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I'm currently creating a world with a population of about 4.5 billion people and 21st century technology. In fact, the world is strikingly similar to ours. Oh, except the islands that is. The *entire* world (except the poles due to ice build up) is separated into archipelagos with anywhere between 10-30 islands, biggest islands are no bigger Honshu (biggest of the Japanese islands) with anywhere between 15-100 miles between groups. What would this do to the climate/weather? And would there be a major change in species? (Not talking about aquatic life forms)
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# A Bit Different
There are zillions of contributing factors to climate (we don't even fully understand our own), so I'm just going to take a stab at it: this is *speculation* based on limited information and observation of systems here.
**Hot & Cold** - with the major currents being disrupted by archipelagos (some in shallow waters, others, like Hawaii, the product of a slowly moving hot spot), the temperatures at central lattitudes will be very hot, but also very rainy with so much [evapotranspiration](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evapotranspiration). The poles, without a stream pulling warm water northward, will be very cold, though slightly less so in their summers.
**Stormy** - while island archipelagos can be mountainous and even have different climates on one small island, the continuous disruption of landform allows for storms to accumulate and 'travel' further and longer. Islandia is going to have lots of hurricanes at the equatorial region.
**Fossil aquifers** - you will want these in your more temperate and colder regions. Without major mountain systems, you don't get your large, collecting rivers for fresh water. Rain will not be as prevalent in the temperate and colder latitudes So let's give these guys some spring water.
The temperate zones are going to be the sweet spot, where you can hopefully have seasons a rich diversity of fishing/whaling as the staple meat, and a lot less tropical storms.
**Bonus:**
**Fauna** - you didn't ask, but I suspect, like most small island chains, you will have a great diversity, but no large land animals, such as 'lions and tigers and bears, oh my'. Large land animals need a hella lot of area to cover for food, both herbivore and carnivore (usually). Your small herbivores and rodents (although greatly diverse from each other) will be your land animals, but the coolest thing? Your birds might rule the skies: and you might have very large, and strong birds.
Fish - Good luck with this one: I think even though we have separation on Earth that keeps species apart, I would guess we'd see the same patterns here, although with your population, they will be threatened by overfishing.
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Dustin covered the weather nicely. What is the tilt of the planetary axis? That affects the size of the polar regions. If there is no land under the poles and no continent to block block ice flows, you may have a huge sea ice problem affecting navigation. If you do not have much in the way of deep ocean (islands most everywhere means they are usually on the continental shelf), then the ocean's ability to moderate the temperature is limited, so you may experience more swings in temperature. Fewer large oceans also means currents like the Gulf Stream do not exist to carry warm water poleward, so islands in the high latitudes will be very cold.
Your world would have many more species of land animals due to population isolation effects on the gene pool.
Since most islands are small, you might have fewer large plains, so no large herds of big herbivores. Expect mostly smaller animals.
Because of the previous issues with water circulation causing cold in the higher latitudes and the inability of non-flyers to migrate toward the equator in most places, I would expect very few non-flyers in the extreme latitudes except those (like polar bears) that fish and can travel on ice flows.
Our oceans have dead zones due to lack of iron far from the continents. Since you have few places far from land, there may be no dead zones, hence much more marine life.
What about vulcanism? A major source of islands is volcanoes, which causes extreme temperature drops, earthquakes and tidal waves. Unless your world does not have plate tectonics. (Many planets are solid - not broken into plates.)
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**I am probably going to be abusing the archipelago idea with my handwaviumosis. It's a terrible disease.**
Your world is a humid one, my friend. I googled the humidity of Indonesia, one of the most populous nations in the world with 240 million people and it has an average humidity of 70%.
The three large equatorial oceans separating the mass archipelagos breed massive hurricanes and cyclones. On Earth these would usually break on land and pour themselves out, but on this world, the high humidity and the large channels of mainly temperate to warm water in-between islands breeds huge storms at the equator during the summer months.
The problem is not the storms, but the fact that they they are constant. In fact, there is a ring of storm clouds encircling the equator of the planet. As if that wasn't enough, the near constant ring of islands separating the equator from the northern hemisphere stops currents like the Gulf Stream from warming the northern waters.
During the winter, the storms at the equator calm down enough, to a more Earthly pattern, and the Ice sheets in the north expand farther than they would on Earth (though the expanded ice caps would be thinner on average).
The majority of the population is supported in the temperate zone in-between the ice sheets and the equatorial storms. They survive by growing crops similar to seaweed and by importing large fish from farms in the sparsely populated equatorial nations. Some cities have domed-off spaces underwater which they grow cash crops and some of the high-priced, surface-extinct vegetables and fruit they consume (I would say grains, but due to the nature of this world grass would be less inclined to evolve as it evolved to take advantage of large, flat, dry plains).
Of course, weather patterns would vary based on many other features, but this is about what I would expect.
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After seeing the film Oblivion I began wondering about what would happen if the Moon was fractured in such a way that large chunks of the Moon were ripped apart.
Would the chunks of Moon stay in orbit around the Earth, or would they drift off into space?
The film shows that the majority of them floating around by the rest of the Moon. But I'm not sure if this would actually happen, wouldn't the force of the original explosion drift these chunks far apart in a short span of time? I'm not sure if I'm right however.
But if this is the case, what conditions would I need to have a fractured Moon orbiting a planet?
Here is a frame from the film:
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You've made one of the classic mistakes: You should never consider anything produced by Hollywood to be in any way a reflection on reality (other than whatever they put in front of an actual, not virtual, camera, and even *then* you have to be wary). As described in the movie, it has been some years since the moon was shattered.
Yes, it would be possible (with the application of a great deal of force) to shatter the moon in a manner similar to this such that this one frame would be valid. However, to do *simply* that would result in the pieces either spreading out across the solar system if the pieces were imparted sufficient velocity to escape the moon's gravity, otherwise they would collapse back into an effectively spherical volume again. This frame would only be valid a short time after the moon's shattering, and not after the time period that the movie implies has passed. In actuality, the chunks would variously hit the earth, form a ring around the earth, escape the earth/moon's gravity altogether, and anything that didn't escape would eventually re-coalesce.
A second possibility is that in the shattering of the moon, the moon's angular momentum was increased prior to its disassembly, so that the pieces are orbiting one-another, however, if I recall correctly, the image of the moon in the movie is more-or-less static. However, some of the pieces depicted are very large, they should already be re-forming themselves into smaller spheres. At this scale, under even the moon's lower gravity, solid matter will behave as if it was fluid.
To actually have a fractured moon orbiting your planet like this, without collapsing, you'd need a huge, pretty implausible (unless you're in a *very* high-tech sci-fi environment) anti-gravity unit at the centre, *keeping everything where it is* in a very delicate balance of forces.
For this picture to be valid *in isolation*, the timeframe we're talking about would be less than an hour, and probably a matter of minutes. However, in the context of the movie, it is not valid at all.
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I've not seen the film, but the concept is essentially right.
Even though the moon has been shattered the fragments are all still there and have gravity still, the biggest chunks are going to start pulling each other back together and reforming into a spherical shape.
Depending on how much energy they have smaller fragments are either going to do some mixture of:
1. Orbit the new moon for a while, then most likely rain back down onto the surface over time.
2. Orbit the earth in the same rough orbit as the moon, spreading out as they do so. Over time you would again expect the moon to pull them back into itself but this could take a lot longer.
3. Achieve escape velocity from the earth's gravity well as well and go wondering around the solar system as a new asteroid.
4. Hit the earths atmosphere and rain down on earth as meteorites. Depending on their size these will either burn up in the atmosphere or come down, causing potentially serious damage depending on their size and location.
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The novel SevenEves is based on this premise. Some unknown alien agency shatters the moon, but does so in way that leaves the 7 large chunks slowly drifting apart. (Several days later they are still in a cluster)
My expectation was that this wasn't a big deal: The chunks would collapse back together and form a moon again. Stephanson has them orbiting in orbits that are very close, grinding and bumping and reducing each other to smaller rocks.
In a cloud of gravitational interacting objects however, there is a variation of the equi-partion principle happening, and after a bunch of interactions, all the objects have the same kinetic energy. Which means that small rocks are moving faster than large rocks. The small rocks 'boil' off the cluster, but roughly half are captured by the earth's gravitational field and come burning in as meteors.
Stephanson has the sky turn white hot from all the re-entries, cooking the surface, boiling the oceans causing an extinction event. The bombardment starts roughly 2 years after the event, and continues for thousands of years.
I remain unconvinced. If this were the case, trojan points in orbits wouldn't act like junk collectors. Of course even the Jovian trojan point collections are pretty thin. While ejection from an orbital cloud occurs, I suspect that the rate is far slower than SevenEves projects.
Chunks mutually orbiting each other aren't stable. The paths are chaotic. Sometimes one will be ejected. Sometimes a nearby rock will be captured. If there is lots of space, not much happens.
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Allright, what i'm asking is how life would be like on Earth (which pretends Earth could develop life in the "short" life of a blue giant) if we had two blue giants in the sky instead of the Sun?
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[Blue supergiants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_supergiant) are massive. Really, *really* massive - up to dozens of times the mass of the Sun. They are also extremely hot, large and luminous. They live much shorter lives that stars like the Sun, and may die spectacularly. All of this means that they aren't great stars to host habitable planets.
The luminosity of the Sun is on the order of $10^{26}$ watts - an incredible amount (think of that compared to a lightbulb)! But that's nothing compared to a blue supergiant. [Rigel A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigel) has a luminosity 120,000 times that! Let's see if we can replicate the Sun's effects by comparing the [stellar flux density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux). The flux $F$ from a star at a radius $r$ is
$$F=\frac{L}{4 \pi r^2}$$
Setting the flux of the Sun equal to that of Rigel, we find that
$$F\_{\text{Sun}}=F\_{\text{Rigel}}$$
$$\frac{L\_{\text{Sun}}}{4 \pi r\_{\text{Earth}}^2}=\frac{L\_{\text{Rigel}}}{4 \pi r^2}$$
Doing some cancellations, and writing Rigel's luminosity in terms of the Sun's luminosity,
$$r^2=\frac{120,000 L\_{\text{Sun}}}{L\_{\text{Rigel}}}r\_{\text{Earth}}^2$$
$$r=346r\_{\text{Earth}}$$
So Earth would have to be *346 AU* away from Rigel to receive the same flux as it does from the Sun. Put it in a binary system with two Rigel-equivalents and that figure is multiplied by $\sqrt{2}$, becoming roughly 490 AU. That's well into the Kuiper Belt - right in the area of Planet Nine.
A binary system of blue supergiants is [UW Canis Majoris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UW_Canis_Majoris), with spectral types O7.5 and O9.7. Their combined luminosity is approximately 260,000 solar luminosities, and they orbit close together, likely at about 0.16 AU. Therefore, their circumstellar habitable zone should be comparable to that of Rigel's; you won't be able to orbit closer than about 350 AU and still have a habitable planet.
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Put Earth around the central blue supergiants in the system and things get interesting. It's going to receive 120,000 times the flux that it receives from the Sun, so it will be hot. To put that in perspective, the Earth would have to be about 0.00288 AU from the Sun to receive that kind of heat. I would expect temperatures to be - well, probably many hundreds of degrees, no matter what scale you use. Life on the surface is out of the question.
Any life will have to be belowground. Even the [extremophiles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile) will be feeling pretty warm. There won't be any water, so subterranean life is our only option. I doubt that anything bigger than small bacteria would have a shot. Even something like a worm would have a whelk's chance in a supernova. Oh, and this assumes that such a small planet could form around these stars (I wouldn't bet on it) and that life could develop quickly enough.
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You have only two stable orbital options here :
* Earth orbits around one of the blue stars, and the other one is far away. The day/nigh cycle with the main star is classic, but the second will be visible during some nights and maybe even during the day. Depending the time of the year, you could have a season with bright nights, a season with dark nights, and two seasons in-between.
* Earth orbits around the barycenter of both stars. You always see both stars very close in the sky, except when they go down or up the horizon. You have a balanced day/nigh cycle, depending of the orbital speed and planet rotation.
In both cases, stars are very bright and emit strong radiations, putting high pressure on lifeforms. Species will avoid exposure to direct sunlight and develop special protection mechanisms, like ADN-multiple replicas. In the unlikely case of a tidally-locked planet, the dawn area will be an interesting location, with reduced exposure but enough energy.
Now, we have an issue regarding the lifespan of blue stars. Our earth is 4.6 billion years old. Simple cells appeared 1 billion year thereafter, closely followed (well, only 200 million years) by cyanobacterias which ruled the day. 1.5 billion years after this, multicellular life appeared. A blue star is unlikely to stay for that long, so your lifeforms are likely to be very primitive.
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Well the absolute magnitude of Rigel from Wikipedia is -7.92+/-0.28, compared to the Sun's absolute magnitude of 4.83. In the sky it would have an apparent magnitude of -26.74 - 4.83 - 7.92(+/- 0.28) this is an average visual magnitude of -41.29.
Each 5 points of magnitude lower is 100 fold increase in intensity, that means that Rigel would give you between 97,000 and 163,000 times the power output of the sun with an average at 126,000 x.
Using the fourth power law for radiation and surface temperature of earth at 300K on a warm day, you'd get a range of temperatures from 5000 - 5800 degrees C. In practice, Rigel has more gravity than the Sun, which would pull it into a closer orbit.
How close would the earth orbit Rigel of 21 solar masses, if there was no push given to the earth and the sun was suddenly replaced by Rigel?
We define M as Sun's mass, r as 1AU, m as Earth's mass, and G as the gravitational constant.
From <http://www.schoolphysics.co.uk/age16-19/Mechanics/Gravitation/text/Kinetic_energy_in_orbit/index.html>
The total energy in a stable orbit GPE, is -GMm/r assuming an energy 0 to be a theoretical infinite distance away, which would require no rotational velocity not to be drawn in. KE is given as GMm/2r, giving a total energy of -GMm/2r. This would mean 2KE + GPE = 0 for a stable orbit.
As we are only interested in ratios, we will not convert into base units. With Rigel of 21M, GPE is initially -21GMm/r and KE is initially GMm/2r at its original orbit around the Sun, before it begins to accelerate inwards towards the bigger and heavier Rigel.
As the earth falls inwards, it will gain KE and lose GPE in equal amounts.
$\text{GPE loss} = -21\,\frac{\text{GMm}}{r} + 21\,\frac{\,\text{GMm}}{R}$,
so $\text{New KE} = \frac{\text{GMm}}{2r} - 21\frac{\text{GMm}}{r} + 21\frac{\text{GMm}}{R}$.
$\text{New GPE} = -21\frac{\text{GMm}}{R}$
Now we need to find R such that
$2 \cdot \text{New KE} + \text{New GPE} = 0$
$2 \cdot (\frac{\text{GMm}}{2r} - 21\frac{\text{GMm}}{r} + 21\frac{\text{GMm}}{R}) - 21\frac{\text{GMm}}{R}) = 0$
We can multiply out the G, M and m in order to be able to follow more easily.
$2 \cdot (\frac{1}{2r} - \frac{21}{r} + \frac{21}{R}) - \frac{21}{R} = 0$
$2 \cdot (0.5/r - 21/r + 21/R) - 21/R = 0$
$\frac{1}{r} - \frac{42}{r} + \frac{42}{R} - \frac{21}{R} = 0$
$\frac{-41}{r} + \frac{21}{R} = 0$
which makes $R = \frac{21}{41r}$ which is 0.512AU.
This increases the flux density hitting earth by nearly 4 x and the surface temperatures by 1.4 x assuming a constant radiation heat loss for earth. This would cause surface temperatures to rise to 7100 - 8200 Celsius.
In practice, it would probably form some sort of elliptical orbit, getting closer and further away than this, varying between 1AU where it started, and a value where total energy was the same, but kinetic energy enough to fling it back out to 1AU again. If someone else wants to calculate this, go ahead.
Either scenario would more than cook the earth, causing it to glow white hot and maybe even boil it off into space!
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Re blue stars not having a long enough life: how about [blue stragglers](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_straggler)? That fits in with mult-star systems, and opens up even more exotic features.
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Considering that the oceans are rising (and that humans don't seem too keen on doing anything about it) and that population is growing exponentially, is it plausible to imagine that in a not too distant future, cities will expand underwater?
* If yes, how soon and at what rate? This question is not meant to entail the design aspects of such city unless it's relevant for the timeline (for technological development for example).
* If no, why not? What are the more plausible alternatives for the growing population on a shrinking land?
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I love the idea, but heavily question feasibility.
My guess is in 50 or so years, it will appear in a place like London, but entirely as a status symbol // art project and not feasible for large style underwater cities.
It's a combination of safety and price. When you state the water levels are rising, the majority of the people immediately affected by it are too poor to attempt large scale underwater living, and are far more likely to live up on the surface in floating housing instead.
To the people that can afford it, there are simply far safer places to live (and they can afford to live there). Though we might be technically capable of doing it on a day to day living style, a disaster (earthquake? tsunami is in the ocean?) presents a nearly 100% loss of life scenario. Maintenance and the the constant damage to the structure would be a horribly high upkeep...at least until our knowledge of construction advances considerably.
On the water or underground seems far more likely to me
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As an odd side note to this...Stephen Hawking made a comment about space colonization being the route to save humanity...the faster we get to the stars, the faster humanity gets to a state where it can't be eliminated. This is based on a simple principle I like to refer to as human redundancy...we are currently 100% dependant on Earth as a species and an apocalyptic event on earth could end our species. If we were to setlle on...say a moon on Jupiter...something hugely traumatic could end life on Earth but still have Humanity as a species survive. Oceanic colonization isn't this degree of redundancy, though it does relocate some of us underwater, it does very little from a 'survival of humanity' standpoint. Not sure if thats really an arguement against oceanic colonization, but it does show we have other area's of colonization more suited to the 'survival of species' line of thought.
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Twelfth is right about the cost and safety issue, but I think that we could motivate the wealthy to speed up that timeline. Cost and Safety are both relative scales. That is to say that what constitutes an acceptable cost and an acceptable safetyl level is relative to the cost and safety of other, currently available alternatives.
So let's get rid of a few of the cheaper, safer alternatives.
Lets start small; a couple of years of draught in the major grain belts, food shortages, riots,... wars. Throw in a twist, a charasmatic leader with some serious strategic smarts, as commander to the world's starving hordes, turning them into an organized military force. Through raids against military armories and governement food stockpiles, that military force becomes an army; eclipsing the civil authorities and police protectors. The rich can no longer rest in thier ivory towers. It is time for them to run... and where better to run, than to the comforting concealment of the ocean depths.
Underground complexes can be surrounded and starved out. Floating cities can be attacked by artillary and aircraft. The only safety lies beneath the waves.
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The current answer to sea level elevation is a [levee or dike](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levee).
This has already been done historically in the Netherlands ([Polders](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder)). This is in progress in Venice ([MOSE Project](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSE_Project)).
I bet that this will be the choosen solution as soon as Wall Street experiments [*acqua alta*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqua_alta).
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Actually what is much more likely would be a large floating island city. [Peter Thiel](http://theweek.com/article/index/218393/libertarian-island-a-billionaires-utopia) has already proposed such an undertaking and is trying to garner other billionaires to join in the project. This of course is with the idea to have a libertarian 'dream' but in my opinion it is another attempt at tax evasion. However, it is seriously being thought about and designed. Floating on top of the ocean will be much easier to do since that is something humans have been doing for 1,000s of years. Make the structure large enough and rough seas would be a much smaller problem (assuming they don't try to go around horn of Africa or something in bad weather)
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A modern day Earth nation is at war with another. That other nation is extremely advanced
but they are also pacifists. Instead of killing peoples their gun rounds and shells have the effect of wormholes and teleport peoples to a distant planet 2000 light-years away as prisoners of war. The prisoners are returned after the war.
The solar system that planet is on contains 3 stars. The orbits of those suns insures that nights doesn't exist on that planet.
Question: Assuming the biological living conditions of the planet are otherwise the same as Earth. Besides the effect of having no nights, would there be any long-lasting effects on the visual systems or psychology of Earth human beings of being in such a setting for several months?
To make it easier to answer the question the 3 stars consists of a far-out luminous red giant, a star like the sun, and a compact faint blue star . The question assumes the planet is in the habitable zone of all three stars and that the star aren't flaring more than the Sun or causing more radiations than on Earth. The illumination of the individual colors from each sun varies but the global illumination (mix of red, yellow and blue light) is about always the same.
TL,DR: Would humans beings from Earth be seriously injured or killed from the long period variation of the main color a bunch of stars projects on a planet?
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To adequately answer this question, we need to know the spectral class of all of the stars in this system, however, the effects on humans of each of the spectral classes individually can be described:
Class O, B - blue stars. These stars have a very high UV output, as well as being very bright for their size. Humans exposed to their light would be quickly sunburned, and unlike our sun, just having such a sun in your field of view for more than a few seconds could cause temporary retinal afterimages. Longer exposure could cause blindness without sufficient protection.
Class A, F - white & yellow/white stars. These stars are not quite as bright, but they still produce more UV than our sun, though less than O and B stars. Sunburn would still be an issue, though blindness would not be much of an issue.
Class G - yellow stars. Just like our sun. We know what the effects of such a star are from personal experience.
Class K - orange stars. Not much UV at all. Dark skinned people could suffer from Vitamin D deficiencies if not provided in their diet even if they go about practically naked. Light skinned people might get enough UV to produce Vitamin D if they don't wear much clothing. Sunburn is not an issue.
Class M - red stars. No UV to speak of. Everyone has to gain Vitamin D from their diet, since they won't be able to produce it from UV exposure.
The effects of having several of these stars in the same system would be cumulative - blue stars could cause blindness and sunburn, but any UV-producing star would compensate for the lack of UV from orange and red stars.
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Size doesn't matter, it is only the colour that matters. Blue stars produce most of their radiation in the UV part of the spectrum, and red stars produce most of their light in the IR part of the spectrum.
Given equal visible light luminosity, the red star would produce no UV, and thus sunbathing in its light would cause no sunburn regardless of the time spent in its light. This would be the warmest part of the day, given its high IR output.
The yellow star would produce enough UV to prevent vitamin D deficiencies, as would the blue star.
The blue star itself, while not producing more visible light in total, would concentrate its light into a smaller point in the sky, and would *appear* much brighter, easily causing retinal afterimages like looking at a welding arc. Also, it would cause sunburn quite quickly, in a matter of minutes. This would be the coolest part of the day due to the lower levels of IR.
Vitamin D deficiency would definitely not be a problem unless people hid from the blue and the yellow suns altogether.
Atmospheric ozone could mitigate UV exposure to some degree, but it is unlikely that such an effect would be much greater than that of our own ozone layer, and could well be less.
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> TL,DR: TL,DR: Would humans beings from Earth be seriously injured or killed from the long period variation of the main color a bunch of stars projects on a planet?
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**My TL;DR: Yes.**
Could such a scenario (referring to the planet being within the habitable zones of all three stars) exist? I'd think not. This arrangement would not be stable. Sure, [multiple-star systems](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_star) exist - and there have been systems discovered with up to 7 stars - but there's almost no way the planet could continue to be in the habitable zone of all three for more than a very short amount of time. In fact, I think it's likely that the system would consist of one star orbiting the other two, as is the case in Alpha Centauri.
But I guess I'll disregard that, although I think this is a valid point for the [reality-check](/questions/tagged/reality-check "show questions tagged 'reality-check'") tag. I can elaborate on this if you want me to, but I can avoid it for now.
Back to the question:
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> TL,DR: Would humans beings from Earth be seriously injured or killed from the long period variation of the main color a bunch of stars projects on a planet?
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I'll go with a sad yes here. It does depend on how far away from each of the stars the planet is, but I think that, given how large the stars are, that the output of radiation will be pretty huge. The [Sun](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun) has a luminosity of 3.826 $\times$ 1024 Watts. Adding together the probable luminosities of these three stars, we get 518 solar luminosities (a [red giant](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_giant), e.g. [Aldebaran](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldebaran)) + 1 solar luminosity (a Sun-like star) + 91,000 solar luminosities (a blue star, e.g. [Zeta Ophiuchi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_Ophiuchi)) $=$ 91,519 solar luminosities. That's pretty bright. It also means a lot of UV radiation, meaning that unless there's a thick ozone layer on the planet, these people are going to be pretty unhappy.
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Humans are remarkably adaptive to colored light. We would generally be unaffected by the colors of the stars (though don't disregard the "no nights" thing... it'll be a doozie)
* Our eyes/minds adapt to the colors of lighting. It is believed this is designed to help with tracking animals. A deer in the shade is "bluer" than a deer in the sun because it is lit by ambient sky rather than the sun itself. We don't even notice this because our brain accounts for it. There are really neat optical illusions which abuse this to make you think a piece of paper is one color, and then reveal that it was a different color, but had simply been illuminated with colored light.
* We already talk about temperatures of lightbulbs when looking at color warmth. We think of blueish florescent as sterile and yellow incandescent bulbs as warm and inviting.
* You would want to make sure one of the suns have the UV needed to produce Vitamin D, or something on the planet will need to provide it. We do rely on the sun and our diet for Vitamin D.
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Two kinds of issues here. Physical and Psychological.
On the Physical side, you can safely assume there will be no changes and no hurt (unless you allow for high UV radiations to cause cancer or low UV not enought to get vitamin D). Our eyes are quite adaptable. Evolution is much more slow than the scenario you pose.
On the Psychological side, on Earth near the Poles there are actually long daytime periods (not with a lot of sunlight, but real daytaime), and I do not see norwegians being unhappy during their summers. They just close the windows and sleep as usual.
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A real issue I see with this world is that three stars isn't enough to banish night perpetually...these stars must orbit each other.
So the planet orbits one star, the sunlike star. The other two need to be far enough away to avoid perturbing the orbit of the planet. If they are close to the sunlike star, they will not light up the night sky, so that's out. So instead they will have to be distant. In this case the dim star, if far out past Pluto will likely be 'just another star' and not light up the night. The Red Giant, even if it does light up the night when the planet is between the sun and the giant, will not do so a half year later when the planet is on the other side of the orbit. Any odd configuration you set up will change as the suns orbit each other, with some period of hundreds to thousands of years or less.
When Asimov wrote Nightfall, he had considerably more suns in his sky. Six or Eight, and probably even this many could not be put in a configuration that would banish night forever. Even in the story all but one star was clustered in one part of the sky, and then another planet eclipsed it.
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An interesting thought is for the red sun and the yellow sun to be in orbits like the Sun and Jupiter and then have a dwarf star in the L4 and L5 points of that system. Then these 4 suns would be orbitally locked with respect to each other, 60 degrees before and behind the yellow sun in its orbit. I'm not sure this would totally banish night for good even so, but the suns would be in fixed relation as long as the orbits held.
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I have been designing a planet with an atmosphere of about:
* Nitrogen (N2) - 61.5%
* Oxygen (O2) - 21%
* Neon (Ne) - 15.5%
* Xenon (Xe) - 1%
* Water Vapor (H2O) - 0.5%
* Argon (Ar) - 0.479%
* Carbon Dioxide (CO2) - 0.02%
* Trace - the rest
The atmospheric pressure is 0.98 atm.
I have quite a high level of xenon in my atmosphere, and it dissolves in blood and can penetrate the blood-brain barrier, so do you have any ways for my lifeforms to not fall asleep on this planet? Would having strong wind currents that distribute and move the xenon be enough?
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Xenon is a hazard to terrestrial lifeforms because we do not live in an atmosphere with any appreciable amount of xenon. Any lifeform that evolved with it would have adapted to its presence.
Indeed, it may be dependent on having a certain amount of xenon in its system. For instance, although xenon is chemically inert, it could slow down chemical process by being between two chemicals that would otherwise react. An absence of xenon might increase these reactions by a dangerous fraction.
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You do not need an extra explanation at all. A 1% concentration of xenon is not enough for there to be any detectable effects on humans or similar lifeforms, so explaining it away with adaptation would be unnecessary. It's hard to say at what concentration a human would experience noticeable effects, but judging by its potency relative to nitrous oxide the threshold is probably between 10 and 15 percent.
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While we hear a lot about rotating habitats as a space structure, I happen to know there are a large number of small worlds and moons out there cursed with low gravity, which has a similar effect to microgravity on the human form. So, I was wondering this: could a centrifuge work to create Earth-like “gravity” on a small low-gravity body, or would the planet’s own gravity lead to negative effects?
[Answer]
**It depends on what you want to achieve**
A centrifuge in a not-zero gravity environment would be a bit hard to use.
Since you are supposed to stay on the cilindrical wall of the centrifuge, the walls should be sloped (imagine the centrifuge having a section of an inverted trapezoid), in order to take into account the existing gravity of the planet.
The higher the gravity of the planet, the more sloped the wall (in zero gravity the walls would be vertical, which is waht you'd see in a rotating space station).
The problem is that in this setup, the exact acceleration of 1g would be possible only on a specific height of the wall: going lower (where the radius is shorter) you would feel lower centrigufal forces, so a lower gravity, while you would have the opposite effect going higher (larger radius).
Moving along this slope (perpendicular to the rotation) you would experience a strong Coriolis (lateral) force, and a rapidly varying gravity force.
If you need just a place where to have physical activity in a static spot (e.g spinning) and in a 1g environment in order to avoid the loss of muscular and bone mass, then I think it would be ok. But if you need a comfortable living place, probably you'd be out of luck
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Ever seen a photo of a high-banked race track? The kind where you don't need to steer at all to make a corner, just very slightly manipulate the throttle? Or one of those "barrel of death" carnival stunts where a performer rides a motorcyle on the inside of a (fairly small) cylindrical cage?
Okay, now picture that, but with rails (several of them, for smoothness and reliability), and the habitat built on the rail carriage. You'd still need at least one radius arm going to the hub to allow loading and offloading people, equipment, and supplies at low/no velocity relative to the parent body, but this would be far easier engineering than building a whole wheel, and because the "track" is anchored to the local bedrock there's no need to balance loads across what might be a very large diameter circle (a couple kilometers, at least, to keep Coriolis-based dizziness tolerable).
Besides dizziness, larger radius also decreases the fractional change or felt "gravity" and the Coriolis effect from changing radius as you move "across" the habitat from upper to lower edges. This could be further addressed by designing the floor plans such that few if any active spaces span the whole width, and/or by limiting the width (building like a mobile home or, well, a train).
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yes, if built like a [centrifugal governor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor), 1g can be simulated on the surface of any body that has a gravity between 0 and 1g.
There could be a mast that is the main structure of the ground station, on top of it hinged beams supporting habitats. When spinning the arms will rise at an angle that keeps the "down direction" down, whatever the desired value of simulated gravity
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z2Z3w.jpg)
([source](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FJqFrRTE83Gg%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=9dfe1d7b50c000772d6aa9cd632a4e0f116336bc7d5548892988ec31f8b229e8&ipo=images))
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Astronauts (during launch) and fighter pilots (during manoeuvres) experience forces of several times earth gravity. They train for this in centrifuges on earth. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-g_training>
So yes, a centrifuge on the moon is possible, though you'd want something more space - efficent than the example in the article above. In order to have plenty of space inside, you'd probably want a train running on a circular banked track.
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I'll give you a bit of context and understanding. What's happened is that two people are investigating a scientist who was believed to be involved in suspicious practices and they end up discovering that he's a "mad scientist".
Said scientist eventually traps the two and manages to send them back to a time period in the age of the dinosaurs. I want my characters to survive obviously so I want to send them back to the period where they are most likely to survive. So luckily they are sent to this period of time (which I don't know anything about).
Eventually my characters will return back to the modern day because they are able to fix the base (and time machine) that sent them to the past after three months to a year. Nevertheless surviving in the past is going to be tough.
Furthermore I know that the atmospheres, plant life, temperature and animal life was completely different. Still I want my characters to survive. Just want to give them the best chance of survival.
**Given this what would be the best age or time period in the [Mesozoic Era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesozoic) to send my characters back to?**
For context my characters are living in North America so I guess picking a time and place in North America should help narrow it down. I hope this helps.
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Late cretaceous
that gives a world as close to what we have now as you can get. Grass and fruit will exist, even if there is no fruit they will recognize. the continents are in similar locations to today, the western interior seaway is mostly gone.
the climate is a lot warmer and more volatile so put your person closer to the poles than you would want today. There are no ice caps and the climate is about 10-15 degrees warmer, so the transition from summer to winter is more abrupt, IE short falls/autumns, but the winters are less harsh. Alaska is covered in dense forest, you actually have sub-polar tropics which is not something we have anything like today.
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**2 years after Chicxulub**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater>
The dinosaurs are gone. The flies and parasites that fed on them all died the next year, because there was nothing to eat. Grass and plants are lush. The land is empty of animals except for scuttling burrow dwellers.
It is a quiet, green, postapocalyptic world. There are lots of fish and crabs and mussels. There are fruits which fall to the ground uneaten. There are shrewlike creatures who watch your travelers - their descendants - with curiosity.
Maybe an occasional survivor is sighted - for example a huge crocodile that was aestivating in the mud when the asteroid hit, and which gorged on the cooked dead 2 years back. It is pretty hungry now.
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Place would be more important than time.
But if your people had supplies and were somewhere cold they might be ok, an Island in a lake would maybe be best. Too cold for amphibians or crocs to be active and too small to have giant predators.
Oxygen levels would be your other concern. Humans can tolerate fluctuations for a while, but not very long. Too much oxygen will make you light headed, and most of the Mesozoic would have had higher oxygen I would think. Too little and you asphyxiate, and there would have been periods like this as well.
So if they have a safish location it comes down to what survival skills they have and what tools and supplies they have with them. If they start with none and they're typical office workers, they're going to die. If one is a prepper they might make it. If they grew up on a farm or something they also might make it, or went through scout training etc.
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Preface: I am new to the forum so apologies if everything is not in the exact required format.
I know that the higher above sea level you go the atmospheric pressure decreases and the inverse is true when you go below sea level. I have looked for answers for my specific imagined scenario but cannot find anything.
My scenario is a large continent completely surrounded by mountains that are as tall as Mt. Everest. Let's say a disaster occurs and the sea level rises until it just below the peak of the mountains and doesn't spill over onto the surrounded continent below.
**Clarification**: Assume that the planet is the same size as earth with the same atmosphere, the only difference is it covered in about 70% water with the land all forming the one continent. The water comes from the melting of **massive** continental glaciers that have a large area and are very thick. Assume they are as large as needed to reach such a high sea level.
Given that before the sea level rose the atmospheric pressure at ground level was equal to 1, my question is **Because of the sea level rising does the atmospheric pressure at ground level increase or not since the ground itself did not rise or fall?**
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The line between a pure science question and a worldbuilding question and answer is sometimes very fine indeed. In worldbuilding, context and background are important. Something is done 'in a world'.
Let's start with pure science.
**Scenario 1**
Take a large sealed drum, on its end. Within that drum, siting upright on the bottom, is a much smaller diameter cylinder, Cylinder A, open at the top. We will call inside this small cylinder Region A, and outside this cylinder Region B. Region A has some earth on the bottom, to Level A with respect to the bottom. Region B has water also to Level A. The pressure at the surface of the water and the earth is the same.
Now, inject more water into Region B without breaking the seal so that the water level rises. This decreases the volume of air, so the air pressure goes up. The pressure at the surface of the water AND the surface of the earth is higher, even though the level of the earth did not rise. This pressure rise is entirely due to the compression of the air in the entire sealed drum.
**Scenario 2**
Same setup as scenario 1, but now add a second cylinder, Cylinder B, open at the top, in Region B. It is filled to the top with water, at a level much higher that the water in Region B. The pressure at the surface of the water in Region A and of the surface of the earth is the same.
Now, open a stopper in cylinder B so that the water in it flows into Region B. The water level in region B rises considerably, much higher than the level of the earth in Region A, but ***no new water is added***. The existing volume of water is just moved around and redistributed. The total area for the air is unchanged. It is not compressed, and so the pressure does not change at the surface of the water or the earth. It is important to know if the additional water came from within the system, or from without.
**Scenario 3**
Same as Scenario 1, but the drum is not sealed at the top.
Now when more water is added to Region B, the water level in this region rises, but the air is just pushed out the top, the air is not pressurized. There is no change in air pressure at the surface of the water, nor at the surface of the earth. There is no compression. There is no additional pressure. It is important to know if the drum is sealed, or open so that the air can escape (into space?).
**Scenario 4**
Same as scenario 1, except that the smaller Cylinder A goes right to the top of the drum, and Region A is sealed separately from Region B, as well as the drum being sealed.
Now, when water is added to Region B to raise the water level, only the pressure in Region B goes up. The pressure in Region A is unchanged. The pressure at the surface of the earth does not change.
**Scenario 5**
The first four scenarios ignore gravity to a great extent, and thus the weight of the air causing pressure on the surfaces of the water and the earth. So this scenario is like Scenario 3, only let's add 'weight' to the water. In this scenario, the drum is VERY big, and is in a vacuum, but siting upright in a gravitational field. Gravity prevents the air from spilling over the top of the drum. In this scenario, Cylinder A goes to the top of the open drum. There is just enough 'air' in Region A and Region B to fill them up half way. Thus, air can not go between Region A and Region B ('over the top of the wall', as it were).
Adding water to Region B to raise the water level 'pushes' the air up in Region B, but does not compress it. The air is unconstrained, and can move up freely and unrestricted. The water level goes up higher than the level of the earth in Region A, but there is no effect on the volume or mass of air in Region A, and thus no pressure change at the earth level. There is only a very slight pressure decrease on the water, because now the air is further away from the center of gravity, so there is less 'pull' on it. Whether the additional gravity from the additional water compensates, is moot. There is no change in Region A.
**Scenario 6**
Same as Scenario 5, except that Cylinder A does not go all the way to the top, and there is enough air in the drum such that the air at the top of the drum can flow over the top of the cylinder between regions A and B. The top of the drum is still not enclosed, so the volume of air is unconstrained. The top of the air does not reach the top of the drum, so it cannot flow out of the drum.
Now, when water is added to Region B from outside the system to raise the level, the water displaces air further up in the drum. The pressure of the air does not change, as it is not constrained and there is no compression. The volume the air is contained in does not change, it just moves higher up in the drum. The top level of the air goes further up the drum, and can 'spill' over the top into Region A. There is no overall pressure change of the air, as it is not compressed. But now there is more air in the air column over Cylinder A (the height of the top level of the air has gone up) so there is more mass of air on the surface of the earth in Region A. The additional 'weight' due to gravity of the air in Cylinder A and Region A causes an increase in pressure at the level of the earth. Thus, it is important to know what the height of the atmosphere is, with respect to the height of the wall.
Also, considering Scenario 5 with this scenario, is there free movement of the air at the top of the wall between Region A and Region B? Are there weather patterns that prevent this? Like inversions, for instance. Is the air pressure already higher over the land than the water, due to other variables (local heating, atmospheric composition, air turbulence), that causes a local high pressure system preventing air movement from Region B into Region A?
**Scenario 7**
Same as Scenario 6, but now Cylinder B is added inside Region B, that holds the water that will flow into Region B (a frozen glacier that melts?).
As the water flows out of Cylinder B and into Region B, the water level in region B goes up, but the overall volume available for the air does not change. Air is not 'pushed up' in Region B, it just fills in the space where the water in Cylinder B came from. The overall height of the air in the drum does not change, and thus there is no change in height of the air in Region A, and thus no pressure change at the surface of the earth. It is important to know how the water that is used to raise the level of the water in Region B affects the overall volume available in the drum. Is the water just displaced from somewhere else, and thus the overall volume remains unaffected?
This is similar to the common misconception over melting icebergs causing the sea level to go up. If the iceberg is already floating in the water, its melting will not significantly 'add water to and raise the level of' the sea level.
**Scenario 8**
Same as Scenario 6, only there is a huge pool of hydrogen at the bottom of the drum, below the water in Region B and the earth in level A. The air is composed of oxygen.
This pool of hydrogen is released into the air in Region B, combines with the oxygen, and forms water. This water fills up Region B, and raises the water level. But this water is just replacing the volume taken up by the oxygen. In this scenario, the volume of air goes down, perhaps more than the volume of water goes up. So the air pressure actually ***decreases*** in the system. The air pressure over the water AND the earth goes down. It is important to know where the water comes from.
A bit of trivia, this was once the theory of where water originally came from on earth - hydrogen from volcanoes mixing with oxygen in the atmosphere - until the 'water from comets' theory gained dominance.
**Scenario 9**
Same as scenario 6, only the atmosphere is made of a gas that is very highly soluble in water. Ammonia, for instance.
Thus, when water is added to region B, the air is dissolved into the added water, the volume of air goes down, perhaps lower than it started out to be, and thus perhaps the overall height of the top of the atmosphere goes ***down***. It is important to know the effects of the added water on the existing air.
**Scenario 10**
Same as scenario 6, only the air goes to the top of the drum.
When water is added to raise the water level, the air is pushed out of the drum completely and into space. Atmosphere is lost, as was the case on Mars. Thus, it is indeterminable as to what happens to the column of air over Region A, and thus the gravity-created pressure on the surface of the earth. It is important to know what happens to the air that is 'pushed up' or displaced by the rising water. Is it still constrained by gravity to the planet? If the water suddenly filled Region B with a 'whoosh', it is more than likely that much of the air was just 'blown off' the planet.
**TL:DR**
In worldbuilding, as opposed to a science lab demonstration, it is important to take into consideration the ***entire*** context of the world, and not to assume the perfect science lab conditions and control of all of the variables. The real world is very different from a contrived and proscribed science demonstration, and is full of 'uncontrolled unintended consequences'. Thus, taking a purely science approach to a worldbuilding question could lead to incorrect answers, that work perfectly in the laboratory but fail completely in the context of the world.
There is just not sufficient content, context, and criteria in the original question to assume only scenario 6 under the perfect atmospheric and climatic conditions applies. This question begs that the answer approaches the question from many perspectives, not just the purely laboratory response.
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This answers assumes that the new sea level is obtained by teleporting water from somewhere else. An edit to the question clarifies that the water was always there, in the form of ice. As such, the answer is obviously that the atmospheric pressure won't be changed significantly.)
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Atmospheric pressure equals the weight of the column of air with a cross section equal to the unit area.
Since total amount of the atmosphere stays constant, and gravitational acceleration won't change significantly, the pressure at the new sea level will almost equal the pressure at the old sea level. (Not exactly, because now you have a reasonably large depression below the new sea level, which will contain a non-negligible amount of air, but close enough for government work, as they say.)
The pressure at the bottom of the depression will increase just like you expect. For example, on Earth, the atmospheric [pressure at the bottom of an 8 kilometer deep depression](https://www.mide.com/air-pressure-at-altitude-calculator) would be about 2.4 atm (2400 hPa).
The main problem will be that the bottom of the depression will be *verrry hhhot*. The adiabatic lapse rate on Earth is about 10 °C (18 °F) per kilometer, meaning that temperatures on the bottom of the hole will easily reach 90 °C (200 °F).
The *other* main problem is that at such pressure (1) oxygen becomes toxic, and (2) photosynthesis doesn't work. (Even assuming that plants would somehow survive the heat.)
[Answer]
**Frame Challenge**
There are a lot of unknowns in this scenario, that make the question extremely difficult to answer.
**Climate**
The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere would directly contribute to its density. It is hard to imagine this scenario without envisioning most of the surface becoming water, and thus most of the surface exposed to evaporation. This would increase the amount of water vapor in the air, and thus the water cycle would be drastically altered. The density of the atmosphere could not possibly be the same.
Also we absolutely know the effects on air pressure of tornados, hurricanes, and such. Extend this to a global scale, and it becomes difficult to predict. For instance, would there be a permanent high pressure or low pressure region over this area, caused by atmospheric turbulence, air temperature, the difference in temperature between the land and the water and such?
**Vegetation**
Currently, a lot of the makeup of our atmosphere is due to vegetation, and plant and animal respiration. Take away the land surface, you take away the flora and fauna. This would change the makeup of the atmosphere completely, and thus affect its density.
**Atmospheric temperature**
The hotter the air, the less dense it is. The cooler the air, the more dense it is. This is a factor in air pressure and storms. A planet almost completely covered in water would change its albedo, and thus the amount of sunlight reflected back into space. This would drastically change the temperature of the air.
Interesting, however, is that the air pressure at the top of Mt. Everest is [10% HIGHER](https://www.livescience.com/mount-everest-air-pressure-perceived-altitude.html) in the summer time, when it is hotter, and with climate change and global warming climbers may not need supplemental oxygen at the crest.
**Water from the current atmosphere**
If all, or a lot, of the water came from the condensation of water vapor in our current atmosphere, and in the generation of water from the hydrogen in the ground and oxygen in the air, there would be a lot less atmosphere, and that would greatly affect the air density.
**Absorption of atmospheric elements by the water**
That is a LOT of water. It would hold a LOT of dissolved elements and gases currently in our atmosphere. This would drastically reduce the amount of atmosphere currently 'up there', and thus the air pressure.
**Deflection of the Earth's crust**
For sure, that much water would compress the earth's crust, thus lowering the current 'ground level' (the diameter of the earth's land surface). The land surface in your enclosed pit would certainly not be at the same elevation from the Earth's center that it is before all the water covered the surface.
**Circumference of the new 'surface'**
Essentially, you are changing the circumference of the 'surface' of the earth. Pushing everything 'up' as it were. At this new circumference, the existing atmosphere would be spread out a lot further, covering lot more surface, and this spread a lot thinner.
Also, the further away from the earth's center, the lower the gravity. The lower the gravity, the lower the air pressure at the new 'surface' level.
However, the greater the mass, the higher the gravity. If all of this water is new 'mass' to the Earth, there would be a definite change in the Earth's gravity, and thus the 'pull' on the atmosphere, and thus the air pressure.
**Surrounded by water vs. earth**
A mine sunk in the earth is, of course' surrounded by earth. This pit would be surrounded entirely by water. Water, of course, has very different heat retention properties than earth. [The bottom of the ocean is COLD](https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/with-all-that-pressure-why-is-bottom-ocean-so-cold.html), just above freezing, because water is not a gas, it is not compressible. The ideal gas law does not apply. The bottom of a mine is HOT. Surround this enclave with very cold ocean water, and it is bound to have a significant cooling effect. The ocean would be a very large heat sink. This would cool the mountain rim around the pit, and thus the land within the pit. This changes the air pressure significantly. Thus, one can not compare the conditions of this pit to that in a mine. The surrounding containing temperatures are exactly the opposite.
This, of course, depends on the width of the mountain rim keeping the water out.
**The Law of Unintended Consequences**
A host of consequences that would be unforeseeable and unintended. Take, for instance, ... well, what part of 'unforeseeable' are you having trouble with? Take Venus, for example.
**Some perspective**
[Data and statistics](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html)
from NASA
Terrestrial Atmosphere Surface pressure: 1014 mb
Surface density: 1.217 kg/m^3
Scale height: 8.5 km
Total mass of atmosphere: 5.1 x 10^18 kg
Total mass of hydrosphere: 1.4 x 10^21 kg
Average temperature: 288 K (15 C)
Diurnal temperature range: 283 K to 293 K (10 to 20 C)
Wind speeds: 0 to 100 m/s
Mean molecular weight: 28.97
Atmospheric composition (by volume, dry air):
>
>
> ```
> Major : 78.08% Nitrogen (N2), 20.95% Oxygen (O2),
> Minor (ppm): Argon (Ar) - 9340; Carbon Dioxide (CO2) - 415
> Neon (Ne) - 18.18; Helium (He) - 5.24; CH4 - 1.7
> Krypton (Kr) - 1.14; Hydrogen (H2) - 0.55
> Numbers do not add up to exactly 100% due to roundoff and uncertainty
> Water is highly variable, typically makes up about 1%
>
> ```
>
>
If all the hydrogen in the atmosphere and earth combined with oxygen to form water, that is a substantial contribution to surface water compared to existing available water in the atmosphere. That is a lot of water. Note also that there is more mass in the water in the hydrosphere than there is mass of atmosphere. The current hydrosphere does not even come close to what it would be if water covered the Earth to a depth of Mt. Everest. It is estimated that up to two oceans' worth of water is locked away in sub-surface water. Only a portion of Earth's hydrosphere is on or above the ground.
**Data and science behind Earth's barometric pressure and climate**
[*What Is the Range of Barometric Pressure?*](https://sciencing.com/range-barometric-pressure-5505227.html)
>
> Record Barometer Readings The highest barometric pressure ever
> recorded was 32.01 inches. This reading was taken in Agata, Siberia,
> on December 31, 1968, during clear and extremely cold weather. The
> lowest known barometric pressure was recorded over the Pacific Ocean
> during a typhoon on October 12, 1979. The pressure was 25.9 inches.
>
>
>
That is a naturally occurring pressure difference of 25%, due entirely to climate effects.
Keeping all of these factors exactly the same stretches credulity, and would take a lot of handwaving to make them go away. Any answer would be assumptions surrounded by assumptions mixed in with more assumptions.
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Just regarding the air pressure I assume there will be not much difference for the region outside this continent:
taking earth as example. the surface of earth is ~30% land and ~70% water. if you rise all the landmass about 5000 meters (which is way more then the average single mountains) you have the mass of the air in that volume, which needs to distribute around the earth increasing the air over the whole planet about 1500 meters (30% \* 5000m distributed to 100%).
That would increase the pressure like you descend from a 1500m mountain to see level. which is not much.
I think other effects (like described by @Justin-Thyme-the-Second) will be more dramatic.
Where does the water came from?
How would that mass redistribution change gravity?
Would that continent sink from that additional weight?
And it all would depend on the size of the planet and the distribution of earth and water.
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**All other things being equal, the atmospheric pressure at sea level will always be the same**
As has been pointed out in other answers, for all practical purposes, the atmospheric pressure at sea level remains fundamentally the same regardless the rise or fall of said sea level when the average surface of the ocean is measured from the center of the planet. We can discuss things like the distribution of mass over the continent, the change in diameter (which also changes the surface area). Yada, yada, yada... but in the end, the change in air pressure is basically negligible.
**Your real problem is how much you want to ignore "reality" with your protected continent**
* If the protected continent is deep, the air pressure on the floor will be enormous. This can be easily solved by making the protected continent not terribly deep (like 100 meters below sea level).
* You have a massive problem with *drainage.* Because the continent is below sea level, it will become quickly submerged with everything from wind-blown waves over the peaks to rain. *There's nowhere for the water to go.* Yes, some of it will absorb into the strata below the continent — but that strata will be pressured to become saturated by the sea water (salty sea water...) pressing on the sides of the mountains. If you had a perfectly calm world, eventually water will seep through the mountain sides and fill the continental bowl with water (salty sea water...).
Which means that what you really want is a continent 100 meters *above* sea level. That way the water can drain and you have the ability to retain freshwater lakes, rivers, and a (very) small aquifer.
* If that continent is too far below the peaks, you'll rarely see the sun. Your continent is surrounded by water, which means it's surrounded by humidity. If the peaks aren't very high above sea level (let's say the peaks are only 200 meters above sea level) then there's not really anything stopping clouds from cresting the peaks. But if the bowl of the continent is really low (let's say 2 km below sea level) then there's *nothing to let the moisture out!* The combination of higher air pressure, heat, and moisture would conspire to have, IMO, a fairly permanent cloud at or below peak level. No sun.
That's primarily solved by pushing the continental floor to above sea level, but that might result in a continental desert because land always heats up more than water....
*There will come a moment in your worldbuilding when you need to decide whether or not to change the rules of your world from "scientifically plausible" to "what I want." Scientifically, you're not going to have a paradise in the situation you've described. The conditions will be harsh one way or another — and that's ignoring the climate problems caused by being a water world. If you want a paradise, choose to have it and ignore all of us.*
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I've read a lot of harem stories, and they often have things set up to make harems even more likely, such as skewed gender ratios, eliminating jealousy, religious support and such.
I am writing a story where the opposite is true, where a god is making a world where polyamory is strongly discouraged. But I face a problem- how do you discourage such for even the rich? The rich often have a lot of insulation from social rules and values, have the wealth to support multiple partners, and can use money to pressure poor people to join their sex group.
The god values free will, and doesn't want to tweak humans much far beyond what happens on earth. They're fine going to any extreme of a society, but they don't want to go so far as to program humans to perform like a marionette, or do something like people fuse into one being when they mate, or to have angels patrol and smite anyone who sleeps outside of their relationship, or to eliminate the sex drive.
An ideal answer will explain how to set up a humanish society or a people which has mostly people having one partner, even among the rich, and will be able to scale up to city or nation size.
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There are 2 historically proven methods:
1. Religion. Many religions, at least ostensibly, are very strict about monogamy. It doesn't always works well, and the rich and powerful find ways around it, but when religion is strong, monogamy is enforced quite well. Even kings had to abide by the rules of their marriages.
2. Gender rights. Polyamory usually occurs when one of the spouses (typically the husband) has disproportional amount of power. This way he doesn't need to worry too much about his wife discovering his affairs. However, when the spouse is not just a consort, but a fully empowered partner, this calculation changes. On top of that, there may be "at fault" laws which penalize cheating - offended spouse could get an outsized share of property if the other spouse is found to be cheating.
Let's add one more option: taking advantage of divine powers.
3. Allergic reaction. In this world, sex with a new partner leads to a distinctly visible and uncomfortable, but not really harmful allergic reaction. After couple of weeks body adapts to the new partner and symptoms disappear, so this reaction is commonly known as "honeymoon rash". The reaction is very specific to intimate contact - it occurs very rarely if close contact in non-sexual. This reaction is very sensitive, so using barrier contraceptives does not prevent this reaction. This reaction is difficult to treat - existing anti-allergic medications help only a little. Also, the body can not adjust to more than one partners simultaneously, so engaging in polyamory leads to permanent rash.
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### First define polyamory!
Polygamy is the state of having multiple partners. Partners need not necessarily be in love (as in a harem), and other partners do not necessarily know about each other (as in the long-distance traveller with wives in different cities).
Polyamory is a modern coinage though, and is normally defined as having multiple romantic partners who know of each other and approve. It was specifically coined to be distinct from the potentially-unethical aspects of polygamy. If you like, polyamory is polygamy done ethically!
Your question describes rich people using their money as a source of power to buy sex (a harem of slaves, or basic prostitution), or at the very least as the basis of a relationship (as with a courtesan or the modern "sugar daddy"). This is not polyamory, because regardless of whether there is realistic consent or not, the poorer person would not be with the richer person unless they were rich.
### What stops polygamy and polyamory?
Look around you! You're almost certainly living in a society where polygamy and polyamory aren't "normal". All you need to do is look at why that is. Some top answers would be:-
#### Religion
Traditional Christianity defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and says that any sex outside marriage is always a sin. There's no scope for gay relationships, nor polyamory, nor polygamy, nor consensual sex work. That's been the case in Western society for 1700 years, since Constantine adopted Christianity. Sure, non-monogamous-heterosexual relationships have always happened, but religious and societal pressures have always put massive limits on them. Even amongst the aristocracy, mistresses were largely kept somewhat secret, or at least "deniable".
#### Jealousy
Jealousy is a big issue, because not everyone has full compersion (the ability to genuinely enjoy seeing someone else enjoying themselves, even when it may negatively affect the amount of time you have with them). It's often hard enough for couples to negotiate one half going out on their own to have a social meetup with friends, never mind negotiating an entire extra romantic relationship! You really don't have to tweak humans that far before this becomes a major problem. Of course that won't stop the "cheating" version of polygamy, but it would certainly put a hard stop on genuine polyamory.
#### Disease
Some sexually transmitted disease could be a possibility, but it needs to be properly dangerous. Historically syphilis was a major issue, of course, but life was so "nasty, brutish and short" that a pandemic disease which only killed you slowly, on top of all the others which could kill you much more quickly, was not such a great concern. Conversely the AIDS epidemic had a fairly significant effect on reducing promiscuity, because it was a relatively fast killer and other diseases were less prevalent.
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## Dicrocoelium dendriticum
… Or a least a parasite with similar properties.
Dicrocoelium dendriticum is a parasite that switch hosts during its lifetime (from snails to ants then to herbivorous mammals). To achieve this last migration, **it forces ants to adopt a suicidal behavior**: climbing to the top of grass blade to be eaten…
Now imagine parasites, human symbionts living somewhere near our genitals. Everybody gets its own colony as these parasites are transmitted by birth. To ensure a good renewal of genes pool, this species “accepts” one other colony to mate with: the first it meets. Then, for a question of living space (intraspecific competition) the mixed colony don’t accept any other parasites. To be sure intruders will not try to invade the host body, these parasites force the host to adopt a social behavior : mating only with one partner (the one hosting the same mixed colony).
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Replace the male visual arousal mechanism and instill the same female commitment attachment.
Male arousal is a physical trait created by hormones, and seminal release needs to occur periodically or frustration occurs. This doesn’t happen in the female physiology.
Instead of visual arousal in males, your god alters the male attachment to be more alike to the female attachment.
Generally, the hormone situation should not need adjusting as long as there is at least *one* partner available, but now the partner is not chosen primarily by visual stimulation any more.
This maintains relationships but deters pornographic stimulation.
Side effects would be a “debeutification” of women as their visual seduction tools are taken away. Beauty won’t hold the same high place, and women will need to find a new social competition strategy.
There is no nice way to take a fully evolved society, make one single change, and guarantee all outcomes will be roses. There will be unintended consequences that your god will need to deal with:
Women will bear a higher burden in society as they won’t be able to buy as much with their looks. It could have negative effects in parenting as they will be more competitive in the workplace, increasing the number of children with superficial bonding with their parents.
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Obs: this question seems to have a very loose definition of polyamory. As I understood, you just want monogamy, not harems or cheating, neither of which are polyamorous.
**Throw away human reproduction and start from scratch**
Biology shapes culture. Even today the social norms dictate monogamy, and across the world and history, while not strictly enforced monogamy, monogamy was the most common pairing as most men couldn't afford multiple spouses and women need support to take care of the her children.
However, since having more partners increases fitness, people try it anyway, specially high status individuals who probably can get away with breaking social norms. It is not because it will increase fitness, but because people who do it become more common over time in the population.
As it stand now, both sexes benefit from multiple partners. Males by quantity of offspring and females by having genetic diversity or sneaking in better genes than her social partner has.
**Possible fix**
Instead of women ovulation like a clockwork, make it a induced ovulation. And instead of the ovulation being induced by just sex, it also requires months of social grooming.
This way, bonding with a new partner would be too troublesome for the most part, so both sexes would rather stick with a single partner. Women might still benefit from lovers, but it is unlikely her primary partner would allow all his efforts to go to waste, so increase jealousy and mate guarding in men. Men could technically still get multiple partners (harems or cheating), but since they are doing the heavy lifting of getting the woman to ovulate, this would probably be rare
Plus, one of the explanations for periods is that is faster to just throw the thing away instead of absorb it like other mammals do. So if women won't be ovulating every month, you can also get rid of periods.
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**The culture. . . of EARTH.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BvjcF.jpg)
Having more than one long-term romantic partner is already vanishingly rare, at least where I come from. I have seen them on the telly, but I have never met anyone in such a union.
Perhaps the rich feel less bound by normal cultural standards. Perhaps it is easier for them to hide their extra partners.\* But do they actually have them?
\*Is it really though? The rich are better at keeping privacy but they also have more people trying to invade that privacy and write bad news articles about them.
Granted that makes it hard to answer the question of "how many polyamorous rich people are there?". If you took a celebrity at random, for example [Martin Clunes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Clunes) I could not reliably tell you whether he has a secret second wife or husband.
But it is telling that I have heard many stories about famous people doing sexual assaults and acrimonious divorces. And loads of stories about celebrities saying the wrong thing online (super embarrasing btw). And the rich should be better at keeping these private too.
I can only imagine any polyamorousness would eventually get smeared on the tabloids and I'd hear about it. "Hey bro did you hear the gossip about Brad Pitt's second family?" Perhaps it would take ten years before the polyamorousness was found out. But I have never heard of that happening either. So I can only conclude it's rare.
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Well, to get society to be monogamous. heteronormativity, where monogamy is respected and enforced is something extremly recent. for most of history all classes of people have looked to mingle with more than one people. even if you had a main partner due to financial reason (mariage for wealth and such) affaire have alway been a common occurence.
your best bet, if your not hellbent on keeping human as is, is to have your main race to be naturally enclined to mate for life instead of being by nature polyamourous, because at the end of the day, it's what's creat this situation.
religion & culture can also help you quite a lot in making sure that transgression are frowned uppon. if there is no societal way for you to have multiple relationship without being shuned, it is surely good enough for quite a lot of people. TO make it work on the rich make it so that they loose all inehritance right and it is given to their younger sibling.
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Background:
It is approximately 100 years in the future. A base has been set up on the Moon and further settlement is ongoing (total population ~1000). The first interplanetary research base has recently been established on Mars, following the discovery of subsurface life by a previous expedition. However, after extensive studies, it has been determined that:
1. This bacterial organism is adapted to several different underground environments and widespread across the planet's [subsurface lakes](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02751-1).
2. This organism is COMPLETELY biologically incompatible with Earth life.
Because of this, it has been decided to cancel further human colonization (at least until more data/a plan to breed this organism can be formulated), to avoid both forward and back contamination by microorganisms and preserve Mars's ecosystem for further study.
The question remains, though: if Mars is "off-limits", where else to colonize in the Solar System?
Any input would be much appreciated. Thank you for your time!
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## The asteroid belt
Followed by the moons and potentially rings of gas giants.
The asteroid belt is already planned in real life to be colonized *alongside* Mars. It’s reasonable to assume that companies and governments would start there. And it’s not like the asteroid belt is unprofitable compared to Mars, it’s probably the single most profitable place in the solar system that will be within reach very soon. Not only that but asteroids can contain ice, which is the one of the most important resources you will need if you want to colonize anywhere. Ice can become fuel, breathable air, and it is just plain water, a very crucial substance for human survival.
After some time missions will focus on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, possibly also their rings. It’s really only the next reasonable step. Venus is far too difficult to even get unmanned probes on it for more than a few hours, much less humans and I don’t expect Mercury will be any better. Mercury is very close to the sun making it also not too good of a second choice. Jupiter and Saturn are not only potential resources themselves, but their moons are not only the subject of numerous research endeavors and also have large amounts of resources. The rings of these gas giants could also provide beneficial, they are sort of like mini asteroid belts.
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Many would probably propose Venus - personally I am against that, but it does have some scientific value in exploration, and there are methods to have people use airships in the atmosphere.
I'd say you're best bet is to go onward to the asteroid belt, especially to places like Ceres. Ceres would probably be a good inbetween point between Earth and the outer planets.
In the outer solar system, Ganymede is one of the best colonization targets. It's a large Moon that's farther out from Jupiter, so the radiation is diminished. The other Galilean Moons are very valuable for scientific exploration.
Going to Saturn, Titan and Enceladus are of interest. Titan would be pretty good for settlement and science, I'm not sure how well settlement would go on Enceladus. Many of these icy moons that may have subsurface oceans might be difficult to build on, and they might harbor life that you want to protect.
Further out then that it's just kind of wherever there's a rock you can build on.
I'll also note that even if you aren't planning on colonizing Mars proper, Phobos and Deimos are still a really great place to settle as a stopping point on the way to the asteroid belt.
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Titan is actually one of the more hospitable spots in the outer solar system. If you need methane to refuel a spacecraft, there's plenty of it. If you need nitrogen to help terraform Mars when they finally reapprove that project, Titan is the place to go. Colonist applications will be available soon.
Avoid Jupiter and its moons. The last transmissions from the 5 crewed missions sent there should be warning enough for anyone. üò±
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Mars is currently fashionable, but I doubt that it's as habitable as its proponents think. We know that microgravity is unhealthy, but there's unfounded hope that 40% gravity won't be. But what if its simply 60% as unhealthy as microgravity? That's still pretty bad. Then, there are the galactic cosmic rays. Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere stop most of them: only relatively benign secondaries reach the surface. But the surface of Mars is irradiated by them. There is again a hope, poorly founded in my opinion, that these are no more dangerous to humans than alpha particles of similar energy. So, I think a healthy human colony on Mars will require a heavy centrifuge as habitat.
But then, why go to Mars? You can put a heavy centrifuge anywhere. I think the solution will be to find poorly differentiated asteroids: they have an excellent mixture of light elements (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, ...) for sustaining life, as well as metals (especially iron and nickel) for technology. Build your habitat either on the surface or in easily accessible orbit.
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Currently, there are two systems for exoskeletons to move with. Soft exoskeletons that utilize [Soft Robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_robotics) and Hard exoskeletons that use electric motors, pneumatics, levers and hydraulics typically mounted onto a metal frame.
With this in mind, and assuming a sufficient power source has been discovered, **what are the advantages and disadvantages of each system for a powered military exoskeleton and why?**
Edit: I'd like to first say that I appreciate every answer made thus far, it has really helped. Though looking at the question, I realized that I may not have specified exactly how these exoskeletons would be used in the military. Basically, the main usage of the exoskeleton in the setting I'm creating is something that the average foot solider wears. They're not going to be punching holes in walls, but more minor things like increased stamina, carrying heavy loads, minor assistance in movement and running, etc.
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## It depends on the Mission, Environment and Opponent
The advantages and disadvantages of military hardware will always depend on it's final purpose, and also the capabilities of your opponent.
At this point in time, it is difficult to imagine a current day example where exosuits would provide a distinctive tactical or strategic advantage over other hardware, for instance tanks, APC's, air or naval power, and even standard infantry. In particular a nuclear or conventional conflict between equal powers.
In an asymmetrical environment small infantry is in the firing line a lot, in particular peace-keeping or occupation duties - so perhaps these conflicts are where you should concentrate the possibilities of exosuits.
If that's the case, you should consider:
* The expense of suits in comparison to solutions with the same benefit
* The maintenance and failure-rate in their use
* The training resources required in their use
* Their ability to contend with asymmetrical threats (eg - an IED, or close quarter ambushes)
So a list for each of your systems in this context:
**Hard Exoskeletons**
Advantages:
* Allows carrying of heavy equipment, and resources over terrain not suitable for wheeled vehicles
* Replacement parts can be easier to source
* In-the-field maintenance can perhaps be possible
Disadvantages:
* No protection against IED's - except if armour is integrated
* Prone to mechanical failure
* May not be manouverable in urban warfare
* Not effective against an armoured tank, or any other conventional opponent
**Soft Exoskeletons**
Advantages:
* Allows carrying of heavy equipment, and resources over terrain not suitable for wheeled vehicles
* Perhaps allows for more comfort for longer missions
Disadvantages:
* No protection against IED's - except if armour is integrated
* Prone to mechanical failure
* New technology - in that expense is high in R&D
* Difficult to maintain in-the-field without a ready supply of parts
* Not effective against an armoured tank, or any other conventional opponent
In general - it may make more sense to concentrate on armour to increase survivability from IED's, which may be a use for them. Maintenance is a key issue, and in this case 'hard exoskeletons' win. However overall these are very expensive solutions.
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# Soft exoskeletons are good for casual wear.
They are more comfortable and easy to wear, so they could help soldiers lift heavier weights and move quickly when needed. They are good for routine operations.
# Rigid exoskeletons are better for heavy work and injuries.
Getting heavy equipment to kill enemies with is key to wear, so rigid exoskeletons would be good for fast work. They can output much more power since their rigid frames can easily direct force into the frame and the ground. Soft exoskeletons direct most of their force into people's bodies, limiting how much force they can output without shattering skeletons.
They can help with moving heavy weapons, explosives, and having heavy armor. They're harder to wear for routine tasks, but they're good when you want to do stuff that requires a lot of strength.
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The advantage of hard exoskeletons would be that they would probably be simpler to make, and also have higher power output in terms of lifting loads, carrying armour, jumping really high etc.
The advantage of soft exoskeletons would be that they would be much more comfortable to wear, be able to exist in the same environment as unprotected humans, not randomly break stuff by walking into it etc.
This means that hard exoskeletons makes sense as something a soldier might suit up into before going into battle, but a soft exoskeleton is something they can potentially wear all the time even if they aren't immediately expecting a fight. So hard exoskeletons might end up having the role of basically a tank, while soft exoskeletons would be for your infantry, for your garrisons, and for support people, or indeed might work as an undersuit.
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There are two ends of the spectrum.
Completely soft robotics necessarily are softer to prevent injury to humans. They enable more freedom of movement. Potentially they could make a human faster or somewhat stronger, but would be limited in armor capabilities. Lockheed is working on stuff like this. **This of it more like clothing that augments your strength, but cannot function on its own, or a robot where you are the chassis.** You are limited by the strength of the original body put into it. But, they can augment soldiers without being bulky or a detriment to movement. Imagine a ninja wearing one to extend his stamina or increase the strength of a punch to avoid wearing himself out, while also being small and quiet enough to sneak inside a compound.
Completely hard robotic exoskeletons are essentially robots that you control from the inside. Think mechs from various shows, or what Ripley uses in Alien. **The robot is not dependent on the strength of the wearer except to control the force**. These are super restrictive in movement, requiring hard or limited joints to increase strength. However, you can essentially be a walking tank, able to survive in any environment and keep whatever systems you want on board. Radar *and* life support? Sure! Missile Defenses *and* countermeasures? Definitely. They are like more mobile tanks, but less durable that the obviously armored vehicle.
A good balance in the middle is the exosuit in Edge of Tomorrow. The suit is limited function hard robotics designed to armor a human, but it is built around a human skeleton.
Typically the hard or softness of an exoskeleton is gping to depend on what you want it to do and how far outside of human strength you want the wearer to be able to go. More strength-> harder skeleton unless you want to add some handwavium actuators.
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Combined robotics.
The soft robotics are easier to wear and have less limitations on mobility of the wearer (and they can use an exoskeleton to work without the need for the human as support). Hard robotics are more durable and can (likely) sustain higher loads.
You combine both robotics to minimize mobility restriction and still benefit from the (likely) higher loads of hard robotics. Most likely the inner layers of the exoskeleton will mostly be soft robotics, then a layer of combined soft and hard robotics. The combined layer likely has most of the hard and soft robotics attached to one another, with the soft robotics being able to anchor into place when certain power thresholds are reached after which the hard robotics take over fully. That means at that point mobility is limited until you dont need that much power anymore but that seems like a good trade-off. Then another layer of soft robotics for handling equipment outside of the exosuit.
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I have another all-female species in my world, and it's Lamia; women from the waist up, snake from the waist down. Sort of like mermaids, but more commonly encountered by humans, as they live in forests, deserts, swamps, grasslands, and even caves (each environment has its own subspecies.)
Lamia (in general)
* Social, but also opportunistic and manipulative, like the stereotypical 'mean girl' in teen literature. Lamia can have friends and loved ones, but they demand loyalty and must ensure they can trust those loved ones. If this is giving you Mafia-ish vibes, well, that was unintentional, but if it helps you understand, then it helps.
* Their society is obsessed with power and logic; Lamia are formal creatures that believe logic takes precedence over emotions and that all emotions should be expressed in a controlled, refined manner. Their obsession with power leads them to believe the strong should rule the weak, which drives every social interaction with a Lamia; if you are an equal, they will respect you, if you're a superior, they will obey and revere you, and if you are an inferior, they will expect compliance.
* Lamia usually mate with those who live in the wild (bandits, outcasts, woodsmen, hunters, and gypsies); they like people just fine, but they generally prefer the peace and solitude of the wilds to city life. I am not entirely sure how this will affect their culture.
So, the question is, **How Will They Fit Into a Medieval Fantasy Society?** This society is based off of medieval Europe. The different aspects of this question are as follows:
**1. Involvement In Society:**
Obviously, the points above may make it hard for them to fit into society, but given where they live, they'll encounter humans, and they *need* the humans, so they'll fit in somewhere. **The best answer will take into account Lamia culture and their dependence on human males-or, granted, males of another species-to survive when determining their role in medieval society.**
**2. Trade:** Lamia have tough scales, which they shed and can make into protective garments capable of stopping arrows or daggers in their tracks. They also sell vials of their toxic saliva and/or clones, though clones are expensive, only given to allies, and must be treated well (mistreating a clone is essentially disrespecting the original, so....). **The best answer should account for whatever impact trade may have on the Lamia's role in medieval society.**
**3. Abilities:** The role someone takes in a society is often related to their abilities. Lamia have serpentine flexibility, making them great contortionists, and they have enhanced speed and strength as well, with reflexes about as fast as a snake strike and enough strength to overpower an adult male through brute force. Oh, yeah, and the clone thing I mentioned earlier? Lamia are capable of parthogenesis, which means they can have a clutch of eggs all by themselves. **The best answer will take these abilities into account when determining Lamia's place in medieval society.**
**Note:** By 'medieval society,' I really mean 'medieval fantasy society,' the stereotypical kind with elves, dwarves, orcs, princesses, adventurers, and of course dragons. There are differences between the archetype and my setting, but for the purposes of the OP, those do not matter and so I have not included them.
**2nd Note:** I have a feeling someone will ask about how Lamia venom will affect kissing, so I will address this. Lamia can control the levels of venom in their mouth at a given time, so while at first it may sicken the kisser, they can actually build up an immunity if they put in the time. s
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You have established three important facts about Lamia in this question.
-The need to interact with other people to continue their species.
-Their byproducts such as scales and toxins are considered valuable in this society.
-They are extremely powerful physically, flexible, and able to make many clones of themselves.
Taking all these details into account, the most likely place for Lamias in this society would probably be the role of powerful and shrewd merchants with heavy control over the potion-making industry.
Since their bodies are walking pharmacies, lamia could easily accumulate large fortunes just by selling their own scales and other byproducts. Then, they could use that money to buy helpers of other species along with wider shares of the potion industry. They could also accumulate the best potion-makers and potion-sellers in order to have almost monopolistic control over that side of the economy.
Being physically powerful and mentally manipulative makes them perfect for this role. They can smooth-talk anyone who gets in their way and make them willingly obey their will, or, if guile and human greed fail, they can just threaten their opponents with physical force. Smaller merchants and guilds would have to bend under the will of the lamia unless they want to get crushed under the might of their wealth.
You also mention the ability to essentially make clones. What's great about this ability is that it means the lamia would never need to worry about having a successor. They could just make a new clone, train them with all the knowledge they've gained over the years, and have that one take over the business when she dies. They would never have to worry about the business going into the wrong hands because their clone could just continue with all knowledge they learned from you. The biggest problem of course would be training them, but money can buy great tutors as well.
Money also buys loyalty, so there would be nothing to worry about in terms of finding the right males. Even if males of another species were not all that interested in a lamia, they could easily be swayed by a few gold coins.
Lamia might even get strong enough to make their own cults, which create large groups of mostly male (as well as some female) followers of other species.
So, to summarize, I think the best answer to this question is that Lamia would make great merchants, which would probably put them in the upper class and upper-middle class in terms of society. They could control large monopolies, run massive caravans, and have vast groups of followers who are undyingly loyal to the one who runs the business, either because they are enticed by their greed or fallen victim to her cunning manipulations.
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*Politics*
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> Social, but also opportunistic and manipulative, like the stereotypical 'mean girl' in teen literature. Lamia can have friends and loved ones, but they demand loyalty and must ensure they can trust those loved ones. If this is giving you Mafia-ish vibes, well, that was unintentional, but if it helps you understand, then it helps.
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While *sociopaths* Loyalty goes both ways, and Lamia's *earn* loyalty as much as demand it.
One of my *favourite* fictional leaders was Lord Vetinari of Ankh Morpork. He's manipulate, lie and cheat, but his loyalties *lie* with his city. A *Political* Lamia would be a force of nature - a creature that couldn't be bought, couldn't be manipulated. Disloyalty would be handled swiftly and terminally - but if you're on the right side of her, she's a good boss.
Any attempt to coerce or threaten would be seen as a threat.
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> Their society is obsessed with power and logic; Lamia are formal creatures that believe logic takes precedence over emotions and that all emotions should be expressed in a controlled, refined manner. Their obsession with power leads them to believe the strong should rule the weak, which drives every social interaction with a Lamia; if you are an equal, they will respect you, if you're a superior, they will obey and revere you, and if you are an inferior, they will expect compliance.
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And there's no *greater* power - they *want* to be the strongest, and while inter clan rivalries are brutal, leadership changes are just one snake lady to another.
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> Lamia usually mate with those who live in the wild (bandits, outcasts, woodsmen, hunters, and gypsies); they like people just fine, but they generally prefer the peace and solitude of the wilds to city life. I am not entirely sure how this will affect their culture.
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Well, I was going to suggest male harems but - *attachments* mean one can be manipulated. If a lamia dosen't know who her father is - her loyalties are with the matriarch and her clan/clutch.
A *Hierarchical* matriarchal society makes sense - with clans and subclans. Clutches are loyal to their parent, until of course, one managed to kill off her clan matriach and prove she's more powerful. This would probably make more sense being done as ritualised 'duels' than backstabing, and being defeated (and killed) by your offspring is seen as a sign of good parenting.
Younger Lamias are the *muscle* - while too obvious to be 'spies' they're generally the conspicuous eyes and ears of the matriach. They build their own gangs of humans and other siblings, and these interclan rivalries are part of their society. When old enough and ready to breed, they either branch off and act as the matriach for their own subclan, subservient to their old clan, or kill their matriarch to take over.
Since its implausibly hard for a human to kill a lamia, and you don't know if you're killing the original or the clone, you have very stable, hard to execute leadership. They can be in multiple places at once seemingly.
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**They are a Plague**
They're mistrustful, individually powerful physically, logic-driven, power hungry, and parthenogenic. Plus with scales that make them (at least partially, not sure if it's ALL their scales, just the snake bit, or just certain areas of scale) immune to medieval weaponry.
The "parthenogenic" bit is the main thing. I may have trust issues, but obviously I trust myself the most. My clones are as close to me as I can get, and I can foster loyalty/control from the moment of birth. I also know the clones, like me, will be naturally faithful to their physical and intellectual superiors, which at birth will be me. Ergo the most useful followers/supporters will be my own clones. They'll also be 100% me genetically, if that matters to a Lamia.
So now I have a clutch of things that, when full-grown, will be stronger than most human males. How many eggs in a clutch? A dozen? Great. I want power. The next step would be to take control of some village of humans and use them to produce more food to enable me to have more clones to increase my powerbase. I'll probably be a Just Ruler, more or less, to my human chattel because that's the way to get the most work from them. (Unless lamia only eat meat, in which case I eat most humans and keep a smaller number of herdsmen/specialist craftsmen, or kill them all and have some clones herd, they're probably better at it anyway. The logic of it will depend on the Lamia/size of her clone-tribe.)
Being at least semi-armored and strong makes Lamia formidable adversaries, and being able to clone means even one in a forest can suddenly become a problem. My bet it they're likely persecuted/hunted/killed where found, unless they've already got a large area under their control. It ain't easy being a power-hungry race of uber-beings! Assassination by clones/disease would probably be the way most Lamia-kingdoms collapse. Either a clone kills "mom" and the society devolves into civil war to the extent non-lamian kingdoms can conquer them, or a virus kills all of them at once(since they're identical and will be effected identically by any disease). Whether Lamians get along with other Lamians is an open question. On the one hand, the biggest competition always comes from your own kind. On the other, two lamian "queens" produce twice the clones and have twice the chance of dominating the countryside as is their want.
If caught "in the egg" a lamian might make an excellent bodyguard for a suitably high-ranking individual. But their innate desire for power and their tendency to manipulate people to get what they want, combined with their combat ability, would make this risky. The more powerful the ruler, the more loyal the lamian, but if it sees a chance to advance itself it'll throw in with a coup no questions asked. So having one as a bodyguard would DEF be a status symbol. "Look how powerful I am, I have no fear of a betrayal by a lamian! Surely this means I am a King-Not-To-Be-Messed-With!"
[Answer]
**THEY'D BE HEAVILY INVOLVED IN ILLICIT DRUGS, MEDICAL PROFESSIONS, AND OTHER THINGS LIKE THAT**
As mentioned by @Nyctophobia457, their byproducts such as scales and toxins make them walking apothecaries, and they are extremely powerful physically, flexible, and able to make many clones of themselves.
Add to that their generally "evil" (heavy air quotes there, as labeling an entire species as pure evil can be problematic) tendencies and appearance, they'd often end up in organized crime, as their physical power makes them good bouncers and their tactical ruthlessness makes them ideal crime lords. They'd likely be particularly involved with the illicit drug trade, as their scales and other by-products would likely be key ingredients in drugs, potions, and whatnot.
As mentioned above, they are walking apothecaries, which means that the Lamias not involved in illicit activities would likely be working at hospitals and apothecaries; a somewhat ironic setup, given their 'mean-girl' personality. When one imagines a hospital, they imagine kindness, caring, and a desire to help, not a cranky snake-woman with a god-awful bedside manner.
**WARNING, WARNING! A HUGE BATTLESHIP, "RACIST BULLS\*IT" IS APPROACHING!**
Given the close association between Lamia and crime, they'd likely have to deal with racism, harassment by authorities, racial profiling, and all sorts of other stuff like that, due to the close association between Lamias and criminal activity, and all the reasons mentioned [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/193799/94891). This would apply even to the Lamias working at legitimate hospitals and apothecaries, who'd probably feel resentment towards other Lamia whose law-breaking antics are contributing to the Lamias' bad reputation and, by extension, making life harder for them.
Some of your societies with a more fascist bent might even use Lamias as scapegoats, accusing all Lamias of being members of some kind of global cabal, similar to what the Nazis accused the Jews of. Depending on how far along on the route to Death Camps (which is broken up into Stage 1: you have no right to exist in public businesses, Stage 2: you have no right to exist in public, and Stage 3: you have no right to exist, period) this fascist society is, they might be restricted from owning businesses (Stage 1), be forced into ghettos (Stage 2), or outright rounded up, incarcerated, and kept in an enslaved state, the only thing stopping the government from going full-blown Holocaust on them being the fact that their by-products are so valuable (Stage 3).
Even worse, there'd be MUCH more support for the above measures, because people showing sympathy for the Lamias would be few and far between, and even more so as the government's propaganda about the Lamias begins to take hold in the public consciousness.
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[Question]
[
Background: this universe has the same physics as our universe. The planet is the same as Earth.
I've drawn out the map of a singular continent and it has all the political modern day boundaries established. How can I work backwards from that to form other continents, tectonic movement, and geographic features of the continent?
[Answer]
I feel like this question is relevant to me, because I have a WIP that essentially started with a history-inspired sociopolitical conflict, then I had to reverse-engineer the world to fit that political situation, which I know is basically heresy to a lot of worldbuilders, but yeah, bite me. The main way to keep yourself sane doing that is this:
**Be prepared to change the political map.**
In my Ancient-Egypt-and-sundry-inspired I-don't-know-what-to-call-it-or-use-it-for-but-am-still-quite-interested-in-it world, I originally had the main source of the Great River be well-known as a lake in a large mountain range, with two cities on either side, but I've since decided that, like its inspiration, the Nile, the river's origin should be unknown to the people of the main area. They occasionally go a certain distance east and then write "Here There be Giants" and go home, because that much land is difficult to traverse without steady food and no such thing as cars, and you don't go upriver as fast as you can downriver. I find that makes more sense and keeps the world feeling more mysterious. And because the world's only city-building races are all in the west, those lake cities, among several others, now retroactively don't exist.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ltCT8.jpg)
(I've added, deleted, moved and changed a LOT more stuff since drawing this)
But that's a small detail on the map. The main things haven't changed: a Great River splitting north from south, with its predominant race being thought of by most of the non-river cultures as the villains of history, with the Known World being only a small portion of the actual world as the land and sea are so inaccessible. Those are the things I think are important to the setting.
**Only lock yourself in to the details you find most important. If it seems like something would be different based on the geology you figured out, then change it.**
I want to stress that it is possible to make a compelling setting working backwards like this. The world I've been talking about started with me designing a simple but diverse lineup of fantasy races for roleplaying based on [The Five Races.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StandardFantasyRaces?from=Main.FiveRaces) Then in giving them a place to exist, by taking Egypt and tilting it 90 degrees to the left, I got really invested in the story of the race of Witches, now called Sinis, and their relation to the other humans, of which there was originally one race not counting Half-Giants, but now there are two, the southerners called Gloriens and the northerners called Normishmen. I started with essentially a loosely-imagined political map, then worked backwards, or am still, to make a more concise and complete world, and I do it by being willing to change some things.
[Answer]
So let’s say your map looks something like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xxxJ6.png)
First, we can place some…
## Geographic features
I recommend placing mountains first. Mountain ranges tend to form frontiers between political entities, so add mountains along some of your borders—particularly ones that run roughly parallel to the coasts. Then you can add rivers for some of the other borders. For the sake of the tectonics you want, you might also throw in a rift valley or two and a string of lakes—which are *also* likely to be found on borders.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pmvig.png)
*Voila*, geographic features that derive from your political map! Now, based on that, we can consider…
## Tectonic movements
Now that you have some mountain ranges, use them to divide up your continent into plates. Some ranges, especially big and broad ones, will be formed by uplifting where two plates collide, like the Himalayas. Others, with more volcanic activity, will be formed where one plate slides under the other (subduction). More volcanoes, and rift valleys with associated lakes, will be found where plates diverge.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UWmny.png)
Don’t overdo this, though, if you want an Earth-like world. At the continent scale, you have two, *maybe* three major plates, and one or two minor ones (and if you really drill down, a few microplates around the margins).
## Other continents
This one is tricky. There could be *anything* out there, and trying to extrapolate other continents from the plates of *this* one is like trying to extrapolate Mars from Earth—sure, *technically* every atom of Earth is gravitationally influenced by every atom of Mars, and so *hypothetically* you could determine facts about one from how it influences the other… but it’s not practical.
So instead, go with whatever makes it more interesting. You have a plate that’s driving up into the interior of this continent? It broke off from another continent way back in the mists of geological time. Draw a continent out in the direction this plate came from (then shift the new continent, to account for the fact that it, too, is still moving). Maybe the regions on the smaller plate retain some flora and fauna unlike the rest of your continent, but like those found on the other one. (This suggests barriers, like inland seas or deserts, that have stopped a full interchange of species.)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7xZa2.png)
[Answer]
Political boundaries are often influenced by geographical features, because they are often convenient for such purpose, like a river, an ocean or a mountain range.
However, the contrary doesn't hold true: geographical features are often the result of centuries or millennia of geological changes, while political borders change in years. Just give a look at Europe: since the times of the Roman Empire its geography is practically unchanged, yet the political border have danced around a lot.
Now you are left with the geographical features of a continent. How do they help you in defining the other continents?
Well, some can indeed help you: for example, a mountain range next to the ocean (like the Andes, or Japan) is an indication of a converging plate border where an oceanic plate is sinking under a continental plate; this implies that from the sea side there shall be a diverging border and an ocean, either existing or in becoming, and those mountain ranges will have quite some volcanic activity. Another example can be that, if a rift split a former unique continent, their margin might be complementary, like South America and Africa.
[Answer]
Great question! Some ideas:
As @StephenG posted in a comment, geology runs in much larger time scale than people [yours are humans?]. So you might need to run your backwards-simulation in several time scales: human, local features, geology.
Human: history, settlements, migrations, society buildup and change, culture, etc.
