text
stringlengths 22
2.11M
|
|---|
[Question]
[
Consider a magic system that follows the Eragon model; "doing it by magic takes just as much (biological) energy as doing it the mundane way".
In Eragon, magical energy can be drawn from other living things besides the caster. Thanks to questions such as [How much can a magician lift if constrained by her own body's energy?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2909), [Magic and physics with human power output](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15641) and [How can wizards do such powerful things running on pure human metabolism?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8393), we have some general idea of how much energy *animals* (including humans) can contribute for this purpose.
What about plants? Eragon is stated to also draw magic from grass and trees and such, but is this realistic? If I had a "magic converter" that could be hooked up to some plants and losslessly convert their "energy" into electricity (or whatever, really; I'm using electricity because it's a form for which we're used to thinking about measurable energy), how many watts could I reasonably expect to produce, continuously? (If any?)
Since the above is probably too non-specific, let's talk numbers for some specific producers:
* One square meter of a typical lawn.
* One "average" 10m tall tree.
* One bush/hedge that is about 1 meter tall/wide.
Note 1: it's okay if this process (while active) stunts the plants' growth, but it shouldn't kill them.
Note 2: I did find [this article](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/turning-energy-plants-produce-usable-electricity-180955110/) which, if I did the math right, appears to claim that "a one-square-meter garden" can generate about 3 watts; is this plausible? (It does go on to say that "15 square meters [...] would be enough to charge a cell phone", which is hardly impressive.)
Note 3: For comparison purposes, a human is probably good for around 50-75W. I'm guessing other animals are at least in that ballpark (adjusted for mass, obviously!).
[Answer]
Let's take a plant with C4 photosynthetic pathway in a tropical zone for some quick maths.
Average insolation in a tropical zone is ~400 watts per square meter.
Photosynthetic efficiency on wikipedia gives us a high of 6% actual efficiency (not theoretical) at converting solar energy from our sun due to many factors such us how much of the sunlight's radiation can actually be used by photosynthesis.
This gives us an average of 24 watts per square meter a year converted into biomass which can be utilized by your magical catalyst to do work. The efficiency of your catalyst could bring this down further.
Keep in mind when you are talking about energy or work, you are talking about Joules. If you are talking about the rate at which this energy is converted (used or stored), then you are talking about power, or watts.
You can store the energy produced by your plants, as they do so themselves anyway as biomass. They will not just store 24 joules an any one time, they will keep storing up to 24 joules every second. The maximum energy stored in the plant would be greater than the rate at which it can store it. The rate at which you convert biomass to magical work will depend on your magical system, including efficiency at conversion and the conditions which allow the biomass to be converted.
Does your biomass need to be in contact with a physical catalyst, or just in a general location within the plant?
Since its magic, your catalyst doesn't have to act like a chemical where it needs to make contact with the reactant to get it going.
You could literally just have an organ where all the energy stored as biomass inside it gets converted at once, in which case your rate of conversion would depend only on how much biomass you can put in there at once and its energy density and the efficiency of the conversion from chemical energy to magical energy.
If for example you can store 400 Joules worth of biomass in your conversion engine, and it takes a full second for your engine to complete a cycle of putting in the biomass and converting it, then you can safely say that you can convert 400 watts of power until you run out of biomass to convert.
If thats the case you could set up something like a modern combustion engine where biomass is pumped at a specific rate utilizing some magical energy produced by previous cycles to induce continued pumping of biomass and conversion to more magical energy. The rate at which you convert biomass to magic would depend on how much you pump in there per cycle. But the rate at which biomass is stored would be about the same as calculated above given that you also provide the necessary resources for you plants to continue what they do at peak efficiency.
It really isn't any more impressive than charging your phone with 15 square meters of lawn. Which honestly is quite impressive considering my phone fully charges faster than it takes for me to make it need another charge.
Keep in mind you can still choose to convert biomass at the same rate that it is being produced, but then why store the excess energy? The plant will consume the excess keeping itself alive until it runs out, then you'll need to slow down the conversion rate or turn it off entirely so it can build a surplus again.
[Answer]
I have plastic packet with rice seeds i bought at general store this week, and i plan to eat them for breakfast.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bPCDf.jpg)
They claim each 100g of this rice (one coffe cup) gives human consumed this product 1415.1 kilojoules of energy. If we manage to fully convert this energy to heat, and considering [specific heat capacity of water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capacity) to be equal 4220 Joules per kg and 1 degree, we can heat 335 kg of water for 1 degree of celsius, or, warm 3.35 kg of water from freezing to boiling temperature. 3.35 kg of water its 2 big plastic cola bottles.
If we try to fully convert this energy into kinetic energy, it will allow us to make 1kg body (for example, one brick) to achieve speed of ~ 600 meters per second.
If we burn this rice, we can probably boil some water too.
So, i assume, plants can store not so much energy in them.
So, for "One "average" 10m tall tree" - its about 500 kg of firewood.
With my hiking experience, you need ~ 1-2 kg of wood to boil 1 kg of water.
So, one tree can give life force to boil enough water to fill jacuzzi.
Its 500 bricks flying at 600 meters per second.
"One bush/hedge that is about 1 meter tall/wide." its 50 kg of firewood, 25 big cola bottles boiled, 25 bricks flying at 600 meters per second.
[Answer]
# Food is very energy-rich
Here's an [energy density chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Reference_Table). This is an amount of energy produced per kilogram of reactants. Gasoline reacting with air produces 13.3 megajoules per kilogram. And here are similar numbers for [digesting food](http://apjcn.nhri.org.tw/server/info/books-phds/books/foodfacts/html/data/data2a.html). Note: kilojoules/gram works out to be the same as megajoules / kilogram (there are 1000 KJ per MJ and 1000 grams per KG, so the conversion cancels).
In other words, if you were to *eat* the plants, you would get *more* energy per unit mass than a car would get by combusting an equivalent amount of gasoline.
TL;DR - there is a *lot* more energy in plant matter than many people think. You can, with a relatively low amount of biomass, easily generate enough power to do the equivalent of operating heavy construction equipment. Or to generate surprisingly large explosions - there are explosives on that energy density list, and their energy density is lower than that of carbohydrates (i.e. fruit).
[Answer]
According to [this answer](/a/157605/43697) to a different question:
>
> On Earth, a large tree on average collects maybe 200 calories of energy in a day.
>
>
>
(Thanks, Dan! [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2fb2uz/have_we_ever_measured_the_caloric_intake_of_a_tree/) also gives the same answer, but could be where Dan got the number.)
That's about 2.3 watt-hours, or slightly better than a AAA battery (but only a little better than *half* a AA battery); *maybe* enough to run an under-powered cell phone under modest load. Continuously, that works out to a whopping tenth of a watt. Hardly impressive.
An adult human, on the other hand, should be able to supply around 50 watts. (Again, this is *continuous*, and trying to avoid radically dietary alterations; the numbers for short bursts are much, much higher.) As a magic power source, one adult human is roughly equal to one *forest*, or several *hundred* trees.
If the magic user doesn't want to totally drain (and thus, kill) plants, it's probably not worth even bothering with them.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/140798/edit).
Closed 4 years ago.
The community reviewed whether to reopen this question 9 months ago and left it closed:
>
> Original close reason(s) were not resolved
>
>
>
[Improve this question](/posts/140798/edit)
I am working on a post-apocalyptic world with relatively advanced small-scale militaries. In what ways are landfills useful as sources of rare earth metals, glass, or other materials?
Edit:
Mostly looking for rare earth elements to recycle and use in electronics. Wondering if it is feasible and at all easy.
[Answer]
>
> I am working on a post-apocalyptic world with relatively advanced
> small-scale militaries. In what ways are landfills useful as sources
> of rare earth metals, glass, or other materials?
>
>
> Edit: Mostly looking for rare earth elements to recycle and use in
> electronics. Wondering if it is feasible and at all easy.
>
>
>
**Maybe, but we have to take into account where the landfill is and when it was in operation.**
In recent decades the United States and many other countries have limited what items can go into a landfill. Likewise, there are other places with few, if any, restrictions to landfill contents.
Even in places that did put restrictions in place, they didn't go back to old landfills and dig out all the undesirable junk, they just didn't allow it in the new landfills. So, in the US, landfills opened after the mid-'90s would have little in the way of electronics. But the older landfills would. [There are thousands of such places in the US.](https://www.citylab.com/design/2012/05/can-inactive-landfills-become-assets/1930/) We buried a LOT of stuff up until the '80s! [There was a dump of Atari games in the '80s](https://money.cnn.com/2015/09/01/technology/atari-et/index.html) and maybe there is more out there.
Changing the dump mindset took years of effort and people willing to [dig up the past](https://www.nytimes.com/1992/08/13/nyregion/seeking-the-truth-in-refuse.html) in order to disprove landfill myths.
**If it's key to the story, there is a good possibility you can find some history to back up your ideas.**
[Answer]
Not reasonable.
A: In many places electronics are now separated from the general waste stream to keep the lead in solder from getting into the water table.
B: most of the waste stream is crushed, metal disolved out (exp. gold) and the rest returned to the landfill.
C: the reason that stuff goes into the landfill is that it's not economic to separate the materials even with fans, and power conveyors. When you have to excavate a landfill layer by layer by hand it's a worse return on your time. I don't think this would pay even with slave labour.
]
|
[Question]
[
I have a planet circling an M-Class star (M3/M4). I'm trying to figure out what the effects of flaring on the planet's biosphere might be.
**Background:** As some of you may know, M-class stars are renowned for their vigorous and powerful flaring (CMEs). It's commonly assumed that this flaring would strip most planets within the habitable zone of their atmosphere, leaving a planet lifeless. However from pouring over research papers, I've come to the conclusion that planets orbiting older M-class stars, particularly of lower classes (M0, M1, M2, M3, M4) would likely experience vastly attenuated flare activity compared to their higher class or younger brethren.
So that offers me a window to create a world with a flourishing biosphere.
The part I'm having the most trouble with is...what will the remaining flare activity mean for life on the planet? The flares are less powerful, sure, but they still pack some degree of radiative wallop (UV, X-rays, etc.) that doesn't typically play nice with life or atmospheres.
**My question in full:** Given the level of flaring (see below) how much of an impact on the biosphere should I expect? Will the atmosphere suffer periodic damage in some form? Will this and other effects be enough to force adaptive measures during the strongest flares (behavior, anatomical, etc.)? What conditions might result from this flaring?
**Details on Flaring/Star/Planet:** My star is old. As M-class stars age their rate of rotation slows, inducing progressively weaker magnetic fields which gradually attenuates their flare activity. However, like other M-class stars of this kind, that doesn't mean it has zero flare activity. Far from it. Based on astrophysics papers I've scrounged through, it seems such stars can maintain a reasonable level of flare activity for many giga years. We have flare data for star GJ 4083, so using that as a model for my system and referencing several sources, I've gathered the following data (correct me if I go astray):
**First off my planet is generally Earth like**: oceans, continents, oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, the whole shebang. The atmosphere is about 3 bar, and the mass (and hence gravity) somewhat lower. It has tectonics, a carbon cycle, and experiences substantial tidal heating. Magnetic field of my planet would be weak. In the range of 1/8 - 1/3 Earth's. My planet is not tidally locked, but instead in a 2:1 orbital resonance. So all points on the planet experience day/night.
Other specifics are probably not relevant to the question, so I'll leave them out.
**Our Sun (for context)**
* A regular "big" flare on Sol (our sun) occurs once or twice every eleven year solar cycle. These might be `1E+32 Ekp(erg)`\* in power.
* The 1859 Carrington Flare (one of the most powerful recorded flares from our sun) is estimated to to have been about `5.6E+32 Ekp(erg)`. That's 5.6x bigger than the solar cycle flare mentioned above, and might occur once-a-century or so.
* The 774 A.D. Solar Flare (the largest known postulated flare from our sun) is estimated at perhaps `1.6E+34 Ekp(erg)`. That's 160x more powerful than the flares you normally see at the peak of the 11 year solar cycle for our sun. That might be a once-every-couple millennium flare. From what I've read this may have had appreciable effects on the biosphere, including acute ozone depletion.
**GJ 4083 (My model star)**
* Over a period of several years, the largest recorded flares from GJ 4083 were about `1.6E+31 Ekp(erg)` and averaged about one every two months. At the distance my planet orbits my M-class star, that would yield a received flux about 4x more powerful than the 1859 Carrington flare.
* More frequently GJ 4083 will output flares all the way down to `5E+30 Ekp(erg)`, which occur about once a month. At the distance my planet orbits, this would yield a received flux slightly higher than the 1859 Carrington Flare.
* I would guess that GJ 4083 (and my fictional star based on it) emits smaller flares that happen more often (but we can't detect them), and much larger flares that happen at greater time spans. I wouldn't be surprised if GJ 4083 outputs a monster flare every couple centuries or millennia which would rival the 774 A.D. flare earth experienced. There simply isn't data to say one way or the other. If you need a solid answer, assume the star experiences more frequent minor flares and very infrequent super flares just as our sun does.
If it helps, feel free to postulate flare activity/strength somewhat less or greater than GJ 4083. That would certainly be within the realm of possibility.
*Ekp (in erg) = Luminosity of the star in the Kepler bandpass, multiplied by its equivalent duration. Unit ergs.*
---
**References:**
KEPLER FLARES. I. ACTIVE AND INACTIVE M DWARFS – <https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/797/2/121/meta#apj504475s3>
The 1859 space weather event revisited: limits of extreme activity
<https://www.swsc-journal.org/articles/swsc/pdf/2013/01/swsc130015.pdf>
<https://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshots/X17/>
Terrestrial effects of possible astrophysical sources of an AD 774-775 increase in 14C production
<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.1501.pdf>
[Answer]
The problem that I see in your question is the assumption that an earth like planet would exist far away from a red dwarf rather than closer to it, hence the focus on attenuation.
Red dwarfs are larger, but colder, than stars like our own. As a consequence, earth like planets will have to orbit [much closer to the sun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_red_dwarf_systems#Luminosity_and_spectral_composition) in order to maintain their temperature. If we say an average of 0.3 AU (or 30% of the distance between the Sun and the Earth), and we go with your weak magnetic field, then the likelihood of life existing is already quite low. The closer to the sun you get, the higher the intensity of the cosmic rays being given off (the cooler sun tempers this a bit, but at 30% distance you still have a problem) meaning that without a *stronger* magnetic field, life is going to struggle on your planet and the likelihood of your planet being able to maintain an atmosphere is reduced as well. That means that your 3 Bar atmospheric pressure and weak magnetic field are likely incompatible, especially given the age of the star.
So, how would CMEs affect life on this planet? Well, assuming that life can exist there at all (which isn't guaranteed) then the CME is going to be catastrophic, by virtue of proximity.
I'm of the view that;
1) your planet couldn't exist in the first place,
2) if it did, life would be quite fragile on it, and
3) CMEs would likely be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Remember, that your magnetic field is already struggling against basic solar radiation, so any more strife, like a CME, and you're going to find the magnetic field being overwhelmed.
On the bright side (literally), the aurora at the poles (and possibly over most of the planet bar the equator) are going to be **spectacular**. Even if life has been killed off, if you have the technology to predict when the next CME is due, you could create a magnetically shielded viewing platform on this planet's version of Europe and sell tickets for the light show across the galaxy.
This planet may struggle to harbour life, but that doesn't preclude it from being a real money-spinner.
]
|
[Question]
[
Let's say that there's a superpowered character who has superstrength, control, speed, and durability, but no super friction powers.
Ordinarily he can only accelerate about as fast as a motorbike although he has a lot more power in theory. One day he needs to go a lot faster, so he steps up the power to the extent where instead of running through friction, he aims to run through thrust, by overcoming the material strength of the ground and pushing his foot through the ground so fast that he can propel it away from his foot at absurdly preposterous enough velocities to give his own body a fast speed kick forwards.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/X4XLk.png)
Now, the question is: shouldn't he actually spiral out of control because the thrust is occurring at his foot and not at his center of mass? What direction will he rotate in? Will he rotate away from the material he pushed exactly like if he had a rocket attached to his foot (that briefly fired), or will he rotate around his own leg due to torque?
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AjOtI.png)
[Answer]
You might get a better answer at physics.SE, but here goes.
When there's something to push against (friction), the force of thrust appears to be at his feet — and it can be considered to be so because the remarkably complex process of balancing the body is automatic and we humans almost never think about it.
However, take away that necessary mass and what you discover is that all the energy isn't at the feet at all. It's at the hips. Yes, the body is pushing against the ground via the feet. But the other end is pushing against the body's center of mass (the torso). And that connects to the motive force (the legs) at the hips.
So, what happens if our hapless super hero runs on pebbles?
He falls over. The center of mass (torso) is no longer being supported by the legs and has nowhere else to go in a gravity well but down. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Chaos Theory proves we don't know what will hit first: the back of his head, the left ear, the right ear, or the tip of his nose. But hit the ground he will.
Will there be some initial forward motion? Sure. His feet didn't go from zero to the proverbial sixty in zero seconds. So, for a moment (measured in seconds) he could be thought of "spirialing out of control" because he's moving forward while he's falling down.
Now, if necessary, after hitting the ground (and if not already in this position) he'll rotate over such that his legs are moving parallel to the ground. That's the lowest energy point.
Once on his left or right side, the leg motion will spin him around like a top, most likely in a forward (as in entering the space in front of his kneecaps), pivoting on his shoulder. Which he'll continue to do until he discovers live stinks and stops moving his legs.
]
|
[Question]
[
In my story there is something akin to an [Island Three O'Neill cylinder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder) buried vertically into the side of the asteroid [Vesta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_Vesta). It is 5 miles across and 20 miles long. The station is buried but is spun up inside of a cylindrical shell carved out of the asteroid. The whole of Vesta does not need to be spun. The station is buried for two purposes: to protect from cosmic radiation and to give better access to the miners.
Vesta's gravity is about 0.25 m/s^2 which (I think) is around 0.03G. For things to feel like 1G inside, the cylinder should produce 0.9995G artificially.
Now, (if I'm doing the math right) using arctan(0.03/0.9995) the inside of the cylinder would feel like it has a 1.72° slope to it, which doesn't seem like much, but...
1. Would this feel like a hill? Would walking far surface-ward wear you out faster than? Could you throw a ball further "downhill" at this angle? Or would it not even feel any different?
2. Would it make sense to build terraces periodically to level things out?
3. Would this noticeably affect air pressure or water flow across the gradient of the cylinder?
I'm trying to feel out if this would even be worth mentioning my story, or if the effect is so negligible that it wouldn't.
[Answer]
So, a force toward the more-or-less center of Vesta of 0.03g and a perpendicular force of 0.9995g. Earth experiences [magnitude variations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth#Variation_in_magnitude) of up to 0.7% and Vesta's gravity represents 3%. I'm not sure people would feel this that all, but it is "sideways," which would be odd. Let's run with it.
OK (it's been a while since I did inclined plane physics, so I might be wrong)...
Potential Energy = mgd sin(θ)
* m = mass
* g = gravity constant
* θ = angle of the hill
* d = distance travelled (we're going to assume "1")
At 0° the contribution due to the hill is 0 J. We want a contribution equal to the affect of Vesta's gravity. F= ma.
m(0.03g) = mg sin(θ)
0.03 = sin(θ)
θ = 1.72° (which you calculated! I'm on the right track.)
So, living in your environment means feeling like you're constantly walking up and down a 1.72° hill. What's that like?
Well... that was a long and fancy way of saying you're stepping up 0.03 meters (30 cm) for every meter walked or just over an inch for every 3.28 feet walked.
It's almost nothing. I doubt people would even notice it. According to [this bicycling site](http://theclimbingcyclist.com/gradients-and-cycling-an-introduction/) a 3% grade (which this represents, rise/run\*100 = 0.03/1\*100 = 3%) is like riding your bike into the wind (of course, they don't tell you what wind...) but not considered much of a challenge to cyclists.
*OK, whether or not a 3% grade is an issue depends on what's happeneing. For a person walking, it's likely not noticable. For a car moving at 70mph, it represents a risk if a sharp turn occurs. For a train, it's a big deal. It really depends on how much mass is being moved. As mass increases, the grade of the hill becomes more important (especially downhill) because the energy needed to overcome the grade increases with it. A 3% grade won't cause my Toyota Prius to recharge. I'm just sayin'*
Oooh. You had more questions. You can't "level things out" with terracing. It may feel like you're living on the side of a 3% hill, but you actually aren't. You can't change an angle to make the potential energy due to Vesta's gravity go away. You can thank the need to spin your cyclinder for that.
It does mean that if you spill a glass of water, it's going to want to dribble in the direction of Vesta's core. Remember, 3% isn't much. If you spilled it on a big sheet of glass you'd see it move, but if you spilled it on concrete you probably wouldn't.
It will mean a slight increase in air pressure toward the center of Vesta. But, once again, I doubt it would be noticable.
]
|
[Question]
[
I have two tidally locked planets of roughly equal size (about the size of Mars) orbiting each other around a barycenter equidistant between them. They complete a day-night cycle every 72 Earth hours. Together, they revolve around a single star similar to our sun. One revolution is approximately one Earth year. Both planets have life on them. Is this arrangement possible?
Both have large liquid iron cores and magnetic fields, but the poles are oriented toward the east-west rather than north-south. That is, the "north" pole of one planet's magnetosphere always faces the south pole of the other, and at midday on either planet, one of the poles faces the sun. Is this possible, and would it expose an area of the planet to intense solar radiation?
If one is standing on planet A at midnight, looking up at planet B, will the eclipsed planet B appear red like a lunar eclipse on Earth?
[Answer]
I'm inclined to believe that life would not exist on either planet. If I understand the arrangement the liquid cores are going to try to rotate in the direction of the planet's spin but also in the direction of the tidally locked pair of planets which is at 90 degrees. This will cause the liquid core to not spin and not generate a magnetic field thus the atmosphere gets ripped away by the solar wind and exposes the populations to extreme radiation.
Imagine two basketballs filled with water and tied to each other with a piece of string. You have the basketballs rotating along the axis of the string and rotating in the plane of the string. What will the water do? Because there are no hollows inside the balls the water can't "bunch up" on one end. They can be tidally locked but not magnetically locked since there is no magnetic field.
The other idea to consider is that they are each in geosynchronous orbits of each other. Therefore they can't be more than half the distance to the sun apart otherwise they would hit/graze the sun. This will dictate the speed they are rotating and the distance apart, along with their masses.
You might consider Trojan Points to resolve these issues.
]
|
[Question]
[
This is the third question in a series of such for my worldbuilding project that deals with plausible fantasy creatures. Previously, I have pondered cockatrices and hydras, but now we move on to another popular mythical animal, the griffin. Last two questions: [Is petrifying vision plausible in an animal?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/113648/is-petrifying-vision-plausible-in-an-animal) and [Hydras as parasitic-mating, polyandrous amphibians?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/114179/hydras-as-parasitic-mating-polyandrous-amphibians)
The griffin, or gryphon, is a well-known beast of fantasy that was depicted by the Egyptians, Iranians, Minoans, Greeks, Romans and Medieval people. It is said to have the body and forelegs of a lion and the head, wings and hind legs of an eagle. However, the consistent thing in all portrayals of griffins is that they have four legs and two wings.
Yes, flying quadrupeds, Bane of Worldbuilders. Such an anatomy would require the griffins to be hexapods, which isn't realistic evolutionarily. So, hexapodal griffins must be ruled out. When I realized this shortly after considering including griffins in my worldbuilding project, I thought that I'd have to simply leave them out.
But then I remembered a real-life group of giant flying animals, the Azhdarchids. The largest species in this group being the giraffe-sized *Quetzalcoatlus northropi*, they walked with their wings as their forelimbs.
Could a bird evolve such locomotion? My premise is that these griffins could have evolved from Accipitrids or similar birds, and grown larger and larger until they gained a wing-walking posture to sustain their massive size. Hypothetically, their movement would be very Azhdarchid-esque, and it would be about the size of a horse.
Now to the real question: **would massive wing-walking birds a) evolve rather than some other method of sustaining their frame, and b) survive and hunt with such adaptations?**
[Answer]
This worked out just a little long for a comment,
**Simple Answer, yes!**
You've already got documented evidence of a creature that moves the way you want it to, and that happened due to evolution, but they're not the only ones... Bats will fly, however if injured and unable to fly they walk along the floor in the manor described.
**The Problem**
The issue you may have is that creatures way back when were all larger, part of this is back then the density of the atmosphere was lower, therefore lower pressure therefore they can be bigger(oversimplification i know, not getting into that here), if Jurassic park actually existed, a T-Rex would probably be about the size of a family car, rather than a bus. so it depends on the size of the creature you want at the same time as humans, realistically your griffins/gryphon's would probably be about the size of a decent turkey
**Possible work arounds**
Maybe have them be smaller and be pack animals, weather good or bad is up to you and you can describe them in ways that do so, good animals would be beautiful fur covered creatures that look healthy and then hunt smaller animals intelligently, like a Wolf, whereas evil might be skinnier more leathered skin and very aggressive and act more like hyenas
Or have them be horse size, maybe talk about how they have shrunk since man first saw them, have a debate on wether man was just smaller or they have shrunk, maybe find massive bones belonging to their ancestors, after all giraffes exist and so do elephants, big animals exist all around the world, its how they act compared to smaller aimals is whats important. these animals don't fly but maybe the your gryphons walk more and only fly when needed to save the huge energy required to do so. if you think about the Rhino, Elephant and Girafe they are all slow land based animals but all can move quite quickly when they need to, but never over a great distance
Pneumatized Bones *might* help but you'd have to offset this against the wieght those bones would have to carry
[Answer]
I would say Absolutely, with the one caveat that they may not be quite as large as you are describing.
There are some species of bat that use their wings as a part of their non-flying locomotive strategy. eg: [Vampire Bat](https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/vampire-bat-blood-taste-buds-01-768x576.jpg)
It depends a little on why you want them to exist, and what you want them to achieve with both their flying & non-flying locomotion. I could certainly see some evolutionary pressure moving some creatures in the direction you describe, but it would have to be fairly specific, and target the young in a fashion that creates that evolutionary development in certain directions.
I suspect that having 4 legged animals develop into flying creatures might be more likely than 2 legged birds that already have wings developing into wing walking birds.
]
|
[Question]
[
Regular people are too big and heavy to fly on their own (i.e. without magic or internal combustion), but I'd like to have the fantasy equivalent of the Royal Flying Doctor Service so...
Could someone fly if they were smaller than a regular person, just how small would they actually need to be to fly on their own yet still look like a normal person?
[P.S. Gliding down from a tall tower and walking back would also be acceptable]
In response to comments:
[worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25466/…](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25466/anatomically-correct-angels) seems to be aimed more at full sized people and their evolution, and as one of the answers states
>
> [The] biggest problem here is that a **classical angel cannot fly** with classical angelic wings. [The wings] are just too small...
>
>
>
Seeing as "classical angels aren't 3 feet tall, *can we shrink the people to compensate?* (after all, we have the square-cube law on *our side* for once)
[https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39736/...](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/39736/what-would-humans-wings-need-to-be-like-to-fly) asked specifically:
>
> What would humans wings need to be like to fly?
>
>
>
The response to which was:
>
> On an Earth like planet (same atmospheric density & gravity) **humans can not fly**. Our configuration makes us **too massive to fly** given our skeletal-muscular structure.
>
>
>
So... smaller is better?
And as for [https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23145](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23145/how-to-make-a-flying-human) well...
>
> [Your] flying humans would have enormously over-long arms and clumsy few-fingered hands. They would have large massively muscled and protruding chests and thin fragile skulls.
>
>
>
Which is not the look I was going for and that's for a full sized person, as people get smaller (and lighter) I'm guessing there's more margin to have them look like regular people (I've added a note abut that to the question)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OEHmw.jpg)
[Answer]
This feels like a dangerous area to answer. There are far too many pre-assumed conditions for angels and their relationship with an Abrahamic diety for me to be comfortable making suggestions.
But... why not?
I enjoy the picture of the Flying Doctors. I see that the doctors have wings but the woman standing by the window, and perhaps the sick person, don't have wings. This suggests that either:
1. they are genetically different, or
2. they have been given different developmental stimuli to force
different developmental paths (such as Royal Jelly in a bee colony
to promote the development of a queen), or
3. the wings are an addition to their original bodies.
As must have been discussed here, the difference between primarily flying and primarily walking creatures goes far deeper than wings. All of the body systems in fliers have adapted to reduce body mass and lower the energy required for flying. A partial list of examples:
1. Bones are lighter, and not filled with marrow,
2. Fat stores are minimized,
3. Blood volume is reduced, and
4. Digestion changes to reduce the storage time of feces.
These are structural changes, not simply changes of scale.
Other practical matters would include feet. Flying creatures have various ways of transitioning from air to ground. Waterbirds act more like airplanes, running along the surface of the water to take off, and gliding on the surface of the water when landing. Other birds typically come to an aerodynamic stall and grab onto the surface. Landing in a window would be difficult because at the moment of the stall the wings are extended fully, but the center of mass for human-style feet needs to be over the feet.
IMO, how you shape the flying doctors depends on the other constraints of the world. If it is a hard-science story, you could use something like:
1. based on genetic engineering, with people having a more complex
genome coding for many specialties, selected during development,
2. based on symbiotic bio-engineering, where non-human creatures (such
as wings) are added to humans to alter their adaptation,
3. based on mechanical changes, mixing mechanical with biological,
4. purely mechanical, like strapped on wings or gliding surfaces.
Soft-science or magic are easier because one doesn't need to have plausible equations.
Looking back at these paragraphs, I realize that I haven't answered your question at all.
Specifically as to size, yes, smaller is better. Unlike some of the discussions, you are not asking that the wings be formed from the arms. You have an additional set of appendages for lift. You also allow for gliding from a tower, so you don't have the problem of generating all the vertical potential energy from the wings. There is no specified a glide slope, so the amount of lift isn't determined, but you need enough lift for reasonable range, and enough lift to do a flare-to-stall at the end.
I'm still not answering the question. Thank you for the interesting diversion.
[Answer]
People in wing-suits can sort of fly (falling with style?) and a parachute effectively automates the flare-stall-landing process, so your winged humanoids could potentially fall-fly down from a high mountain peak or hot air balloon. They wouldn't need to be much shorter than regular humans indeed being light and lanky would be optimal if they're using wing-suits instead of or in addition to their wings.
]
|
[Question]
[
[Vacuum tubes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube) were a mainstay of digital computer technology until around the 1960s, where transistors (and later integrated circuits) replaced them for most applications. In real life history, one of the last commercial tubes to be developed and widely manufactured was the [nuvistor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuvistor), a small, relatively reliable tube used in radio equipment and televisions. The linked Wikipedia article has photographs of the tube, which has a metal casing and is about 11 mm in diameter.
In a hypothetical setting where the invention of transistors and integrated circuits were delayed indefinitely, how much smaller and more reliable could 'traditional' vacuum tubes operating on the principles of [thermionic emission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermionic_emission) been made, given sufficient commercial demand for further innovation? What limitations (heat dissipation, fundamental physical effects) might come into play that would prevent tubes from shrinking beyond, say, the size of a grain of rice, or a grain of sand?
(I'm aware of the existence of [nanoscale vacuum tubes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoscale_vacuum-channel_transistor), but these devices are fabricated using the same photolithography technology invented for manufacturing integrated circuits, and for the sake of this question I'd like to exclude them, or anything else that relies on semiconductor technology or technology developed as a direct result of semiconductors.)
[Answer]
The only similar technology which has survived until today is incandescent light bulbs.
I say they are similar in the sense that they require to put some electrodes in a vacuum and have current flowing between them.
A google search shows this [article](https://www.livescience.com/3557-world-smallest-light-bulb-created.html), allegedly reporting the smallest light bulb in the world.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KnN75.jpg)
Though, as the article says
>
> The lamp's filament is just 100 atoms wide. It is made from a single carbon nanotube.
>
>
>
it is pretty evident from the photo that the bulb in its whole is not that small.
Let's scale it down by a factor 2 to compensate for the different usage, we still are in the mm length realm. And I don't think you can go much lower, as the real issue is handling a small bubble of molten glass and let it stay a bubble while it becomes solid.
]
|
[Question]
[
**What's the longest plausible orbital period for a habitable planet with a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance?**
I want a planet with a 3:2 spin orbit resonance (which would experience 1/3 of a year of nighttime followed by 1/3 year daylight), but I want
* relatively long periods of dark and night
* liquid water possible
([As](http://crack.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/ftp/pub/gillett/joshi.pdf) with [tidally](https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.0515) locked planets, I'm assuming a sufficiently thick atmosphere and oceanic circulation could distribute temperature enough to avoid the dark side freezing completely and the hot side completely baking.)
I thus need a planet which is
* as far away from its star as possible (to make the orbital period longer)
* far enough from its star for the hot side to not be destructively hot (although see the effects of thick atmosphere and clouds above)
but which is also
* close enough to the star for the 3:2 orbit resonance to have occurred
* close enough for liquid water (again, see the effects of thick atmosphere)
I was thinking that a cooler star than the sun (maybe K class) would allow the planet to get closer and locked into resonance without being too hot, but a star that is too cool (e.g. a red dwarf) would require the planet to orbit very close and give a very short orbital period.
**What kind of star and what distance of planet would be suitable, and what would the orbital period be?**
[Answer]
Not clear why you need a resonance. E.g. Venus has a very long day, but AFAIK is not locked to anything. Would it not be sufficient to have a late impact in planet formation that cancelled most of the angular momentum?
You could also have fun with a Roche World like setup (Novel by same name by Robert Forward)
You have a pair of planet in mutual orbit. If it were earth and twin at Luna's distance you'd have a period, I think of about 2+ weeks (about 1/sqrt(2))
The two don't have to fully locked. You could have one of them appear in the planet's rotating system of reference to take months or years to pass thorugh the sky.
I don't know how stable the climate would be. In another question I posited that if you lenghtened Earth's day to even 100 hours large parts of the planet would be un-inhabitable. Anything borderline desert right now. Places that are cold air traps in irregular terrain.
A slower rotation means smaller coriolis forces. This I think would make for larger storm systems with slower movements. That hurricane sits on top of you for 2 weeks raining 3 feet of rain a day...
]
|
[Question]
[
Approximately how likely is it that a tidally locked planet would have a long term natural satellite, and where would that satellite most likely be located? What I've so far researched (and puzzled out on my own) indicates it would be extremely unlikely and would either follow the terminator line or be opposite the star and orbiting at such a pace as to be geosynchronous.
Additionally, would it be feasible to place a man-made satellite at such a planet, assuming fuel/spacefaring technology has not progressed too much (I have another explanation for traveling from one system to another) and considering the fuel requirements to keep the satellite in orbit?
[Answer]
Yes, but with limitations.
The fact that a planet is tidally locked does not by itself stop it having a moon or a satellite. In fact Mercury was orbited by an artificial satellite called [MESSENGER](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESSENGER) for several years. Mercury may not have conventional tidal locking, but it does have a form of tidal locking called [spin-orbit resonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)#Spin.E2.80.93orbit_resonance).
However the factors that lead to tidal locking tend to involve a body orbiting close to another body, and often a smaller one around a much larger one. Both of those factors make it much harder for the tidally locked object to have satellites of its own. Artificial satellites stable for a few years would generally be fine but natural ones stable for millions of years would be highly unlikely.
[Answer]
Tides happen on the Earth because of the gravity of the moon is strong enough to shift the seas around . If your natural/artificial satellite is sufficiently small ( which means it will have less gravity ) and sufficiently far away from the planet (but close enough to be in orbit) , then it won't influence the tides of the planet and the planet will continue to be tidally locked .
]
|
[Question]
[
How stable (or possible) would binary moons be, (Luna-sized or possibly slightly smaller) rotating around an earth-sized planet?
Edit: Thanks for the questions! And thanks for the welcome! My apologies for not being more detailed. I want them both to be the same size approximately, look about the size of our moon, (so if they're smaller, they'd be closer) rotate the earth-sized planet at about the same rate our moon does, with a 28 day cycle from full to full, and they would orbit each other around a central point, but not so that they would eclipse each other; just so that at one time, one would rise before the other, at another time the other would rise first.
I'm hoping that such a situation is plausible.
[Answer]
They can definitely be stable with respect to one another. In fact, there are several possible configurations you can put two moons in order to gain this sort of stability. Here are a couple of them:
**1: Moons in separate orbits**
The trivial solution to this is to put your moons in separate orbits far enough apart that they don't interfere with one another. The moons around the gas giants mostly behave like this.
**2: Moons form a binary pair**
If your moons are significantly closer to one another than they are to your planet, they're likely to form a stable binary pair, orbiting their common center of gravity. These moons would likely be tidally locked with each other, rather than the planet. They'd also likely need to be further from their parent planet than Luna is from Earth, since if they orbited too closely, the gravity of their parent planet would likely throw off their orbital pattern.
**3: Moons form a horseshoe orbit relative to one another**
It's also possible for similarly sized bodies to stably orbit a planet while sharing an orbit if they form a [horseshoe orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_orbit) with one another. Epimethius and Janus, two moons of Saturn, are good examples of this sort of system. From the surface of the planet, your moons would appear to vary in distance over time, from a position fairly close to one another in the sky to one in which they were on opposite sides of the sky. They'd oscillate periodically between these extremes without ever touching one another. They'd also vary in size, taking turns appearing to be the larger celestial body. This would no doubt lead to lots of interesting stories in the mythology of your planet dwellers.
**4: Moons which sit in each other's Lagrange points**
Specifically, we're talking about the $L\_4$ and $L\_5$ Lagrange points. These points are dynamically stable, so barring any particularly large perturbations, two moons should be able to sit in those points relative to one another. These systems are less stable against perturbations when the bodies are similarly sized to one another, so if there are other planets in the solar system, one of the moons may be ejected from its orbit after a period of time.
[Answer]
It would depend on where your moons are in relation to each other and to the planet. The size also matters: if you got them in the right place and the right size, you might be able to get a planet with a stable orbit.
If this did not happen, the moons were not in the right distance proportional to your planet and each other; in that case, you would have very unstable plant seasons, and tides could change suddenly, perhaps in some cases completely erratically. I might be able to give you more details, but without exact knowledge of your moons' sizes, their distances from each other and from the planet, and the size of the planet, the possible outcomes are just be too numerous to list.
]
|
[Question]
[
**The Idea:** A planetary system composed of many interconnected nodes and small bodies in a semi-stable arrangement, with much shorter distances between astronomical bodies than our own Solar System. It's kind of like an orbiting structure made of tinker toys, or the floating mountains in Avatar on an astronomical scale.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DtfLW.jpg)
Take this, but scale it up. Individual planetoids/rocks in this system should be able to see other bodies, with something like the distance between our Earth and Moon as a common range. So with a much greater density than the asteroid belt, and fewer collisions than a planetary ring. A star still forms in this structure, providing a chance of life evolving on these planetoids.
**The Explanation:** Our planetary system forms with a significant volume of exotic matter; let's call it Zero-Mat. This particular exotic matter has an interesting property: it repels itself, but increases the gravitation pull of any regular matter near it. It's influence falls off much faster than gravity, say something like 1/r4 instead of gravity's 1/r2. Thus these exotic particles could attract matter to themselves, but keep that matter from aggregating into larger planets. There may be some mechanism/structure of the exotic matter that allows it to bind together, like an alien form of the nuclear force, if the repellent force is overcome.
**The Question:** Would this explanation in any way work? Would it allow this proposed system to come into being?
What other ways could this system form?
[Answer]
# Exist? Sort of.
It would be possible for something like this system to *exist,* even without the addition of exotic $\frac{1}{r^4}$ repulsive matter. To scale this up to an asteroid-belt size with "visible" neighbours would be possible as well, as long as you accept that the individual asteroids all have nearly-perfectly uniform angular velocity about the system's star to avoid (major) collisions and gravitational "slingshot" effects that could destabilize the orbits (unless you have an efficient government that can re-zone these about-to-be-ejected-"neighbourhoods" for cold storage, and therefore don't care if you lose a few here and there).
# How massive?
First, the Earth-moon distance is about $384\,000\,km$, and for the objects to be visible at typical 1 AU reflected brightness, they would need to be at least 30 [arcseconds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter), which gives us a real diameter of about 60km, equivalent to a spherical volume of about $113\,000\,km^3$, and a mass of $6.2\times 10^{17}\,kg$.
Next, the Earth's orbit is about 940 million km in circumference. If you were to unroll that into a line 940 million km long, and then "stamp" a ring of such planetoids every 384,000km along the ring, you get around 2500 planetoids, "weighing" in at an Earth-scale $1.6 \times 10^{24}\,kg$, given Earth-like density (actually the density would be a lower, but trust me, that wouldn't be helpful, here).
The Earth itself is about $6.0 \times 10^{24}\,kg$, so you could have a few concentric rings and still come up with something relatively of Earth-mass. Of course there's no reason you couldn't make it a bit more or less massive.
# Atmosphere? No.
In order to have a human-like life-sustaining atmosphere, the temperature (mean velocity of atmosphere molecules) has to be less than the escape velocity of the planetoid.
The [escape velocity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity), $v\_e = \sqrt{\frac{2Gm}{r}} = 38\,m/sec$. (c.f. Earth's $v\_e = 11\,200\,m/sec$!)
To sustain liquid water at the surface, the atmosphere would have to have a temperature around 200 K (very approximate value so I don't have to talk about pressure yet). At room temperature (294 K), oxygen molecules fly around at an average of nearly 500 m/s, which is more than ten times the escape velocity. They would be somewhat slower at the 200 K mark, but certainly not by a factor of ten. If I have time later I'll put in the "exact" [RMS calculation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root-mean-square_speed).
Thus, either the atmosphere would be too cold to support life (at least water-oxygen based life), or the atmosphere would literally fly away.
# Pressure and Gravity
Without doing the calculations (yet), I can tell you that the acceleration due to gravity and the air pressure will be far, far less than what we're used to on Earth. The gravity is not a big issue (at least not in the short term, although evolution might be challenged), but the pressure would be quickly fatal to humans, so your species would have to either have evolved to adapt, or your exotic matter would need some kind of "air magnet" properties.
]
|
[Question]
[
I'm writing fan-fiction for the superhero [serial novel Worm](http://parahumans.wordpress.com/about/). The main setting in Worm is Brockton Bay, a failing city of about 300,000 people. The economy has been in decline since the decline of shipping through Brockton Bay. I assume manufacturing has also fallen as well. The people of [Brockton Bay](http://parahumans.wikia.com/wiki/Brockton_Bay) are largely poor, and superpowered gangs are in control of large sections of the city. (A side note for manufacturing: Japan in this story has been destroyed by a kaijuu, and China is a closed economy.)
The economy of Brockton Bay is not all bad, however. There is a section of the city that is fairly rich due to tourism. The city has the most superhumans per capital, and attracts people on that basis.
What economic problems are likely plaguing this fictional city? How would you solve them?
Edit: A bit more detail on economic problems:
The justice system is corrupt. The two major gangs are White and Asian. The White gang is well-organised, the Asian gang not so. I imagine the White gang holding on to wealthy suburbs and charging protection fees.
The education system is likely failing, so a good segment of the population is illiterate.
Unemployment is high, which feeds into the gangs. Probably 20%? I'm basing this off of Detroit unemployment rates.
Due to Japan being devastated, and China becoming a closed economy, there are a lot Asian immigrants. Some are rich, some are poor. The poor Asians are used illegal as cheap labour to support unproductive manufacturers.
That's all I can think of right now. As for more specific questions, I'd ask: How would you develop infrastructure, when the city is broke? Which infrastructure do you prioritise? How would you fix the justice system? The education system? On which do you prioritise your energies?
How do you create more jobs? Do you use macro policies? Or targeted policies? Do you implicitly encourage illegal immigrant labour? Or regulate working conditions? How do you improve productivity?
Edit: Property rights, tourism and superhumans as human resources
The police don't want to involve themselves in superhuman gangs. They're corrupt anyway. The superheroes are severely outnumbered, and probably don't want to pick a fight unless they have to. How do you enforce property rights then?
There is an implicit agreement not to use too much force against each other, otherwise the superheroes will hammer down on them full force. So tourism isn't too much affected. There is also implicit agreement not to touch the tourism areas.
Superpowers are generally small scale. Potentially useful powers such as creating technology are limited by lack of replicability.
[Answer]
One important source of income for both gangs would be drugs, as the market for all kinds of drugs would proliferate very easily in a settings where a small niche of richer people would access the "good stuff", while the poorer would be enslaved by opiates, and as well provide cheap and unscrupulous manpower, and additionally with the aid of a corrupt system.
In a place like that, even a good part of tourism would probably be the sex&drugs type, with the gangs providing both (I see the asian having predominance in the former).
But even in a place where the justice system is corrupt, money coming from sex and drug markets has to be laundered. What better business to easily lander money than infrastructure and building? The white mafia would own construction businesses, winning all local government tenders for infrastructure, with the help of bribes and just because it could work just for any price (and yet, the cheap desperate manpower would provide profits actually); and, too, building skyscrapers and lodging for the tourists, generating an induced economy of small-business from which collect more protection fees; and why not casinos?
On the other side of city, where the poor people lives, is a sparse proliferation of favelas/slums, where the micromarket of drugs is handled by pawns, and police itself will collect protection bribes. In the asian slums, people would play lotteries where you can eventually win a job position as waiter, or get a body part ripped away.
]
|
[Question]
[
**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
In previous questions, I asked about how a K2V star could develop an [O VII] forbidden line and how those x-rays would create "pseudo-aurorae". Now, I'd like to know if my star could realistically only have one forbidden line, or if it has to have multiple (like if it as an O ᴠɪɪ line, it is very likely or has to have X forbidden line).
# Some Real Life Stars with Forbidden Lines
ζ Puppis is a well studied O4Ief star with the O ᴠɪɪ forbidden line and I found [this paper](https://works.swarthmore.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1014&context=fac-physics) that says the star has the lines S xv, Si xɪɪɪ, Mg xɪ, Ne ɪx, and O ᴠɪɪ.
Another star, β Crucis, this time with the spectral type B0.5 III, also has the O ᴠɪɪ line. Using [this other paper](https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/386/4/1855/1456919), I found that the star has many forbidden lines including O ᴠɪɪ, Ne ɪx, Si xɪɪɪ, Mg xɪ, N ᴠɪɪ, and Fe xᴠɪɪ.
I see that both stars share (besides the O ᴠɪɪ line) the Ne ɪx, Si xɪɪɪ, and Mg xɪ lines.
# My Hypothetical Star
My star is a K type star, and is much cooler than these extremely hot stars and produces these lines in trace amounts using [MCWS](https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.08540) (magnetically confined wind shocks). However, my star sometimes (mostly in very high periods of stellar activity) produces these lines in significant quantities.
Here is my star's coronal composition (where most of this stuff takes place):
* Hydrogen ($H$) - 72.3%
* Helium ($He$) - 27.4%
* Oxygen (including the [O VII] line; $O$ and $O^{6+}$) - 0.3%
* Carbon ($C$) - 0.05%
* Nitrogen ($N$) - 0.02%
* Other Elements - 0.02% (mostly neon, magnesium, silicon, and sulfur, and there are almost no metals higher than iron/nickel present in this star)
My question is when my star is excited and produces x-rays, what other lines would most likely be produced (if any) and if I have to or should (because it is very likely to form if I have an O ᴠɪɪ line) include it.
[Answer]
**Note**: Firstly, I would like to thank the people over at [astronomy](https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/54964/can-a-star-have-one-forbidden-line-or-does-it-have-to-have-many) for answering my question there. This is just a summary of the answer there, and also me adding some stuff about the hypothetical K star.
# An Overview of Forbidden Lines
Forbidden lines occur when a quantum mechanical effect makes a transition from two energy states unlikely. Below a density threshold, you will see forbidden lines, though unlikely, but above, you will see lines produced from collisions.
These thresholds vary based on the line you are talking about, in this case, O ᴠɪɪ. So, there could be various groups of forbidden lines that occur below similar threshold densities.
I'm guessing that the Ne ɪx, Si xɪɪɪ, and Mg xɪ lines have similar threshold densities as the O ᴠɪɪ line, so that is why they occur together. I'm guessing because I can't find the actual threshold densities for these lines.
# The Hypothetical Star
The corona of most stars is similar to their overall composition, so you will be getting lots of hydrogen and helium, with notable amounts of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, silicon, magnesium, neon, and iron. That means that these elements are present to become ionized and emit forbidden lines.
So, to answer my own question, it depends, but for this star, it is pretty likely that it will have the neon, magnesium, and silicon lines. However, it is possible to get a star with a certain line that has a density threshold that is similar to no other forbidden line, making the star have only 1 forbidden line.
]
|
[Question]
[
I was reading [this PDF on the speed of sailing ships](https://gewa.gsfc.nasa.gov/clubs/sailing/RESOURCES/Physics_of_sailing.pdf), and it occured to me that I need to determine the physics of the flying sailing ships in my world. Being *flying* sailing ships, there will be no water involved.
In my universe, there are two things that allow a sailing ship to fly:
1. Ether: This is a fluid that occurs throughout the universe, that moves relative to large objects such as stars and planets, so that near such objects, the ether has zero relative movement. Most matter does not interact with the Ether, but some matter does.
2. Etheric Keels: These are material objects that interact with Ether. They are able to move through the ether in one direction, 'along the grain' relatively easily, while if they are moved through the ether 'across the grain', the resistance is much higher, proportional to the *volume* of the etheric keel. Think of a chunk of Etheric Keel as being like a collection of parallel pipes, and the ether like a body of water. Regardless of density, etheric keels neither float nor sink in the Ether, there is no buoyancy effect between Ether and Keel.
There are other factors that would affect the speed of a flying sailing ship, such as gravity, air density, the pulling power of the sails and the drag imposed by the friction of air against the ship's hull and rigging, but while these are important, for purposes of this question, please consider them to be constants.
I envisioned a ship having multiple keels in controllable gimbals so that they can be angled to control the ship's lift, attitude and direction of movement, and if necessary, increase drag. Keel material could also be used as a 'screw' or 'propeller'.
I want to derive a formula that I can use to calculate the speed of a flying sailing ship given factors such as the drag of the hull and rigging, the properties of the sails, the density of the air, the vector of the wind and the desired direction of travel. These are all things that are well known.
However, I also need to know what the relevant properties of the keels and ether will be. I don't need *values* for these properties, I just need to know what they *are* and how each will affect the construction and performance of a flying sailing ship, and if these properties will affect the ideal shape of a keel, or if I just need 'chunks' of keel material.
The best answer will include as many *relevant* properties as necessary for both ether and keel, and as few *ir*relevant properties as possible, with ether and keel each being assigned the most logically relevant properties, with descriptions of how they will affect the performance of a ship.
I don't necessarily need the entire formula, nor do I need the values, just the relevant properties, with SI units.
**EDIT:** Just to make it perfectly clear and clarify an earlier paragraph, I anticipate flying sailing ships having multiple keels, probably at least two fore and two aft, to control pitch, yaw and roll, as well as to provide lift and to counter side-slip.
Ships will also most likely have masts in multiples of two, three or four, arranged symmetrically around the hull in order to provide balanced thrust.
**EDIT 2:** Again, to make it perfectly clear, these ships are heavier than air. They carry no lifting gas. They are intended to use the force of the wind in their sails to generate forward motion, and an appropriate angle of attack on their keels to generate lift and maintain a course not directly downwind by pushing against the ether.
[Answer]
**The formula for speed would likely match the one used in normal sails**
See, you have here two forces that make your flying sailship move: the force of wind hitting the sails (and body, as it would encompaass the whole ship), and the force of etheric keel resisting its motion against the ether. On the water, you have essentially the same forces. And regarding your keels' shape, your best shape would then be *the orb*, and its location as close to the ship's mass center as possible. The orb is best because it has most compact external dimensions for a given internal volume, and since your keels work by volume, you want to maximize this instead. Therefore your ships would probably resemble flying saucers, with masts and rigging above the main deck set, and the keel somewhere in between. Or maybe like wide but short ships of the sea, as you don't need excess length to contain the keel as it works by volume, while having your ship be wider would allow more cargo and stuff, as well as more rigging for movement power.
Regarding the quantity of keels, you would probably go well with a single keel located dead center, or somewhere between the mass center and the rigging center to have less angular momentum to be compensated by its gimbals. The sailing ship has riggings above the keel for the reason of catching more wind, as well as for stronger winds, as the speed of wind does somewhat increase when rising from sea surface. In your case the wind is all around the ship, but you would still need the bottom defined as your ships would have to land, and landing on rigging would crumple it beyond repair.
**The gravity would require some other approach**
You have the keel to also do gravity compensation, that is, preventing downward movement by applying increased resistance, so the ship in mid-air would hang over the keel, relying on it as the buoyancy center. You will still have to apply some upward force in order for these ships to lift off, maybe by inclining the keel "nose upwards" and unfolding the sails, so the ship would climb upwards on the ether like a kid being dragged uphill on a sled. But, this ability would require exact value of resistance difference for keel between "along the grain" and "across the grain" in times, say 1000 - sliding the keel along the grain requires 1000 times less force than across. If the value would end up too low, your ships would never take off the ground, as they would founder too easily.
With the ship's keel aligned orthogonal to gravity force vector, it would act as a stopping force for a falling object, making your ships to have a free fall terminal velocity calculatable by existing formula, but using the keel's volume multiplied by ether resistance as extra addition to drag component. Your ships should likely not exceed 1 m/s of terminal velocity in design regarding liftoff weight vs keel resistance. Should the keel be turned nose to zenith, the resistance would be effectively gone and the ship would fall off the sky as a normal wooden device. If the rigging is up, the sails would compensate this motion by using air resistance to turn the ship "masts up", yet they are expected to be more fragile than the hull, thus only a small libration is permissible for a ship mid-flight.
**Ship's construction**
Regarding ship control, you would have some problems with rigging vs hull balance, because if the wind resistance force center would also become below the center of the keel, the ship's equilibrium will become unstable and the slightest wind change would topple the ship. This never happens at sea regarding wind, yet there are known configurations regarding water and buoyancy that display such instability in water, which topple if allowed to rock sideways. Regarding gravity control, it's possible that having two keels spaced in "forward" direction and aligned like this `\/` in vertical plane with a small angle between their axes would benefit towards static control of rocking the ship by stray winds and mass rebalance, so that the ship won't nosedive if a sudden gust of wind would cause a temporary balance shift forwards or backwards. (This configuration would also prevent the ship go all the way down if it would actually nosedive, as long as the keels' support is intact, with great forces applied between them to the ship's hull as it would start turning masts up.) But if the angle would be too big, the increased wind resistance (as it would be proportionate to sine function of that angle) would slow the ship to inability to lift up, so this angle should be constantly controlled, and a means to increase it rapidly towards stable formation should be implemented as a safety measure.
**Steering**
In order to steer the ship, you can use those two keels to also cause an angle between their axes in horizontal plane, causing ether resistance force to apply angular momentum to the hull turning it sideways, this will however also cause the ship to roll outside the turn due to keel configuration causing gravity resistance disbalance to the ship side wise, yet this is compensated by the same force as the mass center being below the keels would have been shifted inwards, applying reverse roll momentum. Also the roll would meet increased resistance from the keels, as when you rotate the keel around its "along" axis, the entire keel is moving "across", experiencing ether drag. Additionally, a steering "keel" might be implemented at the outermost point on the ship, like the tail on a dual-rotor toy helicopter, providing yaw/pitch momentum to the entire ship by its rotation.
**Weight handling**
There are several problems with those keels in mid-air regarding ship's structure, the primary is that the keels will be THE thing that would support the entire ship hanging in midair by its interaction with ether. This part is not too relevant to speed calculation, because it only covers limits on how the keels should be attached to the hull, but since the process of rotating the entire hull would cause resistance from the keel material, as a part of it would be moving "across the grain" while turning relative to ether, the best form to minimize that force would be a thin disk/plate with the "along" axis oriented along the smallest dimension, this arises some issues on durability, proper gimballing of keel pieces and overall weight handling.
As an example, a piece of keel that weighs 1 kg and is shaped into a cube with its axis along one of the edges, that is able to carry 1 ton of weight against gravity and founder at 1 m/s would have its ether drag parameter "across the grain" at 10000 N/(kg\*m/s), and the attempt to turn its axis in a plane parallel to its side would cause ether drag force of 250 N/(rad/s). Making the keel thinner while retaining the mass and density would lower the required force proportionate to resultant thickness (say 2.5x20x20 cm brick would turn four times easier). This actually prevents using long keels on those airships, as the forces required to turn them mid-flight fast enough would exceed rigging durability. These same forces put a limit on the proposed "ether screw" as the keel pieces there would constantly experience drag, even if the whole engine is already moving at desired speed.
