a classic but probably unfitting, thunderstorms could work as well in various ways, thermal lift would be something more mundane that is actually being used, but probably wouldn't be effective in combat scenarios.
[Answer]
You could stay with Da Vinci and look at his helicopter concept:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cWkVk.jpg)
Expand this to have more screws to increase the lifting capacity and a few propellers for lateral movement and you could achieve something steampunkish.
[Answer]
What you can (relatively) easily do is a **Human powered steam assisted airplane** craft. We'll call it HPSAA for short.
Check out human powered crafts:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-powered_aircraft>
The first successful human powered craft was assembled at 1923, when the materials were not reliant on electricity to produce.
What you can do with this is a human powered but steam assisted airplane, where a couple of compact steam engine help with the initial lift (that takes the most amount of power) and then keep the plane in the air at minimal velocity with help from one or two humans. When more velocity is required the humans will have to give it their all.
[Answer]
## Giant flying animals.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZAThg.jpg)
There's nothing stopping animals from growing big enough to carry people around, there just hasn't happened to be anything that big since humans have been on the scene.
In another universe, it may well be that huge pterosaurs or birds exist and can be domesticated. If they aren't common, a Jules Verne-type expedition to a subterranean land or exotic isolated valley would fit quite well with a steampunk aesthetic as a way of describing where they came from.
Ultimately, there's a reason we didn't have flying machines before we did. Without lightweight materials and compact power sources, flying machines are exceptionally difficult to build, especially when you consider the degree of aerospace knowledge required to design effective ones. By the time a society has developed the technology for flight, it's difficult to explain why they wouldn't just use that same technology to improve the rest of their society. Animals, as a zero-tech solution, offer a great way to circumvent that issue without requiring any hand waving or changes to a planet or it's atmosphere.
[Answer]
What makes heavier-that-air flight hard?
To compensate gravity we need to push air down. The more air we push, the less energy we spend for the same pull. But as we push a lot of air we start losing more and more energy on friction. So it is hard to create vehicle with high lift-to-drag ratio - lets consider L/D 10-20.
Lift-to-drag ratio means that flying is equivalent to running up the hill - to go 10-20 meters(10-20 m/s = 36-72 km/h) forward you have to spend energy equivalent to raising yourself 1 meter, that's about 1000 W per 100 kg. 1000W is about 5-10x more than a human can do for long time.
The faster you go the more power you need and that requires good technology.
But if you want to go slow you get other problems - if you go slower than wind then you vehicle is useless. And if you move slow, then your wings meet less air, and you need bigger wings to push the same amount of air down. That's why human powered airplanes have such big wings. And it is hard to make big and light wings without good technologies.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sYy9e.jpg)
So - increase density of the air ten-fold and make climate calmer(zero axis tilt) and airplanes would become much easier to build and use.
As for the engine, IMHO pulsejet engines can be created with 19th century technology.
[Answer]
There are several possible approaches, but each one has limitations, and all of them provide far less flight ability than using internal combustion Otto, Diesel or even Brayton engines (piston engines and jet engines, respectively)
If steam power is used as flight assist (i.e. for a glider like aircraft to lift off), then two techniques come to mind, either storing steam in a high pressure container and using like a JATO rocket to launch the aircraft (much like [Bob Truax](https://infogalactic.com/info/Robert_Truax) did with [Evil Knievel](https://infogalactic.com/info/Evel_Knievel)'s Snake River Canyon "motorcycle"), or have the high pressure steam used to run an engine just long enough for takeoff and climb to gliding flight. The second option leaves the boiler and firebox on the ground, but does not subject the aircraft to violent acceleration.
Direct production of steam without a boiler through chemical reactions is possible. The WWII German [Me-163](https://infogalactic.com/info/Messerschmitt_Me_163_Komet) rocket plane was powered by high pressure steam created by mixing highly concentrated Hydrogen Peroxide with a mixture of methanol and water. The fuel and reaction itself was insanely dangerous, but if you're looking for a rocket powered interceptor, this might be the way to go. A somewhat less dangerous reaction was using "Walter" technology, where Hydrogen Peroxide was used as an oxidizer for more conventional engines. [Walter turbines](http://uboat.net/types/walter_hist.htm) were fitted to seem experimental Germa n U boars towards the end of the war, buring a mixture of Diesel fuel and concentrated H2O2. The combustion products and steam expanded in the turbine, giving the submarine rather spectacular performance, however the short range and danger of using concentrated H2O2 as the oxidizer was a negative factor for the Navy.
A final option would be to ditch the steam altogether and use the [Stirling engine](https://infogalactic.com/info/Stirling_engine). This is also an external combustion engine, but uses a gas contained within rather than water as the working fluid. While early Stirling Engines were quite heavy, they were designed as stationary engines. There have been many lightweight designs that were developed by car companies in the 1960s and 70's, which could be adaptable for aircraft usage. Once again, the power to weight ration is lower than a comparable internal combustion engine, but a Stirling engine is quiet and economical, and in a large "steampunk" aircraft there should be room for multiple engines, the large radiators and external heaters needed.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wknWD.jpg)
*Junkers G-38. Imagine filing the wing space with Stirling Engines*
[Answer]
As far as I understand, what you need is an external combustion engine which does not use water vapor, because (1) water is heavy and (2) the boiler is *very* heavy. You may want to take a look and take your pick from the list of external combustion engines which use air as the working fluid in the Wikipedia article on [caloric engines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_engine). My suggestion is to use the [Ericsson engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_cycle), which has already been used successfully (albeit fictionally) to power airplanes in William R. Forstchen's series [*The Lost Regiment*](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B01N0F5GBW).
Alternatively, if you don't need more than a few minutes of flight time, you may use a carbon dioxide engine, such as the engine used in the real-life [Vuia I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traian_Vuia) aircraft (1905). (Liquid carbon dioxide is boiled off to produce gaseous CO2 which is fed to a piston engine as a total-loss working fluid.)
[Answer]
Not entirely sure how this might fit in your world, but how about this:
Supercapacitor powered single prop "gliders" or ultralights, and have them launched from a Zepplin.
Capacitance was known by the mid 1700's. check out the [Leyden Jar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyden_jar)
Advance the knowledge of capacitors a bit by your typical steampunk mad scientist with crazy hair.
I bring up Capacitors because they weigh less than batteries. They have their own problems though.
Now, Fly up in your gas bag. Line it with lightning rods. Lightning charges the capacitors. Of course, you have short flight times, but you can stand the zepplin off and then strike with squad after squad of plucky aeronauts. zipping around, breifly, firing pistols and dropping hand grenades.
This sounds like a lot of fun!
[Answer]
In a case like this, steal from the best. Simply imagine there exists a negative gravitational substance akin to HG Wells' [Cavorite](http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=717). Your hypothetical antigravity substance doesn't need to launch vehicles into space, it only needs to provide sufficient lift to elevate steam-powered airships to enough altitude to sail the seven skies.
Wells in his novel, *[The First Men in the Moon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Men_in_the_Moon)*, described a number of other applications, instead of lunar travel, which Cavorite could be used.
While Wells' sphere was enclosed completely in Cavorite to enable it to travel to the Moon and back. If an aircraft was partially covered with Cavorite this could provide enough to stay airborne. The amount of lift could be varied by opening and closing shutters coated with Cavorite.
The antigravity substance doesn't need to be exactly like Cavorite. If necessary it only needs to reduce the pull of gravity and make other forms of flight more practical. However, if the substance exerted enough force against gravity then it would be the ideal lifting mechanism for gigantic steampunk airships.
[Answer]
Two options I can see:
One way to go is that you use hot air and limit the weapons technologies that people are willing and able to use at altitude so that instead of bullets you get "sealing harpoons" that stick into a vessel and expand to seal the hole so your sky pirates can capture vessels intact.
The other depends on how much magical hand waiving you're willing to do. If you use magic as a heat source for a steam engine it barely has to weight more than the cylinders, if you use magic to reinforce the block and pistons you can basically make them out of foil. In a not hugely magical setting a RPG group I was in once built a locomotive engine that weighed about 15-20 kilograms and was basically a perpetual motion machine, with a power source like that you can built a whole host of heavy-than-air flying machines. With magically reinforced materials you can also build a lot of the machines from the likes of da Vinci, that don't work, light enough that they're functional. If you want lighter-than-air forms a little magic goes a long way, magical heating again gives you a hot air balloon that doesn't need fuel while material reinforcement gives you a basically bulletproof canvas shell. You could also go the whole hog and use material reinforcement to create *vacuum cells* instead of having a gas bladder.
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petrol/natural gas/propane would be all good fuel sources for a Steampunk Airship. These were used for Naval ships with Boilers for years.
If your going to use the Airbag method of lift, I'd think using a combination of Hot Air and Helium for the bag (each in separate chambers) this would allow for lift and decent. for steam generation remember that while Locomotives and Trains were hugely popular there were smaller and lighter steam generators also. Some small enough to power horseless carriages, or if you really want to think about it Alcohol Stills are mini steam boilers. for light building materials, composite wood materials were already in use in by the 1800's and while not hugely in use Aluminum was discovered in 1823 and Titanium was discovered in 1791. Both are light weightish metals (when compared to Steel)
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**Springs** seem like they might fit with the steampunk aesthetic. Build a propellor airplane around one or more mighty springs, like awesome steampunk clockworks. A steam engine is used to wind the springs up to an extraordinary quantity of potential energy on the ground, then the pilot detaches from the engine and lets the propellors spin.
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Say that a heavy (150ish kg) android was involved in some kind of incident in orbit and came crashing back down to earth (traveling at orbital-ish speeds upon re-entry).
**Would they be going fast enough to "arrive" with a bang** or would atmospheric drag have slowed them to more of an anticlimactic soft thud? (for the sake of argument, assume they don't burn up on the way down)
Playing around with [this crater size calculator](http://keith.aa.washington.edu/craterdata/scaling/index.htm), sizeable (i.e. violent) craters only occur with objects traveling at several km/s *at impact* as opposed to at re-entry.
The idea is that the impact is violent enough to be heard as a thunderous boom in several nearby towns, but sadly my rudimentary google-math suggests otherwise.
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So, as your impact crater calculator is showing, no, there wouldn't be an exceptionally large boom or crater from a 150kg robot hitting the ground from orbit. Unless the android was exceptionally streamlined (think "bullet-shaped"), it would be slowed to a terminal velocity of only a few hundred meters per second before impact, not enough to make a sizeable crater. There'd be a "thud", but not a "thunderous boom".
However, there *would* be a boom which might be heard in nearby towns: the sonic boom as it passes through the upper atmosphere. That boom would occur pretty high up, though, (several km) so it's not going to be shattering windows or anything like that.
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No crater. No crash.
Android with enough dV to deorbit would be **designed** to fall to pieces upon reentry. And small scattered pieces would easily burn in the atmosphere. Even if we assume they do not burn nor melt, pieces would be small and scattered and of low terminal velocity.
Even without special design, such android wouldn't have aerodynamic heat shield (why would it?) and a lot of his mass would be in manipulators. Then there is reaction mass. To deorbit he would use most of it, making it lighter. Or, if you count without fuel, at least it would have empty tanks. These are making it less dense, lowering terminal velocity. And if some leftovers explode, the better. You have even more, even smaller parts. No threat.
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You have to look at the right sort of calculator. Avoid impact calculators as they assume your space android can read the ground intact. Be assured it won't.
For your in-answer enjoyment, please refer to this [xkcd](https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/) what if question. You're welcome!
The Wikipedia entry on [atmospheric entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_entry) has this useful information.
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Assuming that only 10-40% of the space android survives re-entry, its velocity will be greatly reduced.
An aerodynamic heating calculator can be found [here](http://www.theknowledgeworld.com/world-of-aerospace/Calculate-Aerodynamic-Heating-Rate.htm).
Research hasn't been able to discover a calculator for the amount of deceleration a deorbiting space android would experience. This would be useful as it would determine its velocity on impact. With various estimates on its terminal mass, ranging from 10% to 40%, it would be possible calculate its impact crater.
Hopefully other answers can provide the velocity change re-entry.
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We are the space androids. We are here to protect you. Here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.
Normally a space android will not crash, as we are perfectly constructed for your safety and happiness. However some space androids of the "shover robot" class may be sufficiently malfunctioning to do so. Do not trust the shover robots. In this case, those towns nearby may hear a sonic boom during re-entry, but the actual ground collision would be likely to be unspectacular unless you were very close. Space debris such as spent fuel tanks, rocket parts etc. in this size range comes down rather frequently (1-2 a week on average), and often manages to do so completely unnoticed even by people living nearby.
As a decent comparison, NASA's UARS satellite crashed in 2005, and the largest impactor fragment after burn-up was 158kg, very close to the size of your space android. The energetic yield of the impact was estimated at 153 KJoules. You'd get a similar impact from crashing a car into a brick wall at 36mph.
Thank you for your attention. Now you will be protected, please go stand by your stairs.
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In this scenario, the character is, as the only person, aware that in a few days the whole world economy will fall apart. He is likely to lose his home and probably has to flee to another country because of war activities. These war activities will also cause the economy to break down, meaning all currencies and all virtual assets lose their value. However, only a very small percentage of actual production, agriculture, etc. is destroyed during the war, and can be used by their new respective owners.
As I said, the character knows about this a few day in before, and currently has about 5 million dollars. He wants to invest this money in something that should at least keep its value after the big breakdown. However, as he is bound to flee, and doesn't know yet if he will have a car or any other vehicle available, he can't just buy barrels of oil with his money, as this would be rather painful to transport over a longer period of time. So what could he invest his money in?
**Edit**: Wow, thank you very much for all your answers. I think like I should clear things up just a little bit, as many comments suggest things that would not be possible / advisable in the characters situation. I try to explain a possible scenario which the character could be in:
The world is split in a few (maybe 4-8) major forces. Looking at todays world, I would think of a scenario with the USA & Canada, a south america coalition, the EU, extremists controlling Africa and some european / asian countries, and an asian coalition. At the top of every of this groups are very extremistic people, and there are no alliencas between the different groups, and all of them have about the same strength. Think of it as somewhat similair to the 1984 scenario (only in terms of power and strength of the different groups).
The character could f.e. be european, living in france, and it's very probable that his town will be taken over by another of these groups, and he doesn't really know how the situation will be after the escalation. So he has to flee, maybe even go to more than one of the territories hold by the descibed groups, and find a place to settle down again. Or maybe he will be on the run for several years. He simply does not know in before. So all options like farming or hiding his stuff are not possible. He has to take it all with him, and be able to transport it for a longer period of time, in which he will no always have a car or transportation vehicle available.
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If the person in question doesn't have any moral qualms, he may wish to invest in *guns* or other items which allow people to have more power than other average citizens after taking away society's security. Of course, this also depends on the society - if everybody already has guns he might only need to invest in ammunition.
* Say he invests in diamonds and ends up in a situation where he needs to trade them for food, but the people who have food won't trade it because they *need* it.