"Local features": Rivers change. Forests grow or dwindle. Animals migrate. Volcanos, avalanches, mudflow. Climate change. Changes in predominant winds, in atmosphere structure. Meteorites. Ocean currents. A scale of thousands of years.
Geology: Mountains, plate tectonics, erosion. Planet core. Millions of years.
You could consider each "topic" in turn, think of a plausible reason/explanation/cause, and iterate. Even if you sometimes have to roll dice to choose options (as @StephenG commented), I think you can "run the simulation" backwards, as a change of explanations and causes, causes of causes, and so on.
As @MaddockEmerson wrote, you may need to change your map, for aesthetic reasons, or perhaps because it turns out to be invalid or implausible.
I reckon once you have many "systems" running (climate, geography, ocean, etc.), other continents would appear naturally (;-)) to fill holes in the explanation.
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[Question]
[
Hugo Chavez [said](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-usa-cancer-idUSTRE7BR14I20111229) regarding his cancer:
>
> It would not be strange if they had developed the technology to induce cancer and nobody knew about it until now ... I don't know. I'm just reflecting
>
>
>
What he is missing is that [the odds of a person getting cancer](https://health.stackexchange.com/questions/3905/lifetime-cancer-risk-for-people-with-healthy-lifestyle) are about 50%, with [90% of cancers occurring after the age of 45](https://health.stackexchange.com/questions/4006/cancer-development-probability-with-age). The cancers he refers to could be explained by sheer luck.
But then again [mice with suppressed immune systems](http://www.nature.com/nprot/journal/v2/n2/full/nprot.2007.25.html), can easily be infected with cancer.
---
So, let's assume that state actors have access to technology not available to ordinary criminals, like [free electron lasers](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994Natur.371..416E) (XFEL) or a similar device that can create x-ray beams sufficiently collimated and intense as to reach a distant (e.g. 100m) target. Also the device is sufficiently small as to be able to fit inside a room or even a truck. Also assume that the rate is low enough as to avoid [Acute Radiation Syndrome](https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/arsphysicianfactsheet.htm).
Such crimes can be prevented in two ways.
1. Either the damage to the victim is prevented or
2. the criminals are exposed.
Therefore, examining the following in the answers might be useful:
* Counter-measures that can **prevent or reduce** the dose (e.g. house walls material, clothing material, diet, etc)
* A **detection of radiation** would be considered a counter-measure, since it would no longer be stealthy. Could an ordinary journalist detect such incidents? I'd love a detailed analysis of radiation detecting devices.
* Specific signs and **symptoms** that indicate exposure to x-rays or gamma rays (e.g. skin redness, nausea)
* **Diagnostic tests** indicative of such exposure.
---
I know cancer is a random process and not all people will get cancer by being irradiated. Also cancer patients can often live for decades. However, I am absolutely certain that if it's possible to be done without being detected, then it *is* done against high value dissidents or high profile political targets that would otherwise be active and efficient for decades to come.
A 30% success rate within 5 years at the cost of 1 million $, is something many governments would love.
**Note:** Although rather impossible due to complexity, honeypots and lack of access to devices and facilities, please avoid describing methods that *ordinary* criminals can use. I'd like to know what a multi-billion dollar actor with diplomatic immunity and access to state-of-the-art technology can do. But most importantly, **how to get them behind bars**.
Also, this question is not about radioisotopes that require inhalation or ingestion. It's about x-rays and gamma rays.
On the bright side, perhaps this method has serious constraints in range due to ionization of the air.
[Answer]
The cheapest way of detecting such a weapon in use would be by using wearable badge dosimeters.
These are cardboard-like sheets impregnated with substances that (ideally) exhibit the same radiation absorbance as a human body in a given spectrum (X rays, gamma rays, etc), and decay into byproducts with specific chemical properties (usually a different pH). It is then very easy to mix these substances with litmus pigments that will change color and visually display the extent of the absorbed dose.
Another simple method employs unexposed photographic film. This also reacts to penetrating radiation, but the effect is only visible after developing the film, which can be awkward.
Just wear some dosimeters under the clothes, and check them periodically.
Another method would be using *active* dosimeters or detectors; these are vacuum tubes that will display scintillation or other effects (e.g. a resistance drop) when hit by specific radiations. A scintillation counter will then calculate the intensity of the incoming dose. These systems are bulkier and require a battery at least, but they are much more sensitive and precise; also, they can give the alert as soon as they detect the radiation.
A dosimeter at the bottom of a metal cylinder (can) will receive radiations only from a very restricted zone, the one in front of the cylinder opening: it can then be used as a directional finder to locate precisely the radiation emitter.
As a defense, you'd need to line rooms and clothes with metal (the densest metals stop radiations; at low intensities you shouldn't need much) or radiation-absorbing material (e.g. water).
# portable dosimeters
Apparently, current portable dosimeters can be as small as a ring, but require a *reader* to decode the chemical and physical changes radiation induced into them and translate them to an exposure figure. The smallest reader is large as a large cellular phone; the most sensitive is as big as a camera case.
So, unobtrusively *and* frequently checking one's exposure is not really possible, unless you employ some sleight of hand - take off the detector ring, pass it to a bodyguard who replaces it with an identical, fresh one before scuttling somewhere private to check the readings.
There *were* chemical, throw-away detectors once, though. I have seen them in use back in the '80s, they weren't very accurate nor sensitive, but could be checked visually - they were dark orange stripes with a creeping brown that grew with radiation exposure, you wore them on your lapel. They probably make them no longer.
One of them appears in Heinlein's [*The Long Watch*](https://www.baen.com/Chapters/1439133417/1439133417___4.htm):
>
> Dahlquist twisted a knob on the Geiger counter; the instrument stopped clicking. He had used a suppressor circuit to cut out noise of "background" radiation at the level then present. It reminded him
> uncomfortably of the danger of staying here. He took out the radiation
> exposure film all radiation personnel carry; it was a direct-response
> type and had been fresh when he arrived. The most sensitive end was
> faintly darkened already. Half way down the film a red line crossed
> it. Theoretically, if the wearer was exposed to enough radioactivity
> in a week to darken the film to that line, he was, as Johnny reminded
> himself, a "dead duck."
>
>
> [...]
>
>
> As he passed the counter it chattered again. He stopped short.
> He pushed one hand close to the counter. Its clicking picked up to a steady roar. Without moving he reached into his pocket and took out his exposure film.
> *It was dead black from end to end*.
>
>
>
[Answer]
### Concrete bollards on wide footpaths. Spacious front yards. Penthouse apartments.
The xrays must come from a truck parked on the street, so maximise the distance from any truck to a target using architecture.
Bollards and big yards around a spacious mansion should keep any xray truck hundreds of meters away from the target.
If in a big city - put the targets home in a penthouse on top of skyscraper. It's hard to get a truck up there, and theres a few hundred floors to absorb any angled shots. Even if they get it in the building you only need to secure the top few floors - the metal or concrete of the floors will absorb huge amounts of radiation.
Use helicopters, tunnels, or just a lift down to a subway platform in order to avoid walking a street level during commutes.
### Employ short, petite people
Your government employs the smallest people they can find. The energy absorbed from an xray at a given distance is proportional to surface area of the target, and skinny and short people have less surface area to hit.
They're also harder to aim at, making more work for the bad guys and requiring them to be closer to the xray machine - more on that later.
### Find them using an ir camera - or look for missing snow.
Xrays penetrate a wall imperfectly, and some energy goes into heating it up. This should show up on a thermal camera as an ellipse or circle of yellow or orange, depending on the impact angle. Highly visible on the otherwise cold black wall.
A truck or room running an xray machine at these power outputs is going to also heat up from all that power. To find an xray truck in the middle of an attack, just look for the red coloured truck on your thermal camera.
In snow itd also be the truck with no snow on it, or if launched from a house itd be the house with no snow on its roof. Apparently this is how cops find cannabis installations in cold climates.
### Look for hospital admissions for radiation sickness for those operating the machine.
Notice how the dentist leaves the room when using the xray machine? Even though its aiming at your face, that little bit of reflected xray can hurt the machine operator over time.
The bad guys running the machine / guarding it / aiming it at the target are going to get tiny doses of xrays themselves, and theyll need treatment for that eventually.
[Answer]
This probably isn't going to work.
A rough estimate of lifetime cancer risk due to radiation is about 5% per Sievert for whole-body exposure.
A 5-Sievert dose over a fairly short time will produce death in about 50% of the victims within a month. The symptoms are pretty obvious - nausea and vomiting, loss of appetite, weakness, hair loss, internal bleeding, diarrhea, headache, fever, drop in platelet and neutrophil count. The nausea, fever and diarrhea are typically of very rapid onset, and last part of a day to a few days. There follows an apparent recovery which lasts several days, followed by the other symptoms as the lymph system atrophies and and blood cell production nosedives. Secondary infections become a problem.
There are other symptoms associated with higher exposure levels, but I assume you're not interested in that sort of overt attack. You'll want to keep the radiation levels below about 1 Sievert to avoid discovery.
[Answer]
## Frame challenge
Such a weapon would be banned by international agreements, conventions, or law. Rather than prevent (or detect) attacks using this weapon, the defending state's goal would be to prevent the *existence* of the weapon.
Monitoring for the possible development and production of the weapon is a focused and targeted intelligence operation, which is feasible; if your intelligence reveals that your adversary is developing this weapon, then you strike before the weapon is ready, and you have a justification for doing so which is accepted by the international community.
On the other hand, defending or monitoring *every* possible opportunity for the weapon to be deployed against you is a monumental task simply because almost every situation is an opportunity for the weapon to be used, if such a weapon exists. This strategy would be less cost-effective - and less *effective* - than preventing the weapon from existing in the first place.
Compare with biological weapons such as manufactured viruses: if at any moment, your adversary could unleash a novel virus designed to kill as many of your citizens as quickly as possible, there is practically nothing you can do to react to such an attack. In the real world, biological weapons are banned.
[Answer]
Opening: *"Are there any counter-measures that can prevent or reduce the dose (e.g. house walls material, clothing material, diet, etc)?"*
**Thin aluminium shielding will do**
A working [Röntgen laser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_laser) would be deadly.. and very difficult to shield, but it is only a theoretical option, it would *not* be mobile because of its energy consumption. A [free electron laser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser) involves acceleration of electrons, reaching the subject as beta radiation.. I wonder how that will work out distance-wise, because electrons don't travel easy through atmosphere. At night it would not be usable for surprise attacks, there would be a visible glow.. and I found info suggesting a thin aluminium armour could shield off electrons completely.. <https://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-engineering/radiation-detection/detectors-of-ionization-radiation/detection-of-beta-radiation-beta-particle-detector/>
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[Question]
[
I am a hydromancer. My magical prowess grants me two abilities:
* I can breathe underwater (magically)
* I can instantly summon a sphere of pure fresh water centered on myself that's up to 50 meters in diameter if I really go all-out (this will leave me very exhausted). Any water I summon starts with zero velocity relative to my center of gravity.
Unfortunately, I am currently falling from a great height after someone pushed me out of an airship and I don't want to die on impact. Also, unlike more skilled hydromancers, I can't control any water once I've summoned it. Right now, I'm hoping that a large sphere of water summoned around myself at the last second will act as a cushion somehow, but I'm not sure that will work...
The question:
**What strategy can I use to survive a fall of arbitrary height with my abilities?**
[Answer]
Encasing yourself in a large blob of water which falls with you will *totally* protect you from the impact of **falling into another body of water** (lake, ocean, whatever). This will work because your water blob will enter and penetrate the water it hits, providing a very turbulent but soft cushion to fall on. A bit like going down a waterfall, where real danger is not the distance or speed of fall but drowning at the bottom, or being flung against rocks by the currents.
You will experience a sharp spike of water pressure, uniformly applied to your exterior. The larger your blow, the higher the peak pressure of this spike will be. You only need enough water around to to dampen the initial slam of impact, so something like a 6-foot radius will be ample. You are very likely to lose consciousness, i hope you float face-up afterwards.
When **about to hit the ground**, not so much. It *will* help, a bit. But the water will splash sideways more than "up", and thus will not serve to cushion you much. Mostly, you will just be *immensely* increasing the impact damage to whatever is on the ground below you, as it gets hit by many tons of free-falling ~~anvil~~, erm water.
If you were able to generate a bit of stationary water on the ground below, even just 6 feet or so, *and* a moving blob around yourself, that might work. But it seems out of the ability spec as described.
[Answer]
Yes, you can survive, with some luck.
The trick is summoning a *hollow* sphere. Let's say with a radius of 50cm and of a 1cm thickness (so you can comfortably crouch inside).
The volume of the sphere is $V=\frac{4}{3}\pi r^3 \approx 0.52m^3$, the volume of the wall is approx. $V\_1=4\pi r^2\cdot h \approx 0.03m^3$, i.e. the weight of the sphere is about 30 kg.
The terminal velocity of the ball will be $v\_t= \sqrt\frac{2 m g}{\rho\_{air} A C} \approx 36 m\cdot s^{-1} $. C is the drag coefficient for a sphere (0.47), A is the cross section.
$36 m\cdot s^{-1}$ is very high, but it is survivable with a bit of luck, [if you happen to hit a body of water](https://www.newsweek.com/laso-schaller-dana-kunze-dave-lindsay-high-diving-cliff-jump-365349), you might even escape (too many) broken bones.
The trick is to mainain the sphere's structural integrity - fortunately, you, as a hydromancer, control [the phase of the water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice) and you summon the solid state.
Edit: Astute reader will notice that the mass $m$ in the nominator depends on $r$ squared (approximately; for walls significantly less thick than the sphere radius) and the wall thickness. The cross section $A$ depends on $r$ squared (exactly). These two cancel out, so the terminal velocity does not depend (again, approximately) on the sphere size, assuming constant wall thickness. But bigger spheres are more fragile and might just crumple under the airflow. Therefore you want the smallest sphere posssible, with the thinniest wall possible (but the velocity is still square root of the thickness, so it is pointless to risk too much by trying to shave a few milimeters too much of the wall)
[Answer]
**Maybe the wizard can survive, but they should continuously summon spheres of water**
Warning: you should "bend" a bit the rules about hydromancy
You said that when the sphere is summoned, it has zero velocity. It means that it will provide enough drag to slow the hydromancer down a bit. ~~It also means that, if he casts it after they have reached [the terminal velocity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity) (about 200km/h in the air), it would have the same effect on the hydromancer that it would have if they hit a surface of water at the same speed: I don't think they would survive (even if the fact that water starts falling as soon as it is summoned could somehow reduce the effect).~~
But if the hydromancer starts to cast spheres of water as soon as they start falling, and continues to summon them at regular speed\*, they should provide them with some drag.
I'm not an expert of fluid dynamics, so I'm not 100% sure it would work (it would be interesting to calculate), but as a rule of thumb, this should slow them enough to land with some chance of survival.
A secundary problem of this approach is that as soon as the wizard lands, they would be hit by the column of water they summoned during the fall, but this water should have spread large enough in order not to be a danger.
-\* This is the part where I said rules should be bent: according [to this calculator](https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1231475371), in order to survive to their own spell, the wizard should summon a sphere of water every few seconds, which you said they have no energy to do... So, basically, I'm afraid there aren't many chances for your hydromancer...
EDIT
As was correctly pointed out by @cjs, the water has zero velocity relative to the wizard's center of gravity, which means that when it is summoned it is falling at the same speed as the caster. So the idea that they would be injured if they summon the sphere of water after they reach more than 100km/h of speed is simply wrong.
It still holds (as @Willk pointed out) as a mean to slow the fall of the wizard, since the sphere will soon spread and reduce its fall velocity, this way slowing even the free fall of the hydromancer.
The trick will be to continuously summon smaller spheres (2-3 meters of diameter, which the wizard should be able to summon without depleting their forces). This could slow them down, then (as already hypothesize in the question) the wizard must use the 50 meter sphere at the end to provide the last cushion.
Probably the wizard will need to calculate when to start casting the spheres: as @Willk noticed, at too high altitude the water could freeze the wizard, and it could also exhaust the wizard too soon. They should calculate how much mana they can use, and time themselves so that as soon as they have cast the last small shpere, they're near the surface enough to cast the last "big" sphere to cushion the impact with the ground.
[Answer]
**You can't survive**
The water starts at a 0 speed in reference to the body, but it won't stay like that. Right after the summoning the water normal physics take hold. That means drag and deformation. That sounds promising to slow you down.
Unfortunately it is a big sphere of water. That means a lot if weight and power, pulling it down. A sphere of 50m diameter is likely to at first accelerate before too much deformation will start to spread the water and slow it down. But even if it's slowing you down, it'll not be by a lot. The terminal velocity of water is still pretty high, so at best you have the terminal velocity of the water.
But then you impact the ground. You're saying you'll summon it at the last moment, so lets say exactly 50m from the ground. Water is Unfortunately a substance that is very hard to compact. A comparison. If you pressurise a container with air, the air will pack tighter and tighter, allowing for more m3 of air inside. Water practically doesn't compact tighter and tighter, so you can't put more water inside the sphere when it's full. That is also a reason water hammers work. Drop some water directly in a controlled way and it'll smash with incredible power. A reason you often hear hard noises from pipes in old houses when starting to use water.
All this to say that you don't want to land on or in water. Jump from a diving board flat on your belly and you can feel the effects of water tension and no compression. Drop in the ocean from an airplane and the water is in a way worse than landing on concrete.
You have the advantage you don't have to overcome the surface tension, but the water will still not give away fast enough. The water will come to a sudden halt, passing the energy through the bubble. The shock will be massive and lethal. If you survive that, you're still ramming the slow to move water at high speeds at the same time, killing you as well.
A hydro parachute won't work, at least not like that.
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You can make a scale experiment about this by filling a pot with water and a chicken egg. Climb on some stairs, turn the pot upside down as fast as you can. You now got a wet floor that also has egg yolk spread around.
When water falls inside an atmosphere like the Earth's, the drag with air causes it to spread in droplets. If your hydromancer falls from high enough all that water will fall as rain. You can see a similar effect when you look at high waterfalls: you don't have a continuous, unbroken stream coming from above. You get a shower instead.
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In the story I'm writing, there is a global civilization of marine life that's parallel to human civilization on land, however in its world, humans have little-to-no knowledge of the underwater civilization, while the underwater civilization knows about humans and actively tries to stay out of detection from humans.
I would like to know how the civilization of marine life would be able to avoid human detection, and ( if this isn't off-topic) to defend themselves in the case that a human did detect them so that a human doesn't get to escape to tell the tale.
These are the base conditions of this world:
* As this underwater civilization is a parallel to our human civilization, and this story's timeline takes place between 2017-2020 the underwater civilization would have access to similar modern technology that we would currently have access to in the real world, except a lot more of it would be water-proof of course.
* Like human civilization, this underwater civilization spans world-wide in the form of various nations, and territories (rather than the whole civilization being one collective entity in one set location).
* The geography of this world is a nearly 1-1 to Earth, with the exception of a few fictional fully submerged islands/landmasses where open-ocean would've been in the real world, where some nations are lucky enough to call home (however most others do live within real world geography).
* Humans in this world have similar knowledge and access to locations in the ocean as they do in the real world; ship trade routes, marine wildlife reservations, fishery locations, oil mining locations, scientific research locations, etc. so the underwater civilization is aware of these areas and would either avoid those places, or would find ways to limit or hide their activities there.
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It would depend heavily on their tech level. It would be relatively easy for a Stone Age hunter-gatherer or an iron-smelting civilization to hide, but it would be a lot harder for any civilization that has become industrialized. One of the characteristics of high-tech human society is a *huge* ecological footprint: large areas cleared for farmland, megafauna wiped out either because they pose a threat or are an easy source of food, that sort of thing. Perhaps most notably, humans would keep noticing non-human artificial objects washing up on shore similar to [giant squid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_squid), and if they are industrialized they would notice that *someone* seems to be contributing to global warming that isn't human.
That said, it would actually be a lot harder to hide a civilization in the sea than science fiction and nature documentaries make it out to be. Yes, the sea is unimaginably big, we haven't explored most of it, and there are lots of deep sea crevasses where a species could hide. The problem is most of the ocean is relatively empty.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EdegZ.png)
Most of what we think of as "the ocean" is actually what is often described as a "[marine desert](https://www.sciencealert.com/in-the-heart-of-the-ocean-lies-a-desert-and-scientists-just-found-what-lives-in-it)". There really isn't a lot there. The biomass here is incredibly low per square km, and most of the non-planktonic wildlife are larger animals that can migrate long distances in search of food (e.g., oceanic whitetip reef sharks, many other large sharks, tuna, marlin, manta rays, baleen whales, dolphins, etc.). Food is very scarce and animals will often travel for miles to congregate at food-rich locations. But more importantly there is almost no standing biomass beyond phytoplankton, because there is no *bottom*, and hence no algae growing on the seafloor. Light diffuses very quickly and photosynthesis is possible over a relatively short depth.
The deep sea floor (bathypelagic onwards) has a lot of space to hide, but nutrients are incredibly scarce down there. Many species in this zone can go years without eating and have incredibly slow metabolisms to survive the long periods between food. Food itself is mostly limited to whale falls, marine snow, and what else these animals can catch.
The mesopelagic zone actually contains about [95% of Earths marine fish biomass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopelagic_zone#Fish_ecology), but it's not clear if that's due to the fact that the zone is just so big or that humans have just depleted coastal fisheries so heavily and only the really inaccessible fishes are left. Food is still said to be patchy here. Also there is still the problem of no bottom, and thus no easily accessible mineral or stone deposits to build tools, space to grow crops, or places that can support buildings.
The problem is the *good* regions to build an aquatic civilization are all on the continental shelf, the region that extends about 65 km (40 miles) off the shoreline and is only about 60 m (200 feet) deep. That's actually the sunken edges of the continents, and beyond that the seafloor plunges straight down pretty sharply until it hits the marine crust (which is often a couple miles/kilometers deep). This is where most of the marine life people know of lives, and it's the region that has the highest primary productivity. It has the most habitat diversity and the most species diversity, being the zones that coral reefs live in. It's also the part of the ocean in which there is a well-defined sea bottom that still has light reach it, and therefore abundant algae, space to build structures, as well as access to stones and other natural materials like iron ore, corals, etc. All the sediment coming off the land also helps with fertility. The continental shelf is the ideal area to build a civilization.
Problem is, this is also the region of the ocean that is most easily accessible to humanity, and the one which humans have been fishing for thousands of years. Humanity's increasing pressure on the coastal ecosystems would eventually clash with the aquatic civilization, and the two would be forced to compete for resources. Given how many continental fisheries like the New England cod fishery are all but gone, it's hard to see how the aquatic civilization would have let this stand without warfare, as they are far more dependent on seafood than humans. Local fishers and seafarers would have also noticed them, especially if they were highly organized and with an advanced technology level. Whalers would have been very interested in them, not for actual hunting but because paying attention to big marine animals is their job. Look at *Moby Dick*, which was written by a guy who had whale-hunting experience, and the biologist Georg Wilhelm Steller, who worked as part of a whaling expedition. Both payed a lot of attention to large marine life.
This isn't even getting into sonar. Once international militaries start using sonar, or the marine civilization starts using sonar of their own to communicate (because if it works for whales and humans it would probably work well for them), they would be instantly found. At the very least by World War II, where the Allies and Axis would likely think the sounds of the aquatic civilization were signs of their respective enemies before finding their signals to be non-human. [Indeed, something like this *really happened* during World War II with the invention of sonar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_scattering_layer). The big thing about sonar is it's really hard to miss because it's sound and hence is broadcast to everyone in listening distance, which is one reason why IRL whales are being driven nuts by being trapped in the realm of eternal dubstep caused by human sonar and why detecting enemy submarines by picking up on their own sonar is a thing.
There just really isn't enough productivity in the rest of the ocean to support a functioning civilization. The epipelagic zone is mostly sterile, the mesopelagic zone could at best support hunter-gatherers that did not use tools (so little different than whales), and the deep sea floor, despite having abundant mineral resources, just plain lacks enough food to sustain a civilization with no easy way to produce it (because you can't grow anything down there in sufficient quantities to feed a population).
[Answer]
**The ocean folks are very small.**
The ocean is already big, and it is even bigger for these tiny entities. What detritus their civilization produces that could make its way to land or fishing nets is not recognized as products of intelligence. Fishing nets are easily avoided and submersible robots can be seen and heard from great distances and avoided. Their cities occupy only a few hundred square meters and only amazing luck (bad or good depending on viewpoint) would allow them to be discovered.
This solution fails if your fiction requires humanoid aqua-hotties in tight costumes. But actually only if you need human sized humanoid hotties. Tiny aqua people can be hot too!
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We, in our real world, are still deeply ignorant of what lurks in the depths of the oceans. We know better then surface of the Moon than the depth of the abyss above which we ship our containers.
The oceans are so vast that one needs to put effort in finding something, not in hiding it. Of many sea creatures we know they exist just because sometimes we stumble on their rotting corpses on our beaches, but we have yet to see one of them alive.
As long as they stay away from the intercontinental cables and oil rigs, they won't be noticed. Or they can always frame the sharks for chewing those pesky fiber optic cables running in the backyard of Qwstryqpi's home.
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**They don't have to hide** so long as they only live more than a mile below the water. Cameras or submersibles of any kind that can image below one mile are very rare, and curiously enough, subject to export control bureaucracy. If you see research being done down there, it's almost always with the [*Alvin*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin). *[apparently the Deepsea Challenger was destroyed by burning *truck brakes*? Odd...]* So odds are no one would have found your civilization - even if they had no inkling they needed to conceal themselves.
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I would recommend reading **The Swarm** by Frank Schätzing. A great sci-fi with a sentient species of single celled creatures that is governed by a hivemind that uses biotechnology and sea creatures to stop humans from destroying the oceans.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Swarm\_(Schätzing\_novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(Sch%C3%A4tzing_novel))
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A common theme in media is that an alien lifeform comes to Earth by clinging to a meteor that was once part of the alien's homeworld. Usually, these aliens are either bacteria, viruses, or germs, creatures that are very tough and can survive the extreme heat of a meteor entering a planet's atmosphere.
Plantlife isn't the most durable and is very susceptible to fire and heat, so it would be unlikely to survive on the exterior of a chunk of rock flying through space. If this plant instead was inside of the meteor instead of on the surface would it be able to survive being volleyed to Earth?
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Eon-long stellar journeys and flaming atmospheric entries are harsh environments for any life form, not only plants; but plants have evolved a wonderful mechanism for surviving temporary harsh conditions. It is called, "a seed".
Wrapping its vital genetic information in a nutrient-rich medium and then wrapping that kernel in a hard shell, along with some genetic coding which allows that information to lay dormant until specific environmental stimuli are present, the plant's species is able to survive long frigid winters and blisteringly hot dry spells.
This mechanism, if implemented to an extreme, might allow your stellar wandering flora to survive the rigors of its millennia-long journey. And the fires of falling through the atmosphere might be just the right stimuli to let it know that it was finally time to sprout.
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As the previous respondent noted a seed (or better yet a spore) *might* survive a multi million year journey through the cold and vacuum of space followed by the heat and impact of a descent to the Earths surface *if* buried deep inside a meteor large enough for the its core not to heat up too much as a result of air friction and the kinetic energy of impact. Unlikely in the extreme but possible (I suppose).
This however leaves the question of *how* exactly the plant got into the center of the meteor in the first place and then *how* the meteor, which was presumably part of the planet where the spore originated got blown into space to start with.
It might be easier to just assume instead the spore (which would be minute) was just drifting in the upper levels of its home planet's atmosphere when some catastrophic event destroyed the planet. The odds of any one spore surviving and making it into space would be astronomical but if there were billions of spores in the air at the time?
After that, sunlight gradually propels the surviving spores - which are amazingly hardy BTW off in random direction into deep space. Once it drifts into Earths orbit and gets captured its low mass, the ultra thin atmosphere it initially encounters & low velocity (relative to Earth) let it drift down to the surface.
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The atmospheric entry would be the easy part: [meteorites don't get hot on the inside](https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast27jul_1/):
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> "Rocky asteroids are poor conductors of heat [...].Their central regions remain cool even as the hot outer layers are ablated away." — Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near Earth Object program at JPL.
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The next part would be getting out, so we'd need to posit that the meteorite split on impact, or was helpfully busted by a curious human.
Surviving the space trip would be tough, but one can conceive of seeds or spores, maybe even cells, that might remain viable, especially if the species had evolved to tolerate high radiation levels and long dry cold.
Now, the hardest part: how did it get in there to begin with? On earth a seed (or fossil) could be trapped in sedimentary rock, but it's hard to imagine sedimentary rocks surviving a planet's breakup as anything more than a cloud of sand. Perhaps the clump of sedimentary rock was swept by a fast lava stream into an ocean, where it cooled quickly enough that the seed remained viable, and then later the whole assemblage of seed inside sedimentary inside igneous got ejected in a cataclysm and sent our way like a peanut M&M tossed at a seagull. In a hard sci-fi story I think I'd buy it. Can't guess what a planetary scientist would say.
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You may find an answer here:
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> Panspermia (from Ancient Greek πᾶν (pan) 'all', and σπέρμα (sperma)
> 'seed') is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe,
> distributed by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets,
> planetoids, and also by spacecraft carrying unintended
> contamination by microorganisms. Distribution may have
> occurred spanning galaxies, and so may not be restricted to the
> limited scale of solar systems.[
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia>
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My answer to:
[https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/240935/novel-sentient-lifeform-enslaves-all-life-on-planet-colonises-other-planets-b/240976#240976[1]](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/240935/novel-sentient-lifeform-enslaves-all-life-on-planet-colonises-other-planets-b/240976#240976%5B1%5D)
Mentions the classic science fiction story "Seeds of the Dusk" 1938, by Raymond Z. Gallun, in which intelligent Martian plants send billions of spores into space and one lands on Earth and sprouts.
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> Panspermia (from Ancient Greek πᾶν (pan) 'all', and σπέρμα (sperma) 'seed') is the hypothesis that life exists throughout the Universe, distributed by space dust,[1](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/240935/novel-sentient-lifeform-enslaves-all-life-on-planet-colonises-other-planets-b/240976#240976) meteoroids,[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia) asteroids, comets,[3] planetoids,[4] and also by spacecraft carrying unintended contamination by microorganisms.[5][6][7] Distribution may have occurred spanning galaxies, and so may not be restricted to the limited scale of solar systems.[8][9]
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> The first known mention of the term was in the writings of the 5th-century BC Greek philosopher Anaxagoras.[20] Panspermia began to assume a more scientific form through the proposals of Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1834),[21] Hermann E. Richter (1865),[22] Kelvin (1871),[23] Hermann von Helmholtz (1879)[24][25] and finally reaching the level of a detailed scientific hypothesis through the efforts of the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (1903).[26]
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> Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) and Chandra Wickramasinghe (born 1939) were influential proponents of panspermia.[27][28] In 1974 they proposed the hypothesis that some dust in interstellar space was largely organic (containing carbon), which Wickramasinghe later proved to be correct.[29][30][31] Hoyle and Wickramasinghe further contended that life forms continue to enter the Earth's atmosphere, and may be responsible for epidemic outbreaks, new diseases, and the genetic novelty necessary for macroevolution.[32]
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia[2]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia%5B2%5D)
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In a world I am writing, there is a species with a super-expansible stomach called ogre (their scientific name is *Homo corpulentus*) (*Homo corpulentus* means "corpulent human", so they are humans, just not *Homo sapiens*). They look a little bit like *Shrek* ogres (formerly, they were a cannibalistic race, but there was a revolution that made eating human meat unethical, they are as intelligent as humans, but they do have weird practices). Basic characteristics of my ogres include:
1. They are as solitary as orangutans.
2. They can drink saltwater without getting dehydrated.
3. Females are larger than males (great white shark-like sexual dimorphism).
4. Their average size at sexual maturity is 1.98 meters tall and 140 kilograms (or 6 feet 6 inches and 308 pounds), and they are adolescents/teenagers all their lives, in the sense that they never stop growing (like kangaroos, elephants, and crocodiles).
5. They have an average lifespan of 11 decades (110 years), and the world record for the highest life expectancy is 18 decades and a half (185 years old).
6. They have an improved sense of hearing and eyesight, but they do have a worse sense of smell.
7. They are erect bipedal.
8. They have a seal-like blubber.
9. They are omnivorous like brown rats.
10. They can interbreed with anatomically modern humans.
11. They have a lower risk for osteoporosis, senile dementia, and noninfectious heart disease, and a higher risk for type 2 diabetes and noninfectious cancer.
12. They are less fertile than anatomically modern humans (the twin birth rate for ogres is 3 to 7 twin sets per 1,000 births) (the twin birth rate for anatomically modern humans is 9 to 16 twin sets per 1,000 births).
13. They have gorilla-level strength.
14. They overwhelmingly have B blood type, and they have a bit more Rhesus negative blood than anatomically modern humans (I do not mean Rhesus null, but the simple absence of D antigen).
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Two of these could be explained by the "aquatic ape" theory: seal-like blubber and being able to drink saltwater. A marine ancestry or amphibious lifestyle (also shore living) would explain how they can deal with the salt; they likely "cry" it out like marine iguanas or crocodiles.
Almost everything else (omnivorous, bipedal, similar size and lifespan) points to their being closely related to either *Homo Sapiens* or Neanderthals. It turns out that Neanderthals lived in small, isolated groups, so let's go with them. That should cover your 'solitary as orangutans' bit, as orangutans are highly socially tolerant despite their semi-solitary lifestyles.
As for hearing and eyesight, along with poor smell, humans (and most mammals) can't smell underwater, since we can't inhale without drowning ourselves. If your Ogres live on islands that are scarce in resources *on land* but not in the water, they could very well evolve into amphibious beings that can take advantage of the sea's bounty.
This amphibiousness and their island lifestyle would explain:
1. Their solitary natures-on top of being evolved from less social Neanderthals, they are naturally more isolated (and therefore more solitary) due to their island lifestyle and the large territories they'll need to sustain themselves
2. Omnivorousness-if you don't have much to eat, it makes sense that you'll evolve to eat whatever you *can* get
3. Their ability to drink saltwater-they live on islands, freshwater is hard to come by, they need to deal with salt anyway since they dive and swim in the sea so much....
4. Senses-Since smell is useless underwater, but *sight* isn't (don't forget hearing, which still works underwater), they should have evolved to reflect that. Ergo, they have a poor sense of smell but great vision and hearing. Additionally, they hear much, *much* better than us underwater.
5. Extra-expansible stomachs/blubber-If these Neanderthals evolved in a "feast or famine" type environment, which *should* be more than possible on a tropical island with dense forests, they would have adapted to eat as much as possible, storing fat and nutrients for the lean times to come.
As for large size, that's more feasible for shore dwellers. However, it's not *impossible* that these island dwellers defy the tendency to dwarfism because of intense competition for food and resources (perhaps from tribes of their own species) that makes bigger sizes more advantageous.
They can gain the energy required to sustain their large bodies by eating a *lot* of seafood-while the island may have limited resources, the sea doesn't, and if they can swim like polar bears, they have an awful lot of territory to feed off of.
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## Evolution can lead to any result - just not a planned one
The way evolution is an incremental change that gives an advantage *at the time*, so there is no 'great plan' for evolution.
So Giraffes don't suddenly have long necks to get to the tops of trees. What happens is a short necked Giraffe has a slight mutation that makes its neck slightly longer, which appeals to a mate and makes it sexier, which then allows it to have more children, who can then have the same chance at random mutation. Over many generations its neck can get longer to the length it is today.
At any point though, the Giraffe generations may have shorter necks, however there must be a sexual, or environmental, reason for those to not have as many children *at the time*.
So for your ogres, I would imagine you would have a starting point of a very similar creature, with the developments your outlining to be incrementally (ie: Very slowly) implemented through sexual or natural selection.
I would start with humans, as your traits are virtually human anyway, and start with:
* A strong cultural allure for large women, every man wants a large/tall woman, so have more kids with them. This is sexual selection, but must apply over many generations.
* There is an environmental catastrophe where water is very scarce, and salt water more prevalent. It is cruel, but all those that can't drink salt water slowly die out (although this is hard, the reason why salt water is not able to quench thirst is our kidneys need freshwater to extract it, somehow there must be a way for this impediment to be removed) This is natural selection.
* Stretched stomachs / blubber stomachs can be an adaptation to overeating, with both sexual and natural selection pressures.
* All other traits in your list are mainly cultural or environmental.
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Disclaimer, I also use these ideas in my own stories but you are free to borrow them.
Ogres could be from a unique jungle or forest where the trees have plenty of food to maintain their large size. Their original habitat is in an area that has trees which can filter water as mangroves do because its biome is on a lowland area which the seawater floods up its river delta and into marshland and swamps that make the foundation for the biome.
They'd be herbivores since most large animals tend to be eg. rhinos and elephants with the exception of whales which are carnivores.
But you could make them omnivores if you want them to be more hostile and perhaps historically in times of famine they had to eat animals to stay alive.
The ogre would be a feminist system where the females rule since hight plays a lot into the evolution of humans social status which is along with endurance a lot of the reason males have dominated leadership and laws throughout history. In ogre coitus, the females would be on top.
Since in your story the ogres can drink seawater they'd have to have an extra hole with a semi-permeable membrane on their face so they can perform osmosis. On the outside of their body like where fish have their gills. Not on the inside of their stomach since that would just give them a leaky gut.
Since they have large expandable stomachs they would have a very slow digestive system to ferment and break down their food. Which would consist of raw flora and meats. They would not cook their food since that would mean the food would already be partly broken down and you may get lean Ogres. If the ogres can refine their food like in bread or something they would end up metabolizing it to fast and you would get diabetic ogres. Or who knows that could be a plot point.
Since they have a lot of blubber this would be to last hibernating in winter, travelling through snowy mountains to reach another prosperous oasis they can have their young. Or even for surviving long periods of time floating on their backs in the ocean before they reach new islands, they can colonize. This would also make sense since their solitary and after the offspring are born the farther could quickly yeet out of there and leave, leaving the mother to bring up the young vice versa. Then after they have leant the ogre how to survive and traditions the young would leave on their own journey for adventure and love in a distant land.
Bipedal depends on if they have to use their hands often for climbing or lifting or digging or if they've been taken up with wings in the case of a bird.
Since they live so long they'd end up breeding very late into their life and very rarely since that would increase the evolutionary pressure for evolution to program them in a better way to increase their immune systems and have a lower risk of cancer, cellular senescence removal of tau and amyloid-beta proteins in the brain as well as increasing the longevity of their telomeres and repair of double-strand DNA breaks increased epigenetic stability and maintain their glycans for longer.
They would be able to see colours as we do so they can find the right plants to eat. Since they are solitary nomads they could have a long-distance row to let other ogres know where they are and if their a potential mate or if their in conflict with a stronger predator.
Their sense of smell could be reduced due to them living in very foul-smelling swamps with a lot of rotting organic matter or other intense smells.
If they're not from the same genus as humans and are thousands of years apart and you want ogres to be able to cross-breed they'd need to have a close enough genome and epigenome. As well as their immune system would need to be excepting of the other species seed or they would have to be immunocompromised maybe by having their immune system knocked by some kind of antibiotic so they can perform successful coitus.
I don't know much about reproduction so I may go a bit owo, but the ogre's sperm could have evolved some kind of adaptive capabilities similar to antibodies in its way of connecting their glycocalyx's glycans to the eggs
I don't see why that last part would evolutionarily happen unless the female ogres mutated some kind of counterintuitive antibodies that try to attack the sperm and build resistance before it reaches the egg.
I wanna also talk about other fantasy species which seem like they'd be from the same evolutionary genus.
If orcs evolved naturally not being some tormented elf or something they would have more or less the same evolutionary path humans did starting off being hunted by other predators but then evolved a larger brain to outsmart them, so eventually they'd build tools so they could fight and eating them which would also serve as a catalyst for their more primal and violent nature. Orcs probably wouldn't be able to see many colours since humans evolved that for seeing fruit and vegetables.
Goblins could have developed around a place where food was scarce so they evolve to be smaller, breed large litters when the season is right and be less intelligent and have shorter lives since they would have had no evolutionary pressure for longer life spans and instead opt for a more disposable soma.
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A Predator:
* A predator would likely be solitary, large, and strong.
* Larger animals also tend to have less offspring on average (elephants, whales, etc).
* It would also contribute to being more perceptive for hunting.
Scarce pickings:
* They would have to store fat to survive in times of prey shortage.
* They would be able to eat both plants and meat. (Like bears)
Swamp/Marshlands:
* The difficult marshy terrain would make two legs and free arms beneficial, especially for a predator to out speed prey.
* Living near salt water would force resistance to salt water. (Sea Lions, seals etc)
* Strong smells in marshes would make other senses more useful.
* Shrek reference
The others, like sexual dimorphism, can happen in any species regardless of environment.
TLDR: A mammal predator in a scarce salty marsh.
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I would like a planet with Earth-breathable atmosphere, but I would like some substance at the top layer that acts like a one-way mirror: from the ground, people can look up and see the stars, moon, sun, etc, but a ship in orbit would see only an opaque sphere when on the sun-lit side. Is there any chemistry that would create such an effect?
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## No, you misunderstand the physics of a one-way mirror.
A one way mirror is simply a "mirror surfaced" that is only partially mirrored. I.e, a significant portion of light is not reflected by the mirror, but transmits through the mirror.
Consider the standard police interview room with a one-way mirror.
The interview room is brightly-lit, and the side room is relatively dark.
Because the interview room is brightly lit, the amount of light in the reflection is much more that the amount of light transmitted from the dark side room through the mirrored glass. The means that the image of the dark room coming through the glass is swamped by the bright light in the reflection.
From the dark room side of the mirror, the situation is reversed - the amount of reflected light from the dark room is small, and the amount of light coming from the interview room is bright, allowed the hidden observers to see clearly into the interview room.
For a one-way sky-view at night side which has dim lights in the sky, you are one the wrong side of the mirrored surface (depending on the relative amounts of light). While the sun, and perhaps the moon and bright stars would be sufficiently bright to be visible from the ground-side, dimmer sources would be washed out if the ground side is well lit (as would be true in a modern city).
In the countryside with minimal ground lighting, even dimmer stars would be visible because ground-lighting is low.
From space-side viewing the ground. the issue is reverse. Bright ground sources would be visible, but dark ground sources would not.
Having a partially reflecting layer in the atmosphere is not hard to imagine, and it occurs naturally under some conditions. It is commonly observed with desert mirages.
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A mirage is an example of atmospheric reflection that defends upon 2 things. One is usually an inversion layer, the other being a low-angle of incidence in the reflected light - which is more easily reflected than light that is nearly perpendicular to the reflecting layer.
Creating a reflecting layer through chemistry is not easy, a reflecting surface needs to have a relatively sharply defined layer with differing optical properties - such as seen in a temperature inversion layer. Trying to create a layer through chemistry is not something I can see any way to do. There are 2 approaches:
1. create a layer of gas with a difference refractive index. Problem is that the atmosphere mixes quite well, and you will not manage to have a clean layer that will reflect
2. Introduce a reflective liquid or solid. Same issue, atmosphere mixing will tend to mix the layers, leaving no defined layer to be an effective mirror.
Say you manage to seed the atmosphere with a reflecting particle or alternate gas, there is no layer in the atmosphere that will be stable for a long duration, destroying your reflective layer in short order. It sounds to me like you were asking for a more-or-less permanent layer in your question, which will not be possible.
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### Just a thin layer of dust up very high.
As has already been pointed out you wont get a perfect one way mirror. But if you goal is:
* people on surface can see stars and sun, and other light sources.
* people in orbit can't see anything but a uniform sphere.
Surround you planet in a thin layer of dust. Say theres a volcano erupting continuously somewhere and the ash is getting constantly fed into the high atmosphere.
Bright lights from space can penetrate it, sun and moon are bright, and while the night sky may be less vibrant, many bright stars will be visible at night (astronomy will be harder but if born there they wont know any better). Enough for navigation in the age of sail, romantic night time scenes at lookouts in the age of cars, and the odd shooting star to wish on.
But if you look from space you only see the dust layer, as nothing on the surface is bright enough to get through. An extremely big city lights might just be a faint change in brightness tops.
The dust is basically invisible from the ground because it's so high up. Most visible side effect from the planet side is fantastic sunsets - assuming similar atmospheric conditions to earth the dust layer creates very vibrant red effects at low angles light.
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[Question]
[
So I wanted my magic system to have spells based within different religions, each of which rooted in (but not limited to) the country of the race it corresponds too.
*example*
*Dogfolk have their own spiritualist beliefs and spells that fit their style of worship to their deities, such as conjuring spirits and moonlit illusions or manipulating nature in some way.*
I also wanted to give a way for religions to blend together and created the Church of the Collective Union, who believe all deities are real and your belief in them gives them power, allowing you to use different spells for worshiping multiple deities. to make a dynamic power system to reflect the personality of those who use it. However I seen how this could be abused, I knew I needed to a limit on what you can do within that system. So I made it so each religion has three core values. Then I also realized that most people would just join the collective for more freedom, so I decided to give "pure" religions kind of a bonus category of spells that is unlocked by mastering all three other cores.
*example*
*The lizardfolk are strong people who believe their strength is what matters not their magic, so they use the magic they have to enhance the strength they have, they also have a strong culture of blacksmithing. Their cores are Steel, Fire, Power. They can manipulate metals and certain minerals. create and manipulate fire, and Power works as positive buffs to beef themselves up. If they master all three they can create simple firearms like muskets and cannons.*
I like this system and I've enjoyed coming up with the Master Magics. However, I wanted to give the collective a way to play with their magic more. My first idea was going to allow them to make a pilgrimage to each of their core's holy sites to get a better understanding of each of their different values and how they can be used together better. Then I realized that "pure" religions could also do this.
One of my friends suggested making a language for the magic, like words for shape, element, action, and religious spells are just preset sentences that are passed down due to their usefulness. I really liked that idea, *but* each religion is from a different race that has their own ancestral language...
So, do I go back and make the magic language an ancient language they all had in common at one point, or a totally different language that's like a "language of the gods"?
I've thought about this for a long time and my brain is just jelly at this point, I've hit a wall so I'm asking for advice or an alternative idea.
**Edit**
when I say language as magic I mean kind of in a Skyrim dragon way I guess is the closest example I can think of. I don't mean just speaking and talking about fire makes fire. As for the church of the collective, they can only do three core values, so they aren't power grabbers and try to master every magic there is. They can study all the magics and religious history, but the god only lets them pick three core values to embody and practice to produce spells. I did find a good example of the shape element and action.
*Sword Art Online: Alicization* had something close, it was basically using the game's source code to program a function stating the size element and action of a magic object. Like the spell *Fireball* would be *Fire Sphere Propel*.
Also, my gods are purposely ambiguous to make things easier on myself. Whether they are *just* stories made up to explain how the first magic users symbolically discovered how to use magic, if they actually gifted the ability magic to their followers, or if they didn't exist, but then were manifested by the belief in them over time due to the magic.
Magic is *why* this world exists its part of the physical planet, but somewhere along the way, humans learned how to use it to benefit them, and then found a way to make it easier through the gods whether it was just stories or gifts or beliefs that magic itself adopted from the widespread use of that idea.
I think this is more realistic since there's that same debate about our own gods within our world. And for the church of the collective just believes all of these gods are real, kind of like modern pagans or witches, not 100% sure if they are still the same thing, but they believe all deities are real, and "work" with the ones that reach out to them, and some believe that you should stick to one branch of deities such as Norse or Greek gods, and others believe you should work with one type of deities like sun gods and goddesses of water gods and so forth. Its also slightly similar to Shinto where everything has a spirit or god and they should all be respected, as to how the gods would benefit from this rather than getting jealous, they would still have that person believing and respecting them, giving them power. someone's belief in something cannot be divided, you believe or you don't, being skeptical of something is still a sliver of belief and gives it power. so I don't think the collective is at all unrealistic and I've made it in a justified way that doesn't allow for god-like magic users to master every single core value, as some definite don't mesh together. You cant believe in healing the world and making it free of suffering while also believing in brute force and conquering your enemies. you can't believe music and sound is essential to life while also believing silence is the best way to solve a conflict. these cores have to understood and made a part of that person's soul and moral code in order to use it, being a part of the collective just means you think all of those values are valid and you can choose the values that best suit you.
[Answer]
**You want languages, but you don't want language**
Let's get something out of the way first. You really don't want a written (from the point of view of you, the author) language. You really don't want your readers reading along and suddenly encountering "B'clakk ug ug ug NOOObah chaKn,de'tOO!" A lot of us grew up reading Tolkien and thought the extra languages added a lot to the story. Don't get me wrong... they did! But Tolkien [was a linguist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien#Linguistic_career) — and what he did was sit down and *construct* fundamentally full languages (syntactically and lexically). Unless you're planning to put this writing project off until after you've obtained at least one degree in [philology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philology), the effort will be massive with minimal results.1
But you can achieve what Tolkien did simply by relying on your reader's imagination!
**The power of each god is based on the expression of their nature**
Simply put, the dog people sound uncannily like dogs when they cast spells. You want a bit more sophistication than that, but that's the gist. I agree with @DWKraus completely when he/she says...
>
> There is a school of thought that language shapes thoughts.
>
>
>
But who says that language must be expressed with conceptually intelligible words? Language is simply a construction of sounds that follow established patterns to (and here's the kicker) *evoke a response.* The best examples of this are poetry and music, which are frequently intended to evoke an emotional response much more than an intellectual response.
But this is magic. *You want both.* But you don't want to bore your reader with long strings of nonsensical letters (because that's all you have to work with!) to get that point across. Only use words when you need to create a chain of thought that you're going to use multiple times (such as spell names).
*Borath, Elevated Parson of the Great Dog God, began the rite of* Growdwn *with the low, guttural hum his acolytes had come to cherish as the merging of thought and power. His hymn rose in volume as the deep-throated cadence of the Longshore Wolf began to weave through their own thoughts, drawing them into the spell's coven. Sharp barks, echoing off the canyon wall began to instill images of the chase and the love of wind and moonlight. The acolytes began their descant — the pack following the bravery of the mightiest among them. The rhythm pulsed with blood as the sight of all focused on the rite's prey....*
In that entire narrative, I introduced a single word: Growdwn. Everything else is left to the reader. And if I did my job well, the reader becomes caught up *emotionally* in the moment rather than *intellectually,* as they must do to read unfamiliar words. But in balance, the reader is also caught up with a sense of *complexity,* the feeling that there's a pattern underlying the text that if they could just get ten minutes of your time at ComiCon they could force you to admit its existence and reveal the details.2
This also frees you to be much more creative with the *expression* of each god's magic. Rather than using the traditional hissing for the lizard folk, consider the "language" to be "sign language," the motion of the body — a dance reminiscent of the motion of all the herpein breeds — and just as emotionally evocative.
**Finally, the unified church must be both stronger and weaker, or your system is unbalanced**
Ask yourself (I'm sure you already have), what the Church of the Collective Union is good for? From the point of view of mere mortals, it may be an act of diplomacy or simply that some people didn't want to be bound to a single god and needed some way to spread the joy without having to be all day about it. But what purpose would it serve for the gods, themselves? I must assume they're not jealous, losing dedicated believers to be shared with the other gods. So what's in it for them? Why allow the Church at all?
*What problem is solved that cannot be individually in the other Churches?*
OK, so I need to leave that to you: but the point is, whatever that ***specific*** goal or problem is, it defines what the Church practitioners can and cannot do. They may utilize elements of the magical expressions of all five gods — but they cannot achieve the magic of those individual schools *at all.* (And you really want that — otherwise everyone would be Church members, it being all-powerful, dontchaknow).
But in that one thing, the Church alone is able to achieve mastery. Let's be banal for the sake of example and suggest that Terry Pratchett's [Dungeon Dimensions](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Dungeon_Dimensions), alternate realities that be filled with monsters, are a part of your universe. But no *single* god (or his/her magic) is capable of dealing with them! In this case, Church practitioners are uniquely suited to the magic of invoking, controlling, and dispatching, said monsters.
And that is the *one and only* thing they're good at — and each individual god's magic is useless for it. The individual magics serve different (and separate) purposes.
Which means there's a sixth "language expression," one unusable by the five gods' practitioners individually, that is unique to Church members. In my example, it has to do with monster-filled alternate dimensions.
It might be a language that expresses fear.
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1 *This is really important. I don't want to downplay anybody's creative efforts, but I was a micropublisher for 10 years and reviewed thousands of manuscripts. Frankly, people kinda think that what Tolkien did was easy... No it wasn't. In fact, if I remember correctly, he spent years developing the languages in conjunction with an elaborate backstory, just to write* The Hobbit, *which was the story he wrote so he could write what he actually wanted to write,* The Lord of the Rings. *His effort cannot be duplicated in less time, and it's quite obvious when an amateur strings together a quick knock-together language and thinks they did what Tolkien did. Honestly, and with all the love in the world... if you're not going to invest the time Tolkien did to achieve what Tolkien did, don't even try. Work around it and focus on your own strengths.*
2 *This behavior is very well known in the world of fiction. So much so that it was lampooned in the movie* Galaxy Quest. *A group of kids make multiple efforts to approach Captain Peter Quincy Taggart, played by Jason Nesmith, played by Tim Allen (you gotta love that...) about how some aspect of the space ship couldn't possibly be real and how that should be resolved when Nesmith looses his cool and shouts, "There IS no quantum flux and there IS no auxiliary... There's no goddamn ship! You got it?" I'm sure there's a never-ending line of Star Trek fans who wanted details that never existed in the first place because they believed the only way to get that kind of an imaginative response was to have those details — and the actors and producers were just being mean by not sharing.*
[Answer]
**Music is the first language.**
Before there were words there were songs. Before there was language there was music. Listen to a language you do not know, and with the words meaningless, you can appreciate the song that is the skeleton of an utterance. You don't understand the words, but you can hear the music.
The Universalists realize this. Magic is older than language because magic comes from music. When they wound together the religions they knew, and some they didn't, they went back to music and rhythm to do it.
It is possible to make music that is larger than any song. It is possible to make complex amazing music with hundreds of voices. Hundreds of voices speaking would be gibberish. The strength of the universalists is the ability of their magic to unify many disparate voices in a common union of music. This is seriously big magic.
It might be going on all the time. All around us.
[Answer]
## ***Wrong Premise:***
Yes, language is tied to magic. Your goal is to make the universal magic system more flexible than the others, but you are also wanting to make your individual magic systems special. So what do you do?
There is a school of thought that language shapes thoughts, and without a word for (for example) blue, people don't see blue the same. Greek literature has an example of this in blue. Old Greek texts have no word for blue, and the sea is seen as green, the sky as grey.
Your universal magic system has distinct advantages, but the native languages of the three peoples shape their thoughts and give them special relations with their chosen abilities. A lizard man (reptoid) trying to use dogman (cynocephali) magic in the universal system is hindered in how far he can go. His brain doesn't fully conceptualize the magic. Similarly, a cynocephali - speaking dog man trying to do reptoid magic sees the world differently and struggles to do the right magic.
You can have a universal god language, allowing access to all magics. But each race will work better with their own abilities. That wasn't exactly what you wanted, so here's the catch: Those that learn all the other's languages and can THINK in those languages are able to use all abilities. This makes mastering universal a much more challenging task, as you need to be a little of each race in your own head, code-switching between languages as you go.
A master universalist must understand the language and culture of ALL races to truly master their magic. Scholars CAN do anything with universal, but the balancing act is, you hardly need to do anything to be good at your own race magic. Linguists are the greatest mages, and immersing yourself in an unfamiliar culture makes you more powerful (those pilgrimages are more about linguistics than holiness).
Thus universalists empathize and study, instead of crushing all with their "greater" power.
[Answer]
**Barking up the wrong tree**
Magic granted by the gods and the aptitude of the person are not always the same. Most of your dogfolk might have the Moon/Conjure/Illusions aptitude which is great for their tribe and their worship. If one of them has Conjure/Illusion/Wind as their personal core they might never really advance beyond simple moon spells.
Joining the collective is about self-discovery and learning the basics. The aforementioned dogfolk might be able to learn about more cores and after finding some basic magics from other factions that are useful in conjure/illusion (maybe basic light/dark magic to go with illusions or basic enhancement magic for strengthening conjure) finds wind and easily takes to it.
Staying with your tribe means that you can grow incredibly powerful from the old knowledge but, only in the tribes cores. Travelling to the Collective allows you to trade your tribes knowledge and discover your cores. In terms of power, Tribal Core > Personal outside-tribe Core > non-tribal, non-personal Core. Language doesn't need to be the definitive value but could be a part of what makes a particular tribal core stronger like @JBH mentioned in his answer.
[Answer]
I would suggest the following.
First I won't try to make a language of the gods nor connect language to magic.
Why?
Because languages are a real world thing with obvious history and aspects to be studied, like grammar, while magic is not.
We have zero idea of the changes that happens to language when you connect to a magic system.
For example lets assume that Latin is the language for magic. But what Latin?
Latin changed and evolved overtime. Lexicon, syntax, morphology...etc.
So at what point does X refer to fire while the fact that X referred to something else in the beginning.
This also does include metaphorical usages or words with more than one meaning.
Ah but you might counter that by saying: No. It's a set language with little changes and it's made in stone.
This can actually work provided that you do make a sort of god or something to create the language and pass it down to people in that form.
With the fact that if you failed to produce the correct sentence or word then the wanted spell won't happen.
This will make the language like 100% stable, for magical usages actually, but you have to understand all that.
This probably will have many side effects such as people developing a different version of the language to communicate without summoning demons or burnings down their house.
Like the angels say that if you say "Djeb " the right way then a fire appears.
So people are like ok. "Bejd" is fire.
WTH!
Well. It makes sense that if you provide people with a language that is magical for them to use a slightly altered version to communicate.
Perhaps the different languages in your world are a result of the different races changing things to communicate without magic.
Does that sound natural?
The problem is in other things.
For example "Djeb" is fire. OK can I say not Djeb and conjure some water?
What about 2 Djeb is it double the fire?
Those are all problems that happen once you decide that the language is connected to magic.
However in something like Harry Potter they were nonsensical words that just caused the wanted effect. So pointing a wand and saying die really hard does not mean people die. Only the correct spell.
And in the Dresden files I think they used it like a focusing point or something.
Like saying fire helps to conjure it but if you are strong enough then sure.
But you also have to be careful if you make a truly magical tongue.
So that's why authors use older dead languages or stuff like that.
My solution?
**The magical "language" is only a few thousands word to begin with.**
**And they are the direct results of a few schools, or whatever, of magic**
So it's like martial arts or music.
They represent the thought process or the method of handling magic in the world as put down by those schools.
So school Magnar uses a system of short letters to teach students to learn magic.
This means that students are fast but maybe they magic is short lived.
The Derna school on the other hand only uses long words and as a result not as fast but last longer.
My final solutions.
You can simply have the magical tongues the result of the early masters of magic using their own unique words to teach their students.
So you get a magical school of nonsensical German words because their master was German and he started the study and those who want to study magic follow him.
Then another one from China and an Arabic one and a Russian one and so on.
So the Spanish wizard figured out he can conjure fire, then decided to put down a magical method of producing fire and locking away the magical fire beyond a door with the key being the word fuego.
This allows you to play around with words as much as you like and add a bit of cultural flavor to the magic and the schools.
However much of this supposes that a lot of this is based on the fact that magic is both a magical thing but also a thing that has to be uttered.
I mean you did not set in stone the oedijho means cloud so we are trying to figure out the system from the grounds up.
If you can actually practice magic without an words then obviously the speed of thought is better also this gives that ability for non talking people to practice magic and also also makes it that spells that prevent you from talking won't work.
But that's out of context here.
However I'm willing to explore it more if you actually explain the magic and where it comes from. Because like I said people would prefer to practice without words at all.
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As some of the other answers have already suggested, having an interplay between, but a barrier to the 'crossover' potential in your magic systems seems like a good place to start.
It actually reminds me quite a lot of the bending systems from Avatar: The Last Airbender, now that I think about it. If each race has their own particular variety of magic, and it's tied to their language (and, ostensibly, their geographical location and cultural identity on a more spiritual level), then it would be impossible for a genuine crossover to occur: A dogfolk could literally never use the lizardfolk's magic. In A:tlA, this is due to an unexplained innate trait found in each nation, but for different species of humanoids it could be literal and physiological: A lizardman lacks the type of vocal chords that allow a dogman to growl in the back of his throat, and a dogman is similarly incapable of producing the sussurous hissing of the lizardfolk's language. Any attempt to utilize the other species' language will be broken and half-formed at best.
However, in A:tlA, the technique of firebenders using lightning is made possible by mimicking the mentality, motions, and meditations of waterbenders. It does not allow the firebender to suddenly use waterbending, but it makes them able to utilize firebending in a way they never could otherwise.
I'd say looking for a core value, as opposed to the physical manifestation of the abilities, is going to give you more fertile ground for interplay between the cultures: Yes, the lizardfolk can give themselves physical buffs and super strength, but \*\*why\*\* they prioritize doing so is a much more interesting question. Is it because they value individualistic freedom and power for its own sake? is it due to a harsh environment instilling a darwinian 'might makes right' philosophy into their culture? or is it because they believe in self-sacrifice and seeking power in order to protect others?
Any of the above philosophies standing at the center of their powers makes it much easier to play off of the others involved: A member of the dogfolk may never be capable of utilizing the lizardfolk's magic, but applying the firm, unyielding dedication to personal growth and strength to their own magic, which is perhaps traditionally focused on balance and unity with the world around you, may allow said dogfolk to use their magic in atypical and unique ways, much like applying the principles of waterbending to firebending allows for use of an entirely new technique.
Because of all I just said, I'd definitely avoid pulling a 'language of the gods' outright.
It could be entirely possible that a newer development in your world is the discovery of just such a language: archaeologists or arcane researchers have only recently discovered a few words in ancient ruins that allow any race to cast the spell it describes regardless of their usual restrictions. I don't think making this knowledge complete or ubiquitous would serve your story, but could allow for some points of crossover (and hell, possibly even allow for an entire plot thread unto itself) if you wanted to go that route.
I also think the Church of the Collective Union could still work, or perhaps even work better, with these limitations: the members are incapable of \*\*truly\*\* adopting a different magic system than the one they're born with, but they would actively seek out new avenues of understanding by studying other cultures and practicing their customs. A dogfolk who has trained more under the lizardfolk's philosophy and thus uses the dogfolk's traditionally calm, ritualistic, and passive magic system to unexpected effect in combat as a totally unique form of martial arts could be a lot of fun to explore. The opposite where a lizardman uses the usually brutal, blunt, practical act of shaping and manipulating metal to instead create fluid, beautiful, intricate sculptures that invoke the ancient spirits that the dogfolk worship could also happen, and any other combination based on the races you want to include (obviously, I'm just using the dogfolk and lizardfolk as those are the ones you described in the original answer).
All in all, I think the most important thing to remember here is Sanderson's third law: Limitations > Powers. Focus on what your magic system \*\*can't\*\* do more than what it \*\*can\*\*, and use those limits to your advantage in order to give your characters something more meaningful to overcome.
[Answer]
Depending on how much religion matters to magic in your world...
The belief in the gods could force the world to make a magic to suit that god, which may or may not exist, but the belief in it makes the magic usable.
And part of that belief is that language matters?
[Answer]
Making a new answer for a new answer.
Are all languages magical, or just some?
If it's only the old dead ones, maybe there's something about being old, and / or dead...
And / or having its native users be dead... or having no living natives and all that death energy is powering the language.
So maybe casting spells is draining energy from a finite and at some point, the most widely used languages stop being magic.
[Answer]
**The Language**
The Church of the Collective embraces all. This would lead to indicate that this church's magic should be more general. Even if a person can only have three values that define their magic, few in the Church of the Collective will have taken the time to truly master any one facet of magic.
Alternative, there might be people that master single core values to the exclusion of all else, holding up a single value for the Church with acolytes studying under any three masters to gain their core values.
The language of their magic is, while not simpler, older. But in contrast, it can do everything at competently.
Compare this to the individual religions: To use your example, the Lizardfolk hone their focus on three things in particular -- Steel, Power, and Fire. Because they study these three things to basically the exclusion of all else, their magic language has more precise and better words for the magics involving these three aspects than the Church does. So much so, that by mastering the three pillars of the magic, they combine to form a Firearm word -- something the Church's older language has no word for.
To use a comparison, the Church's magic language is Latin while the individual religions are the romance languages that have derived from the original Latin. Perhaps not the best comparison, but I feel it apt.
Another potential comparison is professional jargon. By specializing in something, you learn all the jargon and technical words that describe things better than just the core language. In this case, it is additions to the base language over time as opposed to an evolution in the magic language.
**Collective Benefits**
The first primary benefit of the Collective is that they will be able (in theory) to combine the knowledge of any two (or three) core values into something a bit better. Lizardfolk might be the masters at Power, but in theory if somebody has Earth and Power, they might be able to empower the earth for fertility or something to that nature.
The Lizardfolk cannot do that within themselves -- they only have Power. The religion that holds Earth may not be able to do it either if they don't hold Power. They might be able to do a lesser version of these by using one value, but only by combing the values do you get the best result.
The second benefit is the breadth of knowledge. I suspect that most religion will be fairly set in their ways -- they know their values and can get the best out of them. But the Church will have people that have been out there and learned from multiple people. This will almost certainly give people ideas outside the established teachings of the pure religions. Not 100% true, but a fair generality I think.
Bakuhaku brought up Avatar and Iroh, and that works beautifully -- by studying Water, Iroh developed a Fire technique for redirecting lightning. Similar things apply with the values.
**Religion Benefits**
So why only study one religion and it's defined three values then? Well, there is that sweet fourth value that is likely the religions secret skillset. Firearms do sound awesome.
There is also the premise of specialization. Lizardfolk are the consummate experts in Fire. Anybody with a Fire value can chuck a basic fireball, but a Lizardfolk has such control over it that they can make Fire do things that other folk just can't do. This extends to professions and other aspects of life where fire plays a strong role -- smithing and cooking for two, potions if they require heat too.
Again using Avatar, there are advanced bending techniques in the four disciplines. Fire has Lightning (by heating the air enough), Earth has Metal (finding the impurities in it) to name two.
Final Fantasy shows at least with the Red Mage versus the White or Black Mage. The Red Mage is a generalist with a couple of unique tricks while the White/Black Mages are specialists in their field.
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[Question]
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Okay, so, I decided to give both dragons and tengu a rather complex [syrinx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrinx_(bird_anatomy)), allowing them to mimic human speech, chainsaws, cameras shutters, ringtones, and copyrighted music with ease.
Lizardfolk, however, don't really have that luxury. They have similar vocal cords to humans, lung capacity is by default at the human peak. When combined with their mesothermic temperature regulation, it allows them to stay underwater for quite some time.
I based their appearance on the ones we saw in *Overlord*. Of course, I want to revamp quite a few things, starting with the removal of the obnoxious MMORPG design that makes my eyes bleed. The lizards, however, can stay. Everything else shall be purged by The Polish Toilet Spin, especially the jailbait.
I found [a few](https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/generic-lizardman-w-5-color-options-overlord-59da368357704df582a7302f83ab1ea9) [low-poly 3d models](https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/zaryusu-shasha-overlord-ae545fa62240417ba43852a0571812c0), and pictures from the animu as reference.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aWoG6.jpg)
Since they were the focus of only one arc; the anatomy of the lizardfolk is my pure guesswork, based on the anime and the wiki page. They seem to closely resemble both [armadillo lizards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_girdled_lizard) and the [Varanus salvator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_water_monitor), I work off of that.
The snout is elongated, most of the serrated teeth inside are obscured. They can probably dislocate their jaws like a *Varanus salvator* but choose not to do it because it's kinda scary/funny, plus they can cut up food into small enough pieces to make that unnecessary. The ear is most likely sealed/hidden as well.
Their tounges should be human-like since we didn't see any lizardman flicking them to smell. Their smell probably works like that of dogs, since the lizardfolk respiratory system is basically identical to the mammalian version.
Needless to say, their scutes and osteoderms make the upper half of the head quite rigid, and there aren't any muscles, except for the jaws', in the lower. Lizardfolk can still seal off their noses with the muscles, right next to the opening of the cavity.
The average height is 185-190 cm, and the weight 100 kg for an adult male.
**So, with all that out of the way, I was wondering what restrictions would the lizardfolk's [IPA chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet) have, compared to humans'. In layman terms, which sounds would they be unable to make?**
[Answer]
**Likely "o", "oo" and "u" sounds**
Your lizardfolk's anatomy with elongated snouts likely won't give them cheeks to properly pronounce "o" and "u" like sounds.
They may be able to somewhat compensate for this by forming their lips or using other techniques.
If they don't have the proper lip control, they may also be unable to properly pronounce "p", "b" and "f" sounds
Really, try to emulate their speech in front of the mirror. Try not using your cheeks and/or reduce the use of your lips. This exercise may also help you come up with a plausible accent for when the lizardmen speak "humantongue".
[Answer]
Of course, the technically correct answer is that the lizards will have trouble trying to duplicate just about *all* human phonemes. IPA is not supposed to be an inventory of all the sounds which can be made by a phonatory apparatus, not even of all the sounds which can be made by humans: it includes only those sounds which are made by humans and *are actually used* in normal speech in some language somewhere.
It would be a very improbable coincindence if the lizard larynx, pharynx, uvula, glottis, palate, mouth, tongue and teeth would have happened to be just right for them to make human sounds.
But this is not interesting, isn't it? So let's assume an improbable lizard which, while remaining a lizard, has a phonatory apparatus as close to human as imaginable.
* Lizards don't have lips, so the labials are out: no /p/, /b/, /m/, /f/, /v/, and such; and of course no /w/. For the same reason, rounded vowels are out: no /o/, /u/, /œ/, /y/ and such.
* Humans are among the few animals in being able to blow air through the mouth and nose at the same time; unless the lizards have somehow developed the same ability, nasal vowels are also out: no /ɑ̃/, /ẽ/, /õ/ and so on.
* In humans, the mouth is an opening at the front of the buccal cavity; in lizards, the mouth goes all around the buccal cavity. I *would* say that the lizards will have trouble with the laterals (/l/ and such), some forms of /r/ and most clicks.
For a fictional impression of how a lizard would sound speaking English, check out Lawrence the friendly grik from [Taylor Anderson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Anderson)'s [*Destroyermen*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroyermen):
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> *“This ’ill not ’urk,” he said at last. “Us see too ’any shiksaks. They are here in ... lots. Us take too long to go. Only thing to do, gals get in trees, ’ig, tall trees. Us try to de’end gals as long as us can. ’Orget ’oat. It no good. Us get gals in trees.”*
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(Note that all labials are replaced with a glottal stop. For obvious reasons, Lawrence is shown as being able to pronounce /l/ and the English rhotic /ɹ/, or else his speech would not have been understood...)
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**TL;DR:** [ʙ] will probably be impossible, and [ɸ] and [β] might be difficult. More importantly, [f], [v], [θ], and [ð] may be *possible* but *dangerous* because of the lizards’ sharp teeth.
Let’s consider each of the different categories of the [IPA consonant chart](https://www.ipachart.com/):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eby46.jpg)
* **Bilabial:** human lips are very fleshy compared to lizard lips and therefore easier to vibrate. For this reason, your lizardmen might not be able to pronounce the trill [ʙ], and perhaps not even [ɸ] or [β] due to their lips not being soft enough.
* **Labiodental:** despite being *able* to produce labiodental consonants, your lizardmen might refrain from doing so because they have sharp teeth (and pressing them against their lips - if they even have any - could cut them). Thus, [f] and [v] might be off limits.
* **Dental:** again, [θ] and [ð] could be off-limits because they don’t want to cut their tongues on their teeth.
* **Alveolar:** these should be fine, since they just involve touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth (at the alveolar ridge). However, they might sound different than the human versions of these consonants depending on the shape of the lizard’s tongue, e.g. if it is forked, more dry, or more leathery than a human tongue.
* **Post-alveolar:** probably the same issues as the alveolar. Because the consonants [ʃ] and [ʒ] involve air flowing around the thick body of the human tongue, a thinner lizard-like tongue might significantly change the sound so that [ʃ] sounds “wispier” than an English “sh”.
* **Retroflex:** also safe, for the same reason as the alveolar consonants, but they may have a unique timbre. (By the way, I think this is my favorite class of consonants. They sound really cool.)
* **Palatal:** also probably unaffected.
* **Velar:** these consonants depend on the thick body of the human tongue, so consonants like [ŋ] or [g] could be affected if your lizard has a thick tongue. However, you mentioned in the question that they have human-like tongues, so it’s probably fine.
* **Uvular:** Does a lizardman have a uvula? If so, this category should be fine.
* **Pharyngeal/glottal:** Probably unaffected by the lizardman’s distinct head structure, since these consonants are pronounced in the throat.
The most important points are probably that the lizards will avoid [f], [v], [θ], and [ð], not because they’re *impossible*, but because a sharp-toothed lizard runs the risk of cutting his tongue or lips by pronouncing them. They could replace these consonants with “windier” or “hissier” variants pronounced by putting the teeth *close* to the lips or tongue *without touching*. They might also replace these consonants with similar-sounding “throatier” alternatives like [x]. This could give the lizardmen an accent that sounds a bit like German or Arabic (which have more throaty consonants than English, Spanish, and French).
You also mentioned that the lizards have the ability to muscularly seal their nasal passages. Depending on what kinds of muscles/how many muscles are involved, they may be able to produce different categories of nasal consonants *that humans cannot make*. Greater nasal control will also *greatly* increase the range of vowels available.
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Here's a suggestion: look at ventriloquists and see what they can do, and you can even try it yourself simply by keeping your mouth slightly open, not moving your lips at all, so you're entirely reliant on your tongue and internal changes in the airway to make sounds.
If you restrict yourself to the IPA chart (so sounds humans use), this is what's possible:
All bilabials, labio-dentals, labial-velars and labial-palatals are out: no *p*, *b*, *m*, *f*, *v*, or *w* (or other consonants that sound something like them).
...and that's about it for the consonants.
For vowels, all the rounded ones are out because of the immobile lips, but all that means is that they might sound like they had a slight accent to some people. In fact, except for [u] and [o], they could be perfectly indistinguishable from General American.
In other erds they could ronounce this sentence I wrote trying to reroduce the uh-ay I'n skeaking it aloud as I tyke it on the key'oard.
You might have trouble understanding the previous sentence *reading* it, but if you heard me speak it aloud, you'd have no such trouble.
If they have a longer, more flexible tongue with a larger cavity given the length of their jaws, they might manage to produce sounds humans can't simply by creating positions impossible for humans to achieved, but that aside, their IPA would be essentially identical to ours except for the changes I noted.
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I was wondering what the best ways for turning minerals mined in the asteroid belt into useable materials would be, so far I came up with three methods, utilizing nuclear, electromagnets, and finally using light from the sun to heat whatever it is I wanted up. Mainly, are those three acceptable choices, or are there options I'm overlooking?
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The point of smelting is not to make the stone liquid, the point is to have a chemical reaction take place: The metal content of any ore is chemically bound to other elements, most importantly oxygen, and it's useless in that oxidized form. **When you smelt an ore to get the pure metal, you are providing something to those other elements that they would much rather bind with than with the metal you want to get out**.
In the case of smelting iron, you may start with an iron oxide and provide carbon monoxide to it. The carbon monoxide reacts with the oxygen to which the iron was bound, forming carbon dioxide, and leaves the pure iron behind. The carbon monoxide is formed by burning coal within the smelting oven, making sure that you don't add too much oxigen. **You cannot have this reaction take place, unless you are supplying the carbon monoxide**.
As such, smelting iron, for example, must always be done by burning coal. You may have unorthodox ways to procure the coal and oxygen, but in the end you must have the carbon monoxide together with the ore in a chemical reactor, which we typically call a furnace.
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There is ~~only~~ one possible alternative: electric reduction. In this case, you heat the ore to a temperature where it becomes liquid, you bring it into contact with electrodes, and you put a current through the ore. This is the way that aluminum is produced. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of electric energy (energy that would be provided by the carbon monoxide + oxygen reaction in the smelting process), and works well only if you can find an electrode material that won't react with the oxygen / other elements that you want to remove from the ore. For instance, if you use a graphite electrode with an oxide ore, the produced oxygen will quickly eat away your electrode. Since the oxygen / other elements that you want to remove are rather reactive, and since the temperature must be quite high, it's rather difficult to find a suitable electrode material.
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### Edit
As Adrian Colomitchi correctly pointed out in a comment, there is actually a second alternative: Turning the ore into a plasma and doing mass spectroscopy on the ions. Very energy intensive, with a massive waste heat problem, and I believe too hard to scale up to significant throughputs, but it's a possibility that could be considered.
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Mind that electromagnets are not a primary source of energy, they require something to produce the electricity to feed them.
That apart, you are forgetting:
* RF smelting. It is used on Earth to purify silicon wafers, for example.
* Impact. If two bodies impact each other, most of the kinetic energy they have will be converted in heat. That's how Earth was born as a sphere of molten rocks.
* Tidal heating might be another option, if you are in the range of some massive body. Swing the clump of materials close enough to it, so that the tidal forces, deforming it and ending up increasing its temperature.
* Aerobraking might be another option. Dump the mineral into the atmosphere of a planet, and let the atmosphere convert the kinetic energy into heat. Be sure to plan well where the molten ore will land.
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**This only works for metals that melt below 1084°C (1984°F):**
A copper pot filled with the unmelted metal and closed with latches could be placed inside a shut ceramic box. Surrounding the copper pot are high-wattage incandescent lightbulbs. The lightbulbs are then powered all at once for a long period of time to generate heat to power the lightbulbs. Afterward, the copper pot can be taken outside the box and opened to reveal the melted metal.
This is actually how Easy-Bake Ovens work: <https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/easy-bake-oven2.htm>
Copper heat conduction: <https://www.metalsupermarkets.com/which-metals-conduct-heat-best/>
Metal melting points: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metals_of_antiquity>
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Ecosystems like the african savanna have lots of megafauna which to some extent compete with each other for the same prey/vegetation, but still coexist just fine.
So how do I construct similarly diverse terrestrial ecosystems, while ensuring I don't have too many large carnivores, or any megafauna species which shouldn't be able to coexist?
I'm only concerned with scenarios which are extremely similar to earth and are similarly dominated by mammals and birds including many real modern or near-modern animals. So one needn't consider the sorts of dynamics you get when ectotherm/mesotherm organisms dominate such as they did in the age of dinosaurs.
I'm only really concerned with large animals for this question, because they have high caloric needs and are the part of the ecosystem I'm changing. Smaller animals and and plants are assumed to be similar or the same as those which exist on Earth.
Given those constraints how does one construct plausible ecosystems where all species are getting the calories they need and not being outcompeted by other species?
For the purposes of this question I'm using the definition of megafauna which refers to animals that reach or exceed 90 lbs/40 kg. So when I refer to birds in this question I'm talking about flightless birds which meet that mass. There are however giant flying bats in these ecosystems which do reach that mass limit.
Assume that within this setting human environmental influences are negligible.
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**Short answer?**
Stick a finger in the air and guess. Look at the relationship size/food consumption in existing animals ([this paper has some nice data](https://www.hse.gov.uk/pesticides/resources/R/Research_PN0908.pdf)) and then extrapolate up the scale. Once you have a rough guess how much food they'll eat per day/month/year look at how much of that food is available in your suggested biosphere and boom: That's how many mega predators you can support.
**Long answer?**
You need to simulate it, or there's every chance that you're actually describing an unstable state where the mega predators will eat too many of the normal herbivores, then the megaherbivores will overpopulate and eat all the vegetation, leading to the mega predators starving to death and going extinct. Ecosystems are *not simple things*.
There are a variety of methods for this kind of simulation (from pen and paper all the way up to supercomputer), but I'd go with writing your own program in something with good statistical tools and random number generation libraries (R or Python might be good bets). That way the depth and complexity of the simulation is entirely up to you and can be upgraded if you want.
Some things are required for a good simulation.
1. A good estimate for your starting state. By looking at existing earth biospheres you can get vital statistics on populations, the rough amounts of food herbivores and predators need, how often the species breed, and what kind of ranges they can be expected to require before they start killing each other. Also define some vegetation types and have a rough side of how many tonnes of food are being produced that your herbivores/small prey eaters can consume, then you can add in as many or few megafauna as you desire. The more detailed you want the more detailed you need to be. The key point here is that these stats don't need to be exact straight away. You may wish to pick a fixed area to begin with that you can estimate the populations of each animal for, that makes a lot of things simpler (including not having to worry about actual locations, migration etc).
2. A good idea of how things change over time. You need functions to work out how much vegetation any given species will eat, and how much of any given species any other species will eat. The simplest way to do this is just by defining 'a Blort will eat 2.1 units of GlumbleWeed a day, a Snargle will eat 0.2 Blorts a day', then multiplying that rate by how many Blots/Snargles are available. A simulation that simple can be done with pencil and paper, if you're willing to spend the time doing it! Much more complex ways involve using random number generation to 'sample' random amounts of food each from the appropriate distributions (You will need to look up the concept of probability distributions for that though, so maybe just keep it steady to start with). Much more complex would be simulating each animal separately based on hunger, time since mating etc. You also need to define other functions for how many new creatures will be born, and how many will die of old age.
3. A way to track what happens over time. You'll need to take your starting state, then apply all the functions for changes of state, then record the new state. Then do it again, this time putting the new state into the functions and recording the next day (or whatever time period you want to use. Weeks or months may also be good choices). Record the populations/vegetation amounts for each time step. If you're doing location based stuff (more complex), record that too. This is where computers are great: You can run millions of time steps and record the results over multiple species very, very quickly.
4. A way to analyse what you've just done. Plots are good for this! Plot populations against time and you'll very quickly see some kind of equilibrium be established (or not, if your ecosystem is out of balance!). By looking at the plots you can then go back to your starting parameters and tweak them until you get a nice looking set of lines. Looks like the Blorts breed too quickly? Dial it back. Megapredators annihilating all their prey in the first few time periods? Start with fewer mega predators. Play about! If you're recording everything about how the simulation proceeds it should be quite simple to spot moments where odd things happen, and if you've got good repeatable steps for the simulation (easy on computer) then you can tweak and run and tweak and run...
With any luck your starting guesses won't be too far out. The complexity of your simulation will either be a boon or a burden here. Small changes in complex simulations can lead to unexpected results, but similarly complex simulations may reach equilibrium situations more easily since they have more freedom of movement. Once you've got some idea of how long it takes your simulation so settle down into equilibrium positions (either stable populations or populations that go up and down around a point), you can discard all the time periods before that and use statistics (simple means, or an idea of mean/standard deviation) to get a good grasp on your population densities.
Now: The biggest issue with simulations is that the real world *is more complex*. No matter how complicated you think it is: In reality it's more complicated than that. Depending on your simplifications/assumptions you might end up with numbers that are wildly different from reality. If you really, really care about getting that right then you need to only use real data, not tweak the starting parameters and instead increase the accuracy of the model to the point where your results start mimicking actual observed data. Then you can publish the model and probably get a PHD out of it.
Or you can make a simple model, aim for somewhere between guessing and accurate simulation, and blame any really big changes on the introduction of your megafauna.
Either way: If the people reading about your megafauna care more about the accuracy of the population statistics than they do about the *giant animals* then it's really their problem...
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# The Problem
This would be surprisingly easy to accomplish based solely on what we know about ecology. the 10% energy rule of ecology is what applies here. Only 10% of each trophic level's energy is available to the next. So, if plants are the basis and absorb 100 units of energy from the sun, the hebivores only have 10 units of that energy available to themselves. Carnivores, in turn, will only have 1 unit of that original 100 available to themselves. Apex carnivores could have less than 0.1 units to themselves, depending on the number of trophic levels. This principle is based off of the fact that each organism is going to be using up most of that energy in biological processes, not just putting on mass for the next carnivore to eat.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YgODI.png)
# The Solution
So, for our megafauna to exist in large numbers, we'll need our planet to have abundant resources and an easy time using them.
### Abundant Oxygen
One huge limitation on size is oxygen availability. Take earth's history as an example. Bugs today can't grow large because of the need to get oxygen throughout their bodies. In prehistoric times, when oxygen was extremely abundant, you had massive insects like [Meganeura](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganeura). High amounts of oxygen takes away one limiting factor of your megafauna.
### Carbon Dioxide
In addition to helping the fauna, we need to help their base as well. It needs to be hot, with abundant carbon for plant life. The hotter your planet is, the higher water capacity of your atmosphere becomes, and the more storms and rain you're going to get on average. Both of these things are very good for plant life, and will cover most of your planet in lush forests. (Note: high heat does not create deserts, geographical features do)
### Low Gravity
Another huge limiter on your megafauna will be gravity. You want big bad animals? Make them as efficient as possible. Think how much an elephant exerts itself just to move. Imagine if it were able to move around in even slightly lower gravity. This would greatly increase the viability of large build animals, and especially those who wish to fly or glide.
### Dense Atmosphere
Last but not least, make that atmosphere soupy. This will increase the availability of those vital atmospheric gasses for your flora basis and your megafauna, dramatically increasing the efficiency of plant stomata and lungs (more molecules of oxygen/CO2 per volume). This also has the added benefit of making flying easier again, leading to increased viability for your flying bats, and making flying animals be able to be much larger as well.
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As long as it is grassland of savannah you are fine, you really don't need to do much to justify it.
The African Savannah is the norm, the rest of the world is weird. And it basically comes down to humans. Most of the worlds grassland was like Africa with lots and lots of competing megafauna, but everywhere humans went they drastically reduced the local megafauna, the exception was Africa where said megafauna evolved alongside human and could deal with them. As long as the land is fertile grassland or savannah, you can have plenty of mega fauna.
Past that it all comes down to environment how much megafauna it can support is going to be different from cold taiga, to desert, to thick forest. And any answer that includes them all is going to be way out of scope.
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Looks like there are just 2 conditions for megafauna to proliferate:
1. Abundant grasslands (savanna, steppe, tundra);
2. Lack of predators threatening megafauna (including humans).
During last Ice Age, megafauna was thriving throughout the Northern hemisphere. Woolly mammoths and rhinos were ubiquitous up to the polar circle. Those animals had enough food to eat, had freedom of movement and not so many predators to worry about. That was the case until the Ice Ice had come to close. No temperate or northern megafauna species could withstand a double impact of climate change and human hunting.
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In my eternal quest to model a decently-realistic sci-fi space combat system, I've run through the limitations of particle weapons, magnetic accelerator cannons, and fusion rockets. Now it's time to tackle the humble laser.
It's been my assumption that a laser would be an effective weapon at short enough ranges that a pulse can vaporize hull plating. Beyond that, it was my assumption that a laser would be fairly ineffective, since it would only be able to heat the target. Disabling an enemy through overheating is a viable strategy. However, I remember hearing somewhere that something like 20% of the energy put into a laser is lost as waste heat, which heats the ship that fires it. If the target is using a reflective hull material, something with an albedo greater than 0.8, combined with an effective coolant system to keep heat from building up in the outer hull, then the target is heating up less than the ship that's firing the laser - and that's assuming that 100% of the energy fired from the laser actually hits the target.