**Summary**
For efective operation of etheric keel-driven ships, you need to devise TWO factors for keels, one measureless, meaning how much harder it is to move the keel-material "across the grain" vs "along the grain", the other meaning how hard is it to move the keel-matter against ether, in N/(kg\*m/s), either "along the grain" or "across the grain", and either as a constant or as a function of speed - this parameter also describes how does the keel-matter allow ships to stay afloat, and several factors regarding keel control mid-flight and when ascending. Descent is always done really easily, as you don't have any active means of ascent or air-floating. Rigging and hull might be the same as in water-based sailing ships, with additional control over wind resistance to avoid toppling, and over keel configuration to allow actual movement in mid-air, except for the fact that the entire ship would have to be hanging on the keels.
PS: if you'd ever desire an ether-based engine, you can have a track made of keel-material, working as the one on tanks, the lower part of the track should be aligned downwards, and the upper part should be aligned forwards. Then, as the track would start moving, the parts that face downwards would apply their ether resistance force to the construction driving it forward, while the upper part would provide almost zero interference, thus this device would propel the ship forward without interaction with the ground. So if you have a power plant on the ship, using this device would let you travel into space, provided you can climb with it faster than you would founder due to your main keels no longer preventing the gravity's entire power to pull you down. More, with this track its actual propelling power depends on its length, and losses due to required rotation of keels are constant per construction, thus it looks like a promising configuration to advance beyond the atmosphere.
[Answer]
# No righting moment, no sailing.
Water has buoyancy as well as a different density, a universal ether as you’ve defined it does not. Because “nothing floats in ether,” there is no righting moment provided by it; therefore, torque will do what torque does and just spin, flip, and twirl your ship around. Righting moment keeps a ship upright by countering the gravitational force with the buoyant force. Ballast controls the gravitational force, hull shape controls the buoyant force. Together they automatically correct the torques applied by other forces. More details below.
You don’t understand how sail power works. Wind force applied to a sail above the ship is not applying a force to the ship, it is trying to capsize the ship: it applies a torque. The force that converts the torque of the sails into a directional force is called the righting moment, that is derived from the hull design which changes the “center of buoyancy” of the ship as it rolls and pitches. Buoyancy counters the wind force torque to create a linear vector. If your ether is a homogenous universal fluid, it won't turn a ship like a keel would, it will simply apply a lateral torque when an external keel is acted on. The buoyancy of a sailing ship provides another vector to correct the direction of a vessel without rolling it over. A great deal of effort goes into properly loading a ship to maintain the center of buoyancy above the center of gravity because as soon as the center of gravity is above the center of buoyancy, the ship cannot right itself agains wind or drift moments. You have eliminated the buoyant force completely in this second fluid, and so your controls are left entirely in ballasting. It’s essentially just a beach ball in the ether. Nothing is “righting” the torques applied by the ether on the keels except ballast, and that has no direction in ether - no “pointy end of the boat.”
## The keel must act in the center of aerial sail area.
The “center” changes every time the wind vector changes. There is no single “center” to any shape except a sphere.
The keel is providing the "centerboard force" of a sailboat, and your airships. Since you state there is no buoyancy force, the keel must apply its force vector to the point in the center of its sail area in the other fluid - air. You literally can not “mask” a sail from the air by wrapping it in a bigger sail (placing it inside the hull). The hull just becomes the proxy surface for your etheric surfaces.
## Ballasting will have a limited effectiveness
You can offset the rotational torque from the keel somewhat by ballasting the vessel as a balloon does, which it will have in a limited degree already. However a balanced airship which also wants maneuverability is really hard to have a low center of buoyancy in the air, so the tendency to roll is much more pronounced as compared to a floating sail ship who's mass below the waterline is vastly lighter than the displaced fluid, or to a balloon which doesn’t need to maneuver.
## The keel isn't providing hydrostatic resistance against yaw (there is no drag force)
Basically you can't tack in a vessel with only the keel in the second fluid. If you place the keel forward of the center of mass, a lateral vector on the keel will yaw the ship to follow the ether current. If the keel is aft of your center of mass, the lateral force will yaw the ship into the ether until the keel presents the smallest resistance to the ether flow. A sailing ship's hull running full length provides the hydrostatic resistance to follow a given tack.
## A single small plane in the ether serving the centerboard force won't allow maneuvering
To avoid being driven by the wind force and apparent wind, You will need additional control surfaces exposed to the ether, and deal with centering your ether-driven forces directly against aerodynamic forces associated with the sail area of the ship. You will need something providing the rudder force in the ether as well, and this also has to be balanced against aerodynamic forces that are normally offset by buoyancy in sailboats. Note the rudder of a blimp is center mass. All of your ether control surfaces have this restriction.
## A keel and rudder which resist both air and ether would be arbitrary
The variety of circumstances you could experience when a control surface is acting in two fluids with competing force vectors is infinite. There would be some situations giving you fair sailing, and others making you a slave to whatever the tides bring you.
]
|
[Question]
[
**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
These flightless birds are under strong selective pressure to be able to feed on high up conifer needles, and avoid predation from T-Rex sized predatory flightless birds. The forests the birds are evolving in are generally more open than those of our own Earth (due to being dominated by megafauna), but not as open as ones dominated by sauropods.
Importantly while these birds have many similar adaptions to sauropods, I've heard height is a much more significant limitation than total size, and that sauropods held their heads much lower most of the time than is often depicted. So with only tail feathers and not an actual tail it seems like these birds will be limited in how much their neck can extend horizontally compared to a sauropod.
*Your answer should include some calculations and/or citations about the relevant physiological constraints on tail-less avian biped height. Particularly when it comes to getting enough oxygen to their proportionally tiny brains.*
This is relevant as it seems like how high an animal can pump blood above its heart is actually fairly controversial: <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropod_neck_posture>
[Answer]
**10 metres**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EXdbq.png)
Last I saw *Walking with Dinosaurs* on the BBC the diplodocus were grazers and held their necks horizontal as you say.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kHCoi.jpg)
But the Brachiosaurus was a browser and held its neck vertical.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0Jz2o.jpg)
Likely the diplodocus could not raise its neck this high and the brachiosaurus could not lower its neck.
The upright posture makes the brachiosaurus a 10 metre tall bird. Have the dinosaur people changed their minds in the last 20 years?
]
|
[Question]
[
How much ice would a torus planet be covered in if it rotated horizontally without a tilt such that its inner region never sees sunlight?
It's basically earth but as a torus and a completely 'horizontal' rotation. Dimensions and geography are basically as the pic provides. For the purposes of this question treat the inner side of the torus as sunless while the top-most and bottom-most areas of the torus receive what I'd assume to be similar light levels to our polar regions but if I'm wrong I'll have the answers correct me on that.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bLWAp.jpg)
[Answer]
**That inner surface will get more light than you think**
Light's a funny thing, especially when you bring an atmosphere into play. There's a number of things that come into play, including [atmospheric lensing](https://www.spacecentre.nz/resources/faq/solar-system/earth/flat/atmospheric-lensing.html) and [atmospheric refraction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_refraction). Here on Earth, these effects come into play during sunrise and sunset, when light is visible before the sun is physically above the horizon.
What this means for your torroid planet is that the inner surface isn't as dark as you might think, nor as cold. Certainly colder than the planetary face nearest the sun, but not completely dark anywhere (possibly not even at the inner equatorial regions, but this would depend on the inner and outer radii and the nature of your atmosphere). Keep in mind, you have no tilt, which means there will always be light at the poles... the entire *circumference* of the poles.
**So, the real question is, what are you trying to achieve from the perspective of suspension of disbelief?**
And this is imporant. After all, we have no evidence of the reality of a torroid planet, so the idea of describing the most realistic fantasy planet possible is somewhat near-sighted. But! Combine this with the fact that astronomers are being surprised yearly with new discoveries in the universe that just a few years ago were believed to be impossible and what you're really looking for is a plausible explanation.
* If the inner-R is "small" (whatever that might be) or the atmosphere thin, then I propose it's plausible to assume the inner surface up to the "poles" (the "top" and " bottom" of the planet or the "poles" from the perspective of someone living on the outer equator) would be frozen.
* If the inner-R is "large" (whatever that might be) and the atmosphere reasonably Earth-like, then I believe the inner equatorial region could be quite warm. Especially if there's any volcanism in that area. Not necesarily Sahara Desert warm, but high Alpine warm. In this case only the polar circumfrences would be frozen.
* The thicker the atmosphere, the warmer the inner equatorial region.
Now, a perfectly reasonable argument is that no matter how much atmospheric lensing and refraction, the inner surface can never be any warmer than the polar circumferences. Good point! But hold that thought while I get through the next section.
**Predicting climate is a LOT harder than herding cats**
And @WillK is very right about the wind. Climate is complicated to predict to begin with, but adding that inner equator makes the whole thing exponentially worse. You'd have winds rotating with the spin of the planet (like our Prevailing Westerlies), but you'd also have wind wrapping up and over the poles and a vortex around the inner equatorial region.
Add to that some dog-ugly ocean currents. Oh, the ocean currents....
And the result is, as @WillK suggests, an effect that would moderate the cold.
*Maybe...*
The single biggest problem is that, insofar as we know, habitable torroidal planets *cannot* exist. Gravity would pull them into a sphere. And if you handwave that, then there's a completely unreasonable extension of the [Shell Theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem) that would suggest that anyone standing on the inner equator line won't experience gravity and gravity would only increase to "normal" as you approach one of the polar circumferences... But it also means that every possible means of predicting the climate goes right out the window.
**Conclusion**
And that's the problem with cool worlds that (insofar as we know) don't exist. You're looking for a rational, justifiable answer to a question that's fantastic. I love it! But it means you'll need to accept my half-baked logic as a potential solution — because in the end, there's no scientific way of trivially proving what *should* be true. Only expressing what *could* be true.
So, in the end, I hope you take these observations and use them to design an incredibly fantastic planet! And not worry about how scientifically plausible any of this might actually be.
---
**The muse is driving me to add something to this answer — and I'm not going to get any sleep until her demands are met — and I'd really like to get some sleep...**
I need to underscore why it's important that you simply *choose the conditions you want and move forward.*
**A terrifically simplistic climate model**
Start with a sphere. It's not rotating (certainly not orbiting) and there's a heat source some distance from it that doesn't cause it to burn, just heat up. The sphere has an atmosphere. What does that simplified model do?
The air closest to the heat source heats up, causing a low-pressure zone. It pushes air toward the other side of the sphere opposite the heat source where a high pressure zone develops. A constant "storm" (turbulent wind, no water yet) exists at the terminus where hot and cold air is constantly competing for the same space. Because the air closest the heat source will be hotter than the air near the ground at the same point, you'll have a "rotation" of air from the point along the equator closest the heat source to the terminus in all directions. You'll have something similar on the back side where warmer air rises and cycles away toward the terminus. If you think about it, those cycles (in this incredibly simplistic model, which makes angels weep, by the way), are the basis of the cycles we see here on Earth.
Next, we start the sphere rotating. This rotation does a lot of things (no water, no "landscape" yet, just our perfect spherical ~~horse~~ planet — assume *no tilt*). It causes the "prevailing westerlies" to develop as the spin of the planet causes the air to start moving along with it. That causes the cycles I earlier mentioned to begin to stretch along the latitudinal lines of the planet. Because the sphere is rotating (a turn/day so to speak) the tangential velocity of a point on the equator is quite a bit faster than the tangential velocity of a point near a pole. This causes those stretched cycles to break up along latitudinal lines (now those cycles are looking a lot like what we see on Earth).
So far so good. Our ridiculously simplistic model makes a kind of sense.1 Next, I'm going to introduce three things that are so complex that trying to describe their effects in this post beyond the summary I'm about to provide is, well, basically impossible. But bear with me, it's all important when we get to your torroidial world.
* Add water and think about the *rain cycle.* Wherever water goes, it sucks up heat. Evaporation cools things down. Condensation (you know, "rain," caused by cooling things down) further cools things down. And when the rain falls on the ground, it cools the ground. The rain cycle creates localized high/low pressure zones and, therefore, localized turbulence. But they also create a more *dense atmosphere* by adding moisture. Dense atmosphere is yet another "high pressure" zone. The Rain Cycle gets in the way of all those lovely cycles we earlier discussed and really messes things up. BTW, keep the word "moisture" in mind — it's about to become important.
* Now add *ocean currents.* Never underestimate the effect of a good ocean current on the atmosphere. The air literally gets pushed along from the cold currents to the warm currents. If you're thinking, "dang, now I'm starting to understand where hurricanes and cyclones come from," you're starting to get it.
* Next, add *soil differences.* The effect of desert sand on the atmosphere is quite a bit different from the effect of loam or the hardy rock of many (most) mountains. Worse still are the "soils" (you know, "stuff sitting on the ground") known as "vegetation" and "snow." Soil differences also cause local high/low pressure zones and push the air around.
* Finally, although not particularly relevant to this discussion (but included for completeness) are the geological specifics of your world. Mountains and canyons and valleys... All these things cause local high/low pressure zones *near the ground.*
**Yeah, yeah, yeah... but what about my torroid?**
Here's the problem: Where with a sphere the sun's behavior is to heat the air closest to it and cause that air to "cycle" toward the back side of the planet (using that first simplistic model for convenience), now it's trying to do that *with a honking-communist huge hole in the middle of the planet.* Some air will get to the back-side of the planet, but some will get trapped in the *center* of the planet.
And that's important, because not only is that air carrying that hot/cold (low/high) cycle into that center space, it's also carrying *moisture.* And what's that moisture doing?
* Because the center is cooler than the face of the planet closest to the sun, the moisture is condensing... into rain.
* Because we're dealing with the Shell Theorem, the air in the inner-equatorial region is spinning in a nasty vortex free of gravity. *Kindof...* How much "reality" are you willing to give up? You've already given up a lot of reality to have a torroidial planet. If we let the atmosphere have gravity, then the consequence of the rain, probably freezing, spinning around in that vortex near the inner equator... is a growing ball of ice.
But that ice, starting from the infamous $T=0,$ isn't just sitting around in the center. Remember, *no planetary gravity at the center.2* So as it spins and gives in to random changes in its shape, weight, density, and size (aka *Chaos Theory*), it starts bouncing around in there. As it (or pieces) bounce near the polar circumferences, planetary gravity takes over and the chunks settle to the ground.
**What's the consequence?**
This is the really important part and the reason why you need to decide what the rules of your planet are and run with them rather than worrying about "science." *The chunks eventually close over the central hole both at the north and at the south.*
* Because some chunks are still in that central, near-zero-gravity area, you now have a baby's rattle. The cool part is that this means, upon occasion, *a chunk might break through the northern or southern shell* and scare the beejeebers out of people.
* But the growing *weight* (OK, think "thickness") of the northern and southern shells will also result in ice slowly encroaching on the inner equatorial region.
Result? We now have a spherical planet with an ice-filled "doughnut hole." Volcanism may occasionally cause instability, but that instability has a long way to go to get to the "surface" near the polar circumferences.
Another result is that the rest of your planet is a desert because, eventually, every drop of moisture will find its way to that central hole where it condenses, becomes ice, and fills an inconceivably big hole.
*So... having gone through all this illogical logic... can you see why I'm advocating that you simply choose what your planet's rules will be and move forward?*
---
1 *And if you're about to complain about my ridiculously simplified model, or if you think it doesn't make enough sense... you can [bite my shiny metal....](https://youtu.be/ssr2OndUmjA). I knew that cartoon would come in useful someday.*
2 *OK, "little to no gravity." Remember, "ridiculously simplified model." Please refer to footnote #1.*
[Answer]
**It would be windy, and wind could equilibrate the heat.**
[What would it be like to live on a rapidly rotating planet?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/64851/what-would-it-be-like-to-live-on-a-rapidly-rotating-planet)
A torus planet is a rapidly rotating planet, because otherwise gravity would collapse the planet back to a sphere. Fast rotation flattens the sphere out into a disc, faster rotation thins the disc in the middle and the fastest rotation can produce a torus. [Shape of a habitable neutron star?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/212959/shape-of-a-habitable-neutron-star/213201#213201)
The serious winds from rapid rotation in combination with oceans would produce serious currents. The combination of wind and current would move heat around the planet via convection, with warmed air and water from the sunny side warming up the shady side.
---
Of course the amount of ice on a planet really depends on what temperature it is, shape, wind, water etc notwithstanding. If it is cold, the planet will be all ice. If it is hot the planet will be no ice and maybe no water if it is hot enough. The above was thinking about Earth as regards solar heat delivered, atmosphere etc. Except a donut.
]
|
[Question]
[
I made a nice fantasy map with some really interesting geographic constellations, fitting my story. The climate zones don't fit, however.
I found the tool, [Map to Globe](https://www.maptoglobe.com/#) where I can upload my map to create a globe. Is there a similar tool, where I can change the pole axis and download the map again?
Update: I found another tool, [Worldmapgenerator](https://www.worldmapgenerator.com/de/) that does exactly what I want, but only with Earth. I want to do the same but with my own continents and islands
Thanks for your help.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OdSfh.png)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FkIet.png)
[Answer]
If I understand you correctly, what you want to do is re-project an existing equirectangular map to have the pole(s) in a different location—and your title question (“transfer onto a globe and back”) is how you think this might be done, not something that’s absolutely mandatory. Am I right?
That is, would something that can do the re-projection **without ever showing you a globe** suit you? Because there’s software that can do it for you. Two options are the [Cartopy](https://scitools.org.uk/cartopy/docs/latest/) cartography library for Python, and the [G.Projector](https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/gprojector/) tool from NASA that uses Java.
My evaluation so far: Cartopy gives better results, but is more fiddly to install and use. G.Projector is more straightforward. I’ll go through steps for both.
Here’s a world map I’ll use to demonstrate. It’s not much of a map, but it will do for our purposes.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1DuAR.png)
We’re going to re-project it so that the new poles are on what’s currently the equator—the north pole will lie on that big landmass to the left (0°N 135°W), and the south pole on the smallest landmass in the cluster of three in the centre (0°N 45°E). But the methods shown will be fully adaptable to wherever you want your poles to be.
---
## Installation
Unfortunately neither of these were particularly straightforward for me to install or run. Maybe you’ll have better luck?
### Cartopy
1. Install [Miniconda](https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html).
2. Assuming without loss of generality that you’re on Windows, open the Anaconda Prompt that should now be on your Start Menu.
3. Type in `conda install -c conda-forge cartopy` and hit Enter.
I haven’t tested this method, but it *should* work? (I already have Python on my computer, but not through Anaconda, so I first tried installing Cartopy through pip… ★☆☆☆☆ Do Not Recommend. It’d probably go better on Linux than on Windows, but the Windows machine is what I had at the time!)
### G.Projector
1. Install [Java](https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/).
2. Download [G.Projector](https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/gprojector/download/) and extract it wherever you like.
3. Again assuming you’re on a Windows computer, double-click on `G.Projector.exe` in the folder you just extracted. After a delay, you should get a file chooser window.
(Give it time, and if you’ve got other programs open, Alt+Tab between your windows occasionally. I thought it hadn’t worked, and I ended up fiddling around and finding a way to open it manually, only to find while writing this up that it had opened in the background without a taskbar icon. If it *doesn’t* work, let me know and I’ll share the steps I took to open it.)
---
## Running Cartopy
4. Copy this short script into a text file and save it as `reproject.py` in the same place as your image.
* Change the filenames `notmuchofaworldmap.png` and `stillnotmuchofamap.png` to be your existing image, and a new name for your re-projected image, respectively.
* Also change the numbers for `pole_longitude` and `pole_latitude`, and for `figsize`, to whatever you want.
```
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import cartopy.crs as ccrs
# The image starts in a PlateCarree (equirectangular) projection, taking up
# the entire globe…
img_projection = ccrs.PlateCarree()
img_extent = (-180.0, 180.0, -90.0, 90.0)
# …but we draw the map in a RotatedPole projection. Set the pole location to
# suit yourself.
map_projection = ccrs.RotatedPole(pole_longitude=45.0, pole_latitude=0.0)
# Load the image.
img = plt.imread("notmuchofaworldmap.png")
# Create a new map at a size of 720×360 pixels @ 100dpi (the default for
# matplotlib). I chose these sizes because this is how big I made my sample
# map; change them to suit your image.
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(7.2, 3.6), frameon=False)
fig.tight_layout(pad=0)
ax = plt.axes(projection=map_projection, frame_on=False)
ax.set_global()
ax.imshow(img, origin="upper", transform=img_projection, extent=img_extent)
# Save the result!
plt.savefig("stillnotmuchofamap.png", bbox_inches="tight", pad_inches=0)
```
5. In the Anaconda Prompt that you still have open from before, navigate (with `cd`) to the location of your image and the script.
6. Type `python reproject.py` and hit Enter.
Here’s the result of running this on the sample map.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/G2PHo.png)
It ain’t pretty, though that’s mostly because my original map was so low-quality. There *will* be distortion, but at the very least, it’ll show you how it should look, and you can take steps to tidy up from there!
One thing I haven’t quite gotten right yet is making the result have the same dimensions as the original. A decent chunk of the code up there is just to get it to stop putting borders and padding around everything, which is [apparently](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9295026/matplotlib-plots-removing-axis-legends-and-white-spaces) [not](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40726323/matplotlib-scatter-plot-remove-white-padding) [easy](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8218608/scipy-savefig-without-frames-axes-only-content)! And it still comes out to 22.5% smaller than the original. This *may* be a side effect of the re-projection process, but I don’t see why it should be. A crude solution would be to make the output bigger…
---
## Running G.Projector
4. In the file chooser that opened up previously, find and open your image. Confirm that the default import options (equirectangular, −180° to 180° longitude, −90° to 90° latitude) are correct and click “Okay”.
5. In the Projection dialog that’s open by default, change the projection to “Equirectangular (Oblique)”, and change the “Centered on” position to whatever you choose.
* As the name suggests, “Centered on” sets the centre of the map, not the pole location like we did with Cartopy.
* If, as in my example, you want the (old) north pole to be at the centre, then the latitude will be 90°. The longitude you choose will point up from there, towards the new north pole (so -135° in my example).
6. On the Window menu, open the Graticule dialog and change Stroke to “None”. Likewise, open the Overlay dialog and change it to “<none>”.
7. On the File menu, use “Save map as...” to save the re-projected result, choosing whatever image dimensions you want (probably the same as the original image).
Here’s what I got:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zBnCN.png)
This is even less pretty than the Cartopy version. But it did the job!
[Answer]
I can propose a sort of workaround:
1. Redraw your map as best you can in the Fuller/icosahedral projection. [Map to Globe](https://www.maptoglobe.com/) may be useful for getting somewhat accurate polar views for this step.
2. Rearrange the faces of the icosahedron so the new poles are at the top and bottom (the points of the triangles at the top and bottom are the 90°N and 90°S points on a globe), in one of these configurations:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6g0SY.png)
Remember you can subdivide the 20 triangles above into smaller triangles each and rearrange them to get the precision you need. This would be easiest in a vector program like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer.
3. Save it as a PNG with transparency (for the gaps around the triangles, shown as horizontal lines above).
4. Upload it to [Icosahedral to Equirectangular Converter](https://inexorabletash.github.io/ico2equi/) and select the configuration that matches.
5. Save the result and redraw to the size and level of detail needed.
Admittedly this has a few drawbacks, not least of which is redrawing the map twice. If you're working from a 'finished' map with lots of detail you may be better off waiting for another approach.
[Answer]
If you've already drawn your world map as a single rectangle, either by hand or in some raster program like Photoshop or Gimp, it is pretty much unusable (without significant cleanup) for what you are picturing regardless of what tool you find because of how much square maps distort actual shapes.
The reason world map generator works as well as it does is because it uses an actual 3-d vector rendering of the Earth. Vectors can be losslessly transformed whereas maps made from your own hand drawing or pixel art can not.
Your best bet is to load the map into [www.maptoglobe.com](http://www.maptoglobe.com) and eyeball reconstruct it, maybe even taking screenshots at various angles for references. Otherwise you will end up with funny line sharpness and stretching such that even a mathematically prefect rotation of your original map will look bad.
]
|
[Question]
[
**This question asks for hard science.** All answers to this question should be backed up by equations, empirical evidence, scientific papers, other citations, etc. Answers that do not satisfy this requirement might be removed. See [the tag description](/tags/hard-science/info) for more information.
I'd like to be able to determine the appearance of the night sky from an Earth-like planet, in a solar system with multiple other planets, moons, and other bodies. Here on Earth, we can directly measure the apparent magnitude of a body simply through observation, but that's obviously impossible for fictional planets.
I understand that the luminosity of the primary star, the albedo and radius of the object being observed, and the range of distances between the observer and the object (which will vary, because orbits) are the primary factors in determining apparent magnitude -- it's the precise mathematical relationships between these factors which is eluding me.
For illustrative purposes, here is an excerpt from the setup of my solar system, with each planet's semi-major axis in AU, bond albedo, and radius in Earth radii listed. I'm including one planet closer to the star than our observer, one planet further out-system but relatively close, and one rather distant planet.
Sun's Luminosity: 2.248 (relative to Sol's 1)
* Planet B: Semi-Major Axis: 0.47 AU, Bond Albedo: 0.93, Radius 4.29: Earth radii
* Planet E (observer's location): SMA: 2.178
* Planet F: SMA: 3.87, BA: 0.21, R: 0.89
If it helps/matters: Planet B is an in-system ice giant, a.k.a. "Hot Neptune," Planet E is a slightly larger Earthlike planet with a comparable atmosphere, and Planet F is a magnesium-silicate terrestrial.
I'd like to be able to figure out what the apparent magnitude of Planets B and F when observed from Planet E, and how that result was reached so that I can replicate the process for the other planets and bodies within the system. I will also happily absorb any and all tangents on planetary apparent magnitude in general. Thank you in advance!
[Answer]
I did see this answered on:
<https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-calculate-the-apparent-magnitude-brightness-of-planets-from-within-the-same-solar-system>
So i have copied/pasted the answer below. This is not my answer, i am copying/pasting it as it seems an appropriate answer. All credit goes to Milan Minic.
Calculations of the apparent magnitudes m start with calculations of absolute magnitudes H of celestial objects and of their phase integrals q.
Absolute magnitude H gives us the apparent magnitude of the object when it is observed from the Sun and put at some standard distance from the Sun - that is 1 astronomical unit for our Solar system. For a spherical object of diameter D (in kilometers) and albedo p, H is calculated as
H = $5 \log\_{10} {{1329} \over {D \sqrt{p}}}$
Phase integral q(α) tells us how brightness of an object varies when observed from various angles, α is the angle between the Sun and observer, as seen from the object. Thus 0° means that the object is in the opposition with the Sun (i.e. the observer is exactly between the Sun and the object, like in the case of the full Moon), and 180° means that the object is in the conjunction with the Sun (i.e. the object is exactly between the Sun and the observer, like in the case of the new Moon). If the object is a diffuse reflecting sphere, the phase integral q can be analitically expressed, but for the real celestial objects astronomers have developed empirical formulae for each one of them, to account for the peculiarities of the light reflection from them. For instance, the Moon shows the irregular brightness increase for α = 0° (the so called opposition surge) owing to the forward reflecting properties of the lunar regolith. Or, in the case of Venus,
we can see significant differences from the diffuse reflecting sphere (similar to the Mercury curve, blue line) due to light passing through its atmosphere and peculiar light transmission enhancement at α = 168° because of sulphuric acid droplets.
Now, when we know H, α and q(α), we can calculate the apparent magnitude m as
m= $H + 5 \log\_{10} {{d\_{BS} d\_{BO}} \over {d^2\_{OS}}} − 2.5\log\_{10} q(α)$
where $d\_{BS}$, $d\_{BO}$, $d\_{OS}$ and α are connected by the cosine theorem:
$d^2\_{OS} = d^2\_{BS} + d^2\_{BO} − 2d\_{BS} d\_{BO} \cos(α)$
[Answer]
Note: The log function in this answer always refers to the logarithm of 10.
There are several steps we need to follow to find the minimum and maximum apparent magnitude of a celestial body as seen from another planet, all of which are shown here.
The following formula gives the apparent magnitude of a celestial body:
$m=M-5\cdot\log(d)+5$
```
m = apparent magnitude
M = absolute magnitude
d = distance between the observer and the object in parsecs
```
We can use the following formula to find absolute magnitude:
$M=m-2.5\cdot\log(L)$
```
m = apparent magnitude of the Sun as seen from Earth (approximately -26.74)
L = luminosity of the star relative to the Sun
```
Now, we can calculate the absolute magnitude of your star:
$M=-26.74-2.5\cdot\log(2.248)\approx-27.98$
We must now convert the distance of the semi-major axis from AU to parsecs using the factor of 1 parsec ≈ 206,265 AU. We also need to determine the minimum and maximum distances between the planets to determine the minimum and maximum apparent magnitudes.
For Planet B and Planet E:
* Minimum distance: |2.178 - 0.47| AU = 1.708 AU
* Maximum distance: 2.178 + 0.47 AU = 2.648 AU
For Planet F and Planet E:
* Minimum distance: |3.87 - 2.178| AU = 1.692 AU
* Maximum distance: 3.87 + 2.178 AU = 6.048 AU
We can now convert these distances to parsecs.
For Planet B and Planet E:
* Minimum distance: 1.708 AU / 206,265 ≈ 8.28 x 10^(-6) parsecs
* Maximum distance: 2.648 AU / 206,265 ≈ 1.28 x 10^(-5) parsecs
For Planet F and Planet E:
* Minimum distance: 1.692 AU / 206,265 ≈ 8.20 x 10^(-6) parsecs
* Maximum distance: 6.048 AU / 206,265 ≈ 2.93 x 10^(-5) parsecs
Now, we need to find the apparent magnitude of the planets.
We first need to find their absolute magnitudes with this formula:
$m=M+2.58\cdot\log\frac{r^{2}\*a}{d^{2}}$
```
m = mass of the planet
M = mass of the star
r = radius of the planet in Earth radii
a = bond albedo
d = distance between the planet and the star in AU
```
For Planet B:
$m=-27.98+2.58\cdot\log\frac{4.29^{2}\cdot0.93}{0.47^{2}}\approx-20.61$
For Planet F:
$m=-27.98+2.58\cdot\log\frac{0.89^{2}\*0.21}{3.87^{2}}\approx-23.34$
We can now find the apparent magnitude of the planets when seen from Planet E.
Minimum apparent magnitude of Planet B:
$-20.61-5\cdot\log(8.28\cdot10^{-6})+5\approx-6.25$
Maximum apparent magnitude of Planet B:
$-20.61-5\cdot\log(1.28\cdot10^{-5})+5\approx-5.76$
Minimum apparent magnitude of Planet F:
$-23.34-5\cdot\log(8.20\cdot10^{-6})+5\approx-8.98$
Maximum apparent magnitude of Planet F:
$-23.34-5\cdot\log(2.93\cdot10^{-5})+5\approx-7.66$
It is also important to determine the appearance of the planets when seen from Planet E. Planet B, as an ice giant, would likely appear blue or blue-green as a result of methane in its atmosphere; methane absorbs red light and reflects blue and green light. Planet F, as a magnesium-silicate terrestrial, would likely appear gray or brownish-gray because of magnesium silicates. The exact color of the planets, when seen from Planet E, would depend on the exact composition of the planet's surface and its atmosphere.
]
|
[Question]
[
The limpet teeth's microscopic structure is analogous to man-made [short-fiber composites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_materials#Fiber). Its strength depends on the direction of the force, relative to the orientation of the fibers.
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3350734/>
For worldbuilders, this thing is a gift from Glarnak ([our awesome god](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdo4Eyw4DqM)). Basically, an organic substitute for carbon fiber. The only real problem is the density, as its mostly made of the mineral, goethite. Graphene is reactive but reasonably stable enough for a living creature to use. So, I wanted to replace the goethite fibers with carbon nanotubes of the same length or something similarly lightweight.
**Can I replace goethite whith something else in limpet teeth to decrease its density without decreasing its strength?**
[Answer]
The key feature of the limpet teeth is the combination of mineral element and a protein element. I believe that for a "clever" designer, it won't be hard to experiment a little bit with other "mineral-like" solutions.
For example you could sythesize a protein, that would glue together multiple carbon nano tubes, which would lead to similar strength levels. Bear in mind, that proteins offer a really large domain of structure options.
If I remember correctly, the limpet teeth were the strongest in a pull-like manner. In that case, you could look up [Carbyne](https://medienportal.univie.ac.at/presse/aktuelle-pressemeldungen/detailansicht/artikel/unraveling-truly-one-dimensional-carbon-solids/) as the strongest carbon structure recently found. Since it is a 1-dimensional structure, requiring carbon nanotubes to be stabilized, it might not perform that well in a push-like situations (maybe with some more clever protein gluing it would)
The thing is, that Iron is a relatively abundant element, thus it makes sense that it was the first "choice" for Nature to try it (and it performed very well). If you have any other minerals abundant in your world, you should try to build around them first (if you are not an evolution-dismissing type of person).
]
|
[Question]
[
How likely would a habitable world be that orbits a gas giant that itself is orbiting a larger gas giant? Assuming one exists, what are the likely conditions?
[Answer]
It's hard to say without any actual examples of moon of moons in our own solar system to use as models, but I'd expect it to be pretty rare. The first factor to consider is that your habitable world would be far more inclined to orbit the bigger gas giant meaning that smaller one would likely need to maintain a wider orbit than any moon in our solar system to keep its big brother from stealing its moon. The farthest moon from Jupiter has about a 14,600,000 miles orbital radius and even it does not have a moon of its own. If you need a 15x super jupiter as is implied in the comments, then the minimum orbit could be significantly greater than this. Small fast orbits won't help you as much as some have theorized, because the stronger pull of a larger planet will still rip the small moon away regardless of speeds if the big gas giant is too close to the smaller one.
So, the biggest problem here is that you want a habitable world. Even with an orbit as small as Callirrhoe you'd be looking at massive seasonal changes as the world gets closer to and farther from the star by a factor of ~0.3au per year. If you tried putting that gas giant system into the goldilocks zone, winter and summer would be like going from Venus's orbit to Earth's Orbit every time the small gas giant orbits the bigger one. So, even if life could evolve here, human life probably could not survive.
for the best chance for this to be possible, main sequence stars are pretty much out. Yellow suns are too small for that kind of variance to not be devastating and blue suns tend to go boom way to fast for life to have much time to evolve. A red giant might work, but it is my understanding that red giants have periodic novas that would likely kill off the planet every so often.
]
|
[Question]
[
So, a neat thing, depending on how you look at it, about greenhouse gases is that while it's causing a raise in temperature near the surface it actually makes the upper parts of the atmosphere decrease in temperature. Venus is a good example of this.
Now on another note, atmospheric escape depends significantly on the planet/moon's escape velocity and the atmospheric temperature. The lower the temperature then the lower escape velocity a planet can have and still maintain their atmospheres for a significant amount of time. Titan is a good example of this.
What I'm curious about is if a smaller planet, like perhaps our moon, had a larger amount of greenhouse gases than here on Earth which in turn would cause a significantly lower temperature in the upper atmosphere which then would that be enough to slow down gases that are attempting to escape to space, so that the atmosphere would last at least for millions of years. (As of now, the best calculations I have seen so far puts an Earthlike atmosphere on the moon lasting for roughly 700,000 years).
It is my thoughts that the upper atmosphere would work similar to the cold trap we have on Earth, only instead of freezing the gases it instead slows them down enough for the Moon to pull them back in.
Any opinions on this or calculations for this?
P.s. A cold trap is an area in our atmosphere that gets so cold that water freezes and falls back down. It's the primary reason our water hasn't floated off into space.
[Answer]
Great question!
I don't believe that a "cold trap" would form in the topmost layers and inhibit escape via Jeans escape or pickup by a stellar wind. In order for a gas atom or molecule to escape the planet, three things must happen:
1. The particle must be moving faster than the escape speed of the
planet.
2. The particle must be moving in the upward direction.
3. The particle must not collide with another gas atom (or anything
else) on its outward trip. (It must have a large "mean free path.")
Upper atmospheres are highly rarefied, so the odds of a collision between an outwardly-bound atom and another atom in that region are very small. A collision, if it happened, would transfer some of the kinetic energy from the escaping particle to the other, and may indeed lose enough energy (or change direction enough) such that it no longer escapes. However, this collision is extremely unlikely!
]
|
[Question]
[
Is there a necessary relation between orbital period and the time of precession? In the case of Earth, the orbital period is one year, while a complete precession cycle takes thousands of years. Is a planet that completes a precession cycle within one of its "years" possible? Besides one of the poles having perpetual night and the other perpetual day, what else would this entail?
[Answer]
The planet has some spin, with a rate that can be freely chosen. Given some outside **torque**, the spin axis will precess. The details of the angular momentum, the rotational inertia, and the mass distribution, along with the details of the force doing the torquing, will determine the speed of the precession.
Now what does any of that have to do with the orbital period? Well, the sun is one source of torque, and if that’s what you are counting on, you won’t be able to get the rates to match.
Say for example the precession period comes out to 15000 years. So, put the planet far enough away so the orbital period is *also* 15000 years.
You see why the sun won’t give much torque, wince it is so far away it will apply very little force. I suggest getting a sattelite of the planet to cause the torque since it will be a steady influence that always goes with the planet.
[Answer]
For an Earthlike world in an Earthlike orbit you'd need about 1.4\*10^27Nm of torque annually to get the axis of rotation to [precess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession) 360 degrees per year which is what you're asking for, that's going to produce 1.4\*10^27j of waste heat. To put that in perspective one megaton is 4.18\*10^15j so you get the equivalent of 291,666,666,666 million tons of TNT worth of waste heat annually (it's almost exactly 0.1% of the sun's total constant output). Earth weighs 5.97\*10^24kg so that's 234.5j per kilogram per annum for the entire planet from core to exosphere, that will heat the whole planet by roughly 0.25K a year every year, you'll melt the whole planet inside of 6800 years and evaporate it en masse after only 11800 years. That assumes you start from a completely solid lump of pure silica which the Earth is not, it will take far less time to vapourise an Earthlike world. You can of course extend the orbit and thus slow down the precession reducing the energy inputs needed.
[Answer]
yes, but it still would be slow.
both the orbital period and the precession cycle.
precession cycle have, and will almost always be slow. A fast precession cycle would cause too much instability.
[Answer]
Okay...I'm going to take a stab at this question...but I offer this caveat: the last time I studied astronomy was the 8th grade.
I think you could probably achieve this by having a rotating axis of exactly 90 degress. If I understand these mechanics correctly, this would essentially give a precession which would parallel the planet's orbit, as the north and south poles would constantly align with the same point in space. The planet would still rotate, so you would still have day and night, but the time between the two would be split equally all year round. It might also affect the intensity of the seasons, as well as the wind currents, and ocean tides, so those are things to consider if you go this route.
Alternatively, you could try playing around with the size of the orbital path of the planet you are creating relative to the tilt of the axis.
Hope this helps.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
This question does not appear to be about **worldbuilding**, within the scope defined in the [help center](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help).
Closed 1 year ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/224653/edit)
So, I'm writing a story. Most of the main story is set near Planet 9, which has finally been found somewhere far out in the outer solar system.
So first, I’ve been working on determining the probable characteristics of Planet 9.
In line with predictions, it’s an ice giant (a gas-rich sub-Neptune composed of an icy-rocky core with a H-He rich envelope) which is approx 7 earth masses.
The most recent article I can find on the topic from Brown and Batygin seems to predict that Planet 9’s perihelion is likely 340(+80/−70) AU, that its aphelion is likely 560(+260/-140) AU, and that the semi-major axis is 460(+160/-100) AU. Unless I am sorely misunderstanding this paper (and I could be), the numbers provided seem to be a range of numbers which they think Planet 9 could fall into.
<https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ac32dd/pdf>
I’ll assume that the perihelion is 340 AU and that the aphelion is a bit further out - 750 AU.
The semi-major axis is half of the major axis, which is the sum of the perihelion and aphelion.
So semi-major axis = (perihelion+aphelion)/2.
The orbital eccentricity is the ratio between the difference and the sum of the perihelion and the aphelion.
So eccentricity = (aphelion - perihelion)/(aphelion + perihelion).
So, after crunching the numbers based on these initial assumptions: Its perihelion is 340 AU, its aphelion is 750 AU, its semi-major axis is 545 AU, and its orbital eccentricity is 0.38.
Now, in order to estimate the orbital period, I’ve applied Kepler’s third law of planetary motion for a quick back-of-the-box calculation. If we measure the period (T) in years and the semi-major axis (a) in AU we can use a^3 = T^2.
545 cubed is 161,878,625. The square root of that gives us an orbital period of approximately 12,723 years.
I have a few concerns. I'd like to know if my numbers are solid here, and if they are consistent with Planet 9's hypothesised characteristics given what we know.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/164893/edit).
Closed 4 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/164893/edit)
As a fan of some of the unique creatures of Minecraft I was wondering about the [Endermen](https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Enderman), black bipedal humanoids which exist within the normal world in smaller numbers and seem to come from another dimension, called "The End".
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZNHvG.png)
Their main traits are:
* are humanoids, possibly having opposing digits
* possess extremely long arms, about to their shins, not used for locomotion despite appearance
* Are around 3 meters tall
* walk on 2 legs
* have extremely large mandibles disproportional to their heads. Mandibles seem almost inexistent when the mouth is closed (possibly unhinged when open)
* Are black in coloration
* Have glowing purple eyes
* when mandible are open, you can seemingly see through the back of their head
* can be harmed by water, as if they are poisoned by it
* can teleport or move at speeds greater than the human eye can perceive for short bursts (not a necessity, but it would be nice if you could describe how).
\*have an extreme aggression response when confronted via extended eye contact
My main question is: is a creature like the Enderman possible? What evolutionary pressures could lead to their traits and behaviors?
A list of all of the Anatomically Correct questions can be found here
[Anatomically Correct Series](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798)
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/20749/edit).
Closed 8 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/20749/edit)
Before Mohammed founded the Islam religion, the weak and religiously divided Arabian tribes fought each other on the Arabian Peninsula in the shadow of the powerful Byzantine Empire. Without Islam becoming the common religion of the region, this would have been going on and on until they were assimilated by the Byzantine Empire. So the Osman Empire would have never existed and Byzantine Empire would have remained a strong superpower.
Could this result in a more peaceful future? Or the opposite, with wars between the Catholic and Orthodox empires, leading to a conflict similar to the Christian-Islamic one? What might be the result of this alternative history?
*Note: I asked this question on the History stack, but was advised to ask it here since alt history is off-topic there.*
[Answer]
Every evolving empire finds and uses some religion of one or another kind (communism including). It is a disaster for religion, as the need to serve official daily goals, this so known "[Gott mit uns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gott_mit_uns)", often undermines the crucial values for which the prophets were ready to die, and many did. Islam has been in this role but also Christianity, also even Atheism.
It would have been great success for Islam not to serve in this role. As for Empire, seems not a problem. There is no lack of religions in the world and probably any can be adapted.
]
|
[Question]
[
Say, people can't inherit property or money from their families. Once a person dies and assuming all his dependents are above 18 years old, all his assets go to the government, get re-distributed or monetized, and used for country development.
Does this idea have any loopholes or does it create issues in the economy?
Adding my comments here as part of the question as comments get moved into chat -
* This is to bring change in people's mindsets so that they don't stack up
money for 10 generations and teach their kids values and knowledge
instead of making them lazy and attitude with pre-earned money
* Technically your kids need to earn it..but of course, if ur kids fall
below poverty basic needs would be taken care of by the
government as they would have enough money from others'
re-distribution wealth.
[Answer]
# Trivial Loophole
>
> Say, People can't inherit property or money to their family. Once a person dies and all his dependents are above 18 years all his assets go to the government which gets re-distributed or monetized and used for country development.
>
>
>
A parent who wants their child to "inherit" starts giving lavish cash or property gifts to the child once the parent reaches their senior years. As much as their tax system allows; possibly more for off-book *objets d'art* and similar things.
By the time the parent dies, they are (on paper) penniless and being supported by their child, who has received their parent's entire fortune in gifts over a decade or more.
This law, as proposed, is *far* too simple to do anything to negate corruption. Money could be held in trust for the child. The money could go into a corporation whose management changes hands from parent to child, and then exorbitant dividends/salary turn the corporate assets into assets of the management and sole employee.
I will go further: this law, as proposed, is *mostly* loophole.
[Answer]
**This is massively easy to corrupt.**
There are several major assumptions in this setup, but the primary issue is assuming that the government isn't corrupt. How do you define "redistributed"? or "monetized"? or "country development"?
I could easily take all my daughter's cookies, give her one, and keep the rest as "redistribution". Maybe I'll split them with the wife so she has nobody else to turn to. Redistribution done.
Monetizing could be anything from selling to the highest bidder to converting into a government owned business. The first just makes it incentive for murder; if you want to buy someone's company, but they won't sell, just kill them and wait for the government to give it to you. The second runs the risk of steadily turning the government into a business, which by definition is designed to consolidate power and money.
"Country development" is basically just a different way of saying investing money in *stuff*. What is considered a good investment and who gets to decide what is a good investment are the basis for every economic debate in history.
That is just the assumptions on government too.
You stipulated that all a persons dependents must be over 18 for the assets to be seized. Then men will at least keep having kids until they die, not even necessarily with a spouse. Anyone could just as likely "adopt" a newborn at the ripe old age of 72, thus ceding the wealth to the child's guardian.
This could also increase the prevalence of large age gaps in marriages, if the spouse still maintains assets until their own death. I could build my millions and then when I die my wife could find a new, much younger spouse. After her passing, they could then continue the same process. Even if the wealth is still tied to dependents under 18, it just requires that each pairing have a child.
Honestly, these are just a few ideas scratching the surface of how this wouldn't even come close to working.
[Answer]
## It increases corruption
The only outcome that method has, is that people will sign **all** their possessions over to any next of kin while they are still alive so that they can *inherit* the goods. If such a contract is missing, people are, by the fear of loss of everything, incentivized to fake such a document, which is corruption.
On the counterpoint, it also incentivizes officials to make sure such contracts are found invalid or destroy evidence of them, even if they would be valid. On the other hand, the power to void such documents also incentivizes officials to take a bribe *not* to do so, or to look the other way on shoddily faked documents.
As a result, the law will only lead to massive **institutionalized corruption**.
[Answer]
It will affect corruption (but not by much) by making some aspects of it **unnecessary**. Why cheat when you could simply gift your assets to your children while you are still alive, and preserve your family's generational wealth this way?
You could even be smart and *sell* your assets to your own children, who would then *lease* these same assets back to you. This way you would be able to use all your assets as long as you stay alive, and they will no longer be *yours* and therefore not at risk of being taken over by the government. Of course your children would need to pay you for buying your assets and you would need to pay your children for leasing them back, but can't we just agree that their monthly payment is equal to your monthly payment? ;)
[Answer]
It will increase corruption because the thing you suggest is, itself, corruption.
You are proposing a scheme that presupposes that the government owns the citizens and all of their property and assets. Every time such schemes have been set up, the result has been massive horror.
[The Black Book of Communism](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0674076087) details, with documentation, the horrors involved with communism. The reason these horrors are necessarily attached to all forms of collectivism is that individual rights are explicitly annulled. When people are explicitly labeled as indistinguishable tribal material, the result is they are treated as herd beasts.
[Answer]
**Corruption? Or inequality?**
What I think of when I hear "corruption" is someone *not* doing their duty for some consideration, or doing their duty only for non-lawful consideration. Say a cop not writing a traffic ticket for money, or a municipal clerk processing a building permit only after receiving a lavish dinner, or a supervisor promoting a worker because of a sexual relation.
Many corrupt people are corrupt mostly for their **own** benefit, and only indirectly for the benefit of their family. Tinkering with inheritance taxes does little to reduce this. But there could be cascading effects:
* Removing large, inherited fortunes *may* bring a more equal distribution of wealth, and this *may* limit the ability to give very large bribes, e.g. for government contracts. But then somebody who benefits from getting that contract would control over-average amounts of money.
* Removing the multi-generational accumulation of wealth might hinder *overall* economic development. That could then increase the incentive of underpaid public servants to have their palms greased.
[Answer]
## How to work out the loopholes
Lot of good points so far about loopholes, but let's assume your society has figured out how to work out the loopholes. The best way to eliminate the loop holes is to seize all of the family's wealth, not just the person who died. The problem of course is then that if you are a business owner and your father is a janitor, then when he dies, the government can take not just the \$100 he has left in his checking account, but they could also seize your entire multi-million dollar business... this is very bad for the economy, and will likely lead you down a fast path to 3rd world status for your nation and/or into an extreme form of socialism.
So, in order to mitigate the harmful effects, you'd need to have the Bureau of Social Equity send an accountant out to assess how much of a successor's wealth and assets should be seized from children based on how successful the parent was, and how much they did in thier life to pass on wealth and opportunities to thier children. So, if a parent was wealthy, then the children stand to lose a lot more when they die than if the parents were poor.
## But does it encourage corruption?
Everything about this system encourages horrible corruption at every level of government.
Let's start with the BSE accountants. If your billionaire father dies, and an accountant comes up with unilateral control over how much of his wealth you get to keep, you have a perfect recipe for both bribery and extortion. The children could bribe the accountant into ignoring certain assets, or claiming that certain assets were "self-earned". Likewise, the accountant could extort money from the children by threatening to seize self-earned assets if they don't pay up.
Then there is control over the BSE itself. If you have wealth or influence, then inserting cronies in the BSE is the best way to make sure that you and your allies retain thier generational wealth while your political opponents lose as much as possible. Running for office? Have your nephew in the BSE reopen your opponent's inheritance file and "prove" that none of his assets are self-earned. Good luck staying in the race once you're suddenly homeless and unemployed.
At the higher levels of government, it would be in thier best interest to kill off any citizens who acquire too much wealth and power. We saw similar issues in the medieval period. If a person was guilty of conspiracy, treason, heresy, or witchcraft, it was common and lawful for thier lord to execute them and seize thier assets and thier family's assets preventing their family line from inheriting the wealth. However, this lead to huge problems whenever a subject became more wealthy or powerful than his lord, or when a master simply got greedy. Kings would often trump up false allegations against powerful lords and organizations and execute them specifically to seize thier assists. For a more modern context: Remember the time Mark Zuckerberg got called before Congress for making a social media platform that can be used by foreign powers to influence elections? If voters know that a guilty verdict would kill off MZ and redistribute Facebook's wealth or could be used to cut taxes next year, then NOT finding him guilty and putting him to death would be political suicide.
[Answer]
Inheritance taxes tend to be a very inefficient tax because people have decades to find loopholes and so people spend a lot of money on lawyers to evade them, and the inheritance taxes don't collect a lot.
The normal ways to evade them involve corruption, including corrupt charities and businesses, and it's hard to stop those because then your society doesn't have businesses or charities. Family corporations are notoriously corrupt, and they're much easier to set up for the mega rich.
Corruption also mostly doesn't need inheritance to function. It works where government and business interests are aligned due to friendship networks and they give each other favours and perks that avoid or ignore the rules.
[Answer]
## The idea is corruption itself.
Eliminating property inheritance in families negates two important sacrosanct rights:
1. Property rights (nothing about dying says that a person's will or family is no longer important)
2. The right and responsibility of parents to provide for their children and for each other, even if they are "of age".
Putting the funds into a government moneypot is a surefire way to *promote* corruption by abetting unearned and unaccountable funds for bureaucratic pet projects, all while robbing people blind of their ability to provide for themselves and their families.
You would also be incentivizing children below 18 to commit patricide so that they don't "miss out" on their inheritance.
You're also talking about a HUGE burden on the spouse. Being provided for for 50 years and then suddenly being destitute at the age of 84 or at any age is no way to promote the greater good.
[Answer]
## Frame Challenge: Your Law Won’t Reduce Corruption
You’re assuming that by distributing people’s wealth to the government, this will reduce corruption, but I would argue that such a system will do exactly the opposite. Wealthy people can be corrupt, but often don’t have real power, or their power is very limited. Government bureaucrats, however, do have power, and since government bureaucrats are involved in making the rules, they will use this wealth influx to increase their power, by buying favors, etc. This is human nature unchecked. Now maybe your system tries to put in place checks and balances against this, but checks and balances aren’t always perfect and often have loopholes (look at existing world governments as an example). Passing down an inheritance to the next generation doesn’t necessitate corruption, but I’d argue that taking someone’s hard earned resources and giving it to the government *is* corrupt.
Another issue you would run into with such a system is economic. If everything someone earns can’t be passed down to their children and grandchildren, this will disincentivize people from trying to earn for their future, they won’t have much incentive to make wise long-term investments, and these things will directly affect the economy of your society.
[Answer]
### Yes, it could reduce corruption
Though not in the way you think it will.
This idea sounds like a very good way to enact a change of government or population control.
The vast majority of farmers in the developed world (and the world in general) are nth generation farmers. Their parents were farmers, their grandparents were farmers, their great-grandparents were farmers...
Your idea will is to take all of that hard sweat, tear, and blood earned work from generation after generation of farmers and allocate it to someone else instead of the farmers own flesh and blood?
People have been killed over water rights. You think that farmers won't cry bloody murder and start stringing up those idiotic money grubbing politicians on every available tree?
What will happen is:
A) the farmers win and a new government is now in charge without this "genius" law. This new government will be less corrupt because it is not willing to steal money from its people because they died.
B) the farmers lose, in which case food becomes a scarce commodity and people starve to death. See what happened in Zimbabwe--once a food exporter, now a food importer--after they got rid of all of the white farmers in the name of "racial reparation". Last I checked they were begging the white farmers they had expelled from their country to come back. It is not easy to replace the generational know how/ work ethic of farmers. The starvation will lead to political instability and eventually a regime change. The regime might not be significantly less corrupt. But it will be less corrupt in that it will know not to pass laws to steal money from it's citizens because when they die.
TLDR: This could reduce corruption because it will lead to a new government which might be less corrupt then the current government (its corruption evidenced by the fact that it was passed this law). That being said it is a bad idea because our food supply comes from generational wealth/knowledge. And it will take multiple generations to recover from the damage caused by such a law.
[Answer]
Here is my 2¢ from the point of view of evolutionary biology.
The desire to support the offspring is present not only in humans but also in many other animals. This drive is fundamental and has evolved as a means to ensure the survival of own genes. Trying to mess with this will not go unpunished.
Passing on the inheritance is a form of supporting the offspring and increasing their chances of survival and reproduction. A society which blocks this mechanism will inevitably experience a number of effects:
1. The members of the society will be less motivated to achieve anything in their life. Many people strive to be someone or something so that they could pass the benefits of those achievements to their children. If there is no way to pass those benefits - there is less incentive to working hard. This results in a loss of productivity.
2. People will be passing their wealth and influence to their children long before they die. This will starve the most productive the adults of the resources they could have amplified while they are still alive. This also results in a loss of productivity.
3. Children will likely get access to resources with no strings attached, long before they are mature and responsible people. Also, the trivial trick "*act like an adult and hope that your parent will leave you a bigger share of inheritance*" won't work anymore. Again, this leads to less motivation and productivity.
4. Finally, far from *reducing* the corruption, the measure will *increase* it as some adults would go above and beyond to ensure that their children do inherit their wealth. So official inheritance is illegal? Well, then there will be a new kind of crime specialising on illegal inheritance mechanisms. Shooting from the hip, it may look like this: an individual signs a contract which makes him/her indebted to an intermediary on condition of his/her death. Similarly, the children are receiving bonds which are paid out by the same intermediary only when the parent dies. This does not have to be strictly speaking official and recognised by law in order to function.
[Answer]
Yes, this idea has several big loopholes.
1. People will transfer all their assets to their children as soon as they reach legal age. Something close to that, transferring assets to one's offspring while still alive, is already happening to avoid inheritance-related taxes and stamp duties.
2. People will keep producing offspring as long as necessary to have at least one underage child when they die. This would undermine women's rights as rich men would divorce their old wives when they could not give more children and marry young and fertile girls.
3. There will be opportunities to hide assets so that government will not find them, and everyone with enough motivation will find those. Ever heard of Panama Papers illuminating offshores where rich people and corrupt government officials hide their wealth? Any limitation to economic freedom widens the black market and shadow economy and thus breeds corruption.
The only way to reduce corruption is to strengthen incentives to choose decisions benefiting the common good, reduce incentives to act for the benefit of personal good at the expense of the common good, and assure people their rights would be protected. Eliminating inheritance is neither, as people have the right to own property and manage it as they see fit, including transferring it to their offspring. Obtaining property involves quite a lot of work, and managing it also involves quite a lot of work and expenditure. Infringement on the right of inheritance will upset people and be perceived as unjust, and rightly so.
[Answer]
I think that was the system during at last part of the existence of the Ottoman state. "Nobody" (depending on how "nobody" was defined) could leave their property to their children and it reverted to the state.
In the early Ottoman period administration was supposedly very fair and honest, and in the latter Ottoman period administration was supposedly very corrupt.