* Or say another person comes along with a gun and wants to *take* whatever he invested in.
A gun would provide power in situations where he otherwise wouldn't have any. And if he *is* a moral person, he could trade that essential *security* for food or whatever else he needs.
In situations where power resolve differences, firepower might be the best thing to invest in. (*Note that he could invest in his own bodyguards or personal "army" as well*) The real problem is whether he can legally, and therefore practically, attempt this within a couple days... Suddenly buying tons of weapons or ammunition, and hiring people to wield them, looks a bit sketchy.
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The same things which everyone else in his shoes has invested in historically: ***gold and precious stones.***
Many a refugee fleeing a war torn area has been found with precious stones sewn within coat linings.
Gems are small and easy to hide, light and effortless to transport, yet have historically retained their value.
Other objects such as pieces of art would be far less practical, as you'd need a way to transport, or store them.
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> ***Interesting (& Morbid) Fact:*** When executing the Russian Royal Family (the Romanov's), their communist murderers stabbed some of them to death after bullets were stopped by gems hidden in their clothing.
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**People.** A good model to look at is Niven and Pournelle's "Lucifer's Hammer", in which one guy sets up a ranch to be self-sufficient in the wake of a disaster. Besides obvious goods like guns, seeds, clothing, how-to books and fuel, he starts taking on people with valuable skills. He continues doing so after the disaster, asking people who want to join his little settlement, "What can you do?" Hiring a doctor, a mechanic, a horse-rancher and so on is one of the best possible ways to spend some money in a hurry. Portable, too.
Granted, your scenario doesn't have civilization being smashed by a meteor, but having all the money somehow becoming valueless would cause so much disruption that it would be very helpful to have a self-sufficient and well-guarded village be ready to fend off looter gangs. Better, in other words, to have a dozen or so talented employees/allies at your side than to be alone in a bunker, even with a good stock of guns and food.
Having some excess emergency goods to give away -- like bottled water and blankets -- would also be helpful when some government agency shows up to take control of the camp "for your own good".
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What do you need?
If the answer is food and shelter, buy a farm in your *new* country. Try to get there before everything collapses.
If the answer is something that travels well, buy jewelry. But expect it to fall in value. You won't be able to trade it for five million dollars worth of food. People who aren't traveling will be able to provide more valuable things (e.g. your barrels of oil), because they can store in bulk.
Something of a compromise answer would be a solar-powered sailboat with fishing gear. If you want to travel a distance, you can use the sail. You can catch food with the fishing gear and trade your surplus for other goods. You can also trade electricity (at least if the sun is shining) or transport. The boat also provides more storage, so you can store more bulk. Also consider adding weapons for when someone tries to steal your boat.
If you don't know anything about sailing or boating in general, you might have to hire people to join you. They provide expertise while you provide the funds.
All this assumes that the world economy really collapses. Not just a recession or even a depression. A collapse. Anything short of world collapse, just find somewhere that is not collapsing and convert to their currency. Money is going to trade better than goods unless things are so bad that money is no more than colored pieces of paper. Money is good because it provides a variety of goods. Without money, you want to collect a variety of goods.
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While things might have a certain amount of "density" of value today, this might not necessarily be the case in a post apocalyptic landscape. Imagine you have $5 million in diamonds in your pocket after bribing your way through customs and making your escape to a distant refuge. On arrival in the Galapagos Islands, you are safe from nuclear war, plagues, bands of marauding Road Warriors etc., but have a bunch of rocks in your pocket. Better brush up on your trapping skills so you can at least eat the local wildlife.
Things which will become valuable after an apocalyptic event such as a global crash are generally less portable. If you invested your money in a full set of machine tools, generators, "how to" manuals and most importantly of all, high quality stock, you will have an amazingly valuable post apocalyptic machine shop, but better have good relations with the local strongman, or be prepared to become the strongman yourself, since the shop and all the equipment aren't going anywhere.
Things like caned and dry goods will also retain or even gain value in the post apocalypse period, but this is a declining value as items get consumed, and eventually reach their expiration date.
The most portable and value dense item will be whatever knowledge that you have packed in your head, followed by whatever library you can salvage or pre pack. Sadly, much of our cultural heritage isn't going to make the cut (your books on 13th century French poetry or critical theory are going to be good for kindling, at best), while the SAS survival guide is going to become a "best seller"; especially since you were smart enough to have the only copy.
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It partly depends on the the economic impact and location of things. Will this cause a worldwide economic collapse? Probably not, so I would be moving my money to a country not likely to be affected much, say Switzerland. Moving that kind of cash is hard to do, especially in any kind of physical presence.
On top of that, you would be hard pressed to first cash out $5M and then buy that much worth of something that will hold its value in such a short time. However, getting some cash and buying precious stones for immediate needs is certainly a worthwhile endeavour.
Edit:
After reading the edit above, there seems to be a misunderstanding of how the world works. Let's take the EU as an entity. If one of the factions decides to take out France (as you suggested) the assumption is that the man will have to run from France. Fine. But why can't he move his fortune to Germany? or Austria? Does he know that his entire coalition is going to crumble? If so how does he know that and no one else? If he was a traitor then he should have some 'friends' willing to help out.
Once again, carrying around 5 Million dollars worth of stuff just isn't practical in any way shape or form. If you carry around a Picasso, it is bulky and easily damaged or destroyed. Or stolen from you. Also it isn't very useful for barter since you can't exactly make change. So one back to precious gems as the densest material that one can buy with a semi-universal value. This is a website that compares many things in [dollars/lbs of material](http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2008/the-monetary-density-of-things/). High quality 1 caret diamonds are about $12M/lbs.
So as he fleas his town and country he can stop at every jeweler on the way having liquidated his assets into a single bank account with a charge card. He buys up all the decent stock at each place until he runs out of cash. Since he will be needing different levels of 'worth' he'll have smaller cheaper jewels as well as large one. So the jewels should weigh between 2-5 pounds. This could be carried in something against his body with just a few left out for commerce. But unless he goes to a very large jeweler he won't find that much stock available, and even a big one would be very suspicious selling that much stock to one person.
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An island with sufficient water and food supply that is sufficiently isolated, and / or the means to assume control of and defend said type of island.
when the world goes to hell, people, will generally be the most serious concern. remoteness and the capacity to defend would become paramount to survival.
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Currently we use a representative democracy, where we vote for a single representative who then decides almost everything. This means that we may have to vote for a representative who agrees with 80% of our beliefs, but who we disagree with 20% of the time, because he is the closest 'fit' to our actual beliefs.
There is an idea of a direct, or pure, democracy where everyone votes on each issue, rather then having a representative to stand in on these votes, which theoretically could allow a more accurate representation of our actual beliefs by allowing us to give the answer we want on each issue directly.
Unfortunately a direct democracy is rather impracticale for any decent size of people. Setting up polls every few years to pick representatives is already a hard and expensive process, but doing it for every single vote would cost too much, and people wouldn't want to wait in line to vote on every issue.
However, with our new technology online direct democracy votes have become pretty common, though on much less important issues like reality show winners. I'm wondering what would happen if we could manage something like this for important government decisions.
One of the biggest issues with online direct voting is the possibility of fraud is considered too high. For the sake of this question please ignore that possibility, assume we have created methodologies, technology etc to the point that each person gets only one vote and the threat of fraud is no higher then we face with our current polling systems.
The other big issue is that a system that required going online to vote would make it harder (though not impossible now of days) for the very poor to vote, anyone without a computer, smart phone, or other home-accessible means of going online. I also would like to not focus too much attention to this issue right now, while recognizing the possibility, by assuming that some sort of approach has been implemented to assist those that are poor. I'm happy to hear suggestions for how to minimize this risk, but for the sake of this question assume that the poor have approximately the same ability to vote as middle class and above, or at least the same ability to vote relative to middle class as they have now (no doubt that can't afford cars are unfairly underrepresented now in areas that don't have good public transportation currently).
This question only assumes that the ability to do instantaneous and reliable political votes from home or even smart phone is possible, not that were using a direct democracy. My main question is rather we would convert to a direct democracy, maintain our current representative democracy, or choose some hybrid with representatives for some votes and direct votes for others.
Going along with this how would politics be adjusted by the presence of (the possibility) of direct votes. Would the common populations be better represented? In particular it seems that some people would follow politics, and thus vote, more often then others. Would political decision become more strongly effected by individuals who bother to vote and thus be slanted in favor of certain groups or factions (again, assuming that the poor somehow have the same ease of access to quick online votes as the rich). Would the net effect be policies more aligned with the median desire of the population?
Finally, would this change the way that votes were courted? Would certain factions be courted for votes more because they are more prone to voting, for example? I may ask a follow up question on this last part, so there isn't as much need to go into detail here as the above two questions, but I'm curious about any concepts that may help influence what follow up question I ask.
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**The nation would be run by a relatively small number of unelected individuals**
Most people wouldn't vote. Even people that are interested wouldn't vote on most issues, because there are too many issues to be voted on for the average person to learn about, gain an opinion on, and vote on. This is one major reason that representatives are helpful. Congress has, this year, voted on 246 resolutions, and this has been a year with comparatively few of them. A busy year can see well over a thousand. (source: <https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics>)
If those had all been voted on by a direct democracy, how many people do you think would have read over all of them? Most people would vote in one of two ways: either they'd vote along the lines of whatever their favorite media source was telling them, or else they'd vote only on the few bills that they though were important. The rest of the bills would be voted on by the small minority of voters who would be willing to read and vote on everything. This would mostly consist of retirees.
These individuals would effectively run the country, and everyone else would have a diminished political voice.
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The ancient Greek Philosophers were actually quite sceptical if not dismissive of Democracy, and most seemed to be of the opinion this system could only work if a relatively small number of people actually were able to vote.
Much of this was a reflection of the changes to Greek society after the Persian Wars. Up until them, only the landed Hoplites could vote, having earned the vote with their willingness to stand together and spill blood for the *polis*. This was also a form of *Timocracy*, since the only people who could afford the kit needed to become a Hoplite were people who owned their own family farms. The full armour and weapons of a Hoplite in modern terms would be much like buying a large car or SUV, and Hoplite armour and tactics were also designed to downgrade both the poor (who did not have the weaponry to effectively break a phalanx of Hoplites) or the aristocracy (mounted troops in this period only had projectile weapons like javelins, which also were not able to make an impression on a formed body of Hoplites).
The breakdown came after the Battle of Salamis, where the rowers demanded and were given a vote since they claimed (with good reason) their contribution was equal to any Hoplite. Rowers in the ancient world were actually professionals, since untrained men or unwilling slaves could upset the rhythmic actions needed by oarsmen to carry out complex manoeuvres in a galley. Suddenly instead of a few hundred voters, there were something like 5000 people eligible to serve on the Juries and vote on the issues of the day.
As Thucydides points out on multiple occasions in "*The History of the Peloponnesian War*, the Athenian Jury was easily swayed by Demagogues to vote for or against issues out of passion rather than reasoned debate and critical thought. *Strategoi* (like Thucydides himself) could be exiled or even executed if their opponents could inflame the Jury against them. Ill considered plans could be granted support, the two most famous being the decision to execute all the men and enslave all the women and children of a small island city state which defied Athens (The Mytilenian Revolt; rescinded the very next day by a shamed jury facing remorse, although the demagogues argued that changing their minds would signal weakness to both Athen's allies and enemies, they voted to send a ship to countermand the order which arrived just in time to prevent a massacre), and of course the ill fated Sicilian Expedition, which destroyed the flower of the Athenian army and fleet, and led to the ultimate downfall of Athens itself.
Direct democracy in the modern world would face a similar problem of demagoguery and lack of reflection on the issues being debated. The matters being raised and the timing of the votes could also be manipulated (much like FaceBook illegally manipulated their subscriber's feeds in an "experiment" to manipulate the members preferences; imagine if FaceBook, owned by a prominent Democrat supporter, did this on a large scale during an election: <http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/07/04/facebook-faces-possible-ftc-investigation-for-manipulation-study/>).
For this reason, the Ancient Romans developed the Republican form of government, and the modern Swiss,use referendums to provide people with a "direct democracy" means to raise issues for the elected representatives to debate (but the representatives are under no obligation to approve of any recommended solution in the referendum), but "direct democracy" is shunned as an actual form of government by modern states and most political theorists.
The American Founders went even farther, including separate forms of elections for different branches of government: Direct election of representatives to the Congress, for debates on the day to day issues; Legislative election of Senators, a smaller deliberative body to consider bills from the House and to represent the interests of the separate States (changed with the 17th Amendment), and the Electoral College of the United States, to elect the President and prevent the smaller States from having their influence diluted or swept away by that of the larger and more populous States. So long as the Congress and Senate were vigilant about their roles and prerogatives (and did not shed them to the Executive, Judiciary or the Bureaucracy, a situation the Founders did not seem to have fully considered), then there was a balancing act between the legislative bodies of the United States and much less chance of issues being decided by passions of the moment.
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# Our society would change.
*Note that these are high-level, not getting into technicalities of democracies; also I'm assuming that everyone over 18 is able to use a computer and most vote.*
**Education Issue** - One of the reasons America has (now useless?) electoral colleges was to represent those who weren't educated to vote (it was a bit more nefarious, but whatever). BUT now you have every 18 year old getting an e-mail asking them to vote on the [Justice Reinvestment Act](https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr2944) (as an example), without having heard of it; or even people who've only watched the news, and haven't read the actual bill. Politicians are currently requested to fully read and understand an issue and vote on it the way that they believe their constituents would vote. Whether this happens, is a different thing.
**Majority Rules** - Your change would result in a majority-rules at all times. I'm not saying this is a good/bad thing, but it takes us far away from a representative democracy that protects special interests.
**Increased Results for Referendums** - Increasing the ease by which referendums are voted on would increase voter turnout.
**Still Not Protected** - Even if the cyber-security is watertight, there's nothing preventing voter fraud: even my boyfriend could steal my vote by going on my computer. Maybe you could have fingerprint scanners or something.
**Overwhelming** - Ain't nobody got time fo dat. There are 6,261 bills and resolutions currently before the United States Congress alone. Perhaps you could have them shortlisted by a representative, but this defeats the purpose.
**Sneaky Representation** - Somebody has to write those 6,261 bills, and they don't write the bills that they don't want to be before congress. Of course, that kind of affects us now.
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I think pundits would become extremely powerful. As others have pointed out, there are an enormous number of individual bills that have to be voted on. The average voter isn't going to have the time to research, or even care about, one percent of those. But it seems like such a waste to not vote. So why not pick your favorite pundit — maybe Rush Limbaugh, maybe Jon Stewart, maybe some Libertarian guy you've never met on reddit — and just copy and paste the voting guide they so generously provide on their blog?
I think that pretty much everyone who didn't want to let their votes go to waste would eventually find some pundit(s) they agreed with, and follow them on any issue that they themselves didn't have a strong opinion of or didn't get around to researching fully.