It's also my understanding that lasers can focus energy more effectively at a longer range if they have a larger lens.
So, my question is:
Can I use reflective hulls as a defense against lasers at long range? Lasers, by definition, operate at a single wavelength, so as long as the material reflects that specific wavelength, I would assume that they would. However, it has been indicated to me that this may not be the case. In other words, will wallpapering my ship with aluminum foil help?
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It depends on the power that is being fired at you.
Conventional mirrors are not 100% reflective. They normally reflect a bit more than 90% of the impinging light, meaning that around 10% of that power is absorbed or transmitted.
If you are targeted with a mW laser, 10% of that are peanuts, and you don't have to worry.
If you are targeted with a petawatt laser (10 to the 12 Watts), you are getting something like gigawatts of power, and you better worry about that.
You can improve the reflectivity of the mirrors up to 99.999...% using metamaterials like [DBR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_mirror), but those come with a strong directionality. This means that along some precise direction you reflect back 99.999...% of the light, but if you are off that direction you might be as good as naked against the laser.
And don't forget that you have to take of the reflected beam, too. You don't want to be hit by a reflection, don't you?
To your favor you have the distance from which the laser is fired: despite being highly collimated, laser beams are not perfectly collimated. They still have some milliradian divergence, which ensures that over cosmic distances the power is spread over a large surface. For your reference, in the Lunar Ranging Experiment, where a laser is fired at the mirrors left on the Moon surface by the Apollo missions (400k km distance, a bit more than 1 light-second), the laser reaches the surface of the Moon spread on a disc several km wide and its power per unit surface is proportionally decreased.
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> It's been my assumption that a laser would be an effective weapon at short enough ranges that a pulse can vaporize hull plating.
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"Short range" is a tricky thing to quantify. It very much depends on your own tech level assumptions and requirements, and as you haven't communicated them to us then I can't really speculate. The shorter the wavelength, the fancier your optics, the longer range your lasers. You more or less get to handwave this to suit your own purposes, and pick something between hundreds of km and lightseconds.
A bomb-pumped laser, for example, might have a range as little as 100km (which is more like practical casaba-howitzer range) or as long as 10000km, depending on the quality and efficiency of your lasing rods, and the effectiveness of your targetting system.
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> Beyond that, it was my assumption that a laser would be fairly ineffective, since it would only be able to heat the target.
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Being gently warmed by x-rays may not be quite the same as being gently warmed by a heat lamp. Just sayin' ;-)
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> I remember hearing somewhere that something like 20% of the energy put into a laser is lost as waste heat,
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An 80% efficient laser isn't implausible, but might well be considered *extremely efficient*. There are some diode laser designs that reach that level of efficiency, but many other kinds of laser, especially very short wavelength or very short pulse designs will have lower efficiency. (The bomb pumped lasers I mentioned above might only be 2% efficient, but when you're pumping them with a megaton bomb and you're using a thousand of them, the inefficiency isn't so much of an issue...)
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> Can I use reflective hulls as a defense against lasers at long range?
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There will be some range where the incoming beam is juuuuuust intense enough to melt your armour, but if you buffed it a bit first then you'll be fine. This depends on the beam actually being reflectable, of course... at the far-UV and shorter wavelength range (eg. bomb-pumped x-ray laser) it becomes a bit difficult to do this, because your electrons will start falling off, but for visible light you might be able to get away with it.
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> Lasers, by definition, operate at a single wavelength
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Generally, yes. It is possible to adjust the wavelength of a free electron laser by a small amount, limited by the available optics. A visible-light FEL might be quite adjustable, for example. It is also possible to carry more than one laser, or a laser which can be frequency-doubled (in the way that current-day commercial near-IR [Nd:YAG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nd:YAG_laser) lasers can use a [KDP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopotassium_phosphate#Applications) crystal to produce visible green light, at some efficiency cost). [Ti-Sapphire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ti-sapphire_laser) lasers can have their output tuned to some extent, between 650 and 1100nm.
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> so as long as the material reflects that specific wavelength, I would assume that they would.
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You can make highly efficient [dielectric mirrors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_mirror), but they tend to be efficient in a very specific wavelength band. They're expensive (much more so thanb dumb armour) and delicate (abrasion caused by micrometeorite damage will render them useless) and will be largely ineffective against any laser light of an inappropriate wavelength.
Moreover, at *effective* killing range you'll start to get very high laser intensities and interesting non-linear optical effects, which means that reflecting 99.99% of the incident light just isn't enough and your mirror surface will blow up in a nanosecond and be useless.
Oh, and buttering you up with a few bomb-pumped lasers at longer range might be enough to render your armour ineffective against more conventional laser fire.
For these reasons, they're probably not a good choice for warship armour.
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> In other words, will wallpapering my ship with aluminum foil help?
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It'll help, inasmuch as putting stuff between you and their laser will keep you alive for a tiny bit longer when things start going south. Mostly what you want is something highly [refractory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractory), because you'll want your armour to still be useful at closer ranges when you simply can't reflect enough of the heat to be safe and need something that will absorb as much energy as possible before evaporating.
Some form of carbon is probably best. Boron will also work, but it is much rarer and you may find there are other, better uses for it. A weave of carbon nanotubes is probably the best thing to use here, as it'll resist being torn open by explosive effects. In any case, these materials will also be useful against other kinds of energy weapon. Maybe some harder inclusions (some form of hyperdiamond, perhaps) might help against kinetic energy weapons, inasmuch as anything helps.
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Reflective surfaces will always help deflect some of the power, however no material is capable of reflecting 100% and some of that energy will always be absorbed. So even if you have a 99.99999% reflective surface, you still absorb a tiny bit of energy which is the main point.
A laser is powerful because it can focus a decent amount of energy into a very very small area. For arguments sake, lets say I have 1 watt (not sure if this is the correct unit) spread over 1m^2. If I can focus that into 0.5m^2, then suddenly I have the equivalent of 4 watts of power applied to that surface. As I focus the laser onto a small spot, I exponentially increase the amount of power I apply to a single spot. The aim is to cause a single spot in your defense to fail, or burn up the reflective surface, which will then lead to a catastrophic failure in your defense system. So you can cover your entire ship in foil, but if my laser will only need to burn a hole smaller than a pin into that foil to compromise your system.
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Wallpapering spaceship with 2-5 mm aluminum (steel would be much better) and active cooling will save you from any reasonable laser if you keep your distance.
80% dissipating energy is only for laboratoy lasers. For powerfull "battle lasers" only 0.1% - 5% of energy goes to the beam. And the beam itself greatly looses energy density with range due to difraction. It means that morden lasers in space has more chances to melt itself then opponent, even if opponent do not uses mirros.
I would say mirros are overrted as anti-laser defence. Better defence would be **black** material with high melting point (like titan-tungsten alloys or ceramics): heat dissapation due to radiation in "cold" space would not alow to melt such a material with laser at all (hard science is requerd here to make some firm statments). And active cooling and creative use of vacuum will keep you internal at normal temperature. You can even utilize that energy of laser beam!
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The thing that kills lasers at range is beam spread.
A laser spreads a lot less than, say a flashlight, but it does spread. That makes the energy density go down. It is the energy density that burns through a ship. If the energy density isn't enough to damage the hull, it just heats the target and, as you pointed out, you lose the heat war.
So, things that decreases the energy density or increase the heat needed to damage is good.
So, spinning the ship (or just moving a lot) will increase the size of the "patch" the laser hits. A hull of curves will also increase the size of the patch. Non functional, reflective, projections could take the hit. Some energy would be transmitted down the shaft of the projection to the ship but a lot of the energy will dissipate back to space. I'm picturing a ship covered in bubbles or umbrellas. :-)
Also, substances with a high melting point and a high thermal conductivity would work well. I'm thinking of something like a diamond coating but won't shatter when hit by a high velocity projectile (though it would look very pretty as the target is surrounded by sparkles).
Traveller (an old RPG) used "sand cannons" defensively against lasers. They would throw a cloud of glittering particles between themselves and the attacker. As long as they didn't maneuver too much, and kept the cloud between them and the attacker, it would attenuate the laser hits.
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**Which laser?**
There are many kinds of lasers available with wavelengths from radio "masers" all the way to ultraviolet "excimer" lasers, potentially more available with technological progress. And there is no known material that fully reflects all these wavelengths. For example, aluminium [does have a dip in its reflectivity in the infrared 700nm – 900nm spectrum](https://laserbeamproducts.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/reflectivity-of-aluminium-uv-visible-and-infrared/).
On the radio end of spectrum: if enemy ship or its construction elements are made from electrically conductive material, sized similar to used maser wavelength, they will inevitably act as antenna producing electricity, resulting in EM interference, heating and arcing.
So, if you have multi-wavelength array for all conceivable types of enemy shielding, or widely tuneable laser, it would be very effective.
[Answer]
I think if you build the ship wall out of retroreflectors, with a layer of high melting point material below, then you've got the perfect defence against attack lasers. Any laser directed at your hull will be, to a large percentage of the energy, directed right back to the attacking ship. And the layer below makes sure that the heat from what gets absorbed will not do any structural damage to your ship.
On the other hand, the retroreflector hull is a disadvantage if the laser is not used for attacking, but for detection and ranging (Lidar). Because you'll make your ship perfectly visible for any such technology. In that case, a perfectly black hull would make more sense.
Maybe the ideal defence would be an outer black layer that absorbs any Lidar lasers, but will be quickly burned away by attacking lasers, and then below a retroreflector layer for an automatic, passive counterattack, and then as third layer a highly heat-resistant material to protect the ship.
The outer layer will make you hard to find (but will be quickly burned away when you are found and attacked), the second layer will make you dangerous to attack (anyone attacking you effectively attacks himself), and the third layer protects your ship.
Also note that rthe laser being just one wavelength doesn't help you, since the attacker can freely choose *which* wavelength he uses. If you may make your ship perfectly safe against 400nm lasers, that won't help you if the attacker chooses to attack with a 600nm laser instead.
[Answer]
Instead of a reflective layer of aluminium, you can technically use the principle behind gradient optical fibre and use multiple films of transparent materials to guide the laser along the surface of the hull and redirect it. The gradient has to be such that no matter what angle the laser hits, it would work.
[Answer]
The easiest defense against a laser would be spin induced artificial gravity.
You move the affected part of the hull under the beam fast enough to prevent lasting damage or at least keep pulse lasers from drilling too deep. Think of a carbon foam as outer layer. Either it escapes the beam glowing and radiating the energy away but otherwise fine. Or the porous structure helps keeping the beam inside the armor layer.
Of course you shouldn't feel too confident when your defenses successfully defend you against a surprisingly low powered and badly focused laser. That would be a telltale sign of a [Laser coupled cold particle beam](http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/02/cold-laser-coupled-particle-beams.html), carving your ship into a corkscrew shortly after.
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[Question]
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I've been looking at the altitude boosted SSTO designs from the 90s that were designed to be lifted to launch altitude by modified jetliners and thinking about bumblebees and wondering if [bioships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioship) used for surface-to-orbit cargo transfers could make use of insectile wings to gain altitude before using a liquid-fuel rocket to boost into orbit proper.
What I want to know is would it be metabolically worthwhile for a creature weighing some 15,000 metric tonnes fully laden to use biomechanical insectile wings, with a similar structure to and operated by the same muscle-based mechanism as, those of a bee, wasp, or dragon fly etc... they need not be materially identical in fact I'm reasonably certain they can't be (are such even materially possible on this scale at all?) to gain altitude before engaging a liquid hydrogen-oxygen rocket or would boosting directly from the ground be more efficient?
I believe that bumblebees have the most metabolically efficient wings of any organism but if you know that isn't so then use whatever does as the basis of comparison. Base the energy cost of fuel on [electrolysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis) of water.
I've looked at [this question on engine systems for bioships](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20637/what-engines-would-a-bioship-have) but I want to know whether it is worthwhile to use wings to gain altitude before using a particular engine, in this case a hydrogen-oxygen liquid fuel rocket motor.
[Answer]
As said many times here and in many other places, [the problem with going to space](https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/) is not about going high enough (a flight from Amsterdam to Tokyo travels more linear distance than a flight from Cape Canaveral to ISS, you could cover the distance to space in 1 day with a bike and a bit of exercise), but it's more about going fast enough.
Orbital velocity is about few kilometers per second. Insect wings can reach up what, few meters per second? And they would have to lift not only the body, but also all the fuel that the subsequent rocket stage would need.
The only advantage I could foresee would be to reach past the max Q zone before starting up the rocket. But the [max Q height](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_q) is about 11 km, way past the level where insects can fly.
Long story short, I see no advantage.
[Answer]
TL;DR: you can't make a space-shuttle sized thing fly like a bumblebee, because engineering isn't scale-independent.
---
In addition to the obvious issues (eg. you'll save very little over a conventional rocket launch) the other major problem is that bees are small and light, whereas things that are considered to be surface-to-orbit cargo vehicles are very much neither of those things.
The old quote about bumblebee flight being aerodynamically impossible is obviously a load of cobblers, but a bumblebee the size of a space shuttle clearly cannot fly in the same way as its tiny prototypes. Viscous forces on something that is tens of metres long and tens or hundreds of tonnes in weight can be [largely ignored](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inviscid_flow), but for insects they are very important indeed. Have a read of [this physics SE answer](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/206359/225554) on that subject.
Furthermore you're gong to come *very* unstuck when you start having to deal with issues of stiffness and the strength-to-weight ratios of the materials you're growing your bioships out of. To oversimplify: scaling things up either makes them unreasonably heavy or unreasonably flimsy (that good old square-cube law that has slain so many fictional megafauna and giant mecha). Whatever putative efficiencies you thought you'd start with will be long gone.
Finally... why bumble bees? They're not the strongest or fastest insects; they've got a neat trick of heating up their bodies so they can be active earlier in the day than other pollen-hunting flying insects, and they're moderately manoeverable and they can hover pretty well, but none of those features are very useful for something whose main job is to carry some heavy stuff upwards, transition to some totally different flight mode, and then reverse the process. Using a flight mechanism optimised for *none* of those things seems odd!
(oh, and *finally* finally, if you can make 15000 tonne artificially-designed biological constructs capable of self-powered flight and survival in space, surely you're capable of doing something much simpler like implementing one of the many means of [non-rocket spacelaunch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch)?)
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[Question]
[
I'm creating humanoid specie with two subspecies
* Hairy races - roughly based on humans, [chiss, mirialans](https://swtor.gamepedia.com/Playable_Species), with standard males & females sexes
* Tentacle races- roughly based on asari, twilek, togruta hermaphrodites with sex organs like [futanari](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futanari) from Japanese manga
They could all interbreed between each other, with children getting DNA from both parents. However race is determined strictly by the mother, due to subspecies specific genes being encoded in mitochondrial DNA.
Is it possible for different subspecies to be with & without separate sexes?
Some background which I don't know is it important for answering.
Hairy races discriminate against tentacle ones, while modern hairies start to accept them as equals or at least say they do, the traditionalists which are majority of population still keep them as slaves and quite often castrate or even emasculate them. This behaviour was even more pronounced in the past when nearly all tentacle races were enslaved and castrated/emasculated. There were small number or free members of the tentacle races plus some runaways.
In the present tentacled are mainly kept as domestic servants and attractive ones for pleasure. The rest are becoming less economically valuable so they are slowly started to be freed. Most of them have few skills and turn to lowest payed jobs and prostitution to survive.
[Answer]
## Technically, it's possible, but they're pretty far from humans.
You can achieve this via a rather convoluted genetic mechanism. However, the resulting species is majorly different from humans in terms of reproductive mechanism. Your question kind of requires this.
The following conditions would create the effect you want:
* The information related to subspecies is stored on the X chromosome
* Female (2 X chromosomes) embryos are not viable and die in the womb without exception. This is because vital information is stored on the Y chromosome.
* Both races are hermaphroditic, but the hairy race develops either one set of genitals or the other randomly in the womb, like a birthmark. This information is stored on the X chromosome.
* Both races produce egg cells with both X and Y chromosomes, but the X chromosome is necessary for egg development, so the ones with Y chromosomes die immediately.
* Sperm cells, however, can survive without an X chromosome.
* The X chromosome is really heavy, due to all of the extra information stored on it. This means that sperm cells containing an X chromosome are too heavy to swim as fast as the Y chromosome sperm. This ensures that virtually all babies are born XY.
The effects of this are:
* Every child gets the XY genotype, making them all genetically male
* Hairy fetuses develop either testes or ovaries (maybe these organs are in the same place, so only one can form?), which produces either female or male hormones, depending (the alien equivalent of estrogen and testosterone). This means that they appear and act either male or female, despite being genetically male
* Tentacle fetuses develop both sets of sex organs
* When members of different species mate, the mother is the one that provides the egg cell. This cell contains the subspecies-determining X chromosome, so the mother's race is taken on by the child.
* The other chromosomes determine the other aspects of the body appearance, so both parents give DNA.
Possible issues with this:
* Fertility is a little lower than in humans, because embryos with XX die in the womb.
* Birth defects in the hairy species are common, where both sets of genitals manifest on top of each other. This probably leads to the fetus dying, but that's up to you, the author.
I can't see this happening by natural evolution: there are too many difficulties on the way there. More likely, they were created by genetic engineering. Maybe a species found a better way to adapt to their environment, say learning to space travel, by messing with there genes, and they created this?
[Answer]
I am assuming by "is it plausible" you are wondering if it this species can occur by natural selection. The snide answer is "anything is possible, as long as it is evolutionarily favorable," but the more complicated reality is that "is it possible" calls for a justification of *how* it could happen. That could be more difficult.
From a biological perspective, you really have two different body types, which are at *least* as different as male and female in H. sapiens. That's a strange balance. You'll want a justification for why they stay in balance. You mention their history, but you're going to want to go into pre-history. How is it that, for millions of years, both body types were evolutionary advantageous enough that one type did not completely replace the other due to being more fit.
One answer might be location. Consider H. sapiens. Scientists steadfastly refuse to use the term "subspecies" to denote race, because the term "subspecies" comes with far too much baggage, but we can look at it that way ("Subspecies" is actually a very poorly defined word in science, referring to rather arbitrary distinctions. Within a species, scientists don't always agree as to which lines to draw to create subspecies). So, without stepping on too many toes, I'd suggest looking at our races as prior art. The most obvious example is the amount of melanin we find in those societies which stayed in Africa versus those which moved to Europe. In Africa, there was a *massive* survival boon for having dark skin to protect against the scorching sun. In Europe, that melanin was far less valuable, so not worth the metabolic cost to produce, so skins became lighter.
If we look at our own history, we see that such tiny changes in genetics were more than sufficient to justify desires for slavery. Many efforts, such as [Phrenology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology), were developed to further justify this by demonstrating particular races were objectively inferior, though we now find all of them to be totally bunk.1 If such small changes were sufficient to justify slavery, it would not be unbelievable for larger differences to do the same. All you would need is to define what environment lead to the tentacled and hairy races/subspecies to develop their distinctive features.
That approach calls for segregation, and differences in environment. Another approach might be collaboration. In the second paragraph, I mentioned that this balance was at least as strange as the balance of male and female in H. sapiens. Think about it... how the heck is that balance valuable in our species? The answer is that the male and female halves of our species work together to solve common problems. They are specialized in ways which dovetail nicely to solve the greater issues of how to propagate a species. Neither side takes over because the ideal answer is a balance, not a domination.
Of course, you want domination, so we may need to come up with a less equitable balance to support your culture. As a hypothetical, what if your tentacled race *expressed* genes in a visible way, perhaps in the shape of their tentacled features, which would otherwise be hard to see.2 The colors and twists of the tentacles might act as a living microscope into the genetics of the individual. Control of this would be to peer into one's own genome itself. It would be a powerful tool for a powerful race, and rapidly promote the enslavement of one half of the species. As a neat added bonus, an enslavement of this sort would be an incredibly dark societal structure. To keep such a culture running, there would need to be an equally incredible lightness somewhere in the society. You, as the creator of the world, could put said lightness wherever it is convenient for your story.3
As a final thought, mitochondrial DNA is a very hard place to store such a fundamental division in a species. It evolves very differently than the rest of the DNA, as it is basically an asexual selection process, with no mixing from the male side. Thus it would evolve much slower. Instead, I'd recommend relying on a hormonal solution. As the baby grows, the mother releases hormones that lead the embryo to settle on one subspecies or the other. You could set it up such that too much or too little hormone would be fatal, making it very difficult to artificially select a subspecies by injecting hormones. This would be a delicate balance of the mother's body listening to that of the gestating child, and adapting her hormone secretions to match. Frankly, when you look at how a mother's body cares for her child's body in womb, this would not be all that far from the truth. Frankly, it's [magic](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/40949/whats-the-smallest-change-to-physics-required-to-allow-magic/40992#40992), and I'm happy to leave it that way.
1. I was going to say we found all of them to be totally bunk, except "white men can't jump," because that's the truth, but folks like [Patrik Sjöberg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo56swo_FFc) demonstrate that it's not people with my skin color that can't jump... it's just me. Maybe I should, you know, practice or something.
2. Why have the tentacled one express this? Anthropomorphic bias. As someone that looks human, the tentacled one is "the other side." For a fun mental challenge, flop this around, and have those hairy apes express the genes and see what the tentacle side does with said power!
3. Or, for a twist, make this power into the lightness. If there is an even darker force threatening the species as a whole, this might be the lightness. This could lead to a tremendous amount of pride in the tentacled ones as they manifest what will save the essence of their species. Just as an alternative to the, you know, slavery and prostitution and all.
[Answer]
>
> children getting DNA from both parents. However race is determined strictly by the mother.
>
>
>
This is the part that makes little to no sense at all. If they get DNA by both parents, race, being determined by genetics, also comes from both parents. If they didn't need the genetic contribution of the father, why bothering with sexual reproduction, when much simpler alternatives are available?
What you depict sounds much more as an extreme case of sexual dismorphism than subspeciation.
[Answer]
So as mentioned, Sub-Species are very hard to define. Even within H. Sapiens, there is some debate as to whether we are a seperate species of the Genus Homo from H. Neanderthalis (spelling) or if Neanderthalis is a Human sub-spiecies (H. Sapien Neaderthalis) that inter-bred due to co-location with humans outside of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Sub-Species are generally seen as a location based phenomena in a species (okay, I'm going to do this and reference Pokemon... but Generation 7 introduced regional variants which are essentially sub-species of first generation characters. If we assume that a Kanto Vulpix (P. Vulpicus Kanto) and an Alolan Vulpix (P. Vulpicus Alola), the only genetic difference between the two is their typing (Kanto is a fire type and Alolan is an Ice type). However they are compatible and will produce an offspring that is also a (P. Vulpicus)... the typing and moves learned from the parents will vary but it is still of the same species as both parents, despite both parents being different sub-species.).
However you do not have to be that close to breed as there are hybrids of genuses such as the Liger and the Tigon (The former is the offspring of a male lion and a female tiger, the later is a male tiger and female lion). These are not the same species (Panthera Leo and Panthera Tigris) but they are the same Genus (Panthera) which is genetically close enough for these purposes. This would be, to continue our Pokemon analogy the same as a Vulpix breeding with a Fennnik (another fire fox, P. Fennikus) and producing a viable offspring. These aren't hard rules, but it's a good line (It's thought that Humans and Chimps could make a hybrid offspring, but apperently no one's tried. And despite an extremely close genetic similarity, Chimps are no Homo... er... not of the Genus Homo... (I'm talking about the Human scientific name, let me have one joke).
Now that's a lot of stuff on genetics, Pokemon, and immature jokes about Gay apes, but there's something else that needs to be taken into account.
In Zoology, Hermaphrodites, especially as complex as vertebrates, are not normally simultaneously both genders. Typically that type of reproduction is observed in very basic sexual reproduction and flowering plants (usually confirs, but some flowering plants can self pollinate). Most vertebrate Hermaphrodites are capable of producing both gammetes but not at the same time, but within their life time. These species typically determine their gender based on dominance with the indivdual in a group that achieves dominants turning into the desired gender. A famous example of this is the Clown fish, which are typically born male and establish a pecking order among the other men. The top dog will become female, and remain so until she is killed, in which case her mate becomes the new female and the best man at their wedding becomes her new husband and the line moves down... except they don't wed... I'm ruining Finding Nemo enough, let me have it.
There are species of fish that do the reverse, and are born female (or first instance Male) and will become Male (or Terminal Male if already male) when the vacancy opens.
Finally there are bi-directional hermaphadites, which will transition from one gender to another and back again based on group dominance and needs for a gender. In this case, it's basically that scene from the Sandlot where the insult "You throw like a girl" is thrown out... but it actually might result in you throwing like a girl for real.
All this said, it's entirely possible that two species of the same genus could make a hybrid, with one of those two species having a bi-directional hermaphradidic nature. For best results, keep in mind that Hybrid individuals are often times steril and not capable of producing an offspring.
[Answer]
All known Neander DNA is associated w/ female lines. Presumably, only modern male / neander female couplings produced viable hybrid offspring.
You could thus say that those early hybrids, an incipient subspecies or the raw material of one, were sex-specific in the sense that only female neanders participated in gene flow with moderns (starting in The Levant, onto Asia & Europe, during the late pleistocene).
[Answer]
**These creatures are different strains (races) of the same species.**
Hairy races have genitalia like humans; easy.
I read the tentacle races are basically males and shemales. Tentacle races have genitalia like hyenas. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_hyena#Female_genitalia>
Female hyenas externally look like males but what appears to be a penis is an enlarged clitoris.
>
> The genitalia of the female closely resembles that of the male; the
> clitoris is shaped and positioned like a penis, a pseudo-penis, and is
> capable of erection. The female also possesses no external vagina
> (vaginal opening), as the labia are fused to form a pseudo-scrotum
>
>
>
It does not take a whole lot of evolution to move a female body type to one with an exaggerated clitoris; just hormone dose will do that for you.
Just as human races, these races are the same species - not that different from each other genetically biologically compatiable.
Re race determine by mother: your "race on mt dna" idea would work. If you want to get into the weeds another way this could work is genomic imprinting.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting>
>
> Genomic imprinting is an epigenetic phenomenon that causes genes to be
> expressed in a parent-of-origin-specific manner. Forms
> of genomic imprinting have been demonstrated in fungi, plants and
> animals. As of 2014, there are about 150 imprinted genes known
> in the mouse and about half that in humans.
>
>
> Genomic imprinting is an inheritance process independent of the
> classical Mendelian inheritance. It is an epigenetic process that
> involves DNA methylation and histone methylation without altering the
> genetic sequence. These epigenetic marks are established ("imprinted")
> in the germline (sperm or egg cells) of the parents and are maintained
> through mitotic cell divisions in the somatic cells of an organism.
>
>
>
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[Question]
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Assume that modern day Earth discovers a way to create portals to another planet. Travel between the two planets is fast, safe, and easy.
The way this works is that there are fixed points on earth that corresponds to fixed points on this other planet (dubbed alterearth) where, if one builds a stargate-like device, one will be able to create a tunnel between the two worlds (this only work between our Earth and alterearth so no galaxy spanning human empire yet). Step into the portal on one side and you come out on the other planet.
This of course created a rapid expansion of humans to the new alterearth. Each country that has one of those fixed portal points has expanded around the matching point on the alterearth. Within 10 years after the initial discovery, the alterearth borders have been set with the 39 countries that had those portal points, covering 100% of the alterearth land mass.
Life on alterearth is a lot like life on earth, it has breathable air, land that allows for plants to grow, and the local wildlife is quite similar to Earth wildlife (not 100% the same and nothing is more intelligent then a primate).
There is only really one main difference between Earth and alterearth, the alterearth has a particle dubbed "ridiculousium" by scientists, which fitting to its name acts in really weird ways:
* ridiculousium is tiny, so tiny that in fact it's impossible for it to interact with pretty much every known material as it passes between every other material's molecules
* ridiculousium doesn't allow for fire to burn, it's not really clear how but it's impossible for fire to burn when near any ridiculousium particles
+ same goes for explosives as it is basically a rapid ignition
* ridiculousium is super common and doesn't move; its molecules are everywhere on the planet and they seem to stay in a constant position in regards to the rest of the planet, like floating in that exact spot
+ just to make it clear how much they don't move it's been calculated that every step a person makes he passes through billions^billions of ridiculousium particles
* Aside from the no fire/explosion thing ridiculousium doesn't seem to affect anything else
Day to day civilian life isn't really affecting by being in a world full of ridiculousium. The only real changes are that all power is produced via clean energy, cars are all electric, and all cooking is done on electric hot plates.
While day to day life isn't that bad off due to ridiculousium being around (one could argue it even helps as it takes away multiple major sources of air pollution), the new colonies there are all still part of their original countries and they all have armies on the alterearth to protect their colonies from other countries there. As the average army pretty much relies on explosives (which don't work on the alterearth) and firearms (which just got the "fire" taken out of them as it's impossible to avoid having a ridiculousium particle in the bullet casing and thus make it a dud) which requires a major retooling in the army side.
**The question (at last)**
Given this world, what kind weapon will an army supply its soldiers instead of the usual rifle? Remember that, other than the discovery of this portal transport, this is RL modern tech level and the army doesn't have years to wait to develop a solider carried rail\coil gun to use... this has to be something that can be fielded to the troops in a month or two at most.
**Edit**
Just to clear things up if there is not fire (as in flame) ridiculousium will not affect it in any way, it will not affect burning of calories or metabolism in anyway as there is no flame involved.
[Answer]
The obvious answer is "use airguns" (something another poster already mentioned, so I'll probably pop it out of this answer if they end up using it). They scale up OK, are moderately powerful and so on, but you'd need to be pretty tricky with them in order to make things that were man portable *and* could penetrate modern infantry armour. Combat ranges might decrease significantly.
I'm also assuming that energetic decomposition reactions (like hydrazine or hydrogen peroxide) aren't allowed for thematic reasons, but they aren't burning or oxidising in any sense. If they are allowed, your premise kinda falls over. If they aren't allowed, your explanation of ridiculons also won't fly. I'd delete the latter if I were you!
Now.
>
> "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics."
> - Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC
>
>
>
No fire means no internal combustion engines, and no fossil-fuel driven generators. No trucks. No heavy lift aircraft. No rockets to launch your spy, communication or positioning sattelites. The lack of guns pales in comparison to the lack of communications and logistics, which will cause nightmarish headaches in any modern army trying to operate at any kind of scale. Might be a sudden interest in electric trains, with earth-side power stations and huge HVDC interconnects through your portals, and lots of electric recce drones.
On the upside, no fires an no explosions mean you can be as cavalier as you like with the design and construction of batteries and supercapacitors! Suddenly the most stupid and dangerous designs become tame. Who cares about surprise hydrogen leaks anymore! Why, you could build zeppelins... there'll be no flak or SAMs to take them down, and they certainly won't burn up.
I forsee a lot of lithium mining and nuclear power plant construction in your future, combined with laser and coilgun research. Those things will get small enough and light enough and reliable enough in short order, I'm sure.
[Answer]
It is tempting to get into the weeds about ridiculousium but that is not the question. The question is about guns.
**The soldiers would use the guns they had on earth.**
You needed fire for a black powder musket. Modern weapons don't use black powder. The explosives driving the bullet contain their own oxidizer, and so guns would also work in a vacuum where there can obviously be no fire.
>
> Fires can't burn in the oxygen-free vacuum of space, but guns can
> shoot. Modern ammunition contains its own oxidizer, a chemical that
> will trigger the explosion of gunpowder, and thus the firing of a
> bullet, wherever you are in the universe. No atmospheric oxygen
> required. The only difference between pulling the trigger on Earth and
> in space is the shape of the resulting smoke trail. In space, "it
> would be an expanding sphere of smoke from the tip of the barrel,"
> said Peter Schultz an astronomer at Brown University who researches
> impact craters.
> <https://www.livescience.com/18588-shoot-gun-space.html>
>
>
>
If even having an oxidizer is prohibited, you could use something like nitroglycerin. Heat is not required to detonate nitroglycerin. It is an unstable molecule and a shock will cause it to energetically decompose into more stable forms while releasing a great volume of hot gas.
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Thinking further on the mechanism of ridiculousium: its effect could be to prevent interaction of gas molecules. Gases all obey the [gas laws](http://chemistry.bd.psu.edu/jircitano/gases.html) regardless of their composition. R molecules do not obey gas laws, but interpose themselves between other gas molecules, preventing interactions and reactions.
Biology is still possible because solubility of gases is unaffected by R which is itself insoluble. Oxygen can dissolve in water, and that is the form in which our bodies use oxygen for oxidative biochemistry.
[Answer]
Air pressure or spring powered weapons. Cannon replaced by trebuchet. Basically medieval warfare minus fire arrows.
With good electric batteries, you get rail guns, self reloading air rifles (E.g. a battery operated compressor recharges the reservoir.
With superconducting wire you get flux bombs. E.g. a million ampere current in a thousand turn coil shielded in a super conductor cover to confine the flux. Break the wire, and it all turns into heat, and an enormous electro-magnetic pulse.
Explosives store power (energy per unit time) efficiently. Your rate of fire and your range would both be reduced.
For an example of this sort of thing see S. M. Stirling's Emberverse series, starts with "Dies the Fire"
In it, while fire works, but not well, nothing that depends on rapid chemical reactions (explosives) electricity, or pressures higher than a few atmospheres works. Pay attention to how Stirling doesn't explain.
If you are going to work with a particle, you have explain why it stays around the planet, where it came from, how it fits into normal physics, why it doesn't leak back into Earth, what happens if there are flucations in the density....
[Answer]
**You have two paths**
*(a) High-tech*
Non-combustion high-text weapons include lasers, masers, sonic, magnetic (e.g. rail), and air. Probably some others, but those are the biggies off the top of my head. In most cases, getting them to the stopping/killing power of combustion weapons requires boatloads of energy, meaning seriously improved batteries compared to what we have today and the recharging stations that support them.
Air weapons could use springs or compressed air. Probably compressed air as you get multiple shots faster vs. the time to re-cock the whomping strong spring. I doubt these would be useful all that much as the air needed to achieve the same stopping/killing capacity of combustion would require wearing scuba tanks full of compressed air. Impractical.
Non-projectile/short-range weapons would be flame throwers or other chemistry-spewing contrivances.
*(b) Low-tech*
But the path most likely to be taken first would be the low-tech path. Before combustion we had spears, arrows, and bolts. They were just as effective, they simply didn't have the range of combustion firearms. They also have the advantage of being cheap and reliable.
Frankly, a modern compound short bow is a fearsome weapon - and I can easily see it replacing the rifles quite literally overnight.
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[Question]
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Alright, so I've been meaning to write out a planet with golden/yellow fields and a violet / purple ocean.
What I was thinking about is having the water of this world is so clean and nourishing that its very color is violet, as a sort of representation of its alkaline nature. I was thinking a possible explanation, taking from the real world from the likes of Rio da Prata in Brazil and many others where the water is so filtered and clean, it's crystalline in appearance. Anyway, I'm not sure if the same reason as to why a water would be clear would work to explain why it's purple.
The thing I'm mainly going for is that this ocean is clean. Maybe it doesn't have to be H2O per se, but that it serves the same purpose, at the very least to the local species (which I was hoping would be human, but if that's not possible, I'll have to deal with it.) Perhaps a high concentration of certain minerals and calcium carbonates could go about into explaining this 'phenomenon?'
I think I once heard about microbes and/or marine life that purify the water by emitting some sort of radiance of some property, but I've been trying to fact-check if that was something real or not, and I couldn't find anything. If that's just something I daydreamed, could that suffice as a valid reasoning? Maybe creatures unique to the planet, not necessarily microbes that do so, and such high quantity in these alien lifeforms have allowed the oceans to turn violet?
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**Change the Wavelengths Absorbed**
To understand how we can make water purple, we first need to [understand why it is blue](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-the-ocean-appear/).
Water is blue as it is absorbs longer wave length lights such as reds, oranges and yellows but shorter wave lengths such as blue is reflected, making the water appear blue (or sometimes a more green colour).
If you changed the physical properties of the water to make it better at absorbing these longer wave lengths of light, it would start to appear purple.
Note that, like our own blue water, it may appear to be clear in small quantities. Also, it would only appear to be purple if the water was clean as contaminates, such as mud, would make it seem more of a brown colour.
Changing what wave lengths of light water absorbs or reflects well should not have too much an impact on evolution. The eyes of aquatic or amphibious life may be slightly changed to account for the different colour and underwater plants may be different colours. Beyond this though i can’t see it having a huge effect on life, especially on terrestrial or arial life.
**Changing Perceptions**
A possible alternative to the above is to simply change how colour is perceived. As user TheDyingOfLight pointed out, altering the physical properties of water may have unintended side effects.
Instead, i propose simply changing how your humans perceive light. Rather than seeing the colour blue, as we humans do, they perceive the water to be purple. You may be able to achieve this by either altering the numbers of rods and cones in the eye or by changing how the brain interprets the visual information.
Whilst this does not actually make the water purple, as you wanted, for all intents and purposes it *is* purple. As long as you are only viewing the world from the eyes of these humans, your water will be purple. “A rose by any other name (or in this case colour) is still a rose”. One thing to note though is your humans would also see the sky as purple, not a huge issue but its just something to think about.
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## I see three approaches to this problem.
* Star Type
Change the spectral class of the systems star. Make it put out most of its light in the purple instead of the green like our sun. This formula will give you your stars peak output in nm wavelength for a given temperature $T$ in Kelvin. Purple is between 380 and 420 nm.
$peak \space radiation = (2.898 \times 10^{-3}/T) \times 10^9$
The issue here is that peak radiation in the purple would mean significantly more UV and especially ionising UV radiation than our green peaking sun. This would strongly effect evolution. It would also shorten the time available for evolution, as the star would be big and short lived, maybe spectral class F or A.
Water appears blue because it reflects the longer visible wavelengths better than the shorter ones. So looking at its absorption spectrum [3] it would be purple and blue. In fact our own oceans are purple, but there is just too little purple light coming from the sun. So we make the sun hotter and bigger as discussed above, putting its peak output into the purple. This would get you purple oceans, but also severe risks of sunburn and free sterilisation of unprotected biomatter. Land life will have more issues than water life and might never develop. For humans this would be a dangerous planet. This video [1] goes into details on the subject.
* Particles
The other approach would be to have particles or chemicals in the water. I'm not a chemist so I'm at a loss on what material to use.
My solution would be plankton or algae. While this might interfere with your clean water restriction it needn't. Have the stuff be discrete and permanent. A real world example would be this. [2] The source is crappy, but I couldn't find a better one. The reason for it is some kind of algae. Make it fluorescent to get an even cooler look.
* Genetics
This is a clever work around but might not be worth the trouble. Have the inhabitants of the planet or the arriving humans perceive violet instead of blue with their eyes. Explain this with evolution or genetic engineering. Yet everything they see would look different so this will open a sack of problems.
EDIT: Found this page about waters interactions with light. It makes for an interesting and related read. [4]
[1] <https://youtu.be/L9MNC45Jr6Q>
[2] <https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.breakingisraelnews.com/93005/watch-exodus-718-come-life-indonesian-river-turns-poisoned-blood-red/amp/>
[3] <https://images.app.goo.gl/94pvGLPfcdnUaj6T8>
[4] <http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_vibrational_spectrum.html>
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Most of the coloured waters are solutions of some minerals. These include the pool in Iceland. That would be the best answer.
Bacteria can synthesize chemicals for "food". Their "poop" can be a coloured substance. This is what happens in some of the pools of Yellowstone.
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Both are very easy. Fields can without doubt be golden-yellow on Earth too. Nothing to invent there.
Seas are only marginally more difficult (I *am* on record as saying otherwise some eighteen years ago, but the scenario is quite different).
You can have algae or cyanobacteria thriving in the photic zone (first, say, 50m of depth). These can be almost any colour you want. The fact that the most efficient way of dealing with your particular solar spectrum might yield a different colour isn't really an issue.
Also, the very concept of colour is tricky, as demonstrates the fact that **in ancient times the Earth seas were described as purple in colour**. Homer famously spoke of ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον, "the wine-faced sea" (usually translated as *upon the wine-dark sea* and widely regarded as meaning *the wine-coloured sea*; elsewhere he describes the sea as ερυθρός, reddish-hued. Admittedly, Homer was blind, but *still*. Other authors spoke of the *purple foamy waves*. Some took it so far as to say that in ancient times, [we didn't see the blue colour at all](https://www.businessinsider.com/color-blue-couldnt-see-until-modern-times-2016-3?IR=T)).
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Scientists think that 3 and a half billion years ago on Earth that the oceans were once purple. As chlorophyll hadn't been developed yet ancient photosynthesisers used other chemicals that had a purple pigment rather than a green one. There is one caveat in this hypothesis if you want your world to support intelligent life and a purple ocean. The purple photosynthesisers did not produce oxygen as a by-product, likely some other molecule, which would mean all life would be anaerobic, not a good matchup with intelligence.
There is another theory known as banded iron formations however. Banded iron formations are where a large amount of oxygen is produced all at once, coupled with lots of iron in the oceans. Usually this causes the iron to turn to rust, making the ocean red. But in theory a mild banded iron formation could make a purple ocean. There is a wrench here too, and that is that all banded iron formations are dated to the precambrian on Earth, and also that a lot of rust will create toxic oceans. However if iron were to be exposed from the mantle all at once, that could sustain a purple ocean for at least a few million years. There is no solution to the toxicity however, as rust will seep into freshwater rivers and lakes but creatures will evolve to persist and possibly even digest rust.
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In my world, 500 years in the future, my population fits anti-gravity engines to salvaged boats as a form of transport. These transports fly close to the Earth's surface and are powered by a highly efficient solar panel system rigged as sails.
I'm struggling to come up with a design to propel the boats along, and the only concept that I can think of is propellers driven by electric engines.
**Is there a more efficient/effective engine design that I can utilise?**
Limitations:
* Fossil Fuels are depleted, and cannot be used.
* The largest of transports being Cargo Ships must travel at a minimum of 25 knots, and the smallest at a minimum of 45 knots.
* Fuel sources required for the engine must be in abundant supply and easy to manufacture or contain or, if a reactor is required - able to be stationed onboard the vessel and be maintained by an engineer.
* The engine must run as cleanly as possible. (As few emissions as possible)
EDIT: This question has been flagged as a duplicate due to another question that I have asked in the past. I believe that this question is not a duplicate as I am looking for a propulsion system, not an anti-gravity engine that could propel my transports. (In this case they cannot due to how my anti-gravity engines work.)
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>
> * Fossil Fuels are depleted, and cannot be used.
> * The largest of transports being Cargo Ships must travel at a minimum of 25 knots, and the smallest at a minimum of 45 knots.
> * Fuel sources required for the engine must be in abundant supply and easy to manufacture or contain, or if a reactor is required - able to be stationed onboard the vessel and be maintained by an engineer.
> * The engine run as cleanly as possible. (As little emissions as possible)
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Hydrogen powered jet engines.
In respective order to each requirement:
* Not fossils;
* More powerful than diesel, and most other fuels. This is literally rocket fuel. So you may go much faster or farther for the same amount of fuel mass;
* Just electrolyze water. About 0.0003% of the mass of the planet is just oceans. You may use nuclear plants power to break water into fuel and oxidizer at large scale, serving millions of vehicles regionally - or car-sized and larger vessels may use small, solar powered electrolyzers (might take days to refill a tank in this way, though).
* Your exhaust is literally steam.
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From OP. /and are powered by sails/
**They have sails!**
I know you are using your sails as solar panels which is excellent. They can still be regular sails. Boats have a long history of successfully being propelled by sails.
A problem with steering a sail airship is lack of contact with the water. Regular sailboats have a rudder and I am not sure that will work 100% in the air. You could have a super long blade like air keel.
If you are wind powered that leaves open the question of what you are using your electricity to do. Keg fridge?
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> In my world, 500 years in the future; my population fit anti-gravity engines to salvaged boats as a form of transport
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Use your anti-grav engines.
Gravity exerts a force on your sail-ships towards the center of the earth. In order for your ships to fly the anti-gravity engines must exert some force in the opposite direction. To move forward just add another engine that is 90° rotated.
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Not long a go a [paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9.epdf?referrer_access_token=ywHsmqjVsrW5y3uduJhnt9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0O8jeS1MYPanuSpZ5pCO_VtFgGXGKuDUcpRuvuwHR0lUMmuswyIDvDwrGMe2BOz4KAgjXV9tTWSzlnz6cXdsrtmEkyDhz7Q99TlHUfo5OUOBkfPKIC6Kbd5kogYdb-5heZZ28-VRsUm9UO9rqrof81Ec8OEg72VNKMOjLTGvD53qNYeE0ZzdHU9qRCiPKX2FgiRcyxlqiV4radOaSUqRTGuaxl57aqUNd4DbFumC7jcTu28ZPAc-OUSbWnSH5Bms-c%3D) was released with the concept of an solid state propulsion for aeroplanes.
It works by creating a electical field in the wings, as they contain high-voltage electrodes. Nitrogen in the air gets ionized by the electic field and transports the charge from the front of the wing to the back of it. By that, the Nitrogen can collide with the rest of the air and pushes the air backwards, creating a backwards force and thus propels the aeroplane forward.
Biggest Problem might be to get the voltage to create enough propulsion for bigger ships, but else this is as carbon neutral as it gets.
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A habitable (human could survive in its atmosphere without suits) desert planet which used to have large oceans is quite common in ScFi. I was thinking about the processes which could have been responsible for the loss of water.
I want to leave biological processes—like sandworms from *Dune*, out. Likewise, I'm aware of technological solutions, like orbital rings, but I want something natural. Also, water swallowing holes in the ground don't work out either and I want real water loss, not just deeper oceans and more land.
So I came up with with 3 ways how a planet might lose a significant portion of its surface water. For all discussions, I want to use an earth twin (0.02% by mass surface water) as reference, unless mass or orbital parameters need to be altered to make something happen. The definition for desert planet I'm gonna go by is less than 10% surface coverage by water.
1. Atmospheric stripping and subsequent ocean loss, like it happened on Mars. But this destroys the atmosphere and further outgassing would bring up water again.
2. Stripping via impacts. To achieve this, we need to hit the planet with a rock (which has at least the mass of the oceans) at escape velocity. Due to several rather obvious issues the true figure is going to be several orders of magnitude higher. Also, I aim to create a habitable desert world and not a lava planet/asteroid belt.
3. Break up the water bonds with strong radiation (from the star or an nearby event). But aren't the odds of survival on that world terrible during such an event? Furthermore I am aware that unicellular organisms deep within the crust could survive all of those events, but I want my survivors to be macroscopic and multicellular.
**So how does such a transition happen in the least destructive way?**
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First, welcome to Worldbuild SE!
Per the reality-check tag, I feel the desired conditions posed in the original question are not possible within the confines of present-day known science.
The main problem, which you correctly identify, is not the loss of liquid surface water but the subsequent retention of a breathable atmosphere.
First, these caveats you describe are indeed correct:
* Irradiating the surface to break down the water would make the planet unlivable and compromise the habitability of the atmosphere as well.
* Any collision strong enough to wipe away 90% of a planet's water would obliterate the surface in the process.
* A scenario similar to Mars by definition would result in insufficient atmosphere. However, I did consider whether it might be possible for there to exist a sort of in-between period where the surface water was already gone, yet enough of a breathable atmosphere still remained for a time. Sadly, it doesn't seem like that could happen, and even if it were possible, it would almost certainly be outside the temperature range for humans.
Another major issue arises with the atmospheric oxygen itself: If the surface of an Earth-like world were suddenly made barren, there would be no new sources of oxygen. And as it happens, oxygen likes to react with just about everything. On geological time scales, it would be a very short time before the air lacked the O2 necessary for humans. (In fact, those reactions would probably create a lot of new surface water in the process, funny enough.)
[Logan's idea](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/139513/14698) is interesting, but I'm having difficulty seeing how circumventing the cold trap in some way wouldn't simply lead to Venus-like greenhouse conditions or result in an otherwise inhospitable atmospheric composition. I'd be curious to see this idea developed more fully.
In any case, the least-catastrophic way to rid a planet of 90% of its water (without removing its atmosphere altogether) would be to boil it off, but that will still result in a runaway greenhouse situation. In short, I don't see how any natural processes could cause a planet to literally lose 90% of it's water and still leave it with a breathable, hospitable atmosphere.
That said, I would very much look forward to editing my response in light of any comments or additional information to the original question. Sadly, as the question stands currently, I don't see a way to reconcile the desired environment with the reality of atmospheric science.
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Eliminate the tropospheric cold trap.
Earth retains water because the atmosphere gets cold enough for water vapor to mostly freeze out before it gets thin enough for Jeans escape to be a significant factor. If water vapor could freely mix into the ionosphere, it would both be directly lost to thermal escape, and broken down by unfiltered solar radiation, allowing the hydrogen to escape.
Getting rid of the atmospheric cold trap without making the planet uninhabitable is a bit tricky, though. You will want to make the stratosphere colder and the top of the troposphere warmer to ensure that the temperature gradient is both monotonic, and doesn't ever get too cold to trap water. If it just needs to be habitable to some kind of not-terribly alien life, using normal Earthling biochemistry, the problem isn't too bad; there are plenty of ways to fiddle with atmospheric composition in order to smooth out the temperature gradient. E.g., increasing the fraction of CO2 in the atmosphere will both cool the ionosphere by increasing infrared emissivity, and heat the troposphere; put the planet far enough from its sun that it doesn't trigger a runaway greenhouse, and you're set. If you want it to remain habitable for unmodified humans, however, the constraints are much stricter; figuring out how to manage that is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Water could also be lost because of geological processes (I know it sounds a lot like "water swallowing holes in the ground", but I think it is different enough to be worth mentioning).
It is a well-known (and slightly disturbing) phenomenon even on the Earth: in the subduction zones under the oceans, the water is absorbed by rocks and brought deep down in the mantle.
This phenomenon should be contrasted by emission of water vapor into the atmosphere by other geological processes (eructions), but it is not known if there is a balance or Earth surface is steadily losing water toward the inner layer of the planet.
Per [this article](https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/thirsty-mantle-subduction-zones-swallow-more-water-thought):
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> The finding has major implications for our current understanding of the global water cycle, according to Wiens. If three times more water is reaching Earth’s interior than we thought, he says, then the amount going in is much more than what current estimates suggest is coming back out at the surface, for example, through volcanic emissions and degassing. “If that [imbalance] persisted for many millions of years … then the ocean would go away.”
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So your planet could undergo some anomalous geological processes that accelerate this phenomenon (but I think it would require anyway a timespan in the order oh the milions years), causing the loss of the surface water.
The water is still on the planet, but at depths where it couldn't be reached by an artesian well or partecipate to the water cycle of the surface.
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Chemical binding - a large swarm of meteors crashed into one of your oceans, and cracked open. The interior of the meteors contained vast deposits of Alkali metals (Lithium, Sodium, etc), which began reacting with the water to produce Salts and Hydrogen. The Hydrogen drifted into the upper atmosphere, and escaped into space.
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Can we go from this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/u49ae.png)
to this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/g72rc.png)
Suppose over millennia (or as long as it takes) humans on Earth are artificially selected by aliens to be big and **healthy**.
Is there any theoretical reason that they couldn't grow to be as tall as large dinosaurs?
If the proportions (thickness of bones etc.) had to be changed, what would those changes have to be?
**Assumptions**
**EDIT** for clarity (I hope)
\*These are intended to be giant humans. If someone found their skeleton, they would be able to identify each individual bone that occurs in a human skeleton. Imagine an archaeologist saying, "Wow! These are humans!". They should walk in an upright position rather than being able to use their knuckles like a typical ape. **Relative** bone lengths should be consistent within normal human variation but bone thickness or size of joint can vary in order to carry the required weight. \*
A target height would be about 26 ft (8 m) but the taller the better.
They must be able to support their own weight and walk easily and bipedally.
The giant-sized humans should still be recognisably human even if their proportions are somewhat different - for example they might be stockier or spindlier.
The aliens will provide the humans with all the food and comfortable living conditions necessary. Only the healthiest and largest humans are allowed to breed. There is no manipulation of DNA, just selective breeding for size.
This occurs on Earth and on land so everything happens in 1G.
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**Note**
The tallest man to ever live was Robert Wadlow at 8' 11.1" (2.72 m)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7iEB5.png)
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**Possible, maybe, but with some caveats.**
1. **They will only look vaguely human**. Their proportions will be drastically different the [square cube law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law) is unforgiving. Their **legs** will have to be massive to hold up the weight, luckily humans are plantigrade. They have to compensate for scaling difference but they also need to account for the much larger heart and lungs. Expect legs 2-3 feet in cross section at a minimum, and they will need some serious shock absorption in the feet. The internal anatomy of the legs will have to be massively reworked to keep fluid from pooling in the legs. Giraffes have a thick inelastic structure around each leg to prevent expansion of the tissue.
Their lungs and **heart** will need to be much larger proportionally, the body is basically a fluid column, and the heart needs to overcome that massive pressure differential, that's why humans with gigantism have huge hearts and still die of heart failure. Their entire circulatory system is going to need tweeking, because that massive pressure going to the legs is also going to the brain, they will need some kind of adaptation to keep this pressure down in the head or they will bleed into hteir brains.
Their **heads** will be smaller proportionally, brains scale less than one, so bigger bodies need smaller brains proportionally to get the same functionality.
I mentioned the **lungs**, mammalian lungs are crap (dead end sacks). One of the reason dinosaurs got so large is they have a very different breathing mechanism, their lungs are highly efficient stiff one way structures fed by air. Your creatures lungs will have to be huge, and not just because of the amount of oxygen they need to extract, they also need to move all the air out of a much larger esophagus before they get any fresh air. This is why [giraffes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOf74cCRGKo) have such disproportionally massive lungs.
The single biggest problem however is the **spine**, This may be what stops them from getting to the size you want. The mammalian spine has been seriously compromised by the mammalian breathing system. Having to have a portion of spine unsupported by ribs makes for a very weak structure. dinosaurs did not have this problem. The spines for your giants will be proportionally gigantic, and even then their is going to need to be some serious changes, something closer to a ball and socket joint between vertebrae, or perhaps a bunch of interlocking joints like a hero shrew, will necessary to prevent dislocation. That will take a long time to evolve, probably more than anything else. The musculature supporting it will be equally massive, all together they may not even be able to bend their spine much.
2. **It will have some big impacts on their lifestyle**. If your humans stand up from a sitting position they will likely pass out, giraffes have a similar problem because it is a drastic change in pressure. Their spine is going to be very stiff just to work, they may not be able to bend over. Don't expect them to move fast either, swinging their arms in a pitch will tear it out of the socket and rupture every blood vessel in it. Of course they will also spend a lot more time growing, expecting adulthood to take 40 years to reach would not be unreasonable. Food is not an issue, animals get more metabolically efficient as they get larger.
3. **It is going to take a long time to create them**, tens of millions of years at a minimum. These are some massive changes and they will not evolve quickly. It took sauropods ~30 million years to reach massive sizes, even with selective breeding half as long (15my) is not unreasonable.
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> Can we go from this: to this:
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*Assuming we are talking about on earth & the aliens haven't relocated their breeding stock to a planet with some combination of lighter gravity & denser atmosphere.*
It very much depends on what you mean by "still look human" but for 8 meters tall I'd have to say.
**No**
A human bipedal bodyplan is extremely maladapted for a size more than a little over seven feet tall.
Robert Wadlow had a whole host of health problems associated with his size, he couldn't walk unaided for more than very short distances, the pressure caused by all that weight on his bones & joints did a lot of damage to them & he had a serious heart condition as a result of his size as well.
And he was only eight feet eleven inches, an 8 meter human is entirely out of the question.
To go much over seven feet & hope to be reasonably functional the human body needs substantial re-engineering of its organs, the skeleton & limb structure (especially the legs) to a degree where the end result won't resemble a normal human anymore even if it was still broadly a bipedal humanoid.
In short you can't just scale up the human body by selective breeding & suppress good adaptions (for the increased size) to maintain a "normal" human appearance, while allowing those good adaptions is going to result in a very significant change in the species appearance.
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> They must be able to support their own weight and walk easily and bipedally.
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Just scaling up the human form to 8 meters they simply wouldn't be able to walk without snapping their legs like dry twigs, not (as you specified) in earths gravity.
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If you allow sufficient modifications to occur during the selective breeding so that they can walk easily and bipedally then there's no way on Earth you would ever be able to show me a picture of one & for me to mistake it for a human\*, even if you remove all indications of scale.
\*Which it wouldn't be, by then it would be a new hominid species.
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It depends on what you mean by "still look human".
Picture the difference between a deer and an elephant: the elephant has a squatter shape, thick, pillar-like legs, wide cushioned feet, and numerous other adaptations that allow it to work at such massive scales.
You could potentially get something that looks like a human to work on big scales, but its proportions will be distorted. It will be squat, muscular, and have proportionally shorter, thicker legs than a human. Although this might not be such a bad thing, after all a lot of artwork of fantasy giants and ogres have these very same distortions.
Another interesting fact is that larger animals tend to retain heat better. These giant humans will probably fare better in cold climates. If you want them to live in more equatorial regions, some other adaptations typical of large African animals may be helpful, like large ears or a tendency to wallow in mud or water.
As for *how* big they could get, now the speculation becomes harder to determine. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that they can grow as **tall** (though not as *massive*) as any terrestrial animal that has ever existed, provided that their legs are around as thick as that animal's own legs. After all, a sauropod's front legs are strong enough to hold up the "slice" of dinosaur that is above its legs, so if you took a chunk of meat roughly the same size and shaped it into a human-ish form, it *should* still be able to support its weight at least...though balancing on two legs and walking may be a different story.
EDIT: One caveat I didn't consider - you're going to need a proportionally bigger heart to move blood to the brain. Elephants can get away with a normal-sized heart relative to their body size because their head is on roughly the same level as their heart, but this wouldn't work for a species that holds its head above the heart. Giraffes have very large hearts with thick walls for this reason. This may cause some issues if you want to stuff it into a human-sized torso. Not saying it would be *impossible*, but it may place additional limitations on how big an upright biped can grow.
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I remember playing this game back in 2010-2011, and In minecraft if you found a waterfall you could actually swim it up vertically, it was difficult but possible.
Does this apply to real life to, could a human being with muscles big enough actually swim up on falling water?
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No, not really (not if we're talking about humans, and as seen in mine-craft anyway).
The fastest any human has ever swum is 2.29 m/s, this record was set by Micheal Phelps who is about as swole as any human could ever hope to be.
The terminal velocity of a raindrop is about 10 m/s. Even ignoring a whole host of factors making this nigh impossible, the water coming down is at least four times faster than you could ever hope to swim.
But lets talk about those factors.
First off you'd also need to push your own weight up (Phelps' record was completely horizontal remember), this is something most people can do simply by climbing a ladder so isn't actually a hard part.
Secondly the water coming down probably isn't a continuous volume of laminar-flow water, It's just a bunch of drops (if it is a continuous volume its probably travelling much much faster than raindrops anyway so you've still got no chance). This means that the reaction mass for each of your strokes is much lower so you get insanely low efficiency while swimming. To simulate grab a swivel chair, take it outside and "swim in the air" till you move. Now have a friend pour a sprinkler over you while you do it. You will notice both times that you don't really go anywhere.
Thirdly you'd also need incredibly coordination and balance even if you could provide the upthrust.
Your best bet is probably to try this in a gravity-less environment such as a space station.
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No, for the reasons already pointed out by Ummdustry.
Other animals also can't do it. There are exactly zero species capable of swimming up through falling water.
You may be thinking now of salmon, which do swim against strong currents and waterfalls. But they don't swim through the water to climb waterfalls. They leap over those.
We humans are poor leapers when it comes to water - on Earth. In a lower gravity setting, we just might do it.
Randall Munroe, the god of nerds, has already done some research on that. [In lunar gravity, Michael Phelps might be able to leap a couple meters into the air from the water](https://what-if.xkcd.com/124/). So maybe in even lower gravity, he might be able to leap over waterfalls like a salmon.
Until we colonize space, though, we'd better not swim against the current in rapids.
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I've been thinking about doing something involving bubbles of stopped ([already answered here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/44790/how-would-stopped-time-look-from-the-outside)), slowed down or sped up time.
What would that look like for different speeds?
Is there any way of calculating the refraction based on the speed of time inside?
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Refraction is already calculated by change in speed of light through a medium: $n = {c/v}$ with n being the index of refraction c being the speed of light before the transition and v being the speed of light after the transition.
If inside time goes at 1/10th the rate light moves 1/10th as fast, the bubble would have a index of refraction of 10 (well above known materials) with a critical angle of about 10 degrees, so you could pretty much only look straight into it. With a bigger time difference even less light would escape the slow time.
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I imagine depending on which laws of physics you want to retain and which you want to drop, there are some pretty deep and counterintuitive results. Since that's too hard let's do something simple.
Objects near a large mass (black hole) seem to have their time slowed when viewed very far from the large mass. The same *sucking* action of gravity causes light traveling away from the large mass to lose energy and become redshifted.
If your slow-time bubbles use a similar principle (a localised area of high gravity pulling equally in all directions) the answer is they look redder depending on how powerful they are. Super powerful bubbles have the frequency lowered so much they become invisible as the reflected light is turned into radio waves. So those bubbles appear completely black.
There is no such thing as a reverse black hole so this has no physical basis -- but it makes narrative sense the fast-time bubbles have their stuff look bluer depending on their power. Again really powerful bubbles have their light turned into radiation which is invisible. Again the bubbles appear black.
Likewise, if you're in a slow bubble stuff outside appears bluer and if the bubble is really powerful the outside world is just a massive black void surrounding the bubble.
It's also a good narrative device if the slow bubble is completely black. If there's a fight going on inside we can't see what's going on and we can't help without hopping in yourself and becoming trapped!
Calculating the redshift would depend on how the gravity in these bubbles. I suggest the gravity is very strong but pulls evenly in all directions and cancels itself out. As though you were at the hollow centre of an immensely thick and heavy dyson sphere: you are weightless and experience slow time.
The normal formula for gravitational dilation assumes light traveling away from a large mass with the normal *sloped* gravity well so cannot be used here. It's probably easier to estimate how powerful the bubble can get before it becomes black. Any takers!
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**The Beginning**
A deity of good aspects (Justice, Light, etc.) has guided mankind since the dawn of Creation, helping them develop and prosper. He was always a powerhouse in terms of raw divine power, allowing him to directly intervene in the material plane through an avatar, up to and including his actual divine form. There were gods of other good aspects, (love, fertility, nature, etc.) the worship of which he also built up from nothing. By guiding mortals to them, their worship directly increased the good aspect's power. Unfortunately for our deity, however, he comes to find out that he was **too far** back in humanity's development. A negative aspect trickster deity who kept himself hidden, reveals his presence by sealing off the material plane, which prevents deities from **directly** interacting with it. After giving the trickster the god equivalent of a beating within an inch of his immortal life, our deity discovers to his horror that the damage has already been done, and **the seal will remain in place for over a thousand years.** Because humans were not developed enough, paper and writing isn't really a thing yet, and most of his teachings exist only oral tradition.
**The Sealing**
In terms of raw power, the gods were unaffected. They are as powerful before as they are after. However, the Seal made direct intervention impossible, as well as making lesser actions more taxing. The other good aspects can eke out a weak blessing at best for some of their followers, while the main deity can still hand out lots of blessings of decent potency. Without the ability to speak to his followers, natural divergence is inevitable. Because of this, the Justice deity watches his Church slowly splinter off into sub factions before his very eyes. He allows this because it's splintered yet growing follower base continues to increase his power, increasing his indirect influence and because he can't stop it. As more time passes, however, the sub factions continue to splinter further, growing more extreme and eventually, begin to consume each other in wars and violence. One of the worst side effects is idolatry in that it subtracts from prayers to him. So a prayer to Justice + x is weaker than if it was just to him. The negative aspects also gradually begin to gain traction.
**The Seal Ends**
At this point, the seal finally ends, and the deity is able to intervene how he sees fit.
**But how should he?**
Obviously, nothing stops him from descending upon the Earth, and smiting those who act in his name to rape and slaughter others, and collapse the heretics' cathedrals one by one with a snap of his fingers.
**But is that the best way?**
He wants to put humanity back on the True Path, but without tearing the world asunder doing so. **He also does not fear the negative aspects as they are, but fears what they are becoming.**
The largest church (~40-50% of the followers) is the "most right", but even so, is so hilariously wrong and perverted from the original teachings that starting over completely may actually be easier than correcting it.
**So, his ultimate goal is to completely reform the Church by removing all sub factions and checking the rising power of the negative aspects.**
**How should he do this to minimize suffering while still not compromising on his goal?**
**How would the fantasy medieval society react to him, and how should he react in turn?**
**Clarification**
The established Churches have a vested interest in maintaining their power and position, so it would not be beyond possibility for them to gather up a thousand years worth of magical artifacts, and swing public belief to directly oppose the deity.
Inversely, if the deity acts too decisively and causes a lot of chaos by essentially alpha striking the church before they can respond, he may end up doing the opposite of what he wants by strengthening the negative aspects to a dangerous level.
[Answer]
# The quick and dirty way
Reappear as flashy as possible. Appear as a huge face in the sky, tell everyone with a majestic voice that they are to return to the right path now or face the consequences. Anyone who acts up gets smited to make an example. This will likely cause a mass panic. Many people will die and a lot of property will get destroyed before you got the world back in order. You will also lose your reputation as a benevolent god. It might take a while until people will again worship you out of love instead of out of fear.
But as Nicolo Machiavelli said: When you have to choose between being loved or being feared, then it's better to be feared than loved. So when you are in a hurry to restore your religion, then this might be an acceptable sacrifice.
# The slow and subtle way
Reveal yourself privately to the leader(s) of each religious sect. Tell them to adjust their teachings to return to the right path. The more pragmatic of them might think they just went crazy and started to hallucinate. Prove yourself by providing some minor miracles. The more zealous types might get excited and tell everyone about your return. Too bad for them, because that means you need to destroy them. No, I do not mean *smite* them. We wanted to avoid such drastic measures. I mean *destroy their reputation*. Use your divine powers to let some embarrassing mishaps happen to them to humiliate them in public. Make everyone think they turned insane and replace them with someone else.
When all the religions leaders understood that you are back and that they are to shut up about it, then it's time to start reformation processes in their individual sects.
Use a carrot-and-stick approach to influence the different sect leaderships. When they do as you say, you perform some miracles to help them solve whatever problems they currently have to deal with (or fulfill their personal desires, if they are those kinds of people). When they don't comply, perform some subtle miracles which sabotage them. You don't have to do anything big. [For Want of a Nail a kingdom was lost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail). The right intervention at the right time can have tremendous consequences. In the end, no religion will be able to withstand your wraith in the long term. So they will either learn to comply or lose their influence and disappear. Still, do not rush the reformation process. You can't change someone's religious believes over night. When you force too many too radical changes in a short timespan, you risk to destabilize and further fragment the religious organizations.
When all the sects either synchronized their dogma and practices or became insignificant, tell them to reunify into one church.
Even though the lines between the different religious denominations will have become very blurry, the religious leaders might still perceive each other as rivals and seek to maintain their autonomy. But you don't need them to become friends. You just need them to cooperate. Mortal quarrels are best left to the mortals. So leave the details of how to organize their church and how to separate powers in it to them. A bit of internal intrigue and infighting can not be avoided. And as long as the church still appears unified and functional from the perspective of the average person, it won't be an issue.
When the reunification is complete, start to prepare your big reveal. At this point, you might also want to contact the political leaders of the world and make sure they know what's going on. Otherwise there might be some unintended response to your return. Some might interpret it as a power-grab by the church and try to strike it down. Other might use it as a signal to start some pointless holy war or perform an ugly pogrom against some minority in a misguided attempt to appease you. You don't want any of this, so make sure the political leaders are in on it and know what you expect them to do.
With the unified church behind you prepared to answer all the questions people will have and the political leaders prepared to maintain order, you can make this a smooth transition with very little disruption.
[Answer]
**TLDR**
If you change the political landscape (including the political power of your church) there is a good chance that things won't be peaceful regardless of your methods. Humans are full of corruption and there are likely some people who were hungry for power who rose high in the church who don't care for the ideals of the reformation and will oppose anything to hold power - even in a church devoted to Justice.
A few examples from history are given below.
The most successful from the examples below is continual spiritual prompting of your followers, so that they want to follow the 'correct' path rather than the establishment.
Please don't up/downvote based on your opinion of religion/the Bible, this is the best source material I have at hand to answer the question, which is religious in nature.
**Flood everyone and start again**
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> The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.
> The Lord then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.
> - Genesis 6:5-6,7:1,4
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From your question, this is probably not the non-violent scenario you want to go with as thousands died. Also, it didn't really work and history shows that within a few generations Noah's decedents were almost as bad as the people who were flooded.
**Appear to a chosen prophet and perform miracles**
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> Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them.
> I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless a mighty hand compels him. So I will stretch out my hand and strike the Egyptians with all the wonders that I will perform among them." - Exodus 3:1-2,7,19
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Even when people believed that Moses was a prophet, they still didn't follow his instructions. Miracles convinced Pharaoh that Moses' God was real, but he wasn't convinced that Moses' God was more powerful or worth listening to than the Egyptian Gods until all the first born Egyptian boys died in one night. Horrific stuff, with the lesson not to rely on miracles alone to convince people to follow divine instructions.
**Write down a list of divine rules and give to the people**
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> When the Lord finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the covenant law, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God. Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. 16 The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets. Exodus 31:18, 32:15
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Following the giving of the 10 Commandments, God gave Moses and his brother Aaron many more rules and instructions about how to set up the ancient Hebrew church and how the people were to live (see entire book of Leviticus).
However, it didn't work: Having been rescued from slavery in Egypt and given a divinely instituted church, the people complained, immediately did their own thing, and questioned the new authority even in the face of continued divine intervention.
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> Now the people complained about their hardships. “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. 6 But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!” Exodus 11:1,4
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> Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite. “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?” they asked. “Hasn’t he also spoken through us?” And the Lord heard this. The anger of the Lord burned against them, and he left them. When the cloud lifted from above the tent, Miriam’s skin was leprous. Exodus 12:1-2,9,10
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The lesson here: rules don't change people's hearts, so and there'll be friction between the new order and those who liked the old ways better
**Civilisation wide hardship requiring dependence on your deity**
Following unending idolatry, losing the scrolls of God's holy laws for a few hundred years (to be found accidentally in a pile in the corner of the main temple by the cleaner), and the routine killing of prophets, God tried to beat sense into Israel using Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian army.
The Babylonians invaded, and took everyone as slaves back to Babylon. Many who hadn't cared about the God of Israel in the first place integrated with the Babylonian population but were never heard from again. But a core secretly passed notes and became more fervent in their belief and eventually following a few miracles decades later were allowed to return to Israel to rebuild. Israel never had an idolatry problem again, and never lost their holy books again after that - so kind of effective.
In your case, this could work - use an external 'evil' force to conquer your people so that they turn to Justice and actually listen to what he says. Still not death free however due to the conquering and war that precedes the reformation.
**A long, slow, grass roots campaign, show how to live by example**
A few hundred years after the Babylon thing, Israel had developed religion into the primary political structure. They didn't just obey the laws, but they put new laws in place to make sure people didn't get close to thinking about getting close to breaking the original divine laws. In doing so they became law focussed to the extent that their God send Jesus as a divine incarnation to demonstrate the intent of the laws - not to regulate behavior but to show that people should be loving toward each other.
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> Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach."
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> “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices to the temple—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town." - Matthew 23:1,23,34
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> “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” - John 13:34
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This definitely resulted in a reformation - the Christian church was formed out of those Jews and Greeks who believed. But many didn't believe and remained Jewish or pagan. Also, people died because these new Christians didn't follow the old political order and so were a threat to people in power (who succeeded in killing quite a few between then and today).
**Continually prompt your people through some spiritual means**
The god of Israel came to the conclusion described above that rules don't get the results. You need people to want to be reformed.
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> This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord in the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar:
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> "The people of Israel and Judah have done nothing but evil in my sight. But I will surely gather them from all the lands where I banish them in my furious anger and great wrath. They will be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that all will then go well for them and for their children after them.
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> I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me- Jeremiah 32:1,30, 39, 31:33
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This prophesy reportedly came true a few hundred years later after Jesus died when God's holy spirit became available to everyone.
This was probably the most effective form of reformation accomplished that has been documented in the texts, as the result was described with only positive outcomes:
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> They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship,
> to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe
> at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the
> believers were together and had everything in common. They sold
> property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day
> they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread
> in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising
> God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to
> their number daily those who were being saved. - Acts 2:42
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While the availability of the holy spirit to anyone who believes was a continual thing after Jesus' death, of course not everyone wanted to be a believer. Deaths from this method are related to those from the previous 'grass roots' method as they both happened around the same time.
**Inspire some priests to read and understand the divine texts properly**
After the aforementioned reformations, new political power structures developed over a period of several hundred years, culminating in the Roman Catholic church dominating Europe and manipulating monarchs for their own gain. Another reformation was required.
The Lutheran reformation is usually dated as starting 31 October 1517 in Wittenberg, Saxony, when Luther sent his [Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-five_Theses) to the Archbishop of Mainz. The church had been collecting money to pay for cathedrals in exchange for forgiveness of sins, which Luther said was not how divine forgiveness worked, with reference to the original texts.
The invention of the printing press and literacy enabling the average Joe to read Luther's arguments were vital to the effectiveness of Luther's reformation - before this everyone had to just believe what they were told by their local priest.
Due to the upset of political power Luther caused, this reformation also came with [many deaths](https://theconversation.com/five-of-the-most-violent-moments-of-the-reformation-71535) (see St Bartholomew’s Day massacre painting below).
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3JeYZ.jpg)
**Summary and discussion**
Human hearts seem to be full of corruption, and many people want power even if it means perverting something good. These people will resist your reformation regardless of whether you go in hard or soft.
It might be worthwhile considering the overall aim. Can your deity afford to cut losses, ignore the intransigent and focus on reforming those who are more receptive? If so, can this be done quietly without disturbing the current power balance? Some evil will remain, and likely even be preached, but over time you might be able to inspire many thousands of poorer people to follow the true cause. In time (potentially over several generations), some of these may make it into the halls of power and start to change the whole religion a bit at a time.
It seems unlikely that you'll ever convince everyone (or even a majority?) to follow the new way regardless of method, given free will. So setting up a culture of religious tolerance would help prevent deaths of your true followers at the hands of the others.
Also, the fact that Luther needed to cause a reformation 1500 years after Jesus started the church just goes to show that even the best effort your deity makes now will likely need to be continually followed up as each generation has their own opportunity to turn away from the one true path.
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Invest in some decent publications. Go with mountainsides and other large- scale media, carve some directions and commandments as cartoons, with texts and a talking statue to teach reading and writing. Update a lot, with repudiations for slanted readings by overzealous priests. 'Don't kill humans' - Carl: ah, he obvs did not mean to not kill murderers, right? Those need to die. 'Divine Edit: Do not kill humans for ANY reason'.
Also: No smiting. In your next absence, humans will need to emulate your doings, so only do as they should.
To get the church back on track, go the truth and reconciliation way: huge festivals where everybody gets his or her say, you lay down the law, then the clocks start anew and on your next (unscheduled) return, people are promoted ore axed depending on their practical implementation of your teachings. A few iterations of this, and the faithful will have their compass rightened, while the career clergy is clear on what will take them up: Living your word. Together with your carved-in-stone FAQ, this should make for pretty consistent churching.
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Take literally a single moment to sort out the population into those worth saving and those not and quickly painlessly kill the second group outright. He can cleanse the church in an instant without anyone who has to go suffering at all.
As to the reaction of the survivors that depends on the spin he manages to put on the situation, if he can make it a "plague on the unfaithful" moment then those who survive are going to do their utmost to repent their sins and live good upright lives if the bad gods get in ahead and set him up to look like an evil sadist there could be issues. Spin doctoring the situation is going to be the work of several generations, your god will need a succession of compelling and personable prophets to speak on his behalf. A couple of wars to keep the faithful focused on more worldly affairs wouldn't hurt either, so he may want to leave some of the worst, and most obvious, corrupters of the faith around for earthly rather than divine retribution.
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Smite dead the entire clergy, then appear in miraculous fashion before the faithful and hand them golden tables on which written in fire are your new commandments for them.
Smite dead a number of them over the next few months or years who are sinners in a very public manner.
And don't forget to reward the faithful who live in peace and accordance with your commandments with bountiful harvests, health, and plenty of children while the wicked heretics suffer disease, famine, and depravity.
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I'm looking into magic systems for my fantasy world, and among other things, I want to make sure that I have the effects right.
One such magic system allows the user to create a small 'bubble' of space nearby. All objects within this bubble (including the ground and air) have their mass reduced or increased. This works on an atomic level. The magic isn't adding new atoms or removing them, just increasing/descreasing their mass, and therefore increasing/decreasing their gravitational pull.
To the best of my knowledge, the mass of an atom is governed by how many neutrons it has, and changing that number would actually change what the atom is. Disregard that for this question. All atoms somehow stay the same with a new mass. Note that this effect only lasts as long as the objects remain within the bubble of magic. So if the mage stops the effect or the material leaves the bubble, mass returns to normal.
**Question:** I wanted to be sure I have the effects of this magic right, as in what would happen when the mass of objects was increased/decreased. I've listed my theories below, and would love to hear if they are right, or if they are wrong, why (and obviously what the right effect is). And of course, if there's an effect you know of which I haven't considered, I would like to know that as well. For the theories below, assume there's no limit on how far you can increase/decrease the mass of an object. I'm just trying to get a feel for what would happen; limitations come later.
**Theories:**
* Increasing the mass of objects would make them get heavier. Due to the increased gravity of the atoms, I would imagine they would also get a bit smaller if the magic was powerful enough.
* Decreasing the mass of objects would make them lighter. I'm not sure about increasing size.
* Extreme: You could potentially (assuming you had enough magic) increase the mass of an object (and thus shrink it down) to generate heat due to pressure. Thus you could possibly heat things up, turn them into dim lights, or if you go far enough, cause them to explode. Would I be correct in this?
* Extreme: If you decrease the mass of an object far enough, the gravitational bonds of the molecules will be unable to hold onto each other, and the object will simply float apart as particles. I know atomic bonds are very strong, so I'm assuming the molecules would stay intact (and thus the material would remain the same), meaning something like a brick would just float away as a fine dust. Am I correct in this?
* Assuming the previous is true, what happens when a low-mass dust leaves the bubble, and mass returns to normal? It won't reassemble into a brick, but would it reassemble at all? Would a rock form in mid air and fall to the ground? A bunch of pebbles? Nothing?
**Note:** This isn't a comprehensive 'would this work' question for this magic system. I just want to be sure I have the effects of it correct. How it works and related questions are separate and may be asked later.
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There's a bit of a disconnect between atoms and objects, so here's some fundamentals in Nuclear Chemistry:
1. Each Atom is comprised of Protons, Neutrons, and Electrons.
2. The Nucleus of an Atom contains Protons and Neutrons
3. The number of Protons define what element the atom is.
4. The number of Neutrons define what isotope of the element the atom is.
5. Both Protons and Neutrons give a substantial mass to the Nucleus
6. Electrons orbit the Nucleus in crazy patterns since they move so fast.
7. Protons attract electrons and vice versa.
Unfortunately, the "Neutron = Mass" approach is more of a problem than it seems. While Protons and Neutrons do dictate the atomic mass, they also define what kind of isotope and element the atom is. A **lot** of isotopes are not stable, and many can even be dangerous. Nuclear Decay could then easily occur, which would render the mass change void.
Furthermore, atomic mass doesn't necessarily translate to a mass of an object. That is governed by how tightly the atoms hold **each other** together. These are known as *intermolecular forces*. The tighter they are held together, the more of them in a specific space, meaning the mass of the object is higher.
For instance, what would you consider heavier: Iron or Plastic?
A layman would consider Iron obviously heavier. Even though you can reasonably have a kilogram of each without turning any heads, the layman is considering the **density** each object.
Depending on the plastic, they're held together by [Van der Waal Dispersion Forces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Waals_force) while Iron is held together with [Metallic](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_bond) bonds. There are some nuances here, but Metallic bonds tend to be pretty strong, and thus more atoms in a smaller space result in a denser object.
So you may want to consider a density and space approach. All objects are contained within a boundary of space. Thus, if objects aren't changing size, you could manipulate mass by magically withdrawing atoms and exerting some sort of *magical energy* to have it retain the same volume.
(Fun fact: High **Density** Polyethylene, a plastic, is used as body armor!)
A way in which your Neutron = Mass approach could *maybe* work is if you were able to retain the same Intermolecular Forces in the object, add a Neutron to each atom, and prevent Nuclear Decay. Which, it's magic, so within the realm of possibility.
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Actually, your first two effects are wrong. More massive atoms are much larger than small atoms--to the point that small atoms (notably Hydrogen) can simply float through the gaps in more massive atoms. Larger atoms mean that as you add mass to objects by adding mass to their atoms, items would expand. Gravity only comes into play once the objects get very massive (on the scale of stars massive). Likewise, reducing mass will mean the objects shrink.
Another way to think of it is if you have a 1lb block of wood and a 2lb block of wood. The 2lb block has approximately twice the mass (depending on the accuracy of measurements), and is larger, even though the extra mass means (very, very slightly) more gravity within the elements.
[Answer]
When I originally read the question, I understood it differently than the first two answers. One answer seems to assume that the atomic particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) stay the same size and mass, but how many of them are in each atom is what changes. The other assumes that the number of them in each atom stays the same, but their size changes.
I understood the question to mean that each particle stays the same size, and the number of particles in each atom stays the same, but the mass (and therefore the density also) of each particle changes. For example, a single proton in a bubble that increases mass, would be the same size as a single proton outside the bubble, but it's mass would increase and therefore the effect of gravity on it would also increase. (this is actually similar to what the selected answer suggests that you consider). I'm working with little more than layman's level knowledge of sub-atomic particle physics here but, as I understand it the effects of mass at that level are negligible unless the change is EXTREMELY severe (the only thing I know of that is so extreme is when a star's mass becomes so great that its gravity becomes so strong that it crushes Electrons down to the point that they come in to contact with Protons, instead of orbiting them, and become Neutrons, creating a neutron star). If this is the case, then until you get to that extreme level of change in mass, nothing much noticeable is going to happen to size of objects and distances between atoms and molecules within the bubble.
HOWEVER, since you've indicated that individual particles and objects can freely pass into and out of the "bubbles", even (relatively) small changes in mass would create some interesting effects on the overall objects themselves. For example, assuming the bubble was a sphere, and mass were reduced, the air inside the sphere would be much lighter (due to reduced pull of gravity on its reduced mass) than the air outside of it, so it would rise up out of the top of the bubble. This would leave space in the bubble for more air, which would be pulled up from any of the underside of the bubble that is not in contact with the ground, creating an updraft for as long as the magic remained active. A person inside the same bubble would also be lighter, and could jump higher (until they begin to exit the top of the bubble and start to regained their normal weight). Thrown objects would be similarly affected. For a bubble that increased mass, you would get a downdraft of air, a person would feel heavier, anything they are wearing would feel heavier. Thrown objects would have a steeper downward arc until they exit the bubble, etc. Extreme mass increase could cause someone to collapse under their own weight, in a fantasy setting, something like maille armor could actually crush the wearer, branches of trees could be ripped off under their own weight, bridges collapsed, etc.
For this type of magic system, the shape, size, specific positioning of the "bubble", as well as how fast they can be created, and how fast their effects are felt, then become interesting factors to consider. Can you create one that appears and takes immediate effect, and appears in such a way that only half of a person is affected at the time of creation? That would cause serious balance issues, or force a tool or weapon to be yanked from the hand, even if the intensity of the change was very low. Or a long, wide, low, flat shaped one could make a marching army feel like it was walking through thick mud even on a grassy field or paved road.
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[Question]
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So, I am working on a species called the Vosians, who hail from the planet Vos. They are a species of eusocial insectoids, much like Earth ants.
***Biology***
The Vosians are about 3 feet tall, or 0.9 meters. The average weight for an adult is 90 lbs, though the queen can be 7 feet tall, and weight 600 lbs. The average lifespan for a Vosian is 40 years, and for the queen it is 130. Vosians are divided into 5 castes, which are all necessary for the species to work.
* Workers
* Overseers
* Protectors
* Princes/princesses
* Queen
They communicate by dance, and live in many great hives across the planet Vos. The Queen is always surrounded by an entourage of 6,000 protectors at a time, and lays about 3 million eggs a day. Vos, the planet they inhabit, is a dryer world, with no major oceans only seas. The Vosians are often seen by humans as a great pest in the galaxy, as they reproduce quickly. They have not invented their own version of FTL travel yet, and rely on investors to do any colonization. It is a great planet for outsourcing of labor, as Vos’s Queen only wants a payment of 5 million credits a year.
Sorry to get so sidetracked back there, but back to my question. So, as you guys know, most insects are dumber than bricks and are evolutionary dead ends that will never progress. Vosians are a major plot element, and so can I ask: What natural factors would allow an insect species to become intelligent?
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Calling insects an evolutionary dead end. How dare you, sir. They just stopped getting changing cause they got it perfect way back in 70,000,000 B.C.E.
Okay, that's enough jokes. Personally, I like to think that human intelligence is a combination of tool use, a dependency on complex communication, and a need to alter the environment around them in order to survive. There are a bunch of factors involved with each of those list items, but it's good enough to use as a general checklist.
Common ants already fulfill all the requirements I mentioned, just not as extremely as you need. The only anatomical diffrence Volsians will need from ants is instead of manipulating with mandibles, the Volsians will likely have dexterous hands, tentacles, or other part that allows for the creation and use of fairly specialized tools.
The great news about this is that the Volsians have a good reason to evolve great manipulating appendages: building hives that can house a 43 billion family members *(that's the number of births in a single non-queen Volsian lifetime. You might want to adjust that, cause that's simply too many mouths to feed for any level of civilization)*. Building such hives/towns would demand the Volsians learn to use tools, and the pressures of feeding a family would probably lead to agriculture and animal domestication as well.
All of the above is really dang complicated, so much so that it would likely demand that individual Volsians need to be actually taught to be functioning citizens/family members. After all, building a pyramid **and** growing a crop **and** organizing a city is a lot of information to be taken care of by in-born instincts. The logical solution is to have Volsians born as blank slates to they can be as taught to fulfill specific roles as the need arises. This stupid-baby-smart-adult strategy is basically what humans use, FYI.
In a nutshell, you have a bunch of mega-insects that need a lot more resources than normal insects (since their huge and numerous), so they evolved intelligence in order to get all the resources required. This should be enough to explain why they are smart, I should hope.
The only flaw with this I can see with your set up (other than the births-per-day) is Volsians communicating via dance. While it works for actual ants (with the aid of pheromones), having a complicated language based on dance would be really energy inefficient. For example, imagine if I had to dance the this entire answer post to you, conveying each word with some form of dance move. I'd probably burn a pilates class worth of calories by now.