And so naturally I wonder how long the practice of the state inheriting "every" person's wealth and property lasted, and whether it was during the allegedly uncorrupt or the allegedly corrupt phases of Ottoman rule, or maybe both.
Perhaps experts of Ottoman history could say how well that system worked in reducing corruption.
Islamic inheritance law required splitting the deceased's assets among the broad extended family. This affected inter-generational wealth accumulation and is one of the factors hypothesized to have disadvantaged economic development in Islamic communities. Though other researchers have found this argument to be less compelling. See: <https://sites.duke.edu/timurkuran/files/2016/10/kuran-islamic-commercial-crisis.original.pdf> and <https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/15/2/255/489425?login=false>
[Answer]
If it isn't bypassed then it creates enormous hardship in cases of early death.
Imagine a breadwinner parent dies to accident and there's no life insurance.
Anything that fixes this problem becomes a mechanism for inheritance.
[Answer]
The greatest corruption of all is the inevitable death and decay of our bodies. The government wants to overcome this corruption. In order to build up the country, the government collects the fittest almost-but-not-quite-yet legal adults and gently kills them. They are not yet adults, so they do not have any dependents. The government redistributes their healthy body parts amongst the decrepit leaders. Now the leaders are de-decrepit and can relive their 20s while further developing the country and reducing corruption.
[Answer]
To achieve your purpose, you need to go further.
## Eliminate money.
Permanently storable, freely transferable wealth makes inheritance or lack thereof moot. You can simply give the money to whomever you want.
To protect against inheritance circumvention, you need to make the legal tender inherently time-limited. Weekly credits, not permanent eurobucks.
## Eliminate assets.
Remove the concept of assets from your legal system. Make it so that a person is unable to own an object of value, only to rent it.
This will work easily for real estate and vehicles. It won't work for works of art or small personal property. Still, it will make it much harder to exchange these items for others.
## Introduce social ratings.
To make sure that people who get whatever replaces money have earned it, you have to keep track of their activities. Are they captaining a Starfleet vessel, or singing bad karaoke in dive bars?
Evaluate, assess, and sell first class tickets only to those truly useful to the society.
*Eternal glory to the Communist Party of the Universe, Comrade!*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8HM2J.jpg)
```
</sarcasm>
```
[Answer]
If you can have a system where money is tracked like bitcoin then people could own billions but can't put billions onto their children... you could have an inheritance tax which dissuades people from inheriting dozens of millions.
People will try and hide their wealth in diamonds and gold and all that sort of thing underground and everywhere.
Billionaire children would be found for fraud if they were hiding billions from the parents... And that would prevent a 99% of wealth in the 1% of people type wealth distribution.
It would be very difficult to enforce, but it would redress mechanized inequality without helping corruption a lot.
]
|
[Question]
[
Each soldier would be an "elite" troop, their non-dominant hand removed and replaced with a blade as a test of loyalty to their ruler and country.
As the sword is a sign of loyalty they are hard to remove and removing them beyond maintenance is a sign of shame.
The blade armed soldiers can be supported by normal troops.
How well would they do in battle?
What battle situations would they be most effective in?
Assume this setting is medieval.
[Answer]
[This answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/20045/28) says that (with the wrist intact) they'd do no better. Actually, not only would they do no better but they'd do *worse*, for two reasons: reduced swordsmanship, and inability to do other useful things with their non-dominant hand, like use a shield.
Effective use of a sword does not just rely on swinging the arm. The wrist is critical for first-order refinement (aiming, feints, off-side strikes, and so on), and the fingers and thumb are useful for second-order refinement. The latter depends some on the type of gauntlets being worn, but even "mitten-style" ones that don't allow good use of the fingers still afford the thumb movement independent of the fingers. This matters.
To see this, try holding something the size and weight of a sword (a wooden dowel will do). Grip it tightly in your fist and swing; observe how it moves. Now grip it *loosely* and swing; observe what the "sword" is trying to do. Now adjust your grip *as* you swing and observe that. (I'm not describing good technique here; the point of this is to show that the option space is larger if you can use your fingers.)
Further, you describe this as being done to the non-dominant hand, presumably because you want the dominant hand to remain available for other things. So, either your elite troops are fighting with two swords or they're using their weapon in the *lesser* hand. If they've already been trained to use a sword in the dominant hand, they'll have to relearn some of what they know. It's not just about the hand; when you switch to fighting with the "off" hand you have to adjust your stance, your power, your targeting, and your defense. (And you'll still never be as good with that hand, unless you're truly ambidextrous.) Your "elite" troops will be less-effective swordsmen than those same troops using swords in their dominant hands. If the plan is for them to use weapons in one hand they'll be less skilled; if the plan is for them to use weapons in *both* hands (two-sword fighting) then you've taken away the shield.
And that brings me to the second point: in battle formations (where battles are fought in open fields, as was often done in the middle ages), where troops fight as a unit, the [shield wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_wall) is very important. It presents better defense when being attacked from the front, and in some configurations it protects from archery fire. Your elite troops will not be able to participate in the shield wall -- or, if they do, their main contribution will be holding shields, as we've already discussed their reduced offensive abilities.
There's more to battles than units formed up in shield walls, true -- your elite troops might be used as two-weapon harriers, who operate independently and try to disrupt enemy lines. Their mortality rate will be high (it's easier to pick off one guy acting alone than someone who can't easily be flanked or attacked from behind), but hey, they're supposed to be super-loyal, right? But they'll also be at a distinct disadvantage if they have to, say, crawl through underbrush, climb trees to drop on enemies from above, or do anything else where having both hands would help them get into position.
Also, as pointed out in [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/20053/28) and in comments, the consequences of a broken or stuck weapon are much, much more severe in this scenario, as are the consequences of injury to the dominant hand.
And on top of all that, as others [have](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/20053/28) [noted](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/20046/28), you're impeding their ability to do the tasks of daily living (like getting dressed) and ruining them for non-military tasks completely -- maybe ok if you're planning for them all to die in battle, but not very versatile.
[Answer]
Those so-called elite troops would need normals to pitch a tent, climb a wall, drink from a canteen, or tie their shoelaces. Something like that might work for a gladiator, but not for troops in the field.
[Answer]
BAD idea.
First, without antibiotics, the operation to create such a soldier would most likely kill half of your force (if you are lucky).
Second, your soldiers would have an extra knife/short sword but would be unable of using heavy/long two handed weapons (like combat hammers, polearms, bows).
Third, as @o.m. points, they would be unable to perform most of the operations of the camp.
Fourth, even the slightest injury to their unmodified hand makes them almost unable to attend even themselves ("soldier dies wiping his ass with accessory hand").
Fifth, in the event of battle, if the weapon breaks/becomes dull from usage, they have basically lost an arm.
Sixth, your soldiers may object to being impeded to even going back to civilian life (even if they get too old or another injure forbids them from going to the battlefield).
Seventh, you have to pay sustenance to those troops even in times of peace. You can't just send them away to grow some food.
And eighth, getting away with the wrist means that the path of attack of this weapon is very easy to predict (just follow the line of the arm) and block.
[Answer]
I don't see why they would do any better than someone *holding* a sword, perhaps strapped to a gauntlet or glove.
If the wrist is missing or compromised, I would think a lot worse.
Even with a good wrist, being able to twirl the sword within the hand is a degree of motion beyond that of the limbs alone.
[Answer]
I believe the other answers have sufficiently identified the limits of this approach. In the interests of having a "yes you can do it" answer on the books, I would like to point towards the works of Frank Herbert. I am unaware of any soldier intentionally mutilating themselves in this way, but he did explore the psychological side of combat (and politics... though I admit it is hard to tell the two apart in his style of writing). There may be some psychological ploys to be had.
Consider a less than perfect opponent: one that has mental quirks that still need to be ironed out. If you can take advantage of those quirks, you can find their weakness and destroy them. With enough political, religious, or otherwise mythological work, you could instil a terror in the opponents so deep that it might outweigh the severe combat penalties of your barbaric ritual. Consider a myth that, due to the lack of a hand to hold a shield, these elite solders are incapable of simply holding a line... so they must always be in the process of killing you. You have an army that will never retreat, only advance, because that is what the blades demand.
This would have a chance of unbalancing opponents, for they feel they are against an unbalanced foe of brutal capacity. When facing such a foe, you tend to unbalance yourself, and that's where the trap would have to be laid. You would have to train these soldiers to remain mentally balanced at all times, even while staring death in the face, sans a left hand. If they could maintain this illusion, they could build up the myth of their own superiority. The tiger in pursuit remains in control, the deer in panic flees wildly.
I say this is a Herbert style intrigue because the sword cuts both ways. The trainers and the king know full well that they haven't made their elite soldiers better. They have intentionally maimed them. As long as that secret is safe, the swordsmen are immortal on the field. If the regent were to let that information slip, the swordsmen would quickly lose their illusion and be destroyed. Thus there would be great political intrigue to be had. The soldiers need not know their own weakness, but at some point the trainers would need to know. Thus there would be an entire class of individuals who share a secret which could tear apart the most feared legion in the land.
[Answer]
Hands are one of the most versatile and important part of any next to their feet to carry them to battle. There are so many things that the hands and fingers are capable of, that this seems much more like a punishment to a soldier than a mark of honor. In general disabling a soldier especially an elite soldier is a poor idea. You could get the same kind of 'honor' status by having special weapons that are affixed to their arms that have a spring loaded blade, in medieval times a good high quality blade that is spring loaded and can be retracted would be a very valuable and prestigious weapon to be in possession of. That would be a great honor and wouldn't require mutilation.
Of course if the person awarding these honors is a terrible monster of a person then, suffering pain for loyalty and losing many to infections might be just what you are looking for.
[Answer]
Aside and in addition to the previous answers...
(1) There are many duties a soldier has to do that are indirectly related to combat. From dressing themselves to eating food. Not that these things are impossible to do single-handedly, but you might want to have assistants (like medieval knaves, but for everyday tasks) in your story.
(2) Battle involves more than just sword-fighting. Although there is a romantic vision of the knights in an open field, there were most certainly times when the majority of fighters (non-knights) required climbing and crawling skills. You'll need to ensure that these fighters stay as elite as knights in your story, largely ceremonial and/or for specific battle tasks.
(3) There are many un-battle-related tasks like sleeping and sex whereby it would be impractical to have a sword in the room. This isn't your question, but it should be considered: maybe they can remove their swords more often than you suggest?
[Answer]
Bad idea.
Among all close combat weapons, swords require the most agility. Despite videogames conditioning us that swords require strength and bows require agility, actually it's reversed. Despite movies and videogames showing us fighters who hack at each other sloooowly and with full swings just as if they were chopping wood with an axe, swords were never used for chopping. They were used either for thrusting or cutting, both requiring great wrist agility.
See it for yourself in [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=maqnz3Trn2w#t=129). Think about how you could perform those quick motions with a sword rigidly fixed to your arm, without your hands.
Against armor, you would be in even deeper trouble. Using sword against armor is possible, but it requires [special tactics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwuQPfvSSlo&feature=player_detailpage#t=30) which would be impossible without being flexible with your hands. Even just basic stabbing would be inefficient, you would not be able to pull your sword back far enough, so an opponent stepping in close would make you completely defenseless.
Besides these disadvantages, medieval warriors needed to be proficient in many types of weapons, as all weapon types have advantages and disadvantages. Swords, maces, pikes; open field, ambush, siege or indoors, countering infantry or cavalry, different situations require different weapons and tactics.
[Answer]
I will go against flow little bit, and I say, during combat it actually might be useful. In fact, excluding that it is permanently mounted (which that sounds really terrible, as that kind of soldier is useless outside battlefield), it looks similar to [Pata sword](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=indian%20pata%20wiki&espv=2&biw=1865&bih=950&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=-YKaVeLrHcWfsAGi0If4Dw&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&dpr=1#tbm=isch&q=pata%20sword)
[Answer]
Others have already shown that this is a bad idea if you want them to be effective in combat. However, there are situations in which such a mutilation may aid in a battle: Psychological warfare.
If you're on the front lines and you've heard rumors that the enemy whips bezerkers into frenzy and then cuts off their freaking hands so they can strap on swords (I recommend both hands for this), you're going to be terrified. Remember that medieval armies are made of *people* and people can be made to be afraid. If you can break their morale, you can scatter them and then do some real damage on the retreat.
Imagine a battle scene where the psycho-army is already winning a bit. The enemy is already tired and on the defense. The front line parts a bit to allow the lathered, screaming, sword-arm lunatics through. The opposite line is not going to stop to ponder the ineffectiveness of such an offense; they just want to get away from the crazy person.
There are two ways you go with it: 1) Lunatics are really sworded up and are either killed after battle or simply pursue the enemy until killed OR 2) Lunatics have sworded gauntlets strapped to their arms which are removed once they've calmed down from the bloodlust. Of course, with option (2), you'd have to be very sure to hide the secret from your enemy.
[Answer]
[Predators](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_%28alien%29) has unremovable wrist blades too. But they do not have amputated fingers for it. So, i recommend you to make your elite troops having something similar with intact palms of hands and watch `Predator` movies to see how do they operate their wristblades)
[Answer]
The audience would care too much about having perfectly healthy soldiers have one of their limbs amputated.
This idea could work if the soldiers were:
1. Disposable, i.e. non-humans or mutants
2. Already had lost a limb and were returning to battle
Otherwise, having a sword for a hand would be a detriment to the soldiers as pointed out by the previous answers.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 4 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/162842/edit)
When a person dies, their soul leave the body and departs for the afterlife. There are ways for a person to be resurrected, however. The first involves calling the soul back into the mortal realm and entrapping it inside a specially built core. This core is specifically designed to contain souls that have passed on in the world of the living. This core is then placed inside an artificial construct called a golem. The soul interfaces with it, giving it control over the construct. These golems are programmed for certain purposes, say guarding a shrine, and the soul cannot step beyond those parameters given to the construct. These souls can operate so long as the construct remains intact. If they are ever destroyed, the soul departs its artificial shell and returns to the afterlife. This form of resurrection is voluntary, discussed prior to the person's death as an honor or form of repentance for crimes committed during life.
The second way of resurrection involves resurrecting someone back into their original body. The body must be in relatively good condition and not long after death. The person who comes back is called a revenant. This being looks exactly the same as the person did in life, but with grey skin and black veins over their form. Revenants have the memories of the person as well as their personality, but without their positive traits or characteristics, creating a darker and more sinister version of the individual. Unlike their golem counterparts, this being retains its free will without restrictions. These revenants are also immortal, repairing themselves if they are ever destroyed.
I need a way to explain the rules of this resurrection system in a way that satisfies these parameters. For a person to come back the way they were in life originally, they would need to be housed in these golem structures. However, resurrecting a person back to their original bodies changes them, making the individual evil and removes their positive traits, highlighting only the negative ones. How can I justify this?
[Answer]
Our entire idea of the afterlife is wrong.
Instead of an entire soul going to a good place or a bad place, The soul is sundered and the good and bad portions are split to their prospective realms. This ritual unknowingly only calls back the evil soul.
The reason that we only call back evil souls is because it is actually a voluntary thing and the good souls never want to leave paradise while evil souls would always want to return.
[Answer]
>
> resurrecting a person back to their original bodies changes them, making the individual evil and removes their positive traits, highlighting only the negative ones.
>
>
>
After an entire life of getting up early, going to work, yield my boss' nagging, going back home and yield to my wife's/husband's nagging, sleep and repeat, pay taxes and consume (well, add the variation you prefer based on the locale), I am finally enjoying the leisure of the heaven described by my holy books (be it rivers of honey, gaming consoles available 24/7 or illumination, again, tune it to your religion of choice).
What I was saying? .... Ah, yeah, while I am a enjoying this pleasures, someone calls me back to the life I just left and even put me back in a partially rotten body.
Excuse me if I don't give a nut about being nice and fluffy. Have you have ever seen a kid after being awaken in the middle of nap? Well, take that grumpy and power it to $grumpy^{9^9}$. Now you are close to get why I am so evil.
[Answer]
***Life is pain***
Literally. Being alive in a body made of flesh is painful. People who have been alive for all their lives in their bodies just don't notice it. But once a soul passes on and it returns, it's suddenly aware of all this pain. It drives them insane. It makes them want to hurt others for what was done to them.
Golems, being non-living bodies, don't have the same problem. In addition, they have the extra safeguard that the soul is compelled to pursue a task. This leaves them grounded and prevents a post-resurrection insanity from creeping in.
[Answer]
**The Afterlife Bureaucracy tries to reclaim unauthorized departures**
When you bind a soul to a golem, the specially made container is not just a vessel for the soul, but a contract with the Afterlife to borrow the soul for a specific task until a specific event or set of events happen. This contract combined with the explicit permission of the soul before its body's death permits the soul to depart and reside in the container without incident or side-effects because this is a contracted approved by the Afterlife and effectively signed by the three parties affected by it. It's all above board and legal.
In contrast, there is no contract for the Revenant. There is no authorization from the afterlife for the revenant's soul to depart the Afterlife, and the soul in question may not even have wanted to return in the first place. Did we also mention that the body that the revenant is called into is still basically dead?
Basically a soul has been kidnapped form the Afterlife and bound into its own body for whatever reason. The soul might want to leave to return, and the Afterlife will definitely want it back to keep the books balanced, and only the magic of the reanimation is keeping the body from decaying further than it already has. So between the soul being pulled three ways and the pain of living in an undead body, it ties up the "good" parts of the soul, leaving only the less savory parts of the soul to do its thing. It might be that due to the ritual that animates a revenant, the Afterlife can only reclaim the "good" part of the soul, and continuously tries to reclaim the rest of it.
Any proper full resurrection has to have the paperwork filled out in triplicate by hand by the being being resurrected before it can be authorized. Then there's all the paperwork that your healer doing the resurrection has to fill out. It's not a fun process and there's the issue of getting the paperwork to the Afterlife Bureaucracy in the first place, or getting it from them.
[Answer]
>
> The second way of resurrection involves resurrecting someone back into their original body.
>
>
>
You didn't use this explicit wording, but I assume you mean this form of resurrection places to original soul back into that original body. And in that case, the other answers here offer some interesting ideas.
But what if we tweak it slightly: The original body is resurrected *without* the original soul. It can still maintain the memories and some resemblance of the personality of the person, which can be explained by those being physical properties of the brain. While on the other hand the explanation for the resurrected person being evil can be from the lack of a soul - one just has to propose that the soul is where the moral/good/empathetic part of a person is.
This is a premise used by Buffy The Vampire Slayer for why vampires are evil when they come back to life.
[Answer]
Revenant Ritual brings back the same soul person had during life. During death and earlier parts of afterlife, or during resurrection, person suffers traumatic experience, and becomes broken, having symptoms similar to
<https://www.helpguide.org/articles/ptsd-trauma/ptsd-symptoms-self-help-treatment.htm>
It is worth notice, that, according to question, body for revenant "must be in relatively good condition and not long after death.", so i assume, it was not buried properly, no all necessary rituals was performed. Probably, this rituals somehow pacifies soul, make death less traumatic experience for it?
Probably, revenant soul do not want to return? Probably, while revenant ressurection ritual is performed, soul is chased by some unexplainable horrors which capture it and took it back to body? And its traumatic experience. Or probably they have not performed all funeral rituals required to make soul properly detach from body and come to afterlife, so it would not suffer
After some time in afterlife, soul begins to loose memory, and it forgets pain it received during death, and, who he/she was while living.
Golem building ritual do not requires fresh soul, it requires:
1. either pacified by special funeral rituals soul, who have recovered from near death and after death experience, and this soul do not struggle returning, because, as it was in question - "This form of resurrection is voluntary, discussed prior to the person's death as an honor or form of repentance for crimes committed during life."
2. or soul of person, who was dead for long time, and this soul hardly recalls that it was a human before
3. or, probably, this is soul of domestic dog, or other animal, not humans one?,
so soul for golem is like a child, with clean memory.
It do not have issues performing guard dog grade tasks, but it is not capable of anything more creative and complicated.
[Answer]
You can do something like a social commentary with this.
Let's say the person is resurrected just like he was when he died - what he considers "good", "bad", "moral" and etc. would be representative of the times when he died.
As time passes, society and its morals change, eventually starting to consider prior "bad" things as "good" and vice versa. Your resurrected person can bear the spirit of past times and simply be considered "bad/evil" because he has a morality that is incompatible with the modern one.
[Answer]
A golem only brings back part of a person's soul. A revenant brings back the entire soul, complete with extra baggage from the realm of the dead. Whatever it saw on the other side was enough to make it evil.
[Answer]
Typically, the term Revenant tends to refer specifically to people brought back to life to seek revenge. If you keep with this trope, the need for revenge may be a prerequisite to this form of resurrection; so, the problem is not that you bring back evil forms of good people, but that good people capable of forgiveness and accepting their own fate are just not candidates for this form or resurrection.
All Revenants are hateful, spiteful, angry souls, because the spell dissolved once the Revenant comes to accept his/her own death.
[Answer]
They're not evil - they're just indifferent. They've seen eternity and the afterlife, so many of your petty mortal squabbles and conceits seem... pathetic, pointless, even *laughable*. And, they now realise some of the things society labels as "good" are actually quite the opposite. In short, they no longer see the world in the same way as a mortal does.
If you left a bunch of Revenants alone with each other, they would form a normal, well defined, smoothly operating society based on *their* rules and morals - and we would have a small corner of Paradise on Earth (or whatever your planet is called). It just wouldn't necessarily resemble quite what you *think* Paradise should be like - because you are still blinkered by your limited mortal outlook.
While a lot of them would prefer to "re-die" and return to the afterlife, they also feel a duty or responsibility to help spread this enlightenment among those still living. They are, quite **literally**, "born-again" evangelists for their faith.
This disconnect - the "uncanny valley" where they *look* like mortals but don't *act* like them - is what causes people to feel uncomfortable, and label them as "evil" or "sinister". This is no different to our ancestors labelling foreigners as "uncivilised", "barbaric" or "evil" in ages gone by. You see exactly the same thing in many horror stories - it's why vampires and zombies are so unsettling.
Golems, on the other hand, have a purpose - one that they agreed to in advance. If you employed a Revenant for a job, they would act in much the same way as a Golem does. Of course, some jobs that Golems do they now find distasteful - but less so than breaking their contract. Plus, the additional spells and limitations introduced when building the body help in that regard, allowing (or encouraging) the soul to distance itself mentally.
[Answer]
[Serotonin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serotonin) imbalance.
>
> These revenants are also immortal, repairing themselves if they are ever destroyed.
>
>
>
Part of their immortality is that they no longer need to eat. According to that wikipedia link: "Approximately 90% of the human body's total serotonin is located in the enterochromaffin cells in the GI tract, where it regulates intestinal movements". The normal digestive process is disrupted by whatever magic makes the body self-sustaining and self-repairing.
Even worse, serotonin release is what counters the hunger triggered by dopamine. If serotonin production is inhibited, but not dopamine, your revenants will always be hungry. Insatiably hungry.
Once you throw off the body's balance of serotonin levels, there are implications for emotion and mood:
>
> Serotonin has been implicated in cognition, mood, anxiety and psychosis, but strong clarity has not been achieved
>
>
>
This gives a lot of leeway if you want to hand-wave the impact.
Serotonin release is also tied to our body's normal diurnal schedule. Perhaps revenants are nocturnal, or don't sleep at all.
[Answer]
You could always make it so that only the Revenants are the only ones actually resurrected, and the Golems souls are captured at the moment leading up to death, and extracted into the container. So they never experience the afterlife or what it feels like being dragged back to the world of the living.
So the Golems contract is decided before death, and on completion of their contract they're allowed to go to the afterlife.
Whereas the Revenants are actually resurrected and for whatever reason, either the experience of actually dying, the experience of the afterlife, or the experience of being dragged back damages their soul somehow making it corrupt?
[Answer]
You can explain your rules of the resurrection system through biology.
When one dies, the tissues start decaying pretty fast, so when the soul is forced back into a decaying body, the resurrected person would be in tremendous pain due to the damaged nervous system, decayed organs and atrophied muscles. That constant pain damages the psyche of the resurrected person to the point where the person simply becomes evil, because no amount of magical healing can restore the decayed body.
The soul core has been created to address this issue. By trapping the soul in the core of a golem, the conscience is present but the actual nervous system doesn't exist anymore so no pain can be felt.
[Answer]
As stated, the soul bound to their own body is a revenant, in other words, a hungry ghost that seeks revenge. The original purpose of the ritual was to bring back a soul to fulfil their, or their summoner's, desire for revenge. Good or positive traits require a full resurrection, which is far more expensive, and quite unnecessary for a being whose sole purpose in unlife is to destroy. Add to the fact that the body is decaying, while the nerves are still intact, to allow it to move and respond to stimulus, meaning that the revenant is in constant, excruciating pain, which further dampens their mood.
The resurrection ritual had no such defects, but the cost was too high, so it wasn't used very often and was eventually lost.
[Answer]
It's not the resurrection, it is living and especially dying that makes people evil. That's why they are not usually returned back.
[Answer]
The soul is not an elementary structure, but rather a compound or mixture of all the traits of the person.
When a soul dies on Earth, the entire soul is evaluated for admission to Heaven. If deemed worthy, the negative aspects are overlooked, and the soul is allowed in. It could be that this is the default, there is enough good in most people's souls (except the particularly evil).
However, getting a soul out is more difficult. It's like the soul is being pulled out of Heaven, and Heaven is doing all it can to hold onto the "good" portion, while not being too bothered with keeping the "evil" part. By the time the soul gets back into the body, it is severely tilted towards evil because nearly all the Good has been left behind in Heaven. So you're resurrecting someone, but not getting the complete person.
This adds an interesting optional side-effect. If someone was so evil that they actually went to Hell, and if Hell exhibits the same behaviour, then someone who ended up there and who gets resurrected might end up being more "good" than when they were first alive...
*Note:* I'm using the words Heaven and Hell here just as place-holders for whatever the equivalent of your afterlife is
[Answer]
# Cerebral hypoxia PTSD
When someones dies, their soul is still attached to the body, and so is suffering the effects of this process. A very painfully process. This changes the soul in a primal way.
When reincarnate in the same body, the soul will meet the same brain and will *remember* that pain from their departure, *forever*, This is no way someone can be the same.
When reincarnate (reincoreate?) in a golem, there is no PTSD, so the soul is free from these effects.
**Bonus:** grey skin -> body hypoxia -> brain hypoxia -> background continuous pain -> evil.
[Answer]
**The undead are hangry.**
Revenants are fueled by occult powers which is good since being dead leaves the digestive system in a questionable state. But even though they can't eat and don't need to, they are hungry. Very hungry, and therefore extremely grumpy and irritable, prone to snippy yelling and other surly behaviors. As during life, the good side is suppressed by the hypoglycemic grumpiness that emerges during bouts of hanger.
If there were some way to magically feed the revenants, they would likely be more pleasant. They might then use concealer for those black vein marks.
[Answer]
You didn't just bring back the person you resurrected! There are many beings in the afterlife, some live in heaven and are at rest and happy, but some, evil, souls suffer torment and torture for what they did. To those souls the afterlife is literally hell, they would do anything to get out of it.
So when they see a soul being resurrected, pulled by some powerful magic back up out of the afterlife, they see it as an escape line, a way to get out of their torment. They do everything they can to jump on this escape, to forcefully grab hold of the soul being resurrected and get dragged back up out of the afterlife with it, into the body the soul originally resurrected in. Again I stress these other souls tagging along with the resurrection are all evil, because only evil souls would want to escape the after life.
With the golem approach the core the soul is dragged in is designed specifically for a single persons soul, the core does not allow the other souls trying to escape the afterlife to enter it, and so while they may piggy back along with the original resurrection they get rejected by the core and, having no vessel to house them, immediately get dragged back into the afterlife once the resurrection is completed.
However, the original body is not designed with these protections. The body can in fact act as a vessel for multuple souls, and so you get not only the original soul back, but one (or more) evil soul all housed within the single body. The original owner of the body get's control of it, either by virtue of the resurrection magic or because the body only naturally responds to it's original soul, but he has to contend with an evil soul residing in his body with him.
From here there are many different options for how the body goes evil. Perhaps the soul is the moral fiber of a person, and having another evil soul in the body directly taints the mind towards the evil's and vices of that soul. Alternatively the original owner of the body is in complete control and isn't actually forced to do evil, however, having to deal with an evil spectator, constantly tempting him to evil, throwing evil thoughts in his head, or torturing him with visions etc is so hard to deal with that the person ends up being tempted by the other soul, or suffering so much with dealing with it that his good qualities are diminished by his suffering.
I don't know the work very well, but I believe sin-eater's rpg from the new world of darkness did something like the later, so you could potentially look at it for some inspiration.
This option also adds the potential for outlines, a soul that is resurrected without any evil souls managing to piggyback, or a resurrection that actually get's a relatively good soul tagging along to complete some unfinished business etc, ie the rare reverent that isn't evil, but everyone presumes it is. Though it's possible the physical traits you described for a reverent only happen if the body is stressed by being possessed by two souls, thus the rare resurrection that didn't have any soul piggy back along with it may not look like a reverent, it may not be possible to tell the Resurrection even happened.
In fact this could help explain why someone would resurrect a reverent knowing they would be evil, if they are hoping that, against all odds, this one resurrection went off without any piggybacking evil souls and they get their loved one back as normal; even though 95% of all body resurrections go bad. Though this is optional depending on what you would like to do in your world. My point is only that there is allot of room to play with how a reverent is affected by having to deal with a second, evil, soul that gives you lots of wiggle room for justifying exactly how your revarant's behave.
[Answer]
## The Afterlife only judges your good intentions, and holds onto them. When called, necromancers get the rest.
The Afterlife doesn't weigh souls based on negative or positive actions or memories, but they instead weigh how good your intentions were. These good intentions are a major cause for progress, either for the mortal realm or the Afterlife. Maybe they're copied into angels, or used as an energy source, or new souls are generated from these, or whatever.
While your soul normally stays in one piece during your eternal rest, a resurrection spell can interrupt that. The "important" parts, the parts 'Heaven' cares about, stays there. The necromancer gets the memories, the logic, the experience of the rest of the soul, effectively creating a person that has no remorse or kindness.
Circumventing the Afterlife means your soul stays intact, which is why mages have to resort to using a consensual reliquary *before* you die, as this prevents the kindness of your soul being separated.
[Answer]
# A golem core shields its soul from evil
The reason that a golem core can only be entered by the willing, has to do with its construction, it was constructed with *that one person* in mind, and the magic pulls them immediately towards the golem.
>
> “But you can bring Arlen back.” Jayse fixed his eyes on the witch intently.
>
>
> “I can,” she sniffed, “but not without... issue.”
>
>
> “Issue?! You created the Shrine Protector, there were no issues!”
>
>
> “Yes, that was Hans, and we molded the Shrine Protector to his soul while he was still alive. They have to be a great fit, you know, the body and the soul, otherwise they just slide off. They are always being drawn back to the Veil. So you would need to bring me Arlen’s body—nothing else will fit her soul proper, now. Unless she was already in a golem and didn’t tell you. So I’ll need her body, head intact, and not too decayed! Healing magic on the dead is... clumsy.”
>
>
>
And then there is the evil part. Either the evil is part of this world and it “rolls off” of our bodies normally but she has lost that defense mechanism, or the good is being constantly produced by the soul but now it cannot stay close by:
>
> “Okay, I’ll do it! We need her! I... I need her.” Jayse hid his tears, but she could see his eyes were misty. This was not just about the castle. He started for the door. She grabbed his arm.
>
>
> “You need to understand,” she said. “Arlen will not be the same.”
>
>
> “Not the same, how?”
>
>
> “Once we pull her soul back from the Veil, and bind it back to the body, it keeps getting drawn back. All of its light gets sucked that way. You may find her darker. Angrier. Crueler. No emotional control, acting like the world exists just for her. All of that light which your soul can keep close, all of that is constantly returning to the Veil.”
>
>
> “So, she acts, I guess, like people act when they are hurt? Am I sentencing her to a life of pain?”
>
>
> “Well, yes and no. Pain snuffs out that light too, but from what I know of the folks who have ‘come back’ this way... it doesn’t hurt, as far as I can tell, but they just aren’t the same. Death-touched, is what the ancients used to call it—they forbade this practice outright, don’t you know. She’ll be touched by death.” The witch was clearly running out of words to describe it.
>
>
> “But she will still know the way through the caves to get into the castle?”
>
>
> “Hard to say. Probably? But it is very likely that her love for you will be gone. You may have to persuade her some other way, some appeal to her more... selfish interests. Power. Lust. Fear. Take your pick. She’s going to be half-animal now. Death-touched. She’s not going to want to depose the Prince just ’cause it’s the right thing to do. That light in her is constantly drawn back to the Veil.”
>
>
>
[Answer]
**Evil exists as biology**
Normal people have not just a soul and a body, but an aura of life that shields them from evil. The creation of a revenant does not restore this shield, so the body becomes vulnerable to evil's influence. Evil takes hold of the world indirectly through pestilence and biology. Worms, parasites, bacteria, viruses. Anything that writhes, wriggles, or spreads disease can be loosely linked to the agents of evil's influence on the world.
Natural birth, the creation of life, happens within a body already protected by the aura of life. The child shares its mother's womb, as well as its aura. The one you have as an adult is an extension of your mother's aura right from the beginning. The black veins are the disease of evil spreading through the body, lured by life's light. The infection permeates the air, inescapable, and cannot be inoculated against.
The golems are mechanical things, with no biological bodies to infect, evil can find no sway over them.
Possible extensions of the theme:
holy/sacred places purify the air of its evil, a reverent made in a church can be safe, so long as it never leaves the grounds
The aura you have can be traced to your mother, and hers to her mother and so on and so forth. Through a maternal lineage some special individuals could identify if two auras are related. This could be the basis of a magical test of bloodlines, not just for adopted children but for proof of royalty.
A character could be a nun in a church, never leaving its grounds, and discovered to be a revenant. Of course 99% of revenants are evil, so the desire to hide this person's nature could be a taboo, or story point.
The church survives through re-revenant-ing its highest members. The head of the church having been alive, though always on holy grounds, for the last (insert large number here) years.
A pure revenent-ed woman's child would not have its mothers aura, so its children would be evil. This could be the basis of an evil organization/creature's brood queens.
[Answer]
## Soulsplit
Alternatively (or in addition depending on how you look at it) to @alexIT's answer:
Upon death your soul is split in two, the good half and evil half.
Resurrecting someone into their original body summons evil half of their soul. Rezing into a golem summons the good half. Turns out you can actually resurrect someone twice, putting their evil half into their original body, and the good half into a golem at the same time!
[Answer]
Two things stand out to me about your scenario here:
1) Golem souls are screened. Revenant souls...are not necessarily.
2) Golems are temporary, Revenants are eternal.
The first item suggests that there is some sort of soul-characteristic that makes it suitable for return. In this case, the method itself isn't to blame...incorrectly-housed golems would be equally sinister and dark (though this might be glossed over by carefully constrained programming), and an appropriately "noble" soul would actually come through the Revenant process successfully, but those instances are few and rare enough that "everyone knows" the process only produces twisted, dark parodies of the original.
---
The second one comes with its own interesting ramification. At the moment of death, souls gain a metaphysical understanding of what "eternity" really means. If I asked you to hold my coat for me while I tied my shoe, you'd probably be willing to help me out. If I asked you to come to this exact spot and hold my coat for an hour today, tomorrow, and every day for the rest of your life...I suspect you'd be less likely to agree.
Golem "service" is temporary. Even if temporary means ten thousand years, that's still nothing compared to ETERNITY. It's an honor or a repentence, and in either case it's recongized positively in whatever afterlife your system has in place.
Being returned as a Revenant...is forever. It's permanent. It's a complete severance from the afterlife/rebirth/whatever happens beyond the grave. For a soul that has a perception of eternity, and realizing their entire eternity has now been irrevokably altered? That's going to warp and twist even the noblest of spirits.
---
Speaking of the afterlife...be prepared to describe it in fairly intricate detail. Two different forms of fully-sentient resurrection means that there will be no shortage of prospective individuals that could be interviewed about what "really happens" beyond the grave.
]
|
[Question]
[
In my world there are humans living in rainforests near the coast. In the depths of the forests live giant apes, similar to the extinct Gigantopithecus. Something like a 3 metre tall 300kg orangutang with large canine teeth like a chimpanzee:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YaFxU.jpg)
I'm trying to keep my humans from crafting weapons, and experiment with other ways to hunt. The only weapon for now is the ape's canine used as a ceremonial dagger, a symbol of strength.
The question is, how can the warrior kill the ape, without any weapon (except poison and their own body)?
So far my only idea is strength of numbers. The warrior coordinates a large group of unarmed warriors, who together take down the ape.
However I would prefer if a single warrior could somehow take down the ape without help. Do you have any ideas?
[Answer]
## Touch of Death
So I know that this particular term as been WAY over emphasized in popular culture, but it is an actual Ninjitsu move that can kill a person without a weapon. First, lets separate the fact from fiction here by clarifying that it is not a "touch" so much as it is a really hard, and specifically aimed punch that takes a lot of training to be able to deliver with fatal force... but it is an actual thing non-the-less. There is also a similar attack you see in some Brazilian martial arts that involves a knee-kick, but kills by the same mechanism.
These attacks are aimed at about a 30-45 degree upward angle into the [xiphoid process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiphoid_process). If this strike lands properly, it can break off the xiphoid process which then travels through the pleural cavity puncturing the heart or major arteries... or in some cases, it can even kill just by triggering a heart-attack caused by extreme chest compression. Getting hit here also causes major distress to the diaphragm which can trigger an immediate and debilitating state of shock and momentarily paralyze a person's ability to breath; so, even if the injury actually takes a couple of minutes to kill, the debilitating effects of the strike can be instant. This means that a fast, well trained fighter could (if he gets the first hit in) kill a larger, much stronger ape without getting ripped limb from limb.
Yes, it is true that other great apes are going to be way stronger than a human, but this does not mean they are way more difficult to injure. In fact, in this exact case, it is probably going to be easier. When you look at the skeletal structure of our stronger great ape cousins like Chimpanzees and Gorillas, you will notice that the Xiphoid process is proportionally longer and skinnier which should make an uppercut to it even more deadly than it is in humans.
## Side Note
While I do not think a weapon is absolutely necessary to kill a Gigantopithecus, I do agree with objections that your humans will not have weapons. There are a lot of things about human proportions that are the direct result of evolving to use weapons. Yes, it is well known that humans are proportionally weaker than chimps, bonobos, and gorillas, but what is less well known is that we did not loose this strength because we were not using it, we lost it because we traded our strength for something more important to us: flexibility. Humans are WAY better a throwing things than other great apes because we have proportionately more shallow shoulder sockets which give us a better range of motion, but makes shoulder dislocation much easier. If we were as strong as an ape, we'd be constantly injuring our shoulders, but because we have our shoulders, we can do a way better job of swinging a club, thrusting a spear, or throwing a rock... and evolution says that these abilities are more important than brute strength. But if we never started throwing weapons, we'd have never increases our shoulder flexibility, and we would have never been so incentivized to become upright animals. In other words, it is weapons that made us become homosapiens, we did not become homosapiens and then realize we needed weapons. So if your story has humans, or even humanoids, then the absence of weapons seems very suspicious.
[Answer]
**Frame Challenge**
They can't. Or at least, not with Martial Arts. A Chimpanzee is between 3-5 times as strong as a Human. Fighting a Gorilla, even as a skilled martial artist *team* of warriors - would look the same way that a bunch of toddlers fighting a fully grown man. That's just the bog-standard Gorilla - if you have a Giant Ape, their strength is likely to be higher.
How I would deal with this: Make things like Stones and Metal deposits extremely rare in your region - this removes the ability to make things like flint daggers, metal cutting weapons etc.
You still have trees - and a wooden club is very effective. So are dead-fall drops, Punji traps etc.
The issue is that if you have the means to make a deadfall drop or a spring spear type trap, then you have sufficient skills to make wooden weapons.
The most obvious being the Bow, Arrow and Spear. I'd address this by making your jungle extremely dense - to the point where it's so dense - there's little to no advantage to having a Ranged weapon.
Secondly would be a cultural thing - Make it a part of their Warrior culture to be unarmed at all times - something like 'If the strength of my arm is not sufficient, then it is time for the Jungle to claim me so that the strong survive'.
This will allow them to have all the skills and expertise to build traps (which is the only way you are taking out a Gorilla) - but without having them build weapons.
[Answer]
**Assumption #1** *No weapons, tools, or manufactured items other than the ceremonial dagger. No poisons, herbs, plants, minerals, or toxic soils. No traps, pits, or constructs. Picking up a branch on the ground and using it as a club or throwing a rock from the high ground would shame our warrior to the point of suicide.*
To a degree, my ideas skirt that assumption of your rules. What's a tool? What's a weapon? If what you're looking for is some form of kung fu then, frankly, your question is wasted. You can research any martial art you want to rationalize overcoming the apes and explaining how to specifically attack an ape is story-based. Therefore, I'm also proceding on the presumption that there's a *reason* to attack apes without tools — because the fundamental nature of both evolution and intellect is to solve problems — and that inevitably means tools.
Worse, your civilization uses an ape's fang as a ceremonial dagger. Which means some overworked wife tired of hearing her warrior whine and bellyache about late meals grabs it to help prepare dinner. Suddenly the concept of kitchen knives is born — unless there's a cultural reason to never use that fang.
**Assumption #2** There is a cultural reason to embrace Assumption #1.
Therefore, allow me to introduce some weaponless (from a certain point of view) solutions that are rationalized as some form of *Tests of Bravery* that utilize the *circumstances of nature* without handling any aspect of nature as a weapon.
**The Test of Intellect**
The indigenious peoples of the North American continent had an efficient way of providing supplies for large groups of people — they herded buffalo off a cliff. This was called a [Buffalo Jump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump) and sites have been identified in the U.S. and Canada. They used cliffs as tools to overcome a creature much larger and stronger than themselves.
Buffalo, being a herd animal, could be considered simple to slaughter in this manner. Get them running in the right direction and they'll pretty much bring the doom upon themselves. But your giant apes are a different matter. An individual fighter must either frighten the ape or bait it. The clever warrior must use the environment to distract the ape from realizing it's been led to the cliff edge. Thus, this is the test of the warrior's intellect.
**The Test of Agility**
If I can use a cliff as a tool, can I use a broken branch? This test doesn't test intellect as much as it tests agility. It could be called "The Dance." The warrior can easily lure an ape to a location where can be found a broken branch on a tree. The goal of the dance of combat is to cause the ape to lose its balance and fall onto the branch. While one could point to any number of Hollywood movies that show this kind of demise, if you really want to see something *along the lines* of what I mean, go watch [Grand Sumo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumo) — but the superior warrior can do that without touching the ape!
**The Test of Endurance**
Everyone knows1 that the wild nature of the great apes means they really don't know how to hold their breath. Your warriors, on the other hand, train for months to embrace the risk to overcome the beast. Having found a suitable river or lake with exposed tree roots at the proper depth. Luring the ape into the water, your warrior holds the panicking and struggling ape under water. The struggle is brief, but intense, and the warrior must hold his or her breath throughout the ordeal.
**The Test of [A Fistfull of Dollars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fistful_of_Dollars)**
Finally, the truly elite warriors combine intellect, agility, and endurance, to lure not one but two great apes into territorial conflict! The warrior must keep the two creatures engaged while not becoming a substantial interest to either. By [egging on](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/egg%20on) both apes, continually raising the stakes for both animals, eventually one or both are dead.
---
1 *The Ministry of Meaningful Messages has been researching the veracity of this statement and can neither confirm nor deny that it is true.*
[Answer]
The warrior never *fought* the ape - he found an old equivilent of a greyback that had lost a fight for dominance and performed the *coup de grace* on the big, old dying creature.
It could either be told as a story of putting a honourable opponent out of his misery, or the tale of the ape grew with the telling. While your warrior might lack *weapons*, you'd still need tools, to skin or at least remove the canine, which would mask the poor condition your late ape was.
That said, I don't think teeth are generally used as weapons for a reason - even things like ivory. They're generally brittle and not really as useful as say a sharpened stick.
[Answer]
**Poison.** Find a bunch of the ape's favourite bananas. Spike the bananas with poison. Put the bananas in a visible location. Wait for the ape to eat the bananas. Follow the ape until it drops out of the trees dead. Quickly butcher the ape before the poison spreads to the meat.
**Traps.** The same. Except instead of poisoning the bananas, you dig a pitfall trap underneath. The ape goes to get bananas and falls into the trap. Maybe there are spikes in the trap. Maybe there are no spikes and a long drop.
Since they live in the rainforest, one variation of the pitfall trap is the Tree trap. Find a tree standing on its own and put the bananas near the top. Chop the tree most of the way down:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GM59el.jpg)
Wait for the ape to climb the tree to get the bananas. Then rush in and chop the rest of the tree down. Tree falls over. Ape goes splat.
[Answer]
**Persistence hunting?**
It's a common thought that humans can only defeat any animal because we are smarter and can build weapons, and we are otherwise much weaker in every aspect than even animals of comparable size. However, there is one big exception, something where humans are *physically* better than any animal: endurance. A fit human can jog basically all day long, as [we can cool ourselves while on the run](https://youtu.be/ImYu9dJM4kQ?t=100). Animals can't, they have to stop to cool down, else they overheat and collapse from exhaustion.
If a big enough crowd of humans starts herding an isolated lone animal, so big a crowd that the animal is afraid of attacking them, then no matter how fast that animal is, if the humans keep up the pace, they will be able to chase the animal until it collapses from exhaustion. Don't get too close or it might lash out and attack, but always stalk it so it can never rest. Humans can outlast any land animal in that regard, until the animal will be too tired to fight back.
This has been used by our ancestors extensively, and there are some small tribes which hunt this way even today.
[Answer]
You can't kill without weapons.
>
> weapon
> [ˈwɛp(ə)n]
> NOUN
> a thing designed or used for inflicting bodily harm or physical damage
>
>
>
If you want to further classify, you can make a split between
* proper weapons, which are designed with the primary goal of inflicting damage. Think of a shotgun or a spear,
* improper weapons, whose primary design scope is not inflicting damage, yet they end up doing it because of the way they are used. Think of a broken bottle neck used as a blade, or the fists of a karateka.
It follows that anything you use to kill becomes a weapon the moment it is used for that purpose.
[Answer]
## Go for the eyes
I agree with the frame challenge. This is going to be a serious problem for the would-be ape-slayers.
However, a platoon of men all armed with daggers with one aim - to go for the eyes - might have a chance. Two lucky hits and then the battle odds get far, far better.
## Or the balls
A stabbed scrotum is not only disablingly painful, but is very likely to get infected. In terms of ritually endowed prowess, pointing out that the ape you stabbed died whimpering with pus oozing out of his nuts isn't great, but it's better than the bragging rights you get from it killing you in an instant.
[Answer]
>
> Something like a 3 metre tall 300kg orangutang with large canine
> teeth like a chimpanzee:
>
>
>
**Befriend it**
Orangutan happily co-exist with humans if they are allowed to. Simply befriend the ape by bringing it gifts of food until it comes to trust you. Each time temporarily tie it with a rope while it is eating. Make the bonds more complete as you learn to do them quicker and the ape gets used to them. Always untie them fully at the end of a session.
On the final day bring an especially large and delicious treat and gradually bind the ape until it is immobilised except by you feeding it morsels by hand.
At this point, the ape is at your mercy and you have innumerable ways to kill it. Suffocation or lack of water are just two. If you are particularly sadistic you can pummel it with your fists.
[Answer]
## Give the Ape Wine
That's it - bring wine to the giant ape. A few gallons should be enough. Ape will drink the wine, then pass out. Then, strangle the passed out ape. Alternatively, can just make sure the ape is sleeping face down so it will suffocate on its own vomit.
Other intoxicants would work fine as well.
[Answer]
Left-field pitch, but why not.
**War of the Worlds style; use germ warfare.**
>
> Directly the Invaders arrived and drank and fed; our microscopic allies attacked them. From that moment – they were doomed!
>
>
>
The strength aspect is here. Your finest warriors are those who carry the most deadly diseases, and the biggest variety of them. They're absolute germbags, positively infested. Some folks have resistance, some folks just get by through determination and grit as the diseases destroy them.
By getting into prolonged chases with the giant apes, their heavy breathing alone is enough to transmit plenty of nasties. Eventually, the apes just drop dead. Cooking their flesh is enough to make it safe for the rest of the village. The warrior class live apart.
As an added bonus, when these "warriors" fail and are killed and eaten by the giant apes, that will often cause their killers to in turn be killed. Sometimes many apes feed from the same carcass. Great warriors are thus remembered by their heroic deaths, and the sheer number of apes they "defeated" like this.
[Answer]
**What is a weapon?**
If you mean literally with his bare hands then no, that isn't going to work. But as soon as you are allowed to use found items from nearby, even ones entirely natural and not crafted, then it becomes possible.
* **Hit it with something heavy.** A rock or a log should work. The hero can just happen to find the thing close to his hand in the middle of the fight. It's pretty likely that the ape would do the same, so it's not like it's an unfair fight.
* **Strangle it with a vine.** Tripping it might also work. I'm not sure if natural vines are really strong enough for that, but it never seemed to bother Tarzan. Your vines are probably stronger than Earth ones.
* **Trick it into rushing off a cliff.** Entice it to rush at you then dodge out of the way so it falls to its death. Again pretty far-fetched for a fairly smart ape, but it's a fantasy right?
Incidentally, if you are writing a work of fiction you may be in trouble if you are looking for bizarre ways to have your plot go exactly the way you want it. It's going to seem unbelievable to the audience. Maybe you should consider exploring what would happen if the protagonist actually did use a weapon, or a t least a tool, in this fight, but kept it secret for reasons of honour.
[Answer]
# Insult the Gorilla
If you insult it enough, it won't be able to handle it anymore and it'll either die of stress or commit sucicide.
[Answer]
**Kill them while they're sleeping**
While the ape is asleep, hit them with one of the many [bare-hands techniques](https://listverse.com/2007/11/11/25-methods-for-killing-with-your-bare-hands/) that can kill a person, e.g.:
>
> 15. UPPERCUT – An upward strike to the bottom of the jaw with the heel of the hand, causing the enemy’s head to snap backward. May shatter vertebrae. Fatal.
>
>
>
[Answer]
Scare it, run it down, exhaust it until it makes a mistake, then choke it to death.
]
|
[Question]
[
It takes the Earth about 365.25 days to orbit the Sun on its current elliptical path. That means it moves about 30 km/s, 2×π×(149,600,000 km)/(1 year).
So, given that, how high could Earth's velocity go before its orbit changes?
[Answer]
About 30km/s; that it to say, the velocity cannot change at all if you wish to maintain the same orbit.
Every circular orbit is associated with exactly one orbital velocity. Every general elliptical orbit is associated with exactly one velocity profile--one specific apoapsis velocity, one specific periapsis velocity, and one specific curve in between.
If you speed the Earth up *at all*, its orbit will be different.
[Answer]
If the Sun were more massive than it is now, then the Earth would have to move faster to maintain the orbit that it currently has. The formula for the rotational velocity is $v^2$ = (G • M) / R, where v the velocity, G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the sun, and R is the radius of the orbit. As an example, if the Sun had four times the mass that it currently has, then the Earth would have to be moving twice as fast as it is now to be in the orbit it currently occupies. Of course if the Sun had four times the mass that it currently has then other properties about it would be very different as well.
[Answer]
You can't pick the velocity and distance from the sun independently: either one fixes the other. A planet is in orbit because the gravitational attraction of the star accelerates it, causing its path to be a curve rather than a straight line. If you make the planet move faster, then it would require more acceleration to keep it in its orbit (consider whirling a ball on a string around your head – make it spin faster and you feel more pull on the string), but the only way to get more acceleration is to be closer.
[Answer]
Depending on the orbit, say if it was more elliptically "*extreme*" than now, something like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/k1faN.png)
Then the speed would be much greater when Earth reaches the point closest to the sun since it will have accelerated on its way towards the sun.
The orbit would be the "same" but the speed throughout the full orbit would differ dramatically.
[Answer]
As mentioned by *Itsme2003*, v2 = (G • M) / R, where v is Orbital Velocity, G is the Gravitational Constant, M is the mass of the central body, in this case our Sun, and R is the Radius of Orbit.
Since the mass of the sun isn't changing in this scenario, G and M are both constants, so we can conflate the two into a single value, C:
v2 = C / R
This can be rearranged by multiplying both sides by R to give us:
v2 • R = C
What this shows us is that the Orbital Velocity and the Radius of Orbit are inversely proportional. As one increases, the other decreases, and vice versa.
Therefore, we can say with certainty that if you were to hack into the Earth's properties and change its "Orbital Velocity" value, the radius of the Earth's orbit will also change, taking us closer or farther from the Sun, depending on whether you increase or decrease the value.
This has been explained by others in other answers, but I wanted to show it through the inverse proportion relationship of the mathematical formula.
]
|
[Question]
[
In some parts of my setting, bullets for black-powder weapons are difficult to find, but the black powder itself is relatively easy to come across. Some groups - say raiders, settlers, cheap assassins - anyone without too much time or money to put into bullets but a strong need to be able to quickly hurt someone - use black-powder weapons without actually loading bullets into them - in effect, they only have powder in the weapons. They use this to attack by pressing the end of the gun against the body of their opponent and firing.
My question is: What would this do to the body of the person being fired on? What kind of damage would they experience from this - would it be lethal if the gun was pressed against a part of their anatomy like their head or neck? And additionally: If it can be lethal, where should the gun be pressed to give the best chance of lethality?
PS: I'm not quite certain that I got the tags right on this question, so please tell me if there is one that would be better suited for this.
[Answer]
(1) The effects would be rather unpleasant, and at extremely close distance possibly fatal - see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_(cartridge)#Fatal_accidents> The major source of damage would be the shockwave, especially with a large calibre to the head, think of it as a strong punch. For some info on blasts from very large calibres (in this case tank guns) I recommend to watch this: <https://youtu.be/P5x0Jlxl9uU?t=1069> - in short, even if you're not hit by the shell (such as if there isn't one) the blast of the gunpowder (especially modern and in large quantities) can be DEVASTATING.
(2) I'm not a medic to give you the best answer on to "where" to aim, but if you imagine the blank gun firing as a very powerful fist punch, you can make some guesses. Anywhere in the head is going to pack a punch (pun intended). Neck probably too, similarly a "kidney punch" won't be nice (although not sure how lethal). If you want to go very painful and possibly crippling but not lethal, there's always the groin (ouch!).
(3) Even when "normal" bullets are extremely scarce, firing blank(s) is still very inefficient. First bullets were made out of stone (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet#History>) and even if you don't want to "waste" the effort, you can go the "shot(gun)" way, and just load a pile of heavy rubbish like small pebbles or metal scraps on top of your powder to make the gun useful at some larger distance...
[Answer]
You don't need bullets; anything inside the barrel will be accelerated with potentially lethal effect. Shot, scrap metal, pebbles etc. In early firearms, soldiers in the heat of battle sometimes accidentally fired their ramrod at the enemy. (Very short range, but deadly at point-blank).
Blank rounds can indeed kill. Often the problem is metal fragments from the catridge case which can travel several metres. However, the blast itself is enough to kill if pressed against the temple, as illustrated by the case of Jon-Erik Hexum, an actor who accidentally killed himself by this means -- <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon-Erik_Hexum#Death>
[Answer]
If your firearms can only be used at point blank range, you need a
**Captive bolt gun.**
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_bolt_pistol>
>
> The bolt consists of a heavy rod made of corrosion-resistant alloys,
> such as stainless steel. It is held in position inside the barrel of
> the stunner by means of rubber washers. The bolt is usually not
> visible in a stunner in good condition. The bolt is actuated by a
> trigger pull and is propelled forward by compressed air, a spring
> mechanism, or by the discharge of a blank round ignited by a firing
> pin. After striking a shallow but forceful blow on the forehead of the
> animal, spring tension causes the bolt to recoil back into the barrel.
>
>
>
A captive bolt gun propels a bolt attached to the firearm. The villain in the movie No Country for Old Men used a pneumatic captive bolt gun as his weapon. Captive bolt is perfect for your people who have powder and guns but no projectile. The discharge of powder can propel a piece of metal out the front of the gun into the enemy - a better offensive use of the force than just the expanding gases.
You could have the bolt on a spring so it would retract itself for the next shot. Or maybe the user would need to replace it.
[Answer]
If you have absolutely *nothing* in the barrel apart from black powder, then, if is tamped down, you will simply blow a lot of the powder out, un-ignited. This will be followed by a short-lived flame containing sparks of still burning powder. The flame will travel a few feet, depending on the bore of the barrel and the amount of the charge.
Don't stand within 6-feet but, directly in front of the barrel you should (disclaimer) be safe at 20ft, depending on the wind direction.