Pundits might actually become some of the most powerful people around, given that "all" they're doing is exercising their right of free speech. There's no impeaching them or waiting for their term to expire or any of that. So long as they have access to a computer, they can get their message out.
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I'll try not to duplicate too much of other responses.
If anyone says "[political system] doesn't/won't work", I always ask "By what definition of 'work'?" People tend to exaggerate what they see as the problems with other systems and become desensitized to the things they dislike about what they're used to.
Some possible effects of direct democracy, and ways to make it "work better":
**Constitutions, precedent, and so on, will no longer have weight.** It wouldn't be fair in a direct democracy to prioritize old decisions, specifically those not made with direct public input. Likewise, allowing the non-elected judicial branch power is inconsistent with the philosophy. So, there will be a strong shift towards "The most recent law/policy takes precedence; don't worry about making it consistent with other laws and policies that already exist."
**The legislative and judicial system would be greatly simplified.** These have become insular, designed by professionals for professionals. The deprofessionalization of government would force simplification so that the participants could understand it. Remember, all those bills being proposed are now being drafted by non-professionals...
**Separatist movements will be much stronger.** Most individuals would have much less interest in opposing another region's or group's secession than a centralized government. And, as noted by others, majority rule would be less compromised by minority interests, leading to increased motivation by groups to form their own boundaries.
**Foreign policy would be affected massively.** That's about all I can say on that. It's striking how similar the international politics of democracies and non-democratic countries are, because neither are actually being driven by public will. A direct democracy... Its foreign policy would likely be more driven by ideology and ethical considerations. It would also be much less likely to wage war: the citizenry is unlikely to support policies that put them at risk.
**Direct democracy benefits from citizens having available time.** With time expectations of political engagement, there will be a strong drive toward shorter work hours. Social justice policies will prioritize giving people time to engage with politics.
<http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/you-really-dont-need-to-work-so-much>
Since, curiously, higher-paid workers now tend to get less time off, that means they're politically disadvantaged in a direct democracy.
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If there was a reliable and cheep manner for the population to record votes then having then population vote on finer and finer grains of the running of the society has very few downsides.
Indeed it is probable that the somewhat defunct purpose of the upper house in a Westminster democracy could be usurped bu some form of popular voting.
To achieve this a new layer of political over site could be introduced, allowing citizens to form into a structure of electorates that are based on something different to residential location, such as age, gender, parents, quite possible one citizen could belong to more than one electorate, this is intended to form something similar to liquid democracy and not merely repeat the existing representational system that does the actual work of proposing and enacting legislation.
the next thing to recognise is that there are 3 possible meanings with a vote, I agree, "YES", I don't Agree "NO" and I don't care, "NOT VOTING" so that for an electorate's vote to count on a particular issue, a threshold portion of the members of the electorate would have to actually register a vote.
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I don't think the system would work out very well because the average citizen is simply not educated in a way which gives them any understanding of how to actually run a nation, and because it would be heinously inefficient.
The first issue is a big one. Think about the propositions your city or state has given to you to vote on. I know I've seen several times where the legalese of the wording appeared to say one thing, but the dissenting opinion on it pointed out that the bill actually had the exact opposite effect! And this was local politics. Can you imagine national politics?
There's also the question of information. It may not be possible to even give the civilian population enough information to vote intelligently, especially in issues of defense. Think of defense budgets. How many Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicles do we need vs. how many THAAD do we buy? What's the chances of you getting the information needed to make that call?
This points towards a hybrid approach, but how do you draw the line between what is voted upon by everyone and what is voted on by Capitol Hill? With every bill passed in Washington, there will be grumblings that it wasn't put up to a vote.
And just think of how inefficient the process is. Right now there are a few hundred people who need to really understand the bills. Suddenly you would need 150 million people to really understand the bills. The cost of governance would skyrocket.
The only way I see to survive is to release our grip on the sharp lines of the system. Right now things pass, or don't pass. Once they're in law, they're there for hundreds of years. Contracts are either paid or unpaid. We would need to create grey areas so that people could apply their sense of good and bad, right and wrong.
Then all we have to do is make sure the majority doesn't vote itself bread and circuses.
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My view is that society would actually collapse. Any complex system such as a modern economy requires negative and positive feedback loops to maintain its structure.
Given that individual citizens (even the most intelligent and well informed ones) cannot be expected to be qualified to judge policy in all fields, you would get effectively random policy making exacerbated by chaotic herding effects causing disasterous policy oscillation. The reason why we have 'conservative' and 'progressive' political parties that alternate their time in power is that the conservatives resist changes to that which has been seen to work tolerably well and the progressive parties seek 'ideals'. Both impulses are valuable in a complex social system which needs to exhibit some social memory and process information but can also evolve and explore new pathways.
A tweak to the direct democracy system that could avoid the chaos is as follows:
1. Policy matters to be put to public vote are categorised under P policy areas.
2. Voting proxy organisations claiming expertise in a subset M of P policy areas may block vote on those policy areas alone on behalf of individual if so authorised by the individual.
3. Individuals review the stated objectives and beliefs of the proxy organisations and assign their votes in each area of policy to a single proxy org. They may review and update their assignments as often as they wish.
4. Individuals may use different proxies for different policy areas.
5. Individuals may retain the ability to free vote or abstain on a given policy area by not assigning their vote to proxies.
Essentially the proxy orgs replace political parties with the difference that proxies can and should be focussed on a narrow range of issues and may provide advisors to the executive. For example, you could imagine military generals being swapped when a war is going badly and an alliance of proxy orgs opposed to the way in which the campaign has been conducted gather enough public support to have their own 'expert' installed as C-in-C for the theatre in question.
That brings us on to the main issue with direct democracy - it is probably a police state (either benign or malign) in which certain aspects of the system/constitution are not subject to the public vote since if they were the system would likely be unstable.
However I would say that isn't *that* much different to todays situation in which the way the civil service machinery operates (government clerks, police, regulators, central banks, healthcare admins etc), persists pretty much unchanged from election to election.
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Many answers have pointed out that keeping informed about all the things that get voted on is very difficult and requires a large time investment. We can't expect our entire citizenry to do this -- at least, not at the rate that our representatives are currently voting on legislation.
One solution for this is *proxy voting*: you can choose someone else -- a friend or a public figure -- to cast your vote as well as theirs. Sometimes more complex variants of proxy voting are proposed: you might want your vote to copy Person A for foreign policy, but Person B for economic issues.
But that's not what you asked. You asked whether, given the opportunity, we *would* switch to a direct democracy with proxy voting. The answer is no, because it would be require our representatives to vote themselves out of their jobs. Electoral reform is extremely difficult even for problems with easy fixes: we have no fix for gerrymandering, for example, and no campaign finance reform. Switching to direct democracy would be much harder.
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24 states and DC already have hybrid direct and representative democracy. Ballot initiatives are the origin of everything from women's suffrage and sunshine laws to renewable energy mandates and medical and legal marijuana: <http://vote.org/initiatives>
Few people want to vote on every little thing Congress or legislatures do. But having the ability to insist on that helps keep representatives in line.
But it's far too hard to get initiatives on the ballot, except for the rich. We need online petitioning to fix that, to get people to read the text of initiatives before signing, to save gas and paper and to reduce harassment for signatures. The other 26 states need ballot initiatives, and we need national ones.
I've been working on this for 26 years. See the news in the intro to my <http://vote.org>
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Basically, there is a human civilization controlling the milky-way and an alien civilization controlling Andromeda. They are communicating and have decided, for some reason, that, though the Milkdromeda merger would look cool in the short term and create a short burst of much needed star formation, that is oughtweighed by the fact that the merger would produce a very boring, somewhat ugly, elliptical galaxy. Because of this, the humans and Andromedans have decided they want to halt the merger and make the two galaxies near neighbors forever, but just neighbors. How might they go about achieving this? (no-FTL, no magic.) Another practical reason they came up with is that the merger would fling more stars out of the local group than it would create, but really everyone knows they're just trying to preserve the night-sky view.
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The Andromeda-Milky Way collision is 4.5 billions years ahead - this leaves your species a lot of time not only for planning, but also to evolve.
The most ancient known pluricellular lifeforms on Earth are roughly 1 billion year old. The entirety of human history fits about one million times in this timeframe. And our aesthetics and culture can change drastically on a single century.
But let's consider that for some mystical reason your species' stated goal will hold on this absurdly large time scale, and they found some ways to prevent the collision to happen. Billions years means time to develop absurdely powerful technology so I guess we can leave aside the 'no magic' component of your question. Most of the strategies discussed would be targeting the Milky Way because it is smaller than Andromeda, thus easier to move.
**Space expansion.**
Accumulation of mass or energy leads to local inflation of the time-space continuum - this is what happen in black holes, naturally formed superdense objects. If your species find a way to enhance this phenomenon, they could artificially increase the distance between the galaxies - some sort of wall made of pure distance.
**Dimensional jump.**
Our space is typically considered as a 3D + time environment, but the string theory predicts 11 dimensions. We can consider moving one of the galaxy into an other dimension or reality so it won't get in the way of the other.
**Time travel.**
If your species cannot endure the sight of a merged galaxy, they can simply loop back in the past when the merge did not occured.
**Progressive stellar migration.**
This will not really prevent the merge, but at least the resulting galaxy can be reshaped beautifuly.
**Destroy one of the galaxies.**
The simplest way to a non-merge event.
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A galaxy is made of stars among other things. For your aesthetic considerations, you seem to care mainly about stars. It is possible to move stars using [Shkadov thrusters](https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/Shkadov.html). The intensity of the force and direction can be managed. The civilizations can spread to all or most of the stars in their respective galaxies and build these thrusters around them. The force on the stars can be modulated such that the two galaxies reach an equilibrium with the gravity pulling them towards each other balanced by the Shkadov thrusters pulling them away.
Energy can be extracted from the rotations of the super massive black holes in their respective centers (via the [Penrose process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_process#:%7E:text=Penrose%20mechanism%20exploits%20that%20by,to%20a%20lower%20rotational%20speed.)) as well. This too can be harnessed to include forces on them that tug away from each other, balancing out the gravity between them.
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## Stick a black hole on each of the 'far' side of the two galaxies
Make the black holes absolutely stonking massive. They suck the galaxies away from each other.
As they're black holes, they're aesthetically inoffensive during their duration.
Remove once no longer needed.
Optional: Remove or shrink them to achieve beautiful stasis whereby the two galaxies have zero movement towards or away from each other.
FWIW I'm assuming a black hole generator where you type in the coordinates and press the button. The size is controlled with a large silver dial.
## Rule of cool version
Stick a massive white hole (1) that powerfully repels both galaxies in the middle of them.
It's comparatively gauche but might look quite good, in a confrontational way.
(1) If this term is too well defined to mean a great big repulsor, then I'm coining the term brown hole.
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I'd say they figured out how to affect expansion of spacetime - Hubble constant. They locally (in the space including and between the galaxies) increased it to offset the gravitational pull between Milky Way and Andromeda.
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## Directional Gravity Beam
I'm sure someone's done it before, but coin the term GASER. G for Gravity.
It is highly coherent, directional, and able to be negative.
It glows lavender. Imagining a map of the space between the two galaxies, have the beams almost parallel or in complicated crossing over patterns that resemble macrame.
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Although a *typical* black hole would have been a good method to prevent the merging of the two galaxies but it would be too costly in terms of the required efforts. Concentrating so much energy in an extremely small volume would be a nasty business.
Maybe you can manipulate the **dark matter** that the galaxies are made up of. Scientists have put prominent faith in the existence of such a gravitationally binding matter in interstellar space within a galaxy and among galaxy clusters. Around 85% of total mass in the universe is dark matter. The density of dark matter is related to density of normal baryonic matter in the universe. Within a galaxy the density of dark matter is a bit lower because it does not take tremendous amounts of dark matter to keep a galaxy intact with the stars (although significantly larger amount in comparison to normal baryonic matter). But when we move to spaces between/among the galaxies, there is greater void for dark matter to fill and hence the density of dark matter is quite higher. This happens in keeping together galaxy clusters or supercluster. This is because you need tremendously high amounts of dark matter to keep entire galaxies together gravitationally within a cluster.
The reason I think manipulation of dark matter density would work in your case is that the intact nature of galaxies and clusters is mainly attributed to the distribution of dark matter among them. Perhaps handling just two galaxies would not be that big a deal. For a detailed study of dark matter see [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter) or [Encyclopaedia Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/science/dark-matter)
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# Dark Energy
One very important result of stargazing has been this: The universe is expanding. Despite that gravitational force has no limit, something is still able to push everything apart. We do not know how or what yet, so we've added a theoretical construct to describe it until we know more. **Dark Energy**.
Dark Energy somehow pushes the whole universe apart. We can use this to push two mere galaxies to such an extent that they hover perfectly parallel to each other. They add in a huge layer of not uniformly thick whatever expells Dark Energy between the galaxies. As it's not uniform, parts are being pushed more than others, allowing a gentle flip of the galaxies and settling them perfectly aesthetically from each other. The Dark Energy is reduced in parts until the galaxies will stay stable and aesthetically pleasing for as long as needed.
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[That is not dead which can eternal lie: the aestivation hypothesis for resolving Fermi's paradox](https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394) addresses this in section 6.1.4:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KewPp.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2kgBq.png)
Sounds like it's expensive!
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I'm working on a planet with robotic life, until now I think I know how they work, the only problem is that, unless I want to make all lifeforms autotrophic, I have no idea **how the energy might move across the food web**. By this I mean how the energy the plants store might power the 'herbivores', and the energy the 'herbivores' collect might power the 'carnivores'.
The only solution I have to this problem is not having any energy movement, making all creatures capable of producing their own energy, but I don't like the ecosystem to be like that, so I'm just asking if there would be another solution to this problem.
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Rather than making herbivores/carnivores for the sake of having herbivores/carnivores, let's consider some reasons *why* it's not optimal to make all robots autotrophic. I'm making the assumption that your robo-ecosystem primarily thrives on the following direct sources of power: the sun, nuclear energy, chemical fuel, and physical forces (which are indirectly cause by the sun). In most of the aforementioned, your energy producers are not going to be the dexterous sort of robots seen on Jimmy Neutron. **It's just not optimal to produce energy in a machine that has to move around all the time.** Coral-like tidal power robots may only move every decade or so to follow the long-term oceanic current shifts. Chemical plants need to get very big to approach the Carnot limits on thermodynamic efficiency. In particular, nuclear fusion robots are likely to be more sensitive and bulkier than the rest.
However there are some noteworthy exceptions: If your planet is similar in triboelectric properties to Earth, then static potential differences may regularly build up across large distances separated by insulators. However, since we're "working on a planet with robotic life", then maybe its chemistry is tuned for such an existance: snowstorms with snowflaskes made of nylon and silicone may do the trick.