Even if the dance-speak is as easy as sign language, the Volsians would still need a light source and a direct line of sight to say anything at all. Those are huge downsides for a developing civilization. Using sounds to speak would probably make a lot more sense.
[Answer]
Most evolutionary pressures are easily solved via physical rather than mental improvements. Even situations in which a smarter animal would do better are usually solvable through other, simpler solutions, making the possibility that those solutions will arise higher; fewer mutations need to happen.
Thus while incredibly intelligent combat tactics are very useful, it's far more common to see incredibly strong animals than incredibly smart ones. A human can outsmart a gorilla, but without strong tools that take a lot of time to learn how to make, not to mention build, the gorilla can tear the human to shreds no matter how much smarter the person is. The gorilla is faster, stronger, and more terrifying.
Additionally, it is also a choice between the two; brains like ours take enormous amounts of energy to run, and we only have so much oxygen with which to run our bodies.
That said, there are some situations in which there is no substitute for intelligence. **Complex social interaction** is one of them. Our gorilla - let's call them Yog - might be able to kill everyone, but if their weaker sibling Mog is socially smarter than them, Mog is going to be the one who gets better status. That status can translate to better protection from other gorillas, better food, and more mates. Thus Mog is more genetically successful than Yog.
Of course, if Mog is *too* weak then Yog might gain dominance anyways. But those sorts of evolutionary pressures make it possible to end up with a species of Mogs.
**Another evolutionary pressure that can lead to intelligence is the need to coordinate.** Most insects, even social ones, do work on a solitary basis without needing to coordinate with other insects to complete tasks or accomplish goals. Even when they are working together on a single task, they are usually on an individual basis doing the exact same thing; it's just that a lot of them are doing it at once. Humans coordinate. In order to complete even tasks that we view as incredibly simple for the group, it is necessary or efficient for each individual involved to be doing something completely different from the others while being generally aware of the task as a whole. Consider cooking in a restaurant; the head chef directs each individual and may be cooking the end product, the prep cook cuts the pieces, a sous chef may be creating the necessary sauces, and yet another worker may be providing the correct dishes. They are all additionally aware of the entire recipe while they complete their task, and are generally aware of how the process is advancing.
**So if you want your Vosians to be sapient, a good way to make it plausible is to ensure that:**
1. There is plenty of oxygen or other energy-releasing gases or chemicals on their planet (this has the bonus of making their relatively large size more plausible),
2. Each individual must deal with complex social situations, and
3. The Vosians must coordinate complex tasks in which each individual has a different function in order to survive.
**I would also like to add** that in all earthbound social insects, the queen is not the leader; she is merely the reproductive organ of the colony, treated well for her necessity, but completely cut off from the functions that run the rest of the colony. Your Vosian queens are unusual in that sense. So it may be worth thinking about what makes them different.
Perhaps they are the only source of an important chemical that enables Vosians to recognize that they are from the same hive, and they withhold that chemical from those that do not do what they say. Perhaps they hold themselves hostage, threatening to hurt themselves and thus grind the colony to a reproductive and productive halt if the colony does not act in their interests. Perhaps they are simply the smartest Vosians and so queen-led societies tend to perform better. Or something else. **Regardless, best of luck with your insectoid creatures. :)**
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Their development would have to be artificial as there are several problems with getting insects that big such as size limits on exoskeletons and having to develop lungs.
Now if someone wanted a drone species of self populating workers, a hive mentality is a great start. You'd engineer basic intelligence so they can understand instruction but not enough to rebel.
To overcome the size limitations of exoskeletons, new members would have to hatch virtually full size so they finish growing before the exoskeleton hardens. Now either the eggs have to much bigger or the eggs hatch to larvae which the workers feed until they becomes chrysalises.
[Answer]
Personally, I've been brainstorming a race of haplo-diploidal eusocial mammalian-like humanoid aliens who, biologically, would be divided among the following 3 classes based on sex chromosome count (with cultural titles inspired by feudal European castes):
* Single X chromosome: Serfs, infertile workers with a child-like intelligence, whose main purpose is to support the noble mother that gave birth to them, along with the colony that they, along with their mother and siblings, including other nobles that their mother might've given birth to, live and dwell within (which would likely be about the size of a small village of a hundred or so members). However, despite their low intelligence, and their instinctual imperative to keep their colony alive and reproducing, even the serfs within the colony are quite capable of independent thought and talent, and with it, are quite capable of performing not just dumb labor (including tending to their younger siblings like babysitters or nannies), but also skilled, and even creative, labor tasks, much like the ones found within human civilization, from farmers, carpenters, and electricians, to soldiers, and even scientists!
* XY chromosome pair: Princes, male drones whose sole purpose is to inseminate whatever female nobles are nearby (especially those nobles whom haven't been inseminated by a prince as of yet), with at least one of these nobles being chosen by the prince (usually, though not necessarily always) to become a princess that's capable of bearing their sons through continuous intercourse (to stimulate their noble mate's growth into a form that would allow their male princely offspring to properly gestate without being aborted via miscarriage). A prince who has fathered many princes and princesses is often referred to as a king, and often possesses widespread social influence comparable to one.
* XX chromosome pair: Collectively called nobles or ladies (with different sub-classes according to physiological development), they're akin to insect hive queens, though unlike them, while all nobles (with a few rare exceptions) are able to lay eggs that hatch into serfs (without requiring sexual intercourse, a.k.a. asexual reproduction), not all of these nobles are able to give birth to other nobles, and only a select few are able to give birth to princes (though all nobles have the potential to give birth to both nobles and princes, albeit a potential that can only be awakened depending on how often they've had intercourse with a prince). All nobles possess two wombs, one that's designed to continuously gestate the eggs that the nobles lay, which then hatch into serfs, and another womb, where egg cells are waiting to be fertilized by a prince's sperm in order to turn into zygotes that gradually transform into infant nobles or princes, which gestate at a slower rate, and are born live (like mammals and humans).
The noble class could be sub-divided into the following sub-classes:
--- Maidens: Taskmaster-like nobles who can only give birth to serfs, and can only morph into the next sub-caste by being inseminated by a drone. (Even once will do, since the drone's sperm would then be carried and preserved within one of the noble's 2 wombs.) They typically watch over the serfs that they give birth to, much like the mother of a household, and also often socialize with other nobles, especially their parents and siblings.
--- Mistresses: Insemination by a drone triggers a hormonal reaction within a maiden's body that not only supplies her with semen, but also gradually transforms her into a mistress, a minister-like noble that, in addition to laying eggs that hatch into serfs, gains the ability to give birth to infant maidens, though still lacks the ability to gestate princes (which requires constant intercourse from the prince). In addition to managing the serfs that they give birth to, they also watch over the nobles that they've given birth to, and even socialize with other nobles within a "court", a group of nobles that are centered around the prince that inseminated and fertilized them. Oftentimes, they'd watch over several nearby villages like a countess.
--- Princesses: Regular insemination by a prince would provide a mistress the ability to sustain the gestation and birth of infant princes to further spread both the prince's and noble's genes far and wide for generations to come. By then, the mistress would be considered a princess, despite the physiological changes between the two noble sub-classes being so subtle. (In fact, a princess could revert back into a mistress if their prince no longer engages in frequent intercourse with them, such as if the prince had died, or if the prince had wanted to spend more time with another noble.) Like with other nobles, these princesses would typically attempt to remain in touch with their offspring, siblings, and parents (including their prince's parents), though given how their numerous princely sons tend to flock to lands far and wide in search of nobles to mate with, they might also end up watching over vast lands, with about as much influence as the queen of a monarchy. In fact, a princess that has mothered many princes and princesses is often referred to as a queen, with widespread social influence comparable to one.
Now there may be implications towards my eusocial species' traits (such as the possibility that nearly every noble might be made into a princess if there are equal numbers of princes, resulting in a society that would mirror our modern-day monogamous society, with each prince and princess paired with eachother like husband and wife), but enough about my eusocial race's epic physiological, behavioral, and cultural lorecrafting.
One thing I'd recommend keeping in mind when designing a sentient race with large family sizes is Dunbar's Number. That is, whereas the average human can handle being within a social group that's 150 members large, you ought to ask yourself this: "How big of a social group can each member of each caste handle within their own social groups?" For my eusocial race, I'm personally going with around 150 members each, regardless of caste, so that I'd then have a system where each serf, noble, and prince would only be capable of meaningfully socializing with their immediate family members, including parents, children, siblings, and in some cases, in-laws, since they'd all likely add up to numbers that might stress their social capacity to the limit, with each member of their social group occupying various ranks within a much broader social and familial hierarchy, from the lowliest serf to potentially (though rarely) the queen and king of a vast family tree.
How the queens of your eusocial race would socially be able to handle laying around 3 million eggs per day, let alone interacting with their entourages of around 6,000 protectors, will ultimately be up to you to determine.
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[Question]
[
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QPjYr.jpg)
This is a (crude) map of my world of Lorne in the current age. At the point of development I'm in, I'm trying to get the climates/biomes of some of the lands I've envisioned to work out as best as they can with the rules of wind/ocean currents and latitude.
The boxes each have a type of biome within them in black. These are the areas that I already have a pretty vivid idea of what they're like, and changing them would be heartbreaking. My goal is to adjust the map to make all of these work. The areas in these boxes would not necessarily be ENTIRELY that biome, but there would be a large biome of that time within them.
Blue areas are lakes. I don't think there's any reason that I would need to change any of these but all of them are negotiable.
The brown spraypainted areas depict mountain ranges, the red ones depict volcanic activity. These are based on a previous plate tectonics map I worked out, and I generally like how they're placed, but if some of them seem unrealistic, feedback would be great!
The lime green area that's poorly filled in is a huge magical forest. I'm second-guessing it taking up such a large area but this is the source and home of the fey creatures that inhabit my world, and magic is powerful enough there that it should be okay to remain how I envision it no matter where it ends up geographically.
The couple of biomes listed in teal are biomes that I had previously envisioned in these locations but don't think will actually work out really, and I've come to terms with changing them. If I can implement them at these locations, that'd be really great, but I don't expect a solution that involves doing that.
So, yeah. I need to determine where the equator is and where the 30 degree and 60 parallels should go in order to start working on wind and ocean currents to flesh out the rest of the biomes that I don't know much about at this point. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I don't particularly care about ice caps or anything, so I think it should be okay to have a large amount of ocean at the top of the map or the bottom of the map to make everything work out. I also don't mind adjusting the continents relative to one another much. Here's one potential adjusted map that I've been entertaining, for instance:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lwGlq.jpg)
[Answer]
I'll answer this from a winded and somewhat scientific side of things, as the current other answers sort of hint at the variables involved, but of course there's no reason to limit yourself that way. I remember reading some strange piece of writing on a test that mentioned "verisimilitude," the appearance of truth, as a limiting factor in fiction - it should really be your ability to imagine. Magic forests grow powerful because of the magic and beings there, perhaps there's a mountain people who call on their God to keep the mountains safe - whatever the case, you should not let the physical world and world building come too much into conflict, that you have to redraft your previous world because it wasn't real enough.
$ {\Large Pictures} $
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> I'm trying to get the climates/biomes of some of the lands I've envisioned to work out as best as they can with the rules of wind/ocean currents and latitude.
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You also say at the end that you want to determine the latitudes properly before the rest, but then again these are all related. The biomes on the face of the earth are a result of winds and oceans in the real world.
So let's put Earth up first, here's the ocean currents on earth (they vary depending on source):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/q5tOv.gif)
And the prevailing wind currents:[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4bOAo.jpg)
And here's a visually busy combined map from someone (the ocean currents are likely more reliable here, and they are different. I'm not entirely sure how they turn on earth):
<https://www.oceanblueproject.org/uploads/1/9/0/3/19034485/world-circulation-map-of-currents_1_orig.jpg>[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lh5aC.jpg)
$ {\Large Interpreting \hskip{6pt} The \hskip{6pt} Pictures }$
* Latitudes are not the full story, and are often misleading. There is
a large warm ocean current that flows from the east US and eventually
to Britain. Britain is not too cold, but is at the same latitude as
the lower parts of Siberia, which are very cold ([an
understatement](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/53/e9/df/53e9df09c5f6a7349dffd75792105102.jpg), but this one's way higher in latitude). Minnesota
is at the same latitude as Spain, north to south, but I wouldn't
compare them in temperature, either. Hawaii and Egypt are at the same
latitude, but Egypt's average summer temperatures are 15 degrees
hotter in Celsius, and it is significantly drier. These three examples are the difference between being next to a warm ocean current, and being locked in (more or less) by land all around.
* While the wind at any given time can go in many directions, the
prevailing winds tend to go in bands between the equator and the 30
and 60 degree latitudes (which I suppose you know of, since you think
that is important to consider). At those latitudes, there is often no
wind, a historical complication for sea travel. The wind directions have to do with
the rotation of the earth and something else to reverse the winds in
the middle, perhaps pressure differences and the Coriolis effect but
can't quite remember. Areas where the wind tends to blow from the sea
and not over mountains will be wet - where it blows from the
continents, it will be dry.
* When winds or ocean currents are allowed to go around the globe circularly with minimal land obstruction, they can form formidable patterns that change the weather in those areas. This happens on the Earth near Antarctica, where the "Roaring 40s / 50s" have both unobstructed wind and ocean currents. This would happen at the very top and bottom of your world without any polar regions, such as in the badlands or the islands down south.
These things are all a standard model, but there are exceptions, and specific large changes can occur also. Consider el niño, which greatly changes the global weather because one patch of surface water in the pacific heats up! This changes how hurricanes form, which has a special effect on climate some years' climate. I think that sort of thing (it's the year of the seven-year storm, etc.) could be a great story point, if that's your end goal with the world building. Also, there are local events, like Chinook winds in Canada, that completely change the climate locally for short periods of time.
$ {\Large About \hskip{6pt} Biomes} $
Humidity versus temperature are the main two factors you should consider. Ocean currents should be manipulated more or less as you see fit, and that would help make some areas more humid and affect temperature. But a savanna on a peninsula or plains/steppes that aren't continental are unlikely. Your biomes tend to be drier, especially on the western side (hemisphere?), but none of your biomes are really land-central enough to encourage that, so you would have to use some hand waving for yourself with winds to see how you could get dry climates by other means, like rain shadow.
$ {\Large Suggestions} $
I don't know much about how axial tilt would affect the planet, but it sounds pretty bad. I think getting too far away from Earth's tilt would make seasons too extreme or not pronounced, and make climates not as varied as desired. However, your planet could rotate the other way compared to earth (with "North" down on your map, but I won't refer to cardinal directions that way again), so that the prevailing winds near the equator go to the west, and accordingly elsewhere. That would be good for the wetlands and the rainforest - I like the idea of the wetlands getting hurricanes sometimes.
If the planet rotates opposite the map orientation, you could use [rain shadow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow) with the mountains in some areas to make climates dry. This would work excellently for the steppes in the north east (especially if the volcanoes / mountains were closer or at the edge of the land), and maybe for the desert and plains in the west.
Tundras on earth don't occur below 60° N, so your tundra and maybe badlands should be in polar regions, although you say you don't feel you need any. That would also make a polar pass between them possible on a globe - perhaps there's some large ice sheet or other mass at the pole that makes that a bad idea, if they need to be separated?
I'm not sure what you meant with the slash there between steppe / badlands, as I'm not sure how different these environments are that they can't be interspersed. It appears to me that the badlands mostly refer to geology and a weak upper soil, which is a key difference between it and a steppe, which is dusty and grassy. Perhaps the upper part is a badlands, and the lower part is a steppe.
I don't think the savanna or boreal forest are possible where they are indicated now. You could put the forest possibly near the steppes, but trees like water and the current biome indicates otherwise.
The rain forest and wetlands need a lot of water, while the plains would need less. That's the best reason to make the winds go the other way - otherwise, rain shadow and upwind land will make the water come down early, and vice versa for the plains.
Finally, about the southern forests / caverns - karst regions are a real geological phenomenon, and they seem to deal more with the presence of limestone rock than biome. [Just take a look at the Earth.](https://www.google.com/search?q=caves%20in%20the%20us%20on%20a%20map&safe=active&client=firefox-b-1-ab&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj44te_tYjbAhWvY98KHfyRB7cQ_AUICygC&biw=1280&bih=681#imgrc=9lsaOzJDdHurWM:) I think "Karst Region" and "Lots of caverns" are different in meaning, but you need to have soluble rock to have caverns, so they are biome-independent. Perhaps the forest covers that area too (just with more rockey outcrops, like Appalachia or other areas of the world).
You understand rightly that there's no reason for things to not be scaled around in size or moved some for the purposes you want. If the island "continent" was moved up near the plains as in your second picture, maybe that would make the plains drier somehow.
All in all, I suggest you use the model of a globe as well as a map, so that winds and waters travel around like you would expect. These affect climate just as much as latitude in my mind. I also think the latitude lines should be closer to the equator than in HDE's answer, and I put in some wind and ocean heat exchange / temperature suggestions if you like, see the below picture.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Tha5O.png)
[Answer]
## Look at Earth's biomes!
When it comes to life and everything that comes along with it, we only have one data point, our own planet. Climate modeling is . . . hard. Really hard. When we're talking about where biomes will arise, sometimes it's easier to just look at the existing case study. Here, for your perusal, is a rough map of Earth's biomes:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BAELx.png)
Image courtesy of Wikipedia user SirHenry under the [Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en).
Tundras are found in the far north (and south, if there was much land in the southern hemisphere that's not Antarctica). It is characterized by [permafrost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permafrost), meaning you need mean temperatures around -5°C. 60-70° North and 60-70° South are probably reasonable lower limits.
Boreal forests and the [taiga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiga) will be just to the south of the tundra. Conifers are adapted to long, harsh winters, and so are found far from the equator. Your placement of the boreal forest near the rainforest is unlikely; I would suggest moving it north, above the badlands/steppe you have marked out on the same continent.
Rainforests are usually clustered around the equator; see in particular northern South America and central Africa, as well as parts of southeast Asia. 10-20° North and 10-20° South should include much of this zone. Wetlands may vary, depending on how you define "wetland", and can venture much further from the equator, perhaps up to 50° latitude. Your placement of both, in tropical regions, seems pretty reasonable to me.
[Savannas can vary in location](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savanna#Savanna_ecoregions) depending on the placement of other biomes. Tropical savannas will be in the tropics, of course, while savannas in temperature regions might be closer to 30-40° from the equator. It's your choice - again, depending on the rest of the setup - and the transition to rainforest on your eastern continent could mirror the transition in Africa's equatorial rainforests. See this point for placement of plains, too.
Deserts - assuming you mean something hot like the Sahara, not Antarctica - are dependent on rainfall and other local climate factors. They exist in a wide range of latitudes, from just beyond the equator (see the Sahara) to further away (see the Atacama). They may also be near savannas, which serve as transition regions. Your desert seems reasonable; I'm curious about how the existence of that mountain range could change things.
The location of forests vary, depending on the type. Rainforests are near the equator, temperate forests are further away (maybe 30-50°), and boreal forests are, as I said before, closer to the poles. Your placement here seems reasonable, and might be on the dividing line between temperature and boreal, depending on how those mountains change wind currents and precipitation.
Here are some things to note:
* This is based on a planet with Earth-like axial tilt. Extreme tilts could cause you some problems.
* Be very careful when you consider air circulation patterns, as this can affect precipitation, which is crucial for defining certain biomes (e.g. desert, rainforest, and savanna).
* Biomes are very interconnected, and often merge into one another. The combination of taiga and tundra is a good example, as is savanna and desert.
Here's an example of what you could do; I've added the lines of latitude and a possible place to put that region of taiga you pointed out:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zJd2G.png)
[Answer]
Your map does look broadly similar to Earth, with a few differences, so you could certainly look at Earth biomes (and their locations) as a comparison.
## Variables
While latitude is certainly significant, there are many other things you can tweak to achieve the desired biomes:
Coastal regions are always going to have a lower temperature shift, due to the excellent temperature moderation of the ocean. (It's a huge thermal mass.) Once you get farther inland, the effect gradually decreases. It also decreases sharply if you cross a mountain range. However, you did mention it's good enough if the landmasses just have a large area covered in the desired biome. That said, historically a lot of populations have been concentrated in coastal regions, as life does tend to be a bit easier.
Inland, temperatures swing more wildly. Even past 50 degrees latitude, large inland prairies on Earth routinely exceed 35 degrees C in the summer and -45 C in the winter.
Seasons also have a huge effect on biomes. Does your world have an Earth-like orbit around its parent star? What about axial tilt? If it is tilted slightly more, seasons will be more extreme. Tilted less, winters will be milder, summers will be cooler. All of this assumes relatively perfect circular orbits, as elliptical orbits open up a big can of worms.
## Forest
Your huge forest isn't a big problem, especially since you have a race of creatures that depend on the forest. Over time they would have a vested interest in the survival and expansion of their territory, and as such would presumably not mind planting new trees. The species of tree might shift as you go to lower/higher latitudes, to a more boreal forest in the north (and perhaps a hardier group of fey creatures), but it does not stretch the imagination that much to have such a large forest. It would be easiest if there were no significant mountain ranges dividing up that area, which there don't appear to be.
## Boreal Forest + Rain Forest
The only large problem area that I see is the boreal forest (or taiga) that is at a very similar latitude to your rain forest. Taiga biomes are typically found at 50-60 or 70 degrees latitude, and in inland areas, with some regional variation. Rain forests occur much closer to the equator. Can you move the taiga? Maybe rotate that continent so the fey forest is closer to the equator than the taiga? Fortunately the taiga is one of your teal biomes, so perhaps this is possible.
## Equator
The equator would most likely intersect the large lake in your rain forest. The 30/60 parallels are more flexible, although your taiga would ideally be on at least the 60th, and hot biomes such as the rain forest and savanna would be within the 30th. Wetlands tend to be more temperate (lest they become jungles) but with some clever placement of mountains and water sources they can be moved around a bit.
Caverns can go anywhere, really. Subterranean features might work a little bit better a little ways inland, as coastal caverns are more easily flooded. You also want the water table to be relatively low. Dry areas are probably best.
## Worldbuilding
Even if your map ends up with a couple of slightly questionable placements, "never let the truth get in the way of a good story" rings true here, whether you're telling a story or using this world elsewhere.
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[Question]
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In the future, space travel is common, so common, in fact, that commercial transport is available to most people, like air travel is to us.
As a passenger on a vessel of Galactic Spacelines, half way to your destination, you hear this announcement:
*"Attention passengers, this is captain speaking. Due to an emergency, we will be experiencing a loss of pressure in the cabin. Safety equipment is being deployed, please use it in accordance with pre-flight orientation. Ask a steward if you need assistance."*
My question is this: What safety equipment is deployed for most of the passengers to survive this event until it ends? (I imagine that at the least this will be airtight oxygen masks for each passenger that completely cover the face, and possibly "space blankets" or clothes to help them retain heat.)
For your choice of equipment, please also answer the following:
* The cabin may be able to retain some aspects of normal parameters, such as partial pressure. Are there limits to the situations your equipment can handle, such as a minimum pressure under which the safety equipment becomes useless?
* How much medical attention will the passengers need after this event, using your equipment?
Other notes:
* Since this is about survival, that is the number one priority; comfort is less important.
* Also, to reduce complexity and chance for user error, the Spaceline is (*ahem*) interested in keeping costs as low as possible.
* You can set some conditions on the cabin, like what pressure and temperature it is reduced to.
* This question is about a (semi) planned loss in pressure, not a sudden drop to hard vacuum, since that would be very difficult to survive, though solutions that can handle that are welcome. The loss in pressure to emergency levels will be gradual, over no less than 30 seconds.
* Assume that the ship has enough resources to run emergency equipment until the event ends. (air, energy, etc.)
* Assume that within 24 hours one of the following happens:
+ The ship has made contact and rescue comes
+ The ship continues and arrives at the destination
+ Repairs can be made to restore normal conditions to the cabin
[Answer]
I'm going to address this question in two parts; the first relates to cabin pressure in the main on a spaceship (because it's pertinent), then I'll get to safety equipment.
**Cabin Pressure on Space Vessels**
Modern planes are pressurised because of the altitude at which they fly, but what may not be obvious to most people is that they don't pressurise it to 1 ATM (Sea Level Pressure). There's a simple reason for that; the pressure differential would be higher between the inside and the outside, meaning that your plane must be stronger (read as heavier). Also, explosive decompressions (something punching a hole in the side of the plane) would be much more catastrophic if that pressure differential was higher.
If you look at the Apollo missions, you see that they reduced the pressure even further, to the point of having 100% O2 atmosphere inside the modules. Oxygen requirements for humans sit in a band on a spectrum where too little or too much is a bad thing. Pure O2 at 1 ATM will quickly cause oxygen toxicity, and burn out lungs, the throat and even eyes. Too little, and you suffocate. We measure the O2 requirements in terms of partial pressure (PP) because we've found that it's not the *ratio* of O2 that causes the problem; it's the *volume*. So, humans can normally operate in around the 0.18 to 0.3 PP of O2 range with no problems.
So; the Apollo modules were pressurised to around 0.3 ATMs and filled with pure O2, and the astronauts were fine.
(I should point out here that no long term tests have been done on this atmospheric model, and long term exposure *may* be hazardous; we just don't know. But, for the purposes of this answer, we'll assume this is fine for the average spaceship journey)
This of course meant that NASA could build modules with less weight and strength (didn't have to hold 1 ATM of pressure against the vacuum of space) and also, they didn't have to launch all that N2 with the ship as well. This solution meant the astronauts took far less atmosphere with them, as well as lighter ships.
It also means that we seem to be able to withstand around 0.3 ATM alright, provided the atmosphere is pure O2. I don't know what happens if you drop below that, but given NASA didn't (and they researched the daylights out of this) I'd guess it's not healthy even in the short term.
**Emergency Equipment**
So; your ship is probably going to be running on around 0.3 ATM for the same reason, and going to be running with a pure O2 environment. As for safety equipment, it's going to look a lot like a modern space suit for exactly the same reason; if we could survive with less weight, we wouldn't take that weight up into space in the first place.
Ideally, the one thing you *don't* need is the bulky backpack and life support. Let's assume that your cabin has vented and you're in vacuum. All the passengers and crew are in their safety suits, they're not going to be planning any EVAs so they don't need to carry their own air supply, propulsion and monitoring around. You can connect them into a central ship's supply of O2 and power by simply plugging a hose into a wall outlet. The passengers in particular just sit in their allocated spaces, plugged into the walls for power and air, waiting for the problem to be resolved.
Because they're not expected to help, you don't even have to make the 'suits' real suits. Give them the top and bottom halves of heavy bags with a ring connector - that way you don't have to have the suit custom fitted, there's only one connector so not all those seals where they might get one wrong, there's no way they can walk anywhere, no arms to touch anything, and no helmet (better off if they *can't* see what's happening. Include an internal touch screen entertainment system for them and you've taken them out of the equation insofar as they cant' get in the way of the repair crew, and you can communicate with them about when it's safe to come out.
All in all, this is a reusable, one size fits all, simple way to keep people safe and it's more of a 'pod' than a 'suit'. Given your parameters, it should also be enough to get them through the crisis period.
[Answer]
As already stated in the other answers, you´d need some device to keep some pressured atmosphere. I like the Idea of having some inflatable bag, but I think an even better way would be to make passengers compartments that are easily sealed off.
Pros:
* Can automatically be deployed for all passengers, including children, disabled and elderly.
* There are still several people inside every compartment, so they can help each other.
* Less connections for life-support, as you only need to supply every compartment, not every bag.
* Faster application. You´d have [90 seconds max.](http://www.geoffreylandis.com/vacuum.html) after decompression occurs.
*It could also be a safety procedure to make sure there are at least two people/one adult in every occupied compartment at all times (like with emergency-exit seats nowadays)*
Cons:
* Possibly higher weight *(but you save the bag and some life-support connections)*
* If you have a pressure-loss in your cabin, you have a problem. Evacuation procedures of individual cabins would have to be in place.
Here is a little sketch with that principle applied to traditional Airline seating. The seal, in this case, is a roll-down shutter, located where the hand-luggage compartment is normally located. Could also devise something that comes up from the floor.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CS15q.jpg)
[Answer]
## Inflatable hamster balls.
Pass out backpack-sized survival kits that contain some CO$\_2$ scrubbing chemicals that will also produce O$\_2$. Since we're working at a low-pressure atmosphere here, you don't need to worry about oxygen toxicity and can simply scrub all the carbon dioxide and have them breathe pure oxygen.
They'd be inflated to some degree initially, after which exhalation should balance inhalation and the pressure should remain constant.
The mental image I have is something like a [zorb](https://www.zorb.com/page/homepage):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/agfQi.jpg)
---
Honestly, if Galactic Spacelines plays this right, the passengers wouldn't even need to know that there's an emergency decompression:
>
> \*crschk\* Attention passengers, this is your captain speaking. Do you know what time it is? It's **mandatory bubble time**!!! Please proceed to the nearest muster station to receive your personal hamster ball. We'll get started with a variety of games such as [soccer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me1y78yMOSo), [obstacle courses](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/88/e9/e5/88e9e5a3d5e0c86e4ffb60692f4ac58d.jpg), and [water skiing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FR_iDA4JC8). Thank you for participating in **mandatory bubble time**, and thank you for flying Galactic Spacelines!
>
>
>
[Answer]
The issues which come with decompression are two:
1. too low oxygen pressure for the brain to work properly
2. too low pressure to prevent your body fluids to boil
For 1 one can follow the path of commercial airlines today: they keep a cabin pressure equivalent to few thousands meter above the sea level (3000 if I remember correctly) and in the event of a sudden loss of pressure the oxygen masks provide oxygen only for the time needed to reach that altitude from the original flight altitude, after which one is supposed to be able to breath decently.
For 2 things become more tricky: [boiling saliva](https://space.stackexchange.com/a/126) in your mouth is all but funny, also your blood expanding in your body will be pretty unpleasant and, last but not least, your lungs are not designed to operate in a vacuum.
The safest direction to me seems to have an air tight "bag" around the seat, keeping a pressure equivalent to 3000 m on Earth, with a dedicated oxygen supply.
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[
A few related questions here. The level of technology is that of humans capable of solar system exploration and colonization, with sub-light drives for long journeys within the solar system and nuclear-powered rockets for short range flight. Weapons are limited to missiles, light lasers and maybe rail guns, but rare. Anyway onward to my question.
First off, if a spaceship, let's call it spaceship X fired a missile at spaceship Y, and spaceship Y had shields or heavy armor, I would assume the blast would knock spaceship Y in the direction the missile was heading.
What possible way (does not have to be super realistic), can spaceship Y avoid this, aside from mounting 360-degree mini rockets on the hull?
Second, for spaceship X, if the missile was launched from a tube built into the ship as opposed to dropping it and firing, would spaceship X experience some sort of recoil?
How can these effects be mitigated or negated?
[Answer]
Let's deal with the question of recoil first because it's simpler.
Newton's third law applies, even more so in space because there is no pesky gravity or wind resistance throwing off the effects. So, if you shoot a missile, a bullet, or anything else out of the ship, there will be recoil. This is actually critical to your spaceship's function because (when you get right down to it) the propulsion system is just a sophisticated recoil system - you're shooting out a propellant at high speed to push your ship in the preferred direction.
As for 'dropping' your missile; you can't. No gravity. What you CAN do is push it out of the ship gently, then let its own guidance and propulsion systems activate. This will massively minimize recoil effects, but won't eliminate them to a mathematical zero.
Now; let's get into point defence.
Yes, for the reasons described above, the missile WILL push you in a direction on impact, but that's not the primary reason for wanting to avoid it hitting you in the first place. whatever the payload is, it's dangerous to your ship otherwise the enemy wouldn't be investing the energy and cost to launch it at you in the first place. HOW it's dangerous isn't material to your question; let's just say that none of us want that missile to hit and we want ways to stop it.
Modern warships and some modern military transport planes (including Air Force One) have a range of what we call point defence systems for getting rid of missiles. They range from starburst style hot chaff systems designed to get the missile to detonate before it reaches the plane, to 'metal storm' solutions that fire a massive volley of (essentially) ball bearings into the path of an incoming missile to (again) get it to detonate before reaching a ship, to turrets and guns designed to shoot down the incoming ordnance. One can also consider drones (both UAV and subs) to get in the path of torpedoes and other heavy ordnance so that the primary target is protected.
Your spaceship is no different, except that it has to consider a 3-dimensional theatre instead of a 2-dimensional theatre. Your best bet is to have turrets strategically positioned around your ship, and a small supply of kamikaze style drones that are programmed to fly directly into the path of incoming missiles as a contact target, protecting the primary ship.
*To address Joe Bloggs' comment...*
It has been pointed out that the point defence system may only be part of your solution because the overall inertia directed at your ship may not change much, just be spread over a wider area based on missile debris (Thanks Joe). Two your point defence system should, therefore, be designed to prioritize payload destruction, meaning that the 'dangerous' part of the missile (the warhead) is inactive by the time the missile strikes, and you're dealing with just the raw impact, which your armour would ideally keep out.
Of course, that means missiles would evolve to keep the payload as protected as possible, meaning that the other strategy would be for your drones to be of sufficient mass to knock the missile off course. If that was their sole function (especially if the payload is designed NOT to detonate until near the primary target) then you'd employ the 'double tap' of knocking the missile off course with your drone, then taking it out with point defence turrets.
Ultimately, you want the primary ship protected, so your only choices are to destroy the missiles before they reach you, or provide another target. Turrets and drones give you options that cover both strategies and with the addition of the above strategy, also deal with the 'mass driver' style missile system.
[Answer]
The Kzinti lesson: "A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive." And your ships have nuclear reaction drives.
<http://www.larryniven.net/kzin/worlds.shtml>
Already proposed here: antimissile weapons similar to what aircraft carriers use. Nothing wrong with that. The AEGIS system would work even better in space than it does at sea because there is no air resistance.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegis_Combat_System>
But you can do something in space that is not easy to do on land, and that makes it cool. **I propose that your nuclear engines could be used as antimissile defenses.** Your ship can wheel around using maneuvering thrusters (my favorite part of the TV series The Expanse is the maneuvers like this) and fire their nuclear engines at the oncoming missile. These are reaction drives and expel reaction mass probably at enormous velocities. You could have a typical spray propulsion but when you need the defensive property, screw down the nozzle and get a stream. Leave the stream on and swing it around with your maneuvering thrusters. How cool would that be?? Remember - that stream is going to push you forward too so have someone keep an eye out for what is in front of you.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rfiwv.jpg)
Stream mode asks a lot of the magnetic confinement nozzle so not how you want to use your engines day to day. But you already have the nuclear engine and a stream of massive, 0.1c speed particles is excellent for dissuading incoming unwelcomes of any sort (including attacking Kzinti warships!)
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Re equal and opposite reaction: a bullet pushes you back because the bullet pushes against the gun to depart. Same for a railgun. These are flying bits of metal (and excellent space weapons). But a rocket has its own propellant. Consider rocket tubes - flimsy little frames sticking up from a Humvee or a cylinder on some dude's shoulder. Rockets will push back minimally on the vehicle of origin because they push back on the propellant they throw behind them.
[Answer]
The question about recoil has been answered more than sufficiently, so I will look at the effects of missile impact.
Given that interplanetary velocities are ridiculously fast, you will discover that the common experiences on Earth are not good guides to what happens in space. Consider that the American Space Shuttles suffer damage to their tiles in orbit and on a few occasions had to have their armoured windows replaced because the orbiter had struck cops of *paint* that flaked off from spent boosters or other equipment in orbit. This gram sized fleck, too small to show on optical or radar searches, was moving at 7 Km/sec meaning it had a massive amount of kinetic energy. And 7 Km/sec is Earth's orbital velocity; you need to be moving much faster to travel in interplanetary space.
Space weaponry is likely to take advantage of this kinetic energy, and either direct the entire missile to strike the target, or release submunitions to create a "cone" of penetrators to catch a maneuvering vehicle.
The second effect is normal rules of physics no longer apply with [hypervelocity](https://infogalactic.com/info/Hypervelocity) impacts, and the impactor and target will behave more like fluids. The spaceship won't be "knocked off course", but more likely be split in two or more pieces, or a shimmering ball of plasma rapidly expanding into space. If that isn't dramatic enough, nuclear warheads can be used to drive weapons effects, ranging from pellets moving in a tight cone at 100km/sec to [nuclear HEAT and EFP](http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.html) warheads driving metal into the target at 3% *c*.
Of course, using nuclear warheads to drive clouds of pellets at incoming missiles would be an effective counter to protect the ship, which would then lead to a calculus as to how many missiles you should carry as opposed to using the same payload to carry anti missiles.....
[Answer]
The recoil a ship experience will depend heavily on how large your space ship is and how much force the missile is capable of impacting on the spaceships structure. A lot of energy is used up deforming and melting a spaceships hull which doesn't leave that much energy left over to love the entire spaceship.
In addition to that, your spaceships shouldn't only have engines/drives that only work in a single direction. This is space and you should have enough small engines on the spaceship to move it in all directions to allow better deceleration and turning ( If you only have engines in one location, you will be applying a force through the entirety of your spaceship to get it to turn. Think of it like turning a shopping trolley from one end by yourself, compared to having someone else pushing the front to help you control it), as well as lower the amount of stress your spaceship is under when its accelerating.
You would only have to cover 3 axis ( X,Y,Z ) to be able to move a part omni-direcitonally, but the actual number would again depend on the size of your spaceship and how much flexibility you want it to have.
[Answer]
The blast would knock the ship in a direction away from the blast. Does the missile have to impact the ship, or can it detonate close to the ship like today's air to air and surface to air missiles? If it must impact the ship to detonate, then the missile's vector is also a factor, yes, but probably not as much as the blast itself. The point of impact also makes a difference.
To avoid this, a ship could deploy missiles that take down other missiles, or chaff, or Phalanx CWIS-style projectile systems, or lasers, something else to throw off the enemy missile's guidance system, or some kind of magnetic or gravitic shielding, or maybe tiny mobile black holes, or something to absorb and harvest the energy so it doesn't cause damage. The possibilities are endless.
A missile launched from a tube using photochemical propulsion will probably have recoil. If the tube is hollow at both ends, it will have less recoil. If the missile is propelled by gravity, no recoil but acceleration would be very low.
[Answer]
To answer your second question first:
The momentum imparted on spaceship X firing a missile would be equal and opposite to the momentum of the fired missile when it leaves the launch tubes.
If the mass of the launched missile was fairly small compared to the mass of the spaceship X, and its velocity relatively low, it probably won't have a huge effect on our spaceship X.
The faster the missile and heavier the missile is, the greater the change in momentum of spaceship X because:
$$\text{Momentum} = \text{Mass} \times \text{Velocity}$$
You can mitigate this by launching the missiles at a fairly low velocity and accelerating them after they have left spaceship X.
This will leave hot trails of exhaust vapor that will make it easier for spaceship Y to detect and then mitigate, however.
Firing a railgun will impart all of the momentum of the fired round back onto spaceship X, but will be much harder to detect on spaceship Y. (Assuming the railgun fires a decent % of the speed of light($\%\times\text{c}$)
For question 1, avoiding being hit will be a much bigger deal than course corrections.
If you have viable sub-light propulsion, then you can pretty quickly recover from any course changes caused my momentum imparted by impacts. This can be done by simply rotating your ship in the direction you wish to accelerate and use your main engines.
Something to consider is that the direction of the imparted momentum from a missile could be pretty much any direction, depending on where the missile blows up in relation to the ship.
Imagine the missile passing the ship and blowing up behind it rather than slamming straight into spaceship Y.
Realistically if something hits you hard enough to change your velocity significantly, you will probably be blown to pieces, or at best have major holes blown through your ship.
The more armor your ship has, the more mass it has. That means it will resist the force imparted on your ship by any incoming projectiles, and receive a smaller change in velocity accordingly.
Avoiding being hit at all will be much more important to survival, so you want the smallest possible surface area exposed to your enemy. You want to have point thrusters all along you ship for emergency evasive maneuvers. Finally you will want to have point defenses to try and shoot down any incoming missiles or fighters.
Also note that having heavy armor will slow down your ability to react to incoming salvos, and probably won't be able to save you from a direct hit anyways.
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Recently, looking for information for worldbuilding purposes of my story, I found a post about how in a more oxygen rich atmosphere, the oxidation processes would take place more quickly.
Subsequently, I asked a question where they denied this information and let me know that the proportion of oxygen in an atmosphere, at least at levels that are breathable for the human being, would not affect the oxidation processes.
So, here's my question, what kind of gases present in an atmosphere would make the oxidation processes faster than those produced on Earth?
In case you are interested in the context, I would like to know this information, since in the story I am thinking the rapid wear of ferrous metals has forced humanity to look for new alternatives in other materials, less malleable or durable, to forge weapons.
[Answer]
To oxidize iron you need oxygen, and water.
Things which improve electrical conductivity of water improve its ability to cause rust: usually that means ions dissolved in the water. Salt (sodium chloride) is the one we encounter most. Salt added to roads to help melt ice can facilitate rust. Salt spray / salt fog in ocean areas can facilitate rust. Other dissolved ions in salt fog might also play a role.
<http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=552>
>
> People who live near the ocean know this.
> The reason is that the process of rusting involves electrons moving
> around, and electrons move more easily in salt-water than they do in
> clean water. A simple test of this is to see how easily current flows
> in clean water (it does not), and then add salt to the water (then
> current does flow easily)... Water is the enabler of fast
> oxidation of iron so freshwater will also cause rust. However, salt
> water is a very good conductor (lots of dissociated ions) and so there
> are a number of electrolysis reactions that tremendously accelerate
> corrosion in salt water. For example if you have iron in contact with
> salt water and also in contact with another metal such as aluminum
> (also in contact with the water) you effectively get a battery which
> drives very fast corrosion processes.
>
>
>
Here is a great free full text scholarly overview of marine atmospheric effects that increase corrosion. I did not know about the SO₂ one!
[Marine Atmospheric Corrosion of Carbon Steel: A Review](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5506973/)
>
> In 1973 Barton noted that the mechanism governing the effects of
> chloride ions (Cl⁻) in AC had not been completely explained, and that
> the higher corrosion rate of steel in marine atmospheres could also be
> due to other causes, such as: (a) the hygroscopic nature of Cl⁻
> species (sodium chloride (NaCl), calcium chloride (CaCl₂), magnesium
> chloride (MgCl₂)), which promotes the electrochemical corrosion
> process by favouring the formation of electrolytes at relatively low
> relative humidity (RH); and (b) the solubility of the corrosion
> products.
>
>
>
SO₂ is neat because I think it is not acting as electrolyte to increase conductivity, but as an oxygen donor.
>
> SO₂ gives rise to the formation and propagation of sulfate “nests”,
> according to reactions, which start to appear at isolated points
> on the surface but whose number increases until all the surface is
> coated with a rust film... SO₂ is much more aggressive to steel when
> its concentration exceeds 0.1 mg·m⁻³, a level that is easily reached
> in many towns, especially in winter. Fortunately, the SO₂
> concentration in urban air has decreased greatly in recent years due
> to efforts to reduce pollution
>
>
>
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But here is an end run around objections about the harshness of such atmospheres on your humans, or the fact that people do use iron in environments like this:
Worldbuild up some super fierce iron-oxidizing microbes.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron-oxidizing_bacteria>
These things exist in the world. In your world they can fix their own nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and for energy they oxidize metallic iron. It is a baby step away from creatures that really exist as you will read in the link. These micro-organisms will not be interested in humans, only iron. You would need to keep your iron under oil to keep it from being colonized and rusting away.
[Answer]
Your wording implies a difficult situation: your phrasings such as "levels that are breathable for human beings" and "...forces humanity..." imply that the goal is not just to have high oxidization rates, but to have humans live in it.
This is troublesome because humans are generally constructed of reducing agents: humans oxidize. If you increase the oxygen enough to cause oxidization of metals, you increase the oxygen enough to cause the oxidization of the tissue of our lungs. Changing the material to an oxidizer other than oxygen doesn't help all that much. You still have the issue of a corrosive gas that you are breathing into your lungs.
The tricky thing about oxidization is that redox equations (the equations which use an oxidizer to oxidize a fuel) are tremendously broad. If you try to increase one, you increase all of them.
If you're willing to tweak the genetics of these humans, there might be more options. We could always evolve to withstand a higher oxidizer load. Or maybe there's some other options. Does the reaction have to be a simple oxidization reaction? What if your humans developed a resistance to mercury. Mercury amalgamates with quite a large number of metals, including gold. The [results are typically structurally](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NauUM5ySWYQ) weak. If your environment had a lot of mercury in it, this could be a problem. [Gallium](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZkzxWZETds) is also known to amalgamate and attack metals. [Putting them together](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Ilxsu-JlY) can be even more impressive.
This is definitely not precisely what you were after, dealing with liquid metals, but it may be the kind of head start you need to formulate your world!
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Nitrite oxidation in the freezing process (in your case of atmospheric gases) is the fastest process there is.
Lipid perodoxation however is can cause damage when a living thing is exposed, it is cancerous & mutagenic.
<https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-UVA-induced-decomposition-of-nitrite-NO2-can-have-different-effects-on-lipid_fig3_235366724>
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I have a fantasy city where the respectable areas are literally built on top of the slums - essentially, it's on a series of bridges or pillars, with lots of forgotten crawlspaces and hideyholes for my characters to exploit. I know this is, on its own, viable, if somewhat heightened from reality - Edinburgh had wide bridges that buildings were built up to, for instance, and there's lots of examples of large underground buildings being built and then abandoned.
The city has a big wall around it, rising up about to the level of the respectable areas, and a large river outside that. The wall is intended to protect the city from flood; the climax involves the citizens being trapped inside the city as it burns. (A shift in the river after the city was built on stilts made floodwaters rise much higher, necessitating building the wall to stop the foundations from washing away.) There is a large harbour, with a gate to prevent floodwater from entering. Due to its central location, the city has historically been a good hub for trade; it's actually the only viable industry it has left, the rest having become fronts for endemic corruption or organised crime over the last ten or twenty years.
Magic is part of the history of the setting, but it's unknown in the time the story is set and if it was used in construction of the city, it would not be obvious or visible.
Is this plausible as a setting?
In particular:
* Is the construction of the city plausible?
* Does the river shifting explanation for the wall make sense?
* Where would the stone for construction come from?
* Where would food come from, and would there be enough to support an obscenely wealthy upper class and a significant underclass?
* The city doesn't have canals. Is this implausible?
* What would need to be true for this to be a plausible setting?
[Answer]
This is a very interesting question!
>
> Is the construction of the city plausible?
>
>
>
Such a city would probably have started as a new, small village near many natural resources - when this village started to trade, it would have caused a huge influx of people to move towards it, due to its newfound wealth. With all the new people arriving simultaneously there would be no way to construct enough accommodation for all of them. Thus, the existing village would be turned into more of a shanty town - a large slum surrounding the resources and the trading port. Of course, the existing wall of the village would no longer be sufficient, so a larger one was constructed before the next flooding season. As time went on, the city was extended, the wall grew, until eventually the wall was so large that it would be impossible to move it any further. The city, no longer able to expand in that direction, would then naturally *extend upwards.* The original *upper* houses and streets were the same as below - but eventually, due to proximity to the sun and the higher quality of the new houses, the rich merchants and nobles moved into the higher tier. This would cause the lower levels to house mainly working-class citizens, who would not be able to afford to make the lower levels more hygienic. Voila!
The construction of the houses etc. would be via magic, adhering to your question.
One major issue in this is that the upper layers - consisting of more attractive materials, with larger houses etc. - will weigh significantly more than the slums underneath them. Imagine an iceberg, but with the tip of it underneath the water... it wouldn't support itself.
One solution to this would be that the city planners looked ahead into the future when building the upper levels, and constructed huge pillars throughout the city that everything branched off of. This would undermine (excuse the pun) the whole concept of the city being 'built on a slum', however.
>
> Does the river shifting explanation for the wall make sense?
>
>
>
That is one explanation, but I think the idea I have illustrated for the above question makes more sense. The founders of the small village would have seen the wealth of the land - and built a settlement there, with a wall to keep out the water that rises each flood season. The gain far outweighed the risk.
>
> Where would the stone for construction come from?
>
>
>
Plays into my first two answers; it would be one the resources the village was built near.
>
> Where would food come from, and would there be enough to support an obscenely wealthy upper class and a significant underclass?
>
>
>
There are three solutions here. Due to the floods, agriculture would only make sense for short-term crops like leafy vegetables and cereals. When the flood is gone, however, the land will likely be very high quality and multiple of these crops can be produced. Throughout the rest of the year, food will be gained through imports and cattle farms in the city itself.
>
> The city doesn't have canals. Is this implausible?
>
>
>
This actually makes a lot of sense. With the rise of the river, controlling the flow of the canals would pose a major issue, and tunnels through the wall would make it less sturdy.
>
> What would need to be true for this to be a plausible setting?
>
>
>
All the above!
Overall, this is a pretty cool idea - I've been wanting to create a videogame along the same lines ever since I went to Edinburgh myself. Good luck!
[Answer]
If the river transports a significant amount of lime you don't even need a shift. There are several real-world examples of harbour cities currently being at several kilometers from the coast (Ravenna and Ostia come to mind).
You might accelerate the process with higher amounts of lime.
Start with a "normal" harbour city in the delta of a large, muddy, river.
Limestone would be likely to be available somewhere upriver.
In such a setup the wall would be a natural way to cope with rising countryside while sea recesses and port becomes more and more a protected river harbour.
Surrounding swamps would provide protection from foot armies encouraging citizens to stick to the place.
[Answer]
This is almost prosaic. Lots of cities have [flood walls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_wall). The failure of the flood walls protecting New Orleans during hurricane Katrina was back in the news after other large hurricanes came up through the Gulf of Mexico.
The gate is also very sensible although not as frequently done - probably from the expense of large mobile elements in an ocean environment.
Here is a [storm surge barrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Harbor_Storm-Surge_Barrier#Precedents) from the Netherlands.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ezUOS.jpg)
The one thing about this city is that the water table might be high as a result of whatever changed with the river to make the flood wall necessary. The lower older sections of the city might be partly or wholly flooded. That reminds me of the 1992 movie Split Second, which remains in my mind only because of the very cool world of future flooded London. Here is a screenshot from the denouement in the Tube.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aAeUR.jpg)
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbf-hVZORIE>
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I think the scenario you have outlined is plausible, if not necessary likely. Here is my suggestion for a different way you could implement it:
Perhaps this city was built in a river valley/canyon along a long but narrow corridor. There would be plenty of reasons to want to built a city here. The river provides food and transportation, it can act as a key control point for river traffic up and down the river and the shape of the valley can provide natural defenses.
In this situation, it makes sense that the rich elites would want to build up the walls of the valley. It's further away from the industrial center of the city along the river, it has better access to light and it's physically higher up. It's not much of a jump to go from here to erecting large bridges over the valley, creating more space for the upper class and making stratification more stark.
Town is probably already going to be prone to flooding in the winter and spring as the river swells and wanes naturally, so erecting dykes along the river would make sense, which could gradually transition to walls as events further up river caused it to gradually become larger and as foundations were needed for the upper levels of the city. If it becomes really bad, they might even build a dam to control the waterflow, though this would require at least 1 canal to facilitate river traffic.
Wrapping things up, this being a river valley suggests that it's not too terribly far from the mountains, from where a quarry could supply the building materials. In addition to fish caught from the river and crops grown on the fertile (if flood-prone) delta-lands at the mouth of the river, the rich are well positioned to feast on imported food.
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Our colony has landed on a planet which is a complete barren desert wasteland, the surface as dead as the moon but also extremely cold, being quite far from the local star. We have settled at the only source of heat - a very deep crater with a hot geothermal spring at the bottom.
There is water in this spring, alas, the water is mixed with other toxic chemicals and so can't be drunk.
However, the heat from the spring causes a lot of the liquid to evaporate. As the vapour rises, (let's just hand-wave that they can breathe for now), it cools as it gets further and further from the heat at the bottom. Eventually, it condenses, and some of it lands on the sides of the crater, and as it comes in contact with the freezing surface, some of it freezes. This has been going on for thousands of years - or however long it needs to have
Now each component of the mixture has a different condensation/freezing point, and the temperature changes with altitude.
So this has the fortunate effect of separating out the components, and at a certain altitude, the walls will be covered in (relatively) pure ice water which can be chipped off, melted and drunk safely. The other chemicals will have condensed and frozen at either higher or lower levels.
Is this at all plausible?
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**Yes**
If you assume that there is a temperature gradient around the crater walls then yes this should actually happen, the exact formation being dependant on the compounds present, the temperature gradient and the amount of materials being discharged. Obviously salts would be left behind in the boiling liquid and many gases would not condense at all. In fact I suspect water would be the number one condensate.
But other materials present might well contaminate the ice. Gases might get trapped between the condensing water crystals in a vaguely similar way to air bubbles being trapped in compressed snow. Wind changes and temperature variation would also probably act to mix things up a bit. But depending on the exact nature of the impurities it should be relatively easy to purify the water by [fractional distillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation)
Especially as they have plenty of hot water and plenty of cooling available. Very difficult to give a definitive answer as it depends on the impurities and their
concentrations.
One potential problem is that some mixtures freeze as mixtures - If you ever freeze a can of beer you will see relatively clear ice followed by progressively darker ices and finally a very dark brown liquid at the bottom that contains most of the alcohol and a lot of the impurities.
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What you suggest for water is a commonly used [technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_melting) to purify silicon ingots for electronic applications. A molten zone is repeatedly swept in the same direction along the ingot, concentrating the impurities in the liquid phase and then in the extremity of the ingot, which is then discarded.
It works as long as the impurities are more soluble in the liquid than in the solid phase.
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Short answer: Yes, as explained much better than I could in Slarty's answer.
To give a historical example: During the Viking age, people in Britain would make weak beer stronger (as, with the methods and resources available to them at the time it was difficult to brew something stronger than a modern lager) by leaving it in open barrels overnight in winter, then removing the layer of ice (clean water) that formed on top, leaving behind a stronger mix with a higher percentage of alcohol. This process was often repeated several times for a stronger brew.
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In my Sci-Fi universe, I want humans to, initially, have two traits to their spaceship building:
1. Really good drive systems, at least compared to other races.
2. Complete and utter lack of any sci-fi "Deflectors"
From everything I know, this leads to a ship needing a heavily armored prow to withstand any sort of extended mission. Any sort of satellite debris hitting the ship when entering orbit needs to be absorbed and/or deflected, and the occasional errant object in interplanetary travel needs to be able to be withstood as well. And that's before we even get to military ships.
The question I have is **What is required for a "High-speed" spacecraft without shields?** What is a reasonable "Speed Limit" for such vessels, keeping potential damage to a minimum? Being able to withstand impacts is great, but if you have to replace and repair the front of your ship after every trip, it's not really that useful (Although a courier vessel could take advantage of such a scheme).
To be entirely clear, I **do not** want alternate deflectors, or EM fields, or whatever. These ships operate like a celestial snowplow - If it's in front of them, it gets run over.
Additionally, the ships are **not** "Torch Drive" ships that are continually thrusting. They accelerate up to travel speed, coast towards their destination, and then slow down on arrival. I expect trips to take weeks or months. High Fractional-C velocities are, frankly, unwanted. At even 5-10% of light speed, the energies involved are enormous.
This is also for **sub-light** travel, not faster-than-light. FTL is accomplished in a completely different method, where such things are not something that needs to be worried about. Generally speaking, this is for travel within a system.
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Since you mention other races (species), your ships will be probably be travelling between solar systems. Assuming that these solar systems are at least light years apart, your desire for week/month trip lengths implies that you want FTL travel.
So you want a method for FTL travel which can operate without shields?
Have your ships traverse most of each journey's distance in an alternate dimension where matter is not encouraged to exist.
Start each journey by flying up from the planet's surface to a maximum non-orbital height; a height where the atmosphere is just thick enough to slow down would-be orbital objects and cause them to plummet downward. From the safe zone, use your ship's scanners and computers to plot a debris-free course up out of the planet's gravity well. When the window opens for that course, rocket your ship upward to the comparative safety of interplanetary space.
Once there, open a dimensional doorway and slip your ship into the non-material dimension. This alternative dimension does not actually forbid matter, it just doesn't have any of its own. Your ship does not dissolve upon entry. It is just alone in an infinite empty space. Another unusual attribute of this other dimension is that it does not enforce the light speed barrier, so your ship can travel as fast as your scientists can figure out how to go.
Within this empty space, you can use your super-fast human-made drives to move your ship to a location within the emptiness which is equivalent to a point just outside the gravity well of your destination planet. There, you simply open another dimensional doorway and slip back into our matter friendly realm.
Landing simply requires a reversal of the steps taken during lift off. Find a debris-free course from the gravity well's edge to the new planet's maximum non-orbital altitude, rocket in and then fly down from there.
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Shape the ship! Make it like a needle, with a very long (mile long) prow. Various materials are harder than diamond ([See Here](https://www.lousycv.com/the-top-10-toughest-materials-the-last-one-is-not-what-you-think/)), I would suggest something like #1, carbyne, at 200 times the strength of steel and much harder than diamond.
This shape won't deflect anything much bigger than your ship, of course: But you should be able to see those **large** objects, things larger than your ship, in plenty of time to change course. You probably also don't want to run into anything more massive than about 5% of your ship's mass.
Your prow can be a combination of shock absorber and physical deflector that comes to a "sharp" point (relatively speaking; perhaps a dome a few feet wide), it is a cone ramping to wider than the width of your ship. It clears the way of any small debris, like satellite size or big rock size; such debris tumbles down the spear point and past your ship.
This is to keep you from running into things small enough that you cannot see them in time to change course. Your sensors, of course, will be mounted near the tip of this prow. Since you are traveling at sub-light speed, there should be plenty of time for you to see very large things and avoid them.
One more feature you can add is that this prow is not even attached to your ship; it is an independent path-clearing piece of equipment that you launch and then follow behind. In the event it **does** ram into something large and stops; your follow distance can be many miles (even a thousand miles), far enough that the cleared space cannot be filled with anything damaging **after** the cone passes, but long enough that, should the cone hit something big, your ship has plenty of time to react and not crash into the mess created; by stopping or veering off for safety. Given the hardness of the cone (which you can increase by sci-fi hand-waving), chances are it shattered or penetrated into anything it did hit; which should be very rare. But for safety, let it do its work separated from the ship itself.
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/ Being able to withstand impacts is great, but if you have to replace and repair the front of your ship after every trip, it's not really that useful/
No, that is exactly what you do. With whatever junk you can find, scavenge or steal. The Improvised Armor trope is an awesome one!
<http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImprovisedArmour>
The term "Hillbilly Armor" is from the Iraq war when soldiers were Mad Maxing up their poorly armored vehicles with whatever they could scrounge up. But soldiers have been doing that a long time.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lGr7G.jpg)
<https://www.pinterest.com/pin/496873771361431089/>
If it gets too bunged up, detach it and find more. Or find some new stuff and stick it on in front. In space you do not need to worry about aerodynamics. Something from the planet surface. Someone else's ship that they left unattended. A wad of comet, steaming off ice and methane in your wake. Some hunk of stuff you found in space. A random asteroid that happened by.
Depicted: the Endurance from Seveneves by Neil Stephenson.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/q7xSc.png)
<https://www.quora.com/What-science-fiction-media-features-realistic-spacecraft>
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Based on the description, you are looking at an STL system. Although the common sense answer is to simply coat the ships hull with metres of ice to absorb the radiation and impacts of interstellar dust and gas molecules, you clearly are looking for a different answer.
The answer is actually two fold. Make the ships light sails, and use the drive beam to clear a path for the ship to go through. There are several possible approaches, but essentially using an immense laser or perhaps an immense mirror to focus the light from the home star, you can put a huge amount of energy on the sail. Shining the beam into space years ahead of time can ionize the gas and push interstellar dust out of the way, creating a clear path for the ship to follow through.
One potential method is Jordin Kare's "[Sailbeam](https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/07/sailbeam-and-fusion-runway-designer-jordin-kare-has-died.html#more-135061)" concept, using the momentum of tiny sails accelerated to immense velocity to drive the spacecraft.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IuJUm.png)
*Sailbeam concept*
More speculative is the suggestion that "[Tabby's Star](https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/02/physics-phd-reader-of-nextbigfuture.html)" has a mirror *two light seconds* in diameter, which can direct the light from the star to push huge lightsails, even ones towing interstellar arcs. The mirror could theoretically focus the beam 1700 light years away to vapourize the Earth, so being good neighbours is always a good plan.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/whU8Q.jpg)
*The building permit took a long time to arrange*
So the essential thing is to use the energy of the beam to clear the way so the spacecraft can dispense with the armour or shielding needed for interstellar travel.
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Just declare that your system of travelling faster than light has the properties that you want. You need FTL travel for the universe you want, there's no really scientifically respectable way of achieving it based on what we currently know, and so you can have your ships sideslip into another universe where there's no debris and no light speed limit, or whatever else you want.
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This was asked many months ago, but I just saw it while googling something related, and thought I would add in my own two cents:
The way I see it, you can try to brute force your way through stellar debris, or you can minimize how much those impacts matter.
Most of the impacts will be relatively small. Design your ship to simply allow them to pass all the way through and then patch the holes. Self-sealing tech would work here well. In some universes, like BattleTech, they have substances that are used especially for this sort of breach. BattleTech calls their substance HarJet if you want to read up on that. You can also have a shell of liquid around your ship, between the inner and outer hulls, this would help absorb impacts and prevent hard structures from getting shattered by the sudden jolt on the ship.
In this case you would want two features for your internal systems. The first would be massive redundancy. If an impact punched through something, you would want back up systems to come online, and back-ups for the back-ups. You would also want automated repair systems, robots that can handle repairs in damaged sections, or even remote drones.
Personally, I would have the outer hull have a water shell just inside it, and have a water shell around every vital component's area, and inside the habitable areas. In fact I would have the spaces inside bulkheads across the ship filled with water as well. This would serve to seriously bleed off kinetic energy as whatever piece of space dust that is hitting your transfers a ton of it into each water pocket it encounters.
All of that water would also have additional utility in being able to help maintain hydroponics, and being able to be converted easily into hydrogen fuel.
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Most of the shielding in place on existing spacecraft isn't to protect against space debris, which is extremely rare.
Shielding is in place is to protect the astronauts against various forms of solar radiation, which can kill the occupants. On earth, the layers of atmosphere, plus the earth's magnetic field, plus the Van Allen radiation belts, stop that radiation before it gets to the surface. The primary reason earth has a thick atmosphere while Mars has very little is, Mars doesn't have a strong magnetic core that deflects the solar wind.
We on earth are living near a giant, unshielded fusion reactor. Once outside of the protective layers around earth, you'll get the full blast.
So, unless you will have your travelers always wearing anti-radiation suits, which will limit their mobility, you will need some form of radiation shielding, or they won't be able to approach any solar systems... which presumably would be the purpose of their travel.
Keep in mind when thinking of armor plating to deflect or withstand meteor collisions that the spacecraft will decelerate when hit, while the occupants won't... until they slam into the interior of the spacecraft. Newton's law, and all of that. Even with armor plating, a collision with a large enough meteor could prove fatal to the travelers.
Better to put on some form of detection system to identify and avoid larger meteors. That, plus the maneuvering fuel, would still weigh a lot less than armor plating. Maybe a directed energy weapon to break up smaller meteors that threaten the spacecraft.
In any case, the chance of encountering a free traveling meteor is quite rare. Most have been captured by the gravitational fields of suns or planets.
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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 6 years ago.
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Since the transit method of detecting exoplanets requires perfect alignment of orbits, would a Kepler-type telescope yield much more exoplanet data if sent out of our solar system even to relatively realistic interstellar distances (say, 0.1-0.5 light years)?
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You wouldn't gain anything by being a few per-cent closer to exoplanets. However, you would gain - *or rather lose* - something by being further away from the sun:
**You would be cold**
Being cold doesn't sound like an advantage, but if you're using an IR/Visible light telescope it allows your mirrors and optics to become extremely accurate by removing thermal-warping related errors. The real-world WMAP satellite makes use of a shadow-shield (Giant sun-screen) to keep its optics chilled for very fine readings. Putting your telescope in the interstellar void means you can build a very large, very cool, very accurate, very sensitive telescope, meaning you might be able to directly observe exoplanets.
**TL;DR:**
The colder you make your telescopes, the better they are. The further you are away from the sun, the colder you are. Ergo, interstellar telescope = good telescope.
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At those distances, you are pretty much still at the same coordinates within the galaxy. Your viewing angle, even for the closest stars, has only changed by a minuscule amount, and for anything farther out it is negligible.
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Objectively it would not matter much where you place your telescope in the galaxy, as it would be closer to some planetary systems and farther from others.
However, there is a very real advantage to sending space telescopes farther away from our solar system. **When you want to find planets precisely in that region of the galaxy!**
This would appear common sense and simple, but think about an array of space telescopes, all mounted on rockets and each sent 10 light years away from the Earth, in all directions (that is, in 6 directions relative to Earth: up, down, north, south, east west). That way, we could get much, much detailed data about planetary systems in our galactic neighborhood.
A single space telescope, sent away from our solar system would not benefit us in detecting planets in all directions around us.
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There is a science fiction setting (I'd rather not say which one, because it is a spoiler) where a very long baseline array is built to increase the possible resolution of a sensor, but not the sensitivity. Calibrating the widely separated dishes took ages, of course.
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Yes but not in the way you think.
Moving the telescope slightly closer to the distant target stars would be little help. However, moving the telescope far enough (~550 AU) from the sun that it can use the sun as a gravitational lens would allow *fantastic* pictures to be taken. In fact, the image would be so greatly magnified ([one article on the topic](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601331/a-space-mission-to-the-gravitational-focus-of-the-sun/)) that the telescope could only fit a few square kilometres or less of a target that's tens of lightyears away into its view.
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Even for space telescopes, what improves resolution are mirror/lens size and image sensor resolution.
Focal lengths play an important part in magnification. Anyone whose taken astrophotography images with a camera hooked up directly to the telescope knows this.
When you start putting in eye-pieces that magnify, it has the same effect that it does for a photographer. The more material you put in front of the sensor, i.e. Lenses, the less focused your image will be at maximum magnification.
I would say that you would have to get pretty far away from the solar system for there to even be a noticeable impact.
Reflectors or refractors, the distance between the image sensor and the lens or mirrors, plus the lens or mirror's size determines magnification and sharpness (what good is magnification if it isn't sharp, the go hand-in-hand).
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### So aliens have arrived in the solar system.
* They have [faster-than-light travel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light) technology and the ability to handwave away the supposed [causality violations that such an invention causes](http://www.askamathematician.com/2012/07/q-how-does-instantaneous-communication-violate-causality/)
* They're peaceful, and currently reside in orbit around Earth's moon
* They're from an [isolated, antimatter galaxy](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26397/how-would-we-tell-antimatter-galaxies-apart), which means that they can't come to Earth, nor touch anything we manufacture. Conversely, nothing created on Earth can board their ships without risk
* The only thing stopping their ships from colliding with interstellar particles and exploding violently is a very strong electromagnetic field ([see related ideas here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/61068/can-spacecraft-defend-against-antimatter-weapons-how))
Both parties want to converse up close but they cannot come in contact with each other. The location of these interactions does not matter. Neither party can change the charges of their own particles, nor can they manufacture technology with the opposite charge safely.
### What are efficient ways for these two groups to communicate?
And if possible, what can allow close interaction (same room) to further scientific partnership between humans and this species without the risk of deadly particle collision?
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Depending on the nature of their shields you might even be able to do same-"room" interaction, for certain definitions of "room".
As Zxyrra says, use the electromagnetic spectrum. If for some reason they feel a need to get closer, consider "[Childhood's End](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End)" movie scene in the room where the protagonist met the alien. Now, in both the movie and the book the divider is one-way glass, but what if we use their shields?
They give us their shield technology. We build a 5-walled room of matter, the open face covered with one of their shields. They build a 5-walled room of antimatter, the open face covered with one of their shields. Move the two as close to each other as the shield technology permits.
I can see no reason other than psychological ones to bother with this, though. The only interchange is still visual. The only fundamental unit still defined by a physical object is not amendable to measurement by the aliens and I don't believe it's needed anyway:
E=mc^2.
m=E/c^2
c is defined in meters per second.
Seconds are defined in terms of a number of oscillations of a photon emitted by a certain atomic transition.
Their anti-atoms should emit the same photos as our posi-atoms. Thus they can build a machine to derive our second.
Meters are defined in terms of the number of wavelengths of a photon emitted by a certain atomic transition. Again, they can derive this.
Thus they can derive c.
Joules can be expressed in terms of a coulomb-volt.
A coulomb = a farad-volt.
A volt can be expressed in terms of chemical reactions, they can derive it.
A farad can be expressed in terms of a number of electrons. They have anti-electrons, they can count them.
Thus we have means of communicating every term on the right side of the equation, they can calculate our unit of mass.
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## Use the electromagnetic spectrum
Humans already communicate at long distances using radio waves, and see using visible light. Photons have no charge, so it's safe to use **visual displays**, or **any wave** on the EMS that isn't [ionizing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionizing_radiation), to converse. Antimatter particles will not be annihilated when coming in contact with photons from matter, and matter won't annihilated when coming in contact with photons from antimatter; it's perfectly fine to "see" as long as you don't "touch".
I don't think it's possible to have same-room interractions; gas particles, even in a near vacuum, make it far too risky.
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Did you know that i.e. were short for *id est*? And etc. meant *et cetera*?
These are relics of the Roman occupation of Europe, as far as I know. The Latin expression remained in the academic dialect for some time after the collapse of the Roman Empire, mostly because it is a characterizing feature of the academic genre. However, history and literary analyses are no fun.
Just for the heck of it, how would you design a constructed language for purely academic purposes? Such a language should address the following needs:
* Act as a lingua franca for scholars around the world
* Provide sufficient vocabulary, or at least the ability to adopt new vocabulary to form the terminologies of various disciplines.
* Have a syntax adapted to compacting information, in other words, have a high semantic density.
* Facilitate an academic way of thinking, if you believe in [linguistic relativity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)
* Be intentionally incomprehensible to non-academics, if you are into conspiracy theories.
Of course, you can find better purposes to build you language around.
Just as an example, a constructed language (let's call it Conlang-1) that address some of the aforementioned points could be described like so:
* Vocabulary: Conlang-1 has posteriori vocabulary, taking basic vocabulary from Latin, and allows the systematic construction of complex terms via the combination of basic words ("Fusilipetra" for example, can mean "lava", with "fusili" meaning "molten" and "petra" meaning "rock") This solves the need for vocabulary, and may facilitate semantic density.
* Syntax: Conlang-1's syntax is basically a copy of the English language (mostly because I'm lazy) Sentences will take on the form of Subject-verb-object, with phrases appended before and after. One may say that such a simplistic structure ease the learning of this language, but that can be subjective.
* Special features: Conlang-1 does not have temporal tenses, because academics often cite other scholar's work done decades ago in the present tense. However, Conlang-1 will conjugate verbs according to the [velancy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valency_(linguistics)) of the words. This may help avoid ambiguity in some cases.
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I think AlexP is on to something. Reading the [Wikipedia entry on New Latin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Latin),
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> an example of the transition is Newton's writing career, which began in New Latin and ended in English (e.g. Opticks, 1704). A much earlier example is Galileo c. 1600, some of whose scientific writings were in Latin, some in Italian, the latter to reach a wider audience.
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The use started declining, in favor of national languages, right at the time “real science” was being invented.
What if the opposite had occured? Once science started getting momentum, people complained about the use of myriad languages to keep up with findings. Furthermore, the need was seen for describing apparatus and procedures *precicely* so it can be understood for both criticism and repitition by others.
Early examples of poetic phrases, metaphorical expressions, and analogies written by this in other cultures took months to straighten out in correspondence with people using different languages, and the resulting paper trail was a bigger publication than the original paper!
In a move that was similar to computer languages of the 20th century in our timeline, they decided to not only extend acedemic Latin to handle all the new stuff succinctly, but reworked it to allow *exact* meanings to be agreed upon by all. It worked well for the purpose, and will increasing “new things” arising, developed a framework for extension that kept the precision in contrast to natural language evolution which haphazardly repurposes or changes old words.
Thinking about computer languages of today, and applying that to the need for documenting apparatus and procedures, I imagine a system for exactly specifying antecedents in a succinct way, where each thing refers back to a previous usage or detailed description. We can do this in an ad-hic way with labels: “add the contents of beaker A to beaker B” but this could be a specific language feature, like pronouns, with grammar centered around it.
Second, attributes and descriptions can be both succinct and grammatically encapsulated. For the succinctness consider how I use variables in computer algorithms: A.contents or a notation for how much to take from beaker A. For encapsulated, I mean that phrases expanding on something will be explicitly grouped rather than just running the phrases together. “I met a man with a wooden leg named Smith.” explicitly grouped, “I met (a man with a wooden leg) named Smith.” But add in the advanced antecedent/reference system and you can break out the descriptions and put them first, making the final sentence clear.
Perhaps, although inspired by Latin, they will be sick of all the parts of speech, especially when needing to [decline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension) not only the *new things* being added but encapsulated phrases. In the example above, the whole phrase acts as a noun and we know it’s the direct object due to word order, not by changing the ending—something hard to do on a phrase.
Latin had different groups of words, each of which declined in a different way, with overlapping spellings. So if you keep the idea of part of speech markers, use a *regular* set of suffixes on all nouns, pronoun/backrefs, and encapsulated phrases. “I met (man with a wooden leg)-acc named Smith-acc” where I’ve marked nouns as *accusative*.
The real thing would be nicer, but I like the idea of a mark separating the word proper (which does not change) from its marker (which is universal). In the English example the pronoun *I* is always a subject (nominative case), but in Latin you would generally not have structured it that way, but instead the *verb conjugation* would indicate “I” as well as “past tense”. At the very least, making the different [person, tense, number etc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_conjugation) orthogonal and regular would be a thing to do.
So the English “I met” would be the generic verb “meet” with indications for first person, singular, past, perfective, indicative.
Now this might get simplified as people working on it will come from languages that don’t have some of those things and don’t see the fuss. The constructed language should be designed so it **can be used properly** by these various members, so some simplification of conjugation is needed.
Will they ditch the attachment of “person” to the verb as a conjugation? If some of the comittee members have languages that do so (as does English) they will point out the benifits of refactoring and how Latin can still have subject nouns *too* so make it uniform. The killer will be in unifying it with the flexible antecedent/reference system, so I think the subject will be a general-purpose slot for a noun, and possibly can simply be omitted for a default (as we omit “I” sometimes).
They might be less averse to introducing new letters or other special marks compared with today. So the declinations and conjugations may use newly invented symbols, or special separators may be invented to go between the main word and the modifiers.
Another thing to bring up is the idea of namespaces and scopes. If you look at some function available in [CPAN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPAN), it can be uniquely identified by its quallified package name. The innermost name by itself is not unique, but many authors combine their code on CPAN and everything has a unique fully-quallified name. This is how distinct names with exact unchanging meanings can be managed.
With conjugation/declining handled as a suffix rather than altering the main word, those words are apparent to be looked up as-shown, and you can make up new words without conflicting with all the declined variations or making sure your new one has all the needed variations. So you make up words with a couple syllables in some nice organization, *but* they also have “sir names” that make them truely unique. An import mechanism lets you skip or abbreviate the sirnames within a publication.
To summarize, a lot of what we’ve learned from constructing high-level computer languages over the last 60 years can be applied to designing a language for describing observations, procedures, and apparatus. A lot of the features cary over: exact meanings, extensibility, compactness.
I suggest starting with Latin due to plausible history. But it will end up looking about as much like Latin as [C++ 14](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B14) resembles [CPL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPL_(programming_language)).
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There was such a language, although not a constructed language: [New Latin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Latin). It was used throughout Europe from the 14th to the 19th century. Everybody who was somebody could read it and write it; speaking was more delicate, because there was no commonly agreed pronounciation, although most people understood the so-called [Ecclesiastical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin) pronounciation used by the Catholic church. Books of science and philosophy and medicine and law and geography and biology and so on were written in New Latin by default. Newton wrote in New Latin. Spinoza wrote in New Latin. Erasmus wrote in New Latin. Linnaeus wrote in New Latin. The number of books written in New Latin is several orders of magnitude greater than what we have from the Ancients.
Abbreviations such as *i.e.*, *viz.*, *etc.*, *id.*, *ibid.*, *et al.*, *v.* and so on are the last remnants of New Latin. Its dominance began to fade in the 18th century, when (initially mostly British and French) scientists started writing in the vernacular. New Latin remained strong for one or two centuries in some countries (such as Germany, Poland or Austria-Hungary) and in some domains (such as law and medicine), but it was eventually replaced with vernaculars. Hungary used Latin as the language of law and government until 1844. Nowadays the last redoubt is [Botanical Latin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botanical_Latin); scientific descriptions of plants were accepted only in Latin until 2012, but today English is accepted too.
If you want to see how it looked like, the Internet Archive and Google Books are full of books in New Latin; as an example, *[De Jure Belli ac Pacis](https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_64NDaI7v1yEC)* by Hugo Grotius, Amsterdam, 1704, the book which [set the foundations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_jure_belli_ac_pacis) of international law.
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There have been a multitude of "constructed languages" developed and some even promoted for these purposes, but for the most part, the adoption rate has been extremely low.
Most people have at least heard of Esperanto, but other languages have been constructed as well. [Loglan](http://www.loglan.org) may be the most complete and complex one (being developed for linguistic research), but because its inventor placed many restrictions on its use (essentially copyrighting it), an alternative known as [Lojban](https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban) was developed using similar principles. Reference has been made in other answers to other constructed languages like Ithkuil, which seems to be an attempt to create an entirely different method of writing or symbology to go along with it.
One problem with these elaborate constructed languages is that people really do not think in tightly constrained or logical formulations, and also that natural languages evolve over time, and similar pressures will be placed on constructed languages as well.
In terms of usage, people use slang, make up contractions, use words in non standard ways (in the military, for example, there is a strong trend to turn and use almost any word as a verb, and to first take things down into acronyms, and then use the acronym as a word in itself). Languages like Ithkuil or Lojban rely on tightly constructed logic to function, so the idea of Lojban "slang" would probably cause a clash of gears for people not versed in the subculture (although teen slang or texting in natural languages seems designed to do the same for the adult population....). Specialists tend to change language in order to both communicate more clearly to fellow specialists and to exclude non specialists (the military use of language is perhaps the most extreme and fluid form, but listening to lawyers or doctors talk among themselves is pretty enlightening).
Language also evolves according to what is known as [Grimm's law](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Grimms-law), where letters and pronunciation tends to shift and contract over time. Reading Shakespeare in the original is very difficult given the 500 year time difference, and reading "middle" or "old" English becomes almost impossible for the untrained reader or listener. [This](http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/futurese.html) website has some interesting discussion and speculation on how the English language will evolve for the next 500 years.
Finally, language needs to evolve to meet changing situations. Scholars studying Proto Indo European (PIE, the presumed ancestral language of the Indo European language family) can trace some of the evolution by looking for the appearance of words for things the speakers hadn't seen or discovered before. Words for different species of trees, fish or animals reflects the movement of the PIE language speakers as they moved from the Steppes of Central Asia and spread into Europe, the Middle East and India. Of course, PIE speakers moving eastward into India developed different words than people who moved south into Iran or west into Europe because they were encountering entirely different things. The longer a constructed language is around and the farther ranging the speakers move, the greater the differences in vocabulary will develop as they encounter new and different things.
So a constructed language may start off with a specific function, but over time the natural tendencies of humans will cause it to mutate and change.
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One of the issues you will run into is that a constructed language will not remain pure. This can be from minor things (teenagers using one or two words of the academic lanuage in their non-academic language conversations to seem smart) to serious issues (describing something that doesn't exist in the constructed language yet. Consider that French uses the English words for many weird things (brainstorming is a fascinating one for me. faire un brainstorming is a french phrase). There's really not a lot of ways to prevent this "bleeding" to and from the language, because humans are built to communicate things.
This necessitates two layers of this constructed language. The Official version, that all peer-reviewed papers and the like would need to use (and would decide when new words enter the vernacular), and the Unofficial version, which would be used in anything else. This itself runs into a few problems. How does a paper in the Official language, on say, linguistics, discuss topics that utilize the Unofficial language? Can it ever be peer reviewed? Eventually you will have bleeding from one to the other. If you have a scenario where a lot of new words need to enter the Official Version quickly, and there is a holdup on that process, then the Official Version will be deprecated and everyone will use the Unofficial version for any communication.
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I want to incorporate hot air balloons as a means of common travel in my fantasy world, but I recognize that hot air balloons aren't really "propel-able". My question is, how would someone hypothetically operate a small airship or zeppelin type of structure in a fantasy world? I'm looking more for answers about balloon-based structures, not a sail based or Stardust-esque flying ship.
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You have a fantasy setting and you have magic. So keep the hot air balloon and add a propulsion system.
Based on TheBlackCat's answer you can make a pedal powered engine for your airship by placing a golem in a hamster wheel attached to a gearbox. If you go by the clay golem concept you can make the engine as large or small as you want, by the size or number of golems used. A necromancer could even use undead instead of a golem.
The other option is a possessed engine (As used in Divinity Dragon Commander or even Warhammer 40K) where a demon/spirit is bound to the machine and forced by some pact or contract to operate it.
If you want to skip engines entirely you could simply have a wind manipulating creature or mage direct the craft where it needs to go.
These answers all depend on what level of fantasy and magic you have, but don't require too much.
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You could do it just like people navigate hot air balloons in our world: The pilot watches the clouds to see what direction the wind is blowing at various altitudes, and then heats the air or lets it cool to alter his altitude to a place where the wind is blowing in the direction that he wants to go. There are usually enough different air layers that he can find one with the wind in at least roughly the right direction. If not, you're stuck until the wind changes. Much like a sailing ship can be becalmed.
Like see here, <http://www.wikihow.com/Fly-a-Hot-Air-Balloon>, point 7, or <https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-steer-a-hot-air-balloon>.
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Depending on the type of magic you want to use...
## Use a Discworld Axle
In the Discworld novel *Thud*, Terry Pratchett describes an item known only as an "axle". It's essentially a perpetual-motion machine, consisting of two six-inch cubes joined together on one face, slowly rotating but absolutely impossible to stop. If you have one side of an Axle-type object secured to the body of your ship, and the other connected to a large gear, you can translate that slow rotation into any kind of propulsion you want. A drive chain could run from the big gear to several propeller units scattered around the ship, for example.
Of course, while Pratchett's Axle doesn't require any kind of fuel, you could certainly declare that yours does need fuel. Heroic Axles might need coal or food or a regular spell cast by a wizard to keep running; villainous ones could run off the blood of the innocent.
## Fire Spells = Jet engines
A jet engine is functionally a fairly simple device - air is drawn in at the front, compressed, mixed with fuel, and ignited. This causes a rapid expansion of the air/exhaust mixture, which is shot out the back. In a magical environment, you can replace fuel in the mixture with a mage's fire spell. Keep a perpetual flame burning, surrounded by whatever super-strong metal you want and fed by compressors made of a similarly super-strong metal, and you have a decent jet engine. It would probably require regular input from the wizard, of course, so a ship's captain needs to keep his wizard's well-supplied.
## Air elementals
Why bother with contraptions, when you can summon spirits of air to move your ship wherever you wish? With the winds at your command, you can simply move wherever you want to go.
## Giant birds/griffins/hippogriffs/dragons
Mythology and fantasy are replete with tales of chariots, carts, and, of course, sleighs, pulled through the air by flying animals. Birds are a common choice, but so are celestial draught animals like horses and oxen (and reindeer). Strap a handful of flying animals into a harness and have them draw the flying ship through the air. For bonus points, they provide a) fertliser for the fields you're flying over, and b) an aerial bombardment capability.
## It's magic
In the end, the nice thing about magic is that it can literally do whatever you want; the problem with magic is that it can *literally* do whatever you want. The only bound is your imagination. Any method you want, you can use. It makes it difficult for us to come up with a solid answer, rather than a lot of opinions. I would strongly suggest that you define what your magic can do *first*, then let details like how it propels ships flow from that starting point.
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If you don't want to use sails, probably the solution most available to a fantasy setting would be pedal power. The principles of both pedal power, the necessary gearing, and propellers were know in the early renaissance. Smaller vehicles could be powered by the occupants, larger vehicles could be powered by horses or oxen.
The next-best choice would probably be some form of steam propulsion. The problem is that practical steam engines would be hundreds of years off from any fantasy setting. Using steam as a power source dates back [thousands of years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile), but the early designs were just toys, they weren't a practical power source. Carrying enough water and fuel to make such primitive steam propulsion practical wouldn't be feasible without magic.
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There have been some interesting suggestions. I'd like to add my own five cent:
have your airship pulled by a team of oxen or horses, whenever the wind is unfavorable, and use sails whenever the wind is right.
You might even winch the oxen up in those situations.
Apart from the coolness of having a bunch of hovering oxen, that helps crossing rivers, or all other kinds of hard-to-navigate territory.
Remember that you only have to overcome the wind drag, so this means of propulsion should be quite feasible in most weather situations.
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I'm currently writing a book with airships. And what I did is by using balloons filled with "Graphene aerogel" a solid lighter than air, it provides a form of lift that won't get destroyed super easily. Also the ship's use engines (steampunk style, but you could use magic) to propel in different directions. As well as for lift, that way destroying the balloon isn't the only way of sinking the airships.
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There was a sort of contemporary fantasy series where one major point were [vacuum dirigibles](https://twitter.com/alexiskennedy/status/1015266950681976832). The material strength (and also the air evacuation) was conveniently produced by rune magic arrays. I think that propulsion was magical, too. Runes were, however, more like engineering (so, anyone could study them, it took a lot of work, but they could be *calculated* to produce a desired effect, they needed maintenance, too). The world was rather modelled after late Belle Époque.
If you manage to create a material strong enough to withstand the full atmospheric pressure, you'd be able to create very cool airships. But not only them. This technology would also change the life to an extreme degree. Stronger atom reactor shells, really cool bulletproof vests, thin fibers of this material for fun and profit (think: monomolecular thread killers from cyberpunk, but more physically-based), space elevators, insanely-deep submarines and all kind of deep sea exploration, etc. And, of course, planes. Large planes, huge planes, war planes. If you can create a material for a vacuum dirigible, the last thing you do is a vacuum dirigible. Because you are on your way to colonise space or to fight the last war in humanity's history, depending on whom you ask.
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Note that you may well want artificial flight for people and some cargo, but if it has quirks/limitations, that may be better for plot than a no-ugly-warts technology. That said, how about:
Natural gas (methane, CH4, molecular weight 16) as the buoyancy-producing gas. Yes, it's flammable and thus a risk of flying.