How do I know? As an irresponsible young teenager I experimented with home-made guns and gunpowder. I'm very lucky I wasn't blinded or seriously burned and scarred for life. DON'T TRY TO REPLICATE ANY OF THIS, IT IS FOOLISH AND DANGEROUS. A lot of inventors were killed or maimed when guns were new technology.
[Answer]
**You're just a stones throw away...**
While lead bullets might be rare, it's really unlikely people couldn't find something to shoot. Some of the earliest bullets were stones (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet>), which are dirt cheap (literally) and a lot better than firing a gun with just black powder. These aren't great, but you are talking abundant powder and a short supply of projectiles.
[Answer]
First of all let's stress the fact that we are talking about black powder (also named in America gunpowder) which has different properties from modern smokeless powder. Aside from smoke black powder yields much lower pressure. Bullets from this guns are subsonic while bullets from modern ammunition are often super sonic (with some being sub sonic by design).
Let's do some calculations to understand better the amount of energy that such a gun would discharge. Am not trying to be exact as there are many variables involved but just trying to get in the correct order of magnitude.
Gunpowder releases 3 megajoules per kilogram and contains its own oxidant.
[Gunpowder composition and characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder#Composition_and_characteristics)
Muzzle loading firearms are proofed using a double or even triple charge to have a safety margin.
When it comes to load for rifles most suggest either 1 grain per caliber or 1.5 grain per caliber to stay well within safe limits. But notice that pistols it’s more like .25-.5 grains per caliber. Pistols aren’t as built up as rifles.
This leads us for a .50 caliber firearm:
rifle: 50-75 grains = 3.2-4.9 grams
pistol: 12.5-25 grains = 0.80-1.6 grams
let's keep just the higher value because your raiders are *mean*
rifle: 4.9 grams will yield: 3 Mj \* 4.9 \* 10^-3 = 14.7kJ
pistol: 1.6 grams will yield 3 Mj \* 1.6 \* 10^-3 = 4.8kJ
To have a comparison a boxer heavy weight can punch around 1kJ with some estimates of 1.6kJ. So your pistol would produce at least three times as much as a heavy weight champion.
But then there is another, more complex, problem. How much of that energy is going to actually be delivered to the target?
Here things get more complicated because as soon as the pressure builds up the target and the shooter are being pushed apart. The energy starts being dissipated on the sides increasing the invested area but lowering the pressure and so the damage that the area is taking. Another reducing factor would be if the target surface is slanted. Further the damage on the target body will depend on any kind of protection he may be wearing.
For all these factors the energy actually delivered to the target will be lower than the stated 4.8kJ for a .50 pistol.
So while killing someone might be possible it does not look like it would happen consistently enough to use this as a fighting method where your first concern is that of stopping your foe before he can do you any harm.
With a rifle you are going to achieve much more energy but it seems impractical (and dangerous) to fight someone at close quarters with just a rifle. The foe could move the muzzle to the side and stab you with the other hand. With a bayonet on the rifle you have a better fighting chance though.
Still it does not look something that has any practical advantage.
As an execution method though it may be. A long, painful method that most likely should be repeated again and again before the poor victim finally dies.
TL;DR: Use a projectile, almost anything might do at close range. And anything will provide more damage to the opponent than shooting just the powder.
[Answer]
`Duncan Drake`'s answer suggests one little extra possibility.
When I mention the bayonet here, bear in mind I do so 40 years after asking a Vietnam vet why anyone would ever use a bayonet and he said no one would if they still had bullets left which I've always thought made so much sense that I've not ever challenged it in my mind. (Lol, after all, it matched my thinking exactly and that's always convincing, right? But it framed the point so perfectly for understanding it.)
So, the bayonet. There you are in this world with no bullets but a loaded gun and involved in what people usually call melee combat, meaning, no guns and really meaning, no bullets. Bayonets are always presented as `STABBING` weapons, in any context I've ever encountered right down to WWI German overcoats apparently being designed to resist said stabs and nothing ever said about slashing. I'm sure a slash or seven would be used if one thought it helpful, but bayonets seem to be stabbing weapons.
So you stab. ANY amount of damage you do in the stab is all to the good, and will be whatever you managed to achieve. But THIS gun is loaded with a full charge, or more, of black powder (where Frank's gun (the vet, above) would have had no bullet or any kind of charge since it was meant for bullet firing). So you COULD, the moment you achieve most of your stab, fire the powder directly into the place of insertion (slightly off, but...) and do all the damage the above answers suggest, but dead on a torn open place on the body. Very close to that body and the hole just made (might fire as pulling out rather than at deepest insertion) that powerful blast would likely have much more serious effect, especially if it did successfully enter the body's interior. At the least, it seems to me the open wound might be terribly enlarged, a nice result in itself.
That might also give you some respect as a man with a "real" spear (the thing a bayoneted rifle comes closest to) or sword grins at you as if you're a dead man and closes in. Anything making such a creature hesitate or not just berserk me is good in my book.
Also consider how it could affect something like a shield. A little care if you can could have you fire right at the part opposite the holder's forearm which, if reasonably close, might even break that arm, quite reducing his effectiveness against you. Additional odd things in this category might include that you can pick your target differently than "going for a kill, always" suggests (a FINE approach, if it is available to your circumstances, but this might not be such a circumstance, so small gains ending in a dead enemy could the good thing to aim for). For example, aim at a foot or knee. The massive punch described above would seriously reduce your enemy's chances. Perhaps in the frenzied parry and thrust, you might get a chance to target the weapon-holding hand. Further, anything that impacts the eyes even partially could be devastating. All little things, desperations perhaps as the properly clad and armed enemy moves in to kill you, but could be gamechangers if they succeed. And when pointing downward, another target most can figure out might be clad in a strong metal cup, so to speak, but the hammer blow others describe could make the phrase **"scraped off"** apply which should take the steam out of an attacker **...**
Surely such a world would see you carrying the gun, usually, as a complete extra to your own proper melee weaponry, but as Frank said, broadening the concept, not the point, you use it (gun in this case, not a bayonet, but still a definite "down the list" choice) when what you really use is not available. Perhaps why you slung it on rather than not carrying the 5-15# extra weight. Maybe an extra sword would've been a better extra, but you had a rifle, not a second sword, so...
]
|
[Question]
[
In my world, fortune tellers and psychics aren't con men but actually possess supernatural abilities. People born into the Romani lifestyle can make repeated and accurate predictions via tarot cards, palm reading, dowsing, astrology, abacomancy, crystal balls, and other forms of divination. Fortune tellers cannot scry more than one year in the future. A future prediction can also be wrong if a new event occurs (like hearing a fortune) and people change their actions. Of course, there is also a chance that the prediction included other people's predictions and created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fortune tellers initially use their abilities to great effect on the stock market, casinos, lotteries, sporting events, foreign policy, etc.
So if you are an entrepreneur who runs a lottery or owns a casino, and you're tired of fortune tellers winning all the time, what do you do? Banning fortune tellers wouldn't work because others would simply hire them. You could hire fortune tellers of your own and try to change the predictions but that could create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Random number generation won't make a difference because the fortune teller knows what the final result is going to be.
[Answer]
## Maximize the impact of the fortune-tellings on the outcome of the draw
Don't use a normal random-number generator to draw the number. Instead use a cryptographic hash function (like SHA-1), to generate a random result from the data describing all the bets.
The beauty of this is that anyone can predict the outcome, but if they then try to use this prediction to place another bet, they would change the outcome.
>
> A future prediction can also be wrong if a new event occurs (like hearing a fortune) and people change their actions.
>
>
>
Thus, any predictions about the drawing would be no better than a random guess if someone hearing a fortune uses this information to change whether or not they place a bet (or how large their bet is).
### EDIT: Example
I initially didn't want to bog down the answer with too much details, but I'll try to give an example, as it might make the idea more clear:
Say the lottery needs to draw six random numbers between 0 and 99, allowing duplicates. The lottery allows bets of any amount on combinations of numbers (and somehow pays out based on the number of correct guesses, but that's not important to the drawing itself).
As @JohnO points out, a random string of letters can be added to the end of the list to avoid non-fortune-tellers to easily compute the result ahead of the announcement. Obviously, a fortune teller would be able to predict this random number, and the outcome of the draw.
The list of bets would look something like this:
```
John Smith $10 10,10,20,30,50,80
Jane Clark $99 5,45,89,90,95,99
Jack Locke $11 4,8,15,16,23,42
Adam Baker $200 1,2,4,8,16,32
MIWPTIUWRSOGBBNLRDEG
```
During the draw, this list (as a text-file) would be passed through a hash-algorithm, to obtain a number such as
```
aa56985b538cf846dee1366cf20fb7f05a08fb59
```
This hash is in fact just a number written in hexadecimal, so we can easily get our 6 numbers by [converting to base 10](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=aa56985b538cf846dee1366cf20fb7f05a08fb59+base+16+to+base+10) and taking the last 12 digits, giving us the numbers 90, 85, 31, 49, 78, and 17.
Now, a fortune teller could predict all of this, and know the numbers ahead of time. However any change to the bets based on this newly devined information would completely change the hashed value, and thus the outcome of the draw.
[Answer]
## Don't bother with small change
Any effective and accurate fortune tellers would be far too rich (and busy) with their demanding jobs forecasting for banks and insurance firms and the Weather Bureau and the military and the police and investment houses and a hundred other vital organizations to bother with piddly little casino heists. They simply won't have the free time, and the payoff is too small to bother.
A few clairvoyants might *own* the casinos as a hobby projects. They would be rich enough. They would obviously know when a heist gang --likely using an inferior clairvoyant who couldn't hold a better job-- was going to work their shed. Then it's clairvoyant vs. clairvoyant for relatively low stakes, and you can have it come out any way you like. Be sure to end it with a big dance number.
[Answer]
# Place bets, then predict:
Lotteries will be easy, and even a casino could still be made to work. There are two factors that allow this. Prediction can alter prediction, and the prediction can't be more than a year in advance.
So fundamentally, you can't predict the outcome of a prediction.
As a result, your Fortune tellers would be making predictions of results that will happen in a year. Lottery players will place their bets, and after all bets are in, the fortune teller will let you know what number will be generated - in a year. Any attempt to predict beyond a year will fail (so pre-predictions of next year's lotto will fail) and any attempt to predict the prediction will fail (because you can't predict the outcome of a prediction, and if you could, then a chain of predictions could potentially see far into the future as you predicted the predicting of predictions, thus violating the year limit).
Casinos might be odd affairs. The wheels and slots are cranking out result before people's eyes that are already known, because they were gambled on LAST YEAR. While a lottery would require just one fortune teller, a casino would require as many as the games they offered.
Anyone who could see even a few extra days into the future would have a huge advantage. But someone's always gaming the system.
Because sports involves so many people and so much statistical prediction already, it would be virtually unaffected - as long as there was a prediction about the game publicly posted. The randomizing effects of so many people on the teams and in the stands would mean tiny perturbations in reality would re-randomize the effects of individual performance. As it is, predictions tell us the likely outcomes of sports events, but they can't guarantee random effects don't change it. Any coach who is told they will lose a game will change their strategy. Even attendance at the stadium can affect the outcomes, and if you think your team will win or lose, it may affect if you go or not.
The other solution is to have games and slot machines with very modest payouts. It allows the fun of the gambling, but any fortune teller who could predict the outcomes would make a lot more money predicting stocks or working for the casinos. So you can still fleece the little guy, and the big fish can play at the (now even more exclusive) high roller tables run by fortune tellers.
[Answer]
## "Reverse Observer Effect"
Get a couple of good, usually reliable fortune tellers. More than two, for safety. Put them into different cabins and have them predict the lottery outcome. Compare the predictions.
* If most/all predictions are the same, do something physical to the random number machine (re-sorting the initial position of the balls, rotating a drum with the tickets, etc.) and repeat the fortune telling to check if that was enough. *That's reacting to hearing a fortune to make it less likely.*
* If the predictions differ, the draw is safe. Hurry, draw the numbers.
[Answer]
**What's the difference between prefect fortune tellers and counting cards?**
People have been cheating casinos since time immemorial. Casinos have been working to keep the cheating in-house1 for that same amount of time. When all is said and done, your fortune tellers are no different than counting cards with a really good memory or using a communication device/computer to keep track of the statistics to bend the odds in the player's favor.
What does the casino do? The same thing they're already doing.
They run real-time statistical analyses against the winners to see if any of them are winning measurably outside the bounds of the (\*ahem\*) "random chance" the casino has built into their games. When they find someone who is winning too often, one of two things will occur.
* In those casinos where corruption is kept remarkably in check, the cheaters are either invited to the door with a warning to never come back or are turned over to the law where they are stripped of their dignity and thrown in jail for cheating.
* In those casinos still enjoying the freedom to run their businesses without too much government oversight, the cheater is hauled out back to have their knee caps broken.
*Problem solved.*
Like all modern casino cheats, the really good fortune tellers will keep their winning to a practical minimum so that they come out ahead but don't get their knee caps broken. Greed may be good when it comes to business, but not so much when you're cheating a casino run by the local mob.
But in the end, your godlike fortune tellers will lose to the simple reality that casino owners go out of their way to understand statistics and probabilities.
*It would do you a lot of good to research what modern casinos do to detect cheaters. It's not a small science — it's a massively involved science that involves everything from serious mathematicians to tech gurus to top-shelf psychologists. All that in an effort to understand the patterns of chance and behaviors of cheaters so well that people can't benefit from the kinds of skills you're suggesting. Similar analyses occur in stock and commodity markets to detect people with too much inside information. The simple truth is, casinos know exactly what random chance looks like and are very good at detecting when it isn't happening. It would be surprising if they didn't understand your fortune tellers better than the fortune tellers do themselves.*
---
1 *All due respect to casinos. They're businesses in an entertainment industry. They're looking to make a consistent and predictable profit and they know very well how to do that: by controlling not-as-random-as-you-think chance to balance the thrill of winning with the common sense that there must be a thousand better places to spend your money. If you believe there's a significant amount of random chance in casinos (not individual games, but casinos as a whole), you need to do some research into casinos.*
[Answer]
## Just make your money off the location
Let the gamblers deal with the risk of cheats.
You just provide a location, some singers, food and booze, all at healthy markups, and have a 2% spread on the chips, that is, people pay 1.02 dollars to buy 1.00 dollars worth of chips.
[Answer]
**Just change how the games work.**
Fortune tellers would not be a big deal for lotteries for example. They would win the big pots and fleece other players with you... It is all about how payouts are set. For example pick 6 numbers. 20% would go to everyone who got all 6 rights, and lesser cuts from down there so that you end up distributing 50-70%. Still leaving healthy margin for the runner. This however means there would not be any guaranteed prizes.
Now casino and other games should be run like poker. People betting against each other or into a pool and the casino only taking a rake. That is cut from the pot. Zero risk of losing money from gambling part. Parimutuel betting for sports would be an option.
Now, getting enough players might not be possible. As most people would lose too many times.
[Answer]
To me the key is this:
>
> A future prediction can also be wrong if a new event occurs (like hearing a fortune) and people change their actions.
>
>
>
If this is true, then making a lottery immune to fortune tellers seems easy enough. After all the tickets have been sold, a prediction is made of winning number. That result is removed from the possible set of results before making the draw.
While not applicable to all games of chance, a similar method could work for many.
The larger question, of course, is how valuable are predictions if the only way they come true is if noone acts on them?
[Answer]
## fortune telling only works on predictable events
there is a fundamental difference between things that someone does not know and things that can't be known. for example, humans don't currently know how many planets orbit our nearest star, but with the right instruments we will eventually figure it out. in contrast, no one can know the position and velocity of any electron. that knowledge is unknowable. similarly, in your fictional world fortune tellers could predict things about the future magically that could be known with enough research, but cannot predict anything fundamentally unpredictable. so having someone guess how many candies are in a jar won't work. but having them guess the polarity of the next photon detected by your photon detector would work fine since it's an unknowable property. realistically, you don't need fancy equipment to do this. quantum uncertainty can be the dominant factor in any sufficiently chaotic physical system. honestly, a standard air-blown lottery ball machine would probably work just fine, since the quantum fluctuations in the air stream would compound fairly rapidly.
further reading: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle>
[Answer]
Don't make the future predictable to 100%. Prediction works like quantum mechanics, just probabilities. So if anyone would be able to predict to 100% accuracy, this represents a huge anomaly even in a world where everyone is able to predict the future. Prediction works with symbols, not numbers ... except the number is a symbol.
[Answer]
# Bribe the police, and break the knees of any fortune tellers.
If anyone cheats in your casino, send some thugs to their house and beat the crap out of them, or their families. If they keep cheating, kill them and their families and bury them somewhere remote.
That has been the standard practice for crime ridden casinos. You can detect cheating with cameras and psychology and statistics models, along with sharing data with other casinos about anyone trustworthy.
[Answer]
## Another perfect opportunity for quantum handwaving about the nature of consciousness!
I (i.e. the person writing this, me, fattie) can in fact predict the future. I'm incredibly good at it. (And indeed, I know others who are even better.) I'm often paid professionally to guess whether, for example, a startup will fail or succeed. (And again, there are others better than me at this.)
There are others who are incredibly good at predicting (say) the winners of certain sports events, and on average they have "magical" records statistically.
Note though that all these things **depend on consciousness being involved**.
If you toss a normal fair coin, **I have absolutely no clue** what the outcome will be.
You can see that in a more magical world, there would be fortunetellers (much better than me) who could predict really accurately a vast array of things.
But just as in the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment, their skills would be not relevant to *purely physical* random outcomes.
(So, in your world, sports betting or horse racing would no longer exists - fortunetellers would ace it every time. But as you ask, gambling (dice games, etc) would behave normally.)
[Answer]
## Games of chance would not work
Things like gambling and other games of chance only work when it's impossible for anybody to reliably engineer a win.
If everyone can reliably engineer a win, the people who run the betting will never be able to make a profit, and so they will close up shop and sell mustache wax instead.
Perhaps book-makers might experiment with a scorched-earth anti-scrying policy, such as:
>
> Any game whose winner placed their bet based on fortune-telling will not pay out, and said winner will be permanently banned from this establishment.
>
>
>
So, imagine that you wait for the ponies to run, and then you know who the winners were, and then you consult your own fortune-teller to find out whether any of those people placed their bets based on a fortune-teller's advice; every person who did gets their money confiscated and is banned.
If that works, great! But if cheaters get more sophisticated, the book-makers will figure it out pretty quick just based on their payout rates, and if they can't invent new preventative measures they will again just have to get out of the business.
Regardless of what actual measures are taken by book-makers, game theory tells us that the continued practice of gambling will always be in grave danger because just one bad actor could end the whole enterprise by deciding to not abide by the rules.
The saying "this is why we can't have nice things" often comes up in contexts like this.
[Answer]
There are two possibilities: either the universe is purely deterministic and you can make reliable, accurate predictions of the future *or* the universe is not purely deterministic and your predictions are unreliable. There is no middle ground to be found here.
>
> A future prediction can also be wrong if a new event occurs (like hearing a fortune) and people change their actions.
>
>
>
In a deterministic universe that can't happen. Everything that will happen is already set in stone and nothing you or anyone else can or will do is going to change the results.
In a non-deterministic universe - not pure chaos, but one in which future events are merely probabilistic - then sure, the introduction of the prediction can change the outcome. Which means that your predictions aren't particularly useful, since there are plenty of other apparently non-deterministic things that could also change the outcome.
Let's consider the weather for a moment. While it might not make much difference to you whether or not it rains on my car today, it will have a minor effect on me. It so happens that we have a leaky roof at work, so rain on my car means water getting into my office. That leak happens to be above the power distribution box, so if it does rain then we're all going home for the rest of the day. (Don't worry, we've got someone coming to address that, hopefully before the next thunderstorm hits.) If that happens a whole bunch of things will be delayed, our clients will have to wait for stuff to happen, some of them will be OK without but at least a few will have to put back their own plans and so on. Eventually the wave of after-effects will spread out to change the future path of any number of things in the world... all because of the weather over my office. If the weather is non-deterministic (which appears to be the case) then the effects of rain on my office are rooted in the non-deterministic and cannot be predicted until, at best, after it does or doesn't rain.
Predicting lottery numbers is like that, only worse. Billions of apparently insignificant things can affect the outcome, and many of those things are directly or indirectly non-deterministic. Roulette? Pfft. The direct data required to accurately predict one fall is insane. Not only do you need to know the precise amount of force imparted to the wheel and the ball, you need complete information about the microscopic imperfections in the ball and the race, the precise consistency of the grease on the axle (which is affected by the exact temperature among other things), the exact structure of the bearings and how they are going to wear during the spin, the exact nature of the air currents, how the ball was positioned before the snap and which part of it is going to impact the pins... and on, and on. Every one of those factors can affect the drop and place the ball in a different slot, so any one of those that is directly or indirectly non-deterministic *ruins* your predictions.
But what about a simple game like Blackjack? Best case scenario, you have 6 sealed decks that are exactly on the nominal production specs, an evenly worn baize on the table and the dealer is slightly inexperienced. Now all you have to worry about is humidity affecting the friction coefficient of the table during the spread, tiny changes in the dealer's muscle tension and fingertip moisture during the riffle, etc. Oh, and let's hope that the dealer put exactly the right number of grains in her morning coffee, didn't get rained on while waiting for the bus to work, that her bus was exactly on time and so on. Because any tiny deviation from the situation you predicted is going to result in radically different outcomes.
---
Long story short (yeah, I know, too late) you can't have it both ways. Either you can make accurate predictions or you can't. Even *really, really good* predictions aren't going to cut it when large amounts of randomness are involved, be it dice, cards, spinning balls or lottery numbers. You might be hell on wheels when it comes to figuring out when your mark customer is going to meet her soulmate, or when a particular stock is going to dip, but if you want to throw money away there are thousands of casinos out there ready, willing and able to take it away from you.
]
|
[Question]
[
Could a jet engine that uses water work?
The idea is that water is sucked in, compressed, and boiled instantly by a dozen mirror focused industrial grade lasers. The resulting super heated gases would be routed out of the engine via a pipe able to adjust where the gases go by up to 10 degrees in any direction. This engine would be mounted on a submarine. Some of the hydrogen and oxygen would be collected for energy generation and life support. Some sodium (from the salt in the water) could also be used in the food. Could this design work in a real ocean? Please tell me any flaws in the design.
[Answer]
Let's analyze this step by step.
* First, you wouldn't be using the water as fuel, but as reaction mass, like an ordinary jet engine uses air.
* You can't really compress water, fortunately, that's not necessary, turning it to steam will provide the required expansion.
* Using lasers to heat the water would be a colossal waste of energy and engineering, as lasers aren't very efficient at turning electricity to heat (at the business end; the energy will end up heating the laser itself instead). It would be much easier and more efficient to heat the water directly like an immersion heater does.
* You seem to assume that heating water to steam will somehow separate it into elemental hydrogen and oxygen, which won't happen. You can electrolyze water, but the energy you'd get from burning that is at most the same you put in. If you can fusion the hydrogen, that's different, but it's not currently attainable technology.
* the sodium (and other stuff in the raw sea water) is actually a huge problem as it will accumulate and gunk up your pipes, you'll need a way to continously get rid of it; also, sea water is notoriously corrosive. Collecting the salt for food would be kind of wasted effort, the small amount of salt you need is trivially carried in store.
That said, if you have a reliable source of high heat, using steam for propulsion might be possible. But if it would provide an advantage over propellers, nuclear subs would already do that probably. Since nuclear reactors primarily produce heat, it would be advantageous for them to not have to produce electrical power first.
[Answer]
**You have updated the venerable pop-pop boat.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QPpRq.jpg)
[Pop-pop boats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_pop_boat) are sweet. They boil water and use the steam for propulsion. The vacuum caused by the steam leaving the boat causes the water reservoir to refill.
Historically these were powered by a candle. The update here is the LASERS. A good reason to heat things with lasers is that the lasers are heavy but you can heat things at a distance so you dont need them on your boat. They can be on shore. There are proposals for space ships that fly because distant lasers are boiling water on their tail ends to propel them with steam. This is [laser propulsion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion) and you are here using it to make steam for a boat. That is fine!
I hope you have supersniper robots keeping the lasers aimed at the boiler or I might be nervous waterskiing behind this boat. Also some robots need to keep anyone else from coming out on the water, because there are lasers. That also helps make waterskiing better because I have the whole lake.
The lasers would look cool at night because you would be able to see them in the mist coming up off the water. It would be like a rock show, and you could play Pink Floyd from the boat. Maybe you could get the pop pop engine to go in time with the music but that might require another robot.
[Answer]
Faulty physics on multiple levels.
Vaporizing water does not produce oxygen or hydrogen; It produces water vapour.
To produce hydrogen and oxygen from water you need electrolysis, not heating, and so cannot contribute to propulsion. And you still can't use the hydrogen and oxygen to fuel your ship because it takes more energy to crack the water than you can get back from it by burning the hydrogen with the oxygen. If it didn't you would have a perpetual motion machine.
You might as well hang onto your fuel and use it directly for propulsion and not waste it in a roundabout, energy-wasting process.
[Answer]
## No
You might be able to use water as a reactant to combine with the vessel's fuel (in effect giving you bonus fuel because you get reaction mass from the outside), but you are wanting to use water as the only fuel source.
Unfortunately, water is fairly stable. It is a product of the decay of energy-rich compounds. It is less energetic than elemental hydrogen and oxygen gas (which is why, when you burn hydrogen, energy and water are released).
This means you can't use any chemical process using only water for fuel to generate more energy than you put into the system. It doesn't matter how you try to break the water apart, the laws of thermodynamics require you to pay for lunch. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
## The vessel would need to go nuclear
There is, in fact, a way that to extract more energy from pure water than you have to pump into it. Fusion. The first problem is we don't have working fusion reactors, so this requires sci-fi future tech.
The next problem is you want a jet engine. Even if you have futuristic fusion plant technology, this would be a *plasma* jet engine, and the problem with a jet of radioactive plasma exhaust hot enough to undergo nuclear fusion is it will be essentially impossible to contain in an engine. The plasma will destroy the engine.
[Answer]
Here's my concern even if everything else worked, which is not certain at all.
This is for a submarine, it is supposed to be stealthy. Your sub would have a huge thermal signature which could be detected. Then send in a few heat seeking missiles (i.e., torpedoes) and they are going to go straight for the engines and blow you to smithereens.
If and only if stealth was a non-factor would this even be useful. If you were exploring the ocean floor for scientific reasons and not military.
[Answer]
## Yes! Sort of.
You have water. You have electricity (which you'd have needed for your lasers anyhow). You even have air since you're in a submarine, not a spaceship, just need to surface occasionally to resupply. Congratulations: You can make [hydrazine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine). Electrolysis to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. Mix the hydrogen with nitrogen from the air, and you've just made hydrazine, a powerful rocket fuel. (It's slightly more complicated than that, but easily explainable with tech-tech.)
Caveat: It will probably *not* be very stealthy, but you'll be one of the *fastest* subs in the ocean, and you might not need stealth all the time if you can outrun everything. You'll probably want to use a more conventional propulsion when you're not in a hurry and want to remain undetected.
[Answer]
You're pointing the lasers in the wrong direction - there is a technology called [supercavitating torpedoes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval), which point an infrared laser or other gas generating technology in the direction of flight so they can travel flying hypersonically in a bubble of steam rather than having to push water out the way.
* Water absorbs IR quite well so using lasers for heating isn't an insurmountable problem, though I don't know if anyone has a torpedo deployed using them, though I have heard it being talked about as a possibility
* it's not enclosed, so scaling up with precipitated matter is not such an issue as it would be vaporising the water in a tube
* this occurs at depth so the bubble is compressed and turns back to water behind the torpedo before reaching the surface, so bubble tracks are not an issue
* travelling at 200 mph the stealth tactics of conventional submarine warfare don't apply, but the noise will scare any whales you don't boil to death
So, most of the issues have mitigations for some applications, the only issue is to create thrust without scaling up with deposits. Something like an [Aerospike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospike_engine) might work, where the expansion is around a core and bounded by the fluid rather than within an enclosed tube like a ramjet would be (the VA-111 does use a ramjet with water as reaction mass, but it has to operate for a minute or so so it doesn't matter if it would be clogged after an hour). Or maybe just turn it off for a few minutes per hour so the water gets to it and most of the deposits can redissolve.
[Answer]
Here's my (sci-fi) idea.
The engine rips the water into hydrogen and oxygen, cold-fusions the hydrogen for energy, and uses the energy proceeds to jet the oxygen and fusion by-products out the rear.
]
|
[Question]
[
Lets assume that the ice anvil is as resistant to physical blows much like a normal anvil and its never melting(will not explode as well). It will always maintain its negative temperature enough to turn human hands into ice with continuous use.
How would an Ice anvil(That never melts or break or explode when exposed to super high temperatures) change forging process as is?
How would it affect the metalworking?
How would it affect forging process?
Is there even a benefit using an ice anvil?
Materially speaking how would anything forged using an ice anvil compare to the normally forged ones?
[Answer]
At 0°C, your 'ice' anvil is about 1000°C below hot metal rather than 980°C below it, which is probably not significant. However real ice is 35 times less thermally conductive than iron, so if your magic ice is the same then it won't conduct the heat out of the metal being worked, and that might mean the metal stays hot longer. Compare how long it takes your hands to get cold holding an ice cube vs an iron railing - both will freeze your hand eventually but the iron 'sucks' the heat out much faster. I don't think it would end up requiring more heats than a iron anvil.
Real ice is much less stiff than iron, with a compressive strength of 6 vs over 100, so you'd need extra magic to make it a good anvil. But then you already seem to have assumed it won't just break.
>
> Is there even a benefit using an ice anvil?
>
>
>
Assuming the magic allows it, you could put moulds on it and pour on water to create ice form dies for complex shapes or jigs for bending.
[Answer]
When you forge something on the anvil you want it to stay hot as long as you need for working it, so that it keeps its plasticity.
Cooling or quenching is done only after the forging is finished. Anything that speeds that unwanted cooling up negatively affects the work being performed.
Just to name a few potential issues, it can embrittle the piece or it can induce unwanted residual tensions.
[Answer]
**Frame challenge**
You have redefined ice and changed its properties so much that is no longer ice.
If you're going to do all that, why not just redefine the melting point of ice as well and say that it is not made of hydrogen and oxygen?
A. If you want the *appearance* of ice, then instead have a high-melting-point transparent ceramic or mineral.
B. If you want the *temperature* of ice (which isn't fixed anyway - it can be anything from 0°C right down to near absolute zero), just use an iron forge and pack its base in ice of the appropriate temperature.
**Conclusion**
If you just want an anvil that is to be used at 0°C, put an iron one out on a freezing winter's day and let the blacksmith work outside. Compared to the temperature of the iron that is being forged, an anvil at 0°C will be no different to an ordinary anvil that is at, say 15°C.
[Answer]
# An experienced blacksmith will make it work
Blacksmithing requires thinking on your feet. It's as much an art as a science. Sometimes you have a tool that just doesn't want to behave right or your forge isn't quite the right temp or you find an imperfection in your metal, etc etc. Your question is about the final product. An experienced smith will be used to adjusting to problems that are more serious than a cold anvil.
I'm new to blacksmithing so I have to go back and reheat my metal more often than an experienced blacksmith. If you have a *super* cold anvil, your smiths might have to do the same since their metal could cool faster than usual. That doesn't make a big difference in the final product, but if you want to come up with some difference for your story, check out [this discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blacksmith/comments/2m8iv1/can_you_heat_metal_too_much/) or [this one](https://www.iforgeiron.com/topic/46943-can-you-over-forge-metal/) about the effects of repeated reheating.
[Answer]
Iron fuses at 1538ºC, and it becomes [malleable at 900 C](https://www.britannica.com/technology/iron-processing/The-metal).
Assuming you mean that your ice forge is at around 0 C (and not 0 K), if the iron is retired from the furnace at 1000 C, the difference between your "ice anvil" and a regular anvil at room temperature will be a mere 3% of the difference with the metal.
Not really significative.
Even if your ice anvil is at 0 k, then the difference would be a mere 27%. Perhaps it would lead to a considerably shorter time between reheating the metal, but nothing more.
[Answer]
Frame Challenge
If your magic can make the ice anvil suitable for use as an anvil, you're better off using your magic to smith your weapons. The material control to manipulate ice in that manner far exceeds creating a perfect blade. Even if you have to make your weapons out of this never melting ice material (aka only frost magic), you're manipulating far less metal.
If the answer is just "this ice anvil is awesome cus magic", that works and you can impart any properties you want on the items smithed on it in that case, but I don't think I could buy it as a reader
Sorry to be a debbie-downer, but I don't see a believable way to make it practical
]
|
[Question]
[
My story features Renaissance-era feudal society with working space travel. Humans are able to travel around the Solar System (Earth, Mars, asteroid belt, moons of Jupiter) in spacecrafts fitted with solar sails. These crafts are manufactured in space and never see the ground.
My question is, how can these people get into and out of space without rockets and without resorting to handwavy magic? What alternatives exist?
[Answer]
Not strictly "medieval", but we're going with sci-fi, so...
# Lost Precursor Technology
There were ancient people at a much higher level of technology. Are they the ancestors of the current feudal society who suffered some sort of disaster? Did they leave and did these new people evolve on what was once their homeworld? Were they only here briefly and installed some stuff?
Doesn't matter, what *does* matter is that they installed a set of large-capacity [space elevators](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator) around the globe. Many settlements are located around the bases of these impossible structures because they've become items of worship due to their mind-bending scale. Their maintenance and operation is automated - one need only get in and press "up" and one will be dropped off in space.
Automated energy weapons also kill anyone attempting to damage the elevator with no warning, lending an added element of "gods' wrath" to the worship of these colossal relics.
## Alternatively...
You could go with the style of [The Road Not Taken](https://www.eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf). Antigravity and/or hyperdrive are easy, we humans just didn't go down the right paths to find them. This is effectively magic, but it's also the only way you're not subject to the rocket equation.
## Overall Problems
Even with a hand up into space, a medieval technology society with solar sails beggars belief. Making a vessel air-tight would have been near-impossible. Manufacturing the ultra-thin, ultra-light, ultra-huge material for a solar sail would have been *completely* impossible. Being able to carry sufficient air and provisions for the months of travel between planets would be *completely* impossible (spoilage would have done them in before arrival). But this is ultra-soft sci-fi, so as long as you don't draw much attention to them, you can *probably* get away with it.
[Answer]
# Cartoon Physics
Julius Verne was a great author, writing steampunk fiction with broken science that sounded logical to the average reader of his time. Any nerd from even a century or two before him could see the errors though.
But supposing that the physics of the Verneverse are valid, take a page from his book *From the Earth to the Moon*.
In this book there is a club of Americans who fiercely compete to see who can america the most (i.e.: who can make the biggest gun). Goes to show how timeless this piece of work is.
So at one point one guy tries to outamerica his peers by landing a shot on the expletive Moon, as a manner of greeting whatever people might live there (insert the theme song of Team America here). Then out of the *sacre bleu* a French guy comes along and says "Bonjour, I'm Michel Ardan and this is Jackass!" Just kidding - Jackass hadn't been invented yet. Instead Ardan said "hey, if you make the bullet hollow then you and me can sit inside and use it as an interplanetary vessel", which is a longwinded way to say the same thing.
And then they do it. They dig a 270m (900 ft) hole to act as a barrel, fill the bottom with gunpowder guncotton and load the "vessel". They shoot and, to add insult to insult, they expletive miss.
Now in our own boring universe, any steel from the 1860's would have been obliterated (edit: to make matters worse, they used... tin). Even if the capsule would survive, it wouldn't fly at enough speed to go into space, and if it did, then the americanauts would become a thin paste on the bottom of the projectile. But in the Verneverse they make it alive into space.
As long as your universe follows the same cartoon physics, people should be able to replicate the feat - even with more rudimentary technology.
[Answer]
Naturally occurring space elevators
Your society may live on a world where plant or animal life exists that forms a natural space elevator. For example, giant plants that live in the upper atmosphere that have vines that reach ground level, and seed pods that travel to other worlds to pollinate other space pants that can be used as shuttle craft.
Thinks wind pollination but on a solar system scale
[Answer]
**Tame wild space horses**
*The Reefs of Space* (Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, 1964) features a whole ecosystem living in the vacuum of space...including air-breathing mammal-like animals (sleeths) that have mysterious internal organ(s) that keep a bubble of air around them as they swim reactionlessly among the reefs of the Oort cloud.
Sleeths occasionally journey close enough to the sun to wander onto the curious large planets. Being mammalian, they can be somewhat domesticated. Their jetless drive works just as well in atmosphere as space.
Create your own space-horses, have some wander close enough to encounter your Medievals, and then chariot across the cosmos.
[Answer]
## Hyperspace
Usually hyperspace is an alternate dimension where the distances between points is shorter, but that doesn't have to be the case.
In The Long Earth, somebody figures out how to step into an alternate reality Earth with a very simple to reproduce "stepper box." It's a little hand-wavey, but allows for a lot of options. In that story, there are an unlimited number of alternate Earths, but you have to step through them one at a time.
One of them is what's called the "gap Earth," where the planet itself doesn't exist. If you take that to a logical extreme, even if the distances aren't shorter, you're still operating without gravity. You would hop out to that other vacuum and ride your 1000 mph momentum to a spot outside the atmosphere, and accelerate from there.
[Answer]
# Hot Air Balloons and Ornithopters
According to Wikipedia, Vijaypat Singhania set a world record and reached an altitude of over 20,000m in a hot air balloon in 2005.
So, what I would suggest is to have a hot air balloon lift your space faring capsule to an altitude of ~30km, then detaching from the balloon and using an ornithopter mechanism in combination with your solar sails to reach even higher, before dropping the ornithopter mechanism for weight savings, and using only solar sails to take you the rest of the way.
As with all answers, this wouldn't actually work, but I think it would fit your aesthetic very well
[Answer]
About 50 years I had a dream where the Roman Empire had a space program and other advances. And I had another dream where the Holy Roman Empire in the time of Frederick I had a space program. While I was dreaming those dreams I believed they were real history. I was really disappointed when I woke up. And if you write a really good story about space travel with medieval tech, readers may believe you while reading, and not realize how implausible it is until after reading.
I can add one more way for medieval people to acquire space travel.
Poul Anderson's classic novel *The High Crusade* (1960) opens with an alien spaceship landing in Medieval England. The English people capture the spaceship and become lost in space. They lead a revolt to overthrow the alien space empire and replace it a new space empire, but can't find their way home to Earth.
And in Larry Niven's Known Space series, the Thrint and the Kzinti acquired space travel the same way, stealing spaceships from visitors and conquering them.
So possibly in your story a group of people with medieval technology have managed to conquer and rule at least one world with advanced interplanetary or interstellar travel.
And they have to live at least part time in a world or worlds with advanced technology they don't understand in order to supervise their more advanced subjects. But they take long vacations from that work, spending vacations on less advanced worlds which are more understandable to them and which may be their main homes. And they travel between medieval and advanced worlds and societies in spacecraft they don't understand and which they decorate to look like they were built by medieval craftsmen.
I also point out at a society with a medieval level of technology doesn't have to be medieval European. And of course technology was different in different parts of Europe at the same time, and usually more advanced in AD 1500 than in 500. Other medieval era societies had technological levels anywhere from stone age hunter-gatherers to Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans, the eastern Roman or "Byzantine" Empire, the Caliphate, the Delhi Sultanate, Song and Ming Dynasty China, etc.
[Answer]
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/x73mi.png)
Building stairs might be a very slow process. But trying over the years. I think we can reach the space.
[Answer]
What about biological (living!) rocket ships that can survive in the vacuum of space?
Suppose the inhabitants of your world have bred animals, over many millennia, that can generate propulsion via internal chemical reactions.
Passengers and crew are carried inside a chamber in the organism.
Harry Harrison developed a bio-tech civilization similar to this (although there was no space travel) in his *West of Eden* science fiction novels.
[Answer]
**Babylonian ["updraft"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower) tower**
Ancestors of your civilization managed to achieve what our did not. Using analogous technology to the solar-sailed craft, they built the hollow tower that extends most of the way you need.
Geothermal energy is used to heat the air at the base to near-lava temperatures. Stack effect gives you whizzing winds in the tower, on which your people would ride in capsules hanging from heat-resistant parashot upwards, even getting considerable momentum at the end, so tower 'shoots' them the last step somewhere, where prepared orbiting craft can dip into sufficiently low orbit to snatch the capsule.
[Answer]
You could use an "active support" structure, like a Space Fountain/Tower or Loftrom/Launch Loop. These look similar to a Space Elevator from the outside, but they don't require super-strong materials. Instead, they contain a stream of mass travelling round and round a loop that's either oriented vertically (for a Fountain/Tower) or otherwise angled upwards (for a Loop). That mass is usually assumed to be steel pellets, so it can be guided with magnets; although a continuous cable or chain could be used in principle (but may suffer from large vibrational modes).
Imagine firing a gun vertically, at a target that's lower than the peak of the bullet's trajectory: we get pushed into the ground by the recoil, whilst the bullet will slam into the bottom of the target, pushing it upwards slightly. Now imagine someone attached to the target, who digs out the bullet and fires it back down to us: they get another upwards push from the recoil, whilst we get pushed down again when it hits us. Now imagine doing that over and over, in a constant stream. A practical device would need to replace those guns with something less destructive: in the real world we'd use electromagnets; a medieval setting could use a rope or chain driven by a wheel, or heavy slugs thrown by catapult, etc. (in general we'd want something mechanically powered, to avoid using up gunpowder)
The advantages over a Space Elevator are:
* No need for unobtainium (since there's no tether)
* Can be built anywhere, not just over the equator
* Ability to build up from the ground (rather than down from geostationary orbit)
This last point is interesting, since the system can all be built on the ground, then turned on to gradually lift up the top of the loop. Multiple streams can be used in parallel to support one platform, and towers can be built on top of other towers (as long as the lower towers can support the weight of everything above). The streams can be used to transfer energy up the tower (mechanically or electromagnetically), which is useful for powering the turnaround mechanism at the top. Structures at any point along the stream (either upward or downward) can also "tap into" it to hold themselves up; e.g. wooden or stone architecture that could not support its own weight otherwise.
The main impossibility of such devices is their power requirements. In steady-state we only need to replenish the friction losses; but starting it up and lifting the platforms takes an enormous amount of energy (although, as previously stated, it can be done gradually as desired).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain>
<https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47e1bb1fc898c>
<https://hackaday.com/2022/01/01/attack-of-the-eighty-foot-string-shooter/>
[Answer]
Depending on your definitions, it could be argued that some nations in the 20th century and even today are both "feudal" and "spacefaring".
[Answer]
Actually rockets may be the most realistic scenario. Primitive forms of rockets (fireworks) already existed in China at that time. The problem is having a fuel which could be used to reach escape velocity, without all the knowledge gained only in later centuries. This however could be achieved, if only we allow using some technology without the actual knowledge why it works.
I would opt here for the nuclear power, as it can be justified without such knowledge, if we assume it were discovered accidentally during researching something else. And it could be: e.g. at that time Venice was leading producer of glass products (Murano glass), yet in later centuries it was superseded by Czechia (bohemian glass).
If we assume bohemian glass was a thing a bit earlier than in our reality, and that uranium glass was accidentally invented at that time, by experimenting with various ores (e.g. in Jachymov), it gives a quite plausible explanation for pure uranium being in active use and research, without any knowledge of modern chemistry or nuclear physics.
Let’s suppose then, some alchemist out of curiosity somehow manages to accidentally enrich it on a centrifuge, and causes a nuclear explosion destroying the whole city.
As renaissance Italy was a bunch of independent cities instantly at war, such weapon would gain instant attention of every ruler. Just in this reality, instead of Leonardo da Vinci’s tanks, they will get Leonardo da Vinci’s nuclear warheads (and probably an excommunication of anybody who actually uses it).
And all this assumes only trial and error (and lot of innocent victims) and no actual need for the XX century physics.
From here we can just assume the trial and error (justified and funded by the usefulness in war) leads to finding that this form of energy can be controlled by neutron reflectors. Since those are substances as simple as the graphite, we could still assume it’s reached without understanding why it works.
And having nuclear reactor that can be manually (!) controlled, and its power directed in one direction, you have a rocket propulsion system capable of reaching escape velocity.
Now you only need some religious explanation, why anybody involved in operating such a vessel has burns, ulcers and dies in pain.
[Answer]
**Alternate Earth.**
You don't need an Earth sized planet to have sapient life on it. Make it Moon sized and then you can build a space elevator out of steel.
[Answer]
Well, all they need is a cannon and a capsule and way to survive the acceleration.
The canon is easy- its just a long stone channel into an active volcano, with a controllable water reservoir overhead.
The capsule seems doable, although reentry and oxygen would be a problem. Lets assume they have oxygen candles with them, as it pleases the gods (which they are visiting).
Now how to survive this acceleration?
There are animals that can recover after large traumas. They would be the first test-pilots.
I have no idea how a ancient civilization with marble benches would survive the thousands of Gs.
Maybe transfer "counter" acceleration Gs into a dozens gimbals whirring with rotational energy that chancel out the redirected acceleration? ;)
]
|
[Question]
[
In the distant future a breakthrough in cryostasis technology can put healthy people into frozen state so that all metabolism halts and cells never age a bit, the spaceship is carrying them across billions of light years hopping between star systems in search of newfound hospitable planet.
I am wondering if the journey spans several centuries what benefit would encourage people to wake from cryostasis state periodically?
The ship's AI had plotted a route in interstellar space to avoid crossing path with asteriods and high velocity giant molecular gas and clinical trials suggested that cryostasis is 99.99% safe to use.
We know that human being requires high maintenance so would it be optimal if everybody wakes at the destination instead of in batches enroute and wasting on the essential resource like oxygen and water.
[Answer]
1. Ship maintenance. While automated, one still needs to mitigate the not null risk of unforeseen events that require prioritization of repairs and better-taken-by-humans kind of decisions.
2. cryostasis may be 99.99% safe, but the number of cells damaged by high energy particles grows over time. While active (not in stasis), the body eliminates the nonviable/dead cells and replaces them.
3. "cryostatis induced dementia" - unless the cryostasis happens at temperatures within fractions of K to zero absolute, the biochemical configuration defining the strength of neural synapses will drift over time. The biochemistry of the body will still define a viable organism, but the memory and intellectual capabilities of the human brains degrades (a bit of plausible handwaving on the line of "the whole greater than the sum of parts", where cryostasis fails to preserve the relations even when it preserves 99.99% of the parts)
As a note: current level of cryogenics can't even guarantee the quality of [cryopreserved sperm](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5365198/) over 20 years, so your 99.99% safety of cryostasis already requires handwaving.
[Answer]
Another possibility is that if you use grounded hibernation tech, you'd need to wake up so that your body could self repair every so often. Even if the system is perfectly shielded from the outside, the body has [naturally occurring radioactive atoms](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/slowerlight.php#id--Go_Slow--Lifespan--Sleeper_Ship) that cause damage, which means you'd probably need to thaw out every fifty or so years. If this was done properly in shifts you could also use it to make sure the ship was running without problems as a bonus.
In terms of the AI side of things, Stuart Russel has a potentially interesting [solution to the control problem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBK-a94IFHY) that essentially says that AI should be constructed as a perfect altruist that never assumes that it knows better than a person, and will rely on people as its basis for what they want and need. Having an AI like that operate without people could potentially cause problems.
[Answer]
It would take hundreds of years to prove that the cryostasis works for hundreds of years. ("Our simulations say it will be perfectly safe for 5000 years" "They said that about the nuclear jet pack, and look what happened there. Simulation is not enough.")
I suspect the only way to keep your insurance valid will be to bring patients round after every X years (X being the guaranteed safety rating of the device) and check everything is fine, update them on current events etc. They only need to be awake for a day every few decades, so it won't have much effect on their journey overall. If anyone wants to volunteer for untested, unknown-safety hibernation longer than the warranty allows, that's up to them, but it's at their risk and no refunds if you end up permanently popsicled or messily thawed.
[Answer]
Why do [people spend months lying in beds](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150506-the-underground-space-sleep-lab) despite being healthy?
Why do people spend months living in places like an Antarctic base or a cave hundreds of meters underground?
Why do [people spend years of their life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie#New_elements) playing with radioactive substances that will later kill them through that radiation?
For the same, simple answer: intellectual curiosity, a.k.a. science.
You can automate a lot of functions, but you need a trained human mind to recognize interesting events and investigate them.
Observing the depths of space without the bother of a close-by star is a unique opportunity for many observations. It makes sense that scientists would want to take the chance of using such a once-in-a-lifetime laboratory.
[Answer]
**Wakeup time**.
If it takes several hours to several days to wake people up from cryosleep, then even though the odds of something requiring human intervention are low, the fact that if something did happen everyone would be dead before a human could be woken to fix it would be a good incentive to keep emergency crews awake through the whole trip.
You'd rotate them through so that nobody gets too much older than everyone else.
"Earth Star Voyager" is a pretty good two-part serial with a similar setup if you can find a copy. They have an AI that can run the ship, but they run shifts of human crew to deal with unforeseen circumstances. (And it's a good thing they do because there's a plot afoot, obviously.)
[Answer]
Two possibilities come immediately to mind:
1) Hot bunking. If there are more people than cryopods on the ship, then someone has to be thawed in order for someone else to go into stasis. (One story possibility this presents is if the excess population is simply a small maintenance staff, they could become a hereditary caste of protectors/guides as they rotate in and out of stasis for the centuries of the journey, while the bulk of the population remains frozen for the entire trip. What happens when they arrive, everyone wakes up, and the proud caste of protectors expect to be honored for their generations of service, but the ever-sleepers still see them as nothing more than glorified janitors?)
2) Freezer burn. Long-term, uninterrupted cryostasis could have a number of negative side-effects which cause permanent damage to the body (or mind, especially if you take a dualist view in the story) and/or make it less likely that the sleeper can be successfully awakened.
[Answer]
A couple points:
1. Cryopreservation of humans is not some far future distant dream. It's a modern reality, so you don't need distant future for that. (See: Alcor)
2. In many states, there are fully AI run trains. However, they require a human conductor anyway, as basically someone who can pull the 'stop' in case a situation unforeseen by the AI's designers comes about. It's basically a safety check.
So this is a story that could easily be set a few decades from now. So combine these two, everyone is specialists in different things, so people would be continually cycled through, every so often, so that someone can just be there to 'pull the emergency lever' if need be. On a massive ship of thousands, it could easily just be a couple people at a time awake, and everyone on the ship gets one shift during the thousands-years journey.
[Answer]
What does it actually mean if cryosleep is 99.99% save?
Here is a simple answer: if you put 10000 people to sleep, 99.99% of them wake up okay. This implies that one of them does not. How many people do you have on your ship? If it is more than 10000, you better have some extras.
A slightly more complex definition:
If you cryo-sleep for 1 hour, you have a 99.99% chance to wake up okay. If you sleep for two hours, your chance to wake up okay is 0.9999\*0.9999 = 0.9998, so, 99.98%.
If you sleep for 5 hours, your chance to wake up okay already decreased to 0.9999^5 = 0.9995 (99.95%). If you sleep an entire day, it is 0.9999^24, so 99.76%.
Sleeping an entire week (7 days), means you are okay with a chance of 98.3%. Your chance after an entire year (365 days) is 41%. Less than a coin flip.
Question is what happens to the math if you wake up in regular intervals? When I do the calculation like this, it does not change anything. The probability to survive your first 365-day interval is 41%, your probability to survive two 365-day intervals is 16%, same as for a 730-day interval (two years!).
I would consider it reasonable to say that the 99.99% only apply, say, for the first month: Being in cryosleep for one month is 99.99% save. Being in cryosleep for two month is only 80% save. Now if you wake up in between, you have a probability of 99.98% to be okay overall. If you do not wake up in between, your chance is just 80%.
You can design the probabilities to fit your plot, and use the answers others gave to argue why longer periods of cryosleep are more dangerous.
[Answer]
# Lonely AI
The AI is afraid it will get lonely and has insisted that it have human company during the trip.
Alternatively, the designers of the AI are worried it will go insane over the years without human input to ground it.
Either way, you need some people awake to keep the AI happy and sane, and you need more people awake to keep the first people happy and sane.
And, as others have pointed out, you want everybody to age at approximately the same rate, so they take shifts.
[Answer]
It's common knowledge that all living beings have a soul. This is why, despite all technology, actual *life* is still a kind of magical mystery that we cannot reproduce. A living human and a dead human have the same amount of atoms. Despite this, we are, for some reason, unable to transform one into the other (well, it *does work* in one direction!).
The reason for all that is that your body is not just flesh, or biochemistry, but also an anchor for what we call, in lack of a better description, the *soul*.
The body connects to the soul via a kind of elastic bond. We do not know how exactly it works, but we do know from observation that it is that way.
You have probably already had the chance to witness it yourself. When you have a bad hangover, you feel like you're standing besides yourself. You literally are! As your body is not functioning properly, it doesn't do a particularly good job at anchoring your soul.
Luckily, the elastic bond is quite durable and flexible, so no bad things happen even when you travel in an airplane with a bad hangover. The trip *truly* isn't going to help with the hangover, but eventually, after a good night's rest and a good meal, your body will pull its soul back into place.
Now, a starship is another story, it travels at stellar speed and distances are, well... on an astronomical scale, literally. If you stay in stasis indefinitely, you will eventually, after a few hundred million kilometers, reach a point where the bond ruptures. That's bad because your body will no longer be able to pull your soul into place once you are woken.
Thus, it is necessary to wake before that happens.
[Answer]
Without nanotech-repairs you would need to wake up periodically anyways.
Just because you're frozen doesn't mean that the you are invulnerable. The cumulative radiation released from the radioactive decay of elements in your body, and the materials your ship are made of, and just anything that leaks past your shielding from the cosmos can be significant.
You need to awake periodically so the body's mechanisms can repair itself.
[Answer]
**Legal reasons**
*In the year 2200 the media mogal and wealthiest person alive, Lucy Portabello, entered cryosleep to avoid dying from her incurable cancer.*
*Over 200 years later her decedents launched a legal challenge against her estate. They claimed that the cancer remained incurable, and probably would be for all time. Thus Lucy was essentially already dead and her wealth should be passed to her inheritors.*
*The legal battle was long and protracted, and ended only when Lucy's estate went bankrup.
As a result a new law was passed by the Supreme Government of Humanity United (a totally non-fascist government for everyone everywhere and at all times - Praise the Leader!). This law stated that any person to have been in cryosleep for a continuous period of over 200 years is considered legally dead.*
As a conseqeunce all colony ships revive their sleeping crews from stasis at least once every 200 years. The ships food/oxygen/water recyling can only keep up with part of the crew waking up at a time.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Question:** Given the rules of my world as explained below, how can I justify "The First Iron Law of Necromancy?"
---
A living person can't simply raise the dead from their slumber, only somebody who is dead, themselves, can do it. This fact is reflected in "the first iron law of necromancy," which is commonly known by all practitioners of all kinds of magic. I would like to see possible *reason* for this law.
**The Rules Thus Far**
In necromancy, the word "dead" has a more precise meaning than in everyday speech.
* A living person (regardless of species) has a soul. Compare this to, for example, plants, which have a living biological process, but do not have souls. In necromancy, a plant cannot be dead because, not having a soul, it was never "alive" to begin with.
* A person is "alive" when their soul is not in the world of the dead, not even partly. Their soul is entirely in the world of the living.
* A person is dead when their soul is either entirely or partly in the world of the dead. Once a soul has entered that world it cannot entirely leave it.
* An undead person is one whose soul has been stretched between the two worlds. They are **not** partly alive and partly dead, they are 100% dead, as if you have a soul you can be either entirely alive or entirely dead, with no gradation between them.
**Raising the dead** means to stretch souls of the dead from the world of the dead partly into the world of the living, i.e. make them undead.
Because it is impossible to escape the world of the dead it is impossible to be fully resurrected. This is "The Second Iron Law of Necromancy," true resurrection (bringing a soul entirely into the world of the living) is impossible.
**To get ability to raise the dead you need to pay a price:** In order to become a necromancer you need to perform a ritual that will kill you, but at the same time will preserve some of your connections with the world of the living. You become, in my world, a lich. The ritual must be executed flawlessly or the wanna-be-necromancer will be just plain dead.
Many people would like to raise the dead without performing the ritual and paying the price. But alas, this is impossible.
You can help me to explain why it's impossible to break the First Iron Law of Necromancy and thus avoid need to perform the ritual.
[Answer]
**You need to make your request in person.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oPVpG.jpg)
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacquesson_de_la_Chevreuse_Orph%C3%A9e_aux_enfers_(2004_1_121).jpg>
Orpheus wanted his dead love back, and so he went the the underworld and made the request in person. So too your necromancers. The lords of the dead will not come to you, but if you have the right introductions (like from your dad the god Apollo) and you show up in person, and your court manners are good, they will hear what you have to say.