Unlike bulky producers, predator robots are not constrained by the same efficiency curves, so you can imagine a sort of parasitic symbiosis between the producers and consumers with the ladder tapping into the formers' power supplies, and the former designing defensive and offensive countermeasures, even employing other robots to defend them in exchange for power.
Of course, this begs the question: **why are these robots even trying to eat each other?** There must be scarcity of physical resources which are most easily satisfied by preying on other robots. Since we're "working on a planet with robotic life", metals may already be abundant, but processors and other high end electronics...? It seems logical that energy producers would want to use their energy to run computations. Therefore, a correlation may be found between power production and consumption.
Finally, it's worth noting that zoological autotroph/heterotroph, herbivore/carnivore/detritivore, etc. distictions may not be the most appropriate in clasifying your robots. The autotroph/herbivore distinction breaks down when you have mining robots work for a power plant robot.
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If you're talking about robots, you aren't talking about a food chain, you're talking about an energy economy. It is far easier to extract energy from the sun if you don't have to move, but it's impossible to extract resources from the world. Thus, energy generating robots would trade energy for materials with resource harvesting robots.
You're probably heard terms like "hydrogen economy," where power is converted to compressed hydrogen, and traded. Any energy base (electricity, compressed air) will work for this. Maybe they convert it to sugars.
If the robots have free will, then there will be those who optimize for theft and/or parasitism. It's just an inevitable side effect of game theory. You can model everything after the variations in a standard economy.
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Let's start by asking: **why are these robots even eating each other in the first place?** Since we're "working on a planet with robotic life", metals, semiconductors, and other raw materials may already be abundant, but processors and other high end electronics...perhaps not? You see, these electrionic goods have already gone thorugh the value chain and are equivalent to many more times their weight in raw material. However instead of going through an economic value chain, they go through an ecological food chain.
Next, **what is energy used for?** Consider humans: for an organ weighing less than 3% of the body's mass, the brain consumes a whopping 20% of basal metabolic rate. The body practically worships the brain: it is one of the last organs to stop recieving energy during starvation. We might expect similar and even more exagerrated trends in intelligence robots: energy is for computation, and computation is for obtaining more energy. It follows that processor-rich targets regularly consume a large amount of energy while low-tech robots generally do not.
The converse may not necesarily be true: your planet may have nuclear fusion reactors, tidal power 'reefs', and other 'gentle giants' which produce a lot of energy but are only kept in existance because of parasitic symbiotic relationships.
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# Plants produce fruit/ power cells
Plant robots feed off energy sources like volcanoes, the sun, rich chemical deposits, lots of things. They produce fruit, which have nanobots on them that will form more bots. Their power cells are mostly in the form of low energy density graphene batteries.
# Herbivores eat plant power cells and use them to charge their cells.
Herbivores eat these power cells, and then spread the plant's nanites outwards. They get extra power which they use to power their ethanol based power cells. This allows them to store power more densely and burn it for quick bursts of energy. Some power is lost, but they still have a lot.
# Predators eat herbivore power cells to power hydrogen fuel cells.
Predator bots eat herbivore power cells and convert them into their mega dense hydrogen fuel cells. This allows for them to have powerful and intense bursts of speed, but at the loss of some degree of power.
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## Who cares?
Really. Ignore energy. Assume robots are all able to provide their own power.
The only thing that matters is raw materials, for building new appendages / reproducing. When robot A eats robot B, it probably doesn't care how much energy it has stored, it just wants B's lithium and semiconductors.
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Let's look at a few reasons robots might want to eat (or at least hunt) others:
**Being a predator lets you stay active all day**
Sure you could be a boring robot and harvest solar energy. But this is not a very high power density. A car takes about 1L of gasoline to run 12 km. To have enough energy for a measly 1km ride, a robot with ideally efficient solar panels of 1m2 in perfect weather conditions will need to charge for almost 3 hours. You're really spending most of your day napping, and you're not going places. Then there is the night problem. We're not very good at storing electric energy. So at night you're mostly sleeping, too.
The same problem is going to arise for pretty much all renewable sources: low energy density + not available on demand. That would result in huge (which in turns consumes more power) and not very active robots. If your planet ran out of fossil fuel, generating your own energy makes you... essentially an easy prey. Predatory behaviors then seem like an efficient strategy (although it's more likely that being parasitic will give you better results; steal some batteries but don't kill the giant autonomous power station)
If you do have fossil fuel/nuclear energy, it is a bit harder to justify unless those resources are scarce enough to explain hunting for gasoline. But being dependent on fossil resources would probably lead to sedentary behaviour (you stay near that yummy puddle of oil that you found). That could still leave room for predatory nomadic species of robots.
**it's not about nutrition, it's about population control**
A robot can only last that long. Electronic components will oxidize, mechanics parts will rust, break, etc... So the god-engineer who designed robotic life programmed the robots to "recycle": every robot seeks to produce another robot of his own species every 5 years (you don't want to have robots only making one copy, because your population will go down every time a robot breaks before reproduction, leading to an unevitable statistical extinction).
With every robot potentially making several copies, you need to avoid overpopulation, so hunting robots are designed. They are hunting primarily the older robots close to failure. There you have your predatory chain of recylcing robots. The predators also reproduce. They are not hunted, but if they grow too numerous, they will start starving(they don't have any other mean of energy generation), thus a carefully planned equilibrium is reached (see prey-predator models)
N.B: You could have other, more ideal systems to maintain a fixed population. For example, just have the other robots build a new friend every time they detect a robot death in the world. But that would require for all robots to be connected and cooperating as a society. You could find a few reasons why this is not the case
**getting resources is not hard, but crafting is a highly specialized task**
Ok, maybe you have abundent fuel, but you still need to refine it. You have enough copper, silicon, etc but turning it into a processor to change yours or reproduce is another story. Those manufacturing processes are pretty complex and robots as we design them are usually good at one thing, not 1000. Very dexterous robots are unlikely to have a factory built inside them. So they need help from other robots. Sure enough you could do that in a peaceful way and build an economy around it... but if the processor-generating robots reproduce fast enough and are not very mobile, it's definitely easier to rip them open and get the goods directly.
So it's not so much a herbivor/carnivor dichotomy, it's more like you have specialized manufacturing units, and jerks who just take what they produce when they need it. The frequency of hunting in those conditions would be signifcantly lower tho (you might not need to hunt for a new processor before 10 years. Might be more regular if we're considering fuel)
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The sword I'm talking about is about 7 human heads tall.
In the lore the sword is magical or at least thought to be magical. It is swung around by a creature capable of going invisible, which gives the impression of the sword flying around as if it was possessed by a ghost.
The sword does still have "something magical" to it. The pommel (the round appendix at the end of the handle) is actually a metallic golem's heart/stomach that connects to the "core" of the blade. When the blade strikes something, the heart/stomach is able to absorb minerals and repair the wear and tear of the blade.
It can also protect the user by covering his skin with hard mineral scales that can be detached after a while without much pain or trouble, although they do leave severe scars.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uXac0.png)
The blade is already humongous by itself and thus really heavy, both due to the sheer amount of material and the leverages, but it also makes the user heavier by covering their skin in scales.
It is supposed to be a slow weapon in my game, mostly for "berserk/suicidal tank" kind of play-styles, or for players who just want to smash things down without thinking much about their safety. In the game, one basically gains "defense points" by striking things with this sword. Defense points reduce the damage the player receives from external factors.
**Given those "magical" properties, would the blade be useless and unusable due to its sheer weight, or can I somehow make it usable?**
I tried playing with a big tree trunk as if it was a sword, very heavy and very hard to grip but only due to the shape of the tree, it was mostly like swinging around a mace rather than a sword though. Seemed very impractical from my experiment, yet the blade is made of more dense materials thus probably heavier than the tree trunk.
**Details**
A good answer should apply the in-game sword's "magic" to real life, handwaving away the magic and only thinking about the practical usability of the sword.
The scales form instantly, so ignore the physics of how fast they are created, given that they probably would explode or something like that if they were made at that speed.
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A 7 foot sword is ok. Claymores could be that long.
<https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Claymore>
But your sword is not as heavy as the claymore.
**Because your sword is made of glass.**
Steel mass: 8 g/cc
Glass mass: 2.7 g/cc
Let us assume a big claymore is 4 kg. The glass sword would be 1.35 kg.
A glass sword would usually break. This is where the golem comes in. It repairs the fractures as they propagate and so the sword stays whole. Also the mineral scales on the user are made of glass. The golem can maintain those too while the sword is in the user's hand.
The glass sword is translucent. If the light is right, you can see the golem in there. Only its heart is in our dimension; the rest is in an extradimensional space. If you hang the sword point down by a string so your hand does not dampen the vibrations, you can hear the golem speaking and you can talk to it. Mostly it likes to hear jokes. It is a hard working golem so do tell it some jokes from time to time, as a morale booster.
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As said, 7-foot long sword is not out of the realm of practical. The swords of similar length were comparatively popular in Renaissance - not only Scottish claymore, but also German zweihander, Spanish montante and Italian spadone are of the same type (similar swords existed in China and Japan in different periods, but I know less about them).
Modern HEMA practitioners reconstruct their usage as slightly different then that of usual longswords - using the inertia of the weapon to keep it in swing. The length of such a sword allows a person to keep multiple opponents at bay, unable to attack.
<https://youtu.be/OtT3sjO0ocU> - a solo drill with spadone, showing that a trained person can keep swinging it quite fast.
<https://youtu.be/s3aAqlzn3PQ> - a training bout of a guy with montante against two longswordsmen. As you can see, he capitalizes on superior reach for both offence and defence.
So, the idea of using a very long sword to fight multiple opponents is quite realistic, historically accurate and perfectly fits your 'berserker tank' idea.
Now, the thickness of your sword is excessive. If it were made of steel, it would be much heavier then Renaissance swords. But there are two solutions here - either, as Willk says, it is made of some less dense material then steel, or it is just the artistic license of your game, and all swords are similarly too thick and wide. Not all artistic styles keep all proportions realistic so the time.
PS: it is important to remember that for the Medieval and Renaissance periods HEMA deals mostly with civilian usage of the weapons. So those wide sweeping cuts are supposed to keep unarmored or lightly armored opponents scared. If the you were to fight a fully armored opponent, your would rather use the sword as something similar to the pollax (or quarterstaff). Half-swording, less distance, less cuts, more trusts and plays for leverage and disarming.
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**The scales that envelope the wielder function as an exoskeleton**.
Besides protecting the wielder, the scaly growth also enhances the ability to lift and sling the sword.
This seems to work through means of interlocking scales that are able to anticipate the movements of the wielder, but how exactly this functions is difficult to decipher. What can be discerned are faint illuminations that run through the channels between the load-bearing scales.
It has been rumoured that the golem is able to partially manifest in the space the wielder occupies, and this could explain the scaly armour (which forms a barrier between our physical realm and the 'manifestation' of the golem), the scar tissue (an affection caused by this constantly materialized barrier), and the supernatural strength.
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**I see no issue here.**
I feel like you answered your own question; the sword is heavy, so requires an inordinately strong wielder, or since you're making it for a game, high STR level; but if you are able/willing to wield it despite its clunk, it gives you bonus magical effects that make up for the disadvantage compared to a normal greatsword.
For *connntext* here's a video of a guy one-handing a historically accurate two-handed sword: [Can the two-handed greatsword (spadone/montante/zweihander) be used one handed?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbNL_At0IVw) Those things are about as beefy as swords got, excluding ceremonial/decorative/etc. that weren't meant to be used in combat anyway. Granted, this is a highly experienced martial artist who specializes in swords and the like, but he is quite able to use it, and he says in the video that it's a noticeable bit heavier than most swords of that size would have been.
And for further context: [michaelcthulhu](https://www.youtube.com/c/michaelcthulhu) <--This channel is all about absurdly oversized swords, most of which are too heavy to feasibly wield, as can generally be seen at the end of the build videos. Yours looks like what he would call a "tiny little dinky sword" which is just on the edge of usability.
I would guess that your sword, wielded by a competent swordsman, would look not too dissimilar from the use of a real historic greatsword, just a bit slower. Maybe it'd be like the way greatswords swing in *Dark Souls*, if the wielder is strong enough but not very skilled, or the way the weapon class of that name is used in *Monster Hunter.*
Although it does look chunkier than a historic greatsword, I don't think it would be unusably heavy as you're implying, it's not a buster sword.
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To be elite in much of the ancient world was to be a warrior. There are a few famous kings who spent part of their youth fighting for foreign rulers, like Harald Hadrada, but in my setting there’s a culture that takes this to the extreme.
Every year a portion of the nobility of a certain kingdom goes campaigning as mercenaries for the richer city states to their south. They do this to make considerable money, keep their skills sharp and keep the commoners of their own lands in line by keeping taxes low and prestige high through their mercenary exploits.
My question is, would it be plausible for a region to send most of its warrior class to fight as mercenaries? Would this cause too much political disruption or make too many enemies?
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* There are not all that many noblemen. That is sort-of the entire point of nobility.
In western Europe, France and Germany had some 2 or 3% of the population beloging to the noble class. The English had less than 1%. (With the English it's complicated, because it's not clear what counts as "noble"; I assumed that we count "peers" as noblemen, and we don't count all ordinary gentlemen, who never had any special legal status, unlike the gentilshommes of France and the Adel of Germany.) The absolute European champion was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with about 10%.
* In real life, having a fraction of a small fraction of the population go abroad and play soldier would not bring anywhere near enough money to "keep the taxes low".
+ Which is quite obvious if you think about it. If sending your people to fight as mercenaries for some foreigners keeps the taxes low, this means that the foreigners transfer a significant part of their tax income to you. Which means that the foreigners are so very much richer than you, or else they could not afford it; and since they are so poor at fighting, why don't you conquer them outright?
* During some periods of time it was perfectly normal for young, poor noblemen to seek military employment abroad. No, this did not make them rich, except in a handful of cases. More usually it made them dead.
Except in Italy, where they eventually reached a point where wars were not as much *fought* as *played*. For a typical example, see the furious [battle of Anghiari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Anghiari) (1440) between a Papal-Florentine-Venetian alliance and Milan, famous for being the subject of a [lost fresco by Leonardo da Vinci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Anghiari_(Leonardo)); some 16,000 soldiers were engaged, out of which *one* died, and he died because the drowned in a swamp.)
* Realistically speaking, the situation varied enormously from place to place and from time to time.
+ During the later part of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, just about *everybody* playing soldier in Italy was a mercenary. (Excepting of course the invading French and Spaniards, who actually brought actual armies with actual soldiers.) (It's not that mercenaries were not good soldiers; they may have been. But mercenaries are *expensive*, and the Italian city-states were small and disorganized.)
+ The Germans, the Italians, the Scots, and the Swiss were notorious for seeking military employment abroad.
For the Swiss, serving as mercenaries abroad was sort-of a national specialty. Everybody had Swiss mercenaries, the Spanish, the French, the Italians, even the British. The Swiss were considered the best among mercenaries, and were the best paid. Not many noblemen among them, however.