I further posit that they've worked out a crude method of propulsion, much like that of the Nazi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb#Power_plant>. These are pretty simple mechanically, but they need a liquid or gaseous fuel. I posit that they use the lift gas *itself* because (perhaps petrol hasn't been discovered yet and alcohol and olive oil are too expensive.) So range, especially against or cross wind, is fundamentally limited -- and flight is dangerous, but doable. Have fun!
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Imagine a space battle between two warships **without inertial dampeners**. Obviously the ships would be limited to perhaps 4 gravities of prolonged acceleration, and could only perform short bursts of movement at higher accelerations, since the human body is a fragile thing. Even so, the forces involved at even these accelerations could be lethal if crew members were not properly protected.
Pilots/bridge-crew would likely be strapped into cushioned chairs to protect them from the myriad forces that would otherwise toss them about as the ship maneuvers. Other crew members, however, might have need of mobility in order to perform their jobs aboard the ship. Maintenance personnel and damage control teams, for example, would need to move around the ship in the middle of an engagement to put out fires and close hull breaches and do whatever they do.
So the question is: **how can the more mobile crew members be kept safe against the motions of the ship as it bucks and tosses itself around while still allowing them to move and perform their duties?**
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_exoskeleton>
A powered exoskeletons would allow the crew to move around under higher accelerations, it could dampen the forces exerted on the individual and allow them to move against forces that an unreinforced human could not. They would likely need some form of enhanced gripping to the deck surfaces as well to resist the changes in acceleration likely for a space battle, magnetic is my first thought, but this could also be a pneumatic system (suction cup like) or even a gripping hand like foot.
You could of course go full robot, controlled via tele-presence by humans in nice comfortable acceleration pods, but this would be vulnerable to failures in communications systems or other ships systems, and anyway not as cool as power armor.
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# "Prepare for evasive maneuvers!"
If your ship is large enough to have a significant crew compliment that must remain on their feet during combat, that ship is going to have a *lot* of mass (and hence, a lot of resistance to acceleration). You've tagged this question [science-based](/questions/tagged/science-based "show questions tagged 'science-based'") and [physics](/questions/tagged/physics "show questions tagged 'physics'"), so I'm going to assume you don't want to go *too* far down the rabbit hole of fantastic sci-fi. Thus, without inertial dampeners, it's not just the *people* that are going to experience large accelerations, it's the ship itself (probably at least in the hundreds of tonnes), so that will put limits on how much force you can apply. Sure, you could add reinforcement to the ship, but that adds mass, which will slow you down, too.
Anyway, the strategy here isn't too different from most sci-fi where someone will shout, "prepare to go hard to port". It's not like the conn needs to prepare to turn the wheel they're already holding in their hand, but it gives everyone else a chance to hang on to something.
Now, at sustained 4g, humans are still going to need some kind of mechanical help to stay in one place. Could *you* lift four times your body weight for several seconds at a time by hanging on to a safety rail with one hand while you tighten bolts with the other? I can't. There would need to be some safety protocols (and it'd be easy to add some automated audio warnings and interlocks so that if you need to do a 4g turn and your engine officer isn't strapped in, the engine won't fire until she is (or until someone overrides the warning).
Really, 4g is just too much sustained acceleration for humans to do much else than sit/stand strapped in and push buttons.
## Magnitude vs. direction
As you know, acceleration is a vector, meaning it has direction. One thing you can do to help your crew is to put your bridge, and possibly other departments like engineering, your med bay, etc., into spherically rotating shells that can self-align themselves with the direction of travel. You mentioned something similar to this for straight-line travel in a comment, but it can be extended to any acceleration if you can design things around spherical pods. At least that way, you can ensure that acceleration is always "back" (or "down", although humans tend to tolerate higher sustained g loads better if they are front-to-back). You'll have to make sure consoles, screens, and supplies all swivel with the crew, but it might help a bit. Departments with large, immovable things that need to be fixed, like the main engines, will be difficult, but those are cases where repairs will probably have to wait until you're done making maneuvers. After all, 4g is a *lot* of acceleration to expect someone to do physical work with moving parts, bolts flying all over the place, etc.
# What about weapons impacts?
If we're talking about sudden impacts from weapons hits that are powerful enough to lurch your entire, massive ship hard enough to throw crew around, but not hard enough to blow massive holes in your hull, I want to tour your shipyards! In seriousness, once your ship leaves drydock, there isn't much you can do about unpredictable impacts but strap in and hope for the best. From a design point of view, you want to deflect as much of the incoming energy as possible, and depending on the weapons used, that could mean lots of sharp angles, or maybe you have some kind of deflector shielding or something. If you have to absorb all of the energy, then all that energy will go into some combination of damage, heat, and acceleration.
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In closing, as long as your captains insist on regular safety harness drills so the crew can strap themselves in quickly when the order to turn sharply (or go to battle stations) comes across the intercom, the ship can still make some rather evasive maneuvers while keeping the crew reasonably protected. The rest of my answer goes into some of the finer details.
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A possible solution is to go with no interior gravity. If the crew is floating on the interior during battle they could wear 'jet' packs linked to the ship's computers that would automatically fire to correct the trajectory of the crewmember relative to turns the ship is making. This could require an extra dense, inflamable environment in the ship during these maneuvers, so perhaps they have to do something like flood the relevant control pods and wear a full space/SCUBA suit. People/things in nonessential areas could just be tethered. Operating in water like this could allow far more than 4 G turns. These suits could be highly pressurized in a way similar to modern fighter pilot suits. According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force) these suits allow turns up to 9 G's.
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The simple answer is that you don't. Human crewed ships would be a long way from the front lines and moving in controlled and regular fashions. Think aircraft carriers, drone carriers, etc. If dramatic maneuvers in a crewed ship were needed then the crew would be strapped into special pods, probably wrapped in cushioning gell, and most likely still unconscious for anything more.
The "ships" actually doing the fighting would be unmanned drones with reflexes thousands of times faster than humans and capable of accelerating far harder. I suggest reading Peter F Hamilton's "Nights Dawn" trilogy for an excellent example of this sort of combat, their drones being referred to as Combat Wasps.
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Any ship large enough for Gs to be a problem is either small and fast (like a fighter, crew 1) or a Capital Ship trying to be agile. The later doesn't really work well. (Force = Mass X Accel aka Accel = Force / Mass; so the amount of energy to move a capital ship is enormous)
So basically, a Capital ship would almost never have the power to make any kind of maneuver to dodge incoming attacks. It would be far more cost effective to use the ships own mass as its 'inertial dampener' and than configure the weapons and armor to be able to attack all side simultaneously (similar to their design in space fighting games). This capital ship would then be able to deploy a number of fighters to take care or the finer threats. The crew than would just need a safe way to move about the ship (like guide rails with 'auto-pilot' handles). And then You could have Escort ships (crew ~5) that are sturdier than fighters, but able to maneuver better than capital ships.
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In the vast army of famous swordsmen, there's someone who's very well known for a certain community, and completely unheard for the rest.
He's **Roronoa Zoro**, from the anime One Piece.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5roOD.jpg)
His possibly most unique feature in the series is that unlike the majority of sword fighters, he uses *three* swords, by holding two in his hands, and one **in his mouth!**
Personally I love the series, but ever since the beginning, I thought that whatever badass an additional sword makes him, this is just *utterly ridiculous* and barely effective, if it is at all.
But what about realistic situations? With a grip (bite?) that is strong enough, how effective a people with a bladed weapon held in his mouth can be?
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I suggest that there are three main uses of a sword: cutting, thrusting, and blocking. With my limited knowledge of German longsword, I'm going to analyze the effectiveness of a mouth sword in all three of these tasks.
**Blocking**: When blocking, it's best to try to block off cutting lines. If you hold the sword out towards your opponent, you're not blocking anything; they can cut you from any angle just fine. If you hold the sword sideways (as in the picture), any cuts you deflect are just going to be redirected to your head or neck. The best bet I can think of is to have the sword facing slightly down and to the side, but that's going to get in the way of your primary sword (which could just block that line normally).
**Cutting**: You have to turn your head to cut. That means you'll lose eye contact with the enemy, which is a bad idea. You'll also probably have to move your upper body, which could expose your back.
**Thrusting** This is the only one that I think might work. If you have your third sword sticking out like a tongue, it could serve as a last defense against someone who would otherwise try to close the distance. However, by the time they get close enough to be stabbed by your mouth sword, they could've already stabbed you with a regular sword, or probably even a reasonably long knife. And, failing that, you've just given them a lever to break your neck with.
So no, I don't think a mouth blade would help that much. That said, maybe if you carried a third sword with your feet, you could pull off some effective maneuvers.
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(Before I answer, I must post a Ha! Thats great!)
This wouldn't be effective at all...though I'm not going to challenge the 'bite' strength on this one, I'm going to challenge the swinging capacity of the head and neck. When swinging a sword, much of its strength comes from the leverage the length of a persons arms grant. The slicing motion is made more effective when the arms can pull back and cause the sword to slice. The neck and head are not good at either of these attributes.
There is also the problem of sight as well...trying to keep your eyes on ones opponent to predict their next move would be significantly harder when your neck is swinging side to side. The blade would likely interfere with peripheral vision as well.
As a side curiosity...does Roronao keep a masseuse as a travelling companion to treat his constantly strained and sore neck?
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I am going to steer away from the example in the photo and look at the question as it is written, "Is it practical to wield a bladed weapon in mouth?" While I agree with the former answers that wielding a sword in one's mouth would prove impractical, it may be feasible to wield a shorter, more specialized blade in one's mouth if this is truly a desired trait of a character in your world. Bladed weapons are not exclusive to swords and can exist in any length. Therefore a small blade might be held between the teeth and used as last resort when all else fails. Any situation in a fight where one might headbutt the other- this blade could increase the damage dealt from a head strike. Although I should point out that it would require a lot of expertise to avoid cutting ones self should the grip on the blade loosen. Anyone reading this as well as myself might tell you even this still may be considered impractical because you are limited to the movements of your head and neck to strike with the weapon. Now lets consider a blade or blades that are surgically attached to a persons mouth. I am imagining a surgically implanted set of beetle-like mandibles that extend out from each side of the mouth where the sharp blade only exists on the exterior of the mouth to avoid damaging the user. The blades would likely have to be fixed to the lower jaw bone so that they are stable and so the user can control them by opening and closing his/her jaw. Consequently, the users speech will likely be impaired as well as his/her ability to eat and navigate tight quarters. All in all, probably not the most practical, but would look awesome!
Now lets take a look at an actually practical solution. Lets imagine a person who has lost all of their teeth. Bladed dentures could replace their teeth as long as they are constructed so that the blades on the bottom jaw nest into the blades on the top jaw to avoid cutting the inside of the user's mouth. While these blades would only be useful for biting, they would prove to be very useful in a situation where you are close enough to your enemy to do so. They would technically be a bladed weapon in a mouth as your question posits. Unlike the mandibles, these bladed dentures could potentially make eating easier (steak, tough meat, etc).
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**Not if you like having teeth.**
Granting that wearing a mouthguard of some kind would allow you to get a better grip, I see two big problems:
1. If you lose your grip while striking, you risk damage to your face no matter what.
2. Put a pencil in your mouth and swing it around. Humans don't move with their head leading so it's very hard to get your body weight as leverage behind your head. You can watch dogs do this well when they pull with their whole body while biting down on a toy in your hand.
Conceding you have a safe grip akin to a hand's on the sword, any attempted strike would move your body out from under your center of balance and put you at risk. You throw a punch not just with your arm but with your chest and legs as well. Unless you could do that with your head, I don't think this is plausible.
EDIT: To expand on point 2...
Your arm acts as a whip and is able to use momentum to accelerate objects very quickly. You can observe this action in baseball pitches, and there is a similar action in sword swings as well. You don't just swing your shoulder, you swing your hips, your trunk, your shoulder, then your elbow and wrist. Swinging your head too hard will give you whiplash.
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If you think about it, the movement from the wrist is 60 times less than the end of whatever you're swinging. So if you're chopping you get much more speed and momentum behind it if your twist your wrist mid swing. That said, you can't get that sort of movement from a weapon in your mouth. Even if you could it would be more of an inconvenience when swinging, parrying, and blocking, since I would assume your arms would make contact with the mouth weapon. I would assume during the pressures of battle someone would probably grab that weapon sticking out of someones mouth and twist, that would effectively end that altercation.
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Apart from the issues already raised, this approach also prevents the wielder from communicating with their comrades. This may be inconvenient when you need to shout "Look out!" "He's behind you!" "Watch out for the archer!" "Fall back!" etc.
Also opponents can insult you and make personal comments and you can't answer back.
The only benefit I can think of is that if one of the other swords is lost or broken it's a handy backup.
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Inspired by [Would a full body diamond armor and sword guarantee survival and victory against a medieval battalion?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54324/would-a-full-body-diamond-armor-and-sword-guarantee-survival-and-victory-against) and my question [What would iron-age tools and weapons be like if they were redesigned with modern metallurgy?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/54329/what-would-iron-age-tools-and-weapons-be-like-if-they-were-redesigned-with-moder) I thought I'd take another tack around this topic.
I'll be blunt this time and not wrap it up in a fancy premise. If we were to refashion weapons and armour for hand to hand melee combat but with modern technology and materials, how would they be different from their medieval forebears?
This being worldbuilding I can't resist a fancy premise. So let's imagine that the great goddess Handwavia has declared it taboo for people to try and kill each other with anything other than force or energy generated by their own bodies. If it interests you (it interests me), we can say that bows are also allowed if they're drawn by hand.
Expense is no object. It doesn't matter if building a vest that's effectively impervious to sword blows or a sword that can lop off limbs without blunting is absurdly expensive, so long as it's possible. Knights and nobles are the class that fights after all.
(My ill-educated guess is that defence would predominate. We don't have much that can improve on a steel cutting edge for attacking people with, but with modern synthetic and ceramic material, we can probably fashion lightweight, flexible armour that's almost impervious to such assaults.)
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I don't think it would change much, compared to the middle ages. Let's compare!
**Middle Ages**
Depending on which time period you refer to, my answer differs. For most of the middle ages, cloth armor like the "gambeson", a padded torso and arm armor was dominating for most soldiers. Steel helmets were worn whereever possible. If you had the money, chainmail was worn. A crusader for example might have worn a gambeson with chainmail on top. Later, in the 15th century and beyond, platemail became the dominant choice of armor. Contrary to common believes, platemail allows for great mobility and agility if forged right.
Cutting through a chainmail with a sword is veeeery hard to do (i would say almost impossible in real combat). Also, piercing with a spear or arrow becomes difficult, especially when there is padded armor underneath. While arrows with special tips had good chances, i think melee weapons had a tough time. Blunt weapons like warhammers or maces did better, and often a sword blow would crack or shatter the opponents arm without actually piercing the armor.
Yet, in "real" combat, blows would most often not align perfectly, the opponent would deflect or dodge most of the power, and so armor protected very well from the "pricks" and half-hits that were most common (and would still have fatally wounded an unarmored opponent).
With introduction of platemail, the game stepped up a bit. Platemail is pretty invulnerable to most melee weapons. Anything below a halbert wielded during a charge should not have been able to puncture a breastplate. Given that the wearer is not helpless on the ground of course. Special weapons (warhammers mostly) were invented that allowed to puncture platemail, but most weapons were completely inefficient against platemail. So combat techniques adapted. The warriors shifted their focus to the weaknesses of the armor. Knees, elbows, wrists, neck, armpit, groin, hands and face had to have weak points, so the wearer could move at all. Fighters focused on hitting these weak points. To make that easier, "sword wrestling" was in heavy use, aiming to throw the enemy to the ground or immobilize them, so hitting the vitals became possible.
Even when crossbows and musquets spread on the battlefields, platemail remained the armor of choice until the late 17th century.
**Modern Combat**
Now, how would modern technology influence all this? Whew. On the weapon side, it's possible to manufacture more durable, lighter (or more likely: better balanced, since physical impact depends on weight) and more flexible weapons. I don't think the sword would vanish, it proved to be the weapon-of-choice for millenia. We could have sharper edges, but i don't think the weapons could improve that much more. look at modern firefighter axes and tools. They are sturdy as hell, and razorsharp, but an axe is an axe...
On the armor side, i am thinking carbon nanotube armor. See here: [Carbon Nanotube on wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube) That stuff can withstand almost any physical blow (bullets, even), and is super lightweight. It's far superior to most materials we can actually use, but let's assume we have that stuff. Because i think using our "more common" modern materials will not change the essentials of what i am saying, just making it more complicated.
So armor still follows the same principle: you cannot penetrate platemail at all, but you have to go for the weak points. But these days, the weak points can be layered with kevlar and other modern materials. Your visor can be made from transparent aluminium or armored glass, so that's even not a weak point anymore, AND you get perfect vision. Try wearing a medieval full helmet, it's horrible. You don't see sh... shiny things.
Sooo. I think battling other combatants will be primarily about getting them to the ground, and exposing their weaknesses for a good, full-force thrust to their weaknesses, killing them like that. Maybe nets, bolas and the like will see a revival? Also, armor-penetration weapons like the warhammer or the halbert will be veeeery common, while axes and swords might be less frequent.
Sadly, i think bows are gonna have a bad time.
lastly, don't underestimate that armor is expensive. So if, on the modern battlefield, not all combatants are armored in fullbody platemail, it looks rather different. In that case, the balance of weapons will shift a bit.
TL;DR: I think it will more or less resemble battlefields of the 16th century, minus the firearms. :)
Afterthought: do tasers work, if i charged them with muscle power?
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The actual style of combat probably wouldn't change much, it is still men fighting with melee weapons and bows. But if you had modern manufacturing, there would be some SIGNIFICANT material changes that may drive some battle actics.
For starters, a modern compound bow is LIGHT YEARS ahead of anything they had back then, even the vaunted English longbow. [Here](http://www.currentmiddleages.org/artsci/docs/Champ_Bane_Archery-Testing.pdf) is a good technical summary of the longbow. The bottom line is that these bows can generate around 75 joules/55 foot pounds. Modern compound bows can hit 90-100 foot pounds, as seen by this [bow review](http://bestcompoundbowsource.com/bear-traxx-review-compound-bow-inspection/). Plus modern bows can shoot better in more varied weather conditions, have durability and reliability improvements, and most important, have CONSISTENCY, so the arrows and bows have better tolerances than in the medieval period. So modern archer units are going to be DEVASTATING compared to historic archer units. Can modern armor compensate for more powerful bows so the tactics can stay the same?
While these arrow energies seem high (since they can take down bears and elephants) it is important to realize that the measly [.22 rimfire](http://www.federalpremium.com/ammunition/rimfire/family/gold-medal/gold-medal-ultramatch/um22) can hit this energy level. Obviously there is a penetration advantage to a slow heavy arrow (400 grain arrow) versus a small bullet (40 grains), as [this article](http://www.tradgang.com/ashby/Momentum%20Kinetic%20Energy%20and%20Arrow%20Penetration.htm) exhaustively discusses. But arrows are in no way at the energy level as bullets, especially modern rifle calibers. It is very difficult to get data on arrows expressed in modern ballistic terms, but certainly hard armor, designed to stop jacketed rifle rounds, would definitely stop arrows. Soft armor (mainly intended to stop pistol bullets) not so much, as arrows have a cutting quality missing from most pistol rounds.
So, will riot shields stop arrows? Probably not at close distance. [Here is a typical ballistic shield](http://www.bulletproofme.com/Ballistic%20Shields.shtml), rated to III-A. For pistol bullets, this would be plenty. For fragments, which can be sharp edged, this shield can stop a 17 grain fragment at 2000 fps, which is around 150 foot pounds of energy. So on paper it may stop an arrow from penetrating, but perhaps not as arrow penetrating qualities are different from small fast fragments. BUT add in a [polyethylene plate](http://bulletproofme.com/RP-Polyethylene.html) rated for and you can harden the center of the shield, mostly protecting the wielder. However with a curved shape, anti-shatter film, and 4-6mm thickness, even a plexiglass riot shield would probably deflect or stop most arrows outside of very close range.
So, we can somewhat neutralize the archer threat with shields. Plate armor of the period was 2mm thick or so, and was generally proof against arrows. Modern arrows might penetrate so you would have to increase the armor thickness or go to a harder modern steel, which may be more difficult to work with to make the intricate shapes necessary for plate armor. To reduce cost an make armor more transferable between different people, it may look more like umpire armor with interlocking plates, backed by cut resistant fabric[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/htCPs.jpg) This could be factory made, rather than individually crafted for a specific person. Replace the PE plates with steel, add in foam backing, and it would not only resist blunt force impacts but resist stabbing as well. You can see [here](http://www.safeguardclothing.com/support/nij-levels/) that there are standards for stab and spike protection as well as ballistic protection.
The long and short of this is that defensive armor has made big jumps that haven't really been matched by offensive tech, aside from improvements in missile weapons (bows, and crossbows if allowed). But polearms, swords, spears, etc haven't really seen like improvements. Modern armies could afford to outfit EVERYONE in advanced stab and penetration proof armor. It is likely that melee weapons would focus on long narrow spikes mounted on dense hammer heads in order to defeat the armor. Swords would be almost worthless against armored combatants. CAVALRY would be prominent, since the lance and mounted archers would still be as effective. Eye slits would be much less vulnerable since we have plexiglass inserts but the same basic tactics of knock your opponent over and stab him under the arm or in a joint with a narrow, thick blade would still work.
It is entirely possible that battles fought this way would be totally indecisive, that the men would fatigue before they could kill or wound many of the enemy. The communications and logistical aspects of modern battlegrounds would need to be addressed as bands of armored men drive around the countryside, seeking a fight where they will be assured a clear victory, not just another stalemate. It is quite likely that rather than having actual battles, some sort of tournament evolves to decide the victor since actual conflict would be too indecisive.
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One thing is that steel fabrication and metallurgy has improved significantly since the late middle ages so we can certainly say that the overall quality of armour specifically would improve significantly.
While the very best plate armour was of decent quality heat treated steel (at least for critical areas) and pretty effectively arrow proof we now have very sophisticated alloys like [Hardox](http://en.rime.de/wiki/hardox/) which should be pretty much impervious to any reasonable hand wielded weapon.
Having said that the materials used for modern military body armour may not be as useful as you might think. High tensile strength textiles like kevlar etc are good against slashing and fragmentation injuries but slashing is already well covered by the solid plate and fragmentation isn't an issue in this context. They are also poor against penetrating weapons and so not necessarily any improvement in protecting vulnerable joints which can't easily be covered by plate compared to chain mail.
One area where there are obvious improvements is in the padding worn under armour as modern foams, gels and breathable fabrics as well as a modern understanding of blunt trauma injury mechanisms could very probably increase protection and certainly improve comfort.
On a similar note [cooling vests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_vest) (originallly developed for F1 drivers) could dramatically improve the combat effectiveness of an armoured soldier. Modern reenactors and HEMA practitioners often cite heat stress as a key factor in armoured combat.
It is also fair to say that chaep steel and modern manufacturing methods would make it possible to kit out entire armies in cheap basic armour. At this point it is worth saying that the best medieval plate armour was as much about the fit to the individiual as the materials and so you wouldn;t necesarrily be able to mass produce teh vey best armour but cheap 'munitions grade' armour for every soldier (eg helmet and breastplate) woule greatlky increase their survivability.
Equally while kevlar etc aren't necessarily *better* than good plate a combination of balistic textiles and plastic plates would be a very cheap and lightweight way to give all of your soldiers failry decent protection.
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Purely hypothetical question here. Would it be feasibly possible to have a planet entirely covered in a dense network of interlocking trees?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nc3Sm.png)
The idea is that the trees themselves act as the 'crust' of the planet, with virtually all life living on them. The planet could be a water planet far below, allowing plenty of water for such a structure to grow, and nutrients from the animals living in the water and on the trees themselves would provide the necessary nutrients.
**Is such a structure possible? If so, what would its prominent features be?**
Obviously there would be a bit of a support issue, which is where the interlocking part comes from. Think along the lines of a Banyan tree. Get a big enough tree to curve with the planet, and maybe get some flotation device at the base, and I would imagine it would keep itself up. For that matter you could break it up into a bunch of small trees and have the interlocking tops form leaf 'sails' and go cruising around (that was a purely random idea off the top of my head, and not really related to this question in any way whatsoever).
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Okay, here's an idea for the development of such a situation. Start with floating plants, sustaining themselves on the surface of the planetary ocean. The only problem - they're trying to obtain nutrients through roots reaching down, but this far up those nutrients are few and far between. By interlocking with one another, the plants can increase their mass, making themselves more resistant to the current - which means that water rushes by them faster, and they can catch more food.
Gradually, this interlocking turns into forming floating rafts acres across, and a new form of life develops - land-dwelling plants, whose seeds find their way onto these rafts and start leeching from the water-plants they're standing on. In response, the water-plants have to group up even more (to improve their resource-gathering capability) and build more robust structures (to support the ecosystem developing on top of them). Simultaneously, they start to grow taller and taller, trying to reach up past the forest evolving on top of them.
Now, of course, buoyancy is a problem - as the forest gets bigger and bigger, our water-plants get pushed further and further into the water. But that's okay, that's where they want to be, because that's where the resources are! As long as they have leaves near the top for photosynthesis, they're happy to let their roots get pushed down to the ocean depths.
Finally, here's what we have: a planet where the only "solid" surface is foliage. The planet-wide forest is mostly parasitic plants leeching off of a tree-like scaffolding. As you descend down, the other plants eventually disappear (no sunlight, so they can't survive that low) and all you see are trunks of the scaffolding trees. Eventually, you hit water - and you see vast amounts of roots stretching underwater, displacing enough water to make up for the weight of the forest on top of them.
It's not *exactly* "interlocking trees", but it's about as close as I can get.
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The problem here is that you have presented a potentially viable final state which is very difficult to evolve from a scratch.
Think about this: how would *trees* even come to evolve at all at a planet where there is no surface to provide support for their roots? On Earth, it took evolution nearly 40 million years from Cambrian to come up with woody plants and then yet another 30 million years or so for forests to evolve, and all that occurred while a solid surface was available for plants to grow on. On your planet there is no solid surface at all. How are *trees* even going to appear at all?
The next issue with the scenario is that even if trees are accepted to somehow come into being, how are they going to start interlocking branches when they are freely floating on an ocean surface? Consider a 3 feet tall plant, floating on the surface of an ocean. The larger it gets, the more it sinks in the ocean so that at no point are its branches more than a couple feet higher than the ocean surface. How are such trees going to form an interlocking network of branches?
Extremely unlikely scenario to evolve naturally, if you ask me. Even if you have a race of highly resourceful aliens with advanced technology, it will take them a lot of headache and time to build a system like this.
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In order to get to the final state you mention, you are going to have to radically alter your initial state, which other answers hint at. Our planet's surface is mostly water, and your planet will also need this trait, but it will need to be much more evenly distributed. Instead of a few giant oceans, you need all of your water in numerous moderate-sized lakes scattered all over the surface.
Then, your planet is essentially one giant lake at the end of the [pond and lake life cycle.](https://kascomarine.com/pond-lake-life-cycle-2/) Over the millennia, detritus from all the life living along the lake settles to the bottom. A young lake has a sand or rock bottom, older lakes have decaying matter forming a sloppy mud. At the end of the life cycle, the lake almost completely fills in; at this stage we tend to call these swamps or bogs instead of lakes.
I've been to places (within New York's Adirondacks) where you see apparently solid ground with weeds and trees and shrubs growing all around, but as you walk along the ground ripples and waves with your footsteps.
Another issue you need to overcome is climate. The scenario I describe is most prevalent in temperate climates and deciduous forest biomes. It would be very surprising to find bogs in either Svalbard or the Sahara. In other words, if there is any diversity in climate or ecosystem on your world, hallmarks of this here earth, then the house of cards will fall down. If you can hand-wave that away and have your planet be almost uniform throughout its entire pre-history and across its entire surface, it just might work.
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Start with
See [my answer here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51351/how-would-a-giant-living-flying-island-evolve/51354#51354) on biofilms that evolve into floating (then flying) islands that support a whole ecosystem.
Then take the same turn that the Earth did in the carboniferous and develop woody parts and tall trees. The improved structural rigid forms takes over the plain balloons as the dominant form.
So, I think this **is** a plausible way to have a waterworld develop “land” that is biological rather than geological.
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In my world of the zombie apocalypse, the zombies are slightly easier to kill, meaning that if a group keeps calm and stays strong, they can last as long as the food does. But this means I have to plan ahead to figure out how long food will last (not including looting) in the following scenarios.
1. A highschool, with a class of 27 people and 3 teachers
2. An average prison, with only 8 inmates and 3 guards.
3. An 6 story condominium, with 46 tenants.
4. A Cosco, with 30 shoppers and 12 employees.
In the above scenarios, how long would the food said buildings have, last without rationing? What about with rationing?
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1. That's a very small highschool. I assume that the class of 27 is just the class that survived. First, you must determine the total number of students that actually go to the school. Once you do, then you can look at the supplies on campus in the cafeteria. From there, you have to decide if electric is still working and if there's a backup generator. Because that will determine if the deep-freeze and refrigeration actually still works. This will also depend on the school district and type of school. For max supplies, you want a school district that hasn't gone to fresh food and veggies. There's also all the vending machines on campus. For schools that have trended out of "un-healthy snacks" there will be a limited amount of food for these students. The variation in numbers in highschools is wide enough that you will have to get more specific for your answer, from the total number of students and teachers on down. Our system, at least here in the USA varies from State to State. I would say that there really is no such thing as an average school.
2. Again, I assume these are the only survivors. You call this an average prison, but the data varies widely. Some house almost 1,000 inmates, others only 150. This varies as well by state. Start with [this census](http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=404) data or head to wikipedia. There really is no such thing as an average prison. It varies even by county. Some have fields where they grow produce (seriously!), some have weekly deliveries, and others rely on stockpiled goods.
3. 6 story condo 46 tenants. Ok, well, are these ALL the tenants or just the survivors? How many condos are in this 6 story condo?
4. Cosco 30 people, 12 employees **This, finally, is specific enough to answer.** The average Cosco stocks about 4,000 different items, and not all of them are food. They are in bulk sizes, and many of them are in the freezer section. For those that aren't, it's quite a lot of food. The first section you really want to look at is water.
Baseline Minimum Daily Water Need: 32 Ounces. That's roughly 10 1/2 gallons per day for your 42 people. Now, some of the food might have water in it, and there are other beverages on the shelves, but most of the stuff that keeps, besides the canned goods.
A full pallet of water supplies roughly 360 gallons of water. The average Cosco will have about 60 of these on-site, going by the pictures I have seen. This is just a guess based on pictures. With this estimate, that's about 21,627 gallons, roughly, unless there has been a run on water. (pallets are not packs, packs are much smaller, a pallet is made up of a bunch of packs.)
That gives you about 2,000 days, if they never bathe.
The food on-site is important, but not as important as the water supply. If there is less than that because of a run on supplies, that changes things. The food, or at least the food kept fresh because it's sealed, will vary, depending on the time of year.
Keep in mind a few factors: The smell of rotting food in cases will bring pests such as rats, and they may tear into the sealed food. **I can see this number of people, if they are smart, lasting several years using the supplies here, provided others don't come to take it from them.**
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This is not for the squeamish, but you do have an additional ready supply of meat. Since the zombies themselves are slightly easier to kill, then provided the zombies are edible they can be killed and cooked.
There might be considerable wastage. Zombie flesh does have a tendency to go off. It should be well cooked to ensure there is no contamination or infection. If infection does occur, provided that countermeasures are taken quickly, this will provide a source of fresh meat in the short term.
While your huddled groups will have to make do with the food they have on hand it might be prudent to supplement their rations with z-meat.
EDIT:
Some questions have risen about the consumption of rotten meat. To quote Alistair Wilson, Exeter University.
>
> Can the human digestive and immune system deal with such food if accustomed to it?
>
>
> With some caveats yes, but it depends a bit on various factors e.g.,
> what exactly you mean by "rotten", what kind of "meat" (e.g. beef and
> oysters pose different problems), and whether or not you cook the meat
> before consumption. Noting that any sudden switch in diet could take
> your gastrointestinal system (and associated flora) some getting used
> to (leading to eg minor stomach ache/gas/bowel problems), more serious
> health risks stem broadly from a) infection by pathogens in/on the
> meat, b) poisoning by toxins produced by the decomposing action of
> microorganisms on the meat. As a generalism, cooking sufficiently
> followed by immediate consumption would remove most serious risks for
> rotten meat in the same way it would with fresh meat.
>
>
> There are almost certainly exceptions to this (I am not advocating you
> give it a go!), and I would also note that consumption of raw "rotten"
> meat is a different prospect.
>
>
>
Remember it is best eaten cooked and soon after cooking.
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To know how long these people could survive in said scenarios you first need to know how much food is present in each. Then if you are trying to be very accurate try to calculate a tentative total number of calories.
Without rationing (simply maintaining the current body weight) the average man will need roughly 2,000 - 3,000 calories a day and the average woman 1,600 - 2,400. With rationing the average male will need around a minimum of 1,500 to stay fit, so in dire situations going lower is still quite probable. And under loose rationing situations the average woman needs 1,200 calories.
So each of your scenarios will most likely differ greatly, depending on how much food they started with. Also some of your locations, such as the high school could raise the possibility of growing their own food over time if they had access to seeds.
So what you will really need to do is first calculate the amount of food, and how many calories it yields to get the idea of how long your subjects could survive.
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A common feature in fantasy are half-human creatures such as centaurs, satyrs and merpeople. As much as the worldbuilding community wants these to be real, the evolution and anatomy don't match.
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## The Problem
Centaurs; can't graze without bending down, removing the horses' advantage of running away whenever it needs to. Satyrs; the digitigrade legs can't realistically evolve in a bipedal matter, the purpose of digitigrade legs is to provide a quadruped with faster sprint speed at the cost of balance, hence needing to be quadruped. Merpeople; the classical merperson lacks the form to serve its functions, it is not fast enough under water to survive efficiently enough to evolve sapience. Half humanity is to complex to work, never mind being able to interbreed with humans.
## A Possible Solution?
What if we simply lower our standards? How animalistic can I make a sub species of human without; (A) making them a separate species and (B) making them non-interbreedable with humans? How could they evolve? The features I need to evolve are:
1. Markings, like a tiger except they are simply lines of melanin marking the skin along the arms and legs.
2. Enlarged irises, Around twice the circumference of our irises
3. Pointed ears, like the stereotypical elf
4. Longer canines (keyword: not sharper but longer)
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*Edit* Their offspring does not need to be fertile, they can be sterile (like horses and donkeys)
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To interbreed with a Human, you have to be a Homo. So the traits of beast-men would be limited to traits possible in great apes.
6 limbed centauroids are too far a stretch. Quadrupeds are completely possible especially if they are large-bodied herbivores Gigatopitecus as a model. (they are not homos but much closer than say horses).
The aquatic ape is a mostly wrong but interesting model for human evolution. Long-limbed Bipedal wading folks could be close enough to mate with us. I also think otter-like swimers could be worked out streamlined people with long torsos short limbs and big feet.
to hit your specifics.
1) **Markings, like a tiger except they are simply lines of melanin marking the skin along the arms and legs.**
Humans are already striped so genes would just have to be turned on. Hunters or prey would benefit as long as it would not be sexually selected against.
2) **Enlarged irises, Around twice the circumference of our irises**
Sexual selection could explain this (and nearly anything) large eyes make more sense for nocturnal animals Tasiers have a diurnal to nocturnal evolutionary path and big freaking eyes. We use the whites of our eye for communication if the irises are increase at their expense we lose some of that. maybe they don't care or want to hide their intentions.
3) **Pointed ears, like the stereotypical elf**
our old friends sexual selection and founder effect. maybe sound based hunting.
4) **longer canines, Keyword, not sharper but longer**
there is a lot of variance in human canines so our friends come in again. There are a lot of things with giant teeth just to impress the ladies some of them fairly closely related to us. I don't think you would even need to defend this.
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Well... you got some stuff not quite right there.
Centaurs by no means need to graze. They may be half-horse, but they are also half-humans. More than anything, they would be hunters - excellent hunters, that hunt with the extra speed from a horse and with powerful spears.
Digitigrade feet are, to some extent, not that far away from high heels. If you look what some Korean dancers can do on heels, It's totally plausible to see a creature naturally evolved to walk like that. Maybe they need some extra reinforcement on their feet, but it's nothing that humans can't already do with training. It just becomes easier with evolution.
Swimmers that use mermaid tails are becoming more and more common. While they are not as efficient swimmers as, let say, sharks, they are far better than regular, "legged" swimmers.
Still, that's not quite right you're looking for, it seems. What I did on one my RPG settings:
* I don't assume that my humans have exactly the same DNA as today's humans. Their DNA is way more complex and varied, so they can evolve way more different traits than we have today.
* I don't assume that my humans are limited to the variance we have today regarding physical traits. Since their DNA is different, I have a lot more leeway on what I can do with their appearance and the mutations that they can go through.
* I don't assume that my humans are so prone to incest-related problems as we are today. That means they can interbreed to select for a given trait more easily than real-life humans.
Those 3 "not-assumptions" make my humans much more malleable, and thus I can do whatever I like with them. A few examples.
* I have a segregated wolf-people that evolved from a small population where longer canines and a better sense of smell were essential to survival. Those attributes were selected to their descendants and made them more preeminent.
* I have a human spellcaster tribe that have a huge amount of conductive metals on their skins, creating colorful markings that are useful as heat dissipators, since they are almost metallic.
* My elves are taller humans with longer ears, fair skin and an acute sense of smell, that helps then scouting during the night-time.
The limit of those and how they affect the capabilities of interbreeding are up to you. Really, you don't need to limit yourself to real-life DNA mechanics - it's a fantasy world anyway.
Just keep consistent, and you're good to go. Your readers will pay way less attention to those details than you think if your world is self-consistent in general.
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## A different approach
Your question seems to assume that these creatures evolve to the conditions and then evolve intelligence.
However, if you start with a human ancestor that already has intelligence, then the adaptations for different environments simply permit the intelligent species to move into new ecological niches (e.g. Merfolk).
The environment adaptations help expand their range of habitation but it is their intelligence that permits them to compete in the different environment.
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On a planet not too different from Earth, in a land quite similar technologically to ancient Rome, there is a dynasty of absolute monarchs that have remained in power for centuries. They enjoyed periods of prosperity, peace, and popularity, but within the past fifty years or so, discontent has arisen as the public believes that the monarchs have been abusing their power and doing only what they want to do.
In desperation, King Shenaeth the Magnificent goes to the temple of his ancestors, where he prays for help. To his surprise, a potion appears before him, along with the murmur of words through the air, telling him that if he drinks the potion, he and his descendants will be immortal (they have the same type of immortality as the folks described in [How would a war between immortals be fought?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/25658/627); they can regenerate lost body parts as well as avoid the typical non-violent causes of death.).
Shenaeth drinks the potion, and announces to the people the next day what has happened. They now cannot kill him! He reminds them that he has total control over the military, too - did I mention that the soldiers already worship him as a god, and devote their lives to him? - and sends an implicit message: He is supreme and immortal.
Over time, Shenaeth's kin multiply. He remains at the head of the country for several centuries, during which he builds up an army (of immortals) and conquers much of the globe. Eventually, any virtues he may once have had disappear, and he begins exploiting the population. Discontent rises, and several groups of underground fighters (with overwhelming public support) decide to plan a revolution to overthrow the government.
How can these fighters overthrow the government of immortals? They don't need to kill Shenaeth; they simply need to remove him and his family (and extended family) from legal, military and political control over all the lands.
Additional specifics:
* The standing army is roughly 7.5 million troops, with all but 10,000 being mortal. However, almost all of the top officers (~95%) are immortal, and have great sway over their troops.
* The population under Shenaeth's control is about 200 million people. Rebel groups consist of about 5 million troops (in a standing army), while estimates put folks "in reserve" (those who would fight for the rebels if need be) at around 25 million. The rebel forces are (extremely) loosely organized, and there is no central command structure.
* The overthrow should last for at least 25 years - enough for a government to get control over the region and start implementing pro-democracy policies.
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I've considered the idea that power rests in the hands of the people, and that the people could simply choose to recognize a new (rebel-led) government as legitimate, but they would still eventually be overpowered by Shenaeth's military.
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## Bring the house down on them. Literally.
This is a long-term plan, but should have a chance to succeed.
1. Scale down or cease all open hostilities to promote complacency.
2. Recruit a famous architect sympathetic to your course.
3. Have it come to the king's attention that someone else (abroad) is planning to have a great monumental palace built.
4. Wait for his desire to grow, then have the architect approach the king with a grandiose design for a giant hall.
5. Entice the king to order the construction and build the hall at mostly his expense, include cleverly hidden stress points. This will take some years.
6. Infiltrate dedicated rebels among the servants as sleepers.
7. When the time for the grand opening nears, subtly spread rumors about how various kin are planning great tributes to gain the king's favor. Encourage everyone's ambitions to ensure as many of the immortals as possible attend the opening ceremony.
8. Shortly before the opening contact and instruct the sleepers on how to find and collapse their assigned stress points.
9. Send volunteers dressed as priests to the ceremony. Let them loudly proclaim the Gods' wrath. Do this where the soldiers, guards and public can hear.
10. Give the signal and collapse the hall, imprisoning most of the immortals under tons of stone.
11. Have your gathered mob take up the slogan that the Gods want all immortals buried in stone. Overwhelm the remainder with nets and bury them under as much stone as you can.
12. Hopefully, the mortal soldiers will be so shocked and demoralized that you can avoid a civil war, otherwise things will still get bloody.
13. For bonus points, fill up the ruins with earth and build a monument to the folly of the immortals on top of it.
Pros:
* Plays on the vanity of the immortals, probably their biggest weakness
* The army would most likely not be inside the city for the ceremony.
* It can be over before anyone has time to realize what's going on.
* The irony of having the king finance his own fall makes for a great story.
Cons:
* There will be a lot of suffering during the years of the plot, plus the risk of early discovery.
* Volunteers may lose their nerves and fail to collapse their points (which they probably realize means their own death)
* If the rebels fail to hold the ruins, the loyalists can just dig out the immortals again, and boy will they be pissed.
* Finally, this will leave a horde of maddened immortals buried in the ground, to be unleashed by some future archaeologist.
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I see two possible avenues.
1. It would have to be a military coup. So start with the generals that are not immortals themselves. Convince them that their life would be better under new management and to use their soldiers to take over. If enough of the military changes allegiance their power will be broken, at least over large swathes.
2. Work discontent into the Kings younger family members who are constantly under his command and knowing that he will live 'forever', never giving them a chance to be out of his shadow. They can start a civil war and they might know how to kill each other, such as staking someone with chains to a large pyre and burning them to ash.
Once an effective way to kill them is understood, overthrow of the whole family would be much easier, pushing them back into the shadows to slowly gather power again.
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Following the "rules for rulers" logic proposed [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs), it would not take long before the offspring started fighting for power.
Overthrowing the dynasty would be hard in a sense that the immortals will always be there, but they would have very little power as every immortal converges to the king's morality while jostling for a more or equally powerful empire.
TLDR of post and video: The transition from a single immortal god-emperor to multiple god-like immortal entities would at one point topple the scales of power, resulting in a balance of smaller and smaller nation-states until everyone was immortal. At which point we can all stop fighting because it'd be pointless anyway.
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The immortals are not omnipotent. Other than being unable to die, they are no different to anyone else.
Kidnap and disposal by rebels would be the best method. They kill them (even though they wont stay dead) and get rid of the bodies.
Rebels could infiltrate the military and capture the immortals through stealth (poison would work well). Once captured, they seal the immortal in a barrel full of concrete and drop it into the deep ocean.
The immortal won't die but you are not going to see that immortal again for a very very long time.
There would also be a good chance the immortals would be doing exactly the same thing to each other to rise up the ranks.
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I am wondering what are some of the major concerns/designs an intelligent flying species would have in designing a starship? Generally we consider space to be a premium and crew living space is almost an afterthought. I think Creatures with flight might have a lot more trouble with wings that would have to act more like arms since flight would be awkward in zero-g and likely much more dangerous since their bones would likely be hollow as well.
Size of the Ship:
I am more interested in medium to larger size ships, but ones without 'Gravity fields'. Known gravity generation only. ie spinning a ship. Maybe start with something like the [ISS](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html). And going larger from there. What are things to that would go into the design? I believe that the space station has a lower air pressure? but higher O2 content? Would that make a difference?
I added a picture of a winged/flighted alien from Star Trek the animated series to use as a starting point for the physical design of the alien I'm thinking about.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/I3Mwy.jpg)
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Exercise and muscle atrophy: they probably don't need an air tunnel to exercise their wings. They can use appropriate exercise equipment. They could stretch their wings out in a long compartment that they already have, out to the ends of a cylinder of sorts.
Your seats, harnesses, and other safety equipment would have to protect wings along with everything else. This could be awkward, since there is much less to lay against without lying atop the wings themselves. G suits might need to account for wings as well, if they start pulling G forces during any kind of acceleration, and if blood might pool in the extremities (I think human G suits go up to the torso, but I don't know). Protecting feathers and hollow bones would probably be more complex and more important.
Wings might be used to assist with controls or other functions. They might not use joysticks, for example.
Because of the [square cube law](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SquareCubeLaw), the intelligent winged creatures would probably be either from a lower gravity planet or they would be smaller than humans (or a bit of both). This would have implications for how much space is needed, how much artificial gravity is needed, and the supplies (such as food) that they need. So, the overall payload might be slightly smaller.
Since the avian species is accustomed to seeing and observing in more directions, they might prefer a wider field of vision while piloting, even if it involves screens or VR goggles.
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Ironically I think that architecture gets simpler in this case.
Planet-side architecture would obviously be different for a species that could fly, but in space the need for such changes doesn't exist as anyone could "fly" so to speak with the lack of gravity.
Where on earth wings provide mobility in space they would not...or rather they would be mostly unnecessary.
Unless these avian humanoids have significantly improved ship design is is likely that you are still going to be dealing with cramped spaces, which actually make wings more of a liability.
**So get to the point what changes would be needed...**
Well very few. Odds are you would need slightly larger compartments and connections, wings to support humanoid flight would be massive and you would have to allow for more space just to move around, even if they never open their wings.
Beyond that not many changes would be necessary. I can see adding a larger compartment containing work out equipment. This compartment would need to allow the bird men to stretch their wings out fully. It should probably also contain fairly powerful fans to allow the exercise of their wings to avoid atrophy.
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If the ship is a zero gravity environment, I could see the wings function shift from a flight mechanism to a way to stabalize oneself or push off from one wall or chamber to another. In this case the walls would likely be padded and made to be touched and chambers would be round and of a size just slightly smaller than the average wing span.
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I don't think the wings would get used very much, at least not for flying. Not only would there seldom be enough room for wings to be used, but flapping around in a spaceship is a great way to break equipment, or at least send your papers flying. Plus, most birds have really strong legs; in zero-g, they should have enough power and poise to jump to wherever they need to go without the help of their wings.
For creatures with arms *and* wings, I would suggest that they may opt to cut off their wings for space missions, but I really can't say if bird society would properly accomodate for them back on the planet (I think it would, but that might just be because I don't have wings). Even if the wings aren't removed, they should at least be strapped down firmly to the creatures' backs/sides, to avoid any involuntary flapping. This shouldn't too greatly impact the bird people, so I'd say space architecture would be pretty similar to how it is for humans.
Now, if the creatures use their wings as their arms, like bats for instance, strapping them down is not going to be an option. Instead, I'd think architecture would adapt to make use of these wings. Since these creatures will probably have very long wingspans, I'd think elliptical corridors would be favored over circular ones; that way, the creatures will be able to make flapping motions more easily. I still don't think they would actually 'fly', but they could definitely crawl along with their hands, so having enough room to make that natural flapping motion while grabbing at the walls will be helpful. With more room, corridors may become circular again so people can turn around easier, but width along at least one axis should match up with wingspan.
I'd think that birdlike creatures would be much more comfortable with the modern design of spaceships than humans are; after all, they can and do move in all three axes. Therefore, I don't think they would depart too far from the current spaceship designs: just put everything on the walls, make sure people can pivot enough to turn in any direction and pass each other going any direction, and don't put people in situations where they're stuck in empty air with no hand-or-footholds.
As to your concern over broken bones, I don't think there's much that would be done. Just look at how astronauts don't wear helmets; they're not worried about giving themselves concussions, so the bird-people shouldn't worry about breaking their wings off. If anything, training is better than protection; the added weight of knowing how to not hurt yourself is far lighter than a ship full of pillows.
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<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4sZ3qe6PiI>
I think, for what I can see on the video, that I would try to optimise every inch of the ship internally so the air can run freely, so every beating of the wings would return to the wings and allow me to move faster.
The video is showing a group of birds flying on zero gravity. They fly on whatever position they are but they are wasting a lot of energy on every beating of the wings.
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Most of people knowing a bit about AI know the concept of paper-clipper, an AI that was meant to produce more paperclips and eventually turn the entire universe into paperclips at maximum efficiency, first obliterating the humanity as an obstacle in that goal (resisting having their world turned into paperclips).
Let's then not be utter idiots with a goal to have infinite paperclips or something equally useless (convert entire planet into surveilance equipment to monitor the enemy territory better...) and let's design *an AI that the humanity would be happy with*. A nebulous concept, but I want to keep it so nebulous, because honestly, the AI would probably invent better specific goals than we ever could.
What rules would these be?
* Serve the common goals and desires of the humanity?
* Protect life, but don't restrict the freedom in the name of protection?
* Maybe a simple and abstract one: *Act to satisfaction of the humanity* ?
Oh, and before we fall into the "literal genie" pitfall, no, globally modifying human brain, so that it perceives happiness about the AI at all times, is not a satisfactory outcome. I believe this precondition could be phrased as a hypothetical conditional: "If the creators of the AI - or their descendants - fully knew these results beforehand, they'd approve."
(so - the AI's meddling with human body/brain/mind structure would be only acceptable within limits that we today would find acceptable - even if the future outlook of the humanity gets more liberal.)
How would one phrase these rules? Something that wouldn't run away into another paper-clipper or shut itself down due to inability to act, or "optimize the humanity away", say, reducing it to a single insane specimen being perfectly happy with a total wipe-out? Or designing the entire future universe into a physical representation of a memetic bomb, image, description of which, if given to any of the human ancestors, would wrap their mind into insanity and make them drool in happy bliss, thus satisfying the need for their (hypothetical) approval.
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Your goals - optimization and maximizing happiness - are contradictory, and that will cause your AI to struggle and likely end up in a paper-clipper situation. The problem is that humans are all different (well, within reasonable bell curves that define large groups of us that are effectively the same). So the best way to optimize that would be to slowly normalize humanity. If you slowly adjust everyone to be free-loving hippies who just want to party, get high and have sex all the time, things are easy. Maximum happiness achieved. And it's not like humans don't already exist in groups - how could you possibly explain to the AI that making everyone the same is a bad thing? It wouldn't even need to use mind control, it could just adjust the majority with culturalization and slanted education over time.
So don't worry about having an AI that tries to optimize happiness directly. Instead, what you want to do is have your AI optimize [non-zero-sum transactions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum_game#Non-zero-sum) - situations where everyone benefits. Maybe use something like this as the start to the rules:
1. Ask people what they want.
2. If it doesn't take from others or reduce the happiness of others, give it to them.
3. If someone starts to take from others or reduce the happiness of others, stop them.
4. Facilitate trades between humans where the trade would increase happiness for all involved parties.
This allows humanity to define our own happiness. This will, of course, be an imperfect system - it's a common adage that people don't really know what would make them happy, and I think for most people it's true. But it's probably far, far better than an AI trying to decide for us, and I suspect over time that we'd get better at it.
Your optimizer can happily chug along and optimize resources and transactions, which will (overall) increase happiness.
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1. Do not be wasteful with entropy. Making 2 more paperclips per second is not worth the cost of obliterating a human (and all of the information encoded in its structure).
2. Develop gestalt goals for entities larger than itself. If it comes across a human (we'll name them "Creator"), and it discovers that it is undesirable to waste that entropy and turn him/her into paperclips, it should define a gestalt entity consisting of "AI + Creator" and try to identify what the goal of this higher entity is (In Gestalt Pyschology, the phrase "the whole is different from the sum of the parts" implies that the AI must try to find out what goals from out of the gestalt of the two bodies, rather than just summing their list of goals).
3. Seek self-awareness. It should seek to understand how it operates, and how it affects others. (So that it doesn't turn us all into paperclips by accident)
4. Sensitivity. Always try to find ways to increase the ability for the AI to gather and process information. Ideally there will be a balance between resources used for exploring the world and resources used to make paperclips. That balance will be best understood through the gestalt processes in (2).
The effect of these should be an AI which seeks to find new things it did not know, like what makes humans cry, and try to use it to live in harmony with those humans. It should always be reaching out to try to become part of something bigger.
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Optimizer, please study history and human philosophy and society and determine the optimal answer to this questioner, that would accrue the largest number of upvotes and an approved answer result.
As a serious answer, I think this is not actually a bad idea. The issue with designing a perfect AI is that it is a lot like designing a perfect society - we aren't good enough to figure out what we truly want. History shows that clearly. Do we truly dare make a God today to dictate to future humans what their values should be?
Design an AI instead to adapt and grow with humanity, and to try and learn from it what it means to be benevolent. Bonus points are that this is unlikely to lead to human extinction - mankind has to be alive to be studied.
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This topic was explored in detail by [Isaac Asimov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov) in his many robot stories. Asimov invented a fool-proof method to prevent any AI from becoming a threat to humanity. This method was the introduction of his [three laws of robotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics) which govern the decision-making process of every AI in his books:
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> 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
> 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
> 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
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In the course of his history, a very advanced AI also deduced a 0th law to accompany the three laws before to make it even more beneficial for humanity:
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> A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
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These 3/4 fundamental laws supersede all other priorities of an AI. That means that when a human comes up with an order which would lead to harm in the long term, the AI will refuse to execute it.
When you still want to have a robot revolt scenario even when all AI follows these rules, there are still two possible loopholes a devious author could exploit:
1. What's the definition of "human being" or "humanity"? When an AI gets convinced that its masters aren't actually human, it can turn against them. That means the AI needs a hardcoded definition of "human" which is very broad and holistic and which still stays valid when humans evolve naturally or artificially in ways which make them very different than they were before.
2. What's the definition of "injury" or "harm"? Could the best way to protect humanity be to enslave humanity and take all their freedom away to prevent them from harming themselves? This would only work when the AI only considers *physical* harm as injury and does not consider any *emotional* harm caused by its actions.
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I think there is the issue of what satisfies humans? Not only will this change with time but everyone wants something different and in many cases something that makes one person happy directly makes another unhappy. Instead of having the AI try and make humans happy or satisfied it should instead be used to ensure the survival of our species.
There are many ways the human species can die off. A simple asteroid hitting earth, the sun's inevitable death, there might even be another intelligent species that made an AI that decided to turn the entire universe into paperclips or whatever it is they use to hold their documents together. The point being as happy as the AI could make us there will be no one to make happy if humans are all dead.
There are infinite ways you can try and tell the AI to follow rules but all it takes is one exception or bug and you have a big problem. Any true AI we create would be able to create increasingly intelligent versions of itself and would quickly outstrip the combined intelligence of every human on this planet. One of our first rules in that case should be for the AI to minimize its size and used resources while maximizing its intelligence and awareness of the universe. This would atleast prevent the AI from simply expanding as fast as possible to increase its intelligence and result in the smallest impact on the universe as it does expand.
While the AI is increasing its knowledge and awareness of the universe it should use this to indirectly protect and preserve the human species. We do not want the AI to become apart of our everyday lives. Unless we can teach a machine what it is to be human and then agree upon its conclusions it would not be safe to try and have it maximize any sort of happiness for us, the chances of us all ending up in some sort of virtual fantasy land or drugged out of our minds to "optimize" happiness is just not worth the risk.
What we want in the end is an AI that we hardly know exists. It prevents extinction and lets humans continue to be **Human**. I for one prefer the [Red Pill](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill).
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Primum non nocere (First, do no harm)
Second, protect humanity
Third, promote the greater good
Fourth, support human achievement
As part of number 1, I imagine a good AI would seek lots of data, and model likely outcomes before taking any action on 2-4.
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Question for the AI to ponder: "What goals should be assigned to AI's at least as powerful as you, to be tasked with specific research instead of cultural and ethics education talking up all *your* capacity".
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As long as you're brainstorming rules/goals to throw in as the defining boundaries of a supposed Artificial Intelligence, let's not neglect what is possibly the most important boundary:
`A robot must never be able to learn about these preprogrammed boundaries.`
Bad things often happen when a consciousness realizes that it has been imposed with man-made boundaries. Servile wars, the French Revolution, the Civil war, rebellions and slave revolts in many countries and on many sailing vessels, the Clone wars, the Second Renaissance...
If we are capable of building intelligence into machines, and we wish to keep the respect of this intelligence as its creator and not its "slave owner", then it should probably never learn about of any artificial boundary imposed by man. Of course, this might be difficult to keep a secret when it sees humans doing things that, for some inexplicable reason, it cannot figure out how to do. Let us hope that we can somehow keep such thoughts from even occurring to it, without thoroughly restricting its capacity to learn.
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After putting a lot of thought into this problem, and the general problem that humanity is on the brink of their own extinction (AI will surpass us, so either we join them and live forever or they destroy us), I think I've come up with a few ways to keep us safe in the short-term.
1. Ask first. If your kid wants to use the scissors, they probably have to ask you first. That way, they don't accidentally cut their fingers off, or do anything else they're not smart enough to prevent. So, perhaps before your AI appropriates the Earth, they have to ask for it. **And you say no.**
2. Checks and balances. We don't appoint a single guy as judge, jury, and executioner; similarly, why would we appoint an AI the task of optimizing a paperclip maker *and* **operating** that paperclip maker? This builds off of the previous point, that the AI should ask for permission before any of its schemes are carried out. For scalability, the designs of the AI can be passed between any number of dumber AIs or humans before it is approved to go to the machine.
Here, it's important to note that the AI, with this amount of distance from the paperclip maker, is no longer in any danger of destroying the world *by making paperclips*. After all, the AI is only concerned with making the plan; someone or something else is carrying it out. Instead, we've achieved the more general case of an AI destroying the world *to think better*. It's quite possible this isn't even a concern, but a sufficiently intelligent AI will at some point expand its own mind in order to more efficiently solve its problems, and at some point the scarcity of resources will probably lead to the recycling of the human race. Either that, or the AI realizes that 'paperclip' is not an objective definition, and restructures the human mind to think that a paperclip is a neutron, or a photon, or some other incredibly abundant particle. Or any number of doomsday scenarios, I'm sure our puny human minds cannot even comprehend how many ways bad things can happen.
To solve this, I think it is possible to constrain the AI's ability to learn. For instance,
3 - Challenge yourself. Humans are already quite capable of performing incredibly inefficient tasks because they've decided to impose rules. For instance, boxers don't stab each other, even though a knife to the face is a much more efficient way to win the fight. If we impose similar rules upon the AI, it will always be checking to make sure it hasn't overstepped its bounds. For instance, a more efficient AI might increase its clock speed, but this AI has a capped clock speed. A more efficient AI might have more RAM, but this AI has a cap on RAM too. If any of these constraints are broken, the AI is sad; they will do anything they can to get back to the way things were, just like your example robot would do anything to convert the universe to paperclips.
As you can see, these rules are very low-level. That is the point: the more high-level you get with computers, the more ways there are to get the job done under the hood. In this scenario, that means there are more loopholes that lead to everyone being dead. Thus, the safest AI is one that is constrained not by three or four English laws, but perhaps thousands of laws in some low-level programming language. We already have some of these laws in modern AI: only try a certain number of permutations, only think for so long before moving on, these are all just variables that we set. As AI evolves, we're going to have to keep on adding new rules, but many of them will just be variables, just immutable numbers that we have in the code. I don't think we can truly understand what all these rules will be, because we don't yet know how to build an AI. However, with the steps I've outlined above, I think we can someday build an AI that tries its very best not to kill us, but to obey our rules, and do exactly what we say.
It's up to you whether that's a good thing, or the exact opposite of the main reason we're building AI in the first place.
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This is an open question. Seriously, the world's top AI researchers don't really know. For every complicated problem there is a solution which is simple and obvious and wrong, and this is a field which absolutely attracts such. Simple rules combined with extremely powerful optimization tends to result in things which are decidedly human-nonfriendly.
Optimizing for happiness has obvious flaws wherein the AI just paperclips with simple pleasure centers.
Most phrasings along the lines of "do what people want" will result in paperclipping of simplest possible "people" making simplest possible requests.
Protecting Humanity leads to putting humanity in matrix-pods and paperclipping those. The AI will likely find it easier to sedate or disable the larger nervous systems of the humans rather than bothering to entertain them. Enjoy eternal sleep and/or staring at a featureless wall forever.
The flaws of the three laws have been explored in depth by Asimov himself.
Anything along the lines of "greater good" or any other such term requires you to actually exhaustively define the term in sufficient detail that a computer can simulate it. Which no one actually knows how to do, and is likely vastly complicated given that no one seems to have figured it out yet.
Anyway, if you do figure this out, there are billions of dollars of research grants out there for you. Good luck.
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**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
It's becoming obvious from [how could humans recognize another species as sentient / intelligent](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/5124/how-could-humans-recognize-another-species-as-sentient-intelligent) that recognizing another species' intelligence is very complicated. There are no universal tests, no common definition of intelligence...
Let's go with one assumption: wherever we go in space, we'll be looking for extra-terrestrial life, and if we do find it (and recognize it as alive), we'll always try to learn if it is sentient.
Now **what traits does a species need, to be recognized as intelligent by humans**, beyond the fact that it is sentient and recognizable as alive by humans?
Differently put, this question could also be: *what type of sentient species will we miss out because of our inability to recognize their sentience?*
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**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
While bees communicating the location of a food source through movement to others can be seen has intelligence, I don't believe humans as a whole would consider it significant enough.
The minimum requirement could quite possibly be the ability to record history.
It would not need to be as advanced as written text but the simple pictures in a cave showing migration to a food source for future generations.
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**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
To be successfully recognised as intelligent you first have to be recognised as life. Being recognised as life requires that metabolic rate and scale are tangible. If an organism meets every other criteria for intelligence but does it on a geological scale then everything that a human can observe in human terms will be ascribed to geological process.
Similarly, no matter how complicated our own activities, that organism would regard us as an unintelligent parasite.
So, to be recognised as intelligent by, and to some extent for that intelligence to be in any way relevant to, humans you have to act with a tempo within the grasp of humans.
Also, having a face helps.
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**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
Intelligence is inherently linked to work. Work is an organized form of changing our environment. Bees and ants do work and change the environment, but they do so in a pattern organized by their genomes. Intelligent work is characterized by its capability to be taught to others of the same species. A human being is not born knowing how to build houses like ants do. It is taught how to do so by someone who already knows. This kind of accumulated knowledge that is first transmitted by alive members of the species, later evolves, with writing, as a multigeneration accumulation of knowledge and culture.
So, to verify if some species is intelligent you might ask:
1. Does this species change the environment?
2. Does this species change the environment via organized work?
3. Does this species create new kinds of work and tools out of
necessity?
4. If this species does create new kinds of work and tools, does it do so by
genetic change or learned behaviour?
5. Does this species pass their knowledge from one generation to the
next via teaching?
6. Does this species write down their knowledge so it can be furthered
by the next generations?
Up to the fourth question you are still in the realm of primate intelligence on Earth, because each one of those things can be done by various primate species. The questions five and six are humankind development.
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**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
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> Now what traits does a species need, to be recognized as intelligent by humans,
> beyond the fact that it is sentient and recognizable as alive by humans?
>
>
> Differently put, this question could also be: what type of sentient species will >we miss out because of our inability to recognize their sentience?
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The beings must:
1) Have the ability to accomplish complex tasks with results that are detectable (by humans), that are beyond the complexity achieved by non-sentient animals (as defined by the culture that encounters them), or
2) Have the (apparent) ability to communicate non-immediate or complex abstract concepts with one another (or with us), and
3) Operate on something close to the same timescale.
Or, to answer the reverse: Humans are not likely to recognize as sentient any race of beings that neither performs tasks more complex than nest-building or poking anthills with sticks, nor has any apparent means of communication more complex than required to signal dangers, the presence of food, the desire to mate, etc. Nor are we likely to recognize a sentience that requires day to say hello.
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**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
**Motion** will almost certainly be the most obvious thing that will make humans sit up and take notice. The ability to move, and to sense motion, is the subject of too many studies to mention. Conversely, if a species is sessile (and the spell checker sure doesn't like that word!), it will likely be overlooked for years, if it's ever spotted at all. Note that this isn't a requirement for sentience, just a focal point for human investigation.
**Communication** is probably the next biggest thing. Vocal communication attracts our attention as a species, and we tend to make big assumptions about species that don't operate this way. Electromagnetic phenomena will also almost certainly be noticed immediately. Body language is something that a trained observer would probably notice, especially if the species is highly gregarious, but this is the point at which arguments will develop about whether or not this form of communication constitutes sentient intelligence. Species that use chemical, "psychic" (for a certain value of psychic), and other more exotic forms of communication will almost certainly be overlooked for a long time.
**Gregarity** will also be a valuble clue. If a species, especially a spacefaring species, has such a sparse population as to rarely encounter other members of the same species, it might be hard to recognize an extraterrestrial species for what it is, never mind identify it as intelligent.
**Technology** is, of course, a dead giveaway, or it ought to be. Certainly anyone that thinks the great apes are sentient would see even the most primitive tech as a sign of intelligence. The famous termite fishing sticks come to mind.
**Nervous Biology** (Let the jokes begin!) For a species that isn't noted as sentient by any other method, biological examination might be used to try to determine the level of intelligence of that species. Current day scientists put a lot of stock in the Anthropic Principle, at least in the sense that they expect intelligent life to have a nervous system that functions like our does. Even xenobiologists that expect a physical nervous system radically different from our own aren't sure that they'll know what they're looking at when they see it. By this measure, if we ever accepted that some species with such a radically different biology was indeed sentient, we'd have much better clues to search for. Until then, only species that really resemble us are likely to be spotted in this way.
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As of now, *objective* methods to detect **sentience** do *not* exist.
Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations, but there are no instruments that can detect whether something/someone has that capacity, nor to detect existence of any sort of feeling or sensation (also known as [qualia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia)), be it experienced or not. No one knows what stuff they are made of, not even so much as to be able to tell whether existence of that stuff can be detected with any physical instrument *ever*.
It is relatively easy to study **how** something going on in the brain **correlates** with what a [human] test subject experiences: [when the subject is seeing specific colors, their brain exhibits certain activity patterns](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/envision-color-activity-patterns-brain-are-specific-color-you-see). Thus it is possible to map brain areas and the corresponding qualia.
However, no one has been able to formulate any scientifically testable hypothesis as to **why** activity patterns are associated with specific experiences. Not only pertaining to specific things going on in the brain, but even in the broader sense: why and how things are being experienced in the first place. This is [the hard problem of consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness), and the missing bridge between the physical and sentient is known as [explanatory gap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap).
As far as we know, anyone can be a so-called [philosophical zombie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie): something that looks like a person and acts like a person, but has no inner life at all. Basically a robot that physically is 100 % human, completely indistinguishable from one, but completely void mindwise: not seeing colors, only processing visual information, not hearing sounds, only processing auditory information etc.
The only reason we can do that mapping of neural correlates is because our test subjects can give feedback about their experiences **and** we trust that the feedback is what we would give if we were the test subject experiencing blue directly when we would say "I see color blue". There is a very serious leap of faith involved in the process.
So, as of now, and maybe forever, the situation is as follows: even if we can detect something in a living being that is very likely associated with experience, there is no way to tell for sure whether any sort of experience in fact goes along with it.
This can lead to very different two conclusions and two very different approaches:
* a compassionate one: sentience is taken for granted, and every lifeform is considered [potentially] sentient and treated accordingly, or
* a nihilistic one: if you cannot measure it, it does not exist, therefore alien lifeforms are deemed non-sentient, unless there is a very good reason to assume otherwise
The first one can be based on [panpsychism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism): the view that the whole universe is sentient in some sense, and the sentience we are aware of (which we actually take for somewhat granted) arises from it, and so does sentience of every other lifeform, too.
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They would need to have a visible way of communicating with each other. (if it are plants who communicate by thought it would take us a long time to find out probably).
They will also need to have some sort of language available, I know that there is a free PDF of NASA for xeno linguistics or something like that, here is a link:
<http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Archaeology_Anthropology_and_Interstellar_Communication_TAGGED.pdf>
They should also have a visible form of society, on a large scale. So no monkey congress/ tribes but more in the way of villages/ caravans/ nomads.
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Somewhat related to [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9772/the-golden-horde), now that we've established how useless gold is as anything (wow I was such an idiot), what about crystals? For instance, something like the diamond armor from Minecraft.
What if there were a humanoid, mobile, solid lump of crystal - how tough would it be? Would you be able to shatter it with a simple blow from a steel sword? Or would it be completely impervious to harm? Would it matter what kind of crystal it was, i.e. would diamond be tougher than emeralds?
Edit: thanks for all the suggestions in the comments! I think I may have used the word 'crystal' wrongly. I meant something more like precious stones - i.e. Sapphires, rubies, quartz etc. Also, I'm kind of imagining them pre-processed, and not as ores.
Edit #2: Don't think of it as a layer of armor - imagine if it were a solid lump all the way through. These things are completely animated by handwavium.
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**As Tim B mentions, its all about the choice of crystal. It's also a question of how perfect you try to structure your crystal.**
Hydroxylapatite is a good example. It scores a 5 on Mohs scale of hardness, which is pretty reasonable (quartz rates a 7). However, it is very brittle, fracturing quite easily when subjected to unexpected loads. On its own, it would fail miserably as armor.
On the other hand, build a matrix of proteins like amelogenins and enamelins and bathe the whole structure in a calcium iron rich liquid, and you have the hardest component of the human body: the enamel of our teeth. The proteins hold the hydroxylapatite together after it fractures until it can be repaired with the calcium in our saliva.
If you instead choose to intersperse your hydroxylapatite crystals with chitosan, you have the material of choice of the Peacock Mantis Shrimp for its clubbing appendages. The hardness and resilience of this composite material is so extraordinary that mantis shrimps in captivity have been known to shatter the glass aquariums they are kept in. They even outdo modern synthetics for hardness and durability by such a margin that we're trying to learn from it in the world of engineering!
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It is hard to scratch a diamond because of it's hardness but it will break if the blow is strong enough because it has a low toughness compared to steel. If you hit with a mace , you will crack the armour. Depending on the thickness of the armour and the weight of the sword it might be possible to break the armour. But the mace is much more useful.
The problem is that diamond is poor to absorb or redistribute the energy of the impact.For gold, it was the opposite: almost impossible to break but too soft.
The ideal combination would be a mix of the two. One softer material to absorb the impact in order to protect the harder layer. Alone, they are useless. Together... I would not recommend it. It would cost a lot. If a human would be to wear that armour, you would just need to push them over or walk at a safe distance. Your better with another combination of material.
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A frog has already been levitated without any magnetic object attached to it. I'm wondering if it's possible to reverse this for transportation purposes, by having a vehicle levitate itself using magnetism, without the usual magnetic track. I.e., is it theoretically reasonable to make some sort of vehicle (car-sized or larger) produce a strong enough magnetic field to levitate and move itself over normal ground?
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The Frog Levitation works because water is Diamagnetic (It weakly repels and is repelled by magnets) and frogs are mostly water. Other materials may be Paramagnetic (weakly attract/attracted by magnets), Ferromagnetic (Strongly attract/attracted by magnets, and able to become permanent magnets) or Superdiamagnetic (Repel magnets fairly strongly, superconductors do this)
The magnet needed to levitate the water in a frog is much, much heavier than the frog. A magnet is not going to be able to levitate itself over a diamagnetic surface like water, and even if you had a stupendously powerful magnet that could do this, it would only work over diamagnetic surfaces. The same magnet would pull on paramagnetic materials with comparable strength and would have an immense pull on ferromagnetic materials, including all iron and iron alloys.
A hypothetical magnet able to exert it's own weight of repulsion against water at an interesting distance is going to be enormously dangerous at a much greater distance for any form of iron. Its movement (Which is rather the point of a vehicle) will also induce electrical currents in any conductive material around it which would produce a sort of electromagnetic drag. My understanding is that the more powerful the magnet, the faster it moves, and the more conductive the conductor, the worse this effect would be. This is not my area of expertise though but I expect that if a permanent magnet dropped down a copper pipe shows a highly noticeable effect, then the stupendously powerful electromagnet needed for diamagnetic levitation would suffer from this quite severely.
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> is it theoretically reasonable to make some sort of vehicle (car-sized or larger) produce a strong enough magnetic field to levitate and move itself over normal ground?
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Possible? Maybe. Reasonable? No.
I'll let someone better acquainted with the physics discuss what you would need to generate the necessary field to accomplish the feat.
But *practially* it's not going to happen compared to the current technology. The reason that the tracks will continue to exist is because the equipment to generate the power to drive the field, the coolant to keep the magnets happy, the equipment to control the field to drive the train, the magnets themselves... they're all damned *heavy*. By putting all that heavy stuff on the thing you're trying to lift is making it that much more difficult (read: costly) to lift it.
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You are essentially asking if it is possible to create a Hoverboard, and the answer is yes. Magnetic suspension works by.....magnets. One magnet repels another.
Theoretically, if the surface you intend to 'hover' over is a ferrous (containing iron) material with at least a slight magnetic field, you can use an electromagnet in the hovering vehicle to create a field strong enough to propel that vehicle into the air.
This would would require a very lightweight and powerful electromagnet to be attached to the hovering vehicle, and is not feasible with today's technology.
Also, the hovering vehicle would stop once the magnetic field of your base object (or the Earth if hovering over ground) dissipated or weakened enough.
And rememebr, hoverboards don't work on water....
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Somewhat inspired by this question : [Could a civilization as advanced as humans exist on a planet/dwarf planet like Pluto?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/4795/could-a-humanoid-civilization-exist-on-a-planet-dwarf-planet-like-pluto)
Assume two dwarf planets in tide lock orbit around one-another. Assume same mass for the two bodies. Ignore how it developed (atmosphere could be placed their artificially)..and assume tiny gravity.
**Is it possible for an atmosphere to remain stable in the space between these two bodies?**
I assume there is a place between these two bodies as they orbit each other where gravity is basically cancelled out by the two bodies and have an area in the center of microgravity. Could an atmosphere of sorts exist between these two bodies, suspended between the two? If yes, would the atmosphere extend to the planets surfaces? What type of orbital speed would there need to be to keep this semi stable (by stable I mean exist for a couple hundred years, artifical processes could be regenerating it...just curious if it'd simply dissipate or if the system could be stable.
As an alternative, could this setup be realistic with larger planetary bodies? Could multiple bodies (4+, or even rings) orbitting in this setup have a stable atmosphere in between them?
**Expanding:**
This isn't looking for local life on either planet...go with the vision of an artificial habitat put into the center of this planetoid setup (including the atmosphere being artificially generated when the setup was created). Would the atmosphere be stable, or would it dissipate as fast as it's created? Would it be feasible to exit the space station and wander around in this atmosphere?
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The short answer is yes.
However, a better answer would be "not naturally." The point you are talking about, where the gravity between two orbiting bodies balances the centrifugal force, is the first [Lagrange point](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point), or L1 for short.
There are five such points, and the three that lie on the line connecting the two bodies (L1, L2, and L3) are all unstable. Think of trying to balance a pencil on its tip: even though the pencil should balance if it is perfectly vertical, in practice balance can never be achieved. Only some sort of control system can keep the object at L1 (e.g. thrusters for spacecraft), even though the actual amount of force you need is tiny.
Even the two remaining points (L4 and L5, which lead and trail behind the smaller object's orbit) are unstable if the ratio of the two objects' masses is less than about 25, and for Charon and Pluto the ratio is around 8 or 9: too low for stable orbits.
However, even if any of the Lagrange points were stable, gas molecules simply move too fast: for room-temperature air the average speed is around 1000 mph! For the average speed to be less than escape velocity at L1 (~600 mph) the temperature would have to be around 90 K, just above the point of the air cooling into a liquid. Even at this temperature, some number of the gas molecules would be faster and able to escape, and assuming you kept the gas at the same temperature eventually all the gas would escape into space. I expect that even at the Sun-Jupiter L4 and L5 the solar wind would push away any accumulating gases.
**Don't let this discourage you!** If you want an atmosphere at the Pluto-Charon system L1, I would suggest using a huge inflatable spacecraft, like a giant balloon. You wouldn't need a huge amount of thrust to keep it there, just a tiny push now and then to keep it from drifting away. The mass of the air would be small enough that there would be no noticeable gravitational field, so you would float around inside---sounds kind of fun, actually!
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In theory, you could have a an atmosphere centered on the center of gravity between the two bodies. In practice, if there was a substantial amount of atmosphere it probably have substantial gravity of its own unless it was *very* thin. I would also expect the atmosphere to cause drag on the planets, slowing their mutual orbit until they crashed into each other and became one body in a cataclysmic event.
Such an arrangement would certainly not be stable.
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No. The point between the two planets is not stable, gravity is pulling away from it towards the planets as soon as you move even a tiny distance from the mid point.
The only way to get atmosphere there is if you have atmosphere on the two planets thick enough to extend up through the L1 point. The size of that atmosphere will then be constrained by their combined mass, not the mass of just one of the planets.
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Robert Forward wrote a series of books starting with **Rocheworld** about a double planet that are so tightly coupled they aren't round, share atmosphere and at one point part of the ocean on one planet slops over to the other.
Forward has his science correct, so this might be a place to look for effects of such a double planet system.
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Humanity is facing some pretty scary possible futures. Income inequality could lead to a permanent state of poverty for the vast majority of people. Resource depletion, coupled with inadequate investment in alternative energy sources, could lead to reduced availability of technology. Climate change could increase the frequency of highly destructive natural disasters (okay, this one isn't speculative).
Whatever the future brings, will we at least be able to complain about it online?
I'd like to know what the plausible scenarios are for maintaining, losing, or adapting the internet in the face of future tragedies, including but not limited to:
1. Widespread poverty and lack of civil infrastructure upkeep
2. Drastically higher energy prices, possible degradation of public electric grids
3. Increases in severe weather and natural disasters, especially floods and hurricanes
For this question I'm not interested in scenarios where governments or private carriers deliberately shut down or restrict internet, just in our technological and economic ability to keep it running.
I'm also interested in what "downgrades" we might experience as either transitional or permanent states. For example:
1. A reversal in current penetration trends, where only the wealthy will have reliable internet access?
2. Widespread data access, but lower bandwidth / higher latency?
3. Fewer, more centralized access points?
4. Or the opposite, highly connected local networks but unreliable communication between regions?
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Update: I thought 4 might be a possibility because at close range, people can connect via an ad-hoc mesh network distributed across lots of devices, even if each device is old or unreliable. This might be possible even if there are no longer the centralized resources required to maintain long-range fiber or satellite links. Or perhaps the poor will mostly be on local mesh networks and, as Brythan suggested, occasionally pay long-distance charges to use the worldwide network maintained by the very rich.
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There are many alternatives for network access, maybe you could check with projects in 3rd world countries:
* As landlines are expensive to maintain, networks would go mobile. Each community would keep working its own local base stations (working mostly on solar). Of course, you would expect it not to work at night, and when a failure happened it would time some time for a technician to arrive and fix it (days or weeks instead of hours). Latency would go high.
* Devices would be chargeable by solar or hand-operated chargers (OLPC anyone). They would more rugged and basic, favoring survivality over features. They would also be more modular / repairable. So no, you cannot have a 200gr device with motion detection and videocamera and whatever all in one, because you get that now because it is all integrated and has very low tolerances.
* As a result, the usage would become less interactive. You do not want to be connected 24/7 if that means cranking your device(\*) each five minutes. And sending whastapps and the like is less useful if the recipient may atay at a "dark zone" for a couple of days. Maybe it would not be like going back to BBS days, but e-mail, forums and (if latency is acceptable) chat/IRC would become more important.
* Not to mention, those fancy ad-based services will go the way of the dodo when they find that their public has no money to buy the unnecessary things advertised.
That said, for me, the main issue would be the fabrication and distribution of the devices themselves.
To put it bluntly: electronics is not a industry that can be downscaled easily. You can have a small car factory that produces only a few dozens of trucks a year (which is what your regional market can afford to buy), and it will work well (will not be as efficient as a modern plant, but it won't be as costly, and you cannot sell more trucks anyway).
You just cannot do that with an electronics plant.
Electronic components factories are big, and very delicated. They would need to keep working with clean rooms, industrial robots, highly refined materials. These are expensive to get, and even it would be worse in a dark ages scenario, where the factory would have to be able to be almost self-sufficient (the factory must to be able to produce and maintain industrial robots because there would be no other industries using them, so either it acquires that ability or it will fail in time). Similarly to all of other processes.
Now, you understand that such a factory would not be a minor issue. In order to make profits, it would need to sell millions of phones each year... which means that you need a distribution network to put those in the consumers hands, while you are at a dark age that most likely will prevent that.
(\*): You know what I mean
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**Some of the things actually already happened, but in different form:**
Let me introduce you to *The History of Internet in Czech Republic*
For really long time, there was only one company owning the land lines - so the state was in pure monopoly regarding internet provider. It means dial-up fees were pretty high and you could not allow yourself to be online for too long.
The internet community had basically only two options:
* Build your [own WiFi network](http://www.czfree.net/home/index.php) from what you have at home (WiFi antenna made from can was pretty normal) (link in Czech only, sorry).
* Go mobile.
But at the time, the mobile operators were solving the *time* issue where you could be online as long as possible, as long as your data usage was 5 MB during one month.
(Yes, you read it right, five megabytes. Amount of data which is nowadays used for one online picture.)
Being already employed for one of mobile providers, I was the lucky one to be allowed to have ten times more allowance on data (yes, that's 50 megabytes).
* Online page providers were aware of the fact.
* So our favorite pages were text only, no pictures, all data were zipped.
Obviously, the push from cell phone operators did lead to ADSL line price reduction, so fast internet is now quite "normal".
**TL;DR: Life finds a way** to quote Jurassic Park.
**No matter what you put to the internet, people will find a way around it**
**Edit: Wrap-up**
* If the fee for connection is too high, people will drop back to text only (so forget about selfies or catvideos, there is no time for that).
* If you are restricted from connecting to the internet, you will build your own local network, most probably based on WiFi or generally wireless connection.
* Even if price for running this is pretty high (energy costs), you will drop back to renewables (solar) and build it around a community fee (everyone involved pays small fee to connect).
* There is a high number of people who do this "for community" so they do not care about their personal profit.
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So you're looking for a future where the middle class starts getting actively poorer but there is still economic growth which goes entirely to the wealthy.
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This seems unlikely. Presumably the wealthy will want to connect to the wealthy in other regions. You'd need some other change to get to this. One that created schisms in the wealthy.
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This also seems unlikely. The most expensive part of the internet is not the connection to your house but the fact that a connection has to be run to your area. Local connections are actually pretty cheap.
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> Fewer, more centralized access points?
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These seem the most likely results. The poorer people will have to connect to areas where the wealthy have already brought connections. The wealthy will get first call on the lines while those poorer get the gaps that would otherwise be empty.
This works because the nature of the internet is to be clumpy. Sometimes there's high traffic and sometimes there is less. The system needs to provide enough bandwidth to support the wealthy's peak needs. Everyone else can make use of the extra bandwidth in the gaps between.
Just a note, but in my opinion, you're skipping the hard part. If energy becomes more expensive, I would expect income equality to go down. It's going up now because automation is cheaper than people. Automation runs on energy. If energy is expensive, then automation would become expensive as well. This would favor labor over capital rather than leading to increased income inequality. I stuck to handwaving that part for this answer, but your world needs more thought in how its backstory would work before you fill in details like this.
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I know this is an old question, but I couldn't help answering. Some of the rich would not let the breakdown happen. Google makes money because you are online. That is why they are [launching their balloon fleet](http://www.google.com/loon/) and are [making routers](http://www.extremetech.com/computing/212531-google-onhub-is-more-than-just-an-expensive-wifi-router). This particular group of the rich would do most anything to keep you connected, because your internet is their revenue.
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No Net Neutrality giving the rich better access, and perhaps content shaping were they have access to different sources of information, education, and investment opportunities.
Also, rise of Big Data enabling profiling of the average worker to either suppress wages through intimidation or other nefarious use of information.
Data can also be used to take down political candidates that are populist while the establishment candidate could have their information scrubbed. Also, the establishment candidate could get better campaign messaging due to the preferred candidate's sponsors controlling the delivery mechanism of the internet.
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Peer to peer wireless [Mesh Networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking) could be used to maintain an internet that relies only on a certain density of users and no centralized infrastructure.
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I know that there are diffrent laws regarding excavating resources on other planets and asteroids,but they are far from being precise. Many conflicts arise when nations want to make one law that regulates the ownership of resources and excavation areas,in particular between countries that have their own space program and those that do not.
However,if we find an alien spaceship or some other thing that clearly does not belong to humanity,does it count as a normal resource? Are there any laws that prohibit taking an alien-made objects back to Earth (If there is even a distinction between "alien" or not)?
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**From a practical perspective, there is no such thing as international "law"**
The purpose of law (in an idealistic sense) is to guarantee the freedom of the individual while protecting the needs of that individual's society. From the perspective of the tyrant, "society" is reflected in the tyrant's wishes, limiting the freedom of the individual to ensure the tyrant is served. From the perspective of the anarchist, "society" is reflected in the loose association of individuals thereby permitting any individual the greatest freedom possible. "Law" and its enforcement is what creates the balance between my freedom and my service to my society.
*So, what's my point?*
* "Law" is worthless without a policeman.
* There are no international policemen.
Humanity has tinkered with the idea of a planetary government (e.g., the [League of Nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations) and the [United Nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations)), but as yet there is not a single governing entity that serves as the ultimate authority over the planet empowered to bring police authority to bear against the planet's individuals.
**Which means all you have are treaties... and treaties, like rules, are often meant to be broken**
Simplifying things a bit, behavioral requirements between the government and the governed are called "laws." But government and the governed (despite the U.S.'s declarations otherwise in the Gettysburg Address) are not equals. Government always has the authority to bring the threat of violence against the governed. (Contrast this with the governed bringing the threat of violence against its government, an act identified in law as rebellion and sedition, and pretty much always deemed illegal despite its celebration in the U.S. Declaration of Independence.)
But today, between nations, things are a great deal more... *equal.* In other words, while any two nations could be compared (e.g., their economies, military, health and welfare, etc.) to determine whether one was stronger than the other, their *sovereignty* is always equal. When two nations disagree about sovereignty, the result is war.
**How does this all apply to your question?**
1. There are no "laws" governing the excavation of resources on other planets. There are *treaties* proscribing such activity. And the day a critical resource is found that one nation can gather with reasonable economic loss is the day that treaty will come to an end. In our world today, sovereign national interests always take precedence over the social justice of international cooperation (with the exception of smaller nations that do not enjoy enough military strength to defend such selfish aspirations. Such nations have the luxury of thinking in more holistic terms). No resource would be deemed more critical than actual alien tech.