You might return with your dead love. You might return with an army of the dead. You might not return. You yourself are one of the dead people whose return you are negotiating.
[Answer]
The liminal state is necessary.
"Liminal" means threshold, and by performing this rite, necromancers basically install themselves on the doorway between life and death. This gives them the power to usher people in and out.
Figuratively, they keep the door open by standing in it. If you are alive, the door is just shut. And if you are merely dead, you pass through the door, and it shuts again. Only necromancers stand *between* life and death.
[Answer]
There is a concept called **sympathetic magic**, which is a system where a magical act requires the caster to make use of an aspect of reality to amplify or direct it.
For example, in order to cause rain over farmlands, the caster executes a ritual of sprinkling water over a plant. To lay waste to an enemy army, you sacrifice one of their soldiers in a blood ritual. To bring upon the winter solstice, you make a whole theatric play about the rebirth of the sun and so on.
Like produces like. To command the dead, you first become dead and command your own self. That will give you comprehension of the state of death that a living mind cannot attain, and thus you become able to properly cast necromantic spells.
[Answer]
### Because only then can they survive with a partial soul.
Life is either 100% alive or 100% dead. It's boolean. When normal people become not 100% alive, they die.
By performing the ritual and becoming a lich, they are able to travel the grey area in-between and survive non 100% life force.
They are able to then lend part of their life force to those they animate. This also helps explain some useful limitations:
* why they can animate an army of low intelligence beings for a big fight, or one high intelligence human that passes for alive. But can't get quality and quantity.
* if they animate too many beings, they're weakened.
* if they keep animating so much they die, their soul lives on distributed in their spawn. Another necromancer can reunite part of their soul with the body to bring them back.
[Answer]
Magic uses energy channeled from a primal source. A mage who wants to cast a spell needs to pull energy from somewhere to power the spell since humans don't contain enough energy to manifest the effect. A fireball (to use the classic example) contains far more energy than any human can actually contain, barring conversion of mass. Therefore the energy for the spell has to be drawn from somewhere - the environment, the elemental plane of fire or some other source of energy.
Not only does the spell require a sufficient amount of energy, it needs the right *type* of energy. If you're casting a wall of ice then you need to channel cold energy, a lightning bolt needs lightning energy and so on. The caster gathers the energy, then channels it into the framework of the spell.
The act of channeling these energies is destructive to the caster's body, and any mage who attempts to over-draw these energies will suffer from it. Over time a mage builds up a resistance to these channelled energies, allowing them to cast more powerful spells with those energies. A powerful Fire Mage has built up resistance and mitigation techniques, perhaps learned to use external channels to beef up his total energy limit.
Necromancy on the other hand requires the channeling of Unlife, the energy of Death. Even the smallest amount of death energy is vastly disruptive to the life processes of a living caster. While a live mage may be able to channel tiny motes of death energy to perform cantrip-level Necromantic spells, it is almost impossible to perform feats of true Necromancy without harming yourself. The energy required to animate a corpse or 'raise' the dead through Necromancy is just flat out fatal to any living caster.
The only way to avoid being killed by the energy you are channeling is to already be dead.
*But wait,* I hear you ask, *what about those external channels you mentioned earlier?*
Ah, glad you were paying attention.
There are two ways you can mitigate the effects:
* Practice hard enough for long enough to learn how to channel all of the energy outside of your body.
* Use a different, opposed energy to protect you from the effects.
The second form is, of course, how the priestly types do it. When they have to channel death energy they do it through conduits reinforced with life energy, tightly bound to contain the energy without negating it. They're all about the life energy, the smug gits.
The other road is a lot more difficult, and the odds are pretty high that the process of learning is going to kill you before you get that far. Without the ability to directly channel fairly large amounts of energy initially you have to find a way to control the energy differently to how others work with their own energy. This is not just hard, it's time consuming. Like multiple decades to even get started, then many more decades to slowly build up the power to the point you need it. Humans don't have that much time, generally speaking, they can't just spend a couple of centuries mastering the basics. And one bad move in that time is probably going to kill you anyway. It's a risky path.
Elves though? Dragons? Other long-lived intelligent species? Yes, they could probably do it. Maybe there are some living Necromancers out there, but they're pretty rare.
[Answer]
**No living soul remembers how anymore.**
That knowledge is held only by the dead who have already been raised. The dead keep *trying* to tell the secret to the living...but the King's goons and bounty hunters ruthlessly burn out and run down anybody foolish enough to listen.
The King's penalty for necromancy (by the dead) is removal of all limbs, then ten years of impalement, followed by cremation.
The King's penalty for necromancy (by the living) is five days of torture followed by cremation while still (barely) alive.
The King is no fool, and doesn't want his realm overrun by a bunch of magical upstart warlords. That's why he's already dug up and incinerated all the corpses in the graveyards, and why his goons outnumber and hunt the few remaining risen dead. The realm's woodlands are quite a bit smaller, but they will grow back.
[Answer]
**Connection is key.**
In my own setting, to cast magic one must have a connection to the natural energies of the world itself (AKA mana). If we assume a similar mechanic for your world, then the First Iron Law makes perfect sense.
In order to be undead, one must emulate a state of undeath, and therefore one must understand undeath. What is undeath? **Something dead, retaining or imitating some aspect or traits of life.** In my mind, I'd define it as a "shadow" of life, not quite darkness (read: death) or light (read: life).
Shadow only exists through its connection to light and dark; it is defined by those two opposites, same as warm could not exist without hot and cold. Therefore, in order to be undead, one must have a connection to life *and* death, and this is where things get tricky.
When one is in a coma, often this entails that one is between life and death, as evidenced by the near-death experiences people have in this state. Therefore, in order to fulfill this condition and become capable of necromancy, one must enter a functional version of a comatose state, and thus walk the line between life and death, becoming a shadow of life itself.
How is this accomplished? That's for you to find out!
[Answer]
... in order to communicate with souls of the dead that haven't been raised yet you need to have your soul in the world of the dead. A necromancer achieves this by stretching their own soul between both the world of the dead and the living. They anchor part of their soul in the world of the living (this is why they are able to raise themselves) and another part in the world of the dead (this is why they need to die in order to become a necromancer).
[Answer]
### The living don't know where to look for dead souls
In order to raise a soul to undeath, you must first find it. Necromancers have invented a number of different techniques to track down specific souls within the world of the dead, but none of these techniques work unless you already know how to get there—the path to take. And the only way to figure that out is to go there yourself. By dying.
Oh, some living wizards have *tried* to pin down the exact location of the world of the dead. They've interviewed necromancers, analyzed zombies, proposed new schemas for inter-dimensional coordinate systems...but nothing works. They're like people who have been blind from birth, trying to understand what colors are. There is simply no language for the knowledge they seek. If you've died, you just *get* it; if you haven't, you don't.
In theory, a necromancer who was fully restored to life would retain all their necromantic powers, since it's only the knowledge that matters and not the state of being dead. Or so some scholars think. It's not like anyone's had a chance to test the idea.
P.S. Under this framework, it's entirely plausible that souls raised by necromancers could become necromancers themselves. If you don't want to allow that, you may need to establish a separate restriction (Third Iron Law?). Or perhaps this is not an issue for social reasons (e.g. necromancers are wary of rivals, so they immediately un-raise any minions who show interest in necromancy themselves).
[Answer]
The living are still playing the game and so have to abide by the rules. The dead are out of the game, and so the rules don't apply.
Imagine a game where you play a role. You are a Hero who faces boundless adversity, and daily danger of death, who must endlessly solve puzzles to survive and prosper. You can get so involved in the game that you forget that it isn't real. You are totally immersed, you suspend disbelief. And within the game, the rules are unbreakable.
But then you 'die', and you 'remember' the game world isn't real and you was always partly outside it, reaching in. Only those who have left the game and come back remember that it is a game. Indeed, they can no longer ever quite forget, and so the 'undead' become strange and uncanny. They have a mysterious occult knowledge of things it should be impossible for them to know, and have seemingly-magical powers over reality. Because they have seen the world from the outside, they now know the *real* rules and how to cheat. They can learn the Incantations and how to recognise the Artefacts by which a being may temporarily gain various arcane powers, speed, strength, invulnerability, or healing, all the way up to the widely-sought "GOD MODE" rune. From outside they can maybe interfere a little with the workings of the world, and change a few things in their favour. They maybe even know a little of the future, if they are resurrected some time before their death, and can decide *not* to open the door this time "because last time round I opened it and an ogre killed me". This requires a special ritual of 'Salvation', that must be performed at intervals, especially just before doing something dangerous. Salvation is the key to eternal life.
But it takes an outstanding intelligence and decades of deep learning while alive to have a chance of decoding outer reality quickly enough to get back in before a soul's interest fades. You might see the cogs and mechanisms of reality laid out before you, but would you understand what you was seeing well enough to be able to hack your way back in? And let other players who left before you back in also? For the World Outside the World has rules and restrictions, too.
>
> "To get ability to raise the dead you need to pay a price"
>
>
>
Oh, yes. That's right. As you die, the Dread Words of the Ferryman on the River Styx appear floating in the air before you in letters of fire...
Game Over. Insert Coin.
[Answer]
## The price is semantic, not literal
Many real world cultures have a set of taboos that, when crossed, confer an 'impure' status on someone or something. (You see this a lot in Christianity and derivatives thereof, which are also the general cultural background for most English-language fiction involving "necromancy")
In this context, what the necromancer is destroying may be more along the lines of their personhood according to society. If you raise the dead successfully, you've completed the ritual (the forbidden has been done, you are seen as unsouled, which (irl symbologies of the cultures of people likely to write on this Stack) has connotations of evil...); if you haven't, well, you died trying so it's irrelevant (normal-dead also means you have no soul)
It's possible that, to non-necromancers, the nature of a soul is taken quite literally, whereas to necromancers (who are the only ones with the personal experience of what changes in the process of doing the ritual) stating any of the two laws is actually an elaborate black comedy in-joke.
In the real world, sentiments like that are extremely common in discussions between trauma survivors, who are often ostracized for simply *knowing too much* about the things that happened in their life, which are topics whose *mere conceptual existence* is considered unacceptable. Looking into these conversations as they're freely accessible on the net and incorporating elements of what you find might lend an interesting/evocative metaphorical element to your narrative(s).
[Answer]
The act of necromancy invokes an Aura of Death itself.
It is not that you need to be (un?) dead to perform a necromantic ritual, it is more a case that the ritual will destroy all true life within its domain,
**including the caster**.
So a living person *could* cast a Necromantic ritual.... Once.
After which act he would then be in need of a Necromancer's services himself.
]
|
[Question]
[
**This question already has answers here**:
[How do you prove you're from the future?](/questions/12348/how-do-you-prove-youre-from-the-future)
(42 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
The community reviewed whether to reopen this question 1 year ago and left it closed:
>
> Original close reason(s) were not resolved
>
>
>
As per title. Supposing time travellers are back in this age from the future, how would they convince the scientific community that they really did travel through time?
Convincing the common person is relatively easy (so easy in fact, that they would most likely start a new religion).
But the scientific community is different. Almost any event "predicted" by the time travellers could be explained away with some sort of conspiracy to make it look like they're the real deal.
I'm thinking predictions of environmental disasters, but that would be evidence more than actual proof.
(Yes, I know that science doesn't really "prove" anything and it builds models based on data, but I'm sure you know what I mean)
[Answer]
# A White Paper and a Blue Book
You state that
>
> Convincing the common person is relatively easy (so easy in fact, that they would most likely start a new religion).
>
>
> But the scientific community is different.
>
>
>
I suspect you’re wrong, and that scientists will be, as a whole, much easier to convince. That’s because the scientific community (unlike the layperson community) has a set process for establishing and proving even the most extraordinary claims.
Works like Newton’s *Principia Mathematica*, Maxwell's "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field", and Einstein’s *Annus mirabilis* papers were field-founding, reality-altering publications. Through precise and scientific language, revolutionary ideas were laid out for inspection, and then were examined, analyzed, and, ultimately, accepted by the scientific community.
So stop trying to prove that you’re time travelers: that’s a question of history and biography, not of science. Prove the extraordinary claim that **time travel is possible.**
Your question includes that as an unspoken, essential aspect that is, to the best of our knowledge, untrue in our own universe. Again, **time travel is possible**. That means that there are *fundamental*, incontrovertible physical laws that define that process, that make time travel possible, and which have demonstrable effects.
Your time travelers should publish a comprehensive white paper explaining how time travel works, along with a detailed blue-book-esque compilation of technical documents that lay out how time travel fits into the theory of relativity and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Lay out the entire process of how time travel was invented, from the first papers that founded the field, to the building of early prototypes that tested aspects of the theory (negative mass? Negative energy?). Since science is an iterative process, the invention of time travel would have involved thousands of collaborating physicists discovering and establishing a new and revolutionary field through countless reproducible and consistent experiments. Lay out that entire process bare to the scientific community, make it possible for them to fit time travel into their own frameworks of reality and prove to themselves that time travel is possible.
Once you’ve done *that*, the claim that you *are* time travelers is trivially believable: after all, you showed up out of nowhere with an entire revolutionary field of science developed, presented, and explored to its peak, a field that makes time travel possible.
Analogy: Trying to prove to Isaac Newton that you flew across the Pacific Ocean in a heavier-than-air plane by showing him a dated newspaper from China is a waste of time. On the other hand, lay out how his laws of motion, combined with Bernoulli’s principle, make lift possible, and then demonstrate the underlying principles and functionality of the internal combustion engine that makes the plane run, and show him the plane operating, and he’ll be much too busy being giddy about the implications of it all to have any reason to doubt your claimed *itinerary*.
[Answer]
## Go to Stephen Hawking's Party
<https://vinepair.com/articles/stephen-hawking-time-travel-party/>
Stephen Hawking threw a party where he invited time travelers. He didn't announce his party until after it occurred, theorizing that if time travel was possible, people who were time travelers would be able to attend even if they didn't learn about it until later.
This would at least convince Stephen Hawking. The rest of the scientific community, well maybe he could help you figure that out.
[Answer]
High precision timing of as-yet undiscovered pulsars; dates of supernovae -- these are items that *should* be unaffected by a "new timeline" formed by the act of time travel (because they're centuries or more removed at the speed of causality -- that is, they're actually in the time travelers' past).
World Series results, stock market fluctuations and such are much more susceptible to local timeline changes.
[Answer]
**Create enough evidence that they have to believe your time-travelers**
Lets take the scientists perspective:
When your time travelers arrive and say they traveled through time, there are two possibilities: They actually did or they lie. At this point, lying seems much more likely because people lie all the time and no one has traveled through time so far (as far as we know). A good scientist would now gather more data. Ask them to make predictions would be a good way to distinguish a liar from an actual time-traveler. A single correct answer alone will not convince the scientists:
The time-travelers correctly predict an undiscovered pulsar (@Zeiss Ikons', idea) -> Maybe they're just good at astronomy
They correctly predict supernovae -> maybe they know even more about space
They correctly predict earth quakes -> maybe they're good at geology as well
They correctly predict lottery numbers -> maybe they found a way to manipulate the numbers
But at some point it seems extremely unlikely that they know more about space *and* geology *and* lottery *and* other topics than the entire scientific community combined. Even more unlikely than time-travel, so time-travel is the most likely explanation for the data (correct predictions) collected. At this point, scientist might start to believe them and with even more evidence consider it *proven*. Wrong predictions would damage the time-travelers credibility severely, so they should stick to things they can predict reliably (@Zeiss Ikon made a few suggestions what to predict and what not).
[Answer]
# The scientist should be the ones to tell the time travelers how they would like it proved.
The way that scientific inquiry works is that it's the scientists, or the ones who need to be convinced that need to be the ones that design the experiments to test the hypothesis. Any system that the travelers employ to "prove" their claims will be met with skepticism and may only serve their purpose by putting more attention to their claims by showing an unexpected result.
The true way that the scientists will be convinced is if they design an experiment, or more likely a series of experiments that would confirm that time travel is the only explanation that fits their observations.
# A more pragmatic method is to just pay them
Use your knowledge of future events to gain a substantial amount of tokens of economic exchange (money). Give this money to a team of scientists with excellent reputations, charging them to write rigorous peer reviewed paper titled "On the veracity of specific time travel claims" and give them your full cooperation, along with the mentioned truckload of money.
[Answer]
>
> I'm thinking predictions of environmental disasters, but that would be evidence more than actual proof.
>
>
>
By this definition, the only proof of a thing is the thing itself. That means no correlation is acceptable, only showing them actual time travel in action. Bring a person back in time to experience something they would recognize as the past. Do this with enough credible witnesses, and others will believe thier testimony.
[Answer]
# Bring back several carbon dated artifacts.
We have collected lots of random junk in museums. Have the time travelers bring back a random selection of that stuff from the future. Chemical testing will show them to be identical to past samples, except that they're notably older.
You can bring back a load of other proof, like several hundred years of movies and music that would be absurd to produce, and scientific devices well beyond human science, but the carbon dated artifacts will be much harder to replicate.
[Answer]
**Have them carbon-date your belongings.**
This is a method of checking when something is from that doesn't require verbally convincing them. This won't work, however, if you're only from, say, a century from now. In such a case, you'd have to try telling them major political events, etc.
[Answer]
1. Be impressively rich.
Inflation does wonders to our money.
100 years of inflation will move you between the middle class and the multiple 300-feet yacht owner.
2. Predict well-known random events (lottery numbers, sports results, etc...)
3. Bring some off-the-mill science - e.g. breaking of some crypto primitives.
4. Or just be bad and seed time-travel paradoxes here and there and let the Universe deal with them.
[Answer]
**Imitate Marty McFly.** Marty is at a loss to prove toDoc Brown that he really is from the future when he meets him in 1955 (?). When he tries to tell him that the future president is Ronald Reagan, that gets a laugh.
But then he stumbles on the one thing that will convince Doc Brown. He mentions the Flux Capacitor. This is something known only to Doc Brown in that time frame. That does the trick.
So the idea is to find something in the future history of those particular scientists that well be well known down the road, but known only to themselves at the time.
This does mean that you have to anticipate which scientists you are going to meet before you time travel, so you can do the research. Either that, or you have to make multiple trips back to the past.
[Answer]
# Destroy the Doubters
Identify all the most influential doubters who will naysay the time travelling. Record everything that they will say against time travel after your arrival. Encrypt these records (articles, videos, etc.) and distribute them around the world before your arrival. Seed them in warez sites, porn videos, free phone apps, etc. Just make sure they are conspicuous and that people will keep them just to see if they eventually amount to anything interesting (give them clickbaity filenames, etc.).
Then arrive and announce the existence of time travel. Promise to provide proof to anyone who saved one of the suspicious records you seeded around the internet. Wait one week. The talking heads will go crazy and make all their public statements. Then, publish the encryption keys to the sealed records and let people decide for themselves. "Where did you get this?!?" "We just saved the video for 1,000 years, because we knew this day already came. Had to close the loop, you know."
# "Scientific Evidence"
For hard-nosed scientists, you can do the same trick, but on a local level: save the raw data produced by the biggest, most expensive scientific instruments (telescopes, particle accelerators, seismographic networks, etc.). Give them the raw data from 1 week in the future, encrypted so they don't know what produces the data until after the time passes. After the data is produced, give them the encryption keys and ask them if this data looks familiar.
# Conclusion
Assuming you have enough credible cryptanalysts who can convince the population that there was no way to fabricate this evidence, that should be enough to remove all doubt. The evidence either comes from the most hostile doubters, held in the hands of neutral observers, or from scientists themselves.
[Answer]
If a time traveler would want to be convincing to scientists they would need to provide information that would take an extreme amount of time to compute or to discover but, if given that information, we could verify it now with less effort. I'm going to provide examples but I'm only going to provide examples of information I think would be interesting but useless to us currently just in case we want to preserve the timeline.
The types of information that would fit this is as follows:
* Information about undiscovered unstable elements on the periodic table:
It takes a huge amount of time to produce this information because scientists need to shoot particles at each other for weeks hoping for probabilistic collisions to occur. This information isn't producible without a large institution and lots of time. If a person was to come with a cheat sheet of useless but accurate atomic data for an undiscovered quick decaying element it would be verifiable with a bit of effort but would ultimately lend credence to the time traveler hypothesis.
* The locations of interesting stellar phenomena:
Its currently possible to detect if stars have planets around them but it takes a huge amount of observational evidence and mathematics to prove their existence. Currently we can only do this one star at a time so that means that most of the stars out there haven't been checked. If someone was to come back in time and start spouting off accurate planet locations that aren't verifiable via amateur telescope but are for bigger telescopes it would lend credence to the time traveler hypothesis.
* Mathematical proofs for hard but useless problems:
There are math problems that, with our current understanding, are hard to solve but easy to verify. This is the class of NP-Complete problems. You could engineer an instance of the "traveling salesmen problem" that takes a couple thousand years(or what ever time you need) to solve via our modern computers (assuming one like that was solved in the future) and bring it back to our time and we could verify quite easily that it wouldn't be solvable in our time given that computers have only existed for less than a hundred years.
There is likely lots more instances of these but these are the only ones that comes to my mind at the moment.
[Answer]
If the time traveller is not from the too distant future, they could prove it by searching for their younger self among the living population and let scientists do whatever comparison-tests they want between them (fingerprints, DNA, etc.).
However, depending on the modell of causality/ space-time and the influence of time-travel on it, this could bring some high risks with it.
[Answer]
Show them their watch, it would appear fast, because there is no daylight savings time in the future. `¯\_(ツ)_/¯`
ON a real note though, assuming time travel is in fact real...
It would largely depend on which time travel theory you subscribe to.
In some theories, the act of being there created a new timeline in which you would not be able to reasonably assure anything localized but natural would *Actually* be natural. Many influences on the world could be attributed to many things called "Natural".
Assuming an otherwise parallel timeline, I would go as far outside the sphere of human understanding and influence as you could get. Predict a supernova and its coordinates. One could not witness it in any fashion in advance as its witnessing is it happening long ago. The only way to have known it was to have seen it in the future.
[Answer]
## Make a time travelling car that costs $500
You'll never get published in academia. Don't even bother. Why persuade if you can just render your skeptics foolish beyond doubt?
When 3 million people a year go to the future for holidays and come back having had a great time, time travel will be something that isn't even thought of as a scientific question, but just another uncontroversial feat of engineering.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/232004/edit).
Closed 1 year ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/232004/edit)
A militaristic, autocratic nation masquerading as a democracy resembling a mixture of Communist Romania & Post-Soviet Belarus exists in the future. This country has two pathways for migrants to gain citizenship.
The first is a skilled migration program similar to Australia’s, which only allows educated or highly skilled migrants to live there. The second is Roman-style military service for unskilled migrants to become auxiliary soldiers for at least ten years to gain citizenship and the right to vote, along with benefits such as tax cuts, free healthcare and scholarships for any of their children.
**Why would a government make migrants do a decade of military service for citizenship?**
[Answer]
# Because They Need Loyal Soldiers:
Many governments need soldiers. It is an extremely central function of government, and even the USA has paths to citizenship involving military service. You want soldiers! This is a militaristic state, so the need is even greater.
If it is a small or wealthy state, your citizens could be soft or decadent, unwilling to fight. Finding strong, vigorous, aggressive men willing to give loyalty for citizenship gives you what you need.
But your justifications can go even further. Basic training and military service involve intense indoctrination. The idea is to tear down the man and rebuild the soldier. So if you are concerned about their loyalty, what better way than to force them into a years-long indoctrination program?
You may not trust your citizens, and/or your citizens may not trust you.
If you are of a ruthless bent, then foreign-born soldiers kept apart from society since arriving will feel less connection and empathy towards the civilian population. They will not have local loyalties to challenge their service. So when called upon to fire on protestors or drive a tank over civilians, they will follow orders without as many complications.
[Answer]
This almost exists today, although in a somewhat milder form - the citizenship is the reward for the military service (and usually is not the primary motive to join the military, since there are better options even without the citizenship).
Namely, joining the [Légion étrangère](https://www.legion-etrangere.com/) of the French Republic entitles you to get the French citizenship after 3 years of service, though the service lasts at least 5 years - which is not that far from your 10 years of service.
[Answer]
You said it in the question: they are unskilled workforce.
Where I have grown up there were basically two paths in life for those who didn't want to get a higher education and had no other relevant skills: one was to try to enlist in the army/navy/police forces, the other was to enroll into crime organization.
As an unskilled migrant, it's not easy to start over in a new country, therefore serving in the army for a decade can be a good way to get an income, a roof above your head and some training.
As an army planner, having the possibility to rely on the service of an abundant work force can be an asset.
As a politician, sparing the life of your citizens by using migrants and in parallel forming them to become "good citizens" is hitting the jackpot.
[Answer]
A few possible reasons. Being a citizen may have such great benefits that they cannot afford to let just anybody in, especially the rabble that would just live on the government teat forever. The military service may be the price to ensure no layabouts try it, you have to actually risk your life to immigrate and do ten years of hard training and labor to get in. And they only take the relatively young and healthy, they aren't going to be a retirement community for elderly immigrants that want to live off the excellent government retirement system, use the free hospitals, etc.
Another reason is their social welfare systems are very attractive, their land provides enormous wealth, but they need a large army to protect it from predators, and their own pampered citizens are not much interested in volunteering for it. So join the military, if you live through it, you are set for life. Ten years now is not a bad bargain for 50 years of leisure, especially if the rest of the world is also dangerous.
My father took that route in the USA, in the early 50's, he joined the military at 17, retired at 38 with a good pension for life, free healthcare and access to very low cost non-profit base facilities, including the grocery store, pharmacy, movie and numerous other entertainment facilities, even free legal services.
And perhaps the nation is even altruistically expansionist; their ultimate goal is to convert the world, take over the brutal dictatorships by force, when they believe those other countries are enslaving and brutalizing their citizens. Perhaps enticing those citizens to immigrate to them, and then overthrow their previous government, is a strategy. Sometimes the best defense is a good offense.
[Answer]
**Because everyone must serve**, whether native born or foreign born. This is not my idea, but Heinlein's. I will not debate the merits of that idea, but clearly your country has taken it to heart. You can read about the idea elsewhere, including [this entry](https://rapidtransmission.blogspot.com/2019/02/starship-troopers-and-egalitarian.html) from the blog "Rapid Transmission" by Joseph Hurtgen. The basic argument is:
>
> ...if individuals are personally involved in the life of their society through mandatory armed service, their interest and investment in the life of their society is raised, resulting in citizens that get involved and take responsibility for local, regional, and federal levels of government.
>
>
>
Questions your country must answer: How are non-citizens treated? What rights are common to both citizens and non-citizens? What privileges are granted only to citizens? What constitutes service (i.e. military only?).
[Answer]
#### Because they are a decadent society
In a decadent society similar to the situation in the final period of the Western Roman Empire a small group of families accumulating wealth and power over the centuries caused an enormous wealth gap.
Common people are not very keen to fight to defend other people wealth and few join the army, therefore foreigner fill the ranks. They have two purposes, to defend from external enemies and to keep in check a riotous population.
To avoid ending up as the Romans your state will be very careful not to put together too many foreigners from the same area. A Mix up of different nationalities to prevent the formation of small groups would help to keep all the units under control.
Why the service should be so long? The foreign legion service in France is 5 years if I can remember correctly. But the longer the soldier stay in service the longer they are forced to listen to the government propaganda. Furthermore those who already spent more than 5 years in service have a lot to lose if they give up, veterans are the most reliable soldiers.
[Answer]
## Bodies, Skills, and Counterbalancing
Leaning heavily on an [International Security](https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/46/1/147/102854/Leaning-on-Legionnaires-Why-Modern-States-Recruit) Journal article from last summer...
Countries employ foreigners when the "costs" associated with using citizens are too high. A fair number of factors can raise the cost of using citizens, including:
1. Industrial Demands - a citizen fighter isn't in a factory making bullets.
2. Skills - Foreigners might come with specialized skills that take time/money to train (The Brits have used Nepalese Gurkhas for mountain warfare for hundreds of years, the Australians recruit US pilots and submariners, etc.)
3. Attrition within Favored Groups - Many autocratic regimes have favored groups (pre-9/11 Iraq, pre-Civil War Syria, etc). Often, the army draws from these groups because they are loyal - but if they experience losses, they are only a small subset of the total population. It is often safer to recruit outsiders than to recruit oppressed minorities.
4. Co-Ethnics abroad - similarly to 3, an ethnic group might span multiple countries (think the Kurds in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey) If this ethnic group obtained power, it might view "foreigners" who share their ethnicity as more loyal than citizens from other ethnic groups.
5. Desperation - When defeat seemed close at hand, countries have historically **conscripted** foreigners within their borders. Any port in a storm, if you will.
## What about the Fighters
Honestly, foreign legion programs are pretty common. There's about a dozen active programs right now, including both sides of the ongoing Russia/Ukraine conflict. Citizenship is a fairly common reward for service.
It might be more important to consider why foreigners want to join your autocratic regime. It's often easier for a government to hide how terrible it is from its own citizens, so legionnaire recruits might have *more* information about exactly what kind of regime they are supporting, which may require explanation.
[Answer]
Your nation has no truly trusted allies. Any incoming immigrants will be citizens of a hostile (or at least *unfriendly*) nation. The risk of spies and sleeper agents is real. One way to flush out such threats is to make them help you fight against their former homeland. Someone who is truly on your side will behave much differently at this task than a spy who is still loyal to their country of origin. If they can make it for 10 years fighting against their old allegiances and performing as well as your native soldiers, then they've demonstrated their loyalty and destroyed any hopes of being welcomed back home.
[Answer]
**The Empress Really Likes Big Parades**
This is an intentionally silly answer but I wanted to play off of sphenning's comment: in world building, the motivations can be literally anything. They don't even have to be rational. It just has to make sense within the context of the story.
Perhaps the autocratic leader just really likes seeing people in uniform, and really likes big parades. Like *really big*. She demands no less than 1 million uniformed military people march in her parades. It's pretty much their only job, actually. The military has an entire parade division just for this. The only way to meet her numbers was to bring in a lot of immigrants to fill positions. To save on training, it made sense to keep them all for longer terms rather than have a higher turnover rate. They don't even join the parade for the first two years of service, to ensure that they are properly trained and certified. The last time someone messed up in a parade, a general was beheaded, so training is more vigorous these days.
Point being, if this was the Politics stack, there are a lot of very serious answers for why real countries do this. For Worldbuilding though, there's no need to limit yourself.
[Answer]
A very short answer (based on @AlexP's comment):
Your country is in a imperialistic expansion phase.
Just as ancient Rome it could provide citizenship plus lands to foreigners who served in the military. Note that I avoid "immigrants", here's why:
Given the right condition people from abroad would migrate to this country *specifically* to serve in the army, gain fame, glory, riches (looting in some form) and finally lands.
I would in this case be thinking on something like the world of Carnival Row, were some "normal" human countries invade the land of Fae or any other setting in which your country would be in a similar position of power as Rome was in its heyday.
Otherwise, in a common setting with a continent full of other nations of similar status people would just avoid migrating to the country to begin with.
[Answer]
>
> Why would a government make migrants do a decade of military service for citizenship?
>
>
>
Because they are a militaristic, autocratic nation masquerading as a democracy resembling a mixture of Communist Romania & Post-Soviet Belarus exists in the future.
---
Aside from you answering your own question:
* Migrant [cannon fodder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_fodder) is historically more palatable than using your citizens
* If a person spends 10 years fighting for the ideals of that government then there is a good chance that they become loyal to that government; especially if that government makes good on their promises
[Answer]
Due to external/internal pressure, your autocratic government feels a need to allow immigration into it from a foreign culture with societal norms that are different then your countries.
It could be viewing:
* Any women not completely covered in cloth as loose women who deserves to be raped
* People of a different ethnicity are inferior
* People of a different religious belief are heretics who should be killed
Or, it could be the opposite problem, that the immigrants hold beliefs that are more enlightened than your countries and you don't want the common people infected with more enlightened views.
But it comes down to cultural differences between these immigrants and your countries population that makes a major stumbling block for their integration into your society and might end up 3 generations onward still a separate and distinctive minority inside of your country. Which might format unrest, or cause societal problems that your autocratic government doesn't want to deal with
The military is more effective at imprinting its culture on its servicemen/women, than any other tool at the disposal of the government. (as you can have people who failed to become indoctrinated with the desired culture executed in a mock military tribunal for...I don't know desertion or something).
Military service allows your country a lot more leeway in how they treat the new immigrants then if they were civilians. As those pesky democracies aren't as likely to complain of human rights violations if your country shoots a bunch of immigrant soldiers for breaking military laws... Than if you shoot those same immigrants but they are civilians instead.
And its not reeducation camps for people to complain about either (which would be the other possible method to indoctrinate people from foreign countries into your culture).
[Answer]
**Some sort of Current Disaster**
Maybe your country is in some sort of war against a powerful force. Or, what if at the same time, there is some sort of disaster that is happening, like a civil war or zombie outbreak (or just a really bad epidemic and panic). Due to situations like these, they will need to recruit more soldiers and peacekeepers, but not many current citizens are interested, or they may even be dead. Due to this, they may change their policies, so they can try and deal with many problems at once.
]
|
[Question]
[
So, as you know, superheroes and heroines have been popular for many decades. All superheroes wear some form of colorful spandex, but it seems like female superhero costumes are a little more…revealing.
Ok, so there are two superheroes, Bionic Bob and Heroic Holly. Bionic Bob wears a costume that goes from neck to ankle, cape, boots, utility belt, average super hero get up. Then you have Holly. Wearing a costume that shows cleavage, thighs, and etcetera. Why might superheroes wear revealing outfits?
[Answer]
To sell comics to teenage boys is the real reason.
But revealing costumes is to be memorable and identifiable. If the hero doesn't bother with a secret identity, it might be worth sponsorship. If you look at sports people, it's not always the best that make the most money. Being attractive helps greatly.
After all stopping bank robbers doesn't pay well.....
[Answer]
If I was bulletproof or had super strength, what need would there be for clothes other than aesthetic? If I was also in superhuman fitness, why wouldn’t I want to show off my body?
Superhumans must have huge egos.
[Answer]
Two good reasons that nobody has mentioned yet:
## Reason 1: Exposed skin is required for the superheroine's power(s) to work.
This is an increasingly common justification for female characters to wear skimpy outfits. A good example would be Midnight from *My Hero Academia*: her power is to emit a gas from her pores that sends anyone in the vicinity to sleep, so the more skin she exposes, the more gas she can release at once. When she first debuted, her outfit was so skimpy that the government actually passed a law regulating superhero costumes. (See also: *Kill la Kill*, *Metal Gear Solid 5*)
## Reason 2: To distract the bad guys.
If those skimpy outfits are, out-of-universe, designed to make male readers stare, they're gonna cause men to stare *in-universe* as well. With any luck, that'll include the villain you're fighting, and while he's distracted looking at your cleavage (or trying not to look at your cleavage), you sock him in the jaw. Granted, this will only work on het/bi male villains (or lesbian/bi female villains, like Poison Ivy), but in my experience those tend to make up the majority of comic book villains anyway.
[Answer]
I have seen many female superheroes wearing full coverage costumes. However, they seem to have almost all been in movies and TV shows for children, not for teenage boys.
I have just looked at pictures of bathing suits for children, and it looks like most of them were designed by manufacturers of sunblock hoping to increase sales. One piece bathing suits for little girls cover at least as much as most swimming trunks for boys, but two piece bathing suits for little girls usually cover a lot less skin than bathing trunks for boys.
looking at photos of female gymnasts, it looks like most of them wear the equivalent of one piece swimsuits, while male gymnasts often wear shirts, and wear shorts or long pants, and seem to wear more clothing on average than females.
I'm starting to see a real world trend that may be carrying over to fictional female superheros.
One possible theory is that female superheroes want to have boyfriends and get married just as much as non super women do. But because of all the time they spend fighting super villains, they don't get to meet as many men as they would like to. Also they probably only want to meet, date, and eventually marry male superheroes. I believe that the majority of women are attracted to men who are stronger than they are. And if a woman is a superhero, the only men more powerful than her are likely to be male superheros.
Thus most female superheros probably want to make good impressions on male superheros. So the first time a female superhero used a sexy and revealing super costume to impress male superheros, she started a costume arms race with all competing female superheros to make the best impression on male superheros.
Such a costume arms race might not benefit anyone in the world of superheros, but many male readers of comic books probably think that it benefits them.
At least, that is one possible theory about the in universe reasons for the typical female super hero costumes in comics.
[Answer]
Because superheroics are theatre. Sure, you fly, make forcefields and shoot lasers out of your hands, but if somebody shoots you with a gun or clubs you over the head you'd go down. So you want to make clear to potential threats that you have powers, and you want people to generally think that a person with powers beats a person without, hands down.
So you get really into branding. You pick a cool name, you wear a flashy costume, you talk to PR people and sell the rights to use your likeness to merchandising companies; you make sure that when people see your strikingly-costumed figure, they know that they're seeing Laserdream or Wonder Woman or Elastigirl. And you make sure that your victories are boosted in the press and so on so that when some mugger sees you drop out of the sky their first instinct is to surrender, not shoot.
And every other superhero gets into the same act, because they're driven by the same incentives. Even the villains buy in to some extent, because a general culture of not bringing guns to a capefight benefits them, too.
tl;dr: branding.
[Answer]
### Reduce damage to clothes
If the superhero is bulletproof, then it may be easier to make rip resistant clothing if it is close to the hero's skin. This allows the superhero's skin to stop the bullet as soon as possible after it hits the clothing. If the clothing were further from the skin, it might rip before the bullet gets a chance to create pressure on the skin.
To demonstrate, set up a paper towel such that it is stretched tight an inch in front of a board. Fire a BB at it. The BB probably goes through. Now move either the board or the paper towel such that they are touching. Fire the BB gun again. The paper towel likely stays intact.
This applies even more to making clothes abbreviated. Superheroines are often bulletproof or have accelerated healing. Clothes? Not so much. The sleeves and hose that you are not wearing are not in danger of getting ripped.
### Freedom of movement
Put on a skin tight leotard. Try to move in it. Put on a woman's dress, try to move in that. In which would you prefer to fight for your life and those of your family, friends, and community?
You want your fighting clothes to move easily with you. Athletic clothing tends to be close fitting because that moves easily with you.
### Easy to hide
Superheroes can wear their skintight suits under their clothes. That doesn't work as well if the suit is as bulky as the clothes.
### Empowerment
She's a superheroine. Is she going to dress to hide herself? Or is she declaring that she is woman, hear her roar.
Many superheroines are overcoming shyness and timidity when in costume. Part of that may well be a reluctance to dress sexy. So when she is expressing herself, it's not just physical power but sexiness. Mousy in real life but sexually aggressive in costume. She may not even realize that she is doing it. She represses herself in real life, but she can let go when in costume. This includes hitting the idiots as well.
### Supervillains are sexist pigs
Supervillains are evil right? So clearly they are exactly the kinds of people who objectify women and can be distracted by the fan service shots.
Ooh, boobs! Kick to head. Ooh, birdies! Passes out.
Hit 'em while they ogle, ladies. That's how the smart heroines do it.
### Hide her secret identity
Flashing skin draws attention to the skin and away from the face. She doesn't have to give the "Eyes are up here" speech. She can simply travel in anonymity, as she won't show those parts of herself in her real world identity.
This may not work as well on women, particularly straight women. But presumably women will better understand why a superheroine might want to keep her identity secret. After all, men have enough trouble with smarter women. Where would we be if women didn't even need us to open jars?
[Answer]
For the same reason that male superheroes wear tight spandex clothes. Or that female ice skaters/dancers wear as little skirt as possible. Have you ever tried to fight in layers of skirts and restrictive blouses? Those types of clothes bind and actually make it more dangerous for the wearer to fight in. Skirts wrap around quickly moving legs and trip you up.
It is possible to wear them, but the wearer must be EXTREMELY well trained, and even then circumstances can change things in an instant.
[Answer]
No one will remember her face as long as there is cleavage to look at. Especially if it is combined with big, loose hair that hides half her face and lots of make-up. (There are some pretty crazy make-up / removal videos on youtube to support this claim.)
Then she can wear normal clothes when she is not super-heroing and no one will suspect her.
Also, thermoregulation is very important during strenuous physical activities, like beating up a baddie or jumping over skyscrapers.
[Answer]
## Merchandising
It turns out that heroing doesn't pay very well. To make ends meet most heroes sell the rights to their image to toy companies, and it appears that action figures of female heroes sell much better when they are scantily clad.
## The Superhero Fashion Industry is irrational
Women have been complaining about the apparent impossibility of creating women's clothing with real pockets for ages. After that, is it really surprising that superhero clothing would be needlessly revealing?
[Answer]
Also, Skin-tight is Easier to Draw
As I understand it, comic artists pretty much start any figure (male or female) undraped, so as to get the musculature and stuff correct, then cover it with clothes. If the clothes are skin-tight and/or show bare skin, then that's less work than getting looser clothes to drape correctly, especially in action scenes.
[Answer]
Why wouldn't they? If you are basically a god, as all heroes look like Apolo/Hercules/Ares and all heroines look like Athena/Diana/Aphrodite, why would you hide your perfect body behind clothes? So, the heroines would use revealing clothes because they can.
Ps.: the REAL question is: Why aren't the male heroes walking around "dressed" as Conan the Barbarian.
[Answer]
I don’t think that all superheroines would choose this kind of outfit, if it weren’t for us, the spectators, but some would. Here are some ideas:
## Vanity and memorability coupled with no fear? Superheroines have been very reasonable!
These superheroines (regardless of attire) tend to look exactly the way average joe finds super attractive. In our world there are already many provocatively small hot pants(resisting urge to link). **Imagine how these people would dress, if they needn’t fear sexual harassment, criticism...** Considering that, superheroines have been very well behaved girls. Add to this, that superheroes such as The Flash or Superman are the hope of their respective cities. I guess many heroines are the same. They need to wear memorable costumes!
## Spider Man style money making
Remember what spidey does when he’s low on money? He sells pics of himself. Superheroines might have a similar business going with help of a friend - many superheroines have suitable friends, such as Cloak and Dagger, Arrow and Black Canary.
[Answer]
Wearing anything else costs too much.
Have you ever thought about how much it would cost to have someone make a custom outfit for you? How about how much time people like cosplayers put in to making their costumes? Simply put: heroes who don't need armor in their outfit will wear revealing outfits as every inch of skin the immortal demigod who can not be harmed by mortal weapons exposes is an inch of their body where if they get hit they don't have to go pay a tailor or slave over with a sewing kit.
For some heroes I could see they have to replace their outfits every time they get ripped since if they repair it to many times they stop looking like the invulnerable god that they are and more like some one who's wearing a patched quilt.
[Answer]
To keep cool.
Superheroes routinely engage in some pretty energetic actions. While there are hot-climate outfits that are fairly covering (think Arab robes) that's to reject solar heating. The superheroes' heat is internal and thus such approaches don't work.
Hence superheroes wear attire that exposes the maximum skin consistent with social requirements, and where they must cover it's with skintight material to maximize thermal transfer.
[Answer]
For most superhero getup there is very little justification. As there is for the powers. As there is for the actions. Why should not all three be connected?
The advent of superpowers is a very traumatic event, one that leaves every superhero/ine deeply disturbed. They are thrown into a world of violence and chaos, with few rational guidelines left. Relationships crumble, everyday societal norms become ephemeral. They crack. Just as many disturbed people, their looks reflect their inner turmoil, dicumenting their dwindling grasp on what is normal. By insulating their alter ego from the crazyness of super-existence, they manage to keep that persona looking normal, (although, notice, sometimes too normal).
Crazy cat lady goes for layering long skirts and wild hair, catwoman goes for tight leather and slick hair. Just expressions of their derangement. Superman wore his undies over his suit - either he was mormon and needed the extra protection, or he was not coping with his traumatic childhood.
[Answer]
Simple: the fashion trends in female superheroes were set by a couple of superheroes with regenerative abilities. They could regenerate any part of their body, as long as their (heart, liver, stomach, intestines, etc.) was intact.
Many superheroes have powers that negate the need for armour, and those that don't will often wear things more like full-body suits.
[Answer]
Male superhero struts around in a leather loincloth and little else: Look how strong and masculine he is!
Female superheroin wears a spandex bodysuit with some cleavage: Sexism, female exploitation by the patriarchy!
Me: Let people wear what they want. If I were an attractive woman who has a job that requires freedom of movement I'd wear something like that as well. Victorian style dresses or burqahs just don't work in a superheroin's line of work, they get snagged on things way too easily :)
And why not look attractive while saving the world? If it distracts the villains even for a second while it even helps you.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question needs to be more [focused](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by [editing this post](/posts/77715/edit).
Closed 6 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/77715/edit)
What methods could be used to make a very westernised country, such as England, turn mostly vegan without too much resistance?
So far I have thought about putting high tax on animal based products such as meats, milk and eggs etc . This along with a massive marketing campaign that emphasise the dangers of this life style.
I initially thought about fines, but people would just do it in secret or even protest for their own rights.
The faster the method the better but I'm looking between 5 and 10 years.
[Answer]
**Kill all the livestock.**
They're all gonna die anyways. Seriously hear me out...
If everyone would turn vegan, then there is no nice way of preserving all life. Right now society has inhumane, but efficient ways of feeding livestock. If every vegan wanted these animals to be treated well (free roaming, normal food, live longer etc) then they will die anyways, because we cannot maintain the needs. It's even worse if they are set free, it would be a huge ecological disaster and then they would die.
**Disease**
They need to die for your needs. Like Alexander said, if the animals fall sick to a disease, then you probably won't need conviction anymore. Just make sure the disease is highly infectious, deadly and epidemic or even pandemic. To have the best result the disease also has to be zoonotic, meaning it's transferable to humans. Also make sure the disease "stays in the air" so no one would try to import new animals. I see no other way. Even if eating greatly increase the chance of a new cancer, people would still stubbornly eat them. Don't believe me? Just check the tobacco industry. They NEED to die.
The result could be that there is no livestock left, or maybe a really small percentage, making the price and risks insanely high. But after this event, only the insane would still eat animal.
[Answer]
It's pretty difficult to 'make' an entire population do something unpopular - see [Prohibition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition). Rather, you need to persuade them to follow your recommendations. For that, you need a couple of things in place.
## 1. Provide plausible alternatives
Alternatives have to be *real*, appetising replacements, not something totally different made to look like meat. They need to have similar taste, texture, and nutrient values.
Depending on exactly *why* this is being done, the best option might be lab-grown meat, if you can get it to industrial levels.
## 2. Propaganda and Education
With your alternatives in place, you can start your program. Sponsor detailed, explicit adverts about the practice of meat farming, similar to those shown about smoking or drunk driving. Sponsor media about anthropomorphic animals trying to avoid the meat market. Avoid mention of the livestock species that will go extinct and the livelihoods that will be destroyed by the change.
## 3. Taxation and regulation
Add heavy taxes to all stages of meat production. Enforce rigid 'safety standards' at all levels of the process, from the hoof to the shelf. Ban the import of animal products that don't meet the same standards. At the same time, cut taxes on replacement foods.
## 4. Phase out meat production
Buy out small farmers who can no longer afford to raise livestock. Provide subsidies for them to switch to arable production. If possible, provide large subsidies for them to switch to producing your replacement foods or their precursors. Hide the slaughtering of their herds.
[Answer]
Realistically doing it in 5-10 years is not possible. If you try taxes or restrictive laws, England will see revolts it haven't seen since the days of Cromwell. Monetary incentives are not good enough too. Quite a few people would not give up their steaks for any amount of money.
It can only be some natural or human-caused disaster that would turn people away from animal food. Imagine that a new "Mad cow disease" has broken out. Only this time it's not just cows, but sheep and chickens too. Milk and eggs are also contaminated. There is no cure, only sad death for non-vegans. In that case, turning entire country's population to veganism is possible.
[Answer]
The simple answer is that you can't. In addition to going against hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, your claim about "the dangers of this life style" - that is, eating animal products - is demonstrably wrong.
Thus you can perhaps use your marketing campaigns to convince a part of the population to become vegans, but you'll never manage to convince everyone. In fact, the harder you market something, and the more ridiculous your claims become, the more you will create resistance among the general population. (Consider for instance the attitude of most people towards PETA &c.)
Since persuasion doesn't work, you'll have to try to do it through coercion. Unfortunately for you, historical experience - Prohibition, the War on Drugs, &c - suggests that that's not only not going to work, it's going to have the opposite of the intended effect. The prohibited activity gets driven underground, becomes fashionable among the rebellious and profitable to a criminal element, and the upshot is that you wind up with more of it than you started with.
So if you want to continue down this path, you wind up with extermination camps for meat-eaters.
[Answer]
# Start with Lab Grown Meat
Not quite science fiction, not quite on your table, [synthetic meat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat) is here, and at about $12.00 a pound. It's grown from bacteria (like yogurt or cheese), and it's able to replace most ground beef. Or chicken breast. It's pretty neat stuff, but it costs too much for it to be economical. Handwave this to a popular price, and able to replace most cuts of meat (more than the two above we currently have). This should take the science about 20 more years from today, but you can handwave it away. If it's on the shelves in your world, it will likely be available but not wanted because it's made by [BIG LABS](https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/03/25/is-gmo-labeling-a-scare-tactic/) and [Doug Guacamole Fox](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/12/think-organic-food-is-better-for-you-animals-and-the-planet-thin/) will have everyone on regular meat. The sheeple will be convinced of toxins in this science-gone-to-far meat and only to use natural foods as advertised on his website, instead of the safer, more humane option.
## Add a famine
The [Mad Cow Scare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy) really changed things. Cows were slaughtered left and right to combat the disease, and suddenly the price for beef shot through the roof. Suddenly the prices on the site go much higher.
## Stir in a scandal
Debunking a popular food leader with a scandal has always had a good precedent for changing the popularity of foods. For example, the [Jake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_ginger) used in Prohibition Era threw plenty of attention onto some unsafe foods. These can cause people to turn away from their go to items and stop believing in trusted sources for food.
## Cook 2C warmer with global warming
By adding in some serious droughts, the rest of the farms are going to have a tough time to replace the beef lost by the disease with other animals. Knowing the [inefficiencies of growing meat](http://science.time.com/2013/12/16/the-triple-whopper-environmental-impact-of-global-meat-production/) and you're not going to get a lot of help from governments to keep meat farms going.
## Season with an advertising campaign, served hot
With the meat scarce, and an affordable, humane option ready to be put on the table, the last step is to convince everyone who is left eating meat because of opinions (and not economics) that it is bad because of moral reasons. Why wouldn't you switch, and leave the animals alone, if it is better, cheaper, and easier, knowing you wouldn't kill an animal?
[Answer]
Tongue-in-cheek answer:
# By Banning Veganism
As many others have pointed out, with examples like the Prohibition and War on Drugs, whenever something is forbidden to the public, us lazy common folk suddenly get inspired to do what we're not allowed to do.
If you had a totalitarian government that forced meat to be eaten at every meal, the rebels (e.g. all of us) will create all kinds of underground ways to be vegan.
This will be extra effective if the government is seen as "evil", and perhaps if the meat industry slowly made the meat taste stronger and stronger, until it's repulsive.
[Answer]
You would need some very powerful incentive, not just a negative one.
You might come up with a new "miracle drug" that repairs animal cell DNA, thereby greatly increasing lifespan and curing most types of cancer, as well as other degenerative diseases.
There would be only a small catch. The drug will operate badly, or not at all, on the DNA of creature X (say, a human being) whenever there are traces of DNA of different animal sources (e.g. poultry) in the bloodstream. It would turn out that in most people, simply eating meat was enough to noticeably thwart the process (in reality, eaten DNA gets denatured in the stomach, but let's handwave it away).
So, to be on the safe side, you either denature meat DNA before eating - turning it in an uneatable pulp, which some people still might need to do for health reasons - or if at all possible, follow a strictly vegan diet. Depending on the size of the effect, even drinking milk might be undesirable, or even dangerous.
You can choose whether it is the diversity between DNAs that trigger the undesirable effects, or just it being the DNA of another animal. In this latter case, you would also need to adopt suitable precautions during certain sexual practices.
Also, you need to come up with some way of disposing of all the animals that will be slaughtered after they have become un-economic to keep. The small population of short-lived, cancer-prone carnivores is not going to be enough to sustain the whole animal husbandry sector.
[Answer]
As mentioned above, the only "fast" way to make a country transition to a new food source is to make the old food either incredibly dangerous or incredibly scarce. There's no way to force people 100% (some people will hunt, for instance), but we can assume broad adoption is "good enough."
First you start a livestock epidemic, like mad cow, swine flu, Asian bird flu, etc. Easiest way to do this is to put something in the feed stock (pesticide?) that poisons animals in a way that mimics disease. This keeps humans protected but leads to die offs and eventual widespread culling of herds to "stop the epidemic." Tricky part is making sure no one puts 2 and 2 together that it's the food making the animals sick. Otherwise you could engineer a virus, but that can be much riskier.
You'd have to find some excuse to ban imports of meat, perhaps by saying the infected livestock came from abroad, allowing you to impound any shipments at the border.
This next step is critical: someone has to use their political capital to "save the farmers" to transition those who raise livestock to some other food source, such as aquaculture or algal protein. This would probably take the form of job retaining and loan programs to allow the purchase of new equipment. Put onerous requirements on raising livestock (to "prevent disease") and subsidize these new food sources so farmers stick with cheaper plants rather than reverting to livestock once the initial "crisis" passes.
This could all be done over a few years, but it would require quite the conspiracy. And people would be vegetarian by force, not choice. If you could keep it up for a long while, the younger generations should easily transition into voluntary vegetarianism, but the older folk who miss the taste of bacon will complain until their dying breath...
[Answer]
If you could convince people to bring up their children in 'the new, *healthy way*', then perhaps it could happen within 50-75 years.
The government could make meat super expensive by adding a ton of tax -- to animal feed, to butchering, to redistribution, transportation -- so that like smoking, fewer people 'waste' the money. Your chicken leg could cost £100 -- or more.
Make eating meat a 'taboo', like cannibalism.
This would take 50-75 years. All laws about blackmarketting would already cover misuse or law breaking.
[Answer]
I confess that I'm not fully conversant with the difference between a vegetarian and a vegan, so I will confine my answer to the basic idea of not eating meat.
The easiest way to do it is a world war. In war time meat is expensive and scarce. Germany during both World Wars, and England and Japan during the second, went meatless. In war time, with international trade stopped, every calorie counts, and wasting perfectly good calories on luxuries such as meat is heavily restricted. (Farm animals are quite inefficient at converting vegetable calories into meat calories.) Meat becomes a rarity, traded on the black market, much like alcoholic beverages in the U.S.A. in the times of Al Capone and Eliott Ness.
If a world war is not available then one can try a Communist revolution. Communists have this divine gift of making the richest country dirt poor as if it was involved in a world war. The consumption of meat will plumet, due to the collapse of agriculture: in a Communist country every calorie counts, and wasting perfectly good calories on luxuries such as meat is heavily restricted.
The problem with war is that it eventually ends, and people revert to their sinful ways and start eating meat again. The problem with Communists is that they are eventually toppled, and people revert to their decadent capitalistic ways and start eating meat again. A more long-term solution involves the fall of civilization, ideally accompanied by a good number of barbarian invasions and a touch of the plague. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, most of the population of Europe went meatless for about twelve centuries: during the Middle Ages the average peasant ate meat *maybe* four times a year -- at Christmas, at Easter, and possibly at two other feasts. Hence the dual meaning of the word "feast".
None of those solutions drops meat consumption to zero. There will always be rich war profiteers or Communist Party cadres who will be able to afford meat. But I don't see this as a problem; after all, alcohol consumption is not actually *zero* in Saudi Arabia, and historically some popes and cardinals were known to indulge in meat and wine during Lent. What counts is that most people most of the time won't have any meat to eat.
[Answer]
The way I see it, you would need a *ginormous* catastrophe to happen, of historical and global proportions. Any non-catastrophical measure (taxes, regulations, phase out of meat, education...) is going to require longer than 10 years, or is going to face resistance from part or the whole population.
So there are three factors of which you could only have two at the most:
* Short time frame
* No resistance
* No catastrophe
**Short time frame + No resistance**
This is what you want in your question: short time frame and without people resistance.. and for that to happen, you need a catastrophe that forces an immediate change: either cultural (people changing their mind from one day to another) or in resources (a plague that kills every animal but/including humans).
You would need to make sure that the catastrophe is natural and not man-made (e.g. war, killing of livestock, killing all meat eaters...), or it is going face resistance from sectors of the country's population (if not from all of it).
Also that catastrophe would have to be at a global level affecting all the countries in the world, or otherwise that country would probably be able to import meat from a neighboring country, stopping or slowing the process to more than the requested 5-10 years.
**No resistance + No catastrophe**
If you want no resistance by the population and no catastrophe, then you won't be able to reach it in such a short time frame. You need a deep change of culture in that country's society, and that doesn't happen in 5-10 years: it would take generations.