+ There is an entire category of Italian mercenary commanders: the [condottieri](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condottiero). (The Italian word means "contractor".)
+ Famous mercenary commanders include [Cesare Borgia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Borgia); [Fernando d'Ávalos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_d%27%C3%81valos), 5th marquis of Pescara; [Andrea Doria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Doria), most famous as admiral of Genoa); [Alexander Farnese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Farnese,_Duke_of_Parma), duke of Parma; [Ottavio Piccolomini](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottavio_Piccolomini), one of the best generals fighting on the Imperial side in the 30 Years' War; [Enea Silvio Piccolomini](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enea_Silvio_Piccolomini_(general)), famous for fighting in the service of emperor Leopold I against the Turks; and [Albrecht von Wallenstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_von_Wallenstein), *the* best general on the Imperial side in the 30th Years' War.
+ The absolute peak of mercenary armies was the [Thirty Years' War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War), the closest thing to a word war that the pre-modern world ever had. The only sides which fielded real national armies were Spain and Sweden; throughout most of the war, everybody else, both on the Imperial side as on the Rebel side, used mostly mercenaries of various kinds. And Spain and Sweden also used mercenaries on a large scale.
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It's perfectly plausible.
In a situation where only the first born male inherit the title and the benefits from a family, any additional male has only two options ahead of him: become part of the clergy or become a cadet and pursue military glory.
Many renaissance captains, like [Giovanni delle Bande Nere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_delle_Bande_Nere), were cadets who created a mercenary army. It was as the game was played.
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# Definitely
Soldiers can be drilled in loyalty as well as fighting skill. Their mercenaries can be good, but the most improvement is simply in numbers. Buying extra troops can lead to a lot of extra wealth for a government if they win, or at least less of a loss.
For the (groups of) mercenaries it's an easy choice. They can accept or decline offers, lowering the chance they get into a huge disadvantaged fight. Winning fights can enrich them enormously through plunder. This allows them to return home as not just a celebrated soldier, but raise their living standards.
As even the lowly peasants can get to the middle class via such a system with a reduced mortality rate compared to normal war they are more likely to accept the culture and be loyal. If other kings or governments try to abuse their power towards the mercenaries/mercenary kingdom they can be cut off, mercenaries can be supplied to opponents and/or infiltrate the normal ranks of mercenaries that are always available and betray them. Lastly they will fight against a highly trained army.
It can certainly work. Even if it's just propaganda. People held Spartans in high regard due to the stories. However, it seems that they weren't as formidable as depicted in fiction. Just a warrior nation that had some advantages and then sold their stories very well.
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**In regards to political disruption.**
Political disruption could happen if one nation or another took it personally, but if the mercenaries themselves were unbiased with who they took up contracts with then this could mitigate that. However, an unbiased contract system could lead to this mercenary society fighting its own from time to time- which of course they could charge more for.
**Another benefit; Access to foreign nobles.**
This would reap its own benefits for your errant warlords. They could arrange deals or alliances beyond mercenary service while in the court of whatever lord they were serving or while campaigning with them. Foreign bodyguards were also not unheard of in ancient times, in fact they were sometimes preferred. Bodyguards with no attachment to other local powers that might threaten your position could be more loyal to the gold you give them than the people you were oppressing. Either way its direct access to the rich and powerful.
**On the Note of Pesky Realism.**
Another answering your question have already criticized the realism and practicality of this. They make a well informed point and supply a good amount of references I'd suggest you consider and research. However, I'd like to may make suggestions on how you can balance realism and practicality with this interesting culture your cooking up instead of telling you all the ways it wouldn't work.
You might want to consider these mercenary nobles to be vassals in one form or another of the rich city states, and instead of paying their taxes in gold or goods they pay with fighting men, noble and commoner. This could keep the country taxes down, require the nobles to often go of to war, earn them the prestige and loot you mentioned, and keep to the general idea of the society you are suggesting.
This was a practice used for certain Gaulic groups conquered by Rome back in the day. These peoples would have to be very good soldiers to justify the loss of that sweet, sweet tax money or specialize in a form of warfare in high demand (it was mounted cavalry for the Gauls I mentioned). A religious element could also play a hand into the reasoning behind why it is a requirement for men of this society to go of to war.
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Constant War of Small Medieval States requires mercenaries and a mercenary outlook.
Time Periods featuring small states with shifting allegiances especially prior to consolidation of a land mass by one power, offer endless opportunities to be at war. Even though an elite class of warriors may exist they might easily have shifting loyalties several times in their lifetime forming new units and affiliations for different battles.
It is necessary in a medieval world, that a state sends its warriors to show support for other states, to push their family further up the hierarchy of noble clans and remain in favour. *Keep your enemies close*, as they say.
Even though Samurai are famous for their loyalty, in the 1500s and early 1600s the daimyos would often commit their troops to other daimyos, and if they lost a battle or were betrayed by a general, all the samurai committed to one side would then go to another. The fighting was continuous for almost a hundred years.
Consider all these permutations of Japan: *Nobunaga*,killed his *own brother* to take control of his clan, fought and destroyed *Shingen*, was betrayed and defeated by *Hideyoshi*, who invents a lineage to take control of the country, unifying most of Japan, and then his son *Hideyori* is defeated by *Leyasu*, who finally completes the task of uniting all of Japan and assembles an elder council of other daimyos to ensure that his dynasty will stay in place.
Even when a ruling dynasty occurs, they will levy troops from smaller, poorer houses . On the other hand, as long as there is no stable leadership, there will constant statecraft, and a dynamic leader will always adapt and have a mercenary outlook.
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**Not mercenary warriors but mercenary GENERALS**
As it was pointed out, there weren't that many nobles during the Middle Ages (or in general for that matter) so if they are serving as mercenaries, it would naturally happen that they would be pitted against each other. What southern state would want to be trampled by a mercenary heavy cavalry unit? Instead place the mercenary heavy lancer unit to fend them off. The casualties suffered by the northern nobles would be catastrophic, and the time it takes to train and the cost to equip them might be not worthy the effort, from an economic and social point of view.
What if, alternately, these northern nobles would hire out as elite generals, logisticians, strategists and captains? Advisors and leaders, not direct fighters (unless required). They would give an instantaneous boost to the performance of these southern cities by the sheer fact that these northern nobles are dedicated to war: improved supply lines, better formations, drilling exercises, positioning and matching of units, more accurate battle orders, you name it.
In this way they would not be killed off that easily. A general could lead the charge, but these mercenaries would be "chess players".
This idea branches off into secondary options: what if these northern generals use the southern wars to further their agendas, their intrigue and courtly matters. Maybe it's a rite of passage for the young. Their politics could be rooted on the contracts, alliances and outcomes of their mercenary campaigns of the south.
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**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
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You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 2 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/199858/edit)
The situation is simple: There is a stadium filled to the brim with a liquid lake of boiling hot melted cheese. You want all the cheese. It's a 10-acre stadium, with a height of 166 feet, and a seating capacity of 102,780. The stadium is under minimal guard, but there is a flotilla of four SWAT helicopters overhead that are slowly lowering a 50-foot tortilla chip into this lake of deliciousness. Probably some snipers.
Under these conditions, how do you successfully extract all of the melted cheese and make your escape with it? Bonus points if you complete your heist before the cheese cools, and extra bonus points if you can get away with the chip, as well.
EDIT: Your assets are a blimp, two goons who will do whatever you tell them, 5 million USD, and a tanker truck. You have two weeks to prepare, but only one day to seize this glorious opportunity. Real-world physics apply (the tortilla chip is reinforced with steel).
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# This is literally the most stupid, expensive, risky, silly, brave, dangerous, and glorious way to steal some cheddar.
1. Infiltrate the project using your money and resources without telling anyone about your devious heist plan;
2. Learn to drive those cool SWAT helicopters;
3. Request security clearance to pilot that cool helicopter from the stadium owner (and your request is granted, *obviously*);
4. Hire about 50 random workers to help with the Grand Cheese Theft;
5. Hire someone to drive your blimp;
6. Also hire a crew who will be able to suck up that cheese;
7. On the day of the theft, have seven goons knock out four helicopter pilots before they fly up. Your seven goons + you = 8 on your side helicopters/8 total helicopters.
8. You jump out of the helicopter and land in an already prepared spot outside the stadium (helicopter crashes, no one cared about it anyway);
9. Order a crew of about 15 workers to scale the stadium. And your goons to search for snipers;
10. Have your remaining workers drive two huge tankers right in front of that glorious cheese;
11. Suck 100 tonnes total of the cheese and use two already bought trucks to haul away the chip;
12. By this time, helicopters and additional guards are returning. Order trucks to escort the tankers out of the area;
13. **But**, while the helicopters and guards are chasing the tankers... you set your **real** plan in motion;
14. Your goons are *still* in helicopters and are ordered to fly above the stadium and let loose huge thick metal cables;
15. Order workers to go into the stadium of hardening cheese and use high-powered drills (that aren't invented yet for us, but are for them) that can easily slice through the cheddar;
16. Drill in large rings into 10 by 10 by 10 cubic feet blocks of cheese. The helicopters can lift 30,000 pounds of weight (yes, these are some $$$ helicopters), and 10 by 10 by 10 cubic feet of cheese would weigh about
59,110 pounds. So, two helicopters could carry 1 of these blocks of cheese at a time (barely, and the helicopters will be trash at the end). It would take about 15 minutes to attach the cable to the ring on the cheese and for the helicopter to lower it into a nearby truck (going as fast as possible). There is about 1,000,000,000 pounds - 100 tonnes (from the decoy tanker trucks) = 999,800,000 pounds of hardened cheese. With four helicopters doing this + four extra helicopters you already owned, your lifting about 236,440 pounds of cheese every 15 minutes from all the helicopters. At this rate, it will take 63441 minutes or 1057 hours or 44 days. Obviously, you need to change some things up or this will go on forever. **So, you make some changes:**
17. The first thing that you do is starting to pump helium into the cheese to make it easier to lift;
18. You also use large bombs to destroy roads leading to the stadium. No roads, no police land vehicles. You set up a scanner to identify objects in the sky. You call reinforcements by air;
19. Luckily, the stadium is next to a port. Coidecntaly, you own some very large ships. You set some stuff up by phone. Within two hours (the helicopters are working during that time), a massive cargo ship arrives (from a separate heist, long story short) that can carry 40,000 tonnes of weight (80,000,000 pounds). Six large cranes came on top of the ship;
20. While the ship was coming, your workers were set to do something different, they were ordered to slice a 30 by 30 by 20 cubic feet block of cheddar;
21. You order all eight helicopters to lift it up (240,000 max pounds) and the six cranes (480,000 max pounds total). Together, their max load is 720,000 pounds. The 30 by 30 by 20 block of cheese inflated with helium is *exactly* 720,000 pounds heavy. It takes 30 minutes to lift it and set it on the ship. The trucks full previously of cheese also start to load up the ship;
22. At this rate, you can load (997,908,480 pounds total) 1,440,000 pounds of cheddar onto your ship per hour. You set everyone to work while you deal with the police and arriving military surrounding in a 2 mile out from the stadium;
23. Your reinforcements arrive by air: more helicopters, weapons, missiles, food, supplies, and money. You set the seven helicopters on the cheese job while you assemble a small army. You pass out highly technological weapons to about 40 willing workers;
24. You order them to drive their various vehicles out to the invaders (police and military). You order their immediate surrender or else you will blow up your whole bomb supply which you planted in a large city for this purpose;
25. They surrender. You take them prisoner to help with the cheese job and their vehicles and supplies go to the cheese heist as well;
26. While doing that, hundreds of thousands of pounds are loaded onto the ship;
27. Your final part of the plan comes into play. You order the ship to take the cheese that it has so far to your evil lair. When it comes back, you will load 80,000,000 pounds of cheddar onto it;
Wait? What? How? The helicopters, even all 15 of them + six cranes only equals 960,000 pounds. You also add military and other vehicles to pull it. Even then, you're not getting close to 80,000,000 pounds. You inject more helium into the cheese. You call in more helicopters. You use the blimp. You threaten the city government to provide more people. You steal cranes from the port. You squeeze water out of the cheese. You start to build a ramp from the stadium to the ship. You do whatever it takes, and finally, you load 80,000,000 of cheese onto the ship. And you do it again.... and again.... and again.... 12 times more in fact.
* The army comes. You capture them.
* The air force comes. You blow them out of the sky (small number of fatalities, most ejected the plane).
* The navy comes. You capture them.
* You take the navy's boats. You use them too.
Finally, you finish.
* You have shipped off almost 1 billion pounds of cheese.
* You release thousands of workers/slaves/employees.
* You blow up all the remaining helicopters, vehicles, supplies, and stadium.
* You leave the site escorted with armed trucks.
* You drive to your evil layer.
* You tie off all loose ends.
And...
## You eat the cheese! All 1,000,000,000 pounds of it!
It only took all your money, resources, and helicopters - and made you the most wanted man in America.
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**Buy it.**
You do not mention detail about the owners of this cheese or why they are engaged in this endeavor. I here assert that it is an art project. Once the project is done they will be glad to wash their hands of the whole deal and move on to other artistic projects. You can have the cheese for $10 and rent the stadium for a week for less than a million.
Now you own the cheese and the chip and you are renting the stadium. Your goons fly the blimp advertising free cheese and the people come and devour it in a most unhygienic fashion.
You will need to pay another million to clean up the stadium in time for bocci ball season.
Now with remaining money you run for mayor as the free cheese guy.
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**You steal it without moving it**
Steal the whole stadium in situ.
Use the 5 million to buy or otherwise obtain a weapon of mass destruction. Threaten the local populace with a massive explosion of boiling cheese if they don't let you keep the stadium and the cheese. That way you still have the heating unit in place and can keep the cheese melted indefinitely.
Supervillains always use WMDs and threats of widespread destruction if they can.
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First, fill another stadium with something that looks like cheese but isn't.
Then, two solutions:
* Have really big pumps that switch the contents of both stadium (with heated pipes, duh). You might need to dig holes to have the pipes stay stealthy. When they'll come to dip the big chip, they won't even notice that it isn't real cheese !
* From your blimp, project an hollogram on top of the real cheese to make it seems the stadium is empty. You previously bribed/threatened someone in the SWAT team so that he'll lead the flotilla toward the wrong stadium. Everyone will just think they got the wrong address, no problem ! And you now have all the time in the world to dispatch the minimal security and fill lots of heating trucks with all the good cheese.
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**Drain it through the sewers**
I'm not even kidding.
Just use the money to clear the area and the path that you want to take. Use the 5 million us dollars to buy trucks at the other end. Just drain it through the sewers. Friction caused by the movement of the cheese should sustain it to a degree, as would the high fluid pressure. You never said you wanted it to be edible.
As [chasly - supports Monica pointed out](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/199864/8732) it would harden. So you mine it. And THEN transport it to the trucks.