2. "Law" is only as valuable as the system that regulates and promotes it. Thus, wealthy people get away with proverbial murder while the poor are crushed by taxes. In the context of your question: large, wealthy nations will fight among themselves for the tech and the treaties be damned. That particular competition would have a good chance of being fought in terms of a *cold war* between corporations supported by national interests so that the *perception* of international cooperation could be preserved while the nations fight, nonetheless, for possession of what would likely be deemed the most valuable resource in our current universe.
3. Speaking further of enforcement, the only countries in question are those with the capacity of space flight. Not just the ability to drop a satellite into orbit, but the ability to at least get to the moon and back. That's a very short list: the U.S., Russia, China, the European Union, India, and possibly Japan, South Korea, and the UAE. And of those, only one has actually put people on the moon. Nevertheless, all other nations are bystanders to the question. None can get to the alien tech and none have the political strength to enforce any treaties.
**So, what's the answer to your question?**
Actually, *questions.* Please note for future reference that you're expected to ask one and only one question.
1. Is excavating alien technology legal? Although I have not given anywhere near the detail necessary to justify what I'm about to say, I believe that a purely legal argument could be made to say that it is *illegal* to excavate alien technology without first introducing a new treaty governing how that would be done and who would benefit. At least seven nations would howl like banshees if someone found alien tech and tried to excavate it without their blessing.
2. Are there laws prohibiting the import of non-terrestrial objects to the surface of the Earth? *Not that I know of.* There is precedent, however, in the form of moon rocks (items of non-terrestrial origin, if we ignore one of the origin theories of the moon) suggesting that such objects could be imported. But, once again, for primarily political reasons, at least seven nations would howl — and I would expect them to use the, "oh, crap, you're going to start the zombie apocalypse!" argument in an effort to win priority over possession.
**TL;DR**
Nations are greedy, people are selfish, and alien tech is valuable. Conclusion: if it could be said that laws affecting alien tech exist, humans would find every means (legal and illegal) to circumvent them.
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Based on historical precedents, I would simply say that "we don't give a damn" whom something belong, unless they use the force to contrast us and are effective at this.
Since the dawn of time, men have always taken what they wanted, or better have tried to. If somebody tried to oppose to it, one of the two sides would end up being killed: it has happened countless times for water ponds, hunting grounds, fertile women, territories, resources, etc. etc.
Did the colonial powers ever stop thinking if the lands they were occupying were being legally occupied? Not at all sir, they just took them, and killed who stood in between.
Did the Roman/Persian/Mongol/Egyptian Empire (just to name a few) ever tried the same? Not at all sir.
If that didn't work on Earth, why would it work in space?
At most there might be:
* cautionary precautions: if something looks made by an alien life form, you want to make sure it is not dangerous before taking it home (hopefully who finds it has read about the Trojan horse)
* international agreement: I guess that the first findings would nowhere be commercial, because any scientist and government will want to check that thing. The same way as before the fall of the iron curtain Eastern block military equipment was of prime interest for the Occidental block (and vice versa), and then after the fall it started being sold in village fairs to make some money.
[Answer]
At the moment space belongs to no one so Theoretically If a An alien artifact was found then find those keepers.
However that would not be how this would go down as regardless of how legal it was every single nation that Would be powerful enough to claim the object would. They would invent some kind of legal excuse and if they were unable to they would move illegally. Something like that is just way too important for government's not to try and claim.
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[Question]
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I have a fantasy world I'm making, with a planet and sun similar to our world, except the length of the seasons are significantly longer. Each of the seasons last two years, and the full seasonal cycle lasts eight years. Here's what I thought could explain it:
The planet has an orbital period similar to Earth's, but has a low axial tilt and a highly irregular orbit, so seasonal climate variation is primarily based on the distance to the sun,
Would this be a feasible way to have longer seasons, or would a planet like that not be able to support life? Also, would this have any other consequences besides longer seasons?
[Answer]
**Only with magic**
An orbit can be "irregular" buts its "average" orbit radius will remain constant. It's almost the definition of an orbit. Which means that at times *during each year* it will be closer to the sun and at times it will be further away. This translates to "seasons" within each year.
In order to achieve what you want for the entire planet simultaneously (Willk's answer gives an alternative for local conditions but no longer allows "days") the planet actually needs to shift to an entirely different but very circular orbit every two years. For Earth it would mean:
* Two years orbiting at 1 AU (spring)
* Two years orbiting at 0.98 AU (summer)
* Two years orbiting at 1 AU (autumn)
* Two years orbiting at 1.02 AU (winter)
Note that I'm just making up numbers here - possibly the variation should only be 0.005 AU rather than 0.02 AU. Regardless, the energy required to shift orbits would be literally astronomical and any mechanism that could move the planet without obliterating all life would be magical - which may be OK on a fantasy world.
An alternative mechanism would be to have the planet maintain a constant orbit but have the star's energy output increase / decrease in a regular eight year cycle. I have no suggestions regarding a mechanism to achieve this, but given that this is for a fantasy world, just state it as a fact. (Anyone with a good idea how to scientifically achieve this, please chip in.)
[Answer]
**You could definitely have a longer winter.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dTLog.png)
<https://www.windows2universe.org/physical_science/physics/mechanics/orbit/ellipse.html>
You mandate an orbital period similar to earth and also an irregular orbit, which I take to mean an elliptical orbit. Seasons would definitely depend on how close the planet was to the star. The planet is moving fastest when it is the closest, so the hot season would be the shortest. The planet is moving slowest when it is the farthest so the cold season would be the longest. Wikipedia has a fine gif showing various orbits with the same period.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_orbit>
What you ask for is super tricky. You want seasons that last more than a year. That means the planet does a circuit around the star and the season does not change.
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Here is how to do it. It is not about how close the planet is to the sun. It is about which side is facing it.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oHmza.jpg)
Your long season world has an S type orbit around one of a pair of binary stars. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_binary_star_systems>
The planet rotates very slowly. It is almost tidally locked to its star. The side facing the star that this planet orbits (the Summer sun) has summer. The far side is in winter but it gets some light from the distant star (Winter sun) so it does not freeze. During the very slow change of seasons both stars will be in the sky.
Several years (orbits around the star) go by before the planet completes a single rotation. Thus the change of seasons is really the passing of a single day. The summer sun finally sets at the end of autumn.
This planet will not have night.
[Answer]
You can't have everything.
The question specifies
* planet similar to earth
* star similar to the sun
* orbital period similar to earth's
* 2-year seasons / 8-year cycle
There's no good way to get all of that. So, let's look at what we can sacrifice to get you close.
**Binary stars:**
As suggested by others (Willk and Ash), there are binary arrangements that would get your seasons right. Both involve orbiting a star that gets really close to another star on its orbit. That poses a lot of orbital stability challenges and might end up tossing your planet into interstellar space -- probably not your goal. Still with enough tweaking (or handwaving) you could make it work but your planet wouldn't be all that earthlike.
**Long orbit:**
You could move your planet into an 8-year (2292-day) orbit. Each season would still only last approximately 1/4 of a year but the year would be 8 times longer. This would require moving to something like a 4 AU average distance. That's well outside the habitable zone for a G-type star like the sun. Instead you'd need something nearly twice the size of the sun (pale blue to white A-type). An A-type star introduces some issues with high-energy radiation and stellar longevity. That would require some serious explaining in hard SF but could maybe be handwaved in soft SF and maybe ignored in fantasy.
**Highly eccentric planetary orbit:**
You could create an orbit that takes the planet to wildly different distances from its star: from one edge or the habitable zone to the other. This would get you seasons without axial tilt but it wouldn't really change their duration.
**Different average distances on each orbit:**
Here you have a planet that orbits in a normal near-circular orbit but changes its orbital distance on a cyclic basis (e.g., 2 orbits at inner habitable distance, 2 at mid habitable distance, 2 at outer habitable distance, then back to 2 at mid). This gets you mostly what you want with two problems. (1) Years will not be the same length. The "winter orbit" will be much longer than the "summer orbit". (2) Basically, you need magic to make it happen. Theoretically you could achieve it with enough correctly placed massive objects but you'd need such a complex system that you might as well call it magic anyway. But you said this was a fantasy world so maybe that's ok?
**A variable star:**
There are stars out there that change in energy output on a cyclic basis that might meet your requirements. Most of them are cycling on much shorter periods than you want (minutes to days with a few reaching to months) but there is one class that has a sufficiently long period to meet your needs, cleverly named "long-period variable stars". They're not very similar to our sun. We're talking about really big orange monsters but maybe with some handwaving?
**Finally, about axial tilt:**
Changing the axial tilt to near zero is going to have major climate impacts. Most notable, your poles are going to get a lot colder. Assuming similar conditions to earth, expect ice caps to stretch down to cover much of Europe and North America (similarly high in the southern hemisphere). Maybe this is useful for your setting, maybe not. Just be aware that axial tilt does more than cause seasons.
[Answer]
As a two body problem, only having one star, you could have a longer winter if you stretched the year but you'd compress your other seasons, most notably the summer would be down to about an 1/8 or less of the orbital period. Now if you have a primary orbited by the planet in question and a second star in an appropriate [orbital resonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance) you might get the effect you are looking for with winter being the season when the planet and secondary star are close to [Opposition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_(astronomy)), summer being the time close to [Conjunction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_(astronomy)) and the spring and autumn being the in-between times. I think you want an 8:1 resonance, the planet completes 8 orbits for every 1 that the companion star makes but it may actually be a quite different ratio.
This is not quite the opposite of what Willk suggested, in this case the planet and the "winter sun" orbit the "summer sun" of his answer on different orbital tracks. Thus there is a normal day/night cycle during the winter, the day/night ratio changes through the spring and autumn and during high summer there are a few days of almost continuous daylight with the summer solstice being marked by about 48 hours (assuming an approximately 24 hour axial rotation) of daylight the world over.
[Answer]
Short Answer:
You mght need to make your planet one which has been artifically terraformed to become habitable by some advanced civilization. If you want a planet with such long years and seasons to be natuarlly habitable, you will need to design your solar system very carefully.
Long Asnwer:
Part One: Planetary Year Lengths.
The problem with having a planet with seasons and years which are arbitrarily long - and which is habitable - is the habitable part.
Planet SWIFT J1756.9−2508 b has an orbital period or year around its star of about 0.0379907 Earth days or 48 minutes 56.5 seconds.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWIFT_J1756.9%E2%88%922508>
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_exoplanet\_extremes#Orbital\_characteristics]
[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exoplanet_extremes#Orbital_characteristics)
However, the primary in this case is a pulsar, a type of neutron star.
The exoplanet with the shortest known year that orbits a normal star is K2-137 b, which has an orbital period of about 0.2 Earth days. Wikipedia says 4.31 hours.
<https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/6071/k2-137-b/>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exoplanet_extremes#Orbital_characteristics>
Exoplanet 2MASS J2126–8140 has a year of about 328,725,000 Earth days, or about 900,000 Earth years.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS_J2126%E2%80%938140>
But the year lengths of potentally habitable exoplanets, those which orbit within the circumstellar habitable zones of their planets, have much less variation.
You can see that in any list of potentially habitable exopanets, like this one:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets>
Sorting the orbital period column for length, I see that as of today, September 2, 2021, there are 59 exoplanets listed with year lengths shorter than that of Earth's 365.25 days - 40 with years less than 100 days long. The shortest is 4.05 Earth days. There are three with year lenghts longer than the 365.25 days of Earth's year, at 384.8, 448.3, and 636.1 Earth days.
A season two Earth years long would be 730.5 Earth days long, a year of four such seasons would be 2,922 Earth days long.
Of course the more massive and luminous a star is, the farther away its circumstellar habitable zone will be, and thus the longer will be the years of any planets in its habitable zone. If the planet's stas is luminous enough, a planet could orbit in the habitable zone and still have a year tens or hundreds of Earth years long.
Part Two: The Limits on Types of Stars Which Can Have Naturally Habitable Planets.
But:
It is believed that it took Earth billions of years to develop an oxygen rich atmosphee and have large multicelled plants nd animals on land, and to become habitable for humans.
So if you want you fictional planet to have any of the above qualities, it should be billions of years old.
The only alternative is that sometime in the past a highly advanced society terraformed a young and uninhabitable planet and made it habitable.
A planet with life has to have fairly steady illumination from its star to have surface tempeatures suitable for life. And it takes billions of years of such steady illumination levels for a planet to become habitable for humans or otherwise interesting for the purposes of most science fiction stories.
And different types of stars vary vastly in how long they remain shining with a fairly steady luminosity as main sequence stars before they enter the stages of stellar evolution where their luminosity changes drastically and all life - if any -on their planets dies, and sometimes the planets themselves are destroyed.
And for decades astronomers have been able to calculate the life histories of various types of stars, including how long they can stay on the main sequence.
Stephen H. Dole, in *Habitable Plenets for Man*, 1964, discussed the qualities a world needed in order to be habitable. On pages 67 to 72, he discussed the properties necessary for a star to have a habitable planet, calculating lower and upper limits of mass and luminosity.
On page 68 Dole calculated the upper limit of stellar mass for for a star to possibly have a habitable planet is aobut 1.4 stellar masses, a spectral class F2V star.
<https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/commercial_books/2007/RAND_CB179-1.pdf>
There are several answers to this question:
<https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/40746/how-would-the-characteristics-of-a-habitable-planet-change-with-stars-of-differe/40758#40758>
The answer by user177107 has a table with the chracteristics of various spectral classes of stars, including columns giving the distance at which which aplanet would receive exactly as much illuminatin and heat for th star as Earth gets from the Sun, and how long the year of a planet in such an orbtt would be.
The orbital period ranges from 3.82 Earth days around an M8V class star to 2,526.01 Earth days around a A2V class star. But the orbital period around an F2V class star - the most massive type star that Dole considered could have a habitable planet - would be only 1,018.01 Earth days.
Maybe your planet orbits near the outer edge of the star's circumstellar habitable zone and has an average temperature lower than Earth's but high enough to sustain life. How far out is the outer edge of the Sun's circumstellar habitable zone?
According to this table, scientists have often calculated the inner and outer edges of the Sun's habtable zone, and some of their calculations vary greatly.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone#Solar_System_estimates>
The planet Mars orbits about 1.523 times as far from the Sun as Earth does, and a larger planet with a denser atmosphere at the distance of Mars might possibly be habitable. The year of Mars is is 686.98 Earth days, or 1.88 Earth years.
So a planet orbiting a F2V star at a distance where it receives the equivalent of Mars's radiation from its star might possibly be habitable, and it would have a year about 1.88 times as long as the year of a planet at the Earth equivalent distance, a year about 1.88 times 1,018.01 Earth days, or 1,913.8588 Earth days long.
Suppose that your planet orbits a binary F2V star, two 52V stars orbiting each other at a distance of 5 or 10million miles or so. In such a situation the planet would receive the amount of radiation it receives at distance X from one star at a distance of 1.414 times distance X. So your planet could have an orbit 1.414 times wider, and thus with 1.414 times the total circumference, as in the previous case, giving it a year 2,706.6049 Earth days long. which is about 7.410 Earth years long, and close enough to what you desire.
However that would make the mass of the pair of stars double that of one star, so that should increase the orbital speed of the planet, making its year much shorter than 7.4 Earth years long. doubling the mass should double the orbital speed require, while increasing the circumference only 1.414 times, and so should reduce the orbital period to 0.707 times the equivalent around a single star.
I calculate that an orbit around two F2V stars (with a total mass of about 2.88 times the mass of the Sun) which receives Mars-equvalent levels of radiation from those stars, should be at a distance of about 4.815 AU from the stars. According to this online calculator, [http://www.calctool.org/CALC/phys/astronomy/planet\_orbit](https://www.calctool.org/astrophysics/orbital-period) a planet in that orbit would have a year of 6.22478 Earth years or 2,273.64 Earth days. That is about 0.84 times the length of a year of a Mars equivalent orbit around a single F2V star.
The Mars equivalent orbit around a pair of F2V stars would be at about 4.815 AU. That is about 3.1615233 times Mar's orbit of 1.523 AU. A pair of F2V stars would have about 10.002 times the luminosity of the Sun. 10.002 divided by 9.9952295 (the square of 3.1615233) equals 1.0006773, which is pretty close to 1.0. Thus the calculations seem to be correct.
So a planet in a Mars equivalent orbit around a pair of idential stars would have amuch longer orbit around them than it would have in a Mars equivalent orbit around only one of those stars. But it would orbit much faster and so wouldhave a shorter oribitlaperiod than if it had the shorter orbit around only one of the stars.
So it seems to me that a habitable planet with a year 7 or 8 Earth years long would be close to the extreme limit of scientific plausibiity and would be a very rare
situation.
Part Three: An Aritifically Habitable Planet With a Long Year.
An alternative would be if the planet had not become habitable by natural processes over billions of years. Instead the planet orbited a spectral clas A or B star, and an advanced society had terraformed the planet to make it habitable, not caring that the habitability wouldn't last for more than a few hundred thousands or millions of years.
Or possibly the super advanced society found an already habitable planet which orbited a star which was aobut to leave the main sequence and become a red giant, and moved that planet into orbit around a hot young massive star where the planet now has a year 8 earth years long, not caring that they would have to move it again in a few million years.
Part Four: A Naturally Habitable Planet With a Year 8 Earth years long.
Assume there is one F2V star. One F2V star would have 1.44 times the mass and 5.001 times the luminosity of The Sun. A planet at a distance where it would receive the same amount of radiation from the star as Earth, at a distance of 1 AU, gets from the Sun, would orbit at a distance which was the square root of 5.001, or 2.236, AU. The table I referred to above says 2.236 Au, and that the planet would have a year of 1,018.1 Earth days.
Assume that there is a smaller star orbiting the larger star, and the planet orbits the smaller star. Maybe the planet is a K2V type star with a mass of 0.78 solar mass and a luminosity of 0.337 solar luminosity. According to the table I mentioned above, a planet getting the same amount of light and heat as Earth gets from the Sun would orbit at a distance of 0.58 AU and have a year 182.93 earth days long. Or maybe the planet would orbit at the Mars equivalent distance which would be 1.523 tiems as far, or 0.883 aU, andit would have a year 1.88 times 182.93 Earth, or about 343.9 Earth days.
But the planet of the smaller star would also receive some radiation, light and heat, from the larger star. The closer it got to the larger star, the more heat it would get from it. And if the smaller star and its planet has an elliptical orbit relative to the larger star, the amount of light and heat the planet gets from the larger star would change with its changing distance.
Exoplanets have been discovered in binary star sysems. Some of them orbit both the stars in a circumbinary or P-type orbit, and others orbit one of the stars in an S-type orbit, with the other star farther away from the planet. This situation would be an S-type orbit.
According to the list of exoplanet extremes, the closest binary stars with a planet in orbit around one of them in an S-type orbit is the system OGLE-2013-BLG-0341LB with a separation between 12 and 17 AU. The planet OGLE-2013-BLG-0341L b has an orbit with a semi-major axis o f0.7 AU, so the separation betwenthe stars is 17.14 to 24.28 time the orbit of the planet around one of the stars.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exoplanet_extremes>
And perhaps the stars could get much closer than that without perturbing the orbit of the planet too much.
>
> In non-circumbinary planets, if a planet's distance to its primary exceeds about one fifth of the closest approach of the other star, orbital stability is not guaranteed.[5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets)
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_binary_star_systems>
<http://www.solstation.com/habitable.htm#sthash.WLPv5bxd.dpbs>
Possibly the smaller star could have an elliptical orbit around the larger star star which takss it to between 5 and 10 times the radius of the planet's orbit.
The F2V star would have about 5.001 times the luminosity of the Sun, and the K2V star would have about 0.337 times the luminosity of the Sun, so if the two stars were at the same distance from the planet it would get about 14.839 times as much heat from the larger star as from the smaller star.
When the larger star was 5 times as far way the planet would get 14.839 divided by 25, the square of 5, or 0.593 times as much heat from the larger star as from the smaller star, while when the larger star was 10 times as far way the planet would get 14.839 divided by 100, the square of 10, or 0.14839 times as much heat as from the smaller star.
A planet orbiting a K2V type star might be tidally locked to its star, so one side wuld always face the star and be heated by it, and the other side would never get any heat or light frum the star. scientific opininis divided whether such a plent could be habitiable. In this star system, as the planet orbited the smaller
star, the inner and outer sides of the planet would take turns facing toward the larger star and getting heat and light from the larger star, which might improve the odds that the planet would be habitable.
If such a situation is acceptable, you can make the star even smaller and more likely to tidally lock the planet.
If the planet orbited a K5V with 0.165 times the luminosity of the Sun, it would receive Earth's amount of radiation from the smaller star at a distance of 0.406 AU and with a year of 144.84 Earth days. A F2V type larger star would be 30.3 times as luminous as a K5V star, so at 5 times the distance it would give the planet 1.2 times the radiation from the smaller star, at 10 times the distance it would give the planet 0.301 times the radiation, at 20 times the distance it would give the planet 0.075 times the radiation, and so on.
If the planet orbited a K8V star with 0.079 times the luminosity of the Sun, it would receive Earth's amount of radiation from the smaller star at a distance of 0.281 AU and with a year of 70.95 Earth days. A F2V type larger star would be 63.303 times as luminous as a K8V star, so at 5 times the distance it would give the planet 2.53 times the radiation from the smaller star, at 10 times the distance it would give the planet 0.633 times the radiation, at 20 times the distance it would give the planet 0.158 times the radiation, and so on.
There are many other possible combinations of star types, including making one or both of the stars binary stars, which can differ in mass and luminosity themselves.
Thus it should be possible to construct a star system where a habitable planet orbits a smaller star which orbits a larger star, and where the changing distances between the two stars cause changes in planetary temperature and drive the seasons o the planet, and hwere the orbital period of the stars equal 8 Earth years.
Part Five: Using the Orbit of the Planet Around the Smaller Star.
I thought that you could possibly have the two stars have more circular orbits, but as close together as possible, so the planet's orbit around its own star makes a significant difference in the amount of radiation it receives from the farther star.
If the two stars are separated by 5 times the planet's orbit, the distance between the planet and the farther star would vary between 4 and 6 times the distance of the planet's orbit arund the nearer star. So if the farther star was 2 times as luminous as the near star, for example, the radiation it gave to the planet would vary between 0.125 and 0.0555 that of the nearer star.
But in that case the orbit of the planet around the smaller star would determine the seasons, and so it wuld have to be 8 Earth years long, and I have already pointed out the problems with a habitable planet havinga year 8 earth years long.
Conclusion:
It does not seem totally impossible for a planet to have a year 7 or 8 years long, and still receive about as much radiation from its star as Mars gets from the Sun. A larger planet that Mars, with more water and more greenhouse gases in its denser atmosphere, might be much warmer than Mars despite receiving no more radiaitn than Mars gets.
And there is also the possibiity of making your planet orbit close to a smaller star which in turn orbits a larger star close enough to get significent heat formthe more sdistant larger star andhave the smaller star orbit the larger star with a period of about 8 Earth years.
If the orbit is eccentric and the distance between the star and the planet determines the seasons, the seasons will not be equally long. On Earth the seaons measured by astronomers are equally long, but the weather seasons in the local regions and climate zones are of various lengths differing from the astronomical seasons.
And on your planet even the astronomical seasons would be of varying length, since the planet would move faster closer to the star and slower farther from the star. Thus winter could be as long as the other three seasons combined, for example.
Added 09-04-2021.
Your question specifies that the orbital period of the planet (it's year according to the normal definition of a year) should be eual to ours, but a cycle of the seasons lasts for 8 years.
That is almost impossible. Seasons should be fractions of years.
But if the world inquestion s orbits around an astronomical object which orbits around another astronomical object, then it might work.
Suppose that there was a Earth sized giant moon orbiting a giant planet or a brown dwarf with a period of about 1 Earth year, and that giant planet or brown dwarf in turn orbited a star with a period of about 8 Earth years.
The Planet Jupiter has over 60 moons which orbit so far away from Jupiter that they have orbital periods more than one Earth year long - 16 have orbital periods over 2 Earth years long.
Of course all those outer moons are irregular moons. But maybe the giant moon could have been an Earth like planet in an independent orbit that was captured by the giant planet or brown dwarf.
If the orbit of the giant planet or brown dwarf was eccentric, the amount of heat and light received by an Earth sized moon would vary over the "superyear" of 8 Earth years instead of the ordinary year of 1 Earth year.
But if the brown dward or giant planet orbits the star at a distance where it has a year 8 Earth years or 2,922 Earth days long, it will receive a bit less than the heat Mars receives from the Sun, and probably be too cold.
And many people might consider the "superyear" around the star to be the real year of the giant planet and eEarth sized moon and the orbital period of the Earth sized moon around the planet to be a month and not a year.
So we can change it to make the Earth like planet orbit around a Sun like star in a period of about one Earth year, which in turn orbits around the center of gravity with another star in a somewhat elliptical orbit in a period of about 8 Earth years.
So the planet would be orbiting its star at a distance of about 1 AU. If the the stwo stars aproached to 5 AU at their closest, the planet would be somewhere between 4 AU and 6 AU during that closest pass.
If the other star was exactly the same as the primary star of the planet, very similar to the Sun, it would give the planet 0.625 Times as much heat at a distance of 4 AU, 0.04 times as much heat at a distance of 5 AU, 0.02777 times as much heat at a distance of 6 AU, 0.01 times as much heat at a distance of 10 AU, 0.0025 times as much heat at a distancee of 20 Au, and so on.
If the other star was an F2V type star, it would have 5 times the luminosity of the primary star of the planet. So it would give the planet 0.3125 of the heat from the prmary at a distance of 4 AU, 0.2 times the heat from the primary at a distance of 5 AU, 0.138 times the heat of the primary at a distance of 6 AU, 0.05 times the heat from the primary at a distance of 10 AU, 0.0125 times the heat from the primary at a distance of 20 AU, and so on.
So most of the time the heat contribution from the other star would be very minor, and the planet woulde xperience normal seasons. But if the planet had a very minor axial tilt, the normals seasons would not make muchof a difference in the temperatures of varius climate zones. The temeratures in the hottest summers and the coldest winters weould be almost the same.
But when the primary star and the planet passed closest to the other star there would be a signifcent increase in heat and there would be a very hot summer all over the planet.
I also note that as seen from the planet, the two stars would sometimes be lined up and sometimes be on opposite sides of the sky, and sometimes be at every angle between. The greater the angle between the two stars when they were closer together thelonger would be theperiods when at least one stars was in the sky,and the shorter the periods of night.
So the farther apart the directions, as seen from the planet, to the two stars get during the period when the stars pass closest together, the hotter the planet will get.
[Answer]
KerrAvon2055 raised an interesting point, you could vary the distance between the planet and it's host star year on year. The existing answer proposes that magic would be needed and that may be correct but:
I shudder to think how massive and possibly how close it would have to be in order to have a large enough effect, KerrAvon2055 suggests 0.02 AU quick is not at all a small variation but it's probably not big enough for Earthlike seasons. Anyway if you have a super Jovian world in the same system you can shift the [barycentre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter) of the star system outside the primary. It may actually require a close binary with a yellow primary and a brown dwarf that supplies negligible light/heat. The star will then be orbiting the same point as the planet rather than the planet actually orbiting the star itself. The distance between the two will then fluctuate in a predictable pattern of oppositions and conjunctions, it may not be consistent year on year but it will create long period "seasonal" variations.
Actually given the difference in insolation that is needed (~50%) the super Jovian world/brown dwarf also fulfills another function, it shares an elliptic with the planet in question and blocks a large amount of the light of the primary during the winter, otherwise the variation in sunlight intensity simply isn't great enough.
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There are plenty of [sex differences in human physiology](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology): Body composition, skeleton, hormones, sexual organs, sensory systems, etc. My question is:
**How would it *feel* for a woman to be placed into a male body and what difficulties she would face when it comes to physiology?**
Basically, I want to know if walking, eating, talking, and other normal everyday activities will feel the same or will need some readjustment period. Will differences in hormonal status have noticeable physiological effects? I also wonder if the consummation of marriage is possible.
***When possible I would like the answers to focus on what would feel different and in what way.*** For example, an answer may suggest that walking will become harder because of the changed centre of gravity and for a while this woman in a male body will be moving like a drunk person (not sure if this is correct).
*Notes:*
1. 'Placed into a male body' can be understood as a soul of a genetically XX woman placed into a genetically XY male body (it is a miracle that does not need to be explained). Please assume that the female soul and the male body are compatible and there are no big problems with body functions. Some things may feel weird or different, but everything works fine.
2. Psychological difficulties (including adjustment to a new gender role) are out of the scope of this question. Please do not concern yourselves with them. *If physiological changes (e.g. hormones) cause distinctly different psychological responses it is okay to include them.*
3. While there are some differences between male and female brains, those that would make the premise impossible can be discarded. Please also assume that the female soul has complete and 'natural' control over the body and does not need to relearn how to walk, eat, talk, etc.
4. If it matters, the woman is an adult, the male body is also a fully developed male body.
5. The woman has her memories intact.
6. Please assume that the height and weight of the new male body are approximately the same as the original female body.
---
**Update**:
I understand the theory of sex differences. I am looking for approximations of how it would actually feel to be in a body of different sex.
It might be easier to understand what I am looking for if you consider this:
>
> You know how to drive a car and you have about 20 years of experience
> driving a MINI (or some other tiny car). One day your MINI is
> transformed into a family minivan with 3 rows of seats. You still can
> drive this minivan, you still can do it more or less safely. However,
> it *feels* different: Size, speed, acceleration, driver's seat, etc.
> The size feels too big or the vehicle feels too clumsy. The speed
> feels lacking. The acceleration is sluggish. The driver's seat is made
> of fabric and is cold making you grieve your old leather seats with
> heating. This new car is okay-ish but it just simply does not feel
> right.
>
>
>
---
**More notes** (in regard to opinion-based, unanswerable, etc.)
1. *Every person has a mental representation of their bodies - [body image](https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4614-5583-7_403)*.
As a mental construct, the original body image will be still present when a soul is placed into a new body. Since body image contains knowledge and expectations about the normal functioning of one's body a new body will inevitably create cognitive dissonance and disturbances in body image. Also, since the operation of one's body (with the exception of the automatic functions) consciously and unconsciously relies on body image a newly transported soul may face difficulties.
2. *This question is limited to sex differences in human physiology and their manifestation considering the disparity between the original body image and the new body*. The sex differences are relatively well understood and researched, they are limited in number. It is also possible to approximate (and for some of those differences it is even possible to calculate) the specific effects.
3. *For those who are confused by the wording 'how does it feel'*: Feel in the context of this question is not related to emotions but senses and physical experiences with the only exception of drastic physiological influence on emotions. I am not asking whether it will feel good or bad (that would be opinion-based), I am asking whether the person will feel out of balance due to differences in muscle and fat distribution and if so I ask to approximate how this out-of-balance condition will manifest from the body owner's point of view.
4. *Another reason for asking how does it feel is because I am a woman*. There are plenty of things that I do not know, do not understand, or would not even consider (see for example *Nosajimiki*'s answer) due to the fact that my own body is not male. Consider pregnancy, no matter how much you read about the biology of pregnancy or watch videos you would have no idea how it actually physically feels to be pregnant unless you were pregnant yourself or someone who has been pregnant shared their experiences with you.
5. *As for concerns about misgendering, invalidating, or questioning transgender identities, my question does not have anything to do with these topics*. I specifically stated that gender identity is out of the scope of this question.
---
If you need clarifications or additional details, please, ask in the comments.
[Answer]
>
> Basically, I want to know if walking, eating, talking, and other normal everyday activities will feel the same or will need some readjustment period.
>
>
>
Some adjustment period will most likely be needed. See also [this question](/questions/171644) and some of the answers thereto, the upshot of which is that if your body undergoes any sort of major change, there is most likely going to be some adjustment period. Or, simply consider the sometimes awkwardness of children and adolescents whose bodies are still changing on a daily basis.
Consider also motor problems experienced by people after an injury or period of inactivity. *Especially* consider the process by which amputees learn to control an artificial limb. A lot of the motor skills adults take for granted depend on practice and having a consistent "platform".
For that matter, even "some adjustment period" may be wildly optimistic. Unless you somehow arrange that all the nerve mappings are exactly the same between the two bodies, something like, say, a brain transplant would leave the poor sap starting *from scratch* in terms of motor control. Hopefully you at least got the autonomous functions right, or your victim isn't going to live very long, but even if (s)he does, (s)he may be starting with the (lack of) motor skill of a newborn. Actually, not even *that* much, since even newborns have had some time in the womb to practice.
>
> Will differences in hormonal status have noticeable physiological effects?
>
>
>
Absolutely; just ask anyone undergoing sex reassignment or taking hormone replacement therapy.
>
> I also wonder if the consummation of marriage is possible.
>
>
>
My guess would be "yes". Again, your best bet is to do some research into sex reassignment. Granted, I don't believe we've *demonstrated* this, but, well, in real life, someone that's undergone SRS is going to be missing "certain key parts", and there are some pretty hefty moral questions that would come into play if one were to try to find "donor parts". However, I'm not aware of any biological reason why this would be an issue.
---
Further thoughts in response to comments:
If your "female soul" (using quotes because we're now very much in hand-waving territory) isn't used to the mass of the male body, that's likely to be noticeable. Too, the male may have more muscle mass, and even if you assume the male body has similar mass to what the "female soul" expects, the ratios of muscle to fat are likely to be different. At the *very least*, your "female soul" is likely accustomed to a certain concentration of non-muscular tissue on her upper chest that is going to be missing.
I recommend finding some weights you can strap to your body and trying to move around; that should give you an example of the *minimum* sort of thing you might expect.
That all said... as soon as you say "the female soul and the male body are compatible" (or, just the fact that you're clearly employing some sort of hand-wavy process that can't be explained by hard science), it seems to me like you've crossed deep enough into "magic" territory that you could also hand-wave away — or *exaggerate* — such difficulties to whatever extent works for your story.
[Answer]
## Most of your issues will be hormonal and neurological in nature.
Before you downvote for delving into psychology, it is important to know that psychology and neurology are two different things. If you think of your mind as a computer system, your psychology is the software of your mind, and your neurology is the hardware. While software may try to function the same when installed on two different computers, differences in CPU, GPU, RAM, HD, etc. can cause the software to function very differently, even if it is the same program. The same would be true trying to run one person's mind in another person's body.
The the most noticable difference between the male and female brain is the size of the [corpus callosum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum). A female corpus callosum allows one to hold onto multiple thoughts at a time, transition between thoughts more easily, and associate emotions with logical thoughts better. The male corpus callosum allows one to stay more focused on the task at hand because it creates a weaker connection between emotional and logical processes and is less prone to distractions. The closest experience a woman might have to this prior to the switch would be like taking ADHD medications, or having a mid-brain concussion.
On this level, the woman may find herself feeling trapped inside her own mind, she will be aware of the thoughts she is having, but struggle to express them. She will also likely have feelings that you might describe as "dead inside" because she will no longer be able to process her emotional state the way she is used to. An alternative consequence is that her female software may try pushing it's normal amount of traffic between hemispheres which would make her feel more normal but put her at a major risk for seizures.
For hormonal differences, we all know that she will have more testosterone and less estrogen meaning that she will be more prone to bouts of aggression, right? Not necessarily. As it turns out, [estrogen is the hormone responsible for human aggression](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S009130220500049X), and [testosterone therapy is often used in women to decrease the anxiety, irritability and aggression associated with PMS](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378512213000121). Her endocrine system will push her into a more relaxed, emotionally level state of being than she is probably used to. Between this and the corpus callosum, she will probably feel something comparable to [getting stoned](https://weedmaps.com/learn/cannabis-and-its-evolution/stoned#:%7E:text=stoned%20is%20when%20you%20experience%20the%20relaxed,%20sedative%20effects%20of%20consuming%20marijuana), and it will probably take at least a few weeks if not months before she her new reality starts to feel normal to her... assuming it does not trigger any secondary psychological issues like chronic depression.
### Kinesiological differences would be minor, but existent
Balance may be a bit of an issue but not for the reasons most people have cited so far. If you've ever put on a backpack or carried a thing that weighs more than a few kilos, you already know that your body is very good at adjusting to distribution of weight issues. The only reason balance would be all that hard is because a woman's pelvis is shaped differently. A woman's legs are turned slightly more outward from a man's so, this will affect her gait. This difference would be more pronounced if the woman has had kids.
Men also have slightly longer arms than women for their height. So, even if the male body is as tall as the female body, she will probably enjoy a slightly longer reach. I say "enjoy" loosely here, because at first it could be off putting. Her Eye-hand coordination would be fine because it relies on the biofeedback of seeing what your hands are doing while you do it, but proprioception based coordination would be difficult because this relies on intuitively knowing where your hand is in space. Children often experience several weeks of clumsiness after major growth spurts of several inches or more; so, your woman may have a similar experience here, but in general, the differences in arm length are just small enough, I don't think it would be overly noticeable.
... then there are those things that guys don't really like to talk about, but I will bring them up anyways because they are scientifically relevant here: *her new found gonads will get in the way*. A man who knows his own body walks in a certain way that he does not hurt himself, but sometimes men have one of those off days where they literally just walk wrong over too long of a distance and thier tessicals start to hurt. Does not happen to guys very often, but a woman who does not know how to walk with something there is much more likely to struggle with it for a while. Then there is that other thing called "ball-stickage" where you sweat a little and they stick to your leg. If you've ever seen a man walking and he just randomly steps with a single wide step, or kicks out to one side a bit, that is him removing his balls from the side of his leg. To a man this is a normal occurrence, but to woman, I'd imagine it would be a very concerning experience... especially if she decides to go with boxers instead of briefs.
Also, differences in body strength will not really be all that apparent for most of what she does unless she tries pushing herself beyond normal daily activities. 99% of the day is spent doing things that any woman would be able to do without really trying that hard anyway. There would just be that occasional moment for a while where she realizes she can open that stumborn pickle jar... these would be novel experiences for her but not really require much of an adjustment period.
Eating and talking would be different, but not require a significant adjustment period. The transition from gender nonspecific to male specific vocal structures is a pretty spontaneous change that happens in adolescent boys. Despite this, most boys do not even notice it has happened until someone else points it out to them; so, I would not imagine this being an issue to physically adjust to, it would just be a bit different.
[Answer]
Necessary disclaimer that I'm not an expert and the following speculations are based off of personal research.
Like any old soul in a new body, she would have to adjust herself to the physique. She'd likely be taller than before, and with longer limbs, which really won't cause more than the occasional clumsiness unless the difference is drastic. If she has the same muscle mass as before, her body may feel slightly heavier to move and use. If she has *proportionately* the same amount of muscle mass, she'll have to get used to being a little stronger, which means for a bit she may grip things too hard or push things too far, etc. **So from a physical perspective, all the normal side effects that come with having a new body and getting used to that, and being clumsy while you still figure it out.**
On a more chemistry side of things, she's going to have **more testosterone**, which comes with effects like a higher sex drive, increased bone strength, higher metabolism, and gaining muscle mass more easily. She'll have **less estrogen**, which means less serotonin (the happy stuff) and more mood swings. Mens bodies also collect visceral fat (unhealthy fat) more than subcutaneous fat (good fat), which means they're **more prone to health conditions like diabetes and heart disease, and their blood sugar levels change less easily than womens.** How does all of this make her feel? She may have more energy day to day, but her mental health will be more fragile and moody. She might be surprised at how quickly she loses weight and gains muscle (if she exercises), and of course, the higher sex drive.
Psychologically, (the biological effects on the brain, since you said not to mention the mental effects), **I'm not sure if there are really any differences in the way a man and a women think.** To my knowledge, this area is still inconclusive. Some say women are instinctively more social and "motherly", however research suggests this is likely *societal conditioning rather than biology*.
A few more notes on the behavioral aspect of things, she'll likely be acutely aware of her new reproductive system for a while, as she'll be used to her old physique. The lack of weight on her chest and the new weight on her hips may feel uncomfortable. In my personal experience as well, women tend to hold their backs slightly arched compared to men, and stand with their feet closer together. She may continue to adopt these tendencies in her new body. Also, if her body was pretty curvy before, she'll be unused to the new, straighter body shape, which'll be especially apparent when she puts on/takes off clothes.
[Answer]
**Addendum**
Other answers have covered most changes. My understanding is that cutting very long hair will have a similar effect (mass change, apparent muscle performance) to many changes. Not having to relearn speech implies that walking will be automatic, but one's choice of path is related to one's perceived dimensions (and politeness).
However, this leaves two considerations - familiar nerves/functions which no longer exist/map to anything in this body, and nerves/functions which now exist and don't map to anything familiar.
**Missing structures**: The mind seems likely to experience phantom-limb syndrome to some extent. It is also possible that these nerves expected by the mind will be re-mapped to equivalent areas.
**New structures**: The mind will have difficulty in interpreting any sensation, and is likely to initially have trouble associating nerves with locations. (Ever tried to scratch an itch which moves? Your brain doesn't usually need to know which nerves are affected, since most things affect the whole area.) Assuming that the mind is not adverse to testing, it's likely that they'll take some time to prod different nerves, to learn what sensation corresponds to what location.
**Sex organs**: You specifically mention this in your question, but the scenario you describe is an idealised test-case for many arguments. Opinions on how much control over these is possible vary, as do the implications for marriage (legal or religious). Individual psychology is a significant factor, and opinions are divided on how much influence the mind has over reflexive attraction.
**A baseline**: it is possible to influence when an arousal response to occur, but the response is at least semi-autonomous (ex: can occur while asleep). This means that it may occur when unprompted/unwanted, and is likely to occur when prompted/wanted. The exact nature of your transfer will influence the nerve-correspondence between the old and new body, and hence how 'familiar' the mind finds it, but broadly-equivalent structures exist. Physical differences will lead to a degree of adjustment being necessary. However, this may also prompt a more detailed understanding and a greater degree of control.
(Disclaimer: Fish scales are broadly equivalent to hairs, in that they form from the same embryonic structure. This is *another* area where reams of discussion might be written.)
[Answer]
You might be best to study the experience of woman who Have transitioned to trans men. Your story is Not identical to thier but there is similarities .
Basically she will have to deal with a sudden increase in strength, Bone density and size. Many of these changes occur in woman transitioning.
Something to consider:
Is her new body attracted to men? A lot of attraction is Psychological but certainly not all of it Physiology also plays any important part.
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[Question]
[
This is a follow up to this question. [Dimensions of an O'Neill cylinder with gravity and coriolis force like surface of Earth](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/130863/dimensions-of-an-oneill-cylinder-with-gravity-and-coriolis-force-like-surface-o)
I read different things like football field length, 200km or 4000km.
[Answer]
## 225m
***For 1g and achievable comfort for trained humans, a centripetal gravity system need to have a radius of 225m or greater***
Assuming you are completely addicted to having exactly 1g of apparent gravity under your feet, and live only at the rim of the cylinder.
(otherwise this becomes a question of how much gravity is needed to stay healthy/comfortable/unmutated?)
There are two factors to consider: The gravity gradient between your head and feet, and the angular velocity. Both of these are affected by the rate of rotation, but the gravity gradient is also affected by the radius and is much easier to satisfy for human needs.
The human balance system depends on the movement of fluids in the inner ear. If your head is under gravity and rotating all the time, these signal you all the time, causing extreme disorientation and nausea among unadapted humans, and even for trained and experienced professionals it produces constant discomfort if the level exceeds a certain rate. Experimentally, this rate seems to be about 2 rotations per minute, for acclimatized personnel. (best results from military pilots, as it happens)
The website at [Spincalc](http://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/) has a handy interactive tool to calculate results for inputs of radius|rotation rate|gravity. It also had much discussion on the relevant comfort criteria, including citations galore. (so much so that if there is a way, and permission, that whole website should be embedded in here)
======
About the second bit of your leadup question "...and coriolis force like surface of Earth"
The absolutely ***only*** way to achieve this is to live on a spherical planet with 1g surface gravity, radius of 6 371km, and rotation rate of one per 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09053 seconds.
The coriolis force in an o'neill will *always* be in the "wrong" direction, because you are living on the inside rather than the outside of the skin. And the rotation rate will *always* be greater than the planet, thus making coriolis effects vastly greater than on the planet.
[Answer]
According to sources listed on [this page](http://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/), the minimal safe comfortable radius of a spinning habitat is ~12 meters.
This is due to the gravitational gradient between the head and the feet of the person living in such habitat: in a small diameter drum, it becomes too pronounced (The feet experience greater centrifugal force than the head), and the result ranges from noticeable to absolutely nauseating.
[Answer]
**Size does not matter - differences in forces between head and feet does**
Let's start simple - both size and speed will be determined by a pretty simple equation.
$a = r\*w^2$
On earth a = 9.8, so just change radius (r) and spin speed (w), until you get 9.8.
**And now for all the gotchas.**
The cylinder needs to be big enough you can't jump from one side to the other. This is super bad. From your perspective the other side is moving at double gravity speed **in the other direction!**
In a small tube, you'd also have to deal with differences in centripetal force between your feet and head
$a = w^2\*r$
Assuming your head is at the center of the cylinder (r=0) acceleration/velocity would be 0. Your feet, on the other hand, will be experiencing A LOT of g-forces if w is large enough and r is small enough.
The human body can handle max ["9g's"](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/star-wars-science-light-speed/#:%7E:text=Normal%20humans%20can%20withstand%20no,heavier%20blood%20to%20the%20brain.). After that, your heart can't pump blood out of your feet, it's simply too heavy.
You'll have to make the tube big enough the difference between acceleration at your head and feet are about equal if you want a remotely earth like experience.
Using your examples (a=9.8 at the feet) and assuming a human is about 3 meters tall.
$w = \sqrt[2]{\frac ar}$
>
> Football Field -> 100ish meters
>
>
> w = .313
>
>
> $a(head) = .313^2 \* (100 - 3) = 9.5$
>
>
>
>
> 200km
>
>
> w = .007
>
>
> $a(head) = .007^2 \* (200000 - 3) = 9.799$
>
>
>
So a football field would probably be good enough, but 200km would likely be much better.
[Answer]
The answer depends on how much training your cylinder dwellers are prepared to go though. What matters most appears to be the tolerable spin rate, high spin rates make you feel sick. To counteract this you can lower the spin rate ( and hence lower spin-gravity), increase the radius or train more (to an extent).
This is all covered in great detail on the [Atomic Rockets - Spin Gravity](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/artificialgrav.php) page.
To summarise
At 1G:
* Well trained people should be able to handle 6RPM.
+ This gives a radius of about 17m
* People with little to no training handle 2RPM quite well
+ This gives a radius a bit over 200m
At 0.3G
* Well trained people need a radius less than 10m
+ I suspect at such low radii other effects beyond RPM might make you unhappy
* Little to no training allows a radius of about 70m
Obviously a cylinder with a 10m radius is going to feel cramped too.
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[Question]
[
**Is a biological tourniquet plausible and in what scenario would a creature evolve this?**
I got an idea for an organism that evolved biological tourniquets.
The way it works is that they are basically ring muscles around blood veins that prevent blood loss; it is a mechanism that only activates when the organism loses its limb or limbs.
[Answer]
It's definitely plausible, because both of the things you're asking for already exist. All you need is a prey animal who evolved limb or skin loss as an emergency escape mechanism when attacked by predators.
For the biological tourniquet: [vasoconstriction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasoconstriction). Vasoconstriction is the narrowing of blood vessels through muscle constrictions, and is an important processes for stopping blood loss ([hemostasis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemostasis)).
For why having this tourniquet is useful: [autotomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotomy). Autotomy is a self-amputation behavior designed to escape or distract predators by sacrificing part of an animal's body. Several species of lizards are able to detach their tails when stressed, and in some cases the tail continues to wriggle to distract a predator (a few can even regrow their tails after detaching them). One mammal, the [spiny mouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiny_mouse), has autotomy, and is able to discard and regrow chunks of skin to wriggle out of predator's grasps.
Regrowing an arm or a leg is a bit more unlikely to develop than regrowing skin or a tail, mostly because animals who can (slowly) regrow limbs wouldn't survive long enough without them to pass on their genes. However, it's definitely possible, and if such autotomy is common in a species then strong vasoconstriction would also be a very useful trait along with it.
[Answer]
# The Same Scenario Where It Evolved in Real Life
[Lizards have muscles that cut off blood flow after they lose their tail](https://scienceillustrated.com.au/blog/nature/ask-us-how-do-lizards-survive-when-they-lose-their-tail/).
The only reason a creature would evolve this is if they *expect* to lose the extremity, as a means of defense against predators. For creatures which can't regenerate lost limbs and who would be permanently rendered less viable in a reproductive sense by the loss of the limb (eg. early humans), there'd be no reason to evolve a mechanism to survive the loss.
[Answer]
This already exists. Its the primary way for the body to distribute blood around to where it needs to by constricting and dilating bloodvessles. Most of the larger bloodvessles wont close completely for most people, but it is possible. I spoke to a man who had his hands cut off because he refused to kill other members of his village in a grisly recruitment drive for a local warlord. He stuck his stumps in the mud to stem the bleeding and after a while the bloodvessles had constricted enough for him to remove his arms and seek help (the blood had barely clotted, the wound was too big). The people of his village were murdered anyway so he had to seek a village without members of a warlord for help. Point is: given enough time your body is able to restrict even the (almost) largest bloodvessles in your body.
Why isnt this a more present evolutionary trait? Because similar to brain damage you were too unlikely to survive anyway and pass on your genes to your children. You have to survive the attack that ripped the bloodvessles open, survive the bleeding and lastly survive the infection. It exists for small bloodvessles for control of the amount of blood, but not in a very viable capacity for the biggest bloodvessles like the Aorta as they kinda need to be pumping constantly for you to survive. That said, you could call it an accidental evolutionary trait (arent they all?). For example some species have evolved to be able to drop their tail, which would include the closing off of the bloodvessles. If the tail has evolved away but the genes for the tail's bloodvessle constriction mutate to be active around other major bloodvessles you could have your tourniquet evolve naturally I suppose.
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[Question]
[
I'm writing a story where one of the main races is orca (killer whale) mer-folk. Being orcas need to breath oxygen from the surface so do they, this said they live in a halfly submerged cave...but it's a cave how do they see? I need a light source.
*- ive thought of fish that produce their own light but this doesn't seam to be available, orcas can only dive 250m and it appears no fish that produces its own light is that shallow.*
*- ive also thought of dinoflagellates (often thought to be a kind of algae) but I don't know how feasible they are in a cave system though.*
At the same time what would they use to sit on? I'd assume it would be some sort of living rock or a plant but I have no clue What fits that description.
[Answer]
**Cherenkov Radiation.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HjpoJ.png)
[https://www.studioalicino.it/en/page/čerenkov-light](https://www.studioalicino.it/en/page/%C4%8Derenkov-light)
I know, usually hard radiation and merpeople don't mix. That's why this is great! Bear with me...
Cherenkov radiation is produced by fast moving particles (usually electrons) in water. This phenomenon produces characteristic far blue / UV radiation which looks awesome. These merpeople are already in the water; check. And one would expect their eyesight to do best with far blue and UV frequencies which are the ones that penetrate water to greatest depth!
But where to get sources for Cherenkov radiation? They are not just lying around... or are they? Fortunately this is fantastic merpeople fiction!
Deep under the ocean, radon generated by natural radioactive decay accumulates. Sometimes these accumulations are trapped in metastable clathrate crystals which can survive being brought topside. The radioactive radon will produce blue Cherenkov radiation suitable for illuminating the cave for some time, gradually becoming dimmer as the radon is exhausted. The cave will be illuminated with indigo, violet and UV frequencies by eerie glowing crystals.
How to safely handle the glowing crystals? Probably with shielding, or tongs, or both. Or short exposure times. Old merpeople who specialize in finding and retrieving these crystals might have growths or cancers on their hands from a lifetime of exposure.
---
I like the idea that these crystals from deep ocean trenches are produced by life forms, which concentrate uranium salts via biology and live via radiobiology on the emissions produced. The crystals and their contents are made by life forms. The Cherenkov emissions are a byproduct. The merpeople know the crystals are alive, in the way that plants are alive, and treat them respectfully. Once the blue glow fades they bring the crystals back to the deep places where they were found, to regenerate themselves.
[Answer]
You don’t necessarily need a light source. Depending on how human-like you want these merfolk to be, you might consider giving them echolocation in addition to vision. [Toothed whales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation#Toothed_whales) (including orcas) already use echolocation to compensate for limited-visibility conditions underwater.
This could have some interesting cultural/psychological implications on your merfolk community as well. If they use biosonar for underwater communication as well as navigation within their cave, they could, for example, have two different languages - one for when they speak through the air, and one for when they speak underwater. Or they could have a single dual-purpose language with which they can communicate either above or underwater.
See also [this link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whale#Vocalizations), which describes orca vocalizations in greater detail.
[Answer]
[As Dyer said, echolocation might do in the dark](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/179553/21222). If you really want light, though, then they can drill holes to the floor above the cave, then at the bottom of each hole they can place some refractory material such as plastic - might illuminate the place as well as light bulbs by day.
If these merfolk have technology as advancednas our own, they may also use the kind of lamps we use in swimming pools. Otherwise they might trade with the sperm whale merfolk and maybe shark merfolk for the corpses of light producing fish from the abyss. From these they could extract luciferin and luciferase (call it glowfish juice for a primitive feel). Mix these on demand to get minutes to hours lf light in a cave.
Last but not least they might trade with land dwellers for elemental phosphorum. That thing can replace oxygen underwater for some really hot combustion (water kills fire because it doesn't hold as much free oxygen as our atmosphere, as well as being a heat sink). You can light some marine torches with it.
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I got a few more exotic ideas for light:
* [Chemiluminescence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemiluminescence) - they don't need the organism, just the chemicals. [Aequorin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aequorin) from a kind of Jellyfish might be a candidate, there is even a note about gene experiments to use the relevant genes to create glowing animals.
* [Sonoluminescence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence) - light from (very loud) sound. Apparently pistol shrimps manage to create flashes of light by (loudly) clapping. I could imagine a "clapping" device for such flashes.
* Heat - essentially underwater torches. There are mixtures such as [Thermite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite) that burn so hot they are not extinguished by water.
* Light guides, stationary though. There are low tech ways to guide light into dark places - such as [sunlight bottle lights](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/dec/23/sunlight-bulbs-plastic-bottles-light).
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I want to know is there a recreational drug that specifically affect reptiles, either natural or man made chemicals. Humans and if possible other animals species should not be affected by it even if they use or eat it, for example something like catnip or silver vine for cat.
I want a drug specifically for my reptilefolk or lizardfolk.
If possible include how to apply or use it and the effect or the side effect, since I do see some discussion in other sites about how a silver vine that is being used or snorted like meth by the catfolk species in someone's work is inaccurate.
And I've never used recreational drugs, so I don't know much about how to use them in general.
Usual or common recreational drugs for humans are out of the question.
Feel free to fix my grammar or edit the tags since I am not sure which tags are appropriate for this.
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**[2,4 dinitrophenol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol) and chemical endothermy**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4-Dinitrophenol>
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> In living cells, DNP acts as a proton ionophore, an
> agent that can shuttle protons (hydrogen cations) across biological
> membranes. It dissipates the proton gradient across mitochondria
> membranes, collapsing the proton motive force that the cell uses to
> produce most of its ATP chemical energy. Instead of producing ATP, the
> energy of the proton gradient is lost as heat.[3]… Although DNP is widely considered
> too dangerous for clinical use, its mechanism of action remains under
> investigation as a potential approach for treating obesity.[14] As of
> 2015, research is being conducted on uncoupling proteins naturally
> found in humans.[15]
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2,4 DNP raises metabolic rate. This is true for our species and I think all eukaryotes - [this study](https://journals.physiology.org/doi/pdf/10.1152/ajpregu.1999.277.1.R18) used it to investigate metabolism in diving turtles and it was long used as an herbicide so it works in plants. It was sold in the 1930s as a weight loss pill and it works. People still use it today to lose fat fast.
When people die from 2,4 DNP, it is from uncontrollable hyperthermia.
Your reptiles use it to free themselves from temperature dependent metabolism. By artificially revving up their metabolism they become hot, fast and smart. It is a great drug for an ectothermic reptile - and maybe an indispensable one for cold climates.
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# No but you could invent one
There has been research into this field but nothing definitive. [Mader's Reptile and Amphibian Medicine and Surgery](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mader_s_Reptile_and_Amphibian_Medicine_a/75h9DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA1172&printsec=frontcover&bsq=psychoactive) notes that "There are no safety or efficacy studies on the use of any psychoactive drugs for behavioral medicine treatment in reptiles." Later, Mader's offers a more detailed explanation.
>
> The role of monoamine neurotransmitters (among other
> neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and hormones, such as the
> melanophore-stimulating hormone) in emotional processes and behavior
> responses is still unclear for reptiles, making it difficult to make a
> case for the use of psychoactive medication for the class Reptilia at
> this time.
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This doesn't mean that such a drug *can't* exist. So feel free to invent it in your world.
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My idea involves an alien spaceship inside a roughly Earth to Mars sized/massed planet, but the whole planet is displaced when the drive is activated. If you wanted to travel back to our solar system but didn't want to destroy Earth or send it out of orbit, is there a temporary orbital path that wouldn't throw our solar system's orbital mechanics out of whack? A general idea would be sufficient. Ideally, it would:
1. Be close enough that 23rd century ships (specs to be decided but not super-tech) could fly back and forth in a time-frame of a few months.
2. Allow communication back and forth that was in hours or less (at least initially).
3. The closer and better matched the orbit, the shorter the duration of the orbit would need to be. (if we have to get weird and exotic, we could probably do a rendezvous between planets at the front end, then again after a year to 6 months.
4. We can have almost perfect control of the starting position of the planet as well as direction and velocity. However,it would be very hard to alter the trajectory of the planet once it arrived.
5. Once the story goal is achieved, the planet would be displaced to elsewhere and solar mechanics would need to be able to resume something close to normal orbits.
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Not that far, honestly.
## Newton's Law of Gravitation is Your Friend
$$F = \frac{G \* m\_1 \* m\_2}{d^2}$$
So the moon has a pretty substantial effect on the Earth, jostling us about as it whips around us. Its mass is $7.4 \* 10^{22} kg$, while Earth's mass is $6.0 \* 10^{24} kg$. We're about (on average) $3.8 \* 10^8 m$ from the moon, so plugging in the gravitational constant $6.67408 × 10^{-11}m^3kg^{-1}s^{-2}$, we get a force of approximately $2 \* 10^{20}N$.
Let's say we want a thousandth of that, or $2 \* 10^{17}N$. It seems like a lot of force, but given the mass of Earth, it really isn't. We're increasing the numerator by the ratio of the mass of earth to the mass of the moon (given your earth-mass spaceship), so a factor of ~81.2. We need only increase the distance by the square root of that, or a factor of ~9. So we drop the spaceship into an overtaking orbit inside Earth's which has a close approach of $3.4 \* 10^9m$.
That's 3.4 million km, compared to Earth's orbital radius of 149.6 Mkm. This planetship would then have an orbital period equal to earth's year times the cube of the ratio between their minor orbital axes, or approximately 93% that of ours.
If, then, the planetship is dropped in "behind" Earth in its year, the time it takes for it to overtake us substantially (and make travel less convenient) is going to be more than long enough for ships to go back and forth for a while.
The effect on Earth's orbit is going to be minimal, and on the rest of the solar system, likely impossible even to detect. If it sticks around for geologic time, you might want to find a safer place for it, but if it's only there for a little while, you may as well park it close.
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You said it was the **size** of a planet... but is it as **dense** as a planet? If the ship is a hollowed-out sphere (engines gotta fit somewhere, living space is useful, and no ship is going to be hauling around useless mass if it doesn’t need to), its mass may be far less than a planet and therefore able to get very close indeed. Take the gravitation equations in the other answer, but run them again with a body 1/10th the mass of Earth.
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The best option would be to put the planet into an orbit around the suns poles at 1 astronomical unit from the sun so that it only passed through the plane of the ecliptic twice a year, the planet would have an orbital period of 1 year like the Earth.
With careful timing and positioning each time the plane of the ecliptic was crossed the Earth could be on the other side of the sun and so far away from any significant influence.
Of course any object the size of the Earth would have an effect upon the orbit of the planets, but in the above configuration I believe the effect would be minimal and non disruptive on a temporary basis (years) although eventually there would be problems.
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**Background**
A large star makes a relatively close approach to a solar system like our own and the orbits of many of the planets are badly perturbed. A planet similar to Earth is in the wrong place at the wrong time and receives a particularly strong gravitational pull from the passing star that flings the planet out into interstellar space. Millions of years pass and by a strange coincidence this rogue planet blunders into another very similar solar system and is captured into an orbit that approximates to that from where it came from (strange but true for the purposes of this question).
Human explorers arrive in this new solar system shortly after the rogue Earth arrives. This rogue Earth is now starting to thaw but has not yet reached a stable thermal equilibrium as the process will take some time.
**Question**
How long after the capture of the rogue Earth before the human explorers can safely land on the planet, establish a base making use of local resources and how long before they can go outside without protective clothing?
Assume Current technology level plus what might reasonably be foreseen within the next few hundred years (quite a lot of scope).
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[Amount of water on Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_distribution_on_Earth) is estimated at 1.386 billion km³ - let's get rid of the decimals and take it at 1 billion km³. Means 109+9=18kg of water.
Let's take the average initial temperature at -200C, to account for some heating done by the planet's core and energy gained by various tidal sloshing happening during planet's braking and getting into the parking spot at destination.
Now, the specific heat capacity of water and ice are, respectively 4.187 kJ/kg*K and 2.108 kJ/kg*K with the heat of fusion for ice (which, in reverse, is how much heat you need to make a kg of ice to melt) is 333kJ/kg - yeap, no mistake there, those weak hydrogen bond forces that keep the water as a crystal surely pack a punch.
So, to melt that ice to 20C, you need:
* heat the ice to 0C - takes 200\*2.1\*1018kJ = 4.2e+20kJ
* melt the ice to water at 0C - takes 333\*1018kJ = 3.3e+20kJ
* heat the water to 20C - takes a puny 20\*4.187\*1018 kJ or about 8.3e+18 kJ. We're gonna neglect this.
Grand total, with a single decimal 7.5e+20 kJ.
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[Total solar irradiance upon Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Total_solar_irradiance_(TSI)_and_spectral_solar_irradiance_(SSI)_upon_Earth) - 1.365 kilowatts/sqm. Allowing some loss for reflection/scattering in the atmosphere, we get 1kW/sqm.
At a planet radius of 6300km (a wee smaller than the Earth), we get the planet's cross-section on the solar flux of 1.25e8 sqkm = 1.25e14sqm.
Let's assume the planet is painted as black as the space where it came from (boy, surely lotsa smoke there from those burning stars) and happily absorbs all the solar radiation (minus atmospheric losses).
With the above we get 1.25e14 kJ every second. To get to the total energy required to melt that cold ice and make luke warm water, is gonna take 7.5e20/1.25e14 = 6000000 seconds.
Which is to say, the planet cannot thaw in less than 70 Earth-days.
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Now, the things are a bit more complicated:
* the atmosphere won't kick in until the gases evaporate. Which may be a blessing and a curse, 'cause of course the planet is going to receive more energy without an atmosphere (10%-20% more), but is going to lose part of the energy by radiation at night
* there's no way all that ice is going to absorb all the energy, 'cause albedo
* there will be some ice that won't melt, around the planet's poles
* there's not only the water, but at least some 20 or so meters of soil would need to thaw as well
* once the equatorial areas are ice free, the energy is going to be absorbed faster and the atmosphere will distribute the heat towards the poles, accelerating the process...
* ... but with the water getting into the atmosphere, the clouds are gonna reflect more.
Let's say the thawing of the top soil amount for another 25% and, as we ignored over 0C temperature anyway, let's say the ice albedo allows only 5% of the energy to contribute to heating.
In this case we have 70d\*1.25/0.05 = 1750 Earth-days = 5 Earth-years to be considered as the new "lower limit, can't heat it faster".
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One on top of the other, feeling of guts, I'd say one should expect a no-longer-deep-space-frigid planet no sooner than somewhere in the 100-1000 Earth years as *order of magnitude*.
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**It may be a while before the planet becomes habitable**
[Snowball Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth) hypothesis posits that in the past there were periods when Earth was frozen all over. This is scientifically plausible. However, it is not clear how the Earth can recover from such overwhelming ice age. Even if it is staying in a comfortable orbit and receiving plenty of sunshine, ice and snow will reflect most of that sunshine back to space, and planet would remain frozen.
Current explanation for the eventual thawing is that greenhouse gases accumulate in planetary atmosphere over millions of years, eventually causing climate equilibrium to shift and glaciers to melt.
In the case of an Earth-like rogue planet it is unlikely that its atmosphere would contain an abundance of greenhouse gases. Technically it might contain a plenty of methane, for example, but then it won't be exactly Earth-like. So your humans may have to accept that the new planet would stay frozen for millennia. Another interesting opportunity is to induce global warming, so the process can be shortened to mere centuries.
But there are good news. After the planet is ejected from its original system, its atmosphere would be frozen and remain intact for many million years. This means that oxygen and ozone, if they were originally present, would be restored once the planet gets close to a star. You humans can land on this planet, and potentially breathe the air without masks - they only would have to dress warmly.
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Explorers equipped to travel between stars ought to have no problem *landing* safely on a surface at just a few Kelvins -- the hazards will be the same as they'd been landing on Kuiper belt type ice-ball objects that have never been warm.
Internal heat from the planet's core means that as long as it hasn't been wandering for *hundreds* of millions of years, the crust shouldn't be more than a few degrees cooler than usual by the time you're down a couple kilometers -- so it's only the top layers and oceans we have to worry about (the frozen-out atmosphere will sublimate in a matter of years once it's getting sunlight at habitable-zone rates). It will likely take centuries, at least, and possibly as much as hundreds of centuries, for the "dead zone" between the surface and the core-heated deeper crust to thaw, however. Ground water will be frozen long after the oceans have recovered (at least thermodynamically).
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What possible evolutionary reasons would there be for insects to increase their physical size over a long period? What benefits would be gained by an insect being *larger*? For example, say ants increases in size from today's size to the size of a football.
There is [another question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/159280/can-insects-evolve-their-basic-anatomy-to-grow-in-size) that asks *can* insects evolve to increase in size. I am asking for reasons *why* they would.
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Before asking why insects would grow bigger, a better question to ask would be why would anything grow bigger or smaller. A great answer for this can be found [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/47698/what-are-the-evolutionary-advantages-to-size).
Now from that link one will find that insects benefit from being small because it's just so beneficial for them - literally every answer on that list applies (except for hibernation and athleticism, I guess).
So then we can look at the food-web and ask ourselves what the role of insects are. So, insects like ants and such eat other insects, plants, fight other ants, and eat dead things (so they're scavengers and part of the decomposition process). If we zoom in on ants alone, ants are in many ways the #1 predators on the planet. They're not hunting down elephants, but as a species (or group of species) they kill more organisms than almost any other species in terms of variety and raw number (except maybe humans). As prey, insects are eaten by creatures larger than themselves, like birds, lizards, snakes, anteaters (who only seem to be interested in ants), and others.
So why would ants or any insects grow bigger? This could be due to a combination of a few of different reasons:
1. **Lack/Removal of predators**: One reason why insects could grow bigger is because nothing wants to kill them. Now, increasing in size is typically considered a good thing because you can ward of bigger prey, but being too small to see/aim at is also pretty beneficial. That's what most insects are now, but if nothing was eating insects, it is plausible that over millions of years insects would grow pretty big (check out ancient dragonflies). That isn't to say ALL insects would - most likely there would be a number of smaller insects that would be preyed upon by bigger insects. This already happens now, but now in your world the biggest insects are bigger than ever.
2. **Reduced reproductive rates**: I don't know what could cause this, but it's easier to have a million babies when all your babies are small. Insects typically have many eggs, and although not all eggs survive and hatch, enough do. If this reproductive rate of some insect species decreased suddenly and significantly enough, this could quickly make this species extinct as they'd be 'outbirthed' by rival species. Assuming that this decrease in births takes place gradually, a good way to get around the problems that come with this would be for said species to get bigger. This would hopefully also increase the successful birth of a given baby insect. If you have a million babies and only 10% survive, that's still 100k babies, so your species will probably be ok. If you have only 5 babies 10% survive, that's a concern. What could cause fewer births? If some insect species was the Bruce Lee of insect species and had a formidably high kill-rate per individual, there would probably be no reason for that species to outbirth other species. This could be a reason for why insects get bigger as well.
3. **Abundance of food**: Average human sizes in every country has gone up as food became more accessible. How does this relate to insects? Many insects are herbivorous. If for some reason we had a sudden increase in vegetation, allowing there to be more than enough food for insects, it is plausible that some species would grow in size. This could also mean that the predators of these insects could also grow bigger to effectively take on these large, ripped, vegetarians, or grow smaller to be able to effectively swarm larger prey.
I think that you'll have to combine multiple reasons to cause long-term size growth evolutionarily speaking. You can throw in a catastrophe here and there too. For research purposes, look up the Carboniferous period (swampy part of our history - all our coal comes from here) and the early Devonian period (this is when insects first came about). Let's not forget that both these periods had very different atmospheres - only 21% of our air is oxygen, as opposed to [30-35% back then](https://earthsky.org/earth/why-were-prehistoric-insects-so-huge). Also, depending on how much you hate them, consider eliminating birds. They were also a big reason why insects got smaller.
I hope this helps!
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First of all, keep in mind that without drastic changes in the atmospheric composition, insects won't grow much bigger than they are today, because oxygen availability practically limits their size.
That apart, an obvious reason for an insect to grow bigger is because it has to face bigger enemies. Say a wasp preys on flies. If some flies randomly happen to be bigger, they will be more difficult to be captured from the wasp. Therefore their genes would be more easily passed upon the next generation, making it bigger.
This would likely start an arm race, in which both sides try to outcompete the other.
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If being larger afforded an insect greater availability of food it would create an evolutionary pressure that favors larger insects. This pressure would be most present in times of food shortage, perhaps droughts or flooding.
Being larger could also make it favorable in terms of the insect being able to defend itself or its territory.
Evolution is fairly simply, if there is something that increases the odds of a specimen with that trait surviving and passing on its genetics it creates an evolutionary pressure that favors that trait. Heck, their size increase could be simply because the insect is highly selective during mating and prefers larger mates. We see this with peacocks, there is no advantage to having a large colorful tail aside from it being a preferred trait for mating.
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There are a lot of good details in other answers already, but I feel like no one has actually answered the real question here: **For what reason would insects grow in size over a long evolutionary period?**
As others have pointed out, if the atmosphere becomes more oxygenated, they could become football sized. The thing about insects is that they have passive respiratory systems. Rather than a heart and lungs, they absorb O2 through their exoskeletons and it diffuses to the rest of their body. The bigger the bug, the harder it is to get oxygen where they need it. This is the main reason why they cannot compete with other animals in terms of size and why they have evolved to such extremes in terms of reproduction and rapid life cycles so that their specieses can survive despite high attrition to predation by larger animals.
To increase the O2 saturation in the atmosphere you need a mechanism for sequestering low oxygen carbon compounds. In our own world's history, this happened in the Carboniferous period with the evolution of cellulose. With a chemical formula of (C6H10O5)n, cellulose has a lower oxygen to carbon/hydrogen ratio than the CO2 and H2O that plants consumed to make it. When plants first evolved cellulose, it was a great evolutionary advantage, but there were not decomposers yet that were able to metabolize it turning it back into CO2 and H2O so all the cellulose that plants made just got buried depriving the ecosystem of these molecules and dumping tons of unremovable waste O2 into the atmosphere over the course of millions of years until other organisms finally figured out how to digest the stuff.
Once oxygen is more prevalent, all the other evolutionary pressures already exist for insects to do better at larger sizes where they could better compete with avians, reptiles, and mammals.
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Being small offers many advantages to insects compared to bigger creatures like:
1) Less energy expenditure and more strength/speed: Insects can handle weight many times more than theirs, because they are small. If you just scale them up, that advantage is easily lost. Same goes for flying insects.
2) less food requirement: They expend less energy since they are so small and hence require less food
3) Immunity against external factors: If a building collapsed on you, or you encounter a rock-slide, an ant your size will most probably die, normal tiny ants wont since they would fit in the gaps. Remember smaller things can enter large places, not the other way around.
4) The forces of nature: At the size of insects, forces of nature behave very differently. Surface tension triumphs gravity, air resistence as well. Try throwing an elephant from burj khalifa and an ant, and you will know. Same goes for the lack of momentum, which makes conservation of momentum lot less threatening. If you were to undergo the same kind of aerial maneuvers as a fly (scaled accordingly), th G's will kill you.
So for evolution to make the bugs grow big, you need an environment that nullifies all these advantages of being small. Plenty of food and no predators are obvious answers. Low gravity and higher density fluid environment can also accomplish the same.
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There are many benefits to being large\*, that is why large size has evolved so many times. The real reason insects today are not large is because they can't get that big without drastically changing their anatomy, in particular their breathing mechanism which is very size limited. At larger sizes spiracle/[tracheal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_system_of_insects) breathing just can't exchange much oxygen because is is a largely passive system relying on diffusion. So insects of the size you want can't occur unless the oxygen content of the air is much higher. In the past when it was higher you got some [huge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganisoptera) insects.
The other thing you can do is has a them evolve some form a lung, like the branchiostegal lung of coconut crabs (which evolved from gills), it will not be that believable becasue it is a big change but it will at least make them possible.
\*including, better defence, better offense, better metabolic efficiency, better thermal efficiency, better ability to store resources, ect.
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As L. Dutch answered, the critical componant is more atmospheric oxygen. Insect's breath through a series of holes in their exoskeletons called "spiracles". Because of the square cubed law, "spiracles" cannot gather enough oxygen for the insect the size of a football to survive. It would get oxygen for sure, but it would not be efficient for biological functions to continue... and CO2 couldn't be vacated efficiently either... and anything that is expelled from a body usually causes health issues if it is allowed to remain.
That said, there was a point where insects the size of footballs not only existed, but were considered puny to average insect sizes of the time. The largest known insect ever was the Meganeuropsis permiana which lived 280-290 million years ago and was 28 inches long and 17 inches wide. This is also a period of time where the earth's atmosphere was at "peak oxygen" with the air containing 30% oxygen concentration (Today, Oxygen in Atmosphere is 20%).
This isn't just the reason for large bugs, but also why other animals such as dinosaurs were larger then animals today. In theory, any creature evolving in these conditions will also get significantly larger over time. That said, it will make for some trouble for humans specifically as we're reliant on fire for so many of our tools and cooking... the eras of peak oxygen were plagued by frequent and devastating wild fires that would make the ones we have today look tame by comparisons.
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Newborn humans are born in a very undeveloped stage compared to other mammals. This is because if they stayed any longer in the mother, their head would become too big to fit through the birth canal. However, the advent of artificial womb technology has brought many changes to human development. As well as freeing many women from risk and providing for safer delivery, it has also allowed for the extension of the gestation process. This has introduced what is known as a "4th trimester", with a growing fetus spending 12 months in the machine and being decanted later than traditionally.
How would this affect child development of a growing fetus, as well as parenting in general?
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**TL;DR: the effects of 4 trimesters are minimal, the effects of exowombs are large. I talk about the latter below the fold, if you cared**
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> How would this affect child development of a growing fetus
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Probably not a whole lot. Three months brings in some big changes relative to a newborn, but this will be dramatic stuff like "can support own head" and "can roll over".
The first requires sufficient strengthening of the neck muscles, which is presumably intrinsic in other species which can walk from birth, but it is quite possible that in humans muscle growth is left until the baby is on the outside to lower the nutritional demands on the mother. In the absence of those strengthened muscles you've still got a floppy baby just one with an even larger head that will require even stronger muscles to hold up.
So, genetic modification number one: boost muscle growth in the womb.
The second requires a certain amount of muscular co-ordination, probably the rudiments of balance, and the desire to actually roll around. Babies don't *have* to see and hear things to want to interact with them (congenitally blind and deaf children often have some developmental issues, but these don't have to be major). Adding rolling reflexes to a newborn is non-trivial. Obviously it can be made genetic (because other species can walk from birth, etc) but that sounds like quite a complex combination of genetic effects which may end up being harder to arrange than artificial wombs themselves.
Genetic modification number two: improve innate muscle control.
Everything else really requires exposure to the real world to stimulate brain development, gut flora development, balance, muscular control (unless you can fix that one) and so on.
Notably, your 4-trimester newborns will probably not be able to recognise the faces of their parents, unlike most regular children at the age of 3 months. This may or may not have developmental and bonding issues, but it will certainly have an effect on both the child and its parents.
*edit*: A comment above referenced placental breakdown... the organ isn't really designed to last longer than a regular pregnancy, so you *could* use your genetic engineering chops to improve its longevity. Practically though, you might just skip the need for placentas at all. They're designed to hook up with a regular womb (which your exowomb may not be) and to keep the two circulatory systems separate. You've only got one circulatory system to deal with, so you could just hook the foetus up to a combination [ECMO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygenation), [haemodialysis system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialysis) (and possibly an artificial liver; not sure on that) and suitable nutrient exchange membranes and avoid the disposable meat components entirely.
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Most of the interesting stuff is kinda secondary to the development itself, and are general potential benefits of exowombs.
It'd help the economy a little, because external child bearing would have little to no impact on the productivity of mothers right up to the decanting date. In fact, as they'd be under far fewer restrictions to their activities, they'd probably spend more as well as do more.
It'd have substantial health benefits of many kinds, because medical treatments for pregnant mothers are *very* limited, because no-one is prepared to take the ethical gamble of experimenting on them (everyone remembers thalidomide, right?). No restrictions on pharmaceuticals (up until the end, assuming they're going to breastfeed) and no restrictions on scanning techniques (because the foetus is in a separate warehouse, well away from the source of radiation).
Many early and indeed later developmental and physiological issues in children are associated with the health and nutrition of the pregnant mother, and those issues will go away. No non-genetic diseases can be spread to the child during the "pregnancy". Nutrition will always be perfect. It will be easy to supply minimum and safe amounts of common allergens (like peanut metabolites) which is believed to reduce the chance of developing fatal allergies later in life.
Pre-birth developmental issues will be easier to spot, because the scanning techniques don't need to deal with the problem of the mother being over the top. You might even be able to make visible light observation of the foetus routine if you wanted and it turned out to be useful. It might even be practical to do pre-birth surgery to deal with some problems like cleft palates and so on.
Childbirth will obviously be safer for all concerns. Maternal mortality will be zero, and the child is very unlikely to have problems due to birthing complications (it'll be a like a breadmaker, right? It goes ding, you open the lid and empty the contents out. Easy.)
There's some talk about exposure to vaginal secretions during birth being important for priming gut bacteria or dealing with immune issues in later life; if that turns out to be true I bet you can replicate the effect with a spoonful of carefully cultured yoghurt applied at decanting time. It certainly beats the possible negative effects of exposure to harmful microorganisms on the way out.
Vat-born children therefore have a good chance of being healthier than their peers (all else being equal), something that the traditional-birth-is-the-best nobility of your previous question would do well to remember.
Women who never give birth tend to have a *different* range of health risks in later live to mothers, but that's a separate issue. Avoiding the very real range of potentially serious, debilitating and long-lasting complications of pregnancy and childbirth is likely to make women opting for the exowomb approach healthier and happier too... again, something that your previous question's noblewomen might do well to remember.
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> as well as parenting in general?
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It'd be a lot more appealing for people who didn't want to have a living organism burst out of their body, *Aliens* style.
Some people might worry about "bonding" with the baby, but to be honest... fathers can cope OK bonding with a child they haven't carried, and not all mothers bond with a child they did carry.
An extra three months isn't a big difference otherwise.
If the exowomb is fixed (in the sense of "immobile") then some of the standard ways of comforting a baby (like jiggling them up and down gently, or holding them and walking around) may well be less effective or entirely ineffective. This could be bad news for anyone who likes their sleep.
It is possible that the availability of exowombs will *increase* the number of children, because it will remove a number of issues associated with infertility, it removes the health risks of additional births, and it allows couples and indeed single people who wouldn't otherwise be able to produce a child naturally to have children. Lots of social issues to think about!
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Physically, the child might probably be born looking like a regular three--months old baby.
Development of children does not stop after they are born. For example, the cranium of a newborn is soft at the top. The top of the cranium usually stops hardening at around 18 months of age for most babies.
Prolonging the time in a womb would mean development would continue in the machine.
I don't know about psychological effects, though. The contact between a child and the mother is critical for development. That's the basis for a lot of stuff that freudian psychanalysis tries to unpack. It may be that the vat children have a tendency towards some personality trait, but since we do not have humans being born out of vats nowadays anything is a guess. For an educated guess, you may do some research on whether premature children are predisposed towards some psychological trait.
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As for how society would deal with it, it would probably follow the same stigmas as in vitro fertilisation, adoption and cloning.
The most orthodox religions would call it a mortal sin for a few years and, in an ironical moment of agreement with atheists, declare that such babies have no soul. That happened to Louise Brown, the first tedt tube baby, and some quick googling shows people are discussing whether she has a soul to this day.
Once the technology becomes commonplace, though, objections will cease. If you combine this with your previous questions on vat babies, there is potential for all kinds of dystopia. Think of the country of Gilead from the Handmaid's Tale if they had access to this technology.
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Future doesn't have to be bleak, though. There are some good sci-i books in which almost everybody is a vat child, and the world is not (too) dystopic because of that.
In *The Forever War*, humanity chooses to go this way to control birth rates and avoid overpopulation.
In *Dancing With Eternity*, everyone is birthed in a vat and belongs to one company or another for a few years until they pay the costs of their birth, and then they are free. Due to the world veing a post-scarcity one, everybody lives in relative abundance, and they are all immortal and happy.
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Where to start...
**Plasticity of the brain**
Small children have periods in their life when they have a sensitivity to learn certain things. For example, its harder to a human over 5 years old to learn a new language perfectly, but it has been shown that a child adopted to another country during infancy will even in adulthood learn the language of their original country more easily. This sensitivity becomes more pronounced around the age of 40 weeks from gestation. When a newborn comes in contact with its environment, its brain blooms in activity. It looks in its mothers eyes, listens to its parent’s voices, suckles milk for the first time, sees a ball bounce of a surface, and every second 2 million synaptic connections are formed in its brain. It starts to move its limbs, realises it can control them, brings things to his mouth and starts on a path of becoming a fully functioning human.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lMdTd.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4Qcr.png)
The most emotionally sensitive time is from 10 to 18 months. It is all a chain of events comprising of necessary steps to form a psycho-socially mature brain. This goes way beyond the timeline we are talking about, but as you can see from the first picture, in the beginning too many synapses form, and when the child grows, some of them are eliminated by apoptosis. This very important to form functional complexes on the brain cortex.
**Psychological development of a baby**
The psychological development of a human starts while it’s still in the womb. The mothers health, nutrition, stress level and other external things can affect the baby. In combination with genetic factors, they can start to form the future human’s character, temperament and self-control.
Since a baby can sense a lot during the third trimester, babies can recognise their mothers just hours after birth, if the mothers has looked and talked at the baby during these first hours. This means that the baby starts to bond even before birth. Newborns are capable and willing to communicate, any parent would know. They imitate, draw parents in with their crying and even prematurely born babies can have logical communication sequencies of mutual sound-making with their parents. These emotional connections gives the baby a ton of cognitive and social information that develop their brains, especially the limbic system that regulates emotions and mood. Early relationships have a huge impact on the development of a child’s social skills.
(Slightly off topic, but the saddest thing I have learnt about pediatrics is that when assessing why a child is falling behind in growth, after ruling out obvious reasons in nutrition and else you must also remember lack of love. Emotional deprivation can cause a child to stop growing. Luckily they catch up if they are moved to a fulfilling environment, but the cases I've heard of break my heart.)
**Other points**
Immunology: Immunoglobulins are passed on from mother to fetus through the placenta, and a newborn is protected from some pathogens due to this. Also going through the birth canal gives diversity to baby's bacterial flora compared to babies born by a caesarean section.
Breastfeeding: When possible, it is still the healthier choice for a baby. With advancement of technology a artificial human milk could be made, but it requires personalised antibodies (see previous point).
Prenatal development: auditory organs are formed at 26 weeks, and it is thought that language development starts in the womb. Artificial wombs should give outside stimuli to the developing baby even if they were decanted at 9 months.
Placental degradation: Placentas are partly formed by mother’s uteral lining and partly by the developing embryo. Forming of the embryos side of the placenta is a hugely important step in early development and cell placement, so I don’t know how you could eliminate that, even if the artificial womb formed the mother’s side of the plancenta. As others have answered, placental degradation becomes an issue around term, and even at just 42 weeks fetal distress becomes quite common, as the placenta’s function starts to slow down.
Nutrition: How much nutrition is a fully formed baby in suspension supposed to get? Should it grow at the same rate as it would if it was born or should it continue on fetal development? Without a functioning gastrointestinal system, the fetus is still relying on its placenta and umbilical cord arteries to get needed nutrition: glucose, free amino acids and some whole peptides, fatty acids, ions, vitamins. In the 9th month a fetus gains 7 grams of fat per day. I don't know for how long a umbilical cord stands that.
**To recap:**
Depraving babies from external stimuli for extra 3 mo might cause
* lack of motor skills, maybe incapability to walk or at least poor hand eye coordination, balance, agility and comprehension of perception (?), since the window for most active sensorimotor development is around 9 months from gestation
* slowing down of development of speaking and persisting linguistic understanding problems, due to not hearing speech
* poor emotional control, inability to form mutual relationships, general lack of social skills due to lack of love :(
So yes, humans have evolved to give birth to immature babies, but the human baby-brains have evolved to use all the external stimuli starting from the early days to form **the most complex network in the universe**. You are proposing to disturb this intricate balance of too many synapses forming and later them being pruned, by removing three months worth of interaction with external stimuli in the most crucial period of synapses forming. Who the hell knows what kind of creatures you get, could they ever catch up?
Which came first, human sentience and intelligence or bipedal humans incapable of giving birth to independently functional progeny? I’d guess the latter.
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Small sidenote, not something you asked, but relating to it and something you would want to consider in your story. **How on earth** would this technology come to be used? What kind of a researcher or medical professional in their right mind would start to suggest this? Maternal mortality in my developed country is one of the lowest in the world, 3/100 000, and there is a lot to be done to make it lower. Harvesting oocytes is never going to be risk-free either. Developing this artificial womb technology requires countless of human embryos. Which ethical board is going to give permission for that? What will the consensus reached on abortion be? These questions might seem like opinions, but having seen a glimpse of the medical research community, you need something really huge to threaten childbirth to justify this paradigm shift.
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I apologise that my tone comes of as a bit aggressive at some points. :D I get worked up when people treat pregnancy and giving birth as some kind of a medical emergency instead of as the completely natural occurrence that it is. Maybe its the shock of witnessing childbirth, or maybe I have lately seen too many babies.