Willow said 50-75 years in [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/77718), I am going to risk and say it would be more than double (or even triple) that. You would need a full reset in the country's population to achieve it: and by that I mean until no-one alive in the country knew anyone alive when the cultural change started...
And probably even then, there wouldn't be a total cultural change. Imagine something as "simple" as accepting people regardless of their skin color. It has been over 150 years since the US Civil War, and there are still many Americans that suffer discrimination and hate based on the same beliefs that caused the war (I understand that this is an oversimplification).
**Short time frame + No catastrophe**
If you want short time frame and no catastrophe, you are going to find resistance:
* Old people will refuse to change their old habits;
* The general population will complain that taxes are too high;
* Farmers will complain of the new regulations (or cheat);
* Rich people will find ways to circumvent the change...
Again, you would need a deep cultural change, and that doesn't happen overnight or without a fight: big changes will bring big resistance in one way or another. It will be unavoidable.
And the way that you deal with the resistance will probably create more resistance. For example, if you punish the meat eaters in harsh ways, many people may change out of fear, but many people will also join the resistance.
[Answer]
To Make a country religion or ethnic group abolish or quit something it must be villainized, Made hard to get, and an anti-farm animal campaign would do that spread rumors about cows polluting the earth how that land could be used to cultivate the more bountiful crops the world has to offer instead of smelly dirty animals.Following this, there would have to be a pandemic in cow farms across the specified region making them unsanitary, disease-ridden, smelly dirty, oxygen breathing animals who take up to much space in a growing world.
[Answer]
I think the only way would be if there was synthetic meat tasting as good as normal meat but cheaper and healthier.
Also while eating too much meat as most Westerners do, eating a little bit of it is generally considered healthier than not eating meat at all.
[Answer]
The biggest question is how do you sell an unhealthy lifestyle (vegan) for a healthy lifestyle (omnivore)? Veganism is a lifestyle based on shame thats full of contradictory rules that make no sense.
My approach would be to look how the fast food lifestyle of excess carbohydrates (mostly vegan) has become a worldwide phenomenon which has lead to obesity, diabetes and heart failure. All over the world we have turned to sugary drinks, fast food snacks and fast food meals to become dangerously unhealthy. Diabetes from lifestyle choices is already one of the biggest killers in the world and it used to be a rich mans disease.
We eat it because it tastes great and lifestyle marketing and sheer convenience. It's cheaper and easier to eat junk food than healthy food.
Start marketing vegan sodas, vegan snacks sold at fast food places for a comparable price. Convince chains like McDonald's or Subway to offer tasty vegan alternatives. If they see a profit in providing those items, capitalism will sell the idea worldwide.
[Answer]
It would be hard to do it in such a short time period. If it were done quickly, then it should be done forcefully as well. I'm talking about severe punishment for not being vegan. Otherwise...
1. Shaming those who are non-vegan
2. Propaganda promoting veganism - in the media and schools
3. High taxes on meat industry and sellers of meat, while having tax breaks on produce (and make fruits and vegetables really cheap for consumers)
4. Banning meat-eaters from entering your country, and maybe voting or owning property - just arrest anyone who resists
5. Serving vegan-only items at government sponsored events and in schools
I can imagine the secret "meat-easies" now. Moo twice to enter.
[Answer]
One way might be to modify vegan food so that the benefits of being totally vegan far far outweigh eating meat. Let's say through research, you find a way so that vegan food on average gives a person a lifespan of 200 years. Which means barring accidents, a person lives healthily well into 2 centuries. As long as this cannot be replicated in meat, a large population will voluntarily switch to a vegan diet. Given a choice between living for 84 years (the current average lifespan in UK) and living for 200 years, most would choose the latter isn't it ?
[Answer]
Have a look at the recently released mockumentary *Carnage* by Simon Amstell if you can. It's centered around more or less the same premise, 'documenting' the story of how the UK becomes vegan by 2067. It presents more or less an extrapolation of already existing trends, such as animal rights activism and health scares surrounding animal products, along with some more fantastical elements. It's a longer timescale than what you're looking for but maybe there's something you could use in there.
[Answer]
# Education + True cost of manufacturing and disposal
No more subsidies but the actual cost (environmental too) of producting meat and animal-related products.
]
|
[Question]
[
This is a fairly simple question with a likely rather complicated answer.
Basically, I worldbuilding a planet that has become a complete wasteland of ash, rock and flowing rivers of magma. The civilization that used to live there has since fled to floating space stations that circle the planet.
My question is: Assuming this civilization uses special mechanical drones to extract magma from the planet and fly it back up to the station, what sort of technology should exist for this to be even remotely plausible? Or, if other methods for energy production far better than this exist, what sort of technology should this civilization have *not* researched to make magma their best choice?
[Answer]
Given that the science-based and reality-check tags are on this one, I'll start with the obvious refutation:
As liquid rock, magma is very heavy. There is practically no situation that would make transporting it out of a gravity well justifiable, because the energy expended by doing so would be greater than the energy that could be harvested from it.
The one potential exception I can think of would be if the mantle of the planet (pre-Cataclysm) was fantastically radioactive. Volcanoes, before the planet was completely ruined, were as dangerous as a reactor meltdown. I suspect that you might run into problems with natural criticality if the core of a planet is made up mostly of fissionables (or even denser materials), but it *would* provide a justification for scooping up the stuff to fly to orbit; fissionables would provide a power source that would likely be more valuable than the energy expended to lift them to orbit, provided you have really efficient reactors.
[Answer]
You might be better off generating the power on the planet and beaming the energy to the station via microwaves.
The reverse of this article. You're creating the energy on the planet and sending it to space.
<https://phys.org/news/2015-03-japan-space-scientists-wireless-energy.html>
[Answer]
There is a specific type of space station for which this would make total sense, namely a "space fountain" though this may differ from your original vision.
In this situation you have a large tower protruding into space (though not necessarily) that is kept aloft by a constant flow of lava through a pipe, the majority of the energy spent forcing the lava up this pipe is re-gained on its way back down. At the top of this tower you have your space station which has a large radiator array and a sterling (or other heat) engine. This sterling engine takes the "cold" of space from the radiator and the "hot" of the lava and uses it to produce electricity. This gets around the problem of lava's high mass as you need a lot of mass to make a space fountain work anyway and much of the energy you spend to get it out a gravity well is re-claimed.
This would be usefull in a couple ways.
* It makes for a semi-space elevator able to serve as a launching
platform for spacecraft.
* It can send some of it's energy back to the
planets surface to provide power to any installations there (espacily
if this volcanic planet is coating in clouds of soot or greenhouse
gases which seems likely).
Technology you need for this:
a (low friction) pipe that can carry lava, reasonably efficent machinical generators and a few bits and pieces we've had for decades now.
The space station at the top of the space fountain can also contain other facilities, obviously.
[Answer]
# Geothermal energy
Put a fluid in contact with some hot part of earth. Get it back when hot. Use this differential to make energy, be it steam-based or heatpump-like.
This a now common way to [get energy from earth undergrounds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power). [Iceland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_Iceland) is getting a large part of its energy from this.
In your case, you could use the lava on the ground to generate cheap energy, and store it in something easier to transport, like [hydrogen](http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/hydrogen-energy-storage).
**Example:**
On the ground, get some lava, put it close to water and use the steam to create electricity.
Then use this electricity to create some hydrogen. Put it in cans and send it to space.
**Advantage**
The energy you get by kilo is higher and more usable than by sending hot rocks in space. Also it doesn't get cold, so you can use it later.
**Problem**
Hydrogen needs oxygen to produce energy, oxygen is scarce in space.
---
Notes: Your problem is in fact similar to the problem we are facing on earth.
1. Places where cheap energy is available (sunny deserts for photovoltaic, or windy seas for wind power) are not where the energy is needed. So we need to transport it.
2. Moments when energy is needed, is not always when it is available (sun is down when people turn the lights and TVs on). So we need to store it.
[Answer]
Given that the comments suggest you're willing to consider solutions that leave the magma on the planet, I have what I think to be a rather elegant solution: Turn your space stations into counterweights for a [space elevator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator), and build a [thermocouple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator "thermocouple") into the tether.
**Technology requirements:**
You need to be able to build a very strong, very light elevator cable at least 40,000 km long. Carbon nanotubes are usually the material of choice for settings that make use of Space Elevators.
You also need to be able to build an anchor on the planet's surface that's not bothered by liquid magma flowing over it. This problem is also easily solved with [advanced carbon composites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforced_carbon%E2%80%93carbon)
Finally, you need a nice room temperature superconductor for your thermocouple. This can run right up the inside of your elevator cable and connect one end to the liquid magma and the other to the cold upper reaches of your tether. I need to do some further research here because I THINK you'd actually want your 'cold' end of the thermocouple to actually be in the high atmosphere, rather than in actual space, since in the high atmosphere you can rely on high-velocity winds to generate LOTS of convective heat exchange where in space you can only use radiative, which (again, i THINK) is more limiting in this application.
In either case, this solution gives you a very effective magma-based power source that has no moving parts whatsoever, making it extremely reliable.
[Answer]
Two possible usages come to my mind:
1. Use the magma as high temperature thermostat in a [Rankine cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle). In layman terms, use the magma to heat up pressurized water and use the (super)heated steam in a turbine. Use the space as low temp heat sink, by building radiators above the atmosphere.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ybwGr.jpg)
2. Use the magma as IR emitter and use some sort of [Seebeck effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator) based device to generate electricity. Again, use the space as low temp heat sink, by building radiators above the atmosphere.
#1 dates way earlier than space travel, so it should not be a problem to master it for a space faring civilization.
#2 has been widely used for space equipment when no other viable power generator is available.
In both cases I would not bother transporting the magma out of the gravity well of the planet. You will need only to move the fluid away from the surface to cool it by radiating into space. Though it still requires energy, you are moving less mass than transporting whole volumes of magma. And transporting the energy, which is mass-less, is less of a struggle, as you can use microwave or laser beams.
[Answer]
If the planet is already past the point of no return for sustaining human life, is it possible to make the 'problem' even worse, and therefore in to a solution?
Use [High-temperature electrolysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_electrolysis "High-temp electrolysis") to produce hydrogen in abundance across the entire planet. This of course requires heat (which sounds like you have in abundance) and likely water (which if the planet was previously inhabited, also probably exists, maybe in massive underground reservoirs).
A possible scenario may be that with all of the volcanic/geo-thermal activity, a lot of various heavy gasses were pumped out in to the atmosphere making it incredibly dense. This, along with appropriately strong gravity, would allow the hydrogen to naturally float to the top of the atmosphere and oxygen to be another layer below, where the space stations encircling the planet could harvest it for energy. The nice part about this is that no storage mechanism is necessary and could make for interesting plot ideas where there are more dense 'patches' of hydrogen, allowing for resource competition which is constantly changing.
While not an incredibly efficient system, improvements could be made such as more direct supply using actual plumbing or something more exotic (not sure on the sci-fi-iness of your world based on the tags). Plot advancement: These could also be designs currently being worked on to be fielded in the future.
As an added benefit, you've solved how to provide water to your space station inhabitants as well since this is a by product of the hydrogen fuel cell process.
Another possible plot idea would be that the thin layer of N2 separating the Oxygen from the Hydrogen gas layer could be tampered with or naturally wear thin and be a threat of a cataclysmic atmospheric 'event'.
[Some science behind gas layers.](https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-think-a-layer-of-dark-hydrogen-could-exist-on-planets-like-jupiter)
[Answer]
**Magnetic fluctuation**?
I admit I don't really know enough about this to provide a feasibility study on this method. But as the tag is science-*based*, here goes.
With the planets magma now flowing on the surface as lava, they magnetic poles and fields are in a constant state of flux. [As these magnetic fields cross conductive metal, electricity is generated.](https://www.solarschools.net/knowledge-bank/energy/electricity/magnets) So instead of directly taking the heat from the planet, use the magnetic fields of the molten flows to generate electricity in space.
[Answer]
## LASERS
Lasers is the answer for everything sci-fi. Truth be told, you could simple use modified solar panels to harvest radiated heat from the planet directly, but that's not the best way to do it. This is where lasers come in. Actually there's more than one way to use lasers to harness the energy of the magma, so I'll give you both and let you decide.
First choice is actually shooting the laser into space, with the laser being powered by some kind of thermal energy converter. You could use a steam engine or [thermocouples](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/question136.htm), your choice. Then, you point the laser at whatever's in space that you can use for energy. You can point the laser at solar panels, which is fine, but require battery cells and stuff and isn't my first choice.
Personally I would fire this laser at a modified [Salt Tower](https://www.solarreserve.com/en/technology/molten-salt-tower-receiver) that's in space. It can store heat energy to be used as electrical energy later, both more efficiently than storage cells, and with less maintenance. Plus, if the laser needs repairs, you have a reserve of energy to use until the laser is operational again. Also, it doesn't have to use salt, so research if there's anything that may work better for you.
Okay, so those are the ways to use a laser shooting into space, but what if a dense atmosphere blocks the laser, or you want a power source that will last for a long time even away from the planet? Well lucky for you, there's a way to get a lot of energy off the planet in a condensed and usable form.
Turns out, lasers can be used to create [nuclear fusion](http://fusion.srubar.net/laser-fusion.html). So far we only really use hydrogen to create helium, but with just slight advances in technology, we could easily create materials such as Uranium, which is useful as a nuclear fuel. Of course, if our fusion is powered by a source of energy that consumes our own resources it won't work, but as far as getting a planet's energy into space, this is a good way to handle it.
[Answer]
I know it's not quite what you asked - but others have covered the plausibility of 'lifting' heavy materials to orbit as heat stores.
The one possiblity I could imagine is eruption-driven.
E.g. a planet with a sufficiently low gravity (and sufficiently forceful volcanoes) that the magma reaches 'space' - either low orbit or even potentially escape velocity.
Then you'd have a double whammy - your 'shipment' of hot (ish) magma would be arriving on the platform for free (or at least, lower cost than a boost-to-orbit), and you'd also be reducing 'mass-loss' from the planet - because any planet that's flinging it's own mass out at more than escape velocity is going to be shrinking.
For real world examples, look to Io:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanology_of_Io>
>
> The higher vent temperatures and pressures associated with these plumes generate eruption speeds of up to 1 kilometre per second (0.62 mi/s), allowing them to reach heights of between 300 and 500 kilometres (190 and 310 mi).[57] Pele-type plumes form red (from short-chain sulfur) and black (from silicate pyroclastics) surface deposits, including large 1,000 kilometres (620 mi)-wide red rings, as seen at Pele
>
>
>
Note though - 1km/sec is less than Ios escape velocity, so the results of the mass-flinging do end up back on the surface eventually, unless Jupiter 'interferes'.
<https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1gkiz3/could_a_volcano_eruption_theoretically_be/>
Since you've already got *some* of the 'heavy lifting' from ground to near-orbit done, you'd have a slightly easier ride of harnessing the energy.
[Answer]
The power generator itself could be something fairly low-technology - a steam engine. This is probably the most efficient way of extracting work from a heat differential.
Now the problems:
1. Lifting magma into space is ridiculously expensive. If you have a space elevator, you can reuse some of that energy by dropping the spent rock down as a counterweight, but it's still a drain.
2. The magma cools as soon as it's out of the ground. Ideally you want the generator as close to the source as possible.
3. Cooling - to use a heat differential, you need to dump heat into something cold. You either need a constant supply of water, or you need to recapture and condense the steam by letting it cool off using air. Both are hard to come by in space. You can dump heat by radiating it off as infrared, but it's slower, and it strains an already very critical system - lose a heat pump and your living quarters suddenly get very toasty. (Waste heat is already a problem in space anyway; this just makes it worse.) ((Admittedly, if the planet itself has no liquid water or air, it's going to be tricky to generate power there too - but probably no more than in space.))
In summary, it would likely be a better idea to put your turbines planet-side, then use microwave lasers to beam it at collectors on the space station. There's some waste, but it's a lot more efficient and safe.
If the surface is too active to build on, you might need to put the power plants on big blimps that can move to safety as needed. (But that was already going to be an issue if you have only the magma-harvesting infrastructure on the ground.)
[Answer]
1. As has already been stated, the first problem you have is that of getting your magma into space. Generally molten rock doesn't have enough energy in it to be able to lift its own mass very far, let alone into space. Developments in gravity manipulation technology would be needed to explain how the machines are able to lift the magma.
2. Lifted off the surface of the planet is not the same as being in orbit. Things in actual orbit are moving very quickly, so the drones would also have to accelerate the magma to orbital speeds as well as lifting it. And if you already have a system for lifting and accelerating that much magma into space without much energy expended, your space station probably doesn't need a lot of energy to begin with, which could be a plus.
3. From a thermodynamic perspective any power generating system that relies on heat is actually proportional to the temperature **difference** between the source (magma) and the heat sink. Due to this, a key technology that they would need is the ability to radiate that heat into space very quickly. The invention of an innovative radiator technology might very well be the key to making that sort of system viable.
4. When you cool magma, it becomes rock, what do you do with the spent fuel (rocks)? If you just throw them out the window, over time there will be a literal asteroid belt of spent magma forming a ring around the planet.
[Answer]
Several answers have suggested geothermal energy to generate electrical energy, which might then be sent to space via laser or microwave transmitter, but one objection in the comments is that there is no "cold sink" for a Carnot cycle heat engine to work.
This problem may be overcome by the use of special materials which are designed to radiate at specific temperatures which the local atmosphere is transparent to. This has been [demonstrated in principle](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608840/a-material-that-throws-heat-into-space-could-soon-reinvent-air-conditioning/) and several companies are now working to commercialize this technology. Essentially the radiator on the ground is radiatively "coupled" to space, which has a temperature of 2.7K. Assuming the radiator is reasonably efficient, the problem of a "cold sink" is pretty much solved.
[Answer]
Lets assume a plannet nearly the size of earth (r = 6000 km) but lacking an iron core. The density of the plannet is on average similar to silicon dioxide (2650 kg / m^3). This puts the total mass of the plannet (MP) at 2.4 \* 10^24 kilograms.
The atmosphere of the plannet has been blown off so you are able to orbit at an amzingly low 150 km (The ISS is at about 400 km)
With no atmosphere the scooper satellites move in eliptical orbits taking them back and forth between the surface and the station without any additional energy. When they pick up their lava payload they must use some energy to raise their payload. When they arrive at the station their energy is replenished from the lava powered heat reactor on the station.
The energy (E) to raise one kilogram of material from the ground to a height of 150 km is MP \* 1kg \* G \* (1/r + 1/(r + 150km)) = 651 kilojoules
Lets say that the lava temperature is at 1500 kelvin and that the cold side of the reactor on your station runs at 300 kelvin. Lets also assume that the reactor runs at 90% of the theoretical maximum (carnot efficiency). The reactor efficiency (N) is then 1500 K / (1500K + 300K) \* 90% = 75%.
If the reactor is 75% efficient then you must produce at least E / N = 651 kJ / 75% = 868 kJ /kg of material to come out ahead.
The only requirement left is that the specific heat of the lava material is greater than 868 kJ / kg / 1200 kelvin = 0.72 kJ / kg.
Silicon dioxide itself would barely meet the requirement. But with some lithium impurities to bring up the average you would have extra energy.
]
|
[Question]
[
In my story, the princess escapes her prison through the window. The window has a lock on it, made by a legendary locksmith, that's said to be unpickable. *But either due to the locksmith not being told what the lock was for, and/or the lock being installed by the lowest bidder from a nearby town, it can open easily from the outside.*
The princess knows this, and she does just that after removing a small glass pane that was loose due to wear and tear of the frames. Breaking the window would be faster, of course, but also more likely to attract attention.
My main question is about the bit in italics. Is it conceivable that a lock such as this (one-sided) could exist, using medieval / early Renaissance technology? (It doesn't have to be common; the work of a mad genius is good enough.) Is it conceivable that the one-sidedness could be a side-effect brought about by faulty installation? I tried looking for 'one-sided locks' but this mostly results in plain deadbolts, which...is technically correct, but not what I'm looking for. Ideally those windows should still open from the inside with a key (e.g. to wash them). I'm interested in locks that can be opened automatically from the opposite side to that in which they are locked. Sort of like some hotel room locks, where the door unlocks automatically when walking out of the door, but it requires a key the other way around.
(If this is not doable, I'll probably go with 'actually, the window was never locked all along', but I'm curious if this can work out! I know nothing about the history of locks.)
[Answer]
Frame (ahem) challenge.
The prison's walls are very thick. The handyman who has to install the windows also does the cleaning, once every two months, and he can see that it would be a right pain to get to the glass, all the way down the deep recess. So he has a bright idea: he'll just mount the window on the *inside*, flush with the inner wall. Easy to get to, easy to clean, just a wipe with a wet cloth.
The princess simply lifts the window off its hinges, which are on the cell side of the wall, and sets the pair of windowpanes aside, still locked with their very expensive, unpickable lock.
[Answer]
Actually, it is trivial, even with today's technology. Most door locks are built to lock from one side and open easily from the other. If the locksmith wasn't told about breakable glass, this could be the type of lock you got.
The unbelievable part is "unpickable". That doesn't stop anybody using the term.
[Answer]
**Yes... and no...**
All due respect to David's answer, he's thinking of *modern door locks,* which didn't become the form we're familiar with today until the early 1800s.
Medieval locks were either padlocks or surface latch locks that would not have had key access from the other side of the door. It's not that a surface latch lock couldn't have a hole drilled in the door to allow a key from the other side, but what would be the point?
It's worth noting that at the beginning of the medieval era most locks required a small hole (not a keyhole) at the back of the lock to mount the tip of the key. This was to provide leverage and stability while moving the latch itself.
So, yes, it's theoretically possible that someone could have created the double-sided (in modern terms, double-cylinder) locks, but is it believable?
No, it's not. Who would put such a lock on a window? Even back in medieval times, the point (literally the *whole point*) was to keep people out — and yet you're looking for a lock that's trivially opened from the outside. Yes, I get that you're looking to imprison, but the prisoner is the person "on the outside" you're trying to keep out. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, inside out... work with me.)
You're suggesting a level of incompetence that's difficult to believe. It's on the order of something invented by [Bloody Stupid Johnson](https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Bloody_Stupid_Johnson).
[Answer]
# Medieval locks weren't unpickable.
They didn't have the technical knowhow to make especially unpickable locks. It wasn't until the 1700s ish that they started developing that.
Medieval locks you could pretty easily pick by just getting a similar key with different biting, filing off the parts that don't engage the lever, and using it.
What you can do is make a latch. That can't be opened from the inside, and so it's absolutely secure, so long as you don't have a window you can remove.
[Answer]
# Some frame challenges
More like "you need the following conditions to have the scenario you describe", not the "this is impossible" challenges.
## Economic constraints
There were no affordable locks in medieval times; they were absolute luxury contraptions. They were typically used on the treasure chests of the wealthy and/or powerful.
Even iron wasn't exactly cheap. You don't have prison cells with iron bars and a locked door, that came only with the industrial revolution when forging became mechanised, which started with watermills driving drop hammers - this became reasonably common in Renaissance times, which is usually considered to be after medieval times.
Even then, it is *much* cheaper to build the prison as a room with a hole in the ceiling. Nothing goes in or out except dangling from a rope that is held by as many sturdy men as necessary for whatever the weight is: prisoners, food, waste. Has the nice side effect that nothing goes in or out except in the presence of guards.
## Personnel is cheap
Or, rather, mechanisms are expensive.
In medieval times, payment for a maid could be food, housing, and two dresses per year, and given that food and housing couldn't be taken for granted and fabric for dresses was pretty expensive, this could be a pretty fair deal.
Guards were even more expensive: Their gear contained metal where leather and wood wouldn't do.
So... again we use the hole-in-the-ceiling prison. The prison personnel is much cheaper than a grille door with a - gasp! - lock.
## So we must be in a gilded-cage scenario
Maybe the princess is on display, for political reasons.
Or maybe her captor is just mocking her: See, I consider you so weak that you won't escape even from an unsafe prison.
Or she's the kind of prisoner that you can take hostage to keep somebody from rebelling, but that person would surely rebel if you put her into a standard hole-in-the-ceiling prison because such prisons take away first health, then life - you can't really clean them.
However, there's still the question: Why locks? Keeping doors and windows guarded at all times is *still* much cheaper than a lock.
So... the captor shows off his wealth.
"Look, I can afford to put her in a locked room WITH NO GUARDS."
(Such an approach to guarding an important prisoner would be considered a bad idea, and indeed the story will progress in her escaping... guards would have prevented that.)
## You don't put a lock on a window
It's just too expensive.
Medieval windows didn't have glass, they had shutters to keep bad weather out.
Improved windows had a grill, to keep attackers out (or prisoners in). The grill would be set into the stone, no lock.
Expensive windows had oiled parchment. It's not transparent, but it's translucent so you get light into the room.
# A possible scenario
It's not the window.
It's part of a mind game: The Evil Overlord is taunting the princess.
Yes, it's an expensive grill door. With an absurdly expensive trick lock.
And the key hanging from a hook... *just* out of reach.
The shoddy worksmanship could be anywhere:
* The window has bars, these were replaced because "rusty does not befit a princess", but the replacement stones that the bars are set into were sandstone.
* The hook is nailed to a wooden piece of furniture. The hook was replaced, and the new nails were slightly less thick than the previous ones. Or maybe the hook has been replaced so many times that the wood became brittle and any nail could be pulled out by hand.
The jailers know this, but fixing this would cost money (if only to pay a carpenter to do the job properly), so nothing was done, and *somehow* the princess manages to attach a rope to the hook and pulls it out.
## Another scenario (just shoddy, not elaborate locks though)
Not a lock.
Just a rivet closing a neck ring or manacles. The rivet is a pretty soft metal so you can file it open with little effort, but files are something that only smiths own so it's practically inescapable. (I read that thralls in ye olde times in England had "thrall rings" around their necks that made their status visible; that was fictional work though, so I don't know much about how much, if any, this was in practice.)
Anyway: No file near the princess, problem solved.
Except maybe the smith wasn't competent. Or sabotaging the work.
Or the smith couldn't be bothered with doing so low-level work, and sent the apprentice.
Either way, the rivet was fastened just enough to barely hold, and can be moved out by hand given oil.
Probably not an answer to the question, but I kinda like the idea of an apprentice mucking up a perfectly reasonable and simple job, just because the master didn't have the time to properly deal with the task.
[Answer]
## The window uses a ward lock.
Before the 1800s, there were very few styles of locks and those that existed were pretty easy to beat assuming you had the right tools and knowledge. The two basic styles were pin tumbler locks and warded locks.
Pin tumbler locks were not like modern pin tumblers because they did not have sperate key and driver pins. They simply had pins that had to be lifted, and as long as you had a pick and a tensioning tool, they were really easy to beat compared to a the Yale Pin Tumbler which is the bases of most modern locks, or if you could figure out the spacing and number of pins, it was trivial to fashion a working key because all pins had the same offset. However, the advantage of these locks is that the pins prevented the latch from just being pushed into an open position. So this is not the kind of lock you want for your story,
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/00X0O.png)
The second style are warded locks which is where you have a shape that matches the shape of the key. These were also easy to beat because you just needed a "skeleton key" a style of key that may not match the whole pattern of the original, but can fit through at least part of the ward's pattern to turn the lock.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/79rvT.png)
A pick resistant ward lock would be one where the simplest profile that can turn through the ward to hit the latch would be more complex than any skeleton key a person could easily fashion by sheer chance like this.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yBjPa.png)
In general, both styles of lock are very easy to pick with the right tools, but the real question here is not if the lock can be picked, but if it can be picked with tools that the princess can improvise from found objects in her locked room. With this being the real test, a well made ward lock may seem like the better option.
However, unlike pin tumbler locks, these locks don't actually have any binding mechanism to keep the latch in place; so, if you were to access a ward lock from the backside, all you would see is some manner or rotating latch that you could just turn open with your hand, since under normal circumstances, it is only the rotating action of the key that actually opens the latch.
[Answer]
Simplest form of a lock that doesn't need a key on one side, and is unpickable on the other, is a lock that *doesn't use a key at all*.
A simple knob-operated deadbolt is well within 13th century technology. On the outside of the cell, there's just a simple knob, but with the door opening outward and no strike-close sprung bolt, it's impossible to jimmy from the inside (without very time consuming and obvious destruction, if anyone opens the door -- for instance to deliver meals and change the chamber pot) if there's a stone or metal jamb. On the inside, there's nothing but, at most, a small iron plate, likely held to the lock body by rivets.
[Answer]
I am reminded of a scene from an old "Robin Hood" TV adaptation. Alas I could not find the clip on-line. The heroes are locked in a prison cell, and the hero asks if they have any chance of picking the lock. One of his companions replies along the lines of:
>
> That lock? No way. I know the man who made that lock and he is an
> expert. We'll be here until midsummer trying to pick it ... however,
> he couldn't make a decent hinge to save his life. Let me show you.
>
>
>
The actual escape happened off camera so we are left to wonder if the problem with the hinge was in loose pins that could be knocked out, or in the way it attached to the door or the frame so that it could be prised loose, or the in materials used so that they could be deformed sufficiently to free the door.
[Answer]
Here is an example. The way my home door works is: it is held in place when closed by two bars. Turning the handle extends and retracts one bar, and turning the lock extends and retracts the other. The one that is controlled by the handle is pushed out by a spring so that the door can still close while the handle is not pushed down. If you could reach inside the door frame and push on this bar, then you could open the door without the handle (provided it was not locked.)
If your window is held locked by only one bar, which is extended and retracted by the lock, and that one bar is pushed by a spring so that the window can be closed without the key, and the lock was installed poorly such that this bar is accessible from the outside, then you can open the window without turning the lock and your italicized statement is conceivable.
]
|
[Question]
[
**As the tittle says what would the ecosystem look like if predator and prey were to switch places?** The cause of this change is either handwavium or a very unlucky sorcerer. The transformation is mainly in diet: prey become carnivores and predators herbivores (omnivores are unaffected so you can leave them out for the time being). This change in diet will then change the niches that each animal occupies over time. With even more time their bodies will change (mostly their teeth to accommodate for their diet) but their overall body stays the same.
For example a giraffe affected by this spell will become a carnivorous giraffe. The animals teeth become sharper and it uses its long neck to prey on other animals. A lion for example would become a peaceful herbivore with flat teeth.
**So how exactly would this change the ecosystem?**
Edit: Yes this change is supposed to change the animals instincts and their physiology to some extent. Hooves might become claws or herds may become packs, but the overall animal stays the same. And to answer a specific comment, no I did not leave out these details out of fear for my idea being stolen, but rather to avoid making the question overly complicated.
[Answer]
In a normal ecosystem, the number of prey animals is normally *much* greater than the number of predators.
(Basically, predators like lions need to make kills one a week or so. If lions live an average of, say, five years, then they need around 250 kills in their lifetimes. Now it's true that a pride will share most kills, so decrease that by a factor of 10. In the course of a lion's life, the lion will require about 25 giraffes (or whatever). Thus the population of giraffes must be at least 25 times longer than the population of lions. You can play with these numbers and get differing results -- for example, the relative lifespans of the prey and the predators matter -- but in the end, prey must greatly outnumber predators or the predators will starve.)
So if you suddenly had a savanna with 2500 carnivorous giraffes and, say 500, grass-eating lions, there'd be a bloodbath, and in the course of no more than a month or two there'd be (a) no more grass-eating lions and (b) a rapidly shrinking population of starving meat-eating giraffes.
This result is pretty robust, though there's doubtless always some way to gimmick the result. (E.g., choose something to become the new predator which can't actually successfully hunt prey. Then the new predator starves (again) and as soon as the new predators are extinct, the new prey undergoes a population explosion and strips the savanna of food before staving in larger numbers.)
Either way, it's not a pretty sight.
[Answer]
**The vast majority of all things non-omnivore would go extinct in short order**
Animals are, for the most part, specialized life forms which are designed for limited sets of behavior. There's more to being a predator than just digesting meat and there's more to being prey than digesting grass.
Birth rates, for instance. Rabbits breed like rabbits because of how many of them die, yet lions do not breed at anywhere close to that rate. Another important point is tracking - predators must be able to track down their prey. Cats have developed senses to track and hunt prey, and part of that is actually a set of patient stalking behaviors. Mice will never achieve that level without drastic adjustments, so if the transformation was just mainly in diet, entire swaths of the food chain would go extinct.
[Answer]
# Mass extinction of most (ex)-herbivores
I'm assuming, based on your question, that all carnivores that become herbivores have all the digestive tracts and the like required to properly consume enough plant food to stay alive, and all the ex-herbivores get the proper digestive tracts to digest meat in order to stay alive.
That means the only barrier to staying alive is getting the food. Let's also assume that the animals innately understand that they suddenly need to eat something else, to prevent them from instantly going extinct because they keep trying to eat food they can't digest.
All carnivores are now built like carnivores, but can only digest grass, all herbivores are now built like herbivores, but can only digest meat.
The problem here is that if their bodies don't change besides dietary requirements, almost all creatures that used to be herbivores will quickly go extinct.
Capturing, killing and devouring meat isn't that difficult for a hippo, they're already a very dangerous herbivore (and now they're a dangerous carnivore), but most ex-herbivores aren't that lucky. While there are plenty that can most likely kill something, the vast majority of herbivores simply aren't designed to kill other animals.
It doesn't matter that a lion can no longer digest meat, it's still going to win a fight with an antelope. In fact, most ex-carnivores will still be vastly more dangerous than the ex-herbivores, so the ex-herbivores will have no real option but to either become scavengers or prey on other ex-herbivores that are lower on the food scale than them.
Before long, most of the species that were once herbivores will be dead. Assuming a lion understands it now needs to eat grass or leaves or something (I have no idea how you are handwaving their evolutionary digestive tract and what type of herbivore they are now), it should have no problem finding that food now that the (previously more) plentiful ex-herbivores are no longer consuming it.
[Answer]
If the only changes in morphology are the teeth and digestive system, it's very likely that the new predators would be completely inadapted and would go extinct.
But let's put that aside for a moment, and consider the point made by Mark Olson. Actually, in the most commonly used mathematical model of the evolution of a prey-predator system (the Lotka-Volterra model), the theoretical behaviour is that no matter the initial condition, the system will eventually become periodic. This is observed in real life, where some species have population booms every few years.
Of course, the Lotka-Volterra model may become unrealistic in a number of situations (notably if the population of one species falls below a certain threshold), but it's very possible that you would indeed observe alternating cycles of low and high populations for both species in that situation (sudden reversal of the population of preys and predators).
[Answer]
TL;DR: Only omnivores, plants, and some former carnivores will be left after a few years. There will be some ex-herbivores, but they will be relatively rare.
Long answer:
If the plants become carnivores, here is the progression of events:
(1) Previously non-carnivorous plants would consume most of the previously carnivorous plants like Venus Flytraps and pitcher plants. Those that survive will die of malnutrition, since carnivorous plants are carnivorous due to a lack of available nutrients. Liverwort might survive, but that's about it.
(2) When the plants run out of other plants to eat, they will then consume most of the land-dwelling reptiles (snakes, anoles, geckos, etc), since they cannot easily avoid plants.
(3) All bacteria will die of malnutrition. Bacteria are, by default, carnivores; there is nothing else for them to eat.
(4) The vast majority of fauna will be caught unaware by the suddenly-hostile flora. As a result, most of the suddenly carnivorous plains and jungle herd animals will die. The former carnivores like lions will also suffer casualties, but they will probably suffer less due to their usage of caves and outcroppings as home bases. Mountain animals like goats and sheep will survive relatively unscathed for the same reason.
(5) The vast majority of the surviving ex-carnivores will now die of starvation. While herbivores can eat animals easily, the same does not go for carnivores. A lion can eat fruit and nuts in a pinch, but otherwise unable to process plant matter. Even if the spell does change their gastric tracts to be compatible, the will still not be able to get enough sustenance; most plants simply do not provide enough nutrients. A few will survive, but, weakened by hunger, the vast majority will be killed by former herbivores.
(6) Due to competition among the suddenly-carnivorous plants, the rainforests will become barren wastelands, devoid of life. Those plants which remain will straggly, and thus not worth eating. Chances are, the rainforests will eventually become deserts.
(7) Humanity will probably die. To be blunt, we are a very specialized species; without modern technology we would be unable to cope. If modern technology is allowed, then we would probably survive; after all, we have developed [weapons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLU-82) [specifically](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napalm) [for](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamethrower) [killing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange) [plants.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbicidal_warfare) Seriously, the 20th century made plant-killing into an art.
(8) The end result will be that the world will primarily be dominated by pigs (those things are invasive even in their home environments), plants, and maybe humanity if we have a high enough tech level.
[Answer]
Predators can predate one another to get protein. So if the prey vannishes, there will be levels of fallback strategy.
Eat other weaker predators.
Eat remains that others can not eat. Your ex-hervibores would for example chew on old skin and bones until nutrition can be extracted.
Self-consumation, aka starving.
Eat plants again, as a emergency strategy.
Other strategys include various hibernations and hibernation of the offspring (triggered to hatch by repopulating prey).
Nature is something desperat, improvised and willing to use all options. As long as there is food, any food, it will be eaten.
One thing that would change though, is a disruption when it comes to parasites. A creature used to dwell on or in a herbivore, certainly would find its lifecycle disrupted.
]
|
[Question]
[
On their homeworld, they can see "normally" but when traveling off world they need to wear protective eyewear (but not full body protection.)
I was thinking some kind of light sensitivity, but nothing so extreme that their skin can't withstand it.
Maybe issue filtering out certain colours on the spectrum?
[Answer]
There are **MANY possible reasons** for an Alien to wear (and need to wear) eye cover.
* UV blocking:
The aliens come from a planet with much more functional ozone layer, they do not normally get exposed to *any* UV light. They need to protect their eyes and skin from the UV. Skin is easy, they can just apply a microlayer of UV-blocking material, but the eyes need to have every single trace of ultraviolet light blocked out to protect them from damage. Eyecover will not be mere sunglasses, but sealing, wrap-around goggles.
* Frequency shifting:
Similar to the UV case above, but even more so. The aliens normally see at light intensities and/or in a spectrum of colors that is *so* different from Earth's normal sunlight that they need to not only block out harmful frequencies, but actually need a device that shifts the frequencies to something that their eyes can process sensibly. Think night-vision goggles, or infrared goggles.
* Chemical protection (pollution / trace gases):
The aliens come from a planet where there is NO air pollution. Their eyes cannot cope with even trace amounts of nitrous oxides, ozone, aromatic hydrocarbon smog, etc. The eyes need protection from these trace gases. Expect the aliens to also have a breathing filter to protect their lungs from the same.
* Chemical protection (humidity):
The aliens' eyes are delicate structures, adapted to a very high humidity level, like amphibian eyes tend to be. When exposed to completely dry air, they need to moisturize the eyes, and yet for some obscure cultural reason the Human they deal with frown on the routine licking-of-your-friend's-eyeballs social behavior that is common in a polite society. Well, they are polite beings, and thus wear eye cover that includes micromisting to keep their eyes hydrated, nevermind how socially awkward it feels to not lick your companion's eyes when they need it!
* Chemical protection (complete incompatibility):
The aliens might have a complete intolerance to Earth atmosphere. For example their air might be good refreshing clean chlorine, not this foul oxygen gunk that the Humans wallow in!
* Biological protection:
The aliens have read the book "War of the Worlds" by H.G. Wells, thank you. They know quite well how vulnerable they could be to Earth bacteria, viruses, ~~airborne sperm~~ ahem pollen, etc. Besides, they have good eyesight, and can see the cloud of vile spray a Human ejects when they sneeze. And the flakes of skin and hair that the inconsiderate Humans litter all over the place.
* Dangerous eyes!
The aliens' eyes are like those of a basilisk, or as the brethren of Cthulhu, any mere mortal that sees them uncovered is overcome by insanity!
* Fashion/Clothing taboo:
*wot*? You Humans go around *with your eyeballs exposed for all to see!?!? How shameful, how perverse!!*
or maybe, they invented Google Glasses many years ago, and *everyone* wears them *all of the time*
[Answer]
The home planet of these aliens is a dark place with a very limited amount of light (maybe because they are on a moon and constantly in the shadow of a gas giant), so they have **Enlarged pupils**, to allow more light to enter their eyes.
So as soon as they leave their planet extra light causes damage to their eyes, for which cool and trendy shades are used.
[Answer]
They do not want to be written up by their supervisors.
"It seems some of you regard the wearing of proper protective equipment as optional when visiting sectors outside the galactic home zone, or otherwise not specifically enumerated in form 76F.82.105c! Safe or not, this planet is not in the list. Rules are not subject to your judgment! I'll be requiring you all to watch training videos 67, 85 and 93-97 once again."
[Answer]
Something akin to snow blindness, or [photokeratitis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photokeratitis), can explain this
>
> Photokeratitis or ultraviolet keratitis is a painful eye condition caused by exposure of insufficiently protected eyes to the ultraviolet (UV) rays from either natural (e.g. intense sunlight) or artificial (e.g. the electric arc during welding) sources. Photokeratitis is akin to a sunburn of the cornea and conjunctiva.
>
>
> The injury may be prevented by wearing eye protection that blocks most of the ultraviolet radiation, such as welding goggles with the proper filters, a welder's helmet, sunglasses rated for sufficient UV protection, or appropriate snow goggles. The condition is usually managed by removal from the source of ultraviolet radiation, covering the corneas, and administration of pain relief. Photokeratitis is known by a number of different terms including: snow blindness, arc eye, welder's flash, bake eyes, corneal flash burns, sand man's eye, flash burns, niphablepsia, potato eye, or keratoconjunctivitis photoelectrica.
>
>
>
[Answer]
A few possible reasons:
They live on desert/ocean planets and their body chemistry can't have their eyes touching water/not submerged in water.
They dont have sand or dust on their planet. Ours do. Or something about too much chemicals we polluted our planet's air with.
Our sun is too bright for them. Just like the aliens in "Battleship"
[Answer]
One more idea:
Their authentication/access control systems are based on retina scans (or whatever their equivalent is), so to protect against credential leaks they only take their glasses, which block the scanner's wavelength, off when they need to authenticate.
[Answer]
## Their eyes are held into their eye sockets less strongly via skin, eyelids, and cartilage, and instead helped by the subtly lower gravity of their planet.
If, their eyes are kept from falling out of their eye sockets by a bit of gravity that allows their eyes to avoid going down a sloped retina, which might provide some additional features to their eyesight, especially on their home planet. Maybe the ability to easily dislodge eyes is a feature on their planet - able to easily give them the ability to look behind themselves without having to turn their heads, or an ability to look at the sides of a wall to keep predators at bay.
The problems come when they go anywhere outside of their home planet - the ability to push their eyes down to dislodge becomes a defect when it happens automatically due to increased G-forces on a spaceship, or general gravity on other planets.
Given the unpredictability of when this will end up happening on other planets, or in space, and the issue of appearing as if this isn't a feature of theirs to other species, they opt to wear protective eyewear, that keeps their eyes firmly in place - with just enough friction available to move their eyes normally to look around.
Could they test if a planet has less gravity in this particular place to justify going eyewear-less? Maybe, but they instinctively have learned to not risk it.
[Answer]
How about the following?
Despite what everyone thought to be an uninhabitable environment, life somehow developed on a planet with very strong gravity.
On the plus side: because their muscles need to work against high gravity, they are among the strongest races in the galaxy.
On the weak side: in order to work against the strong gravity, they have very high blood pressure. While this is not a problem for their bodies in general, the blood vessels in their eyes pop when in low gravity. Only way to prevent this, is to always wear goggles keeping the eyes under pressure.
Depending on want you need, you can vary the seriousness of this condition between slowly going blind, and eyes literally exploding.
[Answer]
It's not that it is protective. Their atmosphere being different from wherever they go, the "air" will necessarily have a different refraction index. Regular glasses won't help, much for the same reason reading glasses won't help your shortsightedness underwater. You need to enclose "air" from your own native atmosphere inside goggles if you want proper 20/20 sight.
]
|
[Question]
[
My question is if a human were to have plant DNA, such as that from a flower, injected into their bloodstream would this have a negative or positive effect on their health? Or would it not affect them at all?
In this world, they have access to a larger amount of DNA.
By negative I mean would this kill them? Or would it possibly dwindle their immune system in any way?
By positive I mean would it strengthen their immune system. Give them some sort of minerals?
Or would doing this have no effect on the person in question at all? They would just have plant DNA in them.
I hope this question isn't too vague. I don't need a big in-depth answer just someone familiar with human immune systems and stuff like that and how they work just to know if it would be a negative or positive reaction or none at all.
[Answer]
It would have little to no effect if it was just "injected", since at that point it would just be harmless nucleotides. It would be captured and digested by lymphocytes.
It is possible that it might trigger an allergic reaction (but unlikely, since DNA is, well, DNA. Humans have it too).
To have an effect, the DNA would need to be injected *inside the cells*, or be bound to something that got inside the cells (in other words, a viral capsid) and then code for something that allows it to replicate. Being plant-based it couldn't reasonably infect the nucleus, so it would need to replicate in the cytoplasm of the cell. This isn't at all impossible (poxviridae do exactly that), but it does mean that the DNA must have specialized protein encoding sections for that purpose, *and those sections would be useless in plants*. In short, we're going farther and farther from ordinary "plant DNA".
[Answer]
DNA is a very stable compound. Unlike proteins, which get involved in all sorts of interesting reactions. DNA just sits there. It doesn't start replicating itself or synthesing proteins or doing any of the interesting stuff unless you supply it with a whole cell's worth of machinery.
When DNA was first discovered (and before Rosalind Crick and Watson figured out the structure), many doubted that it could be the gene; it was just too boring; it must be some kind of structural chemical in the chromosomes.
In fact, it is this very stability that makes DNA good as gene. You don't want your genes to be reacting with stuff and changing. You want your genes to sit quitely in the cell until the time comes for replication, and then only do replicate under careful control.
So you inject DNA into the blood, and your body will break it down. There are DNase catalysts in the body to deal with DNA that escapes for cellular damage such as may be caused by viruses or trauma. Too much DNA in the body's intracellular tissue is sticky and can cause problems, so the body is quite good at cleaning it up. (see cystic fibrosis, as an example of what can happen if this goes wrong)
There are no extra nutrients in the DNA, the chemical composition of plant and animal DNA are the same, it is just the order of the bases that differs.
[Answer]
[DNA viruses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_virus) exists and our immune system responds to them. I don't think it would be any different if it is a plant DNA. Thus, in the end, it will have minimal effect on the host. The only effect I can think of is immune system response, fever, increased white blood cells, etc...
[Answer]
I will suppose you mean gene injection through genetic therapy, possibly CRISPR-Cas, not merely dropping naked DNA on the blood stream.
Well, we already have plant genes.
Plants and animals have a common ancestor. [They branched out in the tree of life about 850 million years ago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_plants), give or take. Probably on a Tuesday.
In evolutionary science, [genes shared by different species may be orthologous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_homology#Orthology):
>
> Homologous sequences are orthologous if they are inferred to be descended from the same ancestral sequence separated by a speciation event: when a species diverges into two separate species, the copies of a single gene in the two resulting species are said to be orthologous. Orthologs, or orthologous genes, are genes in different species that originated by vertical descent from a single gene of the last common ancestor.
>
>
>
And here is an article by Dr. Natasha Glover, whose PhD is in plant genomics and biotechnology:
[What genes do I have in common with a plant?](http://lab.dessimoz.org/blog/2018/10/01/human-plant-orthologs)
In short: we humans share 12,792 orthologous pairs of genes with the [thale cress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabidopsis_thaliana).
Our current estimate for the number of human genes gives us [an amount of 46,831](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genome). So if you inject a thale cress gene in a human at random, there is approximately a chance of one in four that you will be just duplicating a gene. Depending on which one the person may get sick or may even become more resistant to cancer (if the thale cress has the p53 gene and you happen to copy that). Most likely, though, nothing will happen.
If you do happen to give that person a plant exclusive gene, though... Same results. You won't get a person able to do photosynthesis, because on top of that depending on a very complex set of genetic expressions, we don't have chloroplasts. You might get genes for resistance against the [TMV virus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_mosaic_virus), which is anticlimactic because it cannot infect humans anyway. But you may also create [a human that is able to generate their own linoleic and α-linolenic acids](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC409897/), two kinds of unsaturated fatty acids, which would have zero impact on their general quality of life too.
Stan Lee said in his autobiography that if you are aiming to write a story set in a fantastic world with mutant superheroes, you should tone the science down. In this kind of fiction, the more you science things, the more boring things get.
[Answer]
Semi-tangential response.
You explicitly ask about DNA. You could, instead ask about RNA. In which case, it is reported that [plant RNA ingested in food can migrate into tissues and alter gene expression](https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/what-you-eat-affects-your-genes-rna-from-rice-can-survive-digestion-and-alter-gene-expression). No injection needed. (The picture for microRNA dietary uptake has [become more complicated](http://zon.trilinkbiotech.com/2016/05/31/plant-mirna-controversial/) since the cited report, but has not been refuted.)
[Answer]
Most likely boring case: it gradually gets eliminated through the same processes that normally take care of the [circulating free DNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulating_free_DNA) released by ordinary means
Somewhat unlikely bad case: it triggers some immune reaction if the recipient is unlucky enough. Since the foreign substance is in the bloodstream it's likely not going to be fun. Although this might be very unlikely with the DNA alone
Ridiculously unlikely case: that DNA somehow ends up getting into some business other than floating around doing nothing
]
|
[Question]
[
It is inspired by this [furry trout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fur-bearing_trout).
I mean fish (not necessary to be a trout), not aquatic mammals, and real fur, not from fungi or mold (or looks like fur because of the dead cell, like [Mirapinna esau](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirapinna_esau)).
What kind of organs are needed, so a fish can have/grow fur (I assumed the fur probably is waterproof, but correct me if such thing will hinder the fish) either combine with/on the fish scale? Can this hinder their hydrodynamic or gills to breathe?
Since it grows hair, I assume the fish probably live in a cold climate, but I am also curious if this kind of fish can live in other climates or not.
[Answer]
Hair/fur is basically just modified scales, so it doesn't take any new organs; just modified expression of existing ones.
The bigger problem is that hair seems to be a bad idea for aquatic animals. While some semi-aquatic mammals still have hair (e.g. otters), the trend among the most well adapted aquatic mammals is to lose their fur and become smooth skinned with a subcutaneous fat layer. This has occurred in at least three separately evolved clades - whales/dolphins, walruses, and manatee - and so shows convergent evolution. Where convergent evolution occurs it is good evidence that a feature is beneficial. So it seems likely that being hairless is beneficial for an aquatic organism.
I'd also note that in semi-aquatic mammals which use fur as an insulator, the insulation effect is primarily produced by [air trapped between the hairs](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151123103838.htm) and so it can only really function in an organism that spends time out of the water in order to fill the gaps between the hairs with air.
I'd suggest therefore that while in principle hairy fish could be produced with relatively little change, in reality they would never be favoured by evolution, and so are unlikely to ever occur in nature.
[Answer]
First "fur" appeared long before mammals - it was the amphibian mammals' ancestors. Yes, "hairy tritons", if you like.
To cut a long story short: first it was scales all along. Then mammal's ancestors "turned" scales into hair and later dinosaurs "turned" scales into feathers (mammals are older than dinosaurs). First hairs were tactile organs - vibrissa.
So it is plausible that some fish would develop hairs in the form of vibrissa. But since hairs are not good for swimming, it is not plausible to have all-hairy fish (only with some "genetics games")
[Answer]
### They can use it to capture food
While a fish could theoretically have hair (hair is just modified scales), hair on aquatic animals is usually a disadvantage, because it slows the creature down. Even aquatic mammals lose their hair as they adapt for a fully-aquatic existence.
But there are a few exceptions to this: The [orangutan crab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaeus_japonicus) and the [yeti crab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwa_hirsuta) are two unrelated, furry crustaceans that have evolved hair for similar reasons. The yeti crab cultures bacterial colonies in its fur, which it "harvests" for food. The orangutan crab is a filter-feeder that captures bits of food particles with its hair, as well as sand and bits of rocks which help it camouflage.
It is not impossible for a fish to evolve hair for similar reasons. However, it bears mentioning that both crabs have a relatively low-energy lifestyle compared to most fish. They don't need to eat very much and since they aren't moving quickly anyway the hair doesn't slow them down much. So, if you have a hairy fish it probably isn't going to be built for speed.
[Answer]
**It sure won't be a trout**
The obvious con to hair in water is more drag, so more energy required, so more food needed. That is an evolutionary disadvantage, because more food means more going out there to find it, and means the same supply feeds less individuals. One outcome is the hairy fishes are gradually phased out of evolution for lack of surviving, and that's no fun. Another outcome is they evolve in a different direction.
To offset the disadvantage, your fish need to move as little as possible. That makes it an ambush predator, capable to pounce at incredible speed unto unsuspecting prey, but overall below par as a swimmer. It doesn't need to swim fast and far anyways, and it won't try to eat anything that can escape the initial attack. This is already a thing, so it's not that outlandish to imagine. If you want to increase the weirdness factor, you could imagine a fish that hunts with its tongue like a chameleon. Although I don't know how well that'd work underwater, *that* would be pretty weird.
It would use its hair to camouflage in the environment, to surprise smaller fry and to hide from bigger fishes who would outpace it. It would of course help to live in a hairy environment, for instance if you had hairy coral or hairy seaweed, or at least if those pass as hairy in the eyes of a fish. It would possibly develop a slower metabolism to decrease the energy input and the amount of time it needs to feed, though that means doubling down on the "moving as little as possible" lifestyle. They might prefer warm waters, that much less energy to spend in heating.
[Answer]
As stated in other answers, hair can't be used to keep a fish warm and so a hairy fish would have to use the hair as camouflage to retain this feature. There are better ways of doing this than using hair, for example, the "[Hairy Frogfish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striated_frogfish)" is covered in dermal spinules to resemble the plant-life in coral reefs and ambush prey. The spinules produce less drag than hair enabling the Frogfish to lunge quickly.
[Answer]
# When does an otter become a fish?
It doesn't. It's a mammal, but you know what I mean.
If you want fur you need a mammal, and a mammal somewhere on the evolutionary line between an otter and a dolphin might still have fur. Otters range from the Arctic to the tropics, so there isn't any problem there. The biggest problem is that they still give birth on land.
[Answer]
**They're not done evolving their hair away**
After all, how often are normally-hairy land mammals genetically hairless?
In an environment where life had a stronger hold on the land than in the water, it's possible that hairy land animals are evolving into aquatic species (such as the whale examples from our world), but have not yet evolved to be hairless.
This could be due to a disaster/population die-off in the water, or perhaps even due to the fish on this planet being a relatively new adaptation for life that started on land.
[Answer]
You don't need different organs; as has been stated, it is quite possible for modified fish scales to produce hair if needed. What you need is evolutionary pressure, a niche so that hair makes sense despite the obvious disadvantages.
Hair might be used as camouflage, or to cultivate algae, as mentioned.
Hair might also be used to trap gas. Your fish might live in oxygen-poor waters, and surface to capture air in its fur. Oxygen from the mass of tiny air bubbles diffuses into the water, giving the hairy fish a turbo-boost.
Or thick fur might have a protective function, eg against the dangerous toxic spines of a particular threat species.
Or it might simply be the peacock's tail effect: sexual signalling that the individuals can carry around a gigantic, useless mass of hair and still function.
Or -given that it is biologically possible - maybe someone just bred weird furry fish and released them for their own bizarre porpoises. (sorry)
]
|
[Question]
[
In an alternate Earth setting there are two intelligent species at war with each other, they are the humans and the elves. Human technology is an exact mirror image of our current technology, and the mortal elves only rely on the power of nature.
According to the latest reliable Intelligence reports the elves have secretly bred a particular flying insect species that is capable of burrowing between dimensions in $3.14159 t\_P$ (Planck times, equal to $16.93681 \times 10^{-44}s$). The insects leave trails of tiny gravitational anomalies which then evaporate and generate intense pulses of gamma radiation. Each insects can store up to 3.14159 mg of antimatter collected from another universe, using a special organ producing a powerful targeted magnetic field. There are one trillion ($10^{12}$) of these insects which are able to burrow in and out of our universe.
How can the human race outgun the elves?
[Answer]
3.14159 mg of antimatter plus the same amount of matter means 5.64704056 × 1011 joules per insect. I assume trillion on the short scale, 1012. This gives us 5.64704056 × 1023 joules from a swarm.
To put it in perspective, it's 564 704 056 petajoules. [Tsar Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba) has a blast yeld of 210PJ. Your swarm is as poerful as 2 689 067 Tsar Bombs!
To compare with other devices:
* 2 689 067 [Tsar Bombs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba)
* 5 647 040 [B41 nuclear bombs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B41_nuclear_bomb)
* 8 963 556 [Castle Bravo dry fuel hydrogen bomb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo)
* 9 × 109 [Little Boys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy)
And that's what you get just by destroying these insects and making their containment chambers unstable!