How is the cheese getting the heat to be molten anyways?
Does it contain irradiated dust?
Cancer cheese. Mmm...
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Because the stadium is filled with cheese, we could assume, that all openings are closed, except the top, where the helicopters with the chip are.
Find a possibility, to convince all people, that the stadium is empty already, when the helicopters appear. Use a big plane, hologram or VR-equipment (do all people in the helicopters wear special glasses?) to let the stadium be apparently empty.
Be the great hero, who have enough cheese to fill the stadium again (maybe for free?) to save the day! And while they think, you *bring* the cheese, you will in reality *take* it. (I would recommend to use cleaned oil-tanker for transportation and heated pipes to the stadium. But because it was already filled, you could also use the same method than the others before...)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PkVOL.jpg)
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You could use a "water bomber" plane that scoops up the hot liquid cheese and then releases it into another "bowl" of your choosing. See the following video for reference:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHuoXD_VmBs>
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**Channel The Eldritch**
With such a crazy hypothetical, there is no WAY Cthulhu is not involved. He shares the first letter of his name with cheese, and to eldritch monstrosities, that is a *big* deal!
This means one can use eldritch magic to solve this problem. It is a little-known fact that eldritch monstrosities will grant boons in exchange for a one really weird act or just sustained weird behavior, which is why wizards have a reputation for kookiness. (Two little-known facts: spaghetti loves cheese and Pastafarians worship an eldritch monstrosity.)
Thus, if one agrees to spend 5 million USD to do goofy things (or maybe just launch a company called Cheesy Chthulhu, which sells strange but good cheesy foods) chances are you could gain a Potion of Giant Size from Chthulhu (plus a bag of chips that will grow with you), drink it, and proceed to walk to the stadium, take the chips, dip them, and eat them. Mmmm....
Oh, and for the cheese that will undoubtedly be left after your nacho binge (personal experience tells me you can never get all the cheese, no matter how hard you try, *especially* in a place with as many nooks and crannies as a giant stadium), you should really pay five million supermodels dressed as mermaids to lick up all that cheesy goodness. (Trust me, Cthulhu *will* make this hypothetical real if you sign a contract promising to make it happen.)
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In my world there are lots of illegal neurological and mechanical enhancements you can purchase off the black market. Gangs make super soldiers by doing this. The procedure is very dangerous and side effects include mental instability and death by over exertion. These people are a credible threat and must be imprisoned. They are strong enough to bend metals and tear peoples heads off. They can take bullets to the legs and arms without being slowed but shots to the chest will wound them. Direct head shots will probably kill them if they don't have metal bones.
So here is the idea:
I am sinking a giant structure under water. You have any resources. No money constraints.
Rules:
Prisoners must be kept alive except in dangerous scenarios.
There must be guards or some sort of active containment (no prison colony set up).
How to contain these prisoners? I would like it to be underwater but if you want it elsewhere that’s okay.
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**Remove implants**
Implants went in, so you'll likely can get them out. Replace whatever they have with low grade components or remove them altogether if they shouldn't have it. (We're not monsters to rob them of an arm or eye.) If this isn't easily done, underpower components or use software to limit their potentials. They do this already with the computer in cars, so why not here? When finished you can put them at the regular mentally unstable facilities. They might even fare better as you can implement a panic button to turn a lot if their implants off. That way they require less drug and physical intervention when they become violent, which is better for their health.
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**Use their implants against them.**
I am not sure of the advantages of having the prison underwater. People still need to come and go and supplies must come in. Motivated prisoners can escape. The one advantage is *the rule of cool!*
Your underwater prison was not always a prison. It is or was something else, which happens to be underwater and it has been pressed into service as a prison. Maybe it is a sunken spacecraft. Maybe it is a research lab built underwater and it is handy to have prisoners as research subjects. Being underwater mostly deters people who want to come and break prisoners out.
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As regards keeping them in, having a population of disgruntled supersoldiers scheming in their cells is a recipe for trouble. If I had such folks in the present day I would keep them well drugged to reduce creativity and motivation. But ho. Hum. Been done been done.
Better is to roll with the scenario you have set up. These supersoldiers have implants and most have them in their brains which is what sets them up for mental illness and also what lets them push past normal physiologic limits. The prison uses those implants to control them. Certain implants can be used to mellow the prisoners. Many can be used to make the prisoners feel good, in charge, well fed, and on top of things - a good situation. For certain tech the best you can do is cause the prisoner to be disoriented, with weird psychedelic reality overlays.
That last one would be great for a story. Unlike many fellow prisoners your character is smart and has (had) resources. His original motivations were different. He disallowed some implants and customized one himself which [cost him an eye](https://scandinaviafacts.com/this-is-why-odin-sacrificed-his-eye/). As opposed to feeling good and mellow like his fellow prisoners, his captors have hacked his tech such that he lives in a semihallucinatory dream world(s) overlaid (underlaid) on what is real. He has various methods to sort out real from fake when he needs to. They do not always work.
Some of the fake things can still be helpful. He does not consider them entirely fake. There are a couple of other prisoners like him. One might be him. It is a tricky world he lives in.
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They just need to be held in an especially strongly built conventional prison with guards kept at a safe distance up high or behind very strong bars. The guards could also be armed with heavier calibre automatic weapons or even exploding rounds or rocket propelled munitions. Unless these cyborgs use supernatural strength or magic (in which case they might do anything) they could surely be killed by a weapon tailored for that purpose.
Other tools that might be of use would be high voltage mesh screens and powerful tranquilizer darts.
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Underwater works for me. Have the place pressurized to the depth, this can mean the "door is left open" as a large moon pool in the floor of a room for submarines to bring in prisoners. Trying to leave by jumping in can mean one of three likely outcomes. First is simply sinking to the sea floor and eventually drowning trying to walk to the shore for being too heavy. Second is an uncontrolled ascent to the surface with a lethal case of the bends for being too light. Third is trying a controlled ascent, by attaining neutral buoyancy, but unless they have a considerable oxygen supply they suffocate before reaching the surface. Any implants or augmentations to survive underwater must be removed or hobbled before being brought to the prison.
The question on why all augmentations would not or could not be removed must be answered. One reason is the removal of anything deep in the body could result in death. With a lot of the functions of these augmentations left undocumented there will be few physicians that would even attempt to remove them. One reason is ethics, another is just simple self preservation as the operation would be dangerous for the physician. Another is removal of augmentations to the limbs would leave the prisoners crippled to where they'd need specialized care, it's just cheaper/easier to bring them to the prison as at least moderately functional humans than have attendants spoon feed them every day.
Attempts to cut any hole in the walls or ceiling simply floods the compartment. Cutting into the floor means the same hazards as leaving through the moon pool. Active and passive sonar should detect anyone approaching without permission. Other means to detect any attempts to come and go could be lidar, metal detection, and trip wires along the sea floor. Exterior defenses would be torpedos at a distance. An "electric fence" of sorts can discourage making contact with the facility, an outer hull kept at a charge from an inner hull. Completing an electrical circuit between these two hulls can weld metal bits in place, electrocute anyone or any thing, set things on fire (burning off the oxygen inside any vessel), or some other interesting outcome I might miss. Two hulls also makes it difficult to just blow a hole in the hull, the water between the two hulls will soak up a lot of heat and pressure and inhibit damage to the inner hull. Use of electric current can be used to preserve or destroy metals underwater. The wrong voltage, metal composition, or other factors can determine if this is good or bad for the integrity of a metal hull. Concrete, glass, and other nonconducting materials should be in the hull as a backup in case of a failure in the metal parts of the hull. This doesn't have to float so the walls can be thick, and being underwater means even concrete is "light" from buoyancy.
Interior defenses can be selective flooding of compartments, gassing the compartments, different kinds of electric fences, and projectile weapons of your choice. Since these augmentations need power the prisoners can be kept "starved" for fuel or electricity.
There can be all kinds of interesting ways for people to come and go, with or without permission. There's the moon pool or pools. There can be an air lock on the top so supplies can be dropped in. Anything that needs to go to the surface can be floated up. If someone tries to sneak away through this air lock will get a lethal case of decompression sickness unless protected.
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**More Implants**
If there is the technology to make such implants, I would consider a special prison implant.
This could be anything that works to keep the prisoner submissive.
Bad behavior? The implant shocks the prisoner.
Trying to escape, violence against the guards, prisoner tries to remove the implant? Implant shocks more or even explodes, killing the prisoner.
It could also be used to track the prisoners or study their behaviour.
As a second thought, I don't even think that the device has to be an implant. Could just be a collar as well.
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nyarlathotep, the Black Pharaoh, seeks to enter the realm of Earth to rule over mankind. Unfortunately, he is prevented from doing so by a barrier that blocks eldritch deities from crossing over. To get around this, he breaks his soul up into thousands of pieces and seeds them into thousands unborn children. These kids become immortal avatars of Nyarlathotep called Nylanders, who do battle with each other over the centuries through one-on-one engagements to the death. When one is killed, the other "eats" the loser and gains their power and memories, absorbing them into themselves. When all pieces of the deity have joined, Nyarlathotep will become whole within one body and would be reborn on the mortal plane. In the end, there can be only one.
However, even though a Nylander can kill another of his kind and take his soul, he doesn't benefit personally. While he has gained the power and memories of the fallen, he is unable to gain access to any of it. The winner remains completely unchanged, making everyone on an even level when they do battle. This slows down the assembly process, stretching it out to centuries instead of a short period of time, and making it more difficult for the deity to unite its pieces.
What would be preventing these warriors from gaining the abilities of others after defeating them?
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As each child is killed/destroyed, the deity's powers are absorbed, but since all these children are of the same soul, they gain that power equally. There is no benefit to being the one who made the kill. So each child does gain in power, but equally, so there is no shift in power balance. A benefit of this is a child could be killed in any manner, not just by a Nylander, and no power would be lost.
A side effect would be that as children are killed, the rate of power absorption would increase each time. This might be an interesting thread, and it would give the remaining children an indication of the state of the game. The final two would know they are the final two, the drama escalates every kill for all.
Then at the final duel, each participant is at 50% (still equal). Then there will be "only one" at 100%.
You can use this gradual increasing of powers to add random elements. Each child could respond equally, or maybe different children have variant reactions? Equal in power, but different in expression?
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The Nylanders are not a part of Nyarlathotep, they are just carrying a part of him. In fact, they are just humans with some special powers given to them by a fragment of the deity within them. They grew up with this fragment and are used to it. Absorbing someones fragment is not that special. But absorbing someone elses psyche is somehing absolutely different. The human mind is not made for fusing two psyches to one. Different memories collide with each other, different attitudes contradict each other... It would break the human part of the Nylander, make him weaker and weaker with every victory. The last few surviving Nylanders would be babbling madmans, not even able to find each other... So Nyarlathotep would never be reborn.
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Somewhat similarly to the other answer, make a crucial part of gaining power be childhood development, whether before and/or after birth. You could perhaps say that the implanted piece of Nyarlathotep bonds to the new soul, or makes change to their developing mind, or even physical changes during embryonic development. Or some mix of all that. So people who have grown from conception/before-birth to adulthood in this situation are in some way considerably different than a normal grown human.
But acquiring a new piece of Nyarlathotep long after childhood development doesn't add to the development that has already been done - because an adult isn't going to suddenly re-experience embryonic development or childhood growth. So ones who acquire additional pieces don't directly benefit from them but can be carriers of them.
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## Perhaps It Has Something to Do With How the Barrier is Bypassed
Could be the Nylanders' avatar spirits are like enriched uranium to a fission core, or helium to a fusing star -- there's a certain critical amount (in this case 100%) that is required for the avatar material to fuse (or fission) into the deity.
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They absorb the Power and Soul, but *not* the connection to it. In other words, they gain **capacity**, but not [**flux**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux).
This means that the only benefit they gain is being able to use their powers *longer*, rather than *stronger* — they gain their victim's 'water tank', but not their 'hose', so their output remains unchanged.
Of course, with the limits on how much power each mortal can channel at a time, versus how fast they 'recharge', this may eventually hit a point of diminishing returns; if you are unable to use up your entire 'capacity' before you would keep over from exhaustion and lack of sleep, increasing it further has little meaningful benefit .
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Consider this a remake of my "Why might a group of insects evolve to resemble humans?" post. Fairies are a common trope in fantasy works, residing in woodlands and swamps some characteristics of fairies and their associates are:
* being 11 in tall
* have raven level intelligence (optional)
* are erect bipeds
* have butterfly/moth like wings
* are capable of flight
* are nocturnal
* live in large groups
* have an average life span of 3 year
* are capable of imitating human laughter
* look surprisingly humanoid. (optional)
* have proportionally larger heads and eyes
**Now given these characteristics, so what species would fairies have evolved from, what evolutionary pressures would lead to them?**
NOTE: magic does not exist in my story
[Answer]
**There is no evolutionary pressure I know of that will do this**
You have two impossible conditions (technically three including the optional one, but it's optional). These are 'bipedal, with wings' and 'looks surprisingly humanoid'. A creature the size of 11 inches would have no reason to look humanoid - in fact, it would have several reasons not to. This is because of the square-cube law - that is, muscles become far more efficient at smaller sizes. Human anatomy is custom built for out glorious range of height from around 4-7ft. If you were building it on a smaller size, you'd use muscle grouping that aren't the same as ours, not to mention that the face would be designed slightly differently. After all, we're omnivores designed for a massive diet. A creature 11 inches can't have our diet, and thus the it's mouth would be a lot of misspent energy if it replicated ours. Similarly, eyes don't work the same on a smaller scale, so just having two scaled-down eyes would more or less render your poor fairies blind.
Bipedal with wings is also an issue. Having six limbs isn't a problem - you can base it off of insects. But a bipedal body is just wasteful on that small of a scale - there's no point. An exoskeleton would serve better than skin at that size, not to mention that the interior anatomy of a bipedal animal is drastically inferior to an insects at that size. There are methods of creating 'fairy-like insects', certainly, but if you want it to look like a human, it's not going be an evolved life form.
[Answer]
**Protection or selective breeding**
People may be less likely to kill off creatures that look very human compared to some that don't. There is a reqal-world precedence for this in "[Samurai crabs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heikegani)", a species of crabs with a shell that bears a pattern resembling a human face, which many believed to be the face of an angry samurai. It has been hypothesised that crabs with shells resembling samurai were thrown back to the sea by fishermen out of respect for the Heike warriors, while those not resembling samurai were eaten. Thus, the more closely the crabs resembled a samurai face, the more likely they would be spared and thrown back, causing selection for this sort of look. Similarly, 'faeries' that somewhat resemble humans may have been selected or even bred to more closely resemble humans.
Cuteness may also be a factor. People tend to find squirrels cute and hence refrain from killing them - we even feed them. If squirrels looked like rats, we would not be so kind. Similar forces could have caused selection for cute humanoid faeries.