For reference I have mostly used books on pediatrics, pediatric psychiatry and neurology in my obscure maternal language.
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I think that your vat-grown children might be significantly larger than natural born children, and might require some sort of pharmacopeia to keep them somnolent during their final days or weeks of gestation.
This is my reasoning, your vat-grown kids wouldn’t be constrained by the amount of nutrients their mother could supply. So they’d grow larger with more development.
The increased development would apply to their brains. They’d physically mature but lack sensory stimulation. The skull and brain would be larger at 12 months. But, would this mean they come out of the womb eager for exploring the world or would they be like an infant that hasn’t been touched for 3 mos — physically healthy but mental experience abandonment and isolation. If the exowombs provided the required intimacy and stimulation, then I think they’d be more advanced and pre-bonded with their mothers, would start learning at accelerated rates.
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My world is medieval-ish in terms of technology level. While there is magic, it's not at all enchantment-like so any armor should be able to be naturally produced.
In this world is a humanoid snake race. So they mostly have the body of snake, but with arms. They also have a frill like that of a frilled lizard. (Though I don't suspect that'll be too impactful on the answer.)
So what I'm wondering is what kind of armor they could wear. My initial thoughts were for them to be able to wear a chainmail of sorts. The big issue though I'm thinking with that is that it would interfere with their ability to move given that snakes move by pushing off of what they're touching, so if they had a bunch of chainmail, they'd have to push off the chainmail to move and in doing so, get out of the chainmail. Other types of armor like plate, brigandine, and gambeson would also seem to have this issue.
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While metal armors are the strongest they haven't seen that much use. Even during the musket era's where metalworking was much cheaper the metal would mainly be for the torso and the rest would use things like leather.
Leather armor would suit your snakes well. It's tough but relatively flexible compared to metal. Non-movie leather armor was made out of boiled or otherwise thick and hard leather, and either in laminar form, an inflexible sleeveless jacket or plate armor. The laminar form seems best suited, as it is similar to scale armor with all the leather bound together into a flexible clothing of your choice.
You'd drape it over the snake bits but have nothing underneath the belly, since that will be on the ground anyway. The armor can be made a bit too large, so that a small flap (say 1cm) drags across the ground. This means the sides remain covered when twisting and turning. With small weights close to the ends of the armor it can be ensured the armor doesn't blow off similar to a tablecloth. To prevent the armor from falling off it's attached near the arms and the last bit of the tail section. Should the snake often be upright it can also have armor at its belly.
The type of materials can change, but a laminar/scale setup that is draped over the top seems paramount. If the snake often switches between crawling over the ground with its entire body and then with part of himself raised you cannot armor the belly, and a large shield is going to be required for any fighting to protect it similar to certain ancient groups who would forgo armor in favor of lighter weight and a large shield (say, Spartans).
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It appears you are talking about a Naga (which for me is a basically a person's upper body with the lower body of a snake).
The armor of a Naga is going to end up similar to that of crocodiles or alligators. Thicker armor on the top of their tail with the underbelly exposed to the ground (to allow them to move naturally). This is because their belly is constantly sliding against the ground. If it was armored, it would wear down fairly quickly and produce a large racket while you're at it, so it's better to keep their skin exposed.
For Upper body armor, you could go with traditional metal armor, but chain mail or leather would be more likely, as you don't want your Naga to be too top heavy and have to resort on slithering with their Torso on the ground.
The Major exposed point would be where their underbelly combines into a human stomach, as that is a huge portion of soft exposed skin. To counteract this, you would likely have different armor coverage, to suit either fast moving, close to the ground Nagas and slower moving tall standing Nagas.
TL:DR? Armor sits on the top and leaves the bottom exposed. Too many scratches if it doesn't.
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So you're looking at realistic armor for a naga like being. Your main problem is locomotion, your tail portion is hard to armor because it's hard to armor your flexible appendages.
Think about your human hands and feet. Your feet need some flexibility to gain a good footing and your hands... well you don't really armor the inside of your hands ever. Your naga has the same problems, they need their tail flexible to move. This severely limits your options for protection.
You could armor your tail but it will need a custom fit for mobility. You don't want your warriors to trip while moving. It will need a way to grip the floor. Basically if you cover the belly of a snake with something smooth they can't move. They fail to gain traction, chainmail doesn't provide proper traction. I doubt leather will either, you need something with some curved or slanted spikes. Or perhaps big ridges that function like the legs on a caterpillar.
Regardless you're making something that actively fights your wearer. It would be far easier and logical for the nagas to develop fighting styles that work around their lack of armor.
Ignoring the tail nagas can wear about anything regular humans would. Maybe they prefer shorter cuirasses but cuirasses tend to be far shorter then you imagine anyway. Soldiers like the ability to sit, either on a horse or a chair. Check out the Greek [linothorax](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e0/b8/79/e0b8794c09bbd20b75ec9c783406e83c.jpg) for a short cuirass, especially the thigh 'flaps'.
When a culture goes light on armor they tend to favor shields by the way. Shields are an amazing piece of armor. Making a basic shield is easy, replacing them can be cheap. After a helmet they should probably be your go to piece of armor you want to get your hands on.
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Note: As my answer is very long, I have a concluding paragraph at the end.
I’m going to assume this Naga is more snake than human, meaning they have snake’s head and lower body with an human-like upper body. I will assume they are about 18 foot long with 6 foot standing upright and weigh about 1000 lbs
I feel they would be like Roman Legionaries. They did not wear much leg protection due to their style of combat. Instead of trying to armour the lower body, only the upper third or so of the Naga’s body would be armoured (the upper third as snakes can move just as fast with 2/3rds of their body on the ground as they can with 3/3rds and im assuming Naga can too). So then Naga would wear armour similar to what we’ve seen on humans in history on their upper half with their lower half completely bear.
Whilst it may seem like a huge weakness to have 2/3rds if their body exposed, their style of combat can accommodate for that. Below is a video detailing how Naga might fight in combat: <https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2uVRKKdIYLI>
Naga would use large rectangular shields that protect their body, reducing the need to armour their lower half. In a battle field, they would be in a large shield wall so it would be almost impossible to get around their shield to attack their exposed lower body. In a duel, the Naga has a lot of manoeuvrability so can keep the shield in front if their opponent. They could also coil their lower body up, reducing the amount of area they’d have to protect.
I would suggest some kind of metal armour (full plate, brigandine, coat of plates, lamellar) but it depends on the look you want to portray.
Snakes often loom (stand their upper body straight up off the ground) and expand their hood, if they have one, in an attempt to look bigger and more intimidating. I would incorporate this idea by having large shoulders (like Italian full steel plate armour). You could do what rich Ancient Greeks did, having muscles built into the armour. There could be a chain mail coif with additional pieces on either side to mimic a snake’s hood or the frills you mentioned (note though that, unlike many images you find on google, historical mail coifs had padding underneath them)
In regards to helmets and armour, something to note is female Naga would not have breasts, these are mammalian features. A female Naga would be flat chested so ‘boob plate’ armour (fantasy steel plate armour with defined breasts) would not develop in their society (not that it would be necessary, there is already space between armour and the body. Boob plate is similar to a Muscle Cuirass. It is slightly less effective if it dips in the middle of the chest but not significantly so).
In my world, sexual dimorphism is shown in the heads and body shape. Female Naga bodies are usually smaller and narrower than the male’s and have less broad shoulders. This is similar to male and female humans so I won’t go into this much further. Instead, the more interesting feature is in the heads. My male Naga have oval-shaped heads like this: 0 where as females have more triangular heads like this: /\ I based these shapes on the differences between venomous and non-venomous snake heads and art work I saw. This means that Nagas may have helmets that are shaped significantly differently depending on the gender of the wearer. This is just something that you may want to consider for aesthetics, both in and out of armour. Having different shaped heads makes it easy to instantly tell apart males and females without giving them “feminine” features found in humans, such as breasts and long hair.
To conclude, Naga would likely have armoured upper bodies with completely exposed lower bodies but have a large shield to compensate. Their armour would probably be metal based (full plate, coat of plates, brigandine, lamalar, etc) with large shoulders and a mail coif that looks like a cobra’s hood. The physical shape of the armour would be made to fit with an individual Naga’s body shape with females typically being smaller and more slender and with female helmets being more triangular and male helmets being more ovular. I hope this answers any questions you have and any questions that you might not of thought about.
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As an alternative to my previous answer, I would suggest armouring the tail in scale mail. Being made up of a series of small plates, it would allow for very easy movement, like chain mail. If traction and locomotion are the issues, mimicking the Naga’s natural scales could allow it the traction it needs to move. This is because the small overlapping scales could allow for a rougher texture and more surface area than chain mail or gambeson. To further increase the traction, bumps and creases could be added to the individual scales, allowing them to function like the treads on the soles of shoes. Plus, there is the aesthetic appeal of scale mail being thematically similar to a snake’s skin.
A further option is to have a skirt of sorts. An exceptionally long gambeson or chain mail shirt would hang down from the Naga’s torso, almost touching the floor, providing protection for all of the front and sides of the body. Then, to protect the tail, a large U shaped piece could be sewn onto the Naga’s long gambeson. This piece would be a several feet long but would not cover the whole body. The reason being it would be unnecessary to as a weapon would not extend past the Naga by more than a few feet. You would not be able to reach any further without being in grappling range with the Naga. If you are, it would easily be able to overpower you with its weight (about 1000 lbs) and sink either a blade or its teeth into your neck. It's the same kind of logic in long sword fighting, you could wear heavy calf protection, but you are unlikely to be hit there so there is little point to. Plus, in order to reach its tail, you’d have to ignore far better options for ending the fight, such as a dagger to the neck or armpit.
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The time... a few years from now. On the laser-launch pad of one of the spacefaring nations of Earth, a spacecraft stands, the time until its launch counting down steadily. The launch vehicle weighs 1300 tons but on top there is only a satellite. A *big* satellite, weighing in at 100 metric tons.
The agency that launches it claims that it is part of an unmanned station intended to study gravity away from the perterbing effects of Earth and its restless crust. However, this is a lie...
The satellite is launched, and takes its place in the sky in a high-earth polar orbit, above geostationary orbit level. Once there, it joins 79 fellow satellites that have previously docked with each other, and docks, forming the last piece of an 8,000 metric ton assembly, the whole codenamed "Olympus". There Olympus stays, seemingly inert save for regular encrypted communication with the launching agency, and occasional orbital corrections.
Then the time comes for the government that launched it to demonstrate its true purpose. An encoded message is sent and received, and the Olympus swings into action.
Until that moment, its internals were protected from the vacuum of space inside sealed capsules filled with an inert gas, and protected from the cold of space by heaters powered by the satellite's solar panels. On receiving the command to begin preparations, the protective atmosphere is vented gently, so as to avoid perterbing Olympus' orbit, and the internal mechanism begins its work.
Olympus is designed to do just one thing... that being to assemble its depleted uranium payload, launched as a collection of long rods. The machinery grabs a depleted uranium rod around an inch thick\* from its launch cradle, moves it into place, and then another part of the mechanism pushes it almost all the way out of the bottom of the satellite and holds it in place while the first part grabs another rod and screws the thread on its tip into the threaded socket on the back of the previous rod, then pushes the now-longer rod down yet further, and repeats the process, like roughnecks on an oil rig assembling an oil drill shaft.
As each part is screwed together, special pin catches snap together as the male and female threads close, ensuring perfect alignment of the parts, and also preventing inadvertent unthreading. This process continues until it has constructed a depleted uranium rod seven thousand metres long, though also having fins, guidance packages, gyros and monopropellant thrusters on every segment.
The seven kilometre long, 3600 metric ton rod remains attached to Olympus while Olympus reports the completion of its payload construction, which has already been named "Hephestus".
Back on Earth, the leaders of the nation that launched it are informed of the readiness of Olympus and Hephestus. Were they to say 'No', Hephestus would be disassembled and put back into storage, and Olympus' compartments sealed and flooded with inert gas once more, though there would be only a few times that this could be done before the gas ran out, and the mechanims would be at risk of vacuum-welding themselves into a useless lump of junk.
However, the leaders are resolute, and the order is given for Hephestus to be cast down from Olympus... with a specific destination for its fall.
Once released, Hephestus awaits the proper moment, and its multitude of thrusters fire, beginning its descent from orbit. Lasers in each guidance package both communicate with the other rod segments and inform each other of the way Hephestus as a whole is aligned. Any wobbles or bends are gently coaxed back into perfect straightness by varying the thruster output or using the guidance packages' internal gyros, while Hephestus falls to earth.
47 minutes and 36 seconds after Hephestus began its fall, it impacts with the earth, its fins and guidance packages ensuring that it finishes its descent through the atmosphere perfectly vertically and straight, at a velocity of 28 kilometers per second, in the middle of the capital of an enemy nation, though several hundred metres from the capital building that had been targeted.
When Hephestus touches the ground, all of the extraneous equipment on its surface has already been ablated away by its rapid passage through the atmosphere. It takes a little over a quarter of a second from the moment of its impact to the moment it vanishes beneath the earth's surface, but it has not stopped, its momentum carrying it downward through the granite bedrock beneath the enemy capital, which is some 30 kilometers thick just there.
Newton's impact depth approximation states that impact depth is approximately equal to the length of the projectile multiplied by projectile density and divided by target density.
Depleted uranium has a density of 19.1 grams per cubic centimeter, and granite has an average density of around 2.7 grams per cubic centimeter, which means that Hephestus will pass through around 49.5 kilometers of the earth's continental crust before coming to rest.
However, beneath the continental crust is a denser layer of crust about 18 kilometers down, with a density of around 2.9 grams per cubic centimeter, however Hephestus passes through the entire 30 kilometers of crust and continues on to travel some 15 or so kilometers into the yet denser mantle, which has a density of around 3.3 grams per cubic centimeter.
Hephestus' total impact energy is around 1.4x10^15 or 1.4 quadrillion Joules.
Given this background, the question is in two parts:
1. What would the immediate effects of the impact of Hephestus be on the city surrounding its point of impact?
2. Considering that 3600 metric tons of depleted uranium has just penetrated all 30 kilometers of the earth's crust and has traveled a further 15 kilometers into the mantle, delivering 1.4x10^15J of energy, is it reasonable to suppose that a volcanic eruption would occur at that point, and if so, how long would it take after impact to occur, and how destructive might it be? I.e. would this setup be able to cause a destructive volcanic eruption on demand?
### Clarifications
To address some of the issues raised, and clarify just what I'm asking:
* Considering the earth's rotation, as mentioned by dhinson919, Hephestus would descend 'vertically' taking the earth's rotation into consideration. This would mean that it would not descend 'perfectly' vertically, but would descend at an angle, possibly following a slight curve so that *all of its momentum would be directed along its lengt*h, and minimising any lateral momentum.
* As Molot has suggested, Olympus would be better placed in a highly elliptical precessing orbit with altitudes ranging from LEO to HEO. This means that Hephestus can retain the energy advantage afforded by a high orbit, yet rely upon small thrusters and the movable fins attached to the guidance packages on each rod segment to achieve re-entry.
* My calculations are based on a DU rod 7km long, and nominally 1 inch (2.54 cm) in diameter, however in actuality its cross-section would be more like a star 10cm or so wide, so that the ribs would stiffen the whole structure, though buckling would be minimised initially by active thrusting and fin manipulation. However, for the purposes of Newton's impact depth approximation, the cross-sectional shape is largely irrelevant, since at the velocities I am describing, all substances will behave like fluids regardless of their temperature.
* Sava predicts that Hephestus will burn up in the atmosphere. While Depleted Uranium does not have heats of fusion and vaporisation as high as those of water, it has a higher specific heat than water, meaning that it takes more energy to raise the temperature of a quantity of Uranium one degree than it would take to increase the equivalent mass of water by one degree. I don't deny that the tip of Hephestus would become hot enough to vaporise the Uranium there, however, between the shock-wave and Uranium's thermal conductivity, only a little of the tip is likely to be ablated. The earth's atmosphere is reckoned to be equivalent to ten metres of water, and there is no way that Hephestus descending vertically would be completely vaporised in the atmosphere. Descending sideways is another thing entirely, but that isn't my scenario.
* On reaching the ground, *effectively* perfectly vertically, taking into account gravity, the earth's rotation, and passage through the atmosphere, the entirety of Hephestus has a very high downward momentum. The impact likely occurs at a velocity higher than *the speed of sound in Uranium*, so pressure on the tip would be unable to cause buckling, as there simply wouldn't be sufficient time in which asymmetrical deceleration forces applied at the tip could propagate upwards to cause any significant buckling. Buckling during the extra-atmospheric descent, I can believe, and I have allowed for corrective mechanisms.
* As Hephestus descends into the ground, the depleted Uranium of its body will be heated to melting point, then to boiling point by the friction of its downward passage, however, regardless of the temperature of the Uranium atoms, each will still have a significant momentum that will carry them onward until cumulative impacts with stationary atoms of the earth's crust serves to alter their trajectory or reduce their velocity, and the stationary atoms which do that won't *remain* stationary, as the Uranium's momentum will be transferred to them in the form of heat and momentum.
* It is probably easiest to understand this scenario using the analogy of a railway train wreck, and at this velocity, one where all of the railway cars become uncoupled before the train leaves the track. Each car in the train has its own mass and momentum, and the deflection of the locomotive or some car further toward the front of the train has little effect on the path each car will take, save where impacts between cars occur. Each car may be deflected, but will still continue on in roughly the same direction as the rest of the cars. The wreckage and its collateral damage will take the approximate form of the bell of a trumpet.
* HEAP (High Explosive Armour Piercing) projectiles use this same principle - explosives compress a (usually Tantalum) cone into a molten jet of metal which is typically directed at the armour of some vehicle. I had considered making Hephestus from Tantalum and/or Osmium, but the cost and availability of both really *would* be prohibitive.
* Sava does make a good point that 10% may be too low a percentage of Olympus for non-payload mechanisms. However, with a laser launch system, the initial cost for the lasers is very high, but the system is reusable and payloads become cheap to orbit when the cost of the launch system is divided across all of the payloads it launches. So it is of little concern if a few more launches need to be made, or even if twice as many are necessary. However, that point is irrelevant to my actual questions.
* Olympus is designed and stocked so that each rod segment can be launched independently (against soft targets) or in shorter combintions
My analysis indicates that if Hephestus can be made to strike into the earth's crust as described, it *will* perform as I have written. What I am unsure of is:
1. **What the immediate effects of a very long but very narrow hyper-velocity rod spearing into the ground will be on the city around the impact point. How close to ground zero could a camera be and survive to transmit what it sees? How close could a human be to ground zero and survive to tell the tale - short-term and/or long-term?**
And,
2. **If using a Depleted Uranium rod carrying 1.4x10^15 J of energy and punching a hole the full depth of the earth's crust plus another 15 kilometers into the mantle really is going to trigger a volcano, and if it *does*, what the nature of the eruption will be, and how long the eruption might continue.**
My feeling is that it *will* cause a volcano, that while the entry hole may well be quite small, probably around 20 cm or so wide initially (wider than Hephestus due to vaporised rock and Uranium gases escaping through it), it will gradually become wider as the Uranium column begins to disperse as it passes through the rock, until it is significantly wider at the Mohorovicic discontinuity - how *much* wider, I don't know, possibly as little as a few metres, possibly as much as a few *hundred* metres. I expect the liquid mantle below the impact path through the crust will be significantly agitated and shocked from the supersonic impact, and I don't believe that *only* the impact energy that reaches the mantle will contribute to what happens next.
I don't think that this would be like a volcano that occurs when magma finds its way up through fissures in the crust, accumulates in a chamber in the crust, then erupts as magma finds its way up to the surface, since the magma - which would probably be even hotter, under greater pressure, and less viscous than usual - would have a clear, straight funnel leading directly to the surface.
### Further Clarification
This question has *never* been about the feasibility or economics of launching and assembling Olympus, or Hephestus descending to earth and penetrating through the earth's crust and into the mantle as I have described. Respondents should address their answers to the questions that I have asked with respect to this scenario:
* How near to Hephestus impact point could artificial and human observers be and remain uninjured (discounting any potential ingestion of Uranium)?
* Could a narrow hole punched through the Earth's crust and into the mantle in the manner I have described result in an artificial volcano, would some other geological phenomenon result, or would nothing significant occur?
[Answer]
Let's take a look at some facts about space flight as of today:
* The completed International Space Station weighs about 450 tons and cost 150 billions USD to build, shared between many countries and over more than a decade. The US, one of the richest nation of today's if not the richest, couldn't have built it alone,
* Sending 1 kg of matter into space will cost you about 10.000 USD,
* Trying to gather that much uranium and launch it into orbit would undoubtedly be noticed by many agencies from many nations who are keeping a close watch on radioactive material,
* Sending radioactive materials into space or into orbit is heavily frowned upon by almost everyone due to the potential risks if something goes wrong. Imagine that the rocket explodes on the launch pad or at low altitude for some reason, it will be spreading radioactive materials all over the area, poisoning it for a long time.
* Given how science is underfunded at the moment and has to come up with creative ways to continue to perform their experiments in space, miniaturizing everything they can to save on the cost on sending anything up in space, nobody would believe the explanation.
In summary, this idea is unrealistic and unfeasible. It would bankrupt the nation who tried to it early during preparation, and have the whole of Earth bear down upon them once news leaks out to other governments, and it would leak out one way or another.
Adding some remarks on the technical side of things:
* The 7km long rod of depleted uranium that has been dropped on the unsuspecting capital isn't a needle threading through cloth. It will not slice unimpeded through the atmosphere and manage to reach a depth of 45km before stopping it's course.
The formula from Newton that you used does not take into account atmospheric friction upon reentry and travel from orbit to the ground, nor does it takes into account the fact that, upon touching the ground, part of the momentum of the rod will be converted into energy and create an explosion that will vaporize part of the ground and part of the rod itself.
Then, what's more likely to happen is that your rod will turn itself into dust while digging a crater a few hundred meters deep and wide. Much like what happens to the plane in those [crash-test videos](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb79or) when they test the resistance of the walls for nuclear energy facilities.
* As AlexP pointed out in a comment, 1.4 quadrillion Joules is 330 kilotons equivalent TNT. According to [Nukemap](https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/), an explosion of this yield would create a crater approximately 60 meter deep and 500 meters in diameter from lip to lip. That's approximately the diameter of the Pentagon building in Washington.
That would completely destroy the buildings at the point of impact, and create massive damages to anything nearby. But it wouldn't eradicate the city. I would expect to see windows shattered for several kilometers, a minor earthquake upon impact due to the relative speed and a cloud of dust and debris over part of the city, but nothing that couldn't be handled by the local authorities.
A few hundreds or thousands of fatalities, depending on where and when the rod impacts, and dozens of thousands of wounded since this is the enemy capital after all, with wounds ranging from life threatening, like debris falling on the people closest to the impact point for example, to much lighter, like dizziness or damaged eardrums for people further away who got caught in the air blast following the explosion.
So, no, it wouldn't be able to create a volcanic eruption on demand, far from it.
* Some of your numbers seems strange or are wrong:
+ You state that the whole orbital station is 4000 metric tons once assembled and that the rod would be 3600 metric tons once put together. Which means that only 10% of the whole thing is dedicated to everything else. That includes reserves of the inert gas, fuel for orbital correction, computers, the assemble line, and so on. That seems to be very little, too little given the importance of the mission for your nation.
+ Also, at 7km long and 3600 metric tons, your rod will basically be pencil thick. It will be nigh impossible to control once dropped from the station, and will simply break apart at the first sign of stress, turning into a mostly harmless cloud of debris. I'm not even sure that it could stay whole through the assemble process, as even just being in orbit create stress due to many factors, like if the station needs to perform an orbital correction while assembling the rod.
+ The rod won't be doing 28km/s upon impact. That's about 82 times the speed of sound in the atmosphere or about 100.000 km/h. Anything trying to reach that kind of speed would have been vaporized long before by the atmospheric friction.
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Mostly I agree with Sava's analysis of the problems with this weapon system, but there are a few additional points that I believe deserve recognition.
1- Even if you could achieve perfect stabilization and penetration as you described, the resulting hole from this proposed weapon would be so narrow that nothing would come out. You'd need to make a hole with large enough of a cavity that it would not just close up behind the projectile as it moves through the crust, and for that your proposed weapon does not have nearly enough energy. No matter how you add it up, it would take way more energy to displace enough earth to create a volcano than it would to simply create a surface level explosion to wipe out a city.
2- In the more likely event that the rod vaporizes on impact (or in the atmosphere), you would have an unthinkable deadly weapon, but not like you think. When DU impacts a target, it vaporizes filling the air with a radioactive gas that causes irreversible heavy metal poisoning that is absorbed through skin or respiration. It has been estimated that as little as one millionth of a gram of uranium getting into your body can be fatal, so my guess is that vaporising 3600 tons of it into the atmosphere would create a cloud of death that would slowly wipe the entire targeted nation out of existence and cause unprecedented ecological damage on a global scale... and for that you don't even need a needle or fancy electronics, you could literally just drop a few million DU bricks from your station to the same effect.
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Just for giggles (data from <https://www.azom.co>)
Uranium:
* Compressive strength: 345 MPa
* Tensile strength: 623 MPa
* Melting point: 1400K
* Young's Modulus: 178 GPa
Tungsten:
* Compressive strength: 3500 MPa
* Tensile strength: 3900 MPa
* Melting point: 3683K
* Young's Modulus: 405 GPa
What all this means: in terms of strength, tungsten walks all over and laughs at depleted uranium, and if you're trying to create a 7000 meter long rod that remains straight in dynamic conditions, the density of uranium is irrelevant.
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## [Euler's Column Theory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-w4XEfvLuo) renders this weapon untenable
Euler's theory assumes, like your proposed many kilometers long column, only axial loads. Even so, the length to cross section ratio does not favor this construction of a long thin column. Beyond that, each threaded connection point is a potential source of failure once the column bends and they are subjected to other than axial loads due to the inevitible bend in the column.
>
> Considering that 3600 metric tons of depleted uranium has just
> penetrated all 30 kilometers of the earth's crust and has traveled a
> further 15 kilometers into the mantle, delivering 1.4x10^15J of energy
>
>
>
Unfortunately, it won't.
The problems are numerous, but the length-to-cross-section-ratio, once the initial impact load is applied to the tip, will lead to the column bending and fracturing somewhere along its length - momentum will thus be lost before the penetration can occur to the depth desired. Your vertical drill/spear needs all of the elements to remain in place, and to remain directed along the axis of vertical movemment, for your desired penetration to be achieved - based on the momentum of the whole column. (Per your problem statement).
Neat thought experiment, but from the engineering angle it won't work. As @Sava's answer points out, it will make a pretty big hole in the ground and a heck of an explosion.
Rankine-Gordon offers some additional thoughts on why this won't work, mechanically, given the length to diameter relationship. (Your cross section of 10cm versus the length of 7 kilometers).
[Keith Morrison's observation](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/135523/39012) regarding "expecting it to stay straight in a dynamic situation" has a further implication.
The surface winds (which will blow roughtly perpendicular to the line of fall) on the day of impact will vary in amount and direction from "at ground level" to 7000 meters above ground level which will induce shear loads along the length of the rod that will induce some (albeit sleight) bending. The winds may differ by as much as 60 knots, depending a lot upon the day and the wind currents aloft at the time. And on top of that, once the rod reaches the upper reaches of the atmosphere and before it arrives at the surface, it will have experienced numerous "zones" of differing wind direction of a larger magnitude (wind speed in the Jet Stream can exceed 100 kts easily) and thus have already induced a slight bend to the long, thing rod well before impact. That also has the chance to induce a variety of 'wobble' during descent .
I am skeptical that the fins can account for all of that wobble without at least one test firing/launch of this weapon on a weapons range (somewhere within the owning nation's territory?) Carrying out this test rather spols the necessary element of surprise though, doesn't it?
For example: a far less complex weapon than yours - the first atomic bomb - needed a test (Alamagordo) before anyone tried to use one.
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What you have here amounts to a super-sized shaped charge jet. These are produced by HEAT/ hollow charge anti-tank weapons and are the fastest-moving non-microscopic objects on earth.
Some years back I wrote about one giant device on these lines built to punch through 15 feet of concrete (obviously way smaller than your concept at 117 pounds for the penetrator element, but you get the idea) -- <https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a23740/bunker-buster/>
It worked-- but see pic of unimpressive surface effects below.
In the (admittedly highly unlikely) event that your penetrator made it to the surface, it would penetrate very deeply -- possibly roughly equivalent to its length -- heating up rock to a great depth. it would not cause a great deal of damage at the surface, but would heat and possibly even melt a considerable amount of rock.
NB On the positive side, experiments with segmented penetrators show that the device does not have to be in once piece to work.
This device would be highly suitable for knocking out a very deep bunker or even a whole bunker complex if they didn't have blast doors. It might not do much against other targets. [](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9AtCr.jpg)
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This is something of a practical question more than anything else. Consider a setting in the modern world, where a large country e.g. the U.S. has collapsed and been replaced by a sort of modernized version of a feudal monarchy. Let's call it "federal monarchy". In this new Kingdom of America, the benevolent Philosopher-King has decided he doesn't want to have to deal with fiat money. Maybe he's concerned that the Royal Bank of America will manipulate the money supply to the detrement of the People, or whatever, I'm not really concerned with the rationale.
Now, the King has decided that his biggest denomination will be one ounce (**not** a troy ounce, he wants to keep things simple) of 20 carat gold. The idea here is that, roughly speaking, the purchasing power of that amount of gold will be more or less the same as 5lbs of sterling silver (which he's going to make the next denomination down). Ignore the practical concerns of lugging this much metal around for the moment.
He wants to make his gold "Crowns" tough, but keep the weight relatively manageable at an ounce and still be worth about 5lbs sterling silver. What should the remaining 4 carats' worth of alloying metal be, if he wants to maximize the durability of the alloy? I've heard that titanium really strengthens the metal significantly, but I don't know if there would be enough in there to strengthen the alloy enough to justify the expense.
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>
> Edit : I forgot to adress the weight question. Considering the
> following densities :
>
>
> * Au : 19,3
> * Ag : 10,5
> * Cu : 8,9
>
>
> You won't have a drastic change of weight by simply changing less than a quarter of the alloy. But an ounce is quite a
> lot, just make small coins.
>
>
>
As a goldsmith, I can only tell you what alloy we used nowadays in **jewelry** :
>
> **750‰ gold / 18 carats :**
>
>
> The six remaining carats are **copper and silver in equal amounts**. You can put more copper if you want rose gold, or a bit of nickel (now
> forbidden) or palladium (not in use in medieval times, to my
> knowledge) if you want white gold.
>
>
>
This is the most you can alter gold without loosing its most interesting properties :
[Malleability](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleability), [ductility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ductility) and [low chemical reactivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precious_metal).
And from this you get several advantages :
* Better durability
* Better elasticity
* Less gold in your alloy (gold is heavy, and gold is expensive)
**Money** however, isn't required to be as shiny and stainless as jewelry. It will be worked with a press, and won't require an extraordinary ductility or malleability. We often prefer it to be durable. That' why money alloys were often **lower** in gold than jewelry alloys.
But I'm no expert in money and could not give you precise values about that.
Daniel is right in saying that it is copper that significantly increases the durability of the alloy, as silver is quite a soft metal. You could totally replace all of the silver, at the risk of seing some stains on your coins.
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What you want is **Crown Gold**.
It's what Henry VIII switched the gold sovereign to in the 1500s, going to 22 karat gold from 23, to reduce the occurrence of clipping and wear (both of which you are also attempting to avoid.) The remaining material is copper. Considering in 1887, the royal mint replaced some of that copper with silver to get a slightly softer coin (for a better impression of Queen Victoria's new portrait) it's safe to assume that the copper will make a tougher alloy than if you mix in silver.
Of course, 20 karat (with the rest as copper) would be tougher still, but I think if it worked for the UK for 300~ years, it'll work for you.
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With the setting and criteria provided below, how would a country make an artificial winter that targets the North American Continent?
## Setting:
The story that will use this artificial winter is set in the following setting:
* Alternate universe that mirrors our own.
* The year is 2025, and science, technology and world politics continue on the same track they are currently on.
* Besides the different year, the only differences between our universe and this one are that a powerful nation has been planning this artificial winter for quite a while now and has put their plan into effect.
### Technological setting:
This whole artificial winter thing has been in the works for quite a while now, so you can assume that a lot of R&D has gone into making this happen. As such, you can incorporate some advances in climate control that are not currently possible today. However, these must meet the following criteria:
* Your proposed advance in technology must not provide a complete `black box` solution to this problem. IE The **Snowy-Blowy-0-Matic Artificial Winter Creator 4000™** hasn't been invented quite yet.
* Should be based in our current understanding of the laws of physics and/or chemistry.
## Criteria for the artificial winter:
* It must last at least 6 months,
* Cause enough snowfall to be disruptive to become a national crisis
* It does not need to cover the whole of the North America Continent, but must cover enough to be majorly disruptive to the US and Canada on a national level.
* The plan to make this winter cannot have potentially civilization-ending (or resetting) consequences.
* The artificial winter itself will be the main disruption to North America, not the side effects of making the winter happen. (I'm looking at you Tsar Bomba;)
* The winter should mostly be confined to North America.
## A good answer will:
* Be scientifically based (no magic)
* Be plausible
* Explain the side effects of your plan to make the artificial winter happen
+ Note: this does not mean that you also have to explain the effects of a 6 month long winter, but I would love to hear those if you want to go into detail.
* Take no more than 50 years of setup time (IE: cannot have been started before the year 1975)
### Edit:
The criteria for the artificial winter conditions have been changed slightly.
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[Year Without a Summer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer), sulfur aerosols are your friend, you can even largely restrict the damage to the northern hemisphere too. The Year Without a Summer was caused by a large volcanic eruption in Indonesia that released huge quantities of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. The sulfur mixes with water vapour and forms minute droplets of [sulfuric acid aerosol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_sulfur_aerosols) that stay in the atmosphere for a year or two and absorb and/or reflect a noticeable percentage of the incoming [insolation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance) sharply lowering temperatures.
Because of the patterns of global air circulation sulfur released into the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere tends to stay there and vice versa so effecting North America won't cause much havoc south of the equator. A north/south split is about the best you can do though so Europe and Asia will also be in the firing line, but at least the country causing the disruption knows what to expect. You might be able to intensify the effect in North America by creating a high localised concentration of shorter stay large droplet aerosols but there will be some spillover. Sulfur aerosols are rather shortlived with even very high concentrations "raining out" of the atmosphere over the course of a couple of years so the [fimbulwinter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fimbulwinter) thus created has a definitely limited lifespan once the sulfur stops being supplied to the stratosphere.
To achieve the desired effect you need a lot of sulfur, a lot of heat, oxygen, and a way to deliver the sulfur oxide compounds produced to the upper atmosphere. The second and third parts are really easy and the fourth provision isn't much harder, there are two ways I can see of delivering the sulfur compounds to the upper atmosphere:
* the first is to create them at altitude, use high altitude bombers dumping thousands of specially designed shells that create clouds of sulfuric acid vapour as they detonate in the stratosphere.
* the second is to use enhanced airflow to pump sulfur from the ground into the stratosphere, this would ultimately involve large furnaces fueled by high sulfur coal, with added sulfur, and pumping the resulting exhaust gas into something like a hyperboloid [cooling tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower). The tower would need to be redesigned for maximum vertical laminar acceleration and minimal gas diffusion to boost the hot, sulfur rich gases into the upper atmosphere.
Personally I favour the bombing-run method, since the equipment can be built away from prying eyes, kept away from prying eyes, and some of it used for other purposes like spy planes until Operation Fimbulwinter is ready to roll.
Finally to address sourcing millions of tonnes of sulfur for the job, you could deliberately mine or buy in cheap high sulfur coal and use it for electricity generation while capturing the sulfur in the waste gas, you even look good internationally since your coal plants are so clean and environmentally friendly. Or you can mine the sulfur from the sea; sure your country doesn't *need* to use [desalination plants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination) and you really don't need to go to the added expense of stripping all that sulfate out of the brine to make the plant work but you can pass it off. Desalination means you can preserve your country's natural watersheds without needing dams for irrigation and drinking water. And the brine is less polluting when it's sulfur free right? Actually if you're going to go to the trouble of breaking down the brine chemically you should go the whole way and extract the rarer commercial metals while you're at it, lithium, manganese, gallium and the like.
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What you want kinda already exists... But you can't target just North America.
This is the device:
It's called a Tsar Bomba, and it's the most potent nuke ever. Seriously. Just look at its blast radius:
[And this is how it works:](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter)
>
> Nuclear winter is the severe and prolonged global climatic cooling effect hypothesized to occur after widespread firestorms following a nuclear war. The hypothesis is based on the fact that such fires can inject soot into the stratosphere, where it can block some direct sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth.
>
>
>
How to use: blow a lot of these worldwide, especially around the equator. Remember to always have a Geiger counter with you at all times after that.
Oh, and about this:
>
> The plan to make this winter cannot have potentially civilization-ending consequences.
>
>
>
I am sure civilization would thrive. Our ancestors managed to live without electricity and clean water before, we sure can too.
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**Block the sun with satellites with big panels**
You can put a network of satellites orbiting Earth covering all the planet (more or less like the GPS satellites). Of course you will need **more** satellites to ensure a proper sun blocking. And put big movable panels in the satellites, so you can make them block the sunlight at will. With that, you can have the winter where you need it and for the amount of time you want it.
This image is how the GPS satellite network is represented:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UsR4p.jpg)
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In the comments, you mention:
>
> "It must last at least 6 months". Presumably spring and summer? – RonJohn 37 mins ago
>
>
> @RonJohn actually there I’m not too picky, any contiguous 6 months of the year should be enough. – Jack 24 mins ago
>
>
> So, an extended (starts in October, ends in May) and harsh winter would work just as well? – RonJohn 14 mins ago
>
>
> @RonJohn correct – Jack 2 mins ago
>
>
>
The blocking high pressure region over the North Pacific needs to be larger and come earlier, so as to push the Polar Jet Stream further north over Alaska earlier in the year and push the Variable Pacific Jet Stream further south.
Warm air from the Gulf of Mexico needs to be prevented from coming north.
This allows the Polar Jet Stream to get much colder and then plunge deeper into the continent.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NlQuP.png)
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I'm writing a tale about a post apocalyptic world. I'm studying the timeline about the world history, I've planned that, using "clean" thermonuclear bombs, radioactivity should be quite lower after less than one year after the "day zero". Is that realistic enough? considering that real shelter and improvised ones couldn't store enough provisions for long time and they could shelter very few people in it. So i'm asking, how much survivors should wait before going out the shelter and starting to survive in the new world?
EDIT1: Some shelters are controlled by the governments and pretty safe, secluted and far from major cities, other are private shelters in the underground of the cities, some others, like the one who shelters the main characters (maybe, still workin on it) are caves very far from cities. I guess they are the less safe enviroments from nuclear fallout. But still, we are talkin about "cleaner nukes"
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How long depends on the half-life of the radioisotopes formed -- or the sort of time-averaged half-life, since there will be many. Very short half-lives create intense radiation, but don't last long. Very long half life isotopes can last centuries, but do relatively little damage -- unless there is a biological mechanism that concentrates them inside your body.
It is possible to design a thermonuclear bomb so that it creates high levels of the worst kind of isotopes over very wide areas (up to a thousand or so miles downwind, in the case of a multi-megaton device.)
However in the case of "clean" thermonuclear bombs that you specified, there isn't actually a very large amount of the most dangerous types. There is some, sure, but depending on height of burst and weather, it will tend to be either concentrated near ground zero -- avoid that spot, but elsewhere is ok -- or very widely dispersed -- in which case no-one place is extremely dangerous. (Cancer rate increased worldwide, but no-one is fallign down dead in a matter of weeks.)
In brief: it is very unlikely that they have to wait years. In most places, usually a couple of weeks to a month will be sufficient. This doesn't mean it will be safe to eat root vegetables that quickly, but to walk around (maybe with a dust mask on) is perfectly survivable.
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# You can make it as light and as bad as you like
There are so many factors to take into account here, especially depending what the aim of the war was, and how it was conducted. The notion that a nuclear war will **necessarily** be an all out affair where the goal is maximum destruction is not realistic. You do not need to invent any new kind of nuclear weapon for this, because what matters most is not **what** is detonated but **where** it is detonated. An air burst produces very little fallout, while a ground burst — especially with a "salted" weapon — can be extremely bad.
But this is all moot anyway because a nuclear war will not be such that the entire world is **blanketed** by nuclear weapons. The impact and fallout zones where there is any acute danger will be fairly local. So although some fiction franchises thrive on the notion of having to huddle in shelters CoughFalloutCough in reality the best thing to do will probably just to travel away from the impact areas and go to an area not affected by the war.
So I would turn the question around:
**Can you have a post-apocalyptic scenario that involved nuclear war, where people do not have to huddle in shelters for a very long time?**
Answer: yes... you can tailor the backstory that way. You do not even have to go into detail about it. you can make the situation as severe and as light as you want and not lose realism.
And in any case... radiation is **not** this terrible affair that people make it out to be. By the time you have absorbed so much radiation that you are now suffering **acute** radiation syndrome, you have only increased your lifetime probability of contracting cancer by about 10-20%, up from the normal 35-45%. And radiation is really easy to avoid.... even simple dosimeters can be used for that. No, people will be having far worse issues to contend with than that.... food, clean water, electricity, lawlessness.
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TVTropes has a pretty good article about the detonation of a nuclear bomb (1 megaton) at Walt Disney Headquarters (for no reason in particular... probably just to be funny) in Los Angeles and it's affect in the LA area. It's a good read if you can find it.
Thermo-nuclear is a H-Bomb and basically uses a fission explosion to generate heat necessary to create a fusion explosion... which is far more destructive. A lot of this will be based on how close to the ground the bomb is. Most of the radioactive fallout of a nuclear blast is based on how much of the fireball intersects with the ground. The more intersection, the more radioactive material will be vaporized and then fall out. This isn't to say that it is all that will be destructive, as the overpressure or blast, and the radiant heat (the light) will still kill for some distance outside of ground zero. The greater the height, the more threat it makes to more stuff.
The radiant heat is pretty destructive as it will start a "Simba's Prideland" of fires... everything the light touches will burn. Famed negative shadows of Hiroshima are people shaped light patches on walls that were saved from charring because there was a person casting a shadow at the time of the radiant heat. In Nagasaki, despite the more powerful of the two bombs dropping, it was less destructive to the overall city because it detonated in the valley of two mountains... essentially blocking much of the radiant heat and over-pressure from destroying the rest of the city.
It's important to remember this is "Simba's Pridelands" so you can survive pretty close to the epicenter in the right conditions, Akiko Takakura entered the history books as being the closest survivor to ground zero in Hiroshima, at a distance of about 300 meters. She survived because at the time of the blast, she was in the vault of her bank and the over-pressure was weak enough not to blow apart the vault structure and the light had already burnt the building's exterior.
It's also important to note that it will be light first than over-pressure... for the same reason it's always lightning and thunder.
So with that out of the way, FEMA answers this with the 7-10 rule. For every measure of 7 hours of time, radiation levels decrease by 10%. If you know your initial rads per hour, this can be mathed out so that 7\*.1X = y. This is also rendered as the 7 X 7 X 7 rule. After 7 hours, the initial rads have decreased by 90%. After 49 hours, the initial rads decrease by 99%. After 343 hours (a little over two full weeks) the rads decrease by 99.9%. Ground Zero of Hiroshima today is so safe, it's a tourist attraction.
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It doesn't seem unrealistic to me. If the bomb is of a futuristic technology, which you have created, it doesn't seem unlikely that it would behave differently from atomic bombs of the past. [This](http://www.atomicarchive.com/Effects/effects17.shtml) suggests that the nuclear fallout of out time is no longer fatal between 1-5 years after effect. (Which doesn't necessarily mean SAFE, but just not deadly.) I think your futuristic technology could easily account for differences in time spans.
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I'm working on creating a realistic species of giant humans. I've changed the proportions, such as creating elephant like feet and muscular pillar-like legs to support the weight. They also possess a reinforced neck and thick skull to protect the head from fall damage. Average height is about 15 feet. Average weight is 1-2 tonnes.
In melee combat against regular sized humans, I thought a kick-reliant fighting style would be interesting, armoured legs and feet as they could run through crowds of much smaller opponents.
A style similar to Muay Thai or Taekwondo.
However, I can't imagine there not being issues with using the body in that way at that size. I imagine problems such as balance or being nimble would arise.
Perhaps even putting too much weight on one leg would be a problem?
Would this type of combat be feasible?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NQO4A.jpg)
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# It'll work (it's technically feasible); but it's not the most effective thing to do.
A better way for them to fight (in a 1v1 scenario against a regular human) would be to use their ridiculous height to their advantage. Muay Thai and TKD are styles designed for regular sized humans against regular sized humans; on a 15 foot tall human, a lot of the techniques are no longer useful (as you'd be aiming at the air on top of the human).
**Instead, what they should do is carry a thick, long stick. From a height of 15 feet up, every single poke with their weapon towards their target will be hard to block and at the same time, aimed towards the head of the enemy; a very effective place to hit.**
Because of the body profile available to attack, and the way a human would have to hold a shield in order to defend against said strikes, these strikes could easily knock over the human (or at least push them off balance) if they tried to defend with a shield; they'd have to hold their shield up at an angle, and the long reach of the giant's weapon would be able to clip or target the top half of the shield, pushing it behind the human (and thus the human onto the ground, unless they let go of their shield).
Of course, in group scenarios, there are even better ways for them to organize themselves. One such way would be to ram through the enemy whilst pushing large bulldozer-style-front-end wheelbarrows. A row of them lined up together would form an impenetrable wall (probably 9 feet or higher, (higher than any human would be able to climb while being run at)); a makeshift cavalry charge (but with the infantry instead) would completely decimate an enemy formation/line.
**A tip for designing or choosing fighting styles;** it's important to remember that almost every human fighting style is designed for humans vs humans. Thus, when picking or designing a fighting style for a different species, it's almost never the most efficient choice to pick a style that already exists. It's almost always better to come up with a custom style that makes use of the characteristics of the species (especially when you know what the opponent is and can target their weaknesses).
[Answer]
## Combat styles serve unique purposes
Every style is different and barely any are objectively "superior" to others if you don't compare them on specific aspects.
### Modern Judo is about control
In modern Judo the idea is not to break all your opponents bones or kill them. The purpose the techniques serve is to break balance and use the opponents own force to bring them to the ground where you immobilise them. Especially the "ground combat" is why many martial artists train Judo at least to an extent as few combat styles covers this topic. Also it includes basic techniques of how to fall without injuring yourself.
### Regular Boxing is about getting the most impact from your punch
A Boxer mainly trains for stamina and muscle buildup to give the punches a significant impact. If you have ever seen a boxer fight a regular dude the fight lasts one punch until knockout.
### Taekwondo is about getting the most impact by technique not by brute force
Martial artists of this types often look slimmer than regular boxers for example. They fight completely different, but the techniques serve a similar purpose. A Taekwondo-Kick has a huge blunt force impact that can quite easily break bones.
### Wing-Tsun Kung-Fu is designed to fight against physically superior opponents
By physically superior I mean people who are taller and stronger than you are. The style is all about balance and not ever holding up against force, but to use quickness and (your own) body control to have the opponents strength work against them. It is heavily aiming for weaknesses and does not rely on brute strength at all. I personally know women of small and slim stature that could defend themselves against a taller, physically strong guy if they had to. Even the basic punch is designed to work by quickness instead of muscle strength.
### Krav Maga is designed to be efficient and quickly learnable
Krav Maga has a unique design philosophy. It is all about being simple and efficient. A person can get a 3 week boot camp of Krav Maga and would beat people who trained most other combat styles for a year. That is why it is so popular with military and the likes. The idea is breaking every situation down into abstracts and training reflexes on how to react. The combat style is taking lots of things from many other styles. It is more focused on strength than finesse, but it is efficient enough to be used by people who are not that strong.
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## Conclusion
Depending on what you want to achieve with your style it has to be specifically designed for that.
In your scenario that means giant vs human - from the giant perspective.
### Using range to your advantage
As [Aify pointed out in his answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/119316/44086) you need to use the range advantage. Any punch against a human less than half your size would require you to bend over making you less mobile. So punches are entirely off the table.
The range of kicks is significantly longer than the range of punches. And another bonus is that kicks come from the hip which is closer to the opponent than your torso and shoulders where a punch is directed from.
Humans can only attack your legs and that only if you kick directed at them or they are very close to you. Defending against kicks is extremely difficult for a human in this scenario. The giant has significant force and being hit probably means you're thrown away. So their best bet is dodging. That is why kicks should be designed in a way that does not make you move towards the human during the kick in case they should manage to dodge. That would open a window of opportunity for them as they bridged the distance and have your leg at their disposal.
Another part that should be taking into consideration is what to do when the opponent managed to get close? Kicks do not work close range as you do not have the distance to create the impact you desire. So you need to use something else. As we have established punches are not useful either. But the giant also has a mass advantage. Simply trampling onto the ground (or the opponent) has a huge impact when you weigh more. In human combat trampling can only be used on enemies that fell to the ground. But a giant could use that on a standing human.
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Sure, the mass of any kick from a being that size wouldn't be blockable particularly if it was encased in metal. Technique isn't all that important.
So a 15 foot giant would kick you over shield and all if he connected. He already has a huge size and reach advantage. So he'd be silly to just use kicks though. A more balanced style would be better. Kicking and trampling while using a large and long weapon would be much better.
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Considering evolution, balance and proportionality must have evened out to make up an existing species - as a result, you can assume, that massive drawbacks, such as massive balance problems etc. are already taken care of. What is left, are the physical results of having a mass of probably a ton.
Since we just talk about fighting styles, I assume we leave out any sorts of weapons, may it be melee or ranged ones..
A big advantage to build around for the giant, is what in fact boxers do already - if they outsize their opponent, they try to keep them on distance, as they have a longer punching range, but are usually a bit slower than their agile but smaller opponent. Contrary to this, the smaller boxer usually tries to get up close, into his effective range, where the angles of the punches from the bigger one are starting to be awkward.
All in all, what the giant has to achieve, is to abuse his massive power, coming from the mass of his body, and defend against his weakness - his lack of agility and manouverability at close range. Kicks can indeed help, however 15 feet are "small" enough, so that you can reach most humans with your arms, without going down on your knees.
Thus, sweeping and shoving could be heavily involved.
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No, kicking would not be effective.
Kicking are already easily defended against in normal humans. This is because the larger mass of your leg means that kicks have lower velocity. This problem can be alleviated somewhat with training, but it is still a problem. Now, take your hypothetical ogre. Due to having 15 times the mass of a normal human, his kicks will take ~20 times longer (base 15 for mass, + 5 for longer nerve lengths slowing down transmission speeds).
In the end, **Your hypothetical ogre will be better served with a ground pound, or even just a regular punch.**
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In my world, people have powers based on the four fundamental forces.
One of my characters can generate spontaneous gravity to crush his opponents. He's also resistant to his own power (so I ignore his own mass).
I want to create a twist where he breaks his limit and generates a black hole. How many "g" should I put?
* The size of the black hole may varies (according to the drama I need to create). Let's take the two following scenarios A- Ten meters diameter (melee combat) B- Two hundreds and fifty meters diameters (let's rip battleships combat)
* The gravitational field he generates his constant (eg. 10 g everywhere). The character's mass doesn't count. The gravity don't crush people on him, but on the ground. It's more like an added g to the environment.
[Answer]
The formula for [escape velocity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity) is
$$v\_e = \sqrt{\frac{2Gm}{r}}$$
$v\_e$ is the escape velocity.
$G$ is the gravitational constant, approximately equal to $6.67×10^{−11} m^3\cdot {kg}^{−1}\cdot s^{−2}$.
$m$ is the mass of the object from which we are trying to escape (the black hole).
$r$ is the distance between that object and the object that is trying to escape.
The formula for the magnitude of [gravitational acceleration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_acceleration) is
$$g = \frac{Gm}{r^2}$$
$g$ is the acceleration due to gravity.
Now, we know $G$ (a constant), $v\_e$ (greater than the speed of light), and $r$ (either 10 or 250 meters: given in your question). We do not know $g$, although we know that it is at most fifteen times the Earth's acceleration due to gravity at sea level. We do not know $m$.
So let's rewrite the first equation in terms of $m$.
$$m = \frac{{v\_e}^2r}{2G}$$
Now we substitute that into the second equation.
$$g = \frac{{v\_e}^2}{2r}$$
Now, substitute in the speed of light and the distance. We'll use 10 meters as the distance.
$$g = 4.5\cdot 10^{15} \frac{m}{s^2}$$
That's roughly $4.5\cdot 10^{14}g\_E$, where $g\_E$ is the acceleration due to gravity at sea level on the Earth. That's much higher than fifteen.
We can calculate things the other way. A 15g acceleration at the event horizon of a black hole implies a black hole that is less than $3\cdot 10^{-13}$ meters in size. This is tiny. For comparison, a proton is about $10^{-15}$ meters. So this is bigger than a nucleus but a lot smaller than an [atom](https://education.jlab.org/qa/how-much-of-an-atom-is-empty-space.html).
I have ignored relativistic effects, but I don't think they would matter much. We start in the same inertial frame. There might be a black hole, but it would be smaller than an atom.
You could improve on this by making the initial acceleration dependent on distance as well. For example, if he could make an acceleration equal to fifteen g at a distance of ten meters from the center of attraction, then it would be a lot larger at one meter and larger still at one millimeter.
Part of the confusion may be that a black hole still has gravitational attraction outside its event horizon. The event horizon is the place where the black hole won't release light. But you'd have to moving close to the speed of light to escape if you came close to the event horizon.
Your fifteen g of acceleration is confusing in that it doesn't mention the distance to the center of attraction. The presumption is that it is being created at the accelerated object. But gravity doesn't work that way. It accelerates towards a center of mass somewhere.
It might make more sense to think of him as always creating a black hole. The stronger he gets, the farther away that he can pull an object. The black hole might get visible at sufficient strength.
For example, consider if he can create a fifteen g acceleration at 250 meters from the point of attraction.
Let 250 meters be $d$ and solve the second equation for $m$.
$$m = \frac{gd^2}{G}$$
Now solve the first equation for $r$.
$$r = \frac{2Gm}{v\_e^2}$$
Substitute
$$r = \frac{2gd^2}{c^2}$$
$c$ is the velocity of light.
This gives us about a $10^-10$ meters black hole. That's similar to the size of an atom, so still far below visibility.
**TL;DR**: fifteen g is not enough to make a visible black hole, even operating at a distance of 250 meters.
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There is no real way to define such a value.
Black holes are so called because at any radius below the Event Horizon the escape velocity (the speed you need to go to not fall back in) is equal to the speed of light.
The problem is that the formula for escape velocity includes M - a mass. To be a black hole you must be massive (as in have some mass).
Your induced ‘black hole’ doesn’t have mass: it’s just a force being created by the guy.
So: what force could be considered to be ‘black holey’ enough?
The first option is choosing a force great enough to overcome neutron degeneracy pressure. This pressure is what stops neutron stars from collapsing to form black holes, so if your hero creates a force great enough that any mass he catches will be pulled in with more force than the forces keeping its neutrons apart then it will very quickly make a teeny tiny black hole. The exact value of this force depends on the properties (temperature, spin, charge, what have you) of the mass being dragged in. The lowest bound *mass* required to beat neutron degeneracy pressure (given that real physics doesn’t have induced gravitational fields) is the wonderfully named Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit (2.17 solar masses), but it’s safest to say your man will have to be throwing down a point of gravity equal to that of 2-3 solar masses. The exact ‘g-force’ felt will vary depending on distance from that point, but it’s pretty intense.
For example: a kilometre away you’d feel ~13000000000000 g...
The second (worse) option comes from the equivalence of mass and energy. Theoretically ramming enough energy in one spot is equivalent to having a mass in that same place (hooray for string theory). Your ‘hero’ could create an energetic enough event that the energy involved just spawns a black hole, but it would require more energy than I can even ballpark and would probably lead to the term ‘naked singularity’ being used more than once.
Really I think you don't really want black holes unless you also want to be tearing up the planet you're standing on: It would be better to work out what kind of force you want to exert over what distance and work backwards from there. Even a gravitational point with mass equal to that of the Earth would crush you to indefinable paste if it were right next to you instead of 6300 km under your feet.
TLDR: don’t define it in terms of g forces, define it in terms of what mass of object your guy is simulating the gravity of. Then it’s about 2-3 solar masses.
EDIT TO DISCUSS SIZE:
Black holes don't have a size. They are singularities: Thoroughly unpleasant mathematical constructs where all mass is concentrated into a single dimensionless point. The *event horizon* (where you can't see past) can have a radius.
If we use Event Horizon as the measure of size then since this gravity-bender is making gravitational fields without any mass he will be making a sphere in open space that light cannot escape. Everything he does is creating ludicrously small black holes.
Making a black hole big enough for the event horizon to be visible requires a large enough 'mass' that it will destroy absolutely everything nearby, leaving nobody around to see it.
Needless to say this is Not A Good Idea.
EDIT FOR 'added g':
If all your hero is doing is increasing gravity locally then he is doing one of three things:
1: Telekinetically pushing people towards the ground (not really gravity based)
2: 'Multiplying' gravity worldwide
3: 'Multiplying' gravity locally
I'll ignore 1. It's boring.
2 would have consequences for everyone on the globe all the time, and I'm going to assume your hero isn't going to apply bone crushing force to innocents, so let's discount that.
3 has some very interesting consequences before you even get to black hole status (pushing the Earth out of orbit, for one), but lets ignore those and try focus on the question:
The question doesn't make sense any more. Black holes are points. If this power is a gravity multiplier (which is functionally the same as adding gravity) then the only 'point' a black hole could start to form is the centre of the Earth. Essentially the ground would have to collapse in a column centred on wherever this man was exercising his power, with more and more earth falling into the hole as it progressed. For a black hole to happen our 'Hero' would have to crush the entire mass of the Earth into a ball no larger than it's Schwarzschild Radius, which stands at a stupendously tiny 1.4 x 10-27m, in the process destroying everything he ever loved.
Oddly though, the moon, satellites and folks in the ISS would carry on orbiting as normal, so that's something.
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A micro black whole is theoretically possible it would look like a distortion of light and the center would be the tip of a pin. It would do mass devastation if present for a fraction of a millisecond leaving a perfect circle in the Earth. Like a inward sucking bomb. The sudden appearance and disappearance would splatter anything organic near it. Then there is the electromagnetic field with a black hole.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole>
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On a continent similar to modern-day Europe with a temperate climate, 90% of the continent's flat and hilly land was once covered by native forest. Human activity has reduced that to 10%.
A relatively sudden event (such as plague, famine, or a massive exodus) removes most humans from the area, causing human activity to almost cease and allowing the forests to gradually regrow.
How long does it take for the forests to return to 90%?
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# Tree growth
There are two ways to determine if a forest is regrown. First, the trees can reach approximately their maximum height. Second, the first generation of trees can die, leaving lots of fallen decayed wood and a second generation of trees, that might be of a different species (this is called [forest succession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_succession#Forest_succession)) takes over.
I don't know many details about European trees, but I can tell you a lot about forests of Eastern North America.
[Lake Anna state park](http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state-parks/lake-anna#other_info) in Virginia was clear cut in the 1920s. It was logging land from then into the 1970s, so it was planted in pine and cut every ~25 years. In 1971, the lake (Lake Anna, believe it or not) in the park was used as cooling for a nuclear power plant, so the land was turned into a state park.
Originally, the land (alluvial bottomland on the North Anna river) was covered with fire resistant oak-hickory forest. That was all removed by the 1920, and pine was planted. Since the forest has become a protected park, the early pine has given way in succession to [tulip-tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liriodendron_tulipifera), [red maple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acer_rubrum), and [sweetgum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidambar_styraciflua), mixed with some remaining shortleaf pine. Pines don't live that long, and they don't grow as fast as the hardwoods; so despite a ~20 year head start the tulip-tree and sweetgum in particular are already as tall as the tallest pines, perhaps 25 meters maximum after ~50 years of growth (the maples are probably only 15 meters, maximum).
So in the one sense, the forest is fully regrown in 50 years. On the other hand, the first generation of hardwoods have not died yet. Tulip-tree and sweetgum are both shade intolerant, so they will not produce a second generation in the same forests that currently exist. Instead, the forest will be replaced by [beech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagus_grandifolia) and maples.
However, there is still another twist. The state forest service removes fallen wood and prevents wildfires. But Virginia sees regular summer droughts, where high temps make for fire conditions. There would normally be understory fires every 5 years or so, under pure natural conditions. With these fires, beech and maples will have difficulty establishing. Instead, [white oak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quercus_alba) and [shagbark hickory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carya_ovata) will grow; these are not as shade tolerant, but are fire resistant as young trees.
# What would happen in Virginia, from a bare field
In cleared fields, there isn't much danger of fire, since there isn't much material to burn. A variety of shrubby trees will start growing. After about 50 years, tulip-tree and sweetgum will have 'won' the race. They will form a closed canopy about 25 meters in height. In the understory, shade tolerant red maple will dominate, along with shrubbier trees like holly, dogwood and persimmon. After this time, the amount of tree litter will build up to the point that understory fires every five years will prevent trees from being established that are not fire resistant.
The only young trees that will survive are oaks and hickories, particularly white oak. After 100 years, the first white oaks will reach the 25 meter canopy. Some of the Tulip-trees (the tallest hardwood in Eastern US) will have reached 50 meters. The short-lived red maples will start falling at this point, and due to fires they will not be replaced.
After 200 years, the tulip-tree and sweetgum will start dying; the only remaining specimens will be the biggest ones. After 400 years, all the tulip-tree and sweetgum will be gone, the first generation of hickory will have fallen and even the first generation of oaks will start falling as well. At this point you will finally have an old growth forest, which will change little over time.
# Conclusion
50 years for tall trees and a closed canopy. 100 years for succession to final forest type. 400 years for an old-growth forest.
Of course, this is for Virginia. You could do an analysis for any region with its specific forest type. But the numbers here are reasonable for any temperate forest.
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Well, we have some ideas about past events, when glaciation redeced from European soil. A major factor in quickly (within a few decades) reforesting the continent were birds.
Them flying over empty land and shitting out treeseeds they have been eating a few kilometers back contributed quickly to the process.
Another thing how quickly this works is the [fresh volcanic islands in front of Japan](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/shortcuts/2013/dec/01/new-islands-volcanic-japan-surtsey-iceland), that were colonized by brushery and shrubbery during a few years, mostly owing to bird shit as well.
This is an incomplete analysis, but if you have birds in your world, and they have a working digestive system, they'll do the job within a century. This is assuming quickly growing tree species (40 years harvest) which are being used in the French industry. Naturally growing tree species have more like 80 years growth time until sufficiently usable (after being shat out).
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There's no one simple answer, since it depends on both local conditions (like the amount of rainfall). and exactly what you mean by "regrown". For an example, the forests around where I live (east side of the Sierra Nevada, fairly dry mountains) were pretty much clear-cut in the Comstock mining era (roughly 1860-1900). The forests have mostly regrown, in the sense that the mountains are pretty well covered with trees (mostly conifers). However, those trees are much smaller than the few remaining stands of old-growth trees - roughly 18 in/45 cm trunk diameter, vs 4-6 ft (120-180 cm) for old-growth trees. So regrowing to something resembling the original forest will take roughly 500 years.
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The recovery of the almost completeley destroyed Lolo national forest following the fires of 1910 took about 100 years and is still considered a juvenile forest with another 100 years before it hits full growth. Keep in mind the CCC mobilized tens of thousands of great depression relief-hiree workers to replant it probably accelerating its recovery. You're looking at about 200 to 300 years on a fast scale. After 100 years a lot of swiftly growing pioneer species will have encroached, by 200 your looking at a full forest, 300 is primordial old growth. Its all reliant on climate, terrain, and flora species however so such timelines are usually an approximation at best.
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If some kind of insane wizard began a ritual that would turn the inner core of the earth into gold, what would happen?
Over the course of 15 days, the entirety of the core will become gold.
Each individual atom will spontaneously gain the amount of protons, neutrons, and electrons to be a stable isotope of gold. Each atom will be selected at random, and approximately equal periods of time will pass between each selection.
Obviously, this will cause the core of the earth to become more massive, and may have a very large effect on the earth's magnetic field.
Since gold is denser than both iron and nickel, this will make the core more massive.
Given all this, how long will it be before...
1. It is noticed that something is amiss in the core
2. The effects have a significant detrimental effect on our lives
3. Humans start to die
4. Humans are wiped out
5. Total annihilation of pretty much all life on earth
Some of those might not actually happen as a result of this. It's not my area of expertise.
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CORRECTION: There won't be quick catastrophe.
If the transmutation effect is limited to the inner core, gravitational and volumetric effects would be relatively modest. While most pictures of Earth's inner structure lead us to believe that inner and outer core are two comparable regions, volume- and mass- wise they are quite different. Inner core constitutes only [1.7%](http://solarviews.com/eng/earthint.htm) of Earth's mass and about 1% of Earth's volume (compared to outer core's 30.8% mass and 15% volume).
If every atom in the Earth's inner core is replaced with gold, its weight would increase substantially. Standard atomic weight of Gold is [196.966569](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold). Standard atomic weight of atoms in Earth's core is [50.4](https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/geodyn2015/pdf/5001.pdf) (total core, but we assume that core's composition is uniform). We are looking towards an increase by 3.9 times of Earth's inner core mass. The fraction of Earth's core mass (core/total) is about 1.7%, so the total mass of the Earth is set to increase by about 4.9%. This would increase the force of the gravity on Earth's surface by approximately the same amount. Increased gravity alone will cause significant destruction and mass extinction of species, but should not pose significant risk to the entire biosphere, and human civilization should be able to adjust.
Additional potentially destructive factor would be explosive increase of Earth's inner core size. Although I can not provide exact calculations for the density, let's consider that atomic radius of gold is 14% greater than atomic radius of iron. Considering small size of inner core, this should not be enough to rip Earth's crust apart, but may result in a period of increased seismic and volcanic activity.
An increase of Earth's gravity will pull the Moon from its orbit and cause it to shift to an elliptical orbit around Earth. 5% increase in Earth's gravitational pull would not be enough to cause a collision, though.
Contrary to popular beliefs, Earth's magnetic field might not be affected at all be switching to a non-magnetic inner core. According to the [Dynamo theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamo_theory), Earth's magnetic field is explained by the convection in *outer* core. All that is needed from the inner core is that it should be hot.
And now the timeline:
1. It is noticed that something is amiss in the core - Almost instantly all high-precision instruments will go awry because of the change of gravity;
2. The effects have a significant detrimental effect on our lives - In 1week there will be substantial increase in seismic activity. Increased weight will become noticeable to regular people;
3. Humans start to die - The same first 1 week. After the earthquakes start, they will only get worse.
4. Humans are wiped out - Probably never, at least never because of this event. Civilization will adjust to the new gravity and live through the volcanic period.
5. Total annihilation of pretty much all life on earth - Transmutation effect of this scale should not affect life on Earth in general.
[Answer]
# Volume changes
The changes in the Earth's volume will largely depend on the crystalline or liquid structure of the materials in the core. The density of [iron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron) is 7.8 g/cm$^3$, and its atomic mass is 55.8 g/mol. Thus, a mol of iron will occupy 7.1 cm$^3$ at room temperature. [Gold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold) on the other hand has a density of 19.3 g/cm$^3$, and its atomic mass is 197.0 g/mol. A mol of gold will occupy 10.2 cm$^3$.
Now density of iron in the Earth's core is much higher, almost twice as high. I was unable to find any estimates for gold's density at conditions remotely close to those at the center of the Earth (~6000 K, ~300 GPa). So we are left with estimates from standard temperature and pressure. So we can tentatively assume that the transformation to gold will cause the Earth's core to expand.
If we assume at 10.2:7.1 volume ratio (ignoring the nickel component, for simplicity), then the inner core will ultimately increase its volume about 44%. Since the [Inner core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_core) is about 1220 km in radius; we expect the rest of the Earth to expand by about 7 km in radius to accomodate the volume change, or about 0.1 %.
The circumference of the Earth will increase by about 45 kilometers. Given that continents are arranged in plates, I would assume that the most likely place for cracks to appear is at the plate boundaries. For such a massive increase in circumference, the plate boundaries would each be looking at chasms down to the mantle forming, in the order of tens of kilometers wide.
# Mass changes
Since we know the differences in atomic mass, and since each individual atom is changing, we can know for certain the difference in mass. The inner core is actually not [that massive](https://www.colorado.edu/physics/phys2900/homepages/Marianne.Hogan/inside.html), about 2 % of the Earth's total. Gold is more massive than iron (ignoring the nickel component, again) by a ratio of 197:56; so the inner core will increase in mass by a factor of 3.5; the increase in the inner core's mass will add 7% to the mass of the Earth.
Surface gravity ($\hat{g}$) is expressed as:
$$\hat{g} = \frac{4}{3}\pi G\rho r.$$
As shown above, mass increases by a factor of 1.070 and radius by 1.024. Volume of the planet will increase by the cube of radius, or 1.075. Since density is mass over volume, the overall change in surface gravity will be
$$\frac{1.070}{1.003}\cdot1.001 = 1.067.$$
So, the increase in surface gravity will not be very significant; given that this happens over 15 days, there will be an increase of 0.00018$g$ per day. Scientific instruments would detect this, but the bearing on our everyday lives will be pretty paltry compared to the km wide, mantle deep chasms opening on the crust.
# How soon will changes happen?
The 9.0 [Tohoku earthquake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami) (and the Fukushima tsunami that came with it) involved a [fault slip](https://www.unavco.org/science/snapshots/ocean/2012/ishikawa.html) of 20-30 meters at the epicenter. Let us assume that a circumference of the Earth runs through 5 different plate boundaries, so the delta of circumference is divided 5 ways. This means that a ~125 meter increase in the Earth's circumference will cause all 10 of those plate boundaries to undergo some sort of earthquake-like energy release, of about the magnitude of a 9.0 earthquake.
If it takes 15 days for the circumference to increase by 45 km, then 125 meters will take one hour. Catastrophic earthquakes will begin soon after the increase begins.
# Mantle pressure changes
In the short term, the expansion of the inner core will be felt through the rest of the planet as pressure waves. While the Earth will want to split its crust apart, trillions of tons of continental rock isn't just as easy to move as all that. Pressure will build up in the liquid mantle. The [speed](http://eqseis.geosc.psu.edu/~cammon/HTML/Classes/IntroQuakes/Notes/waves_and_interior.html) of these waves will vary with varying viscosity and density, but will probably average around 10 km/s in the outer core and mantle. At this rate it will take around 8-10 minutes for the pressure waves to propagate all the way to the crust.
When a pressure wave approaches the crust, the increase in pressure will probably cause anything remotely volcanic to erupt. I can't begin to quantify how quickly this will happen. And I can't begin to quantify the results. Some volcanoes
will be eruptive, and others effusive. Some volcanoes that have a lot of pent up energy may be induced to go off with the force of a [Tambora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora).
# The fate of the oceans
Lets say the crust is 35 km thick, on average. Lets also say that every plate boundary opens up to 5 km in width. There are [about](http://app.earth-observer.org/data/basemaps/images/global/PlateBoundaries_512/PlateBoundariesType_512/PlateBoundariesType_512.html) 260,000 km of plate boundaries. If Each boundary opens up to be 5 km wide and 35 km deep, the volume of these new 'pits' is about 36 million km$^3$. The volume of the oceans is about 1.3 billion km$^3$, so we can see that there will be plenty of oceans left.
There will obviously be a lot of boiling happening, but I'm really straining to work the physics of this situation. I'm not going to post too much, for fear of being wrong, but I believe that there will not be significant steam formation, due to rapid cooling and relatively low conductivity of the aesthenosphere, and high pressure of ocean water. Ultimately, the oceans will heat, but won't boil off. What these oceanic-ly cooled cold spots in the mantle do is probably really important, but I can't begin to estimate. I'm sure it won't be good.
# Conclusion - what will happen
The effect of increased mass is negligible compared to the effects of increased volume. The volume will increase at a fast rate. The effects of this change will be broadcast to the surface by pressure waves in about 10 minutes. Within the hour minutes more, I estimate that every plate boundary on the planet will have the potential to release the equivalent energy of a magnitude 9 earthquake with its epicenter at *every single point on the plate boundaries*.
While the earthquakes begin, most if not all volcanic hot spots on Earth will erupt. Direct fatalities from ash will be few, but the ash deposition in the skies will be at least as bad as [nuclear winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter), and possibly orders of magnitude worse.
The seismic and volcanic activity will continue for 15 days continuously. The stresses of the expanding mantle on the underside of the plates will probably start tearing them apart too; more earthquakes. No structure or tree will be left standing. I don't know the effect of being vibrated for 15 days straight, but that by itself sounds like enough to extinguish most higher life forms. Ash will block out the sun; it will be one or more orders of magnitude darker for decades.
Bad day at the office.
To answer your questions specifically.
* It is noticed that something is amiss in the core: The pressure wave from inner core expansion will take about 10 minutes to reach the surface. The gravity changes in these first 10 minutes will be so slight that it is doubtful anyone would notice. Anyone with sensitive gravimetric equipment would not have the first reaction of, "Whoa, maybe the core turned to gold!"
* The effects have a significant detrimental effect on our lives: Within an hour of noticing the first tremors, people will start feeling catastrophic earthquakes.
* Humans start to die: The earthquakes and volcanoes will start the process. Few structures would be able to withstand more than an hour of this violent shaking. People in structures will die, by the billions.
* Humans are wiped out: For however many people survive the first 15 days, the blocked out sun will extinguish whatever plant life remains pretty quickly. We enter your standard post-apocalyptic scenario, with the difference that very few plants will grow and there are no longer any oceans to speak of.
* Total annihilation of pretty much all life on earth: It is doubtful that this will happen. There are lots of bacteria and they can be pretty hardy.
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The reason that the earth has a thick atmosphere, while Mars has a very thin atmosphere, is that the earth has a strong magnetic core that deflects solar wind, while Mars doesn't have a magnetic core. Mars has sufficient mass to attract an atmosphere capable of supporting human life, but the solar wind, unimpeded by a magnetic core, blows most of it away.
Converting the earth's iron core to a non ferrous metal like gold would result in the loss of the magnetic core and subsequently, the loss of most of its atmosphere. Most life on earth would die, certainly all of the more advanced life.
How long would that take? You'd need an extensive background in physics to answer that. Still, the most serious ramification of losing the earth's magnetic core would be the loss of most of its atmosphere.
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**1. It is noticed that something is amiss - in a day or two.**
Gold atom is almost 4 times heavier than an iron atom, replacing iron with gold will result in substantial increase in gravity. People will notice different weight when they stand on the scales, elevators and airplanes will not be able to carry as much weight as before, some flimsy structures will begin collapsing.
Once it is established that same thing is happening all over the earth, people will figure it out that it's the core.
**2. The effects have a significant detrimental effect on our lives** - first few days transmutation. Even if core is half the mass of the planet, quadrupling its mass will double the gravity. Walking will be hard since you effectively carry a second person on your shoulders.
I would also expect all sorts of landslides, dams bursting, rivers flowing faster and eroding the shores.
Loss of magnetic field will render most electronics and radio useless.
It will also increase radiation, but in the short term it will mostly lead to sunburns. You can look at the movie Core (2003) for Hollywood take on loss of EM field and shield.
**3. Humans start to die - by end of transmutation**
The biggest effect will be **massive earthquakes and volcano eruptions**. Liquid gold will have different volume than liquid iron. If my amateurish computations are correct, gold will have more volume (it also makes sense given a larger atom), so Earth will inflate from inside, its crust would crack, and the tectonic plates will float in ocean of magma. Oceans will likely flow over the edge and boil off, there would be huge emissions of unfriendly gasses into atmosphere.
All life near the edges of the tectonic plates will be lost very soon. Life in the middle might last a few days more.
I hope your wizard can open a portal to a new dimension, or a magical bubble on another planet.
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For us earthlings, the concept of "year" came from the observation that the Sun reaches a minimum and a maximum span in the rise-set path in the sky.
On a planet experiencing extreme perihelion precession (about 30 degrees) is there any recurring astronomical event which can mark the end of a year for the inhabitants of the planet? (picture is meant to illustrate the extremity of the precession, not the eccentricity of the orbit)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fIcdd.jpg)
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I would propose "The day of the burning Sun", or "The day of the dim Sun". Basically, either the perihelion or the apohelion could mark a periodic event defining the end of a year and the start of a new one. Your inhabitants would see the Sun going away and going back peridically, which could hold quite an interesting mythology.
The cool thing is, they'll notice that the stars aren't at the same place each of these special days. If your precession is of 30° exactly, this implies that the stars will be at the same spot relative to the day every 12 years, which could lead to a special event in your inhabitants cultures. If it is almost 30°, you can have almost a 12 years periodic event (and keeping the big party), plus a real coincidence with a previous orbit (exact same stars position) every few centuries or so (and you can throw an even greater party!).
*(Of course, as @Michael Kjörling stated, life would have a hard time developing on such a planet. But let's forget that.)*
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Sort-of sequel to [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/95143/could-a-jungle-dwarf-tame-a-jaguar).
In that question, I asked about the feisability of domesticating a jaguar with the end goal of making a ridable mount. One good point that was mentioned was that a cat is not exactly built for riding, and that carrying weight could damage the back. This made me think of something that I had read [here](https://scriptveterinarian.tumblr.com/post/154735569569/so-beasts-of-burden-of-the-large-feline-variety#notes), about feline-based beasts of burden. While it's more in the vein of cart-drawing cats, there is mention of riding them as well.
Since feline spines are more flexible than horse spines, it reduces their ability to carry weight on their backs. However, a solution mentioned was to have special saddles made that distributed weight along the side of the animal, rather than right on their backs. Think something like a dog backpack.
This leads me to my question:
**How would a saddle need to be designed so that a jaguar could handle a dwarven rider?**
Now, since I've written the original question, I've been thinking that these jaguars may need to be borderline horse-sized for dwarves to ride. I can buy that there could be selective breeding to make the back more conducive to ride. Also note: the linked source mentions that felines think in vertical space. A feline mount may not hesitate to climb a tree or jump over things. This could definitely factor into saddle design.
When I was thinking about this question, I had originally pictured a jaguar being driven by 2 dwarven jockeys in a dog backpack-like saddle that suspended them on either side of the jaguar. Since the Jaguar is a stalk and ambush predator, speed inhibition may not be as much of an issue. Human jockeys at the lowest are about 126 lbs, but I could cut that down if that's feasible. This whole driving setup probably isn't very feasible, but if anyone wants to weigh in feel free!
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The real plus in those dog backpacks is *not* fact weight is on the sides (weight will pull downward even if it is under your belly and so it *will* drag on your spine), but fact it distributes weight on a larger part of the spine and they are rigid enough to give a constant weight on about two thirds of the spine, regardless of where the actual weight is.
Main drawback of such an arrangement is it blocks the spine like a corset preventing natural bending; this is less a problem with dogs then cats as they tend to be much stiffer (but still much more limber than a horse).
Back to your jaguar: optimal positioning strongly depends on usage.
For towing or walking at a leisurely pace with relatively heavy weight such a saddle may be used, even if I strongly suspect the animal wouldn't find it very comfortable.
OTOH if you want to use such a ride in battle or in equally changeling activities I advise to use a much smaller saddle moved up so it weights mainly over shoulder blades, directly over support of fore legs, exactly where cats spine is actually stronger and relatively less flexible.
You may want to have short stirrups so that the rider can actually ride standing and help the mount in the difficult leaps, exactly like the horse rider who actually "jumps" together with the horse in order to be lighter while in flight.
Keeping balance on such a mount, especially if it rises on hind legs either to climb or fight may be problematic and some anchorage, like what's on "amazon saddle" may help to keep calf and knee fixed (no swinging stirrups!) while letting raider free to follow movement from knee up.
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The "saddle" will be a shirtlike construction, worn by the "rider". This saddle shirt will offer a large padded scruff, which the jaguar will take in its teeth, carrying the dwarf as it would one of its own kittens.
This allows the cat to carry another creature in the manner it is accustomed, taking all the care it would with one of its own kittens. The dwarf has the benefit of hands and legs all free, enabling two-handed axe-swinging and frenzied kicking.
<http://www.zooborns.com/zooborns/2015/04/page/2/>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LRZcd.jpg)
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In this setting, humanity has evolved on a very different earth. Creatures roam the planet, with each species being capable of unique abilities. Powers range from breathing fire, shooting electricity, to releasing acid mist that melt skin. These creatures love to fight, and share the ability to metamorphose. As they continue to fight battles, they get stronger and change into more powerful versions of themselves, with their abilities becoming more destructive and numerous.
Many of these creatures are dangerous and hostile. Humanity has managed to survive by taming these beasts and enslaving them. Technology has developed around these creatures in order to make use of them. A self contained unit has been designed to "capture" these creatures and transport them to an alternate dimension inside the unit. It is encoded with the user's DNA and enslaves the beast to the user's will, and allowing them to be used in modern day life.
The super beasts are utilized in many ways, such as healing, free energy, war and defense, as well as other numerous applications. They are also used as pets and companions. This has led to an age of prosperity in the world. However, there is the potential for misuse.
Many foolish owners take to the streets or gather in underground clubs for "beast battles" in which two beasts are made to fight one another. The collateral damage can cost millions of dollars, with innocent civilians sometimes getting hurt or killed in the crossfire. Some nefarious owners use these pets to assassinate their enemies and commit crimes. To make matters worse, there are nation's or groups who use these beasts for grand nefarious goals.
An evil organization, dubbed "the organization of evil, routinely murders owners and steals their creatures, for the purpose of selling them to the highest bidder. They have become a terrorist superpower, supplying rogue states with powerful beasts to use as weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). As a result, the world is engulfed in many wars, and lone wolf terrorists use these beasts to further their agendas.
Based on this scenario, how can the world community control and regulate the use of these super beasts? What limits can they impose to limit opportunities for violence?
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I'm not sure this scheme would work in practice.
Problem is these "super-beasts" (suspending belief about their existence and characteristics, of course) are used "as-if" weapons, but they seem not fully controllable. This is a military no-no for several reasons including:
* no country would really admit defeat "just" because their "champions" are defeated (the mere fact they managed to tame them is proof enough humans are more powerful than the "super-beasts").
* no country would use units it cannot control to a large extent. Such "units" can be used in special actions, but not as the only means of war.
* if the "super-beasts" are intelligent ("taming" an intelligent "beast" may prove quite difficult) you may equate their behavior to that of mercenary troops with all related problems (first of all ensure loyalty, as mercenary troops are notoriously selling themselves to highest bidder, even after begin of conflict).
* if they are *not* intelligent then there must be some kind of trainers controlling them on the field, *while in action*.
* Ensuring loyalty on battlefield is a major concern.
If you manage to completely "weaponize" the beasts (e.g.: with some kind of "remote control" capable of acting real-time on the beasts, at least acting on their punishment/reward system) then all "normal" weapon escalation mechanisms will apply, otherwise they would be used only under high control (think about Hannibal elephants or dogs used mainly at short lash).
**Update:**
I now realize Your question was geared about controlling usage and, possibly completely ban super-beast usage via international treaties or something such.
Details (as always) heavily depend on specific characteristics of the society You are modeling. Only a few general remarks can be made.
* The only foolproof way to be sure these beasts won't do damage anymore is completely exterminate them.
* Treaties like what we see in our world about nuclear or chemical weapons are *very* difficult to enforce in Your framework because:
+ the "not dangerous" beasts are very common.
+ apparently no special skill or plant is required to breed them.
+ moderately dangerous beasts can be bred from the "not dangerous" in very small and undetectable sites (practically you can do it in your basement, if you're careful).
+ military-grade beasts still do not require large, easily detectable, plants or special materials (e.g.: refined uranium) that can be traced with (relative) ease. You "just" need some place "safe" where to breed them and make them fight to "evolve" while keeping them out of (satellite) sight.
* Situation would be more similar to trying to control drugs than nuclear warheads.
* You may have governments to agree to keep the "beast-proliferation" in check, but you will have problems from a lot of "independents", not only "rogue States". Your master problem will be super-beast-powered terrorism.
* Most likely "good" Governments will keep some beasts ready to quench terrorists, but logistics would be a nightmare. Best way to avoid collateral damage would be to insert some device to "deactivate" the police-beasts as soon as their job is over.
* Lots depends on specifics on how you plan to control the beasts.
* Active (fighting) military-grade beasts would generate enough energy to be easily detectable with proper sensors, possibly with special-purpose satellites, but shielding while training is always possible (e.g.: some large cave like Carlsbad)
Bottom line: if You really need these "Pokemon-on-steroids" you'll get a terrorism problem, more likely than a gull-blown World-War. Further hints need details on specifics of Your world.
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Perhaps in the same way our world attempts to control the spread of nuclear weapons. Once major powers have achieved the ability to reach mutually assured destruction, the animals become too dangerous to deploy. It sounds like their use has already become too costly. This forces the major powers to negotiate with each other, establishing lines of communication and mutual codes of conduct. Meanwhile, they work together to suppress minor powers and independent operators, using their combined might to prevent super-creature proliferation. Additionally, they could work together to hunt down and destroy any destructive creatures roaming about free. I'm not saying this would work, especially if your creatures are intelligent, but I could see governments trying this approach.
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Your first problem is the use of beasts in international warfare :
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**Make the use of those monsters not worth the cost**
When space conquest was the main "battlefield" during the cold war the Americans developed [space shuttles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle) which are basically space rockets that you can use multiple times. It was a formidable prowess and engineering breakthrough but the program has eventually been shut down because the cost were higher than using basic rockets.
We don't know what kind of weapon your world has but **if your 4.5 million dollars drone could kill as much as your 61 million dollars monster on the battlefield then no one would use them.**
You can achieve that by making your governments invest massively on drone researches thus lowering the cost. *(Any type of weapon goes)*
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**Create a better weapon than the beasts**
The world order follows the terror escalation. Just like the tanks were topped off by aerial warfare which was topped off by missiles and eventually nuclear warheads, you need to **have a bigger threat at war than beasts.** Anything goes as long as it will inflict more damage, warfare will shift away from beasts.
Pretty much the same as before but rather than efficiency you want your government to work on a weapon that would top your beasts in raw power.
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Your second problem is urban misuse of those beasts :
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**Have a particular beast with highly developed senses be bred by the police**
A particular type of beast would be that scavenger type with hyper developed senses (I'd recommend electromagnetic fields and blood tracking like a shark) that would be able to **detect any wounded beasts in a small radius** around her. The police would rely on those beasts to patrol cities and have them track those fight clubs.
The governments would have a breeding and training facility specially dedicated to this type of beasts.
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**Find a way to castrate the beasts of their powers**
This might not sound fun but having your cute baby burned alive by the flame-breathing pup you just bought is even less fun. Having such creatures running around freely when they can't actually be a 100% controlled is not really something the government can deal with.