It's enough power to end life on Earth[Citation needed], and if these insects can slide into this universe and explode immediately, there is no way to stop them. Even immobilising them might make antimatter containment chambers unstable and cause explosions.
[Answer]
The elves' insect weapon force is an absolute Armageddon weapon. The humans don't need to do anything. If the elves unleash their doomsday diptera (an insect type chosen for their alliteration), both humans and elves will die in cataclysm of radiation. The Armageddon insects will end all life on this alternate Earth. Call their bluff!
If that doesn't deter the elves and their inter-universe insects, then humans can build an aerial of automated drones, controlled by an on-board AI, armed with insecticide aerosol spray guns and flyswatters held in robot arms.
[Answer]
You state that in this scenario "Human technology is an exact mirror image of our current technology." Are we talking about current real-life technology, or Fantastic Four/90s Superhero movie technology?
**90s Superhero movie technology**
Chances of us surviving are pretty good. Just talk about micro-fusion quantum-nuclear bio-cells until you have a device which jams the interdimensional hyper-X TARDIS field the insects use to slingshot around the xen-dimension.
**Current real-life technology**
To call the situation *hopeless* would be incomprehensibly beyond understatement. We're talking about a weapon which completely re-writes physics. We know of no possible mechanism for tunneling between dimensions, much less a possible counter to it. These bugs can appear anywhere, without warning, at reality-breaking intervals of non-integer-planck-time and we are completely powerless to stop them. Additionally, any attempt to destroy the bugs themselves will result in nuclear-scale detonations.
Creating some kind of pheromone counter which turns the insects against their masters or defuses them seems like a good idea, but from what you describe the elves are absolute masters of bio-engineering. There will be failsafes against that.
Our only chance for anything even approaching *survival* is to hope that the elves are fans of slave labor.
[Answer]
Humanity can't properly fight against this doomsday device for several reasons:
* the weapon in question can defend itself by switching universes in a timeframe that is faster than modern day computers can determine it is even there
+ This would result in a movement pattern of just "existing" for split seconds, phasing out, staying phased out for the larger part of a second, then they phase in again, move and return to phasing out.
* Each mosquito is a nuclear device that irradiates the area just by passing. Even the USA did stop their nuclear ramjet as "too provocative".
* The antimatter in each mosquito is enough to annihilate a smaller city (1/111th of little boy each), mostly in the shape of light and thermal energy. This will just evaporate a large chunk of topsoil, making several of these insects able to dig out bunkers by detonating one after another in the crater left by the one before.
* Due to storing the antimatter in the insects' body with EM fields, the destruction of the body or shutting down of them will result in the setting free the stored antimatter, making destroying the insects not an option at all.
The only option to prevent global destruction is either preventing the very launch of the weapon or surrendering. Against such a device resistance is futile.
[Answer]
Working with round numbers, a gram of antimatter has $10^{14}$ joules of energy. Each insect has $10^{-3}$ grams of antimatter. $10^{9}$ joules of energy is equivalent to one ton of TNT. Adding exponents, each insect has an energy equivalent of $10^2=100$ tons of TNT.
And worse yet, you have $10^{12}$ bugs. Adding exponents, the swarm has on the order of $10^{23}$ joules of energy, or the equivalent of $10^{14}$ tons of TNT. That approximately matches the energy of the [Chicxulub impactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater#Impact_specifics) that killed off the dinosaurs.
This much energy must not be allowed to be released, or everyone dies.
It's quite possible that the Elves have done something idiotic and have released an uncontrollable death sentence on the planet. Consider the following bad days:
1. Elven creator of insects feels an annoying itch on the back of his neck. Scratches the itch, kills an insect. Resulting detonation initiates a chain reaction, and the whole swarm goes up in plasma.
2. The insects find they can get [lysine from soybeans](http://jurassicpark.wikia.com/wiki/Lysine_contingency) and begin to reproduce. Being able to sterilize an area with gamma rays, they outcompete native ants. Now there are $10^3$ Chicxulub impactors.
3. There's a stalemate until early one September morning. The Elven king wakes up and shivers, worrying about the impact of the frost on his rose plants. Before the roses wilt, though, a few insects succumb to the frost. The Elven king no longer has to worry about the cold.
These scenarios lead me to believe a critical thing about these insects: **they don't retrieve antimatter unless caused to do so by an Elf.** If they did it at will, or near death, the elves could not control the risk behind their borders, and the world would end. This gives the menace some tactical value, otherwise the bugs are just a danger rather than a weapon for the Elves.
However, the bugs are *insects*, not tacticians. They won't take complex instructions, like flight paths, hunting in cooperation with other insects, or targets to kill. Perhaps they can be aggressive towards humans, but that's pushing it. What would happen?
---
At first, the human armies would be rocked by unknown bombs near their cities. Surveillance cameras wouldn't see anything. They'd upgrade their cameras, and install NVRs in subterranean safes to capture footage from aboveground, watching for elven missiles, human traitors, bomb trucks, anything that could cause that kind of carnage. Eventually, they'd get lucky with a camera that coincided exactly with the calculated epicenter of the bomb, and notice a private waving his hands around swatting at a bug (probably not visible on the camera). He'd smile when it landed, and at the precise moment when his palm came down to swat it, the feed cuts. It's too precise to be a coincidence.
Higher-resolution cameras being watching for insects. Eventually, they figure out the species, and capture some before they're loaded by the Elves. They deploy laser insect turrets, with some success, killing off insects near hardened military targets, until one blasts an antimatter bug and the installation is destroyed. Fortunately, they have sensors on the laser turret, which note the radiation and EM fields coming from the insect. On further investigation, they find the specialized [antimatter containment](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/antimatterfuel.php#id--Antimatter_Containment) organs.
At this point, they have a couple options:
1. Develop bug life support drone ships. Perhaps the bugs can't consciously release the antimatter, and only have energy for a few minutes' flight away from the sender. If a quadcopter can snatch the bug and give it a cardiopulmonary bypass, feeding tube, and eventually extract the bug to a lab where they can artificially power the antimatter containment or fire it into space, they could survive a little while, until the cost of all that containment and all those drones bankrupted them.
2. Develop biological warfare to target the bugs. A virus or pesticide to kill off the population before they could be sent to pick up the antimatter, destroying their habitat or mating grounds, or otherwise destroying the species could rapidly reduce the $10^{12}$ number to something manageable, if not 0.
3. Figure out the wormhole mechanism used by the bugs, and flee the planet. Alternate universes exist and are reachable by wormhole! 1 in 2 is probably not antimatter. Size limits are one thing, but biology is stupid. If a bug can transit the wormhole with its own energy, a nuclear power plant should be able to send a small spaceship through.
[Answer]
Humans deploy a neurotoxin insecticide. Before killing the insects, as the neurotoxin wreaks havoc on their primitive nervous systems it drives them to burrow back to where they collected the antimatter before dying, so the destabilization of their containment and the reaction (if any) does not occur on the humans' planet. The insects have effectively been neutralized without armageddon.
[Answer]
Depending on the mechanics of how the otherworld and our universe interact, we might have some luck with using standing magnetic fields. If we hit the bugs with a magnetic field as they came through, it might be enough to disrupt their abdominal antimatter store while most of the insect is still on the other side. This could release the antimatter to contact the insect's physical body, causing the annihilation reaction to take place in the otherworld, rather than in our world. As a bonus, taking out one bug thus could cause a chain reaction, as other insects are killed by the explosion of the first, releasing their antimatter payloads and causing more explosions, etc etc, rippling on through the swarm.
[Answer]
Assuming the insects collect their payload in an anti-matter-universe, they need a secondary E/M-field to keep said anti-mater from interacting with their body while in the anti-matter-universe.
A chemical/biological weapon targetting their E/M-generator might cause those insects to detonate in the anti-mater-universe.
Developing this weapon might turn out to be a bit difficult, not like there are many second chances.
Otherwise the slavelabour option mentioned by UIDAlexD sounds promising
[Answer]
I think the key hear is in how the elves are deploying the weapon.
If its just a matter of the elves opening a jar and releasing the swarm, after which the insects, which I presume have been trained for this very operation, slide over to Earth space and explode themselves, then I would go for destroying the bugs before they go.
If these insects are telepathically directed, then I would either a) try to convince who ever is controlling them that this weapon will toast them too, or b) neutralize their psychic influence.
Also, here's a question for the those hear that are more knowledgable in physics: is their anyway to intensify the bugs containment fields, such that the field is so strong that it contains the explosive energy, much like a bottle of compressed gas?
Also, if these insects are able to slide between dimensions, is there anyway for humans to "wall off" a strategically important site and prevent such intrusion? If I understand correctly, the elves are in a different dimension. If that is the case, then the "latest intellegence reports" would have had to be generated based off of a) some earth technolgy capable of peering into the Elven dimension, 2) some earth spy actually physically enter the Elven dimension, or 3) an intellegence agency interrogated one of the Elven officers that would know such information, or 4) a defecting elf gave or sold the info to Earth intel
If 1) is the case, then technology that can look into other dimensions may be able to block incoming traffic or attack remotely. If 2), then there is obvious earth technology that is capable of opening a door, and thus may be able to close one as well. If 3) is true, then that means individual elves can be beaten, and if the leaders of this weapons launch can be eliminated, it might buy Earth more time or, if security has been that well compromised, even a way to detonate the bugs on the elven dimension. If 4) is true, that means Elves can be bought or moral is not 100% secure. This means that, given the right persuasion, the elves can turn on their military leadership and either destroy the weapon or themselves in the process.
Overall though, the humans may be screwed, but there is nothing left to do but try and fight. Giving up only ensures death, or enslavement, what ever the elven object is.
[Answer]
Humans are already developing lasers with automatic target analysis to [shoot down insects](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser), so that might be a good way to defend against lone insects trying to do rogue manouvers.
As pointed out in the comments the fade into the other existence can be used to avoid lockon, so my next idea would be fast winds, won't kill them, but buys time.
To deal with swarms fire or insecticides would be your best bet, although large nets would also work, as they will kill each other if they try to bomb free when tightly compressed.
To protect from the huge amount of radiation humans would definitely not fight in person and live in underground bunkers. Living underground would have the benefit, that there aren't really that many natural things that can tear through hard rock and so this would be a good protection as well. But if one insect gets in it will be a great mass grave.
In my answer I'm assuming that the insects don't have 3,4 miligrams of antimatter each, because it is a swarm that would be strong enough to basically blow a hole through several mountains and that explosion strength is pure death.
Assuming that they really have that explosion strength the only way for humans to win is by leaving earth and shooting it from afar, but our technology is not quite ready for that so I think we would have enough problems with just living outside of the atmosphere. (The Arctic might be ok as well, but I'm not certain whether we will be able to build a colony that supports many people, but it will support more than we can send to space).
[Answer]
I think all the current answer miss a key aspect. [Mutual Assured Destruction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction).
Humanity (not to mention wartime humanity) has enough nuclear weapons to destroy a species, itself or most of the planet.
The over 20,000 nuclear weapons humans got are already more than enough to destroy the elves. Just because (as other answers pointed) the elves' weapon is more powerful doesn't mean humans don't have a weapon "powerful enough".
Given both species can destroy each other (assuming no magic elf nuclear weapon protection) - neither would use their doomsday weapons and I assume they would mostly fight small-ish proxy wars of influence between fringe settlements.
]
|
[Question]
[
My first question so bear with me, also please tell me what I can do better (both about my question and about my way of asking it).
In my parallel universe everything is a carbon copy of our universe, your parallel self doing the same job you do, has the same car and home. Except nearly half of humanity is able to use mindreading.
Whether they are kids or adults, half of the population reads the minds of the other half. They never argue with people who can't mindread, and everyone who can read knows who else can and can't.
It's unknown how long some of these *lucky* people were able to read minds but it is not discussed no matter what.
Even presidents don't know about mind readers if they are non-readers, but people who are mind readers in the government will do anything to stop any attempt to read critical government non-reader's minds.
But why don't mind readers talk about it? Is it risky? Surely they aren't any minority or at risk of being outcast.
**SOME GROUND RULES**
Readers can't read other readers minds.
There are readers on everywhere, there are doctors, soldiers, generals, politicians, mechanics and every job/discipline has readers.
There are NGO's and GO's made out of readers, almost like a cult, for example there are sub-divisions in the companies like "Mind Reading Based Marketing" or "Mind Reading Customer Relations".
A reader would never make it apparent they read your thoughts, they won't be visibly disgusted by your sick ideas, or a girl having a crush on you won't be you girlfriend just because she read that you also love her.
**EDIT:** Yeah I knew it was a long stretch, I really loved every answer & frame-challenge tho, and thanks to the reality check you guys have given me, I believe choosing an answer saying that my question is pretty impossible is fair.
[Answer]
1. If half the population have this ability, it's hard to imagine how you could keep it a secret from the other half for long. Sooner or later somebody is going to reveal the secret to a friend he thought he could trust. Or somebody is going to slip up and do something that gives away the secret.
If you posited that there are a handful of people with this ability in the world, maybe they can keep it secret. But billions? I don't believe it.
2. You say this world is an exact copy of our world. Everyone has the same job, same home, etc. But half the people have this very powerful ability. This seems contradictory. Don't they ever use this ability in any way? If one of the mind-readers uses his ability to make money or get the girl he wants or to ... well, to accomplish ANYTHING, then at that point the world will cease to be exactly like ours. Even if they only use their power in small ways, millions of small things are going to add up to make the world a very different place. Even if they have some code of ethics that says they can't take advantage, won't the mind readers at the least avoid associating with non-mind readers that they know hate them? Won't they avoid hanging around in places where they know a criminal is planning to attack them? Do they NEVER use the fact that they know what answer the person interviewing them for a job wants to hear? Etc etc.
3. Even if the mind readers are careful to never show emotion or other reaction to people's thoughts, surely at some point their actions would give them away. This goes back to #2, but if they take advantage of their mind reading ability in any way, the evidence is going to pile up that there is something different about these people. Maybe they're controlled and subtle enough that once or twice the non-mind readers might attribute it to coincidence or luck. But when you see over a period of years that your salesman Fred always seems to know just what the customer wants, or that police detective George always knows whether a suspect is guilty from the moment he first talks to him ... sooner or later people are going to add 2 and 2 together.
[Answer]
## Mind readers don’t know they’re different
Nobody is hiding anything. Mind reading doesn’t pop up like a notification “Alice is having A Thought!”. It’s more like a vague intuition, like guessing with unusual accuracy the feelings of the person you’re with. A non-mind reader will experience this as the other person being really attentive and insightful. The mind reader will feel a deep connection, like their minds are “in sync”, since they find it so easy to guess what the other is thinking. In fact, this leads to most romantic relationships being between a mind reader and a non-mind reader.
Most people with neurodivergent features take years to realise their brain really doesn’t work like others’. The natural tendency is just to assume that people’s inner experience is pretty much the same as yours. This is probably profoundly false, but we only ever get to see the inside of one head, after all. Mind readers just come across as more empathetic, and naturally drawn to some people. They can tell that their intuition, or close emotional connection, works with some people but not others. They get frustrated, sometimes, that their partner doesn’t pick up on things they way they’d expect, and sometimes need to work on their communication a bit.
The thing that *is* kept secret is the knowledge of this trait, and the specialised training that a natural mind reader requires to perform professional, unemotional, intrusive mind reading. This is very hard, because mind reading by nature tends to form an emotional bond between reader and readee, so non-consensual spying is actually very hard to pull off. But the potential for weaponising effective mind reading is too great. All major governments have secret services dedicated to training thought agents, and preventing awareness about the mechanics of mind reading from spreading.
Research into emotional neurodivergence is suppressed. Theories about mind reading are dismissed as conspiracies and their proponents variously slandered and framed as nutters. Children at school are subjected to standardised testing that, secretly, will pick up on their latent mind-reading abilities (there will be several unintuitive answers that mind-reading kids will be inexplicably drawn to, because, unbeknownst to them, they are being “broadcast” by thought by an agent). The secret thought service will be constantly on the lookout for the golden combination of mind reading and sociopathy that makes for effective agents.
[Answer]
No human can actually read minds.
All Mind-reading is *actually* done by an ancient psychic entity that is reading *all* the minds of all humanity at all times, passing the thoughts of the people it chooses to other people. When this entity decides to make an individual a mind-reader, it contacts that person psychically, and tells them:
1. You are a mind-reader. I will connect you to the minds of nearby people on request, so you can read the minds of those people who are not also designated mind-readers.
2. I forbid you to do things that will reveal my existence, or the existence of mind-reading to the non-mind readers. If you divulge sufficient information that a non-mind-reader discerns that you are an actual, bona-fide mind reader, I will permanently strip you of mind-reader status, I will edit your memories to remove knowledge of mind-reading, and I will let every Mind-reader that knew you were a mind-reader know that you have been stripped of mind-reader status.
This isn't *quite* perfect; a sufficiently motivated mind-reader who didn't care about being stripped of mind-reader status could attempt to engineer a situation where the mind-reading is revealed; but they'd have to do it while an entity that can edit memories and is constantly reading everyone's mind is looking for that sort of thing, and can threaten other mind-readers into abetting a cover-up.
[Answer]
**Your protagonist is delusional.**
Thought broadcasting is one of the most common delusions. Thought insertion is less common but well described.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_broadcasting>
>
> An example of thought broadcasting would be if a student is sitting in
> class and is thinking about what he or she may have planned for the
> upcoming weekend. They may start to believe that their teacher can
> hear their plans, and that the teacher knows that they are not paying
> attention to the lecture being given. They may also believe that the
> other students in the classroom can hear their thoughts and may be
> judging them for the plans that they have....People with thought
> broadcasting rarely admit to having this symptom or to the severity of
> the symptom
>
>
>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_insertion>
>
> Thought insertion is defined by the ICD-10 as the delusion that one's
> thoughts are not one's own, but rather belong to someone else and have
> been inserted into one's mind. The person experiencing thought
> insertion will not necessarily know where the thought is coming from,
> but makes a distinction between their own thoughts and those inserted
> into their minds...
>
>
>
Your protagonist experiences thought insertion and attributes the inserted thoughts to other people. She does not think these people mean to insert their thoughts. She is reading their minds. She also suspects her thoughts are being read by others - around her and possibly at some distance from her.
She realizes that a large community of people must have this ability because her ability to read and also be read means she can pick up her own thoughts as "echos" coming back to her as thought insertions from those reading her mind. She tries to control her thoughts at all times and teaches herself to have a song running through her head, with her thoughts hidden behind it. It is working because she gets clips of this song coming back as thought insertions whcih she knows because they are not timed right with the actual song. One time she got the song back, timed right with the one she had running, but in Spanish, and a Mexican man smiled at her. It was a pretty good trick and she smiled back.
No-one talks about this. She tries dropping some hints which get a chilly reception and she is no dope; she lets it be.
[Answer]
## They don't
If there is a big enough society and some people have started developing anything paranormal, there are two possible outcomes: first, those people display great control and self-discipline, and don't show off, and second, someone does show off and the information leaks out that *there are mind readers out there!!!11* Our society is big enough for this purpose, and gossips of various paranormal activities do spread occasionally. (Whether there are grounds under those gossips is different story)
Next, if the first obstacle still didn't produce a worldwide gossip of mind readers being around, there are more. The second obstacle is that once a person gets some superpowers (and reading others' minds is one), they start using it and adapting their behavior to rely on those powers. So, eventually any mind-reader would start going with mind reading left and right. Eventually, one of them would lose self-control hard enough for "non-mind-readers" to notice, alerting the society that people's minds are no longer safe.
Next, even if all the present mind readers would retain their abilities in secret, two mind readers would eventually meet, and all of a sudden their ability would *break* when they'd try to read each other's minds. This would shock them both to a degree of either someone else seeing them shock at something, or them disclosing their abilities at least to their would-be victims. Even if only one person would try to read another mind reader's mind and fail per your ability description, they would definitely try to discern what is so different about that person as why they couldn't affect them. Such stalking behavior would eventually occur anyway, because people's psychology and law of big numbers say this can happen so it eventually will. Then, some neighbors would notice a mind reader stalking someone else, arising interest, and some of those readers would eventually lose control enough to disclose their ability. Say, when drunk.
Next, the rule of not discussing mind reading has to appear somehow. It's not a given, or say God-given rule. *Someone* has to devise a rule about not talking about their powers once encountering another person with these, but this rule won't appear before it would become obvious that breaking it would produce a highly undesirable outcome. The mind readers can't just meet and produce the rule before something would happen. At first they wouldn't even know why they can't read some people's minds so they have to speak about their superpowers at least with each other (or like with the first two, saying this the very first time would be psychically hard for either), so organizing into a "cult" or something like it would pose serious problems. Without organization, the rule wouldn't appear, so again, information disclosure would be required for it to appear.
Next, if all of the above won't alert the society about mind readers, there is a power problem. When the number of mind readers would become large enough, there will arise a selfish person who would use mind reading powers to elevate his position in the society, eventually rising high enough to influence the government somehow. Probably up to the position of a local ruler, superseding existing ruler if he'd be susceptible to mind reading. The story of his rise would get written and spread, as people like to write stories of their kings or other rulers that bring glory to their people (of whatever kind), and some of the brighter minds would at least suspect that the "from zero to hero" kid has some supernatural abilities. Also if somehow a child in the ruling family would get such a power, they would be plain forced to use it or perish, thus with the society you describe most of the power positions would eventually be filled with mind readers.
Then, since the rulers would eventually be aware of people that are unaffected by their mind reading abilities, there would be activity directed to study such people, with some selection initiated by the scientists or ruling mind readers themselves designed to gather such people. But then, there is a dilemma on who to send to gather such people! If the king, provided he is a mind reader, would go himself, others would start worrying both about his safety and about how would he find people he needs, effectively leaking data to any other mind reader around (aka the target). Sending "normal" people would fail, because they won't be able to find who is a mind reader and who is not, and also be an open book about the king's desires to find more of "people like other kings", after that it won't take long for the mind readers under that king's rule to organize. Once there is an organization, separation would take place, people with mind-reading immunity would be taken from those vulnerable, maybe other measures would be implemented, arousing the "normal" society about *something is going on with some of them*.
Then, as if everything above isn't enough, those kings would start taking care of their secrets, not knowing who to send on a secret mission without it becoming known to everyone who would listen, especially if one mind reading king would meet an aspiring *hero* that would desire to supersede him, capture him and interrogate (aka torture for information). So, if a cult of "special" people would not form amidst ordinary people, it will form as some kind of aristocracy by a willing king. Mind readers would eventually start being promoted to secret keepers or performers of secret tasks everywhere, new people would get elevation because of their ability, provoking "segregation by mind". Eventually some people from above would dissent and disclose the existence of mind readers to everyone else in order to undermine their opponents' ability to rule with reading minds of unawares, again leading to information disclosure.
Thus, the situation you describe is plain impossible. The information of people being able to read minds will at least be known to governments mostly because over the history all of them would contain mind readers and only mind readers. And eventually it will become known to everyone because of dissidents from either side.
[Answer]
If everybody knew that this person can read their minds, then nobody will be willing to face him fearing that this man will know what they don't want to reveal. The mind reader will be alienated.
Like a secret agent, a mind reader is successful only if keeps his ability a secret.
[Answer]
## Hiding the existence of mind readers
The short answer is, "No can do." No matter how bad it gets, there will always be someone who blabs to the wrong crowd. In real life, people sell their families to slavery, or to the local secret police. They betray their country and friends. If people in the real world won't save another person's life by remaining quiet, then there is no chance that there isn't a mind reader willing to sell out "his own kind".
if 50% of the population - or even 1% of the population - can read minds, and can detect other mind readers, it won't take long for the world to know they exist. Maybe it'll be some idiot trying to get famous, maybe it'll be a whistle-blower trying to do the right thing, or maybe it'll be someone with ill intent, trying to wipe out one side or the other. Regardless, it will be truly impossible to hide the *existence* of mind readers. Then again, if there exist companies based around using/marketing to mind readers, it seems pretty clear the world knows about them anyway.
## Hiding personal abilities
While some more progressive governments may agree to keeping the identities of those who can read minds a secret, not everyone will agree to that. Dictators of tiny countries, always afraid that someone is out to assassinate them, will have mind-reader-detection squads to protect them, and will jail or kill any mind readers that aren't directly working for them, kept around to read the minds of dissidents and weed out sneaky mind readers. Covert organizations will specifically hire mind readers, because they are the only ones that can stay under cover. Any group from militaries and governments to think tanks and engineering teams will have mind-reader screening, to make sure their secrets aren't being leaked.
So, if Joe Random wants to hide the fact that he is a mind reader, he'll need to:
1. Live in a country that doesn't actively screen for mind readers
2. Work for a company that has no mind-reader-specific policies (regardless of laws, companies will still discriminate against both mind readers and non-mind readers, putting them in positions where the company can benefit from their ability)
3. Not live near enough to any mind readers who are open about their abilities. Even if Ted can keep his mouth shut most of the time, when he gets drunk, he does party tricks where he reads minds at random, and if he can't read someone's mind, it's pretty obvious.
## Fixing the setup
To give half of the population mind reading powers, but keep it a secret, you can't have any organization have "mind reading based marketing". In fact, it has to be *impossible to communicate that mind reading exists*. Somehow, no one can indicate that they are a mind reader in any way. They would be able to read about half the minds they come across, but would think they are truly one-of-a-kind.
Speaking, writing, even thinking too hard about being able to read minds would be impossible for them - maybe it would cause pain, maybe their voice or hand would just stop working when they tried to talk or write about it, but it would be entirely impossible. Since no one would know that anyone else was a mind reader, they would chalk it up as a fluke when they couldn't read someone's mind.
Your mind readers don't share that they can read minds because they simply *can't* - it's the only way for it to work.
[Answer]
## Compulsion
You said that everything is identical to our parallel world. That’s because it is forced to be that way.
If a mind reader attempts to use or react to their powers, they are compelled to act as if they don’t have them.
If they attempt to talk about it, they can not speak.
If they attempt to deviate in any way from what their non-mind reading parallel selves are doing, they lose the ability to control themselves. They are compelled to act in the exact same way as their non mind-reading counterparts.
Maybe these restrictions are relaxed if they are only in the presence of other mind readers, however they will still be compelled to act like their parallel selves regardless when in the presence of the non-readers, and no action taken when outside of the influence of non-mind readers would be allowed to effect it.
This might not be the story you’re looking for, but the lack of control the mind readers actually have over themselves would make for a nice piece of horror fiction…
Or you could have a protagonist that is unrestricted, and then either cause the worlds to diverge and ‘free’ the mind readers. Or maybe cause some kind of dimensional collapse.
[Answer]
>
> These are the 2 secrets for being successful:
>
>
> 1. Never reveal all that you can do
>
>
>
Whoever has a competitive lead above others can use it way better if it is unknown to them, because surprise is an advantage.
It's similar to what can happen when you speak the local language in a place and nobody knows it because you are obviously a foreigner: you might get to hear things that you wouldn't if you made known that you could understand what is being said.
[Answer]
Violent reactions by non-mind readers whenever anyone revealed and prove their capability. Either by lynch mobs or murder by those in power or money. As they will very certainly get rid of these individuals.
As they are too big liability. Such individuals present just too many risks. They can reveal secrets, they can have upper hand in negotiations. And so on.
It is reasonable to expect that they are very rare so just simply getting rid of any that pop up is simplest and most effective method. As would anyone believe it if some of them said half of population had that capability. So getting rid of one, will still keep others relatively safe.
This leads to those individuals to strictly instruct any others to not reveal that they can read minds. As it is losing proposition most of the time.
[Answer]
# Intuition and the difficulties of mind reading
Mind reading is actually a really ill defined term. Everyone seems to 'know' how it works. Most will view it as in media. A voice clearly tells what the person thinks. How useful. Let's break it down.
Text and speach is done in wernicke and broca. Word comprehension and generation respectively. Damage to wernicke in 'classic' cases gives a speaker a torrent of words with little meaning. Damage to broca gives incredibly slow speach, but each word used tries to convey as much information as possible. Problem here is that thinking doesn't necessarily activate the brain. Words can aid in comprehension, but plenty of thoughts are never put to words. A great example is writing an answer here on stack exchange. We are putting our thoughts and understanding *into* words. Only if we would be dictating you could read a clear stream of words with 'mind reading'. It can be helpful at times, but in most cases it seems no less powerful than just listening to someone speak. How we normally convey thoughs and understanding.
That gives the question. What does mind reading do? If it is reading the thoughts and understanding before it is put into words it gets weird. Do you instantly understand the understanding of someone else? This is too powerful to not change the whole world. It then must be reading the thoughts and understanding as an outsider. How can you read such a train of thought accurately? Wouldn't it go too fast so you only get bits and pieces? Can you even understand the thoughts and understanding of someone else? Plenty of people have difficulty understanding their significant other in many scenario's. How about a stranger?
It also begs the question where this will end. Thoughts and understanding is incredibly broad. The amount of information a brain processes is hard to describe. We habe all senses, knowledge of where your body parts are in relation to yourself and your surroundings, relationships with others, how technology works or ability to visualise things. Imagination, creativity, emotions, breathing and constriction of blood vessels. It seems that mind reading quickly becomes a bog of too much information if you can read it at all. How to understand any of this?
Mind reading can still work, but you would only get flashes of understanding in the hurricane of information rattling at any time within the brain. To an outsider it would look like intuition. They seemingly understand something from nothing.
The readers might not think it's mind reading either, just intuition.
## Question concerns
If they have NGO's or the like they do talk about it, so that violates the premise of the question. Also it seems that no one acts on their mind reading, making it an effectively null ability. Don't act on it - no effect.
[Answer]
There exist mind-reading zealots/cultists/purists.
If these purists read your mind and find out you've told your secret then you get killed, along with the person you told, and anyone else they might have told.
Albeit, this won't fit your narrative of "In my parallel universe everything is a carbon copy of our universe".
In the regular universe counterparts just had to die of other causes I guess.
[Answer]
# Two different conditions: instant death and precognition
First, I agree with the answers that this is completely infeasible with so many people. However, a very constrained explanation might be:
### 1) Readers also have a limited pre-cognitive ability
To avoid altering your setup too much, this is not conscious but instinctual, and limited to extremely short timescales and only directly affecting the reader. It mostly manifests as unease when extreme physical harm is imminent; basically a mostly-useless spidey-sense that makes you flinch just a little bit faster than a non-reader.
### 2) Knowledge of readers causes a fatal panic feedback-loop
When a non-reader learns of the existence of readers, there is always a shocked moment of "WHAT! YOU CAN READ MY MIND?". Readers normally pick up extremely faint signals, and suddenly the person they are talking to is shouting at full volume into their finely-calibrated high-gain microphone. Instant massive cerebral hemorrhage on BOTH the reader and the person who found out.
Now if (2) happens it's mysterious, but guarantees that any non-reader who knows the secret dies instantly. And it happens extremely rarely, because even if the reader hasn't been warned never to tell anyone their secret, the precognitive danger warning almost always stops them before they make the mistake.
[Answer]
First, given such a parallel universe where half the population are mind readers, the society and history would have evolved very differently from our own, so you would not have a "carbon copy" there. The society would be stratified, where the mind reading half would have a severe advantage and subjugate the non-readers. There would be few non-reader presidents or other officials.
But to answer your question and make this workable - one possibility is the mind reading ability is more subtle, more like a feeling than a knowing, and they simply consider themselves more intuitive than their out of touch peers. Also, maybe "reading" another person's mind isn't as straightforward as most TV tropes make it out to be. It's sort of like attempting to read another person's scribbled classroom notes.
[Answer]
## Mind-reading is destructive for both parties (but more so for the victim)
When someone reads someone else's mind, it's a "destructive read" that partially or fully erases two memories from the the mind being read:
1. The memory the reader wants to extract, AND
2. The memory of the extraction event.
The destructive nature of the mind read also partially applies to the reader:
1. The reader does not remember the extraction, but they get used to that over time, so they don't mind – thus decreasing any moral guilt that might influence them to speak out.
2. The memory acquired partially or fully erases another one – as if the readers' brains only have limited storage space.
### This system offers a few helpful (literary) side effects
Even someone realizes they're having their minds read or is told they are about to be subject to a read, they immediately forget after the fact. Perhaps they experience a sense of unexplainable loss.
* When someone discovers mind reading:
1. If they reveal their discovery to a mind-reader, the mind reader just extracts that memory. Alternatively, they just extract the discoverer's memory of revealing their discovery so that these people live in a perpetual cycle of feeling the need to share their knowledge but never succeeding.
2. If they successfully keep their discovery a secret, they might start to notice things are off in society – perhaps because they observed someone else forgetting things they ought to remember. This might influence the discoverer to simply stay quiet about it out of fear.
### Keeping secrets
The forgetting helps the secret keep itself. In the event that a mind reader decides to blow the whistle, they'd have a heck of a time proving it to the general populace or even many other mind readers, few of whom would be in a state to believe them. If other mind readers don't want the secret to get out, they just read the minds of non mind readers, zeroing in on their memory of the discovery.
The mind-reading populace views mind reading as an act of questionable nobility due to its side effect. Mind readers who abuse the power and drain people of too many memories end up being punished or ostracized.
### There is no immunity (Frame challenge)
Suppose you relax the restriction on mind-readers reading each other. When a mind-reader reads another mind reader's mind, the victim's mind-reading power does not render them immune to the memory loss.
Mind readers routinely prey on other mind readers in order to increase their mental acumen / knowledge without actually doing the work to gain said knowledge. These are the people who ultimately end up being in charge of your "shadow" government and business enterprises. The victims of this behavior just end up living out their lives as people with spotty memories.
### Parallel Societies
I don't believe, as some other answers have suggested, that your framing (even as originally stated) significantly reduces the likelihood of the development of a parallel, albeit stratified, society. There are lots of examples of modern societies overlooking the plight of their own marginalized groups, so I don't see why mind readers should differ.
[Answer]
A conspiracy of 50% of the planet wouldn't last a day. The problem is coordination: even if it is in the collective interests of all mind-readers not to reveal that they are mind-readers, it is still in each individual mind-reader's interests to take advantage of their power, and even if they are somehow prevented from doing so, there will be rebellious teen mind-readers who just don't care what's in the other mind-readers' interests, and they'll blab about it to their non-mind-reader friends. It gets even harder if your mind-readers actually have to work together and communicate with each other about mind-reading to achieve certain goals, such as keeping a non-mind-reader President safe from enemy mind-readers.
If you want this secret to have been kept since *time immemorial* then it has to not be a conspiracy. All of the mind-readers are one hive mind, they all act in each other's interests to keep the secret because they all *are* each other; likewise, they can work together to achieve collective goals without having to talk about their mind-reading powers because they are one mind - no communication necessary. And the hive mind is thousands of years old, so they're mature enough not to use their power for petty personal gain, or blab.
Essentially, what you've got yourself is some kind of god who lives on Earth as several billion people rather than one. I don't think anything other than a god could keep your two universes so well in sync with each other.
]
|
[Question]
[
I think the closest example is Nazi Germany attacking the USSR and Imperial Japan attacking the USA.
Afaik the Japanese were not as suicidal as it appears, they had a particular goal in mind and it was all going to hell anyway.
And, again afaik, the USSR was not respected as much and the Red Army was though to be a push over by both the Axis and Allies.
Now this is not an attempt to talk about WWII, obviously, just some context to why it is possible to have such a scenario.
And so my story begins with an alien fleet that appears in our solar system on a sunny, ok it's meaningless is space but let me have it, Saturday and starts approaching earth fast.
A week later an alien "invasion" is launched
So what is the aliens thinking?
First of all they are a splinter group from their "state" they are radicals and believe in their superiority over everything.
And they did arrive with technology the likes of which we can only dream of.
They also estimated that since humans are already divided into rivaling nations. It's much easier to launch separate attacks on each state opposed to what would happen if we had one single unified military like they do.
The military operation had specific and clear goals.
So their initial target Are:
Military bases.
Human infrastructure.
Their ultimate goal of the attacks is **not** total annihilation but to weaken the collective human race enough so to bring them to the negotiation table so that a favorable agreement can be reached.
This agreement they want is just them getting lands to settle with absolute power over them and special statues among humans.
Like they can't be trialed at our courts and so on. Which have a lot of historical bases.
I could not make them blind enough to believe they can destroy the human race.
Now they really want to destroy the military bases but when it comes to infrastructure they see the need for that later on, as they don't want to mess things up too much, so they won't focus on that heavily and won't utterly destroy them. Just enough attacks to cripple the country for a while.
Can't they just come in peace? No.
Why bother with earth in the first place?
We are the only habitable planet they encountered, and having access to our own tech and infrastructure would actually give them a lot to work with.
Because again they are not an arm of their state, they did not bring all the coolest toys with them from their own state.
And so having a whole planet with more than 7 billion potential workers seems better than trying to settle in Mars.
They also see the subjugation of the humans as an important point in in validating their own believes and ideology.
What type of technology is available to them?
So far the most logical thing is a highly advanced ships with nearly unlimited power and large manufacturing capabilities.
They have lot of drones and a crap ton of plasma and laser based weapons and vehicles.
Most of which are controlled from their own ships by pilots or assisted computers, they don't have or like AIs.
The rest is up to you.
Their numbers can't be more than a few millions but that includes civilians so their actual military can't exceed half a million that if they put all capable males into it.
So when it comes to ground troops they don't have much. They use drones and their own tanks.
Those tanks are obviously much stronger than ours but they can be taken out.
They don't actually have much of an air force, nor do they posses vastly powerful startship cannons. The air force can still be better than ours and still be decent.
Their own ships are mostly armored and protected by shields for ship to ship attacks.
But not top of the line invasion ships.
This ties in with the fact they are a splinter group not the actual military arm of their race.
So you if you want to add using their own ships for the attack do so but without making planet killer type of weapons.
Can they call support?
Heck no.
Why focus on them?
Because it's much easier to change the aliens than to introduce plasma tanks to humans with all the complexity that brings.
Do they have access to biological or chemical weapons or nukes?
Initially they don't have them.
What is their military creed like?
Mostly using overwhelming tech in the form of tanks and drones and so on to win the war.
So the focus is mostly on the type of vehicles they have and how to use them.
But this would depend on the answer and I'm open to suggestions.
What is their biology like?
Human like. Only more fragile and they detest manual labor and actually fighting.
Since they are space faring with vastly superior tech. I think they can turn the entire earth to glass if we wanted to, and thus the question and premise don't work!
First they don't want to do that, second they actually have limitations.
Also it's not fun.
Hopefully that's enough information.
This is getting long and so to sum it up they need to have a more advanced army, and initially do a lot of damage to our states but have their own "brilliant" plan fail within a time frame that I'm flexible to because it would depend on what you guy suggest.
And so I just want to focus on the answer to the main question and other points will have their own questions.
**So. What is their overall military capability have to be in order to attack us but actually fail in achieving their goals?**
Edit 1: to clarify the original idea is that they did **not** plan on our own invasion per se. They just escaped their own state and "happened" to find our little slice of heaven.
So it would seem weird that they arrive with specific weapons or ideas to fight us.
[Answer]
## Technology Required to Invade
**Minimum**
**Engines**
* Sufficiently high enough [specific impulse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse) to accelerate to a significant percentage of the speed of light (0.1c, 0.2c)
* Sufficiently high thrust that you could push accelerate a large load (thousands of tons) to cruise speed in a reasonable amount of time (around a year or two)
**Power**
* Anti-matter. At [0.3% mass-energy efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence), as impressive as fusion power sounds, just doesn't cut it. You'll need $mass \times cruising speed^2$ energy to accelerate the fleet to cruise, and almost as much to slow back down. With anti-matter, a 20% speed-of-light cruise will require 8% of the fleet weight to be fuel (if the anti-matter power is 100% efficient); 16% fuel weight for a 50% efficient anti-matter plant.
**Mechanical Engineering**
* There are plenty of stars to launch an attack from within 10 light years of the sun. If cruising at 20% the speed of light, a 10 light-year trip will take 50 years (about; not including acceleration and deceleration) to arrive. The aliens need to build equipment robust enough to reliably start after half a century off.
**Medicine**
* Hibernation : the invaders will need to be able to put troops into an aestivation or hibernation that can be ended on arrival
**Computing**
* Autonomous Systems : the fleet will need to have semi-autonomous or autonomous systems with close to a human level of general intelligence to deal with all of the surprises a long space voyage could bring.
## What Might Go Wrong
If the fleet takes a 10 light-year trip at 20% the speed of light, it will take about 50 years to arrive in the battle space. Additionally, light has a finite travel time (ten light years in this case). If an alien fleet arrives in 2020, invasion planners were looking at data from the 1960s when purchasing equipment and selecting targets.
In the 1960s, the Earth's population was 3 billion. Humanity had just gone through 2 back-to-back world wars (the 1920s and again in the 1950s) and we appeared on course for a third. Invasion planners might have assumed no (or very little) growth in the number of defenders and stagnant growth in technology (which still did not even include orbital space flight).
## Based on the Alien Tech, and the Intelligence They Had Available, Here's an Order of Battle
**(7) Missile Destroyers** (40x 12 terajoule anti-matter missiles) : for use against military bases; one for each major belligerent during WW1 and WW2
**(1) Aircraft Carrier** (90x orbit-to-atmospheric small fighter craft) : only need one
**(300) Troop Ships** (10 thousand ground troops ea.) : - assuming 1,000-to-1 effectiveness of ground troops and 3 billion person population of Earth
## Playing Through It
The fleet arrives in 2020. Where planners expected to arrive in orbit undetected, instead many observatories and satellites detected and tracked the fleet's approach.
Where planners had brought no orbit-to-orbit defenders (the fighter craft can fill the role, but were fitted for orbit-to-air and air-to-ground), there are now [26 countries with orbital launch capabilities]. [Five of these nations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons) have demonstrated nuclear weapons capability, and another four claim to have capabilities. [4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orbital_launch_systems#Argentina)
Rather than the uncontested landing of ground troops planners expected, the fleet encounters a primitive, but passable orbital defense. The alien ship engines are high-tech marvels for their efficiency, but under- or equally- perform chemical rockets.
And, completely unexpectedly due to the cold war, several nations have undisclosed, but supposedly enormous reserves of ground-to-orbit nuclear weapons.
Alien planning software has been active during the trip. It has observed with horror as peace has spread out over the Earth, and most of the plan assumptions are now invalid.
Nevertheless, the fleet commander attempts a contested orbital landing. The missile boats, carrier, and many troop carriers are destroyed during the battle.
The troops that do land find that the military bases that were valuable 60 years ago are now mostly closed. Tactical anti-matter warheads launching at pre-loaded targets detonate around abandoned facilities in the wilderness and desert.
The alien ground troops have to encounter larger ground and air forces than they expected, higher tech defenders, and most of their orbital support lost or wasted on worthless targets.
[Answer]
Most science fiction trivializes much of the space travel, but it would add lot of useful limitations if they did.
Space travel is tough. It should take a long time to get anywhere and even if you do have FTL there could be limitations that make carrying virtually unlimited weight in a ship impossible. So if you attack someone you bring three things: the people that you are going to invade with, a small amount of basic equipment to start the invasion and the manufacturingplants required to keep the war going after the initial engagements.
So the basic method of attack would be to enter the system. Land troops at some important points to secure resources and places to land your production facilities (or launch materials into orbit to the production facilities there). Then start a brutal war of attrition across the planet's surface in order to gain more and more control, hoping your production capacity and technology are adequate to win. "Real" militaries attacking similar tech civilizations would have access to space-based mining, refining and production facilities that remain in-system to produce everything needed while the defenders try to track them down and fight them before they have produced sufficient materials, but your splinter faction does not have access to those.
Your faction ends up not having enough people, resources and/or production facilities to win, either through miscalculation or successful attacks by Earth's indigenous forces.
[Answer]
**Divide and conquer.**
/First of all they are a splinter group from their "state" they are radicals and believe in their superiority over everything/
That is their leaders. Under those leaders are competent military persons. Within the first week of conflict it becomes clear from military decisions made who the competent military persons are. This is not a hive mind or a monolithic intelligence.
One of the reasonable military leaders is approached to parley. This competent military person has thrown his lot in with his radical leaders to escape his homeworld but his actions on the field have shown him to be less radical and more pragmatic. He sees how it is with the humans and realizes they have bit off more than they can chew. A land for peace proposition is made, with the condition that he be the new alien leader. He is no less arrogant than his leaders and sees personal and societal gain in the deal.
This reasonable leader turns and leads a military coup, with assistance from humans. Many aliens respect this leader and the coup does not take long. The radicals are overthrown and imprisoned. The humans keep their bargain and settle the aliens on earth under circumstances much more favorable to the humans. The humans also get all the alien tech.
[Answer]
They had fraction of C drives rather than FTL drives.
So when they surveiled Earth from their home a few hundred or so light years away, they saw a backwater bunch of apes barely capable of fighting off the most basic of plagues. Decades went by and technological advancement was minimal at best. Even being generous in estimating human development, the aliens figured we might be hitting the industrial revolution with a population of a few hundred million by the time the attack fleet/generation ships arrived.
Oops.
You don't need much to beat a bunch of states armed with muskets and *maybe* discovering a telegraph. That force might not be sufficiently equipped to deal with an order of magnitude more enemies, equipped with space-capable rockets, nuclear arms, and a high speed worldwide redundant communication system.
[Answer]
## They Let Themselves Lose.
The only truly logical explanation is that the aliens secretly let themselves lose.
Any other extraterrestrial civilisation capable of interstellar spaceflight is likely to be millions of years, *perhaps even billions of years*, more advanced than us. To give you some perspective, it's the same as us going to war with some fish in someones backyard pond. Or actually, more like going to war with an amoeba in that pond.
So if you need them to lose, then it *has to be their choice to lose*. By why would they want to lose? I can think of many reasons:
* Because although our planet is nice, in reality, they have no real reason to win. Winning is not the real goal for the aliens.
* The war is a test. Not of us, but of themselves, to see if they could win with limited means. Kind of like us placing chemicals in the backyard pond to see if it will kill the amoeba, but we don't really mind if it doesn't work.
* They are curious how we would survive, to assess perhaps, or alter, our future trajectory of civilisation. Kind of like we are selectively breeding animals to make them more suitable for our use, entertainment or simple curiosity.
* A completely alien reason we cannot comprehend. I mean like 'because our scripture says so' or 'because it looks nice' or a reason we may indeed, never know.
To answer your question: So your technology level could be any level, and theirs too. To an alien, it matters not if you have guns or not, electronics or muscles. These are developments that have happened in a couple of hundred or thousand years: to them this period of development is a 'blink of an eye' in a billion-year timeframe such that it would almost seem instantaneous. **Their 'military' technology level will always be beyond ours, far beyond anything we can comprehend now**.
[Answer]
**Sir, we have run out of bombs.**
The plan is to simulteneously launch a bunch of tactical nukes or plazma/laser beans at all government buildings and military sites. This will leave most of the infrastructure intact while taking out the majority of world leaders and anyone who could pose an organised resistence. Then they move in an mop up.
Since this was the plan and space travel is expensive they only brought enough weapons for the first devastating attack. Then they were all out.
It usually works. After that show of force the planet capitulates. But humans are special because we were
(a) Too stupid to stop fighting. Sure the aliens can land their 25 hover tanks and mow down a bunch of civilians. They act all scared for a while and start doing what they're told. But the moment you move on they start acting up again.
(b) Too stupid to reorganise ourselves so the aliens actually had someone to negotiate with. Since there was no one in charge to negotiate with, the rest of the plan was a bust.
[Answer]
It is just about impossible for alien invaders to lose.
Interstellar travel requires control of vast amounts of energy. A spaceship capable of sufficient velocity change, or Delta V, to acclerate its mass to interstellar travel speed, should have sufficient Delta V to change the orbits of many asteroids and comets to fall toward Earth, and then to put those asteroids and comets in orbit around the Earth. When Earth has tens, hundreds, or thousands of asteroids in orbit, and the aliens can de orbit any one to hit any target on Earth, they can demand the total surrender of any group on Earth.
So it is just about impossible for aliens to fail to conquer Earth.
That is why all realistic stories about alien invasion end with alien victory.
So you will have to do a lot of thinking to come up with an poor alien conquest strategy that doesn't use their technological advantages well, leading to their failure to conquer, and then do a lot of thinking to come up with a psychological reason why the aliens choose such a poor conquest strategy.
[Answer]
**It isn't their ship.**
As several other posters have correctly pointed out, any civilization capable of building a fleet capable of reaching Sol must be so far ahead of us that we wouldn't even be children to them militarily. Taking out our satellites from orbit would cripple civilian communications and the economy, and pin point kinetic strikes would take out communications nexuses and military logistics points. If they can jam radio frequencies or decrypt our comms, the military's back to hard lines and PTP connections, both of which are short ranged (and PTP is line-of-sight), severely limiting our ability to call for help and coordinate troop and supply movements. We aren't capable of contesting their orbital superiority, either, so we literally cannot make any strategic progress. If they built they ship they arrived in, they can't lose.
So your invaders not only didn't build the ship, they barely understand how it works. Maybe it's an remnant of an ancient precursor civilization, maybe their species is a client of some much more advanced overlord, and this splinter somehow managed to seize an old, run down ship. It certainly *could* be a warship they just don't understand, or it could be a civilian craft; the tech is so advanced they can't tell the difference. So the ship could possess cannons that could destroy the planet or swat our satelites, aircraft, ships and bases, but the computers are locked down and the aliens haven't a hope of cracking them. Maybe the ship was built to be a local transport, and the FTL drive was a jury rigged piece of junk that broke beyond repair when the ship arrived in our system. Most of what they do use isn't used for it's intended purpose, with a corresponding loss of efficiency and increased component wear (which they can barely cope with). The ship has any number of ways to get all the power it needs just by sitting in orbit, but those systems are broken, locked down, or unknown to the invaders. Heck, maybe the main engines don't even work anymore, and they're putzing around with station-keeping drives that would take literally weeks to accelerate to respectable intrasteller (not a typo) speeds, and weeks more to slow down again. Not to mention, the aliens can't use the ship's tractors to nab a handy asteroid even if they had the thrust to tow it.
This puts your aliens in orbit around Earth and gives them advanced planetary-scale technology, but removes the reader's objections that any species capable of getting here is incapable of losing a war against humanity they don't intend to lose. They have to use what they have, and can't go back for more. Nor can they produce more, because even if the ship has that capacity, it's broken or locked down or other systems it relies on to gather raw material and/or power are broken or locked down.
[Answer]
***IDOLIZE HUMANITY:*** You need a psychology that is sufficiently human to make their motives relatable, but sufficiently alien to defy conventional logic. Given the overwhelming practical advantages such a race would have over humans, there needs to be some flaw in the alien approach that leaves them vulnerable. Overconfidence and arrogance have been done a MILLION times, and is frankly easy and boring. They believe in their own superiority, yet detest fighting. They have a need to conquer humanity to satisfy their own self-worth and philosophy. They don't want to conquer the entire planet, but instead want to set themselves up in a place of privilege alongside the human race. Why do they want this? Because the think the Nazis were prophets, and idolize the human race.
* Their own culture long ago abandoned violence, but there are always those who look back on ancient practices with nostalgia. They found humans initially during WW2, and the information their probes sent back excited these folks about the "noble savages" on Earth.
* Traditions of cultural sensitivity shape their thinking, so conquering humans is merely being respectful of how humans interact.
* Given their admiration of humans, they will constantly overestimate what people will be able to do. Every defeat leads to panic and admiration.
* The goal is to make the humans admire and respect them in return. While collectively they are cowardly, individuals may perform great acts of courage; not to win battles, but respect of their enemies.
* Their emulation of the Nazis lends their behavior towards support of dictators and the establishment of authoritarian puppet governments. Right-wing revolutions would be supported, and liberal/leftist practices would bring attack and scorn. They might admire the Cuban authoritarianism, but then attack them because of their leftist ideology.
* In their desire for human attention and admiration, they will negotiate with world governments to try and extract respect and fear. If Egypt has a strongman who encourages them to invade Israel, they would respect the dictator and invade Israel. Getting the USA angry at themselves just proves they are worthy. A proper balancing act would be for them to flirty with a global war but always back down if they think they'll start too big a conflict.
* Play politics. So you conquered China with your fleet of drone tanks, now promise peace with Russia and trade with them. Don't invade North Korea - exterminate those Commie bastards. No use attacking Japan - you admire their militaristic history and don't want a full-scale war with the US.
[Answer]
>
> So far the most logical thing is a highly advanced ships with nearly unlimited power and large manufacturing capabilities.
>
>
>
I dissagree. The reason why they are attacking Earth and wanting it's infrastructure intact is because they lack the manufacturing capabilities.
As you say,
>
> First of all they are a splinter group from their "state" they are radicals and believe in their superiority over everything.
>
>
>
This could be explained by the splinter group stealing the warships. But those are warships, and they lack manufacturing capabilities. And they didn't have chance to take actual manufacturing ships, in which case they could just grab an asteroid an mine that. Also, due to the splinter group not being official, they might lack skilled officiers, commanders and soldiers.
So we have a situation:
**Earth**
* Populous
* Comparatively primitive weapons
* Fractured governments
* Manufacturing capability
* Want to defend themselves at all cost
* Despite fractured governments, many governments and militaries know and train to communicate and fight together
**Alien invaders**
* Few soldiers
* Lack of skilled officers and commanders
* Advanced weapons
* High ground
* No way to fix or create new weapons, including amunitions
* Don't want to destroy infrastructure
The first strike might go like Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The aliens will hope, that first attack will destroy enough military and break people's will to resist. But due to mistakes on commander's part and fast response of the governments, this attack is met with much heavier resistance. The war then turns into an attrition war.
Next assumption the aliens might have that the governments will not work together. Again, they are proven wrong when the governments of USA, China, Russia and EU all coordinate together at counterattack. This coutnerattack causes huge losses on both sides, but makes fast resolution of the war impossible.
Another assumption might be use of nukes. The aliens might assume the governments won't be willing to use nuclear weapons on their own lands. But once the humans realize the alien's technological supperiorty and the fact they desire the infastructure, they start using tactical nuclear strikes both to destroy the alien's weapons and to deny them the infrastructure they so much need.
In this scenario, technolgy doesn't much matter. Even if aliens can destroy 100 tanks, 1000 soldiers and dozens of jets for 1 of their drones, as long as Earth's infrastructure is intact, and the Earth governments are willing to enact Total War and Scorched Earth policies, they will loose the war of attrition.
[Answer]
**Aliens secretly observed humans civilisation, than decided to choose different target. So conflict not started at all. And humans was too occupied on their own problems to find it**
Aliens wanted to colonize Earth, because there is big oceans with clean water having good salinity level. Perfect for aliens to live in. Last time they send unmanned probes, humans civilization was just starting to build first railroads of 19th century. And aliens send few expeditions forces that will took ~ 200 years to get to Earth.
Alien expedition force used sophisticated cloaking devices and orbited Earth. Unfortunately, it was 2020 year. Aliens observed covid-19 quarantine in China, Great Toilet Paper shortage in USA, they tried to understand negative oil price panic (and their main artificial brain overheated), covid-19 quarantine in Europe and USA, Black Lives Matter protests in USA. Than they read human's wikipedia about [first nuclear weapon usage to burn Hiroshima](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima#World_War_II_and_the_atomic_bombing_(1939%E2%80%931945)), while other civilizations they conquered used nuclear technology only for generating electricity or destroying asteroids threatening to wipe all planet's life. Also they watched some MBA broadcasts and live footage of military conflicts. Than they send few drones to find abnormal level of plastic in sea water of Earth, making it unusable for colonization.
Probably, if aliens was crazy enough as humans, they would try to deploy various biomechanic war machines like "**Cthulhu**" class heavy destroyers, "**Godzilla**" class medium destroyers, "**Kaiju**" class light destroyers, "**Piranha**" class anti personal systems and so on.
They even deployed few "**Kaijy**" scouts, but they died because one entered oil spill in Mexica gulf to suffocate to death, other one consumed too much plastic at Nemo point, and few ones were captured and butchered by Chinese fishermans... Aliens underestimated humans.
And they asked themselves one question:
**Why?**
Why waste resources on capturing contaminated water and than trying to deal with natural born killers (who destroyed megafauna with sticks and stones in prehistoric time), that will probably survive on surface of planet after few orbital strikes and will start guerilla warfare or even send nuclear weapons powerfull enough to eliminate all live on their planet.
Also aliens found, that humans are predators, they like to eat burned meat of animals they killed and consume it, drinking methanol poisoned liquids.
It is something plankton eating aliens cannot understand...
Aliens did the math and decided human civilization is too crazy to mess with. They decided to leave humans killing their own keen and planet alongside.
Aliens moved to colonise Europe, one of Jupiter's satellites. At least it have clean water with funny leviathan grade fauna that can be domesticated, and humans civilization is too occupied with various strange things, so its unlikely they try to colonise Europe in foreseen future.