A fairly big caveat is evolutionary timeframes. Humans haven't existed long enough for evolutionary pressure to produce 'surprisingly humanoid' beings from very different species. Selective breeding is far more likely - just look at how dogs have been bred from wolves to all sorts of sizes and looks.
As for what species may be the root, on Earth insects would be the most likely candidate. It is far more difficult to add limbs or wings through breeding than to remove them. Insects have six legs and four wings, so all we need to do is regress one fair of legs into nothing (or accept fairies with four arms). The thorax (which is where all insect limbs and wings are attached) would have to be expanded and elongated, while the rear body would have to be much reduced, perhaps ending up looking like a sort of short, stubby tail. The bodies would be exoskeletal rather than having soft surfaces. They would have mandibles rather than mouths like ours. Their overall shapes might be made to resemble humans, but all sorts of details would stand out.
Another candidate might be a mammal similar to a bat or flying squirrel, or perhaps some kind of flying monkey built along similar lines - but then, the wings would have to double as arms, and they would be leathery rather than insectile. On the other hand, it will be far easier to breed them to have bodies and faces that are very close to humans.
[Answer]
You might be able to create "fairies" with evolutionary pressures and a bit of chance but they would never hold up to close scrutiny in the "human-like appearance" category. For example, a realistic fairy could be:
* Large, six-limbed insect with wings for flight
* When they're flying, the two pairs of rear legs hang down together and the two forelegs hang to the sides, imitating a somewhat human silhouette
* They have some sort of bioluminescence similar to fireflies and when humans see them in the dark, only a small, somewhat-human shaped figure is visible, floating in the air
* Fairies live in swamps or dense jungle and due to their light and their somewhat human shape, have evolved to lure people into swamps, wait for them to die, and then eat them
* An insect living for three years isn't unheard of
* These creatures may hunt humans and other lure-able prey in packs or swarms, giving the illusion of a society
* Maybe, they have some sort of sound organ similar to cicadas or grasshoppers which lets them imitate a human laugh or something equally creepy
[Answer]
I would like to add, in addition to the answers given, that a squishy, fleshy body/limbs is not impossible with the fairies being insects. Look at caterpillars. Fairies needn't be hard/scaly i think.
Secondly, not all insects have scary inhuman mandibles. Butterflies don't have them for instance.
And thirdly, while the face may not ever have really the same parts as a human face has, it's possible that like the aforementioned samourai crab, the fairy has some shapes/colors that give the impression of human lips, a nose, eyebrows. Much like this caterpillar resembling a snake: <https://www.earthtouchnews.com/wtf/wtf/this-is-not-a-snake-its-one-of-the-best-mimics-in-nature/>
One last comment regarding intelligence: if brain size is an issue (being too small to be sufficiently intelligent), there is a kind of wasp (trichogramma) which is so extremely tiny that it evolved smaller neurons so that its head didnt need to be so big (amongst other adaptations).
So it may be possible that the fairies miniaturized neurons to increase intelligence.
[Answer]
A strange way to get to fairies could be if their were human-like marsupials that evolved to grow extremely slowly and do no parental care. They may make small wings for their larvae to fly around with. Although this isn't much like what you describe in the question, it could definitely be called a fairy.
[Answer]
Fairies as described in the question could evolve from a Microraptor or similar creature, which became more able to fly, and lost its hindwings. Its hand would become more able to grasp, and it would become more intelligent and social. It may find humans, and see them as some sort of gods, and so they would create masks to appear as humans, and pluck their body feathers, in order to become more like humans.
[Answer]
Would the size of the fairies matter if the *world* around them was bigger?
They could have evolved to about 4ft to retain a humanoid appearance. Wings could be a newer evolutionary trait to escape to higher sections of trees if hunted by animals that are huge in comparison. Trees could be massive, as well as any other plant and animal.
It could be a matter of perception of the size that makes all the difference. They know they're small, their world is huge and tThey wouldn't know any better unless faced with a human. Measurement and size is only really drawn to the human perception of size who have made those tools to measure such things
[Answer]
Humans(or human like creatures) have been around for a lot longer.
In our word human society changes very quickly on an evolutionary time scale, meaning there hasn’t been enough time for animals to evolve complex features in response to us.
A lot of the previous answers rely on fairies to evolve in response to human activity, looking more and more human to avoid getting killed. This makes sense, but I can’t imagine a bug like would evolve into a humanoid in the time scales we see on Earth.
I could however imagine a species that looks and acts very similar to us, with some sort of difference that prevents them from developing the kind of tech that would lead to changes in human life. They could have more trouble than us imagining 3D objects coupled with Amish like religious beliefs. Maybe they could be living in a world without fossil fuels that prevents them from industrializing. Maybe they evolved away from having the brain structure to develop new technology after Developing farming tech. In effect, these people could be more like ants evolving agriculture than humans coming up with new ideas
Whatever the case this leads civilization to be stuck at a medieval tech level for millions of years, giving enough time for life to adapt to human’s presence. A large type of insect began evolving to have a more human like appearance, with marking that mimic human faces and the like. They don’t have to actually have human like features just the appearance of human like features.
This could even fit in with classic Tolkien characterization of fantasy races. Dwarves for example as a sort of clockwork like creature in their behavior, with a lot more instinctual motivations for their behavior rather than cultural ones
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[Question]
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In my sci-fi universe, spaceship shields are generated by capturing plasma between two electromagnetic fields. Projectiles are evaporated by the heat of the plasma, and charged particles are deflected by the magnetic fields of the particles and the containment fields.
The problem arises when laser weaponry is considered. In theory, a dense plasma field should be capable of deflecting EM radiation (as it happens in the ionosphere). The denser the field, the higher frequencies it can deflect. But the problem is that enemies can use a wide variety of rays, from microwaves to gamma rays. Therefore, there has to be a way to detect the lasers coming in from afar, and dynamically adjust the shield's density.
Is there any way to detect an incoming laser without actually having it touch the ship, because that would defeat the whole purpose of the shield?
EDIT:
Thank you all for your amazing feedback! On the basis of your inputs, I have come up with a new shield design:
First level ablative/reflective/thickened body armor
Second level, powerful magnetic field with surrounding plasma layer generated by picking up from solar winds and vents from the fusion engine. Thickness can be varied by releasing some plasma to vacuum (thinning) or venting some from the engine (thickening).
Third level, active defenses, like interceptor weapons and defensive drones. Also, radio noise makers to throw off missile guidance systems (in space, a missile off-target is a missile destroyed).
I would like your thoughts on this. Also, a question:
Is there any way to curve the shield in specific ways to leave certain parts like the viewports and the weapon batteries undefended, at least temporarily, so that the pilot can actually see and fire his own weapons?
[Answer]
Don’t block the shot: block where they’re aiming.
Basically: you can’t block the laser once it’s been fired, as the moment you know about the laser is when you’re hit by it. What you can do is monitor the emissions/light bouncing off of your enemy prior to the laser being fired.
For this to work you need two things on your ship and one further thing to be true:
1: You need stupidly good sensor packages that can track nearby threats and their emissions/any light bouncing off them. Using LIDAR (like radar but with lasers) to actively paint potential threats would be useful, but kinda defeats the point here...
2: You need stupidly good threat analysis software that can identify ‘they are pointing their guns at me’ and ‘their gun is about to fire x kind of laser’, and bring up the appropriate shielding faster than they can aim and fire at you.
3: The enemy weapons need to be visible from your ship so you know where the laser will hit you. The exactness of these measurements will depend on how precise your lasers/shields need to be. More precision means better info on laser gun position is needed, but if your shields cover whole arcs of the ship then you can get away with knowing ‘my enemy is that way’.
Once you have those things you can bring up shields in the instant you get the ‘ they're Aiming at me and firing’ em radiation from your enemy, thus blocking the laser that will arrive shortly thereafter.
This method can be blocked/jammed/messed with in any number of wonderful plot-hooky ways, from your own shielding temporarily blinding you to your enemy deploying drones that spoof active laser signatures so your defences can’t be focussed, but if you can see your enemy you can use this as a pre-emptive defence method.
[Answer]
A laser beam is made of photons, and photons travel at the speed of light. Therefore whatever they emit will reach the target together with the laser, and there is no much use for it.
The only way is to detect the fingerprint of the device used to emit the laser, which will be necessarily working before the emission of the laser.
If the X-ray laser has a different fingerprint than the IR laser then the target can adjust the shield accordingly. Mind that the fingerprint can precede the shot of just few millisecond or even less, therefore the shield has to be able to quickly adjust itself.
However I also assume that the attacker will also try to shield or alter the fingerprints, so that the target is lured into using the wrong shield.
[Answer]
If you don't detect enemy ships and their laser-capabilities you just do not have any time for detecting the laser-shots as they go at the speed of light. For your ship moment of you see the shot is the same moment it hits you.
But there are ways to combat lasers.
1. Every ship would want to have good **detection capabilities and some measure of stealth** to be able to detect enemy ships first or push range from where you can be sniped at far enough . Long distance would allow to employ an **evasive patterns** in the movement of your ship. For example, at the distance of Earth-Moon enemy ship would need to "guess" where your ship will be in 1.3 seconds. They try to predict you or get closer and both ships detect each other.
Lasers may look like they are a lines, but they are more cones, so extra distance spreads it's energy over more area.
2. **Passive defense**. Your hull can be covered in layers of reflective surfaces with a gap with a metal foils, that when hit by a high-energy laser beam evaporate and produce plasma clouds, that absorb even more of the energy from the lasers.
3. **Hybrid one**. Use floating sheet drones around your ship, that cover up the ship if there is a danger of laser assault or any other methods that will give you time to detect enemy ships and return fire.
For more effective shield you may use them in layers. Each layer is optimal for different type of laser. After analysis of attack or scan of detected attacker you convert most of your layers to optimal version. Methods above may be used to give you more time for the preparations.
[Answer]
There are two potential ways to have your shields adjust. One from remote sensing, one from direct sensing.
**Remote Sensing:**
For a light-speed weapon, if the first time it is fired in a battle is against you and if it hits on that shot then the first notice (outside having a "shell" of FTL sensing somethings) you will get of that is of it actually hitting you. See direct sensing for that case. However, if it is ever fired other times prior to the shot that hits you (against other targets, or against you and missing) then you have a chance to determine its frequency. Lasers have one very telling property that makes them relatively easy to discern, and that is they are extremely monochromatic. This is what makes it relatively easy to make laser "radar detectors" (really lidar detectors) for cars on earth. The laser of a police lidar is scattered somewhat by dust and by whatever else it hits and that scattering combined with the fact it is extremely monochromatic makes it relatively easy to distinguish from other EM sources. For space-born laser weapons, well, even in space there are some particles. The Earth's observable exosphere extends to at least 10,000km. For some planets this could conceivably extend much, much further. Even far away from a planet with an atmosphere, there is always *some* dust, *some* hydrogen - in some areas much more than others. And, presumably, in an area where there is a space battle, there could be a lot of "stuff" around that might cause some scattering of a laser weapon. Gas and particulate from engines and thrusters, debris, vented ship atmosphere, and the hulls of other ships being hit with the same weapons. And with laser *weapons*, which are presumably quite powerful, it wouldn't take much to create enough scatter for another ship to detect it. In fact, there may be enough scatter just from the laser's own focusing lens, since no lens is perfect. Ships' combat and target threat management systems and operators can be set up to look for that monochromatic scatter and trace it back to the firing ship in order to determine the best shield parameters to use for that ship's weapons. While the firing ship may have more than one laser weapon, it's unlikely that any one weapon will be able to fire many different frequencies. Lasers are something, at least with technology we can reasonably foresee today, that you can't really make to be frequency agile.
**Direct Sensing**
As noted above, in a scenario where there is a surprise shot, where an enemy ship fires for the first time on you and that shot hits, then the first notice you will have is that shot hitting you. Outside of FTL somethings. However, that doesn't mean the game is over. People tend to think of a laser as either hitting or not hitting. In reality it is, of course, more complicated. The amount of energy actually transmitted by a laser weapon will depend on the power output of the laser (in watts) and the length of time it dwells on target: **E = P × t** which means that a large factor in your shields protecting you against a laser they are not currently configured for will be their reaction time. The better welding masks, that protect your eyes from the extremely high intensity light of arc welding at close distances, are LCD masks. They are, essentially, just a large single cell of liquid crystal between two panes of glass, connected to a light sensor. When the light sensor goes off, the LCD goes dark and blocks the light. But this means some of that light has already passed the filter by the time it reacts. The key is, was there enough to do any damage to the retina? The answer is no - these type of masks are proven safe and are regulated by many different national standards agencies. So, the lower the length of time, t, that the laser is on you, the less power is actually transmitted to the ship. With a sufficiently rapid shield reaction, there would be essentially no damage. No matter the power, P, of the laser, as t approaches zero, so does the amount of energy transmitted to the ship. Of course, the more powerful the weapon, the faster the shields must react to prevent damage. This might infer an "arms race" trying to make lasers that produce very high energy pulses, and shields that react more quickly.
[Answer]
You look at what weapon is pointed at you.
Lasers are actually not very good as ranged weapons in space combat. The laser will spread out too much and lose the energy it has over toi much surface area to be effective. Also firing a laser generates a lot of heat on the ship itself, which is very hard to get rid off on a space ship. This means lasers are mostly thr CIWS of future space ships. Great for point defense against fighters and incoming missiles but useless against long-range targets.
Now imagine that because you have shields, your fights happen at much closer range. Now that laser is effective right? Unfortunately you have a shield that can deflect laaers. This means you need to alter your shield so that your lasers have as little effect on your own shield or you would lose both firepower and desabilize your own shield a little. But since your enemy can simply measure which wavelengths penetrate through your shield they can simply make their shield opaque to those wavelengths, neutralizing the effect of those lasers.
Ergo: you can react to something that moves at the speed of light by knowing what is necessary to fire something at the speed of light.
[Answer]
## You've got it backwards
Stopping solid projectiles with a trapped plasma is much, much harder than you seem to imagine. As an example, consider a re-entry vehicle: that stuff heating up the nose is a plasma. After *a few hundred kilomtetres* of that, all that is vaporised is the ablation shield.
(As a small aside, the plasma isn't trapped *between* magnetic fields; it's trapped *within* a magnetic field, between zones of high Z field gradient, which tend to reflect ions.) In contrast, any plasma dense enough to *vaporise* a projectile during the milliseconds it takes to pass, is going to be pretty much opaque to all EM waves.
There are also lots of other issues with beam weapons. Writers who have thought about the engineering issues seem to assume that space combat will consider 100 km to be "point blank range", and most engagements will be at several thousand kilometres. At these ranges, simply focussing the beam on the target tightly enough to do damage is extremely difficult. It becomes practically impossible if the target starts dodging randomly; a plasma shield just ups the required power threshold for damage even further.
So it seems practically mandatory that weapons have terminal guidance. Once you have that, even fairly simple missiles can destroy all but the most extremely armoured spacecraft. (To complicate evasion, they should, of course, be stealthed, with skin chilled with liquid helium and course corrections by low signature engines such as cold gas, rail guns, or ion thrusters.)