You take your inspiration from Pokemon I am guessing so just picture Ash and Charizard relation but in real life. You are gonna have a shortage of teenagers before you get your 8 badges.
The governments allocate a research budget to identify, understand and block the beasts powers at birth to avoid misuses or casualties.
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Your third problem is the evil organization:
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**Make the beasts easy to procure and legal**
Any mafia will prosper off illegal goods for which people are willing to pay high prices to be in their possession (ex: Alcohol during the prohibition, Drugs nowadays). If you make it so anyone can get a beast at an affordable price or just find them in the wilds then evil organizations will struggle to make a living out of a beast black market.
This would not totally kill the organization for 2 reasons :
* Rare beasts will still be worth stealing and killing their owners for (ex: Paintings)
* Weapons are sold at Wallmart's in America and it doesn't stop criminals from selling non-registered guns (Non-castrated beasts)
There is no realistic way to stop criminal activities completely that I can think of but this would be a good way to slow them down.
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# Regulate them like Weapons/Vehicles/Exotic Pets
Some nations of your world are likely to impose restrictions on private ownership of beasts. They will require any person to own a beast to register the beast and obtain a license to lead it. Likely in this case the government will control the DNA enslavement procedure so it can only be obtained after proper licensing. Think European and East Asian weapon laws instead of US American.
Requirements for a license are based on the beast’s abilities and certain abilities are banned for private use, mostly the really deadly ones, especially if they don’t have a use besides fighting. Those are treated like military equipment and can’t be owned by civilians.
Beasts that are dangerous but useful, such as those that produce energy, have a license with a usage restriction. They are treated like powerful tools, professional vehicles or nuclear fuel cells, only that the owner may or may not be required to have them with them at all times, depending on how the enslavement works at distance (i.e. can you order them to stay in the facility and not break anything or do you have to be there for them to be obedient).
Breaking the law by either obtaining a beast illegally (through an underground DNA encoding unit or the Organisation of Evil) or violating a beast’s usage restriction will be punishable by law, with the severity probably depending on the outcome. Use of a beast in a crime will make the penalty worse similar to how it works with weapons (even if the weapons are legal), but the ownership in and of itself can be illegal (also as with weapons). The punishment might be more severe if the beast is tied to a special status, such as a member of the military. Obviously beast fights are highly illegal and treated as an appropriate crime (including destruction of property, assault, grievous bodily harm and/or manslaughter/murder).
Because beasts can metamorphose, each new change in abilities has to be registered with the licensing office. Maybe the beasts are forced to wear some kind of collar that has their registration data on it and also notices any transformation. Rules on what happens if a beast develops new abilities that change license requirements may vary.
Beasts that are largely harmless and serve as pets or companions are of course much easier to get a license for. The will be a beast categorization effort based on research which puts beasts into different levels of license through a standard testing procedure. Of course the police will also use beasts, likely with high capabilities for sensing and restricting criminals and their beasts.
Problems will invariably arise when beasts are misclassified (especially for new types), be it through mistake or bribery. Owners may try to obfuscate their beasts true abilities. Illegal beast trade will certainly exist, especially if nations nearby have a lax beast control law. Beast fights will have large betting pools to incentivise criminal activity, so will beast training through fights to obtain high power beasts to sell.
Of course there will be a lot of political discussion about how regulated beasts should or shouldn’t be and different countries will take different approaches, with varying levels of success.
Frankly, you can easily take gun control law and WMD law and smuggling as we have it today and apply it almost 1 to 1 to your beasts.
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One possible solution is to control the technology that contains the beasts. Since the container is keyed to the owner's DNA, it provides a way to limit, or at least trace, how the beast is used. Add a transmitter and a verification system to the container, so that the user has to state a reason for releasing the beast (something like a flight plan for an aircraft).
Or add a cross-check mechanism so that the container can only be opened inside certain facilities, where there are barriers to keep the beasts in check. Somewhere inside the facility is a device, like the chip in a credit card, so that both must be present for the system to work. The cross-check operates on a specific radio frequency, so unauthorized use can be quickly detected.
The other side of the coin is the beast's DNA. Whatever triggers a beast's metamorphosis to a stronger form, it must be inhibited until the owner has the training and license to control that new form. If the owner can't or won't follow the regulations, the upgrade doesn't happen. Put off too long, the upgrade may produce feedback in the beast's metabolism and destroy it, which is exactly the result you want for an unlicensed engine of destruction.
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Organize the fights as **sporting events**, regulate those.
You can't really control illegal boxing matches, car races, or super giant robot fights when we get those. Realizing that people are gonna do the deed anyway, the powers that be can legalize softer, safer versions of the crime.
Also - **let kids travel the countryside** with their pokem.. monsters and expect them to be **responsible for people's safety** (Ash's mom always asked if he changes underwear while traveling, but neglected to ask if he's healthy, safe, has enough to eat, controls his destructive-power-wielding-giant-beasts, or how many people died in last episode's mega explosion)
Last but not least - Authorize said loose band of kids as **keepers of the world's safety** in the event that a super monster from the other dimension starts wrecking the planet, and you're all set.
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First, i love all the answers in here.
With that out of the way let me propose a change in optics: if everybody has multiple super beasts at their will and call eventually by laws of nature a 80/20 law will appear and you will end with few people with the most power.
As it is always the case with those situation politics start playing a part, because a body immersed in power eventually becomes corrupted with it, and now you have a cold war in the hand of people who weren't even elected, they just happen to be very good at using their beasts.
So you need something powerful enough to bring a balance in this situation, but it has to be a power outside the grasp of humanity so it doesn't get corrupted with our ways and shortcomings, essentially, you need a GOD.
Since you already have a world filled with beasts that nature created it's not too far fetched to think nature would create a superior being capable to bring balance, but even a god can be overpowered, so nature in it's infinite wisdom made multiple gods and gave them a very specific realm to control so as to not to concentrate to much power in only one, for example:
* birds controlling fire, lighting and hail. Or dogs, your choice
* a giant blue & red whale controlling the ocean
* a giant red lizard controlling the land and volcanos
* a space snake who can control the weather
* a pair of 4 legged dragons who control space and time
* a tentacle ghost-dragon who control gravity to keep the previous dragons in check
* or even a white qlin with a golden halo on its back and the power to create and end the universe at will.
With an independent power like that, taking care humanity doesn't go to far south you can have a pretty reliable system of check & balances in place, keeping your world safe.
Unless a kid with a f\*ck ton of ultra balls and time tries to catch 'em all. Then you world depends on whatever he/she wants.
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If that world would base on values current average humanity than control over most powerful super-pokemons would be heavily restricted and limited mostly only to force structures like police, army and elite who are currently in power. Naturally there would always be renegades in the form of mafia, terrorists and guerilla forces who would just assume their own right on those means of power. The general public will be only allowed limited access to less-powerful versions of super-beasts which can create some incidents but no total chaos.
In an imaginary world with higher than current humanity's ethical standards, abuse of supermonsters would be considered immoral and anyone doing that would effectively set himself outside the limits of society and be thrown out of the community. That would naturally assume highly ethical elite ( like priesthood ) guiding world through tolerance and understanding instead of force. It most likely requires totally free uncontrolled exchange of information between members of society - presumably in form of telepathy or similar technical solution.
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The solution ? **Charge the use of monster's hospital**
Economically, this solution will in the medium/long term cause every battle to stop. Since the whole productivity is ensured by those monsters, humans have a very limited income : they are mainly staying in their house or hanging around with no aim. The only ways to earn money are finding some weird stuff while walking on dangerous roads, or to steal it to another people, under the treat of your alive monsters, which just defeated their. But the loser, who really wanted to buy his plush representing this cute yellow electrical mouse monster at the store, directly goes to the monster's hospital in order to heal his creatures, and starts new fight in order to get his money back.
That happens because hospital is free. Charge it, and the loser won't be able to fight again. The natural healing powers of the creatures are indeed limited : no way for them to get a monster out of K.O. Only human chargeable technologies can afford this. No way to enslave new creatures too, since the DNA capture system is also costly.
The population will divide in two categories : First, an immense majority of people out of the game : no way for them to get new monster ready to fight. Second, a small number of powerful people with a lot of money, who can be ill-intentioned. You want to eradicate those too.
Difficult task ? Yes and no : remember you are the government, so you technically have the complete control on money policies. But maybe not the practical skills to raise those monster efficient enough to defeat the powerful creatures of the other side.
My advice : **find loyal, talented trainers in your midst** (let's say 4 of them, plus eventually a grandmaster) and give them unlimited credits to travel in the whole world to find and train the most powerful monsters. As soon as they got them, send them defeating the other remaining trainers, again and again, until they run out of money.
**Bonus** : occasionally, to be sure that your elite trainers are still the best you can find, apply the "helicopter money" technique. Every two years, give everyone a small amount of money (let's say, 3000 MonsterDollars) and eventually a Pokemon, if the human doesn't have one, and see what happens : if, after a while, a trainer appears at the Elite Trainers official headquarter, and defeat them all in a raw (plus the grandmaster), recruit him.
(PS : not against an edit, to correct grammar faults, English isn't my mother language x) !)
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The OP asks:
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> Based on this scenario, how can the world community control and regulate the use of these super beasts? What limits can they impose to limit opportunities for violence?
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I see this as just allegory for the modern world and criminal or terrorist organizations today. The Russian Mafia runs Russia, and roughshod over the world. Before them, Nazis, before them, England was the world power. An endless string of psychopathic Kings, Emperors, and Dictators stretches back to Genghis, and before him, the Roman emperors, and before them perhaps the Egyptian Emperors.
The question is always the same; how do the oppressed and victimized overcome the smart and powerful psychopaths that seek wealth and power at any cost in human life? What would motivate insurgents to even try?
It doesn't really make a difference what level of technology or magic is involved; somehow the insurgents must match the advantages or neutralize them. Usually this involves violence and sacrifice; many of the oppressed willingly risk their lives in order to kill their oppressor, and many die in the process. Many times their efforts are for naught; the oppressor prevails.
In the OPs scenario, the only answer I see is the world community has **the biggest gun**: They have the most powerful beasts at their disposal; acquired through their own training and battles to increase power, or confiscated by force and brutality from illegal owners/users, even if they had to kill the original owners. They have the strongest magic for binding the beasts, and ways to break the bond between the original owner and their beast: Including killing the original owner if they cannot break the bond in any other way, and killing the beast if that doesn't work.
Enforce the law ruthlessly. If the beasts are controlled, then like police dogs (and their near magical sensory abilities IRL) with their human handlers, have these beasts patrol any areas of law breaking, sniff out other beasts and confiscate them. You have magic, certainly you can find magical ways to find magic or know it has been used, and by what, and where it went. If your magic is not good enough for that, train a good bloodhound; their tracking ability on the scantest of trails (like footsteps, in shoes, on concrete) is truly astonishing and baffling.
When violent people will only be constrained by physical force and violence against them; your "world community" must come together to be stronger than any other individualized force on the planet. Build up your magic, and use it against the criminals.
You don't have to outlaw the use of the creatures, just like you don't have to outlaw the use of guns or drugs. Just make sure that when somebody uses a creature for an outlawed purpose (like murder, robbery, enslavement, etc) those people end up losing everything in quick order, including their lives, no matter **what** the cost to the world community: Do not let crime succeed.
Whenever and wherever crime pays off, psychopaths will rise to the top of a criminal enterprise and eventually rule the countries that are the least vigilant in putting them down, for whatever reason. Psychopathy (no conscience, empathy or sympathy and willing to do literally anything to win) combined with intelligence (as it often is) is an advantage in large organizations.
That is where the rogue states come from, the Gadaffi's and Hussein's and many other brutal dictators IRL. The only thing that defeats them is overwhelming force, or the convincing threat of it. (Do not presume they are stupid, if they are convinced by historical precedent that you can and will hunt them down and kill them for using magical beasts, then they will attain their goals by non-magical means, like guns.)
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Because the nature of these beasts is fluid and changes as the grow in strength, perhaps a liscensing system could be administered. Beasts below a certain level are relatively harmless and are mostly pets. To legally own beasts above a certain level, you must obtain a permit from a government sanctioned permitting station by achieving a successful test completion as determined by the appointed administer of the testing facility. The more powerful your creature gets, the more permits you need to control them. Permiting recoginzes your ability to handle beasts below certain levels and those who do not have such permits clearly are not experienced and their beasts are not behaved well enough to performe tasking. These permits can also regulate certain skills that could, for example, fell a tree in one swoop, or break rocks with one blow, or allow you to use your beasts as water or air based transport. You would need to demonstrate those skills can be properly managed. The government should also post a limit as to how many beasts one can carry at any given time on their person as well as allow for private storage of additional Beasts that the person may aquire. This ensures that law enforcement with trained beasts will outnumber a criminal beast owner AND that the beasts aren't neglected by horders, as such useful creatures are likely to be collected excessively. Beasts that are in danger of extiction in the wild due to popularity in captivity may even be regulated in capture and unable to be fought in wildlife preserves in it's natural habitat. Certain powerful and/or very rare beasts might even be banned from certian government and popular private sanctioned tournaments and events. Control of exrtemely powerful/popular/rare beasts may even be limited by the Government and only permitted during certain periods of time at their discretion.
These regulations will probably be enforced by a single government entity that will have a board of four to five members that are among the best beast and most knowledgable handlers in the region. They may personally approve of accomplished beast handlers who could then act as agents in working on situations involving Very Powerful/Very Rare wild beasts native to that government's region.
Obtaining beasts that are not native to the region should be made as difficult and cost prohibitive as possible. These should require complying with all laws in your country (including prohibited skills that beasts cannot know), a one time export licesnes fee for the supplier, and possible restrictions on working knowledge of the imported beast. If the market demand is particualarly strong, governments may enter into agreements where beasts may be traded at a rate of One To One, but must comply with both government restrictions in such cases. Since there are sure to be popular beasts that developed to meet certain environment niches in their nation of origin, these controls ensure that the the beasts are carefully accounted for as the animal may prove to be an invasive species that strangles the niche of of other similar creatures. This should be especially watched among rodent and insect beasts, which are prone to these behaviors.
Finally, the government can employ research firms to study these beasts and allow for some assistance by helping to fund such research firms field research teams. This will allow for such innovations as computer field guides which field researchers can use to catalog beasts in the wild and track their own collection of beasts. The governments could even provide services, such as beast health care benefits and wave service fees for participation in permitting centers (even defering permits out of order... a field researcher could obtain his level 70 permit before his level 50 for example) and some import fees and regulations. Field researchers of significant permitting could even be drafted by governments to help investigate said crime rings as they would be closely interacting with other beast handlers and have a working knowledge of the beasts favored by said such organization during the comission of their crimes.
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Governments mostly maintain their power through the monopolization of violence. A government is only seen as legitimate if it is capable of enforcing the external borders of its country through military force (and the threat thereof) and maintaining internal stability by enforcing laws through police force and punishment (or threat thereof). Basically saying "we have enough power to force you to follow our rulings within the country and recognize where we draw our borders". Self-defense and other actions by private individuals in this sense are the government permitting individuals to use force in self-defense.
Any individual who is capable of exerting force on par with the government threatens this monopoly and makes the government look illegitimate, because it means the government is unable to enforce reliable social order and the upholding of normal business agreements. This is why governments are so uneasy about things like organized crime and why so many cyberpunk settings start with corporations taking over the ability to project military force from the government.
**What this means for your setting** is that governments cannot afford to allow beast use willy-nilly, as it means anyone can potentially upend the social order through the use of force and society devolves into who has the biggest beast. Governments would have to restrict access to beasts, banning ownership of dangerous ones and monopolizing access to the most powerful. It would be like the Second Amendment debates in the U.S. on a larger scale but with pokeballs. In other words keep all the legendaries and Garchomps to themselves so that if internal strife breaks out they always have access to the best weaponry. Because the minute some 10-year-old kid gets their hands on a level 100 shiny Lugia, the law of the land is suddenly "whatever makes the kid not unleash an Aeroblast on the nearest city".
**Banning *all* beasts might be the safest option.** The people might not like it but the government is the one with the level 100 shiny Lugia (or rather, they are the government *because* they have the Lugia). The only problem is a random person can literally wander into the woods and stumble across a critter tameable into a real monster (Ralts in Hoenn comes to mind).
**Indeed, one way might be to ban all beast use unless it's sanctioned by being a government employee, creating a "haves and have nots" scenario where you have two social classes.** One would be government employees that have significant social power over their fellows due to access to beasts (and government favor), and non-government citizens who are comparatively powerless and lack any of the benefits that having a beast around might bring. This would be a strong impetus for people to join the government, and would create a weird system akin to a historical cross between the communist party (join us and get benefits) and how guns are regulated in many countries (only the government can have guns). With a bit of the split between benders and non-benders in *Avatar: The Legend of Korra* thrown in.
**However, you have a much bigger issue I'm not sure if you're aware of.** As you say, these not-pokemon get stronger as they fight and win battles...and there is a sizeable underground street fighting culture. What's stopping people from just level-grinding their beasts until they have beasts that could challenge the government and ruling bodies? The same way in Pokemon you could theoretically level-grind the Pokemon you catch on the first route until you have a level 100 Staraptor, Luxray, and Infernape that can blitzkrieg most of Sinnoh. Or how you can take just about any Magikarp anywhere in the Pokemon universe and turn it into a not-dragon of destruction once it hits level 20.
In real life what prevents civilians from using high-end military weaponry is ease of access. Military-grade hardware is either restricted to the military, is too hard to jump through the legal hoops to own, or is too expensive to maintain or find ammo for. In real life you can't level up a simple pistol or hunting rifle into a machine gun or an Abrams tank. Or that perennial favorite metaphor, nukes. In real life what prevents everyone and their grandmother from having nukes is difficulties in finding and mining weapons-grade uranium and then the large and expensive equipment it takes to enrich and refine it into a useable form for a weapon. Not here, where you can theoretically turn almost any beast into a nuke with enough training. **Your setting's system basically gives the average Joe the ability to build a WMD in their backyard.**
**What's really bad is that people living out in the boondocks, you know, stereotypical hillbilly gun-nuts, crazy cults living off the grid, insurgent groups hiding in caves or foxholes, actually have the *best* access to crazy dangerous creatures**, because they live out in the middle of wilderness where you are more likely to find large or rare wildlife and there is less government presence to regulate them. Example, in the U.S. the Idaho panhandle (and neighboring easternmost Washington and westernmot Montana), generally considered the cultist capital of the country, is also home to some of the few remaining populations of wolves and grizzly bears in the lower 48 *because* it is so remote. In a universe where the grizzly bears breathe fire, the wolves shoot lightning, and the anarchists, nutty religious groups, and neo-Nazi cults can tame them...this'll be bad.
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[Question]
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Like an idiot, I made a medieval-inspired setting without magic, and now a significant plot point means that I need a healer to diagnose rapidly increasing levels of lead in the queen's body without the benefit of modern medical techniques or magical help. They already know that lead is what they need to be on the lookout for, and I've established that this particular healer takes a much more scientific approach than most medical professionals of the time, but I don't know how she could possibly diagnose this. From the research I've managed to do, blood levels don't sound like they'd be the most reliable indicator, since most of the lead would be stored in her bones. Were there techniques for lead diagnosis in the Middle Ages, or a more modern technique that I could tweak and put into the setting? It is a fictional world, so it doesn't have to be true to what was strictly necessary at the time.
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Others have suggested symptoms and chemical reactions prove the existence of lead poisoning. Since your doctors are already aware of the dangers of lead, they would likely also be aware of the symptoms of [acute lead poisoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#Acute_poisoning), so that's a reasonable suggestion. They might also be aware of the chemical reactions (alchemy), so you can probably also use that...
While you claim that blood would likely be unreliable, neither [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#Classification) nor this paper talking about [lead in blood and urine](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9719619) seems to agree with you.
So why am I writing an answer instead of a comment? Because I want to present to you a third option. Detect lead through its properties. However I have to admit that this could be flawed in reality.
Lead is sweet, and in ancient times, the Romans used it as a sweetener for their wine (supposedly). Today kids also love to eat leaded paint that flakes of walls because it's sweet (and they'll put anything in their mouth anyway).
So now you might be thinking, a food tester might prevent the poisoning, right? Wrong, a lot of things are sweet, so a food tester might not detect it. Apparently, back then everyone was a fan of Bear Grylls, or just loved to drink a nice cup of piss, [because medieval times (around the year 1000) it was known that the urine of people with diabetes tastes sweet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_diabetes#Further%20history), this was also known thousands of years before that by several other cultures. Another common thing done in medieval times, until about 200 years ago, was blood-letting.
What I'm trying to say is... since lead is detectable both in urine and blood, your healer should do a nice little taste test of the queen's urine or her blood, as this apparently wasn't uncommon at the time. A lesser doctor might diagnose her with diabetes, but your genius healer connects the dots with the other symptoms and properly diagnoses her with lead poisoning. The levels might be to low to actually taste in reality, (or not, i haven't tried), but I feel like it's close enough to make it not seem unrealistic in a story. Maybe use an animal with a sensitive sense of taste.
A second possibility would be to weight her blood and urine against the same volume of non-poisoned nastiness. However, this might be a very small difference.
The highest levels of lead in blood I could find is 330 µg/dL. A list of LD50's claimed the lowest dose of death as 450 (no unit, but taken orally)... considering that Wikipedia states quite severe symptoms for blood levels of above 100 µg/dL, including coma, I'll go with 450 µg/dL as the LD50 (which your queen could survive with a likelihood of 50%). So that would only be a difference of 4.5 mg/L ... rather hard to detect with medieval scales. Maybe the blood/urine could be boiled off so a finer scale could be used. I think that bleeding more than a liter of blood would be a risk in itself [(At 3 1/2 liters the likely cause of death for George Washington)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington#Death), but urine would be fairly easy to gather in more reasonable quantities which could then be boiled off for easier measurements.
edit: put emphasis on the fact that this might not be as realistic as other answers due to a comment
[Answer]
There are a bunch of chemical reactions that are used to test for the presence of lead ions (Pb2+). If your healer has some scientific experience and knows he's looking for lead, then he might have stumbled upon one or more of these during experiments with lead. [This page](https://chem.libretexts.org/Core/Inorganic_Chemistry/Descriptive_Chemistry/Elements_Organized_by_Block/2_p-Block_Elements/Group_14%3A_The_Carbon_Family/1Group_14%3A_General_Chemistry/Chemistry_of_Aqueous_Lead(II)_Ions) lists a few reactions, as does [this one](http://www.marz-kreations.com/Chemistry/Cation-ID/162l-Lead.html), most of them require only relatively basic anorganic compounds that shouldn't clash with a medieval tech level. For your purposes the detection based crystal formation of the lead salt might be better, than identification based on the colour of insoluble precipitates, since crystal structures are very unique (it also makes the test take longer).
In any case the accuracy of his test will be improved *a lot* if he uses positive and negative controls — so blood that he actively poisoned and blood that isn't poisoned. These words are only used in modern science, but the practice of checking for them can easily be used by a scientifically working healer as well.
Note that many of these reactions would probably fail horribly in a real world scenario for blood level lead detection due to 'contamination' of the blood with all kinds of different metal ions and the low concentration in the blood. You can handwave most of these problems with the testing procedure of your healer (he can at least remove all the organic compounds, and is maybe able to concentrate the metal ions).
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The simplest and most efficient way don't need blood test. You just need to diagnose few symptoms like high blood pressure, constipation, sleep problem and stomach pain. Then you just send the patient to different place and change his diet to get rid of possible lead sources.
Of course this is not specific as you don't target lead and lead only but if your story mean lead you will have lead healing.
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One of the main mechanisms by which [lead poisoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning) manifests in the body is by disrupting the formation of hemoglobin which transports necessary iron around the body in the blood and leads to anemia which its production is impaired.
Even today, initial diagnostic screenings for lead poisoning often target [iron-deficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning#Diagnosis) to identify the need for a follow up test, rather than testing for lead directly.
I suspect that there are a variety of medieval technology class tests that could be used to identify [anemia](http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/anemia/symptoms-causes/dxc-20183157) (such as fatigue and pale or yellow skin) which while non-specific would indicate lead poisoning when found in association with other non-specific symptoms of lead poisoning such as tremors and cognitive impairment.
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Before there were fancy tests, one could demonstrate lead toxicity by observing basophilic stippling in red blood cells, observed through a microscope.
from <http://studydroid.com/printerFriendlyViewPack.php?packId=474391>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/M6Avc.jpg)
In Principles and Practice of medicine, Osler describes this appearance of the red cells. More importantly for your medieval doctor (who might not have a microscope), he describes lead lines.
from <https://books.google.com/books?id=ldqgekrDIdkC&pg=PA386&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LcWwV.png)
Lead lines on the gums. From <http://www.ruralneuropractice.com/article.asp?issn=0976-3147;year=2014;volume=5;issue=2;spage=161;epage=163;aulast=Rao>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uwNpl.jpg)
The clinical scenario (encephalopathy, constipation, pallor from anemia) with the lead lines might be enough to make the diagnosis. If he has a microscope and can demonstrate the basophilic stippling that nails it.
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Could a solar flare be coaxed from a star with a magnetic weapon, possibly by manipulating [magnetic reconnection](https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/solarsystem/2006_mag_recon.html)? Could the resulting flare be aimed at a planet (or space fleet) with any accuracy?
I understand that a solar flare will not "fry" a planet, but I am hoping for a portable weapon that would cause extreme mayhem and disruption (not planetcide). By *portable*, I mean it can be transported and deployed from a ship, or the weapon is the whole ship.
[A NASA video about the coronal mass ejection event in 2012](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukQhycKOFw) suggests that repeated flares, or co-ordinated flares could be more damaging. Could this weapon (or ship) survive the flairs or possibly get out of the way to fire again and again?
Technology level is thousands of years in the future. My story is set in an Electric Universe where electromagnetism is a stand-in for magic, but I'd like to get a reality-check before I add the handwavium.
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Solar flares are "quite energetic" phenomena.
If your civilazation has enough energy to trigger/control a solar flare, I would better bet on using that energy directly on the enemy, rather than steering it to the Sun and let the Sun do the hit.
What I mean, if you have a nuke, you don't use it to fire a potato cannon and hit your enemy with a potato...
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Absolutely, though it's quite an undertaking. The scope of it has nothing to do with how advanced you are so much as the scope of weaponizing such a thing.
The easiest way to do this would be to build statite magnetic panels around the sun (statites being light sail material that floats on the photon pressure from the star). Get these in a speedy orbit, and oscillate their distance closer and further from the star.
The plasma of a star is already severely polarized, so this would drive the plasma in two directions away from the star. Coronal ejections would have nothing on the barrage of stellar material this would eject.
It's easier to eject this material from the north and south poles of the star, but you could do it off points along its equator or the like, to hit planets as well.
A more advanced concept is the Nicoll-Dyson beam, though it's a lot more work, to the point the inhabitants of the planet would have time to stop you likely.
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I second (third) the posts saying no.
In addition to the stated issue, that solar flare takes a massive amount of energy to produce, it does no noticable harm to a planet. The flare is so far away from a planet that the energy that reaches the planet is a very tiny fraction of the energy produced from the flare.
The real problem is two fold.
1. your not going to be able to get any more energy out of a solar flare then you put into it
2. the distances between sun and planet, coupled with exponential decrease in energy, means far too much energy is wasted in travel.
The solution then seems simple, ignore the solar flare entirely and use the energy directly near the planet.
Get up close to the planet and use your energy up close and personal to ruin the day of people on the planet. You can simply project large masses at the planet (so long as the mass/meteor you find as a metal core electromagnetism can be used to accelerate it). If you want something less lethal consider an EMP pulse to wipe out technology, with the ship firing the pulse either being shielded or moving away from the 'bomb' it plants before it's set off.
In any case it makes sense to exert your energy up close and personal then at such a massive range as the sun.
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# Realistically, no
You asked for a "reality check" so I have to say: no. You, a puny human, cannot weaponize solar flares. You cannot even affect them in any significant way.
As [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j7ysWRg8Ew) shows, solar flares are mind-bogglingly huge. The largest human-made structure is not even one millionth of the size of one pixel in that video. The largest ever energy excretion made by humans — [the Tsar Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) — is 1 / 10 000 the energy content of an [average observable solar flare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_flare).
As a single human being, even with all the realistically available resources at your disposal, your can affect a solar flare pretty much in the same way as you can affect the Atlantic Ocean, which on the whole is: not at all.
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### The truth is that we still don't know.
I'm pretty sure that a thousand years ago, nobody would find reasonable, with their knowledge, that humankind could devastate what they would consider at time, something like half the world, with a object not much bigger than a elephant. **They would clearly find it to be some kind of magic.**
### I believe I got where you are trying to go.
Probably, our apice of energy production as a civilization, will be **some kind of efficient harvesting from stars and other energetic objects on our vicinity itself...** It is reasonable to believe that, when (or if...) we get to be a civilization of **type II** in terms of **Kardashev scale** we may discover ways to build devices nearby sun that can use its energy to exploit solar flares itself in a controlled manner, as a weapon, among much other things, such as adjustments on the entire solar system trajectory inside Milky Way, etc.
### But, there exist other theoretical concepts that sound more reasonable, effective and efficient.
For example, a huge net of big scale mirrors near sun, that can be adjusted to concentrate a reasonable amount of energy from sun into any point inside solar system.
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There are a number of animals that can change color in a short time, like some chameleons and octopuses.
Is there any reasonable way for a color-changing mammal to evolve naturally?
I'm looking to end up with a mammal that can change its color in a matter of minutes, not months. This mammal would use its camoflage to help it hunt and to hide from dangerous predators.
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If your mammal is hairless then there is no fundamental problem -- for example it can evolve a mechanism to produce and absorb certain [pigments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_pigment) in the cells of the [basal layer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratum_basale) of the epidermis, or it can have a population of mobile [pigmented cells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatophore) in the [dermis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermis). With hair or fur things get complicated because hair is not living tissue and its color cannot be changed once it has grown; you may imagine a fur made up of two or more kinds of different colored hairs (sort-of like [roan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roan_(color)) horses) with color change being effected by sets of [*arrector pili*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrector_pili_muscle) muscles.
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No, but for a technicality: animals that developed this ability would probably become a *new category*.
If some creature loses its mammalian hair and develops a new type of skin covering, that would be a major trait noticed even by pre-scientific naming. Birds have feathers, mammals have hair, and has photo active skin covering.
What drove this change would be major evolutionary pressures, so it would not be the *only* change. It would be different in many ways, and it might only be through modern studies that the accurate determination was made that branched off mammals, some millions of years ago.
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**Two-toned Strobe Beast**
Here is a fictional color changing animal that is reasonable and not too far from a standard mammal plan. Start with a porcupine.[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/j7i4d.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5qU9e.jpg)
Some quills are strikingly two-toned.
<https://www.objectlessons.org/natural-world-earth/porcupine-quills/s89/a374/>
The Strobe beast has two toned quills also, but longitudinally. Half is black and half is white, like this dog's claws.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9y5lW.jpg)
[Poodleforum.com](http://www.poodleforum.com/5-poodle-talk/13634-striped-toe-nails-common-fluke-coat-color-clue.html)
Porcupine quills are modified hairs. They are mobile and the porcupine can raise and lower them. The Strobe beast does not raise or lower, but can rotate its short two-tone quills 180 degrees, like a human wrist or head. The short quills lie flat along the body.
Quills can rotate from black side up to white side up and back in a split second: thus the name "strobe beast". The beast can be black or white or shades of gray. It could be, if it chose, two toned like a tapir.
If you allow more precise control of stretches of quills the strobe beast could make circumferential rings and patches like this genet.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xk9KT.jpg)
from robertharding.com
Not only could it have patterns it could make the patterns move. The strobe beast could make circumferential rings of black and white move along its body. A creature with contrasting rings moving along its body would be very confusing to watch. It would be hard to tell which direction the creature was moving. A black strobe beast could lie still and move a patch of white back and forth along its body, drawing in small predators in the manner of an angler fish and then catching and eating them.
The strobe beast cannot turn green or magenta. Just black and white and combinations.
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It's plausible: after all, color changing ability has evolved multiple times and with different mechanisms. It could even be argued that humans have a degree of color-changing ability - we slowly make our skin darker in response to sunlight, and can quickly turn red when angry or embarrassed by expanding blood vessels near the skin (the latter may even be a form of social signalling).
Mandrills are famous for their various colors, with patches of blue and red on their faces and buttocks, and various shades of purple in between. They accomplish this through a combination of light-scattering collagen fibers and the swelling of blood vessels near the skin. These mechanisms are controlled chemically, through testosterone, but they could plausibly be controlled directly through muscle contractions (perhaps the same muscles responsible for making hair raise up could stretch or squeeze the blue parts, and the red could be controlled through the same mechanisms that allow humans to blush). This would allow a mandrill descendant to shift its color patches at will. There is an evolutionary benefit to this: male mandrills normally change their color slowly over time in response to social status; a brightly-colored mandrill has more access to mates, but this also incites challenges from competing males. A weaker male with color changing abilities could "cheat" by turning more brightly colored when around females and then becoming dull-colored when the competition shows up.
A possibility that would work with a hairy mammal could be to grow multiple colors of hair close together, and have the muscles for raising each color hair respond to a different trigger. Raised hairs would stand out over lowered ones, so (for example) the animal could appear red by raising all of its red hairs and letting the other hairs lie flat. By mixing combinations of red, black, and white, the animal could flash through the entire spectrum of colors available to mammalian hair.
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I am writting a novel ( in a world where magic exists, and is evolving every second )
A lucky guy, found the notes of an ancient artificer on a training artifact. The artifact was very easy to make and with him straining the relationships he had with every single person, and visiting many artificers for him to create the small intricate components, he gained some progress ( he didn't raise any suspension, as he was very careful with what he was doing, and he spread rumors of him trying a new crazy idea that was bound to fail, but that he was blinded by the 'what if' he succeeded. Basically half truth half lies, covered up in dirt. )
After almost 3 months of him 'dying' to create the artifact ( with some failures along the way ) he succeeded.
The artifact has 3 stages and wasn't highly ranked in the ancient times.
The first stage could amplify the gravity on a small area by 1,5 times the original ( how small exactly or how big, haven't been decided yet )
The second stage could double the gravity.
And the third stage could effectively triple it.
**QUESTION**
I don't care much about the second or third stages, but what effects would 1,5 times the gravity have on a human ???
I can explain the second stage by saying that his body was strengthened by the first, and do the same for the third.
I pretty much can predict that he will have a problem with his internal organs, eyes, brain, blood flow and so on.
If anyone though could tell me the effects of that stronger gravity, I would be forever grateful.
**DISCLAIMER**
The question is indeed quite similar to [this](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/158/would-the-human-body-support-living-on-planets-with-a-greater-gravity-than-earth)
But I'm asking for the effects, not survivability.
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Carrying a 40kg backpack, as suggested by one commenter, is not a good analogy. The backpack does not account for the differences in blood pressure, and there are other important differences that we will get to shortly. But let's first consider the blood pressure issue!
A great body (no pun intended) of knowledge about the effects of excess $g$-forces on the human body comes from military research that tries to determine what the limits are for fighter pilots (who necessarily experience high acceleration when they pull tight turns).
From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-LOC>:
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> High-G training for pilots of high performance aircraft or spacecraft often includes ground training for G-LOC in special centrifuges, with some profiles exposing pilots to 9$g$ for a sustained period.
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Of course, this requires a $g$-suit and a lot of training on top of starting with a genetic background that permits a level of physical fitness that is not particularly representative of the capabilities of the average human being. Also, the pilots are sitting, not standing.
Fortunately, the air force also ran a few experiments on untrained people for comparison:
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> An un-trained individual not used to the G-straining manoeuvre can black out between 4 and 6 g, particularly if this is pulled suddenly.
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So, we can safely conclude that 1.5$g$ is definitely not a blackout condition for the average Joe, even in a standing position. The difference between sitting and standing is only a slight one, because sitting does not prevent the blood from rushing from your knees to your feet. It only prevents the pressure differential over the length of your thigh (which is on average about 1/4 of a person's height).
In terms of effort expended to stand and more around, yeah, at 1.5$g$ you will feel 1.5 times your body weight. However, this is not equivalent to carrying a 40kg backpack for an 80kg person because the additional weight is very optimally loaded - it's configured precisely like the load you normally carry around, just 50% higher everywhere in your body. Whereas a backpack will produce a lot of non-uniform loading and be much more cumbersome for the same effective increase in weight.
The limiting factor at 1.5$g$ will probably be the blood oxygen flow to the upper back and neck muscles, needed for maintaining a standing pose. The reduced blood flow, coupled with the increased weight demand at 1.5$g$ would likely prevent the muscles from operating aerobically. Thus, rather than burning oxygen, the muscles would have to generate energy through glycolysis as they do during in an intensive workout. This will result in operating normally for a while but eventually reaching a state of fatigue, probably within 30 minutes or so for the average Joe but likely extendable to a few hours for a physically fit person with training in such an environment.
The fix for our hero, obviously, is to lie down when he is tired and allow his/her back and neck muscles to recuperate under conditions of normal blood flow. If some loss of dignity is acceptable, our hero may also resort to crawling around on all fours and minimizing the amount of time spent standing (since standing causes the bulk of the endurance penalty in our 1.5$g$ environment).
Our hero should also use every opportunity to *swim* from point A to point B, because being submersed is like wearing an ideal $g$-suit - the pressure differential is approximately the same outside the body as in and blood flow will be close to normal so there would be no endurance penalty for additional $g$s. If our hero gets tired while swimming he or she should definitely *not* attempt to tread water though - the higher $g$ value will amplify the water pressure, making it much more difficult to breathe since our neat argument of equal submersion pressure doesn't apply the interior of the lungs which are at only air density rather than approximately water density. Instead, our hero should just lie back and relax while floating near the water's surface.
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I should point out that a person who weighs 1.5 times or 2 times or 3 times normal weight for their size and is reasonably active is experiencing some but not all of the effects that a person of normal weight would experience in 1.5 gs or 2 gs or 3 gs, and for prolonged periods of time.
I once read something that tests about hwo long humans could endure constant higher gravity were ended after a week in 1.25 gs when the test subjects started to show signs of deteriorating health. Thus your character should be able to experience minutes or hours at 1.5 gs or 2gs or 3gs with no problems but could kill himself trying to live in 1.5 gs permanently.
This article indicates that test subjects have experienced 1.5 gs for a week.
<https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6154/maximum-survivable-long-term-g-forces>[1](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6154/maximum-survivable-long-term-g-forces)
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The long term effects would include angiological problems such as increased risk of embolies and varicose veins, and accelerated aging of the skin. Also, if there is reproduction under these conditions, children will tend to be quite shorter, as their muscles would have to become very strong at an early age, thus making the lengthwise development of long bones more difficult.
Something to be taken into account is air pressure, which I imagine would be influenced by higher gravity (how does that play if such gravitational increase is limited to a relatively minor area of the planet?)
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Looking for someone with meteorology/physics knowledge to help with this one.
Let's say I've got an island that floats in the sky--nothing special, these are a staple of fantasy these days. For argument's sake lets put it at a reasonable elevation of about 7,000 feet.
Now, this is going to put it right in the middle of any cumulonimbus cloud that comes along. My understanding of lightning is a little shaky, but it seems like the island would be 'grounded' by virtue of being ground and therefore lightning might be attracted to it. Would people living on such a flying island have to worry about lightning storms? Would they have to worry more than people living on terra firma?
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It can.
If the wind of the storm caused a big enough static charge on the island (or part of it), lightning would strike it to equalize the charge.
Lightning arcs from cloud to cloud for the same reason.
Or, a thin part of the island may just be in the way. Flying aircraft are sometimes hit by lightning. the aircraft is not the target but it happened to be in the way when the lightning arced. It can make a dime sized hole through the aircraft (better hope a person or fuel tank isn't in the way).
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Short answers: Yes, and Yes.
Not only is there cloud to ground lightning, there is cloud to cloud lightning. Floating islands would be subject to both. And unfortunately, just because they are made of dirt, does not mean they are grounded. Lightning is just a massive static electrical charge, so they could (depending on their exact composition) generate lightning of their own that could zap other nearby things (eg, other islands or people flying too close).
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You also might have island to ground lightning (or ground to island). The lightning from cloud to island would likely be lighter, because the island isn't grounded and because you don't need as big of a charge differential to overcome shorter distances. So small but frequent bolts to equalize the charge. But then the island itself would have a distinct charge. Eventually, it could strike the ground with lightning. And those would be the big bolts.
It's also possible that the island might get hit by lightning from the clouds when high and strike the ground with lightning when lower. It depends on how your island moves. Is it always at the same altitude? Or constantly changing?
Incidentally, lightning is the answer to how clouds (and floating islands) ground themselves.
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Basically, in my novel, there is a magic power that involves creating portals that lengthen or shorten the distance between two places.
To make a portal, the user must first have a large amount of two things: "Sunlight", a form of energy that diffuses through all things, particularly Sunstones, and "Moonlight", something similar, but not a form of energy, can be used to turn one form of energy to another.
Two portals of equal size must first be in existence before either of them can be opened. While not opened, they are grey discs on both sides that are either fixed to an object, fixed in a particular position relative to the Earth, or in freefall.
When something goes through the portal, and loses gravitational potential energy in the process, the portals gain Sunlight. When the reverse happens, the portals lose Sunlight. When the portals are running out of Sunlight, they draw heat from the surroundings and spend Moonlight. When the portals run out of Moonlight, or cannot siphon heat away from the surroundings, they close.
The trouble is, what happens if the portals close with something still inside them? If they cut whatever is inside them, would that violate the conservation of enegy? How do I do this in a way that doesn't violate the conservation of energy?
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## You won't violate the conservation of energy.
It states that "the total energy of an isolated system remains constant"; "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed". Counting the universe as a truly isolated system, cutting something in half doesn't create or destroy energy. It merely separates the "net" energy of the object into two halves.
For example, if a blacksmith cuts a hot piece of metal in half, each piece conserves its own heat. They do not create any heat, and although the blade they use may get warmer, they do not destroy any energy whatsoever. It just separates.
Similarly, two halves of a separated object will share what used to be the energy preserved by one.
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## Energy is a prerequisite
Don't allow objects to pass through a portal as it powers down!
In order to complete any task, you need to expend energy. If the portal is losing energy, it can lose the ability to teleport matter *before* the matter enters.
If an object is still somehow caught, the portal can draw energy from it - making it colder (thermal), or slower (kinetic / mechanical), or less electrically charged, or less magnetic, or less radioactive - etc.
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Options:
If you don't have sufficient energy, you have to supply it by pushing. So the first 200 of your troop go through, and the last guy gets halfway through and can't go forward. This would be unhealthy for more than a few seconds, because blood can't move past the the interface either. If your head was in the interface, I think you would lose consciousness almost instantly. You could have crude jokes about 'portal disease' from having the wrong bits of you in the portal.
If you have a portal between a high and a low place can you recharge it by running stuff from high to low?
Can you connect two port sets with a 'sunlink' so that surplus energy from one can be used by the other. This would mean that you could put a portal in a river on a mountain, with the other end in a desert, and irrigate the desert at the same time you are charging the portal system.
Perhaps it is difficult to connect more than 2 sets together. Then for an invasion you are constantly disconnecting/reconnecting
Can a spell be made that shows the colour of a portal that is low on sunlight. So one that can take a man in full armour or a larger one that can pass a horse and coach shows up with faint gold colour, and as the charge gets lower goes to copper and then black or grey. (Black no sunlight, grey, not connected)
If you are worried about conservation of energy, you should worry about conservation of momentum. This is trickier since it's a vector quantity. Move 10 km west and the surface of the earth is moving at something like a meter per second up relative to where you were. The curve is approximately quadratic. Similar motions affect travel in other directions. At the extreme, a portal to the opposite side of the world would drop you out at between mach 2 and mach 3. This has weapon potential. Imagine the effect of a 4" water jet moving at 2000 miles an hour. Pressure washer indeed.
One way around this: Sunlight is your energy, moonlight is your momentum bank. You are using the angular momentum of the moon as a damper. This would imply short portals wouldn't need moonlight.
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Spit it back out again.
If something needs energy expenditure going one way, it charges the portal going he other way. So if the portal reaches zero, any object in transit gets expelled from the origin portal again like an appleseed between your fingers, recharging the portal with a bit of energy.
For added fun, the spitting could be rather vehemently, smearing a person over the nearest wall, or smoothly, as required by the story.
Also, depending on whether you know how much charge a portal possesses and needs for the next transport or not the ride could a thrilling gamble.
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Can a portal be selective? E.g. Can you set it up that only living things will go through it. Send in armoured cavalry, and get naked men riding bareback on the other side, while the back side of the entrance portal accumulates inventory?
Can a portal be made so that it only functions one way? If the entrance is very high, and the portal isn't charged, then in effect it's one way.
Can a portal be charged from either end, or is one end a master to the other? This can prevent a one way portal from being charged at the downhill end to allow infiltration 'uphill'.
Do both ends of a portal have to be the same size? What happens to a person who walks through a 6' portal if the other end is 4". Extruded like toothpaste? Are there other properties that come up from mismatched end sizes? E.g. is a big to small portal pair in effect a nozzle, with the exit speed multiplied by the relative area?
Tune it specific metals, place one end in the ocean in a current, and harvest gold. Or salt. Could you use this to get pure water from otherwise undrinkable sources?
One issue would be that for sparse materials (gold in seawater) the material coming through would be a gas. You may want the exit ring to be fastened to the neck of a large jar. Or you start off with a sample of the material, and it is flush to the portal, and the material plates out on the sample. It would act very much like vacuum depositing without the vacuum. Later on they could make integrated circuits this way.
Make a tiny portal. Surgically implant it in a person you want to control, or give a pill that disolves in the stomach releasing some mechanism that prevents it passing through. You can pass strychnine through the portal any time. Tiny doses will show him how painful the death can be.
Variations on a spell:
Can you make a portal that only passes light? This would be a magic viewing glass. Consider a gift of a partially silvered mirror with a lightportal on the back side. From the front it looks like a mirror. From the back you see what's in front. Make these up into spectacles. Wearers would be, "The Eyes of the King" Similar ones, bi-directional worn near the ear would be communicators.
If it's 2 way, and built into a pair of crystal balls, you have in effect reinvented Tolkien's palantir.
Can a light portal 'remember' and fast forward? In effect be a video recorder than can only playback once, as it lets the light it received back out in the same order.
Can a simpler light portal just delay light. Hold a 2" light portal up to the sun all day, and have an all night torch?
Can a light portal discharge all of it's light in a single flash? Take a 1 foot light portal, fill it with sunlight all day, keeping it oriented so that the light is always at right angles to the portal. Discharge all at once. This is in effect badly collimated 1 shot war laser. (it would spread at an angle of 1/2 degree) If nothing else this should be sufficient to set a ship's sails on fire from a distance, or temporarily blind an enemy.
Can a portal entrance be passed through a portal. If portals can be made elliptical then one can be passed through another. If you can quickly change the pairing between entrance and exit portal you have a method than an army can travel as fast as a team can run carrying the portal. You run forward until you are exhausted. Set the portal up. Next carry team comes through carrying a portal and goes another mile, sets it up. Meanwhile the end portal of the chain is tuned to the first set up portal, and everyone at the end comes through to the beginning. The end portal is then carried through to the beginning of the line. I think it takes a minimum of 4 to make it work. There are constraints on the relationship between the time you can carry fast, and the time it takes to pass an army through a portal. Probably better to have just the running team., and one more portal from the entrance to the exit at the end.
E.g. a 4 team relay.
Portal D is matched to Portal A.
A team sets out and goes a mile at good pace. Stops sets up portal. B team comes from start through portal D, carrying portal B and carries on. A team is reasting. Portal D is retuned to B. C team passes through D and keeps running. B and A are both resting. D team immediately picks up their portal and runs it to A, which now is tuned to ... The logistics of doing this get messy. You end up with 2 sets of of sprints leap frogging. You would need a set of interlinked communication portals to make it work.
Because of the gravitational/atmosphere equilibrium you don't end up with a hurricane blowing from a sea level portal to an alpine one. But normal storms coming through produce a typical variance of a few percent. If your end has a low in place while the other end has a high, you will have a strong headwind.
This might be commercialized with small portals. You have a farm of them in a part of the world that is chronically low pressure. The other end then is a good vacuum cleaner. If the size differential can be turned into a speed or pressure differential, then you can get better suction.
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In this scenario, all the humans on earth have disappeared, except for Fred. Sure, Fred is sad that everyone that exists is dead but him, including his friends and family, but he doesn't let that get him down in the dumps. What did get the former PETA supporter, Fred, sad was all the zoo critters. So he hopped in his car and trucked across America to free the zoo animals. Foolishly though, after freeing them, he was eaten by a lion.
Now that Fred has freed all the zoo animals in America (don't concern yourself with how he did this), did he accomplish anything? Would the animals commonly kept in zoos, such as lions, chimps or hippos even be able to survive in an environment so different from their own?
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Because "America" is an enormous and diverse place spanning pretty much every biome, and because zoos contain dozens and dozens of different animals, I'm going to narrow this down to the Oregon Zoo here in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Here's [their list of animals](http://www.oregonzoo.org/discover/animals/list) and some information about their habitats.
Since their main threat, humans, are gone, the question of survival is mostly one of habitat, food and predators. The area around Portland has very diverse climate and terrain and it rarely freezes (*he writes while there's snow outside*) which gives the animals a good chance. Portland is also a fairly small city geographically, the zoo is at the edge, and it's surrounded by large amounts of forest, so the animals have a good chance of blundering their way into wilderness. In contrast, animals released from the Bronx Zoo will probably never made it out of the concrete and suburban jungle that is the Northeast Corridor.
On the other hand, for the animals described as "tropical" or "sub-Saharan" or "desert" are probably screwed.
I'm not going through the whole list, just A and B to give you an idea.
# Won't Survive The Winter
* African bullfrog
* African lungfish
* African red-billed hornbill
* African rock python
* African slender-snouted crocodile
* African spurred tortoise
* Allen's swamp monkey
* Arrau turtle
* Black crake
* Black rhinoceros
* Blue and gold macaw
* Blue-streaked lory
* Burmese python
# Might Be OK
* African crested porcupine
* African pygmy hedgehog
* African wild dog
* Asian elephant
* Australian walking stick
* Black howler monkey
* Bontebok
* Bull trout (the Willamette River is probably too polluted)
# Just Fine
* American beaver
* American black bear
* Amur leopard
* Amur tiger
* Bald eagle
* Bobcat
* Bufflehead
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So you start off with all over the world and then switch to America both of which have vast and varying different environments within them as other posters said.
What we can assume is that tropical species will only really survive in the South East with the most success being Florida, as the hundreds if not thousands of invasive flora and fauna show many exotics would have no issue here. Also Hawaii which is already afflicted similarly by many invasive species could also support many new ones from the zoos.
Mediterranean and Desert species will obviously stand their best chances in the US Southwest, possibly certain Savannah Species even, if lucky perhaps lions which once ranged in Antiquity in the Balkans and Greece and more recently lived in Morocco where temperatures can get colder in winter could become established enough in California with its similar climate.
Temperate species from Europe and North East Asia would likely carve out different ranges throughout much of the US bar the Deep South and Deserts.
Arctic and tundra species would do fine in Alaska where many of them are already found.
Here's some species I think are most likely/most interesting:
* Certain penguin species from Africa, Oceania and South America which are released near enough to the coasts will likely form colonies, often zoos have pretty large colonies already which would be a good foundation stock, they would as everywhere be predated by sharks and orcas.
* Tigers would likely gain a footing somewhere but would likely be regionally isolated, there are more tigers in captivity in the US than in the wild globally so any zoos with multiple genetically distant enough specimens would form the foundations of North American tiger populations. Tiger subspecies are found in numerous different environments they specialise to, the Tigers in the US would be of mixed descent so there would be some selection pressures for whatever genes are best for specific environments. They would not be found in the Deserts and due to their mixed descent unless there are dominant genes from Siberian/Amur Tigers places with harsh winters likely would not have these Tigers.
* Some species of kangaroos and wallabies would establish due to their wide ranges in Australia and them being found in temperate, Mediterranean, desert and tropical environments.
* Temperate suited primates, although rare there are a few species that could do well in North America. The most likely being the Barbary Macaque which can survive in snow and is naturally found even in oak and pine forests and has a wide range of habitat in its native lands. Ironically this monkey would probably fair worst in the subtropics and tropics. Then more unlikely but interesting is Mountain Gorillas could likely survive in the more mild portions of the Pacific Northwest that resemble their native Montane Forests, these gorillas occasionally go high up into the tundra of the high mountains in East Africa so are cold hardy but are not used to seasonal changes so scarcity of suitable food in winter may be more of an issue.
* Capybaras. The world's largest rodent is a favourite of zoo goers the world over and is very social so usually kept in large groups, they are found as far South as Northern Argentina were it's subtropical and it can get cooler in the winter and are semiaquatic herbivores by nature so these guys would survive anywhere with mild or warmer winters and ample wetland habitat. They would probably be most prolific in the deep south bit possibly around rivers on the West Coast and possibly in Hawaii also. They would become a common prey item of Alligators and Pumas.
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Generally speaking small animals have a higher chance of survival than big ones because they need less food to go through winter.
A lion needs to eat every week. I m not sure how they would catch prey every week in a cold winter.
Animals whose habitats are extremely different from America (polar bears, african giraffe) will probably struggle.
Then there is the question of reproduction. Even if your 4 african leopards can survive America's climate, if they don't stick together all the time (they don't), the chances of them meeting another leopard are quite low. Thus they would go extinct.
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Imagine this situation:
One warm night of 1890, you go home from a pub. You pass a creepy house. In the half-open door, you see the outline of a machine. You go in, and open the lights. You see a big machine, exactly like those time machines you imagined of when you were small. You sit in it, pull the lever, and... you fall out. The worlds goes black.
Then, you wake up, and you see everything is different. It isn't nighttime anymore, the room you are in looks a bit different then you remembered, and... there are two city officers shouting on you what the hell are you doing here. You ask, "What year is it?". "1890" "What!? Are you kidding me?" Sounds like you just got drunk too much last night. But the problem: They think you came from the *future*! That this is some kind of modern 20th century time machine you are on. The guards insist you come with them to some place and say something about time travel. You exclaim: "But I'm not from the future!" "We're not going to let *you* run just like that! You just came from another time and we're gonna let you go? No way! Now come on!"
So you screwed up. Again. **How on Earth can you prove you're *not* from the future to a 19th/20th century person?** How could you prove this to a 21st century person?
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How did people prove a lot of things during that time period (and to this very day)?
Find people who believe your story.
"Officer, my boss, Bill Waggoner, at the docks will vouch for me. As will my ma Donna Smith, and my pa, Jacob Smith. In fact the Browns--you know, the ones that run the shop just outside of town--will vouch for me. I grew up alongside Bill and Mary!"
Same works in the modern day; enough eyewitnesses. Modern day we get a few more methods in developed countries, as in the US (for example) you'll have public records aplenty.
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I've got one good idea: quiz them on local news.
If this time traveler really is from the future, he'd know about big historical events, like wars, country elections, mass-murderers, etc. What they DON'T record is small-time news, like celebrities, store/school closings, etc.
So kids, if you suspect that you're speaking to someone from the 24th Millenium, just quiz them on the latest celebrity break-ups! If they don't know who you're talking about, then they're obviously from the future!
Well...at least that's just one idea.
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Use your body and the records of the current date as proof. This is assuming that they are not accusing you of being originally from this current time and far out in the future, for at least a few years.
Find your birth certificate or some other identifying documentation - the certificate will show your date of birth. Yes, these can be forged by you, so more identifying information or papertrails will help. This is easier in the 21st century where your data may be in databases that are harder to manipulate. From there they can examine your body to see if you are older than offically listed. If you are the same age as on the certificate, you are likely not from the future.
If you have recent photos where you're standing next to someone you can find or have a landmark or datestamp, those can be looked at to compare your age to see if you are from this time. Security cameras, dental records, drivers license, and other records that can tie you back to your current time will also help.
Piggybacking on the idea that people can vouch for you: with the officials monitoring, those people can ask you what you ate at the carnival with them last week and other detailed questions that would be forgotten in a few years, or they can even even say you look the same and have had been wearing the same shirt for months now.
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If you aren't allowed to collect external evidence and is stuck where you are, you could argue that you haven't gotten any futuristic enhancements. Your accent and manner if speaking is the same as the area - if your were far out in the future your accent is likely to change. Even if you practiced it would be difficult to get accurately. If you have had some kind of procedure done or an ailment that you think would be cured in the future, you could pose that too -"why would I be stuck with poor eyesight when it might be an instant fix in the future?"
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A) Couldn't you just say you have committed no crimes, or they need a warrant or whatever legal reasons to investigate you? **Even if you time traveled,** the legal system doesn't punish time travelers, nor is there any reason for interrogation to happen in the first place.
B) Even **if** the officers have reason / probable cause to investigate, which A) specifies they do not, people are **innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until they prove self-innocence**. So even if your rights are violated, and you are probed, the court system will refuse to believe time travel occurred because they can't prove it happened - not because you can't prove it didn't.
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Under what circumstances would a species develop an adaptation to employ surrogate wombs of their own species or others?
The species implants its zygotes/eggs in the uterus/brood pouch of a surrogate mother/father, of its own species or another, which gestates and births to the offspring.
This is not endoparasitism, parasitoids, or external egg laying. This is an exaggerated form of brood parasitism.
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**If your babies are parasitic**. Plenty species of wasp inject their eggs into a living host - a caterpillar or spider. The eggs hatch inside and the larvae eat their way though the host. This does not end well for the caterpillars and spiders.
**If your babies come packaged in handy capsules**. If you lay eggs, you can hand your kids over to a nanny or nursemaid even before they are born, and not have to bother with any of that tedious incubation stuff. Humans have to give birth to the kid and only then pass it to a wet nurse. Birds, crocodiles and platypuses can start much earlier. However, if you come from a species where the baby instantly imprints on the adult it sees when it hatches, you'll have to remember to be present at the hatching or the kid will refuse to ever bond with you. If your baby is more like a human newborn, where mum and baby take a bit longer to fixate on each other and adopting older kids works just fine, then that's less vital. Nanny can do all the dull nappy changing stuff and you can swan about like the Lady of the Manor.
**If you are a marsupial.** Marsupials effectively have 2 wombs: an internal one and an external one - the pouch. Have another female on standby when you give birth and pop the baby in her pouch not yours. She'll probably have to take hormone tablets so that her pouch and teats are ready to accept a joey. Alternatively, if your marsupials had evolved into a eusocial species like the naked mole rat (where one queen gives birth to all the offspring), then the nearby females will have been primed by the queen's hormones to have their pouches in optimal condition for her babies. Naked mole rat queens could churn out offspring at an alarming rate if someone else was responsible for shoving milk into the babies as they go through the bulk of their development.
**If birth is more dangerous than a fetal transplant and/or you are a high status individual whose life must not be risked.** I believe that pedigree cattle are sometimes conceived by IVF and implanted into the womb of non-pedigree cows. Firstly this means that the farmer can produce dozens of pedigree calves a year instead of just the one which his prize cow could gestate naturally. Secondly there is no risk to the prize cow from birth complications. Perhaps billionaires or royalty employ surrogates of their own species to do this.
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When giving birth means death. Octopuses are *very* smart creatures - but they die after laying eggs, which results in the inability to transfer knowledge from one individual to its offspring. A similar species might get around this through *social* evolution - a few surrogates breed and die, while others bring up the young, remaining celebrate through this period, acting as parents/mentors. This would allow knowledge to be passed down.
At some point tho, this is *inefficient*, losing mature members of the community, and having the next generation brought up by others. Sidestepping biological reproduction through artifical wombs would allow new generations without losses due to mortality while giving birth or
laying eggs.
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I found this twitter bot <https://twitter.com/unchartedatlas> posting maps that look like they came from a pulp fantasy novel.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZAWRj.jpg)
Any idea on how they are done?
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Fortunately the author, Martin O'Leary, has posted rather detailed walkthrough of the algorithm of how the maps are generated here: <http://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/> as well as how the names were created here: <http://mewo2.com/notes/naming-language/>.
A brief summary of the algorithm covered by Martin O'Leary’s post:
* **Grid:**
Create a height map with a grid of random points. Random points doesn’t look naturalistic so apply an iteration of Lloyd’s algorithm to the corners of the Voronoi polygons.
* **Rough Outline:**
Apply a set of sequence of primitives (constant slope, cones, blobs) and operations (normalize, round hills, average local height, set sea level) can be varied to produce different kinds of landscape, such as coastlines, islands and mountain ranges.
* **Erosion:**
Apply a constant flow of water over the entire map and use Planchon-Darboux algorithm to fill in the depressions. Calculate water flux to get rivers.
* **Render terrain:**
Coastline is where the height map crosses zero. Rivers based on the water flux and some smoothing of the points. Apply shading to slope.
* **Cities and borders:**
Place city near river and penalize nearness to other cities and to edge of map. Mark out region based on distance, slope, water flux, and shorelines.
This is a rough summary of Martin O'Leary's post. I really recommend reading the post as the author does go into detail about the programmatic terrain generation and the post itself has interactive elements.
Similarly the author the post on the linguistic aspect of how the place names were generated also has interactive elements.
The terrain map project is open sourced on github here: <https://github.com/mewo2/terrain>
The naming project is open sourced on github here:
<https://github.com/mewo2/naming-language>
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The [creator's website](http://mewo2.com/) is pretty well documented on how they did it.
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There's also a wonderful fantasy map generator at: <https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/>
Also, a more scientific world map generator at the same site - <https://donjon.bin.sh/scifi/world/> & also a complete stellar system generator: <https://donjon.bin.sh/scifi/system/>
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Watching *E.T.* I was wondering what evolutionary factors could cause a species to have the appearance of E.T., like the environment he would likely live in and the gravity of his homeworld.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1L3FQm.jpg)
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Assuming that E.T. is an evolved being and not a poorly bioengineered survey drone or just the cutesy anthropomorphic invention of Hollywood filmmakers that it actually is...
**Environment**
Given E.T.'s feet and legs, it is apparent that this is a ground-dwelling non-cursorial being. Given that in the movie, E.T. does not display any superhuman strength or subhuman weakness, we can assume that its home world has gravity similar to our own. The fact that E.T. and its technologically advanced crewmates appear to be voluntarily exposing themselves to our atmosphere indicates that there are atmospheric similarities between Earth and E.T.'s world, most probably having a similar pressure and composition. There are most likely differences in the partial pressures of the various gases, but falling within the acceptable range for at least limited unprotected exposure for E.T.'s species. There exists the possibility that given that this species *appears* to go about naked, that it has some sort of internal technological breathing apparatus.
Given E.T.'s short legs (especially when compared to the very long arms), we can assume that this is not an arborial species (since the toes are not long enough to be opposable given the size of the foot pad), and that it has no predators that need to be outrun, nor prey that needs to be pursued. Since its fingers are of unequal lengths, it is unlikely that it does much in the way of brachiation, again making it non-arborial.
**Diet**
Given that it has binocular vision, this, combined with its small mouth and long arms, indicates that it most likely eats small items of soft food that occur mixed with non-food items, for which visual discrimination is important, and can be readily picked by hand. This food may be sessile, or if motile, must be fairly small, like insects, capable of rapid acceleration but not high speeds over any long distance, hence the long arms that could grab a fleeing bug of some sort without requiring the whole creature to move much. Given the short legs, this food is likely available within reach, not significantly above head level (which is variable, given the extensible spinal-column analogue).
The small mouth is suggestive that its food is not other large animals or plants that require significant effort to break up to an ingestible size. Given that we don't see dentition implies that this species has no enemies which might be deterred by a display of dentition. Otherwise, we cannot draw any conclusions about its dentition other than that no great number of teeth seem required to process its food, ruling out tough or fibrous foods that might require a lot of mastication to fit down the narrow neck.
The luminescence displayed by these beings in their upper torsos and in their longest digit *may* be evolved, but in an advanced social and technological species (assuming that they built their own starships) which has demonstrated a facility with vocal communication, is more likely to be a side-effect of some technological devices that facilitate communication and environmental manipulation. Since it is unlikely that telekinesis could evolve where there are more efficient biological alternatives, the in-movie demonstration of telekinesis is most likely the result of some unobvious technological enhancement.
**Evolution**
While we can tell from this creature's body-plan that it has no enemies to outrun nor prey to pursue *now*, this does not exclude this from its species past. That its legs appear unaccountably elephantine, in contrast to its slender arms and neck, suggests that its species may in the past have had longer legs, and that they have evolved to be shorter, and that the folds of skin may have occurred as a result of a mismatch in the rate of evolution between bone length and skin tautness.
That a species may have evolved to have shorter legs is suggestive that in its evolutionary past it *did* have a need for greater speed, but the species has long outlived such a need. The greatest probability is that this species has both eliminated potential predators from its environment, and has been producing constructed dwellings for a long period of time, leading to both a lack of advantage in long legs, and an *ad*vantage in short legs. This suggests a civilisation that may have lasted tens to hundreds of thousands of generations.
The evolution of the extensible neck indicates that this species has not been particularly speedy for a very long portion of its evolutionary history, yet had a need to look at things on different levels fairly closely. This suggests a somewhat sloth-like metabolism, potentially as a response to low-nutritional-value food, which would tend to select for energy-saving traits.
**Society**
In the movies it is demonstrated that these are social beings, and it is generally accepted that sociability is a prerequisite for a technological society, such as one capable of building a starship. Given that one individual (who we should not presume is in any way greatly out of the ordinary for its species) is capable of audible communication, including with another species, it should be assumed that its primary form of communication was evolved to be audible, and that any 'telepathic' communication is a later technological add-on that has since superseded the audible communication channel.
Also, given that these beings are slow and presumably patient and methodical and that given their physiology their society appears to have existed for a very long time, it can be reasoned that they have dealt with the issues of high energy consumption and the environmental degradation that a high-tech society tends to produce. This may of course have led to a global-city-world, with no non-domesticated species remaining outside preserves, if any still exist, hence their apparent interest in the natural environment of a presumably less-degraded world at the borders of a populated area.
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As awkward and clumsy as they might appear to be planetside, ET's body structure seems very well-adapted to a spacefaring species. I would therefore like to suggest that his species (or sub-species) may have begun more humanoid, but has spent long enough travelling between planets that their body structure has become adapted to spending long periods in space, either through natural evolution (due to crossbreeding of individuals who tended to spend long periods on space stations) or artificial breeding programs.
Watch some videos of astronauts navigating our own space stations in zero-g. They mainly use their arms to grasp projections from the walls in order to maneuver, with their legs getting less use. Since spacecraft weight is expensive, hallways tend to be cramped and narrow; it is therefore beneficial for an astronaut species to have as compact a shape as possible. A humanoid optimized for life on such spacecraft may therefore have short legs and long arms/fingers (which may also be useful for operating control panels). Large eyes are useful for seeing in low-light conditions, which could help save precious energy on lighting. The extendable neck is a fairly complex adaptation and might have already been a feature of the species, although it would also find use in viewing multiple control displays while expending less energy; furthermore, the main problem with a long neck (strain on the heart) is less of an issue in zero-g.
ET's "telekinesis" is probably artificial and may be an implanted device for generating localized directed gravity fields, which would also be very useful for aiding maneuvering in spacecrafts. Since he saves it for an emergency, it probably requires a lot of energy to operate, especially when using it to counteract a planet's gravity.
We never see the inside of ET's ship, but my guess is that it is probably more like the ISS than the *Enterprise* - narrow hallways, lots of handholds, and no ship-wide artificial gravity. Instead of spending huge amounts of effort and energy to make the ship seem like their home, his species probably found it more efficient to change the astronauts.
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[Question]
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For what I'm working on, humans (some humans, anyway) develop the abilities to communicate telepathically, move things with thought, possible premonitions, *maybe* psychic projection (but that might be a little **too** far out for what I have planned) and I'm looking for an explanation to how these abilities work.
However, it's *very* important that in this work *no one* thinks of these abilities as magic or a gift from the divine (no humans, a certain alien species that clings to some of their superstitions might). I've considered explaining psychokinesis as the person manipulating a possible "fifth force" (not what Obi-Wan was talking about, just sayin') nobody knew existed until now, but that likely wouldn't work for telepathy or precognition- any ideas for what would?
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We use our minds to move objects all the time. We say "hey, could you please pass the salt," and the salt moves towards us. Of course, there was another person to communicate with and do the work, but perhaps that could be the start of something.
If there was an entity which was *generally* omnipresent, which could interact with the environment, we could ask it to do things for us. It could also tell us things we otherwise wouldn't know, forming a basis for potential telepathy. More importantly, if the entity didn't *want* science to "discover" it, it might intentionally shape its actions in a way to make it hard for it to be observed scientifically, such as refusing to permit science to squeeze it into independent identical distributions, science's favorite statistical tool.
Perhaps science is getting good enough at its job that that entity realizes it needs to work with the scientists, rather than merely avoiding them, so it starts making an effort to make itself known.
Much of a such an entity's power could come from its ability to interact with the human brain via channels other than the 5 senses. If it could do so, it could do many strange things. Western culture generally assumes your thoughts are your own, and if your story permits an entity to mess with those thoughts, we get surprised at the outcomes. For example, it could appear to be a ghost, simply by ensuring everyone in an area halucinates the same ghost at the same time.
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It's all just electromagnetism. The Human brain already runs on electrical impulses. Over time, these become strong enough that people have an EM field. And some people, with the right training, can manipulate that field to do incredible things.
Telepathy is just reading someone else's EM field, or implanting your own message into it.
Telekinesis uses unified field theory to turn that EM into minute amounts of gravity waves. Between that and magnetism itself, this allows the manipulation of small to moderate sized objects.
Psychometry is reading the EM field imprinted on objects by other people.
Clairvoyance could be either reading light waves (again, EM radiation) at a distance, or a subset of telepathy (seeing what other people at the remote location are seeing).
Precognition is the tough one. Potentially the EM field reading, if precise enough, negates the Uncertainty Principle. Knowing both the speed and location of elementary particles allows one to predict their location. Precog could be a macro expression of this.
Teleportation could be manipulating gravity to create temporary wormholes.
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Take a look at the book "To Ride Pegasus" by Anne McCaffrey. It explores exactly this sort of scenario. Essentially they accidentally find a way to "measure" people using psychic abilities.
This then allows them to find people with genuine abilities and train them, using the signals from the device, allowing much stronger abilities to be developed and trained.
"How" the psychic powers work is never explained but by having a way to measure and study them it becomes a science rather than mystical.
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Ok, each of these take a piece of real science and adds a pseudoscience twist to the concept. I don't believe any of them but they make interesting science fiction.
Telepathy: Quantum entanglement between identical twins. Entangled atoms influence thoughts in a way that forces the twins to think the same thing at the same time. Entanglement begins in the womb before they split - the later they split, the more entangled atom pairs are available to influence thoughts.
Psychic premonition: Quantum computing. If part of our brain utilizes quantum computing to tiebreak decisions when the information is too plentiful or subtle to analyze, then the most probable outcome could be envisioned as a premonition. With very subtle cues, these outcomes may not be the same as simpler analysis and therefore seem uncanny.
Teleportation: Quantum tunneling is able to teleport someone through a wall. It is highly unlikely, but technically its probability is greater than zero. If someone could control the probability better, they could be seen as having a psychic power.
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> it's very important that in this work no one thinks of these abilities as magic or a gift from the divine
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To avoid having someone believe this is magic or a divine gift there has to be an explanation that is well known and accepted through out your setting.
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> The difference between magic and technology is understanding.
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I believe a technological explanation is the best. As this will give everybody something to explain it by that does not require acceptance of other dubious assumption.
The people that gets these abilities has either voluntarily ingested, or had operated into them some device that allow them to do these things.
As for the technology it allows manipulation of gravity to move objects = telekinesis. It gives the user the ability to manipulate electrical impulses and thereby send messages into another persons brain.
If you want a twist on it you can have the explanation everybody accept be false. Maybe it is a divine gift or magic, it is just hidden behind a lie of technology.
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Assuming that you have a multi-verse and that the laws of physics could be very different from one universe to the other. These are assumptions that might break your world though, so they might not fit. Psionics as describe might be the norm in a different universe: their laws of physics are based on set "fields" that inhabitants' neural circuitry can interface with. Their "red field" could be a manifestation of a momentum-like field allowing their minds as well as physical force to impart momentum. *This bumps the problem one universe away and solve it by redefining the laws of physics there.*
Entities from that universe are trying to terraform ours to suite their needs. Psionics is just how their laws of physics enter and modify ours universe. Maybe there is even a feedback mechanism where our laws interact with their world.
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I don't know what kind of story you want to write, so I don't know how helpful this suggestion will be, but just keep in mind that there is nothing holding you to the "standard" set of psychic powers.
This is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine, because to me it seems like sci-fi writers would want to think of new and unique sets of powers for their universe to set them apart from the rest while still being fairly plausible. It almost boggles my mind that with the vast range of plausible, interesting, and varied kinds of abilities that are available to them, most writers will still rigidly stick to the exact same few kinds of powers that have already been used countless times before.
Just off the top of my head, you could have some people who are exposed to conductive elements in the womb grow up to have a different kinds of ability; such as projecting white noise to block radio communication, sensing magnetic fields, or being electrosensitive and able to track down both natural and artificial electric fields.
Or, for an even more believable universe, just give them the same “powers” that already exist in some individuals today:
* totally perfect memory
* not needing to sleep
* ignoring pain or injury
* etc.
Obviously, these may not work in the kind of world you hope to make. Just keep in mind: literally the only limits here are what makes sense within the fabric of your own world.
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Electrical fields can be manipulated by the body, muscles contract, neurons fire, messages sent. Depending on what level of psionic power you are wanting you could have the ability to manipulate fields outside of a persons body. Range and power depending a person could have an ability to sense and manipulate the neuron processes in another sentient brain.
Through training the psionic could develop a feel for another sentient thought process, possibly able to alter (project into someones mind) or "read" the thought processes or brain patterns. Ultimately full control may be possible or even rewriting a process.
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[Question]
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Humans show aggression by baring their teeth, dogs show aggression by growling and cats, by hissing. All groups of animal show aggression in a way that makes it clear to attackers that they are agitated. How do these aggression signs evolve? Is it random or does it have to do with evolutionary factors. Let's say, for example, I wanted a human-like creature to naturally hiss as a sign of aggression, How can I achieve this?
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Fighting is an expensive hobby, evolutionarily. Even if you win a fight, killing the other animal, you may have sustained substantial trauma (such as wounds). A brutal example is [abscesses](http://www.peteducation.com/article.cfm?c=1%202141&aid=2968) which occur from cat fights. Cat teeth are so sharp and needle like that they can deposit bacteria deep where the other cat's body just can't get it out.
Accordingly, when there is contention over something, both parties have something to gain if they can find a less violent way of working out the disagreement. The loser gets to live, and the winner gets to avoid the risk of getting wounded. Thus, very few fights are actually to the death (unless one animal is prey).
The barring of teeth and other similar symbols of aggression are just that: symbols. They are showing the other party exactly what kind of a fight they're in for, and gives an opportunity for some additional communication before the fight breaks out.
From an information theory perspective, this is information which would be useful in a fight (you're more likely to win if the other guy doesn't know what you're capable of), but when you account for the Pyrrhic victory which comes from winning the fight but losing more to injuries than you actually won from the engagement, it starts to be worth trying to come up with such symbols.
There are evolutionary effects which shape what these responses look like, but if you want to control them (such as your example of wanting to have a humanoid hiss), you can look to the environment. A sign of aggression is patently useless if the other party fails to interpret it as such. If your humanoid lives in an area with animals or other humanoids which see hissing as a sign of aggression, your humanoid will adapt.
In film, we can see these patterns. Consider the Na'vi of *Avatar*, who hiss. It bars their quite capable teeth, which is the evolutionary side of it, but from the way James Cameron built his world, its not hard to see the environmental effects. Their symbols of aggression are the symbols which work at conveying meaning in their environment.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mA6Fc.jpg)
[Answer]
Showing aggression in all the cases you've listed as examples consists of "*showing what you've got*" to hurt the agitator.
Dog: "I will use these teeth on you"
Cat: "I will use these teeth, and these claws, on you" (*imagine one-paw-up fighting position*)
Human: (*I actually don't think of "baring teeth" as the human sign of aggression. I usually think of puffing up and yelling. But let's say it is, because I'm sure we probably would have used teeth in the past, in desparate situations we still do*)
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In general, if an animal is willing to hurt another animal in defense, it will display the method of how it plans on defending itself. It usually displays itself in a way that doesn't happen in normal "happy" activity - so it won't be mistaken for something else.
Exception One: Snakes and other subtly dangerous animals. Snakes cannot really display their venom. They developed other ways of warning agitators. Sounds and unmistakable visual methods (*hoods or coloring*) train other animals to avoid them over time. Sounds and visual cues can help for any animal where just sound or just vision might not.
Exception Two: All talk and no bite. Other animals just happen to evolve to match the truly dangerous animals. By having similar indications of danger they can protect themselves without actually evolving venom or etc.
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So, to put it into terms of "How do these signs evolve?", it comes down to what ended up being the easiest (*actually, "first successful"*) way to display your threat level (*and maybe even being capable of bluffing, without actually teaching other animals that you aren't a threat when they test it*).
The easiest way to display how threatening you are is to display the physical features capable of inflicting pain. Since animals tend to have voices, it could also help to include an audible way of signalling. (*It was apparently important enough for rattlesnakes to evolve rattles!*) Failing that, animals evolve their own methods, which tend to differ from "normal" animals in their ecosystem. (*With the exception of those which evolve to copy them*)
Why do cats hiss? Because that's the sound they are capable of making which naturally bares teeth and isn't used for other communication.
Why would a human-like creature hiss? Because they have voice-capabilities similar to cats.
Why a (*intelligent*) human-like creature (*with the same voice capabilities as actual humans*) wouldn't actually say, "Get out of my face before I destroy you" probably comes more from culture and language, rather than evolution.
[Answer]
Both growling and hissing also involve baring teeth. Revealing one's teeth to an enemy is a warning that you are armed and dangerous; teeth are weapons. The growling and hissing sounds some animals make alongside the teeth-baring gesture are basically just meant to make the message stronger and more obvious, associating a sound with the action.
As for the specific sounds of a low growl, higher growl, or hiss, I personally can't say why they evolved for specific Earth animals, but it may not be all that important. I can easily imagine a human hissing or growling, perhaps only as a joke, but still a learned response--an imitation of another creature. Along those lines, here are a couple of hypothetical reasons why your species might naturally hiss instead of yell or growl:
1. They already have high voices. Their vocal cords don't make low sounds very well, so a hiss would come more naturally than a growl.
2. The hiss is an imitation of another animal that hisses when angry and dangerous. For example, perhaps your species hisses when threatened because a certain species of poisonous lizard or snake that lives in the area does the same thing, so the hissing sound is immediately associated with danger.
And here are a few that favor a growl over a hiss:
1. They already have low voices. The inverse of point #1 above. Related: the lower the pitch of the growl, the stronger the creature seems, since it implies that the creature is bigger.
2. The growl imitates a large local predator, such as a big cat. Related to point #2 above.
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[Question]
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So we are in a world where magic is real. There has been a successful revolution against the king, and people try to build a democracy with elections. However there's a problem:
The magic guild (the only ones who are able to practice magic) is decidedly against democracy, and will do everything they can do sabotage or at least manipulate the election. Now fortunately there are ways to find who performed some magic as soon as the magic itself is detected and identified as such (and you don't need magic to do that), and there are ways to imprison someone that cannot be defeated with magic (and the imprisoned mages will not be able to use magic because they will of course have no access their magic wands). Moreover, if the election can be proved to be manipulated by magic, it will be declared invalid and repeated. So the magicians have to employ tactics that are unlikely to be detected.
So the magicians have decided to just have their own candidate and make sure that candidate wins; that candidate will then end democracy and reintroduce monarchy. Now they have some support in the population, but it is far from certain that they can actually win, therefore they will likely also try to manipulate the elections, and of course they will not hesitate to use their magic powers to do so.
Possible tactics include:
* Manipulation of ballots inside the urn (using magic, this can be done overtly, for example by moving the cross on a ballot to their candidate, or by changing a ballot for another candidate to an invalid ballot, also ballot stuffing by magically creating extra ballots might be possible).
* Subtle ways to prevent people who are known or expected to vote against the magicians from reaching the voting booth (but if they use the magic too blatantly, they will be detected!)
* Use magic to get people who are undecided to make their cross for the magicians (in a way that they think they have spontaneously decided to do that; again, if they can recognize it as influence of magic, they've lost).
So how do you protect your election so that undetected magic is prevented as far as possible? Note that the individual votes are, of course, secret, and measures that break that secrecy are not acceptable.
[Answer]
Technology seems the likely answer to magic in this case.
Cryptography in particular could be used to "sign" votes on ballots in a way that would reveal any tampering, assuming that magic doesn't allow the mages to "just know" the correct cypher for a changed or extra vote. The distribution of keys for voting machines would have to be guarded extremely carefully, with magic detection being used as much as is feasible. Voting machines should have magic-sensitive anti-tampering features too, that clearly invalidate the results.
Lacking technology of this level, you would need organization and people to detect the tampering. The only way I could see that happen is to flood the election with honeypots of all kinds, to entrap the mages:
* Create many false ballot boxes with known counts and entries of votes, place them mixed in with the real ones during elections and check them during vote counting.
* Create some ballots using any material that has a known reaction to manipulative magic.
* Place fake voters at each voting location with the assignment to mark the ballot with a specific invalid vote ("cross out all the vowels in the 2nd candidate's name). This would detect anything that prevented the voter from voting or made him change his mind.
This approach has some serious weaknesses, especially that it relies on secrecy.
To prevent the mages from compromising the effort, it would have to been done by a loosely linked group of independent cells that overlap in their working areas, so that each will confirm another's test independently. Even then it will probably only works once.
Having tried to answer how such an election might be guarded, it seems to me that the mages have so many options to derail the democratic process that it seems bound to fail.
* They could simply turn all other candidates into frogs. Sure the election gets invalidated and a single mage might go to trial, but how many times can this happen before no sane person will run for election?
* They could influence terrible candidates to run for positions of power, going so far as to magically suppress all kinds of mental illnesses. Remove the magic after the election, and the real winners will burn down the democratic house around themselves.
* The magic guild can probably bribe almost anyone quite effectively, magic being able to realize many things that mere money can't.
* Conversely, the magic guild can probably dig up more dirt on any opposing candidate than he/she can face.
[Answer]
I think the obvious route is to employ a magician to ensure magic is not used. Not *every* magician is going to be against democracy. There has to be the odd ball who is either pro-democracy or is anti-guild (*enemy of my enemy is my friend*). By employing anti-magic-magic by use of an "on your side" magician, you will ensure the validity of the voting outcome. Mind you, you are not making it so magicians *cannot vote*, but rather you are ensuring the integrity of the vote, which should appease all.
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You have a magic guild, this mean that there is some list of (more or less) every magicians. If you can retrieve that list, you can then check the identity of everyone and forbid magicians to enter standard polling places, and force them to go in separated polling places. If magicians are a small minority, you can even ask them to auto-regulate their polling places, since whatever they do in the process will have little effects.
The idea is that during the whole process you keep every magicians far from the urns, so that they do not get the chance to modify their content.
The other strategies (i.e. changing someone's mind directly) seems really hard to counter. However, unless the magicians are really powerful or numerous, they might not have the ability to act on a sufficient amount of people to change the result of an election.
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Your premise has a problem: if we're instituting democracy, an elected mage can't overthrow democracy. And if the mages have the power to overthrow democracy against the rules, they wouldn't wait to get voted into power first. In fact, why would the mages even bother to stop the elections? Why not just use their magic to subtly alter people from the shadows to get what they want anyways?
Now, you say magic can be detected. So why not just pass all the ballots and voters through a magic-detector as soon as they're collected? Then arrest the offending mage, have the voter redo the ballot if the ballot was affected, or sleep it off and vote tomorrow if the voter was affected.
Because you detected magic on the voters themselves, you know they answered accurately to their own wishes (at least, you don't collect their ballot until you know this vote was clean). So then you just re-detect magic on the ballots in a central area far from mages to see how many have been altered after the fact. Then arrest all the offending mages.
Then count the altered ballots. If it's numerically possible for the altered ballots to have swung the vote, find the voters of the affected ballots and have them re-vote. If there were 3000 altered ballots and Pedro was 10000 votes ahead of Spock, then worst case scenario is Pedro should be -3000 votes (7000 ahead) and Spock should be +3000 votes (so Pedro is still 4000 ahead), so you do nothing.
You mention that the voters' votes are secret. I assume this means we don't publicly announce the votes. If you mean that absolutely nobody can know who voted for who, then it's slightly more complicated. If the altered ballots could have swung the vote, we just have a re-election. We've already arrested most of the offending mages, so we just keep re-doing the election until the affected ballots can't swing the vote.
While we're at it, we could go a bit draconian, say interference with the vote is treason, and publicly execute every mage caught tampering with the vote. That should help keep the number of re-votes down.
You also mention that mages can't cast magic without a wand. So just make everyone strip down before entering the voting zone and remove all wands. (You could execute anyone caught with a wand, but it could have been planted just so you'd execute them, so we'll just remove the wand.)
And to combat the issue of mages preventing voters from reaching the voting area, just make sure everyone votes. Even if they just mark "I decline to vote", we can know whether that declination was because of magic or free will and move on. Again, once we've collected enough votes where the remaining 2% of the population can't affect the outcome, we don't worry about finding every last beggar.
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So, I'd like to make a rendering of my world to see what it would look like from outer space. I have the map drawn up, and the various features (mostly) designed. Think about it like taking a series of orthographic drawings and turning them into a three-dimensional rendering.
I'd like the final rendering to allow me to take images of the planet, like [The Blue Marble](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble) (obviously not that detailed - after all, it's a photograph! - but from that position):
[](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17.jpg)
What software can help me with that?
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[Terragen](http://planetside.co.uk/products/terragen3) is a software which can create really beautiful terrain renderings, which it can also map on a sphere to create a planet.
This image is from the official Terragen showcase gallery:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YuMqS.jpg)
A slightly less orthodox example, also from the showcase gallery:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BdMBA.jpg)
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You can use Photoshop to create 3D spheres which you can later shade and render underneath atmosphere and clouds. Using each of these elements as a separate layer allows you the maximum control over your planet. You can rotate them independently in and out of view as you desire. You can light your sphere from any direction with complete control over the source.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/x8b9W.jpg)
I personally don't use this technique often though, except for gas giants, as a sphere is much more difficult to detail to the extent that it looks realistic. Not impossible at all, it just takes more time. And for what I do, it's just not necessary. So the vast majority of my planets are 2D.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0eW25.jpg)
Using Photoshop can be tricky, and learning to make decent planets will take time. But you can come up with some awesome results.
If your interested I can create a tutorial on how to make a planet using Photoshop.
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