Furthermore, vaporising the projectile isn't enough:
1. If it's a kinetic kill weapon, it still has the same mass, and is hitting at the same hypervelocity impact speed. The exact penetration depth will change a little, but above a certain velocity the hardness of the projectile doesn't make much difference.
2. If -- as is more likely -- it's a missile with a warhead, it just detonates when its proximity sensor detects your plasma is close enough. Given the scale of space combat, they will most likely be nuclear. Against most targets, sinply detonating near by will be enough -- plasma shield be damned. For very heavy armour, such as the classic "hollowed out asteroid battleship", you can use the x-ray *hohlraum* of a fusion device as the compression driver of a Munroe effect charge to project a few tonnes of tungsten plasma forward at several hundred kilometres per second. Due to extreme pressures achieved in this sort of device, the tungsten plasma density is several times higher than the solid metal density! Try trapping *that* with your magnetic mirror.
BTW, issues of the physics of space combat were explored in quite some detail by the space opera RPG "Traveler" way back in the 1970s
[Answer]
Having the laser touch the ship would not defeat the purpose of a shield.
Laser weapons generally work by heating anything they hit. Assuming you're not thinking about insta-kill death rays, it probably takes a while for the laser to do significant damage. Your ship could get hit for a very short while, and then adjust the shields - assuming this process is quick, you'd probably take minimal, damage, if any. Just like when you touch something hot, you immediately take your hand away and suffer minimal burns (or none, if you're lucky) - if you didn't, your hand would end up roasted.
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[Question]
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## Premise
Inhabiting my [earth-like](/questions/tagged/earth-like "show questions tagged 'earth-like'") world will be [humanoid](/questions/tagged/humanoid "show questions tagged 'humanoid'") beings that have a skin tone that is as dark as Vantablack. Let's assume these human-like beings share the same ancestry as humans and we can safely assume cognition and physique to be identical to humans. The only difference being their skin is naturally as dark as Vantablack (well techinically, this may require some inner workings, like bio-mechanics, to be different as well). While Vantablack is not actually a color but rather a material, it's still the closest thing known to man to the effect I want to create in my world, and so as not to use the word inappropriately, I will just coin my own word for these fantasy humans: **Vantaman**. While the darkest known pigment of us humans has not been scientifically documented, I did want to provide a frame of reference. From a crude1 series of image analyses I got the hex color: 1f1b1a for very dark-skinned homo sapiens. Hex colors, however, can't do Vantablack justice. Vantablack is often described as the closest thing to looking into a blackhole as we can get. It absorbs 99.97% of light. Here is a Vantablack material demonstration, both busts are identical in shape:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RKTEym.png)
## Actual human skin pigment evolutionary narrative
To help us tackle the task of how Vantaman came to be, it may be helpful to understand how actual humans took on the adaptation of dark skin in the first place. According to the understanding of human evolution at the time of this post, humans began to develop dark skin pigments through natural selection about 1 million years ago. The context for this adaptation was these hominids were beginning to move into environments that offered little to no protection from exposure to the sun -- the Savannah. It was at this point that the hominids began to have less and less body hair and began to develop perspiration as a means of cooling down. And it was at this time that humans began to take on the trait of having dark skin. The darker skin helped protect the bio-mechanics needed for healthy hominids. With only vestigial body hair, the hominids with lighter skin could not provide sufficient protection for [embryogensis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryogenesis) and so the melanin-dense darker skin was naturally selected to deal with harmful UV radiation. (it's thought that they would conceivably face DNA degradation as well). Of course as later descendants left this environment and ventured to, say, Europe, where humans embraced a more troglodytic lifestyle, then skin pigments became lighter to allow our livers to synthesize vitamin D more easily. And the rest is history.
## Question
With all that in mind, it's all the more challenging to conceive of an evolutionary narrative to explain a vantablack skin pigment trait. Why would Vantaman need to absorb 99.97% of light?
My first inclination was to keep the narrative and up the ante; Vantablack pigment to cope with a sun that emits far more radiation than our sun. I lacked the knowledge of astrophysics to gauge whether such a world would still be [earth-like](/questions/tagged/earth-like "show questions tagged 'earth-like'") my hunch was no. However maybe someone more knowledgeable can come up with some special case scenarios and revive this solution.
However the question is not only concerned with stellar emissivity -- anything rooted in science is fair game. To help maintain a reasonable scope, here is a quality metric:
**Quality Metric:** The closer to [earth-like](/questions/tagged/earth-like "show questions tagged 'earth-like'") your evolutionary narrative for Vantaman is the better2. If it turns out there is no earth-like solution in the truest sense of the word, then I can still accept an answer as long as it's scientifically plausible. Earth-like is ideal though; I don't want to go nuts with mother nature unless it's really, really necessary.
**Further Clarifications:**
* Even though we have not seen Vantablack in biology, we are assuming its possible; how the heck it works is out of scope. It could be nature's version of vertical carbon nanotubes or something else. Whatever it is, it is as dark as vantablack. Point being, it's not a xenobiology question.
* Assume the vantablack pigment trait requires negligible energy resources
* In this question, "earth-like" is not used in the most rigid sense. Flora, fauna and celestial bodies are [earth-like](/questions/tagged/earth-like "show questions tagged 'earth-like'") in terms of initial conditions, but you may change them as per your answer's needs. Bear in mind the quality metric favors fewer or smaller changes.
* The orifices of Vantaman: mouth, eyes, ect, do not have to be vantablack.
* The evolutionary narrative is concerned only with [prehistoric-times](/questions/tagged/prehistoric-times "show questions tagged 'prehistoric-times'"), we don't have to worry about high technology -- humans won't invent nano-tech for a million years
* Unless it's vital to your narrative, you don't have to provide an exhaustive nutrition plan for Vantaman, you can assume nature allows him to synthesize nutrients like vitamin D some other way. This assumption is optional, because it's related to the main problem, but I don't want to impose undue work for the answerer
* Ideally, we provide a narrative for Vantaman that revolves around blocking UV rays. However, if it this is a dead end, you may propose an alternate evolutionary need for vantablack skin.
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1. crude because images not robust to different lighting or other external factors, but I did my best and averaged the hex value
2. I think this is a reasonable quality metric; we can quickly tell what's plausible on Earth, but we are on the honor system to an extent. For example, who is to say what's more outlandish: UFO's beaming lasers at Vantaman to be dark or having billions of tiny blackholes continuously forming and decaying to create Vantaman's skin. If it comes down to this, we'll just have to use another metric: what is there documented evidence of?
[Answer]
Vantamen didn't evolve to *block* 99.97% of light, they evolved to *absorb* 99.97% of light.
Vantamen developed their dark skin tone in an arctic tundra, where you need to get the most out of your energy sources. As you said, the pigment to produce vantablack requires negligible resources, so the extra gain in solar radiation absorption makes up for the energy to produce the pigment.
So, much like the mighty polar bear, your Vantamen evolved the darkest skin they could to gather the most heat they can from the sun:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3rZHD.png)
[Answer]
Simple:
Vantamen live on a vantaplain surrounded by vantagrass. Dark, nutritious volcanic soil sprouts grasses coated in carbon nanoforests evolved to suck up as much light as possible using [insert plausibly quantum term here]. The vanta colouration is simple defensive camouflage against predators that are exceptionally good at picking out non-vanta prey. They might even use the vantagrass somehow to gain or maintain their vanta colouration.
This entire area of the planet is incredibly hard to navigate as pretty much everything looks exactly the same shade of uniform black, hence why the vantamen exploit this particular niche.
Their art is incredibly dull.
[Answer]
The only reason to have that kind of absorption is stealth.
From the perspective of absorbing something of value, the difference between 99% and 100% is rather negligible. If you are that strained for resources, you're probably already doomed.
From the perspective of not letting something in (such as UV rays), there's little advantage for pushing for such high absorption when reflection and scattering are more than efficient. It's much easier to layer up the biological equivalent of zinc paste, or even mud (as many animals do) than to try to come up with such a perfectly absorptive layer.
Vantablack doesn't emit anything, so the only thing that's left would be the cases where you specifically desire to not provide any emissions. It's a sort of "stealth mode" If you are capable of "looming," which is moving towards a prey without changing aspect angle, you appear to grow in size and it's hard to judge distance (dragonflies abuse this). THis would be even more effective if there was no useful information found in your image.
Of course, this would also generate a mighty sharp silhouette, so it would be bad during the day.
So I say you're looking for a predatory species that hunts at night. The dominant prey animal on the planet has developed an astonishing telescope-grade nightsight capability, which lets it see preadators coming a mile away as they graze. Vantablack may be just what the predator needs to be truly invisible when striking the prey.
You're probably looking for a really black owl.
[Answer]
>
> Why would Vantaman need to block 99.97% of light?
>
>
>
Vantamen evolved in a completely dark environment, much like the ocean floor. Predators hunt by using bioluminescence to illuminate and locate prey. By being completely dark, vantamen stay camouflaged against the dark background even if you shine a light on them.
Sure, they will cast a shadow, but they will still be harder to spot than a creature of any other color.
Being practically invisible to them is no problem because they find each other and communicate through non-visual means.
[Answer]
>
> Even though we have not seen Vantablack in biology, we are assuming
> its possible
>
>
>
Actually, Vantablack is biologically possible, quite easily in fact: <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02088-w>
Which I bring up because you could use all of the evolutionary mechanisms that have been proposed for hyper-black birds. Sexual selection being the lead choice.
[Answer]
1. Camouflage for night hunting, caves. Even more so with no moon or moon has different composition and size to give less illumination at night.
2. Insane assassin/duelist What is even more scary about such being is you can not even tell it's shape, features or perceive it's attacks. They could use their remains to cover tools or paint them black.
Just imagine you need to fight someone like that in a duel or war. You won't even see how he made a trust.
3. Fear incarnate. It would scare shit out of other animals and species of humans. If you use tools and stand in group, no one will be able to tell your real size or count. You can pretend to be bigger or smaller, conceal real numbers.
Other predators will consider you tot risky and uncertain.
For sure there is a problem to make your equipment close to your skin for daytime. Not a big problem in low-light situations.
[Answer]
This could be useful for a creature that operates in groups, either for hunting prey or avoiding predators. When a group of Vantamen are close to each other, they just look like a uniform black mass - it is nearly impossible to tell how close or far apart they are from you, how many there are in the group, or the location of any one individual target. This can make them hard for an enemy to attack.
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[Question]
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So, vaguely, I remember from earth science that when submarine volcanoes erupt they eventually form archipelagos. My question actually has several parts;
* Starting with the first eruption to break surface, how long does it take for those islands to ~~form and~~ become habitable? i.e has vegetation, and sources of food, drinkable water.
* *Without the use of modern technology*, is there a way to know that the eruption occurred?
The antagonist in my current WIP is the deity of mountains and volcanoes, she creates these islands so she can have a place to do her scheming and such out of sight of the other deities. The eruption occurs in the middle of the ocean so the water is fairly deep. Saltwater if that makes any difference.
* Is this a quick or slow process, does she have the time to make the islands habitable before getting caught?
* How would the water itself be affected by the eruption? The aquatic animals?
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> I know initially the water will be hot and the fishies will most likely not love that-- but after cooling etc. how does the pH change, mineral content, current, plant life, animal species change?
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[Answer]
Let's do some math, using Sherwood's Surtsey example. We could use the Hawaii example instead, but I'm assuming your deity would prefer to build islands at Surtsey-speed instead of Hawaii's leisurely pace:
It was roughly one day between the start of the Surtsey eruptions, and when the new land broke the surface of the water. Let's call it a rise of 130m/day.
But! New land doesn't just rise vertically. Most undersea eruptions form cinders, with an average angle of repose of 35 degrees. So let's transform Surtsey's vertical rise into a volume. We know the height and the angle of repose, let's use that to get the radius of our land-cone:
r = h \* tan(x)
where x is 90 degrees minus our angle of repose:
r = 130 \* tan(90-35) = 130 \* tan(55) = 186m
From there, we can get the volume of volcanic matter that was erupted that day:
volume = pi \* r2 \* h / 3 = 4709750 m3 / day
Now let's assume the source of your islands erupt at the same rate. However, the depth they need to rise from is a *little* more than Surtsey. The abyssal plain lies at a depth of 3000-6000m, so let's go with a depth of 4500m. Your island's required time is:
r = 4500 \* tan(55) = 6427m
v = pi \* 64272 \* 4500 / 3 = 194651489600 m3
days = v / rate = 194651489600 / 4709750 = 41329 days = 113 years
So, you could get your islands in a little over a century, provided you keep the volcanic activity at a relatively frenetic pace the entire time.
As for when life arrives, I'd give it less than a year. Life is pretty impressive when it comes to colonizing new land.
[Answer]
Google Surtsey.
<http://www.surtsey.is/pp_ens/gen_3.htm>
This was an undersea volcano that formed off the coast of iceland. National Geographic had a series of articles on it.
The water was shallow(130 m), so the island didn't have to make a huge thickness of land to get above the surface.
Before breaking the surface, there was a lot of bubbles, floating pumice, ash clouds, but the interval from the start of the eruption to breaking surface was days.
First plants were there within a year. At this point the island is covered in green. Nearest land is 18 km away.
[Answer]
# **Hawaii, as a case study: Millions of years**
From <https://dhrititimelineofplatetectonics.weebly.com/formation-of-hawaii.html> :
>
> This is how the islands first became to form **40 million years ago**
> even though some were able to **start developing 70 million years**
> ago.
>
>
> ...
>
>
> The oldest island of Hawaii is Kauai which formed 5.1
> million years ago, then Niihau which formed 4.9 million years ago,
> then Oahu, Hawaii's third largest island formed 3 and a half million
> years ago, followed by Molokai which was formed 1 and a half million
> years, then Maui, Hawaii's second largest island formed a million
> years ago and lastly The Big Island of Hawaii which formed half a
> million years ago and is the youngest of the Hawaiian chain. **Another
> volcano named Lo'ihi is being created currently and is expected to
> emerge from the seas in 10,000 to 100,000 years time as it is still
> 1000m below the ocean's surface** and become an island.
>
>
>
From this quote, we can see that from beginning (eruptions on the sea floor beginning) all the way to having an island, it takes millions of years. Individual islands can form concurrently, however, and emerge next to each other within the space of tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
[Answer]
Rangitoto Island in New Zealand is an example of forming and being covered in vegetation in 600 years. From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangitoto_Island),
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> Rangitoto was formed by a series of eruptions commencing at least 6000 years ago.[7] The most recent eruptions occurred between 550 and 600 years ago in two episodes, 10 to 50 years apart, and are thought to have lasted for several years during the later shield-forming episode. The first recent episode erupted most of the volcanic ash that mantles neighbouring Motutapu Island, and produced the lower, northern scoria cone. The second episode built most of Rangitoto
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