[Answer]
If I understand the question your asking correctly your concept involves a failed invasion i.e. aliens arrive and attempt an invasion but for whatever don't succeed fail. Humanity (or both sides) then have to set about dealing withe aftermath of that failure social, political and environmental etc.
If this is correct then the best possible scenario is one of numbers and logistics. Just getting here proves they have vastly superior technology but that in and of itself might not be enough. You also have to assume that for whatever reason the aliens want to preserve the environment as much a possible. Otherwise 6 aliens and a large asteroid would win the 'war' with one shot.
Consider a scenario where there was a say for example a steam age civilization on Mars. Could we currently send small teams of explorers there? Yes. Could we send a fully equipped expeditionary force to conquer the planet? No. You'd be talking about launching literally tens of thousands of tonnes of soldiers, equipment and supplies into space and then following up with tens of thousands of more tonnes for as long as it took for us to establish a large bridgehead and become more self sustaining. Even then you'd still have to send thousands of tonnes of stuff they couldn't source locally for decades. Even if we had the will we simply don't have the technology to sustain that kind of logistics chain.
The aliens have the same problem only they are hundreds or thousands of light years from home! No help is coming. So the most likely scenario is that they had to fight the war only with what they brought with them. And if they didn't win with that it means they weren't expecting to have a fight a war in the first place. So a refugee vessel escaping a war or a colony expedition stumbling across Earth is the most likely option.
Yes they have access to the solar system so presumably they could build/replace at least some weapons and equipment but what they cant do is replace their 'people' because they no more are coming for at least a couple of generations,if ever. This is especially true if you assume only a limited number of the aliens on board the ship were trained as soldiers to begin with or else could be spared to be used as such. So they end up having to learn the art of fighting humans as they go.
Even if the attrition rate was 10,000 to one more in their favor under this type of scenario the numbers are going to tell them they are on the losing end of the deal and its time for an armistice.
OK, so following your response -
The problem is that your question falls into the 'how long is a peace of string' category. There are simply to many unknown variables. e.g. How much more technically advanced than us are they and in what specific fields. What types of weapons did they bring with them and how many. Failing that what can they make/jury rig once they arrive. Same for soldiers, how many what type?
Remember as I said, technically even a very small team of aliens could de-orbit asteroids of any size needed for a specific purpose and drop in on our heads. No other weapon needed. Indeed That might be their 'go to' technique for taking out key targets and softening up an LZ.
But...when the ground/air fighting starts its hard to answer your question without some description of the forces at their disposal.
So in the absence of answers to that kind of question I think the best answer might be small numbers of control and tech types sent down to the surface to run localized units of war robots. (It's all very good to have a giant 'command center' in the sky) but at some point after you land you need eyes & brains on the ground. People who can make split second decisions at close quarters for your platoons and companies etc of robots in real time.
This might especially be the case because they won't/don't understand us at first contact i.e. we're 'alien' to them. Fighting their own kind? - no problem their robots can probably be at least partially trusted with a degree autonomy about tactical issues . Fighting us though? that means re-programming their actions on the run. And you cant do that if you don't see what works and doesn't in real time.
So I would suggest everything goes well for our alien friends until we start to figure out how they operate and concentrate on identifying their local ground based command teams and spotters/observers when we can find them. They may try to withdraw them eventually and run everything from space but that just slows down the robots overall co-ordination and the tide slowly shifts.
They do the calcs and decide - again that its time for an armistice.
The plus to this idea as I see it is room for lots of discussion around small unit tactics, spoofing and deception, booby traps and ambushes etc.
[Answer]
# FTL is more or less the only tech they've got.
What?
Yes, that's right. They're generally no more advanced than us, but for whatever reason they do have technology to relatively easily and safely travel between the stars. Maybe they stumbled upon it by random chance (some alchemist smashed just the right kinds of rocks together in a mortar to get FTL dust - Earth doesn't have these exact rocks or simply never tried that combination), maybe some pieces of tech from *another* alien civ fell on their moon or even were given by these other aliens - as an experiment, or as a gift, or for the lols - nobody knows. Either way, now all they gotta do is make some neatly sealed boxes with some air/other life support in and they can zoom across the galaxies with impunity. Depending on how handwavy the tech is, they may barely need things like navigation or shielding, or it is all part of the tech.
Anyway, this is more or less how this plays out then:
One day, alien ship(s) show up on Earth. They very quickly erase any doubt about their hostile intent, land in the middle of big cities and open their gates to unleash the invading armies of terror. Only they're armed with bows, brittle, heavy gladii and maybe a crappy prototype musket or two. Best case scenario some WW2 level tech.
After the initial shock (aliens!!) the terrestrial military shows up and steamrolls the entire invading party, possibly captures most of them alive for questioning and study, and seize enough bits of their ships to reverse engineer and get some FTL of our own.
Now, I might be awfully specific here, mostly because it is actully the premise of a classic sci-fi short story by Harry Turtledove called "The Road Not Taken". There, the invaders have easy, cheap FTL, but this actually stunted their tech development so the best weaponry they have is a flintlock.
[Answer]
**There isn't a believable one as long as it is a real war.**
with the scenario you have laid out there is no reason the aliens over have tp put even a single one of their people in danger and they can can do any level of damage to us, up to and including extinction. They can easily force a surrender without a losing a single individual.
What is given
1. **They have multiple ships with intersteller and intrasteller travel.**
And that is all they need to win, they don't need anything else. they can drop rocks of any size they want, with bomb level precision, endlessly until we surrender. There is nothing on our planet they need they cannot get easier from asteroids including munitions. If they can make it here they have solved the closed loop food problem, and they have engines efficient enough to mine asteroids until the sun burns out.
Worse, **they also have high end automation and a large population** we are told this , meaning you cannot even rely on unexplained shortages, because again they can get resources and build anything they want without ever entering our gravity well.
weaponizing asteroids is just a question of math and propulsion both of which they have in abundance. To use your analogy this is Japan attacking the US, IF japans has hundreds of thousands of free ICBM's and we have not yet invented aircraft.
The only ways they can even put themselves at risk are to do several things that are breathtakingly stupid, which is possible, but not believable.
**One possibility you have is it was not a real war to begin with** basically the initial attack was done by a splinter/terrorist group and the aliens are actually peaceful and they make a show of surrender as an apology. There is nothing we can do to force a surrender and it would be a show not an actual surrender.
**The only way we can win a war is if there was never a real war to begin with.**
[Answer]
Their lack of AI would deny them a huge advantage, in that they would not be able to effect the (arguably) easiest form of invasion and seizing control. With an AI they would never need a ship to invade. Instead, all they would need is some bandwidth to transmit it over. But since they don't like AI, they wouldn't actually be able to successfully invade as I could see.
In a planetary invasion the natives are at an overwhelming advantage over any would-be invader, due to sheer number of people in militaries (let alone the hordes of shotgun-armed Texans.) To actually invade a planet like Earth successfully, they would almost definitely need an army of at least ten billion personnel. I highly doubt your fleet would have that many people.
Alternatively, they could destabilize the world's governments through insurgency. This would be (relatively) simple: use social media to make a population discontent, and then use this as a jumping board to incite rebellion on a global scale. Wait until insurgent groups have established global anarchy, then have your aliens come as saviors. Do a global [COIN campaign,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-insurgency "Counter-insurgency") then rise to power through humanity's own political process.
Takeover complete.
[Answer]
**They are not well-adapted to Earth**
The aliens have higher technology, but earthlings are better adapted to the environment. Their home planet may have a lower gravity than ours (and the long journey on the low-gravity of a spaceship wouldn't help), our atmosphere may be toxic for your aliens, they may be susceptible to local bacteria and virii...
This can be worked around, but that gives humans an advantage. If they move slowly and need their space suits in working order, that makes light humans able to evade them, or even defeat them by damaging their suits.
You could imagine a [cataphract knight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataphract) battling against aztecs. The cataphract technolody (iron sword, horses, armour) is superior to actec technology, and just a few of them could decimate an army of actecs in battlefield. However, a knight is heavy, and requires supporting personnel (not available for your aliens). Enter on a forest, the aztecs could throw him from the horse (in which case he could barely stand up), prepare traps on the ground...
The best environment for the aliens is their own starship. However, placing it on a too-near orbit would risk it being damaged by Earth missiles (space is a bad place to be with a damaged ship and, if the invasion failed, they need their ship to safely go somewhere else), so they have it on a quasi-random route, only getting slightly nearer when sending/receiving a ship. On the other side, Earth would probably have automatic missiles "patrolling" the higher layers of the atmosphere, programmed to hit any object larger than X.
Also, trips to the ground (alien tanks, provisions, more soldiers...) are highly vulnerable while descending. There are only some angles suitable for re-entry, and there is a lot of kinetic energy to lose before landing. Yet, an ship-sized object entering the atmosphere is easily detectable. Re-entry becomes much more complicated if you additionally need to dodge the enemy bombs!
[Answer]
It seems your after a military capability 'number', that's high enough to justify starting the war but low enough for loosing. Warfare has so many unknowns and huge mental components that other answers discuses in detail. It is misjudging morale, political will, tactical skill, ruses, sabotage, second/third/fourth order effects on actions that make it hard to judge military ability. It entirely possible to misjudge combat ability that isn't revealed until the war starts.
**So. What is their overall military capability have to be in order to attack us but actually fail in achieving their goals?**
I think all they need a low risk option they believe will be available no matter what. Like ability to strike from space, without interference. So long as they can hit big targets without risk, you would assume they always had a fall back tactic.
All drone based invasion is a risk, even if they are all destroyed, you can still have your space battleship bombing cities you can always retreat.
They knew all along they may never win total victory (because they are sound tacticians who understand they lacked details about earth), that maybe they had to settle a deal after constant orbital bombardment, but they could have ALWAYS retreated and moved on if needed. How is this not worth rolling the dice on?
\*I think its also false to assume settling a preferential peace deal means a loss, and not a victory.
[Answer]
# Whatever tech they have, they should have very serious issues with it
If a fighting force is capable of interstellar travel, them failing achieving military goals (against militaries of Earth) does not sound credible at all. That is unless something is seriously wrong.
The possibilities could be:
* alien force is in a very bad shape at the point of arrival. This may be beacuse they had to fight their way out of their home state and now most of their equipment is severly damaged/unusable
* alien force is not a fighting force per se. They are paramilitaries mostly armed with small arms and no (or very limited) access to heavy equipment. Or maybe they are not militarised at all - their flet could be a resource extraction and colonisation fleet, not equiped to fight at all and all weapons they possess are converted from some civilian tools and vehicles
It sounds to me that whatever option you go for, in order to botch the invasion, aliens must be unable to maintain air(and space) superriority. Given that - Earth militaries have a chance.
---
# ANY tech + Inability to capitalise on initial success
If you want aliens to to be proper fighters with tons of hardware, the only scenario I can suggest is the initial success of milatry campain but a subsequent failure of occupation for reasons unrelated to pure military might. Aliens may have miscalculated in evaluation of their supply chain and are unable to establish/maintain/protect their manufacturing facilities on Earth. This coincides with lack of manpower to succesfully maintain occupation and eventually they are forced to negotiate..
---
# Lust for battle
Lastly, it sounds like your aliens should be very bloodthirsty to proceed with the invasion. Your stated goal of getting a chucnk of space for themselves could be achived through alternative means:
* coercion: "*give us this, or we will drop an asteroid on you*"
* trade: they may establish a corporation manufacturing consumer goods using their secret tech and be quite successful in embedding themselves into global economy, using the profits for establishing gated communities in paradise-like spots for alien elites
* cooperation: they can help solve some of our issues related to arable land, turning deserts into farmaland and forsets keeping a small areas for themselves as a 'fee'
Why wouldn't they want to do any of the above? The answer should provide an irrational reason - religion/tradition/etc.
[Answer]
The only way this type of force could conceivably fail would be failure of political will. They may have assumed that they could win by killing a few million humans (which they can do with impunity, being able to strike from way beyond the reach of our weapons); then they find that they have to kills tens or hundreds of millions. The slaughter is eventually too much even for them. What are their news media like?
Or, if you want to go the allegorical route, they easily defeat the Earth's combined militaries, but then have prolonged actions by human terrorists chipping away at them and their human proxies. The humans only kill a few aliens a year, and millions of humans are killed, but again the aliens political will fails and they get fed up with this interminable, unwinnable war. They eventually pull out of Iraq/Afghanistan/Earth.
[Answer]
Another possibility: They don't actually have their tech. Your aliens original purpose wasn't invading Earth. Rather, this is an enemy warship that is seriously damaged by some means. It expends the last of it's maneuvering capability to attain solar capture at something like Earth's orbit. All that's left are strike craft with energy weapons and shuttlecraft, both of which don't have much more life support range than needed to reach Earth during a conjunction. Their objective is to make us submit to supply what they need to fix their ship, but they are set up for space warfare, not invasion. They can do damage while the conjunction lasts but then have to wait years for the next one, when they come back they get a very hot reception.
[Answer]
## Their strategy relies on alliances. Which fall apart.
Like you say, they find an Earth that is fractious. So they identify terrestrial powers that have a big enough military to succeed with support, and a government that is either
* unprincipled and opportunistic enough to ally with the aliens for their own world domination (Saddam, or perhaps the Russians), or
* ideologically principled in a way the aliens claim to be aligned with (China, EU, US).
This then fractures, because the aliens don’t plan to keep their promises of power sharing, and/or turn out to be not so well aligned with values after all.
Their ally figures this out, possibly because the other nations convince them of this diplomatically.
They then do a heel-face turn, taking advantage of their integration with alien forces to “catch them completely off-guard”.
Partly for cultural reasons, the aliens do not see this coming.
[Answer]
>
> Why bother with earth in the first place?
>
>
>
War is messy, and even if you win, some of your ships might be damaged beyond repair.
>
> they detest manual labor and actually fighting.
>
>
>
If they detest manual labor and fighting, why in God's name are they fighting instead of negotiating? "You give us what we want, and we'll give you what you want."
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/201525/edit).
Closed 2 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/201525/edit)
In my book series, magic is a learnable skill that any person can learn to some degree (although some have much more natural talent with it than others and mastering even a single discipline of magic requires years of training and experience). However, in my book series, magic (outside of the main cast of characters) is only used by various priesthoods for religious rituals and by navigators (who imbue Astral Magic into these special crystals that when attached to boats, enchant them into the FTL [Startreaders](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/198446/how-would-limited-space-travel-change-late-medieval-early-renaissance-era-warfar) I outlined in a different question of mine). How could I justify the restriction of magic in this way if anyone can technically learn it?
[Answer]
**The culture considers it too dangerous to be weilded by common people and it is punished accordingly**
History has a lot of examples of people being kept away from political power that can serve as a template. Mostly it works through lies and stigma.
* Your culture will be full of cautionary tales about peasants who know nothing but the farm, getting magic powers and lacking the competency to use them responsibly.
* Lies will be spread that learning magic is very difficult, dangerous, expensive and easy for authorities to detect. Those few who do learn magic will benefit from the mystique so they won't contradict this. (Lies reminiscent of the infamous 'reefer madness' propaganda)
* Learning magic will be harshly criminalized among the peasantry on the basis that it is considered dangerous to the community.
* A cultural attitude will be cultivated that those who try to learn magic think they're better than everyone else, are trying to take shortcuts to elevate themselves without hard work etc.
[Answer]
**1 it's hard to learn. 2 it's not worth the effort.**
Technically anyone can learn programming (which is in many ways to a game world what magic would be to the real world), same applies for playing an instrument and for practicing martial arts. If all of these are technically something everyone can learn, why is it that most people don't know how to code an entire program or video game? Or how to fight taekwondo? Or how to play a guitar? I'd say it's simple: it's just not useful enough to their daily lives to be worth the effort it takes to learn.
To us magic is a very cool concept that most people would like to learn, but in your world, it's something that already exists, and therefore that "unachievable" cool factor is already absent. Some martial arts are thousands of years old and can technically help you defend yourself and be safer, but how often would you realistically use them in real life outside of the training grounds? Sure, there will likely be some people who are so enthusiastic about some spells that they might learn just for the sake of knowing, not that it's something they'll normally have a chance to use.
Since your story and characters are in a world with magic and space-faring medieval people, I very much doubt your main characters are just ordinary civilians who don't have to deal with a [Big Bad](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BigBad) or some other kind of crisis that essentially forces them to stock up on more specialized offensive and defensive capabilities than they normally would need to ensure their survival, which already sets them apart from regular people much like you'd see with a soldier and a civilian.
In other words: magic is something your world is used to. It's used in religion and even as a partial substitute for technology in some areas, but unless your magic system is extremely dynamic and useful in most aspects of your life regardless of who you are and what you do, as well as being widely accessible and easy to learn, chances are that it won't be something everyone knows and/or uses, simply because it's not helpful enough to be worth it. Add to that a vision of magic as directly tied to some lower class jobs (removing any logic of prestige or status in knowing magic) and the presence of heavy paperwork needed to learn certain spells (plus a slight exploit of the author's "because I said so" privilege for good measure) and you'll likely get a society in which magic just isn't something you'd normally see people using. It's not the easiest thing to learn, it's of little use in most daily activities unless you're a sailor, priest or someone with a magic-related job and some forms of magic are even treated as "dirty" due to their use in jobs performed mostly by the lower classes (which is far from unbelievable with the existence of real societies in which some jobs hold more prestige than others even though certain low prestige jobs are vital for the proper functioning of said societies). Magic spells more focused on combat, despite potentially holding some prestige, are also probably something you wouldn't see that much out of the military, because not everyone who already has prestige wants to risk their lives through a military career and someone with low prestige who wants to know them might as well gain some prestige through it (also, "why would you want to know specific offensive spells if your profession doesn't make any use of them whatsoever? Sounds rather suspicious, good citizen, you wouldn't be planning to use those to break the laws, would you?").
[Answer]
# How do you make a pipe bomb?
From the name I'm guessing it involves a pipe and, um, bomb stuff? Honestly I have no idea. Technically, anyone could probably learn. But I have no interest whatsoever in learning how to make a pipe bomb. Why not?
1. I can't imagine why I would want to learn that.
2. Making bombs is really really dangerous.
3. It seems difficult.
4. It's illegal.
The same four reasons could guide your society's approach to magic. It takes years of study, messing up a spell could have disastrous consequences, there are laws restricting access, and the average person doesn't think it's worth the effort of trying to learn it. There are all sorts of things in modern society that one *could* learn but are generally the domain of experts, either because they are outright illegal (leave bombmaking knowledge to your local bomb squad) or because there are walls around a profession (read all the medical textbooks you want, it won't make you a doctor).
[Answer]
# Magic is Power
and those with Power like to keep it for themselves. If your magic is used for FTL, of course those who know the spell don't want to share. It is more money for them. More importantly, if most people don't know magic exists, they can't even try to research and learn it. Or if they do, they will seem crazy to their colleagues and the scientific community. And that's not considering military possibilities and WMD wizards.
# Magic is limited
There is only so much mana in the galaxy. And while it can never be used up (once a spell is done the mana is released), any mana that some plebeian is using to reheat their food is mana that your wizards can't use for something else. Which can also feed back into the first point and the idea that they keep magic scarce to preserve their power base.
# Magic is dangerous
That spell to reheat food? Maybe it is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than a microwave. But it can also be turned into a weapon. And that's not even the real problem.
Magic is tough. Complex. And if you get it wrong, something still happens. Mess up the reheating spell? Blow up your house. Mess up the FTL spell? Open a portal to Venus, or the core of the sun, and destroy miles of land around you before the portal collapses. That's why only the smartest and most dedicated are even taught in the first place. THey are less likely to make a mistake, and the fewer students, the easier they are to observe.
[Answer]
>
> How could I justify the restriction of magic in this way if anyone can technically learn it?
>
>
>
Not knowing your educational background, I will assume that you must at least have heard of Maxwell equations or of General Relativity. Those are theories that technically anybody can learn and apply, just having the necessary basis. Despite that, not everybody learn them.
Somebody learns just simplified version (e.g. an electronic technician would learn Kirkhoff laws, not the full blown integral version of the Maxwell equations, and Newtonian gravity is introduced in high school), somebody else goes in more details (e.g. engineering or physics students) and finally only a limited subset learns and applies the full blown shabang (engineers do not normally go in the full details of the tensorial fun of GR).
The same goes for your magic. That technically anybody can learn it doesn't mean anybody WILL learn it, because of the time and effort needed to do so, that will be necessarily taken from other tasks/goal.
[Answer]
Magic requires ritual murder. While almost anyone can do it, only state-sanctioned killing (condemned criminals or prisoners of war) is lawful, much like in our society - basically only capital sentence and warfare is "allowed". And there are enough executions to power the priests and navigators (one murder can power your personal magic for years).
While magic as such is not illegal, expect some *very* pointed questioning when caught - and unless you have a certificate or other proof of "lawful magic acquisition", you are considered guilty of premeditated murder by default. And murder is murder.
[Answer]
## Guild System
The guild system was used around your desired time period and already does what you want. Technically, anyone can learn to become a blacksmith with enough practice, but those who do without paying the guild and receiving their approval quickly find themselves squeezed out. Collective underbidding by the guild blacksmiths, smear campaigns, bribes to local nobles or guards, whatever the guild needs to do to maintain their grip on power.
Once a guild has a monopoly on the trade, they can also restrict who learns it. The guild controls how many apprenticeships are available, even if just so they can drive prices up by restricting supply.
If magic is still easy enough in your world that people can figure it out without books or teaching, the guild would likely pressure the local lord for edicts and laws in their favor. After all, with such a dangerous power around, *surely* it should only be provided by properly registered guild magicians?
[Answer]
## Low Literacy
Learning magic requires reading and writing. You mentioned an early Renaissance level of technology - during this time period, the average literacy rate for most of the western world was around 5-10%. Bronze Age would be even lower. If 90% of your people can't read, they can't learn magic, simple enough. Admittedly your cyber/steam-punk planet would have higher rates, though they'd have better tech overall, so maybe less need for magic. (To the people on your Bronze Age planets, steampunk technology would be indistinguishable from magic anyhow.)
Even if your people can learn to read, it takes time they just don't have; subsistence farming is a full-time occupation and nobody can devote large portions of their life to learning advanced crafts such as the magical arts. Magical knowledge would be a privilege of the well-to-do, who are very much aware of the power (both magical and political) it grants them over the commoners, and would devote great energy to making sure that knowledge remains restricted in order to keep the serfs in line.
[Answer]
### Magic is a two-way street
(Credits to HP Lovecraft, John Blanche era WH40K, Charles Stross, and other usual suspects)
You want to open your mind to the gap between worlds and draw power from it? That's great - for the ***things*** that live there, which find you crunchy and good with ketchup. Or which (if you screw up majorly enough) find our planet/solar system/galaxy/universe crunchy etc.. The first priority of schools of magic then isn't how to do it, it's how to stop anything on the other side spotting you.
This is typically going to be a lesson learnt the hard way, involving widespread massacres of civilians and desperate defences against armies of undead/demons/shoggoths. With that lesson, membership of a guild and following appropriate safety measures become very much non-optional. Guilds will also be given the responsibility of finding unauthorised magic use, since they're the experts. However naturally good you may be, you don't stand a chance against a couple of trained magicians.
As far as the non-optional part goes, there will be penalties for non-compliance. The phrase "on pain of death" will be spectacularly literal, not only to ensure nothing has followed the hapless would-be wizard back to this world, but also as a very obvious demonstration of "don't do it".
[Answer]
# Tuition fees and Student loans
Sure, anyone can learn it, but not many people can afford the hundreds of thousands a year in tuition fees – unless you've got a guild paying for it in exchange for your future employment.
Add to this insurance requirements, and perhaps unions who'll come after you if you're going against them, and it'll be difficult for anyone who's not within the official structures to practice.
[Answer]
## Magic Must be Written in its Original Language
When you translate between languages, there are 3 major areas that things often go wrong.
* One is that the source language is less specific than the reader's language. Here, your magic language may not have certain parts of speech like the destination language; so, things like articles, conjunctions, tenses, and genders may need to be added where they did not exist before in order to make a sentence that is logical to the reader. Here extra meaning can be added to make a spell go wrong.
* The next is that the source language is more specific than the reader's language. In this case, the source language might have 5 different words for which the destination language has only 1 word, or perhaps even no words at all. Here meaning is removed from an incantation making a spell go wrong.
* The last is that the source language contains culture specific references that mean something else in the reader's language. Here a common phrase like "with the weight of the world on his shoulders" or "on cloud 9" or use of proper nouns could lose all meaning if literally translated. And if semantically translated risks introducing a whole new set of cultural biases.
While loose translations are good enough for most practical purposes, with magic, semantic meaning must be very precise for it to work, and the structure and purpose of the magic language is too different from normal spoken languages to translate well. Let's pretend for a second that English is the magic language and your reader speaks a language which does not have words for working with N-dimensional mathematics. A passage may read as follows:
>
> Collapse the ethereal vertices of the Wythoff penteract until it settles into three planes of space and one of time.
>
>
>
So if we were to read a translation of this passage in another language not meant for discussing N-dimensional space, along with all the other problems that often arise with translation, your ability to understand it might be limited to something like:
>
> Break the points of air as a bridge breaks using Foobar's impossible cube. It will fall as three squares of nothing and one of time.
>
>
>
Such a translation would be utterly useless without the person going back into the original text to decipher a more specific meaning than his language can express.
When you have a language that is only used for specific things, it creates a really difficult learning curve that keeps most people out it, even if the concepts are easy to learn and understand once you get past the hard part of learning a new language. The Catholic Church did this for a long time by making sure scripture was only spoken and written in latin because they did not want translation errors by the unlearned leading to heresy. Likewise, your world could use the constraints of needing to know the magic language to restrict people from just learning a few simple spells. Because they don't just need to learn the incantation, they need to understand what it means, and that takes a big up-front learning curve.
]
|
[Question]
[
This modern country has strong democratic institutions, and leans toward extreme religious conservatism.
The state religion is omnipresent in culture, and has a major influence on the laws passed by government. One way in which this is visible is in the criminal justice system: the state doesn't believe in long prison sentences. It is expensive to maintain in the long term, and considered a waste of resources. Prison is for people who can be rehabilitated, and the maximum time would usually be about 20 years. Serial offenders, or those who have committed heinous crimes, are sentenced to death.
According to religioua tradition, the gods have decreed that The method of execution is always burning at the stake, in which a person is tied to a stake of wood and then immolated. Executions are treated as a ritual, and can only be done at a particular point in time, which is the last month of the year. Any day can be chosen, so long as it is in that timeframe. Executions make no distinctions between the sexes, and are done publicly. In extemely rare cases, even children are subjected to this. The practice is enforced regardless of when the person was sentenced. While culture demands this, most religious traditions are rooted in logical and sensible reasons, such as not eating pork to prevent sickness. This original purpose is long forgotten, but the ritual has remained over the generations. What practical reason would there be for prevent burning at the stake for the rest of the year, except in the last month?
[Answer]
* **The march of the prisoners is an awfully impressive sight** and the more prisoners that are involved the more impressive it is. Everybody loves to thow tomatoes at the justifiably cancerous legions (or is that lesion?) of criminals (politely identified by their neighbors) so it's huge political points to make a show of it. Besides, Minister Oggula wrote that awful overture that, frankly, the President doesn't want to hear more than once each year (it makes his dogs howl).
* **Burning flesh stinks** and neighbors of the execution yard don't appreciate it. Getting everything over with quickly is a plus for those voters.
* **People prefer life over death** and so, while religiously sanctioned, the general populace still doesn't like all those deaths. Remember what people think Joseph Stalin once said, "one death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic." Once again, ripping off the band-aid helps keep voters content.
* **It just isn't salubrious** there's a whole lot of negative religious juju involved with not executing people at the proper time. Crops will die, rivers will turn to blood, babies will be born with nine fingers... right? Let's just avoid the possibility and do it when the Priests say it's best.
* **Welfare is not us** because the government's no more into welfare than it is into lifetime sentences. Thus, clean-up is a full-time job for the shortest possible period.
* **Death isn't cheap** and that's why good religious conservatives approve of the economy of scale. It even has a side-effect of a cottage industry developing leaner, faster, cheaper ways of mass stake burnings (did you notice the potential of the natural-gas-fueled WitchAway105? It can off an auspicious 11 criminals an hour!).
* **We definitely don't want body ash during the growing season** because 9 out of 10 scientists tell us that body ash will get into the aquifer and our food supply causing our children to grow 11 toes.
* **The prevailing westerlies are bad at other times of the year** and we definitely don't want to dump our ash over the holy site of Rashka (it takes a dozen priests a month just to ceremonially cleanse the place) and we really definitely don't want to dump the ash over our neighbors to the east because they've told us twice already that they'll open up a can of whoopA if we ever do it again and considering they have a million-man army maybe it's religiously prudent not to test their patience.
[Answer]
Roman religion had prescription on *fas* and *nefas*, in other words which was appreciated by the gods and which wasn't. If your religion has something similar, it sounds logic to limit execution only to *nefas* times.
In this way there would be the enforcing messages that god/gods disapprove the behavior of those being executed on that time of the year.
[Answer]
A very pragmatic answer that assume that it's outdoor burning:
The weather of this country is very peculiar.
Half of the year, there is very heavy rain (monsoun), or wind.
Other times, the temperature is very high (like 50 C° at noon), which makes it very uncomfortable to assist the execution.
Basically, there is only a 2 month period that is correct, but because seasons never are 'perfect', they reduce it to a one month period that has the perfect weather for having fun with your family.
I don't know if this kind of weather exists on our earth. But it does not seem too impossible.
A lot of people go with the 'religious option', but from my point of view, it just postpones the question.
Religions might seems 'dumb' and 'random' today (not my personal opinion), but they weren't when they started.
All religious traditions, and more importantly religious interdictions, were a way to educate people that were too dumb to understand why they should act this way.
So if there is a religious reason why the burning is only allowed at a time period, you still need a reason why there is a religious reason... of course this reason can be forgotten, and this allows a full arc for the story (some people trying to understand/remember why there is this religious reason).
[Answer]
The first month of every year is their religious festival: their religion requires human sacrifices and the prison system is where they source them from. So those who are sentenced to death are given to the priesthood to sacrifice.
[Answer]
**If it's a fictional country** (which I believe it is) I would go for the following reasons:
1. Religion forbids the shedding of blood except for that time frame
2. Political reasons (elections, debates and alike) were if the execution could be used as a bargain chip.
3. It's broadcasted as an event to the whole country... imagine the *Hunger Games*, *Death Race*, etc.
**If it's a real country** I would believe (as the most rational reason) a mix of religion and political reasons maintain it in that month. Also if this is the case this question should be asked in another place.
[Answer]
The timing of important events of such impactful nature on a society quite often takes the movements of the Sun and/or Moon into account. If the beginning of the year is in early January (Sun in tropical Capricorn), tax collection may coincide with the new moon.
However, the burning of people at that time might be a sacrifice to Saturn perhaps at the new moon or full moon or when the Moon is in Aries. Mars is exalted in Capricorn, and the burning of wood and/or carbon could be a timely action to inflict pain and horror on those who themselves have caused pain onto others via their Mars or Saturn archetypes (both considered malefic in medieval astrology). This approach of 'like for like' might be deemed suitable and effective by a conservative religious society.
Somewhat related, in biodynamic farming/gardening, 'peppering' refers to the ash produced from burning weed seeds as a method of pest control; the ashes are then sprinkled over affected areas to dis-incentivise the growth of such type of weeds. This is also done for undesired insects. Maria Thun hypothesised the effectiveness of this method as being a message to the gods responsible for sending the pest to stop sending those harmful creatures to the affected areas. It could just be that the chemical ambience changes with the effect of reducing the attractiveness of the area to those weeds/insects. In terms of humans and societies at large ruled by religious conservatism, the month January (in the northern hemisphere) may be an effective time to assert authority for some of those reasons, which deserve further investigation.
[Answer]
Ash actually makes a good fertilizer, it could be *in demand* at the start of the growing season, or just before it. It made sense to align the "burning season" with whatever time the agriculture needed it's byproduct. Then it became a lasting tradition long before synthetic fertilizers were invented.
[Answer]
The god of justice and accountancy is one of the senior members of this highly administrative pantheon. During the month long festival of the god, in the build up to the new year, judgements are handed down, executions are carried out, pardons are issued.
This is the time when the society cleans its books and prepares to start the new year with a clean slate. No prisoner may remain awaiting judgement after this festival, they must be sentenced, executed, or released.
Accounts are also tallied up for the year and tax paid.
The crops have been harvested, the trees are dying back for the winter. It's [coppicing season](http://www.woodlands.co.uk/blog/practical-guides/coppicing-an-introduction/), there's plenty of cut wood around. If you have woodland you can pay your taxes in wood, which will then be used for the executions. With the ash then spread on the fields as fertiliser for the new growing season.
[Answer]
Pragmatism - an execution is an expensive undertaking of it is attended to in anywhere near the detail that western democracies do. You can stock up on the drugs and handle them assembly line style, working through dozens for close to the same cost as a single execution.
[Answer]
There are some benevolent aliens that maintain limited trade with the country. They commemorate their arrival to the planet every year with a traditional cooking of some human meat. Since they don't really enjoy human meat, they don't care for it the rest of the year, but during preparations for the holiday feast, they are willing to give some valuable (to natives) unobtainium in exchange for some fresh bodies.
And since death row convicts ain't gonna provide anything else for the society, they can at least provide some unobtainium in death. It's not that something prevents execution at other time of the year, but it's just a waste of perfectly good corpses.
P.S.: Of course, the question never stated that the country is populated by humans as opposed to, say, turkeys.
**Edit:** Since the method of death was fixed to burning at a stake, you can replace "meat" with "roasted bones". Typical burning at a stake, as opposed to proper cremation, should leave plenty of bone marrow.
[Answer]
## Highly seasonal labor requirements
A place that has very different lifestyles in different seasons will get traditions linked to particular dates, because it makes a practical difference.
For example, assume a place that's food-limited (most pre-industrial societies are) with a climate where half of the year is "growing" season with *really* a lot of labor required; and half of the year is spent essentially idle due to weather conditions that prohibit all outdoors work.
In such a society, if you convict a murderer, it'd be practical to have them doing hard labor throughout the growing season, and then execute them all after harvest so that you don't have to feed them in the winter.
[Answer]
Human Sacrifice. It's a very religious people and their religion demands fire sacrifices to their gods and these sacrifices must be done at the adequate dates. The criminals are immolated to the gods of the underworld, like Hades, to bring the wealth and power of the Underworld, like riches and secret knowledge. The majority of the population follows that religion so they are embedded in their constitution, their laws, and no politician would dare change it lest he finds himself impeached or immolated to Hades due to corruption charges.
There could be sacrifices to other gods but they wouldn't be immolations, but food and wine, animals, and the like. The humans are to be burned in the month of Capricorn due to underworld, hadean, aspects of capricorn, which is cold and dry, earthly, and earth is the domain of Hades, the fire of the Underworld, where there is gold and secret knowledge.
[Answer]
A spiritual reason could easily be behind this. In todays world, the Catholic people believe in purgatory and an alteration of these beliefs could be used to justify this. Purgatory (short version) is the final purification of those who die in friendship with God but who haven’t fully broken their attachment to sin or atoned for wrongs done in this life. Sinners (your criminals) must be sent to purgatory to have the opportunity to break their attachment to sin and have the opportunity to purify their souls (In a religious society, this would be viewed as 'good', giving the opportunity for the criminal to redeem themselves in the eyes of their lord is a gracious act afterall).
Final judgement, an entrance from purgatory to heaven, occurs at the end of the year. Thus criminals must be given to purgatory as early as possible in the year (first month) to have the greatest chance of atonement.
[Answer]
They are short on wood and the only spare stakes are discarded Christmas trees, and because they are religious nuts Christmas and trees are mandatory, despite lack of trees.
[Answer]
Since the stake burning is to be a ritual, the God/Gods are only pleased when a flower of a very particular plant is added to the bonfire, to make the specific God(s)-approved scent and/or flame colour, or conversely, just to kill the smell altogether.
As luck would have it, the plant only blooms in that particular month, hence the ritual cannot take place at any other time.
[Answer]
### You need a special tree
The numbers of this kind of three growing are very small. The required soil is just not available en masse and it takes ages for one to grow to a suitable size.
### That's why you need to handle the convicts en masse
If there is not enough wood for every convict you just have to handle the convicts together. That's why you are *collecting* them throughout the year and then sentence them to death together. That reduces the required resources and can be combined with other reasons such as getting rid of the convicts before a hard winter hits the country and right after they were cheap labour on the fields.
### Only this tree will work for religious or biological reasons
Depending on how much you want to emphasize your religion you might want to make it a rule of the gods that only this tree, which, for example, served as the material for burning an evil god once in the past, is suitable for this occasion. Everything else would be a sin.
Or you could make your trees burn better than any other tree. This would again lead to this tree being used to burn your convicts because everything else would be a waste of resources. Again, combining this with a hard winter, shows that your society appreciates using resources as efficiently as possible.
### This tree could also be imported from other countries
You could make the wood from this rare and very-good-burning tree a good that is bought from travelling salesmen from other countries. They only come to your country once a year and they sell a lot of important goods. One of them being the wood from these trees. And your efficiency-focused society could then buy just enough to burn all the convicts. No work in getting the resources because others are delivering them, no goods wasted because you are only getting as much as you need for last years serious convicts and it enhances your relations with a possibly important allied country.
[Answer]
It is really easy to rile people up into killing someone.
By restricting death punishment to a particular month, you provide time for sober second thought, and made lynch mobs clearly illegal. Except possibly in that month; but that can be patched.
We add in the rule that sacrifice must be during that month, *and* if the sentence was passed in the previous month it must be on the last day of the month, *and* you cannot pass sentence of death during that month, you have a system that prevents lynching, and guarantees at least a month of "appeal" period and sober second thought.
There is a practical downside; it means that you have to *feed* the victim for the year. In a pre-modern society this is amazingly expensive. Practically, temporary slavery will be used, where sentenced criminals are enslaved by the community.
Productive slaves are not a resource to be wasted. So a system whereby the person owning the slave contract can "buy out the death" of the slave and keep the person in slavery for another year should be expected, where the money used would be split between the priest caste and the clan/family that the criminal harmed.
This would be abused by having an ally of the criminal "enslave" the criminal and then "buy out the death" repeatedly. In the usual iterative manner, the religious law would then say an unsupervised "slave"'s actions would be the responsibility of the owner.
In modern days, slavery may have been outlawed, and feeding a criminal is no longer extremely expensive. So the slavery/buyout system may be gone, or it may exist in the form of a freedom bond, imprisonment while productive enough to pay off your "death price" every year, or imprisonment while you/your estate/your family can still pay the annual "death price".
In such a society, you might be convincted of 1 year of imprisonment and a death price of 1000$/year (for the rest of your life). During imprisonment you'd be worked to pay off your death price, and when freed you'd have to continue to pay it. If unable to pay it while free, you'd be imprisoned and put to work. If your labor is insufficient to pay your death price, the next burning month you'd be put to death.
On a tangent, by requiring religious blessing before putting someone to death this also reinforces the religious organization's power. They have the right to put someone to death, and nobody else does. Temporal authority has to bring their criminals to the religous court to impose the top punishment. Religious authorities thus have an incentive to presist this rule over the centuries and consider it important.
[Answer]
In the distant past the people of the religion had an Enemy, so naturally the people of this religion had to go and fight a holy war to eliminate the threat, however because of the inclement weather at the end of the year and the need to get people back to plant the crops at the start of the second month there was only really a "window" of the first month where it was ok to go off and fight this Enemy so the leaders (who ruled both the state and the church) mandated that everyone had to wait until the start of the first month to go and had to be back by the end of it. This was a hugely successful war and heralded the start of a bright new era of growth and prosperity for the people of the religion and as such is an extremely significant event.
Over the years however the finer details of *why* they could only go fight the enemy during that first month gets a bit lost in translation - certainly the crops issue is not what it once was, however the notion that the first month was the only "acceptable" month to go and kill the enemies of the religion remained and as the "enemies" now can be taken to mean the criminals within their own society this gets translated into the first month of the year being the only acceptable month to kill them.
[Answer]
A couple of ideas:
1. Specialist investigators/lawyers - Due to the irreversible nature of the death penalty, multiple specialists are involved in determining if it may go ahead. For logistical reasons, they are fully employed by the state for a set time in the year, the rest of the year they can run their own practices for non death-penalty related things. This is seen as fairer, as they can devote all their attention to these cases.
2. Tradition - executions in the past only happened at this time, for superstitious reasons. As there has been no reason to change this, it has remained.
[Answer]
Judges are employed part-time, and jurors all have jobs. Based on earlier, agrarian times the trial period for criminals would traditionally have been after the harvest when everyone is at their least busy. It then follows that the executions would follow shortly afterwards, so try in October and November, sentence carried out in December.
Perhaps the need for the post-harvest trial has long-since ended, but the tradition of a December execution remains.
[Answer]
This is a public spectacle. Thus we are talking large, public fires--nothing to confine them.
The burning is done at the time of the year where the risk of an ember starting a fire is lowest.
]
|
[Question]
[
In many sci-fi movie tropes, we see gigantic spaceship using tractor beam to reel in smaller spacecraft. Usually in every scenario that is being played out the smaller spacecraft is trying to flee away from the huge ship and we see the tractor beam eventually overwhelm the smaller craft in terms of power, amusingly the same giant spaceship had the capability to transport crews between 2 points, from ship to ship or ship to surface of a terrestrial planet, etc. Wouldn't it be easier for them to teleport security personnel or droids onboard the smaller vessel than wasting time trying to pull in the entire defiant vessel itself? I like to know why would tractor beam be used instead of teleportor obviously the latter seems to be more cost and time saving?
[Answer]
Why would you risk boarding a spaceship of which you know nothing (crew count, internal arrangement, mode of operation) and expending your crew, when you can much more easily bring it under your scanners for studying it?
Moreover, any casualty on your side means the potential for an unknown item being beamed back to your ship. And since that time when that alien got an exploding nuke back from the basement of the pyramids, the whole space knows it's a no no!
[Answer]
**Shields**
Ships have shields that prevent teleportation so they have to rely on the tractor beam to capture and take the ship the old fashion way.
To teleport, the shield would have to be disabled first and that is difficult without completely destroying the ship.
[Answer]
Teleporters are almost invariably portrayed as a rather easily disrupted and quite limited technology.
Probably because if they weren't, they'd be awful for story-telling.
Here's a list of reasons why I'd rather drag a smaller ship into my cargo hold and breach and board it than simply teleport my troops aboard..
1. I don't know what the internals of that ship look like. Even if I have the full design-specs for the class of ship, for all I know, they've lifted the deck-plates 6 inches up and all my boarding crew will find themselves chopped off at the ankles or embedded in the deck.
2. Sensor jamming, transporter-scattering, shields blocking or just plain weird hull-materials may make it difficult to teleport aboard a ship without its cooperation.
3. Transporting aboard a moving target comes with a whole bunch of risks regarding accuracy of the transporter. And while I don't mind if the molecules in a piece of hardware get a tiny bit scrambled, "Transporter Sickness" sounds like an awful way to die.
4. Even if everything goes right, you now have soldiers somewhere in the middle of an entire ship full of enemy combatants, surrounded on all sides with no retreat possible and no sense of whatever internal-security threats they might encounter.
This is not an ideal situation for a soldier.
When it comes down to it, docking and boarding is better, safer and more efficient.
[Answer]
**movement**
your teleporter needs some time to calculate each teleportation. by the time it is finished doing the calculations both ships would have moved in some unforeseen direction. so if it were to teleport you then you'd just end up somewhere in space. or worse inside a wall.
so as a doctrine it has been banned to teleport to any craft that is still using it's engines.
[Answer]
This is like asking "What is the purpose of a screw driver when I have a hammer in my toolbox?"
### Tractor beams do things that teleporters can't.
* Tractor beams can manipulate much greater masses then teleporters Due to limited data processing, energy buffers etc.
* Tractor beams can manipulate objects external to the ship and keep them external.
* There are literal massive energy consumption differences. The cost of teleporting one person would be comparable to tractoring a whole ship for many minutes.
* Tractor beams are simpler thus less likely to be blocked by technical solutions.
* Less ethical issues. Teleport creates a perfect copy and the original is destroyed. So avoiding the whole premeditated murder/suicide thing.
* Legal issues. Teleporting crew on board might be act of war, where as tractor beam might not be as clear cut/not an act of war. Perhaps closer to the difference between detaining a person and searching their possessions.
### If a ship can't block teleporters they will be destroyed in combat.
Any ship that faces teleporter equipped enemies must be able to block teleporters or risk complete ship loss.
Teleporting is essentially the act of random access placement of antimatter level weapons into/on the target.
Being able place 100Kg of energy/ on the bridge, engine room or munitions storage of an enemy ship should have obvious strategy implications. Teleporting bombs would have much greater range then transporting people. Since keeping the destination a functional person is much different then dumping 100Kg of photons.
So a not being able to use teleporters against a ship is very plausible.
### Storytelling
Ultimately however, it is what will make a more interesting story from the authors perspective.
In the Star Trek universe teleporters solve the problem of minimizing boring screen time on shuttles. That is, teleporters exist to make a more watchable show.
[Answer]
Because you make every effort for teleporters to not work.
You can beam/teleport over a crew because you want to capture the ship, but the moment you have that ability then they can teleport stuff as well. Some easy ways to use teleportation:
* beam the shielding plates off of the enemy reactor
* beam random parts of the bridge to your cargohold, you are bound to get pieces of the controls and computers.
* Beam out the fuel of your enemy, for funsies you can beam it somewhere else on the same ship. Even if you dont ignite it or whatever its not going to be a pleasant experience
* beam the enemy weapons off
* beam large parts of the atmosphere out of the enemy ship
* beam nasty things back, like bombs, nasty gasses, ignited fuel etc.
* beam "innocent" things over like a steel plate into a corridor, a wrench inside the antimatter feeding mechanism, some quick drying glue into the coolant lines etc.
Now someone may have the bright idea to create protections against this like shields and interference fields that you can drop for a fraction of a second to teleport your own into the enemy without them being able to teleport back. This still has a massive problem: since teleportation inside the smaller ship is possible (you've just proven that by teleporting people in) there is nothing stopping the people on the small ship teleporting anything you send over either. You can teleport the boarding party to the brig, out to space or in pieces to the waste processing facilities. Assuming you dont just take their weapons and teleport some restraints to their arms and legs.
The end result is always the same: you dont want any teleporter to work in a combat situation, ever. The fact that teleporters exist in sci-fi and still play barely a role in combat is ridiculous.
[Answer]
Ships are life support systems designed for a certain number of individuals plus a small headroom for emergencies. If there are no close habitable planets, taking a lot of people onboard means renouncing immediately to that headroom and a second emergency could put the crew of the rescueing ship in danger.
[Answer]
Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to teleport something?
Tugging a ship requires very little energy - you are already powering your ship to move, you just have to apply the additional power necessary to haul the additional mass along with it, attached by whatever 'tractor beam' connection is being used.
Compared to a teleporter, which has to produce E = Mc^2 *minimum* in order to disassemble and then re-assemble that matter elsewhere.
Clearly, the tractor beam is a better choice for more massive objects. While teleporting is best reserved for smaller objects where that conversion is much less expensive.
[Answer]
## Size and vulnerability
First, while a ship may be relatively small, it's still a ship. That's still pretty big. The room that a teleporter resolves into may simply be too small.
Second, once another ship has materialized inside the larger ship, they have a little ship on their inside. Usually all the dangerous, antisocial parts of a big ship are designed to point outward. The big ship has its mean bits pointing outward toward space. The little one has its nasty bits pointing outward toward the big ship. Anywhere they fire is going to damage the big ship, which presumably will have very little ability to respond. In fact, the instant the little ship has been teleported inside the big one, the best thing it could do is immediately teleport the biggest, meanest remote-controlled bomb it has to some random place inside the big ship, and then start firing in any direction that doesn't damage the teleporter. The big ship then teleports the rude little ship back into space. The little ship then detonates the bomb, and the little ship quickly becomes the biggest intact ship in the area.
[Answer]
It steadies the target ship and makes its relative speed to you zero. It also pulls the target in closer.
Both of these things make it easier to target the empty spaces in the ship (to prevent finding out what happens when you teleport someone into a bulkhead or a chair). This decreases the manpower loss of boarding the target.
The target will probably be making small, fast, random movements to make safe teleports harder. Being held in a tractor beam will dampen these movements. It will also draw the enemy closer giving less signal travel time to make sure that the spot that you targeted is still there when your boarding party materializes.
As an aside, tractor beams also mimic the grappling hooks and ropes that were used in the age of sail (which everyone seems to like to mimic).
[Answer]
### There's something you need on that ship that you can't simply teleport
Maybe you need the ship itself. The craft's hull is made of a never before seen alloy rendering the ship nearly undetectable. It's almost a miracle you managed to notice it in the first place. You'd love to take the ship home for reverse-engineering and analysis, but it sadly won't fit inside your cargo hold.
Or maybe you just need the ship's computer, but have neither the tools nor the personnel to safely extract it. Teleporting that computer into your ship without properly disconnecting it first might destroy the very thing you're trying to recover.
[Answer]
Possibly that teleporting somewhere would require a relatively constant distant between sender and receiver. With a tractor beam you can first hold the smaller ship in place and *then* teleport to it.
Plus that if that smaller ship has its engines on, you probably should not try to teleport it to your cargo bay.
[Answer]
Attitude of the giant spacecraft's commander- sending a small team possibly to the wolves is too nice for him say look at the Death Star pulling in the Millennium Falcon- fits with Darth Vader's personality to grab a whole ship and drag it to him.
Internal infighting is another reason- the commander doesn't have real control over the internal organization-its just too big and just look at arms of the military infighting. the space tractor group is always competing with the transporter beam group so show how more awesome their tech is over the other guys. The tractor beam grabs the ship before the transporter beam group have got set up to send. Our tech is better than yours.
[Answer]
## The is no Stopping in Space
In space, everything is constantly moving in an orbit around something. Even objects that are close together have slightly different orbits. This means that ships can drift apart or collide.
You could fire your engines to match their position, but that would be a continuous drain on fuel. It's much easier to just grapple their ship with the tractor beam and prevent any issues in the first place.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 3 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/177776/edit)
I am thinking about magic in humans and the long term effects on humanity. This is normally handwaved in magic-using stories everywhere, be it Marvel Superheroes or Fantasy. This handwaving is bothering me.
For example, if magic is easy, I guess that any magic user will become tribes leader or at least rich and of great social status and thus have more surviving kids than the average person... and a few thousand years later magic will be everywhere, people without magic will be looked at like they're disabled.
The other extreme, think of dangerous magic coming uncontrolled out of wizard babies each time they get angry or hungry, certainly the higher death rate would lead to no magic at all after just a few thousand years.
I would like to have a world like a typical fantasy story world, where big cities have a magic University or Tower or such, so think of 20 or 30 people who are able to use magic among 10 000 people. They are mostly not the Kings or tribe leaders. There should be enough of them to let politics among them happen and stories be told, certainly more than the 5 magicians worldwide in Lord of the Rings. But they shall be rare enough so that magic is... well, mystic and magic and not "normal".
Evolution is not only about genetic inheritance. It is also about habits. Look at the transition from hunter to farmer - there was no change in the genes, but the farmers could sustain 10x more people than the hunters; so they were bound to win most of the conflicts and they took over the world in a few thousand years.
### Question
How could or should magic be so that magic users don't have only advantages and procreate unchecked and take over the world, at the same the magic be harmless enough for the magician so that it is not eradicated and effectful enough to be worth a story?
What is it in the magic or the humans or the world that could keep the magicians rare but surviving and not extinct?
[Answer]
Since most of the other answers are pursuing genetically inheritable magic, let's explore a more academic scenario.
Magic is like extremely intricate music. Anyone can perform it but for most it will take many years of study and practice to achieve. And like music, much of the initial subject matter has no direct application outside the magical arts. Before you can even attempt to cast the first spell, you must learn the magical equivalents of scales and musical notation and finger placement. You must learn the sharps and the flats versions of each note and learn to recognize when a note fits or when it is just wrong. None of these learnings will ever help you at all outside of the performance of the art, but all of them must be mastered before you can even attempt to perform at any real level of competence.
Of course there will be exceptions to this long and arduous journey, prodigies who have a natural affinity for one style of music or an easier time learning all of the styles. There will be retired professional casters who teach children the basics to bring in extra money. There will be schools for the rich and apprenticeships for all and self study is always an option.
In other words, to make magic use rare and too keep its casters our of leadership roles, all you have to do is make it really, really hard to master. Make it vast enough that a life time of study only scratches the surface of what is possible. Then those who choose to study it will have to dedicate themselves so completely to the task of learning, that ceasing governmental power or earning riches will be unwelcome distractions from what they are passionately learning next.
[Answer]
There is no suggestion that magic is an inherited thing. Like technology or art, some people may have more aptitude than others, but anyone can use it.
More likely, as so often happens, the teaching of magic (as with literacy) will be limited to only certain wealthy powerful families or castes who will insist that any other transmission of magical teaching is illegal/immoral/dangerous to the state, so it will be confined to a self-selecting 'elite'.
This immediately gives you the set-up for politics and power-plays within the wizard community. Who should be given access to what powers? Should magic be made more widespread for the common good, or is that destabilising for society...?
[Answer]
Assume that magic is like sport, only that it takes better magical performance to achieve an observable effect at all. The rest are parallel. There are some people who practice magic, maybe less than doing sports, because some are unsure about the effect, or are unsure whether everyone can do it at all. There are special magic schools, but like sports high schools, they are private schools and only richer families, or those who have a sponsor can afford it because it's a bit off the mainstream. And then there are the professional magicians. I have no idea what they would do right now, but maybe they would just do magical competitions, so a lot of their sponsors are betting shops. Perhaps they work for secret services, governments, film and television, weather services, ... depending on their individual qualifications.
[Answer]
**Why not simply make magicians less fertile or even completely sterile?**
This will **NOT** necessarily make magicians Tolkien-rare!
There are tons of traits among organisms that hampers the individual's capacity of reproduction, but that lives on because of the positive effects on the population as a whole. These positive effects could roughly be divided into two types.
First, we have the genes that are beneficial when you get one copy, but harmful when you get two. A real world example is sickle cell disease: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease> If you inherit the gene behind it from one of your parents, you get some protection against malaria and thus will likely spread the gene further. If you get it from both parents, however, you risk all sorts of complications. This way, the spread of the gene will regulate itself to some equilibrium level where positive and negative effects sort of balance each other out.
Second, there are genes that harm your reproduction but make you better suited to help your relatives. The most extreme example is probably social insects, where infertility is common among workers. There has also been some debate about traits of this type in humans though. According to some theories, the reason so many of us are homosexual is that a certain amount of gay is beneficial for a community, either because of other traits that go along with homosexuality that make up for the tendency to reproduce as much, or precisely *because* of that tendency. The logic goes that without children of your own you can help the rest of the group, including your relatives, and thus better the chances of your genes spreading without spreading them yourself.
There are similar theories about various "disorders" like ADHD, Asperger etc: If everyone has it it's probably not good for the group, but if a certain proportion has it maybe it is. These cases are not technically about reduced fertility, but the mechanism are related I think.
Regarding magic I think it's better to go with reduced fertility, and either variant could work.
In the first case the "magic gene" maybe means that you have some slight advantage with one copy, but with two you become a (semi) sterile magician. This would fit with the nature of the magic being dangerous to the carrier and the surroundings. If you get a magical child you give it away to the Order as fast as you can, or leave it in the forest if you live too far away. Keeping them would risk setting your house on fire or worse. The advantage of a single copy could be anything, but you want to keep it slight if you don't want it to spread too aggressively throughout the population. Maybe you're just a little more resistant against magical influence, maybe you have some weak magical sense for detecting something, or maybe it's something as mundane as having pretty eyes.
In the second case, a magical child could be a blessing which helps your family even if they can't reproduce on their own. Some families would grow powerful this way, by planning marriages to get a large number of magical people. This could backfire though, if they grow too many, as they will not spread the linage themselves. This would still work well with having magical orders, either as schools where people send their children to hone their abilities, or as refuges for magicians who grow tired of being exploited by their families.
The mode of infertility is up to you. Maybe they just have a really hard time conceiving children, with a birth rate of 10, 1 or even 0 %. Maybe their children are born but so sick and deformed that child baring is avoided. Maybe, if you're feeling controversial, all magicians are gay. I would personally not go with this as it would be hard not to let this fact totally take over and make your work a political statement which distracts from the rest, but it's possible.
[Answer]
Magic might be an inherited trait and that trait might also come with disadvantages. For instance there is a gene mutation that provides a limited degree of immunity against malaria. So this might be a bit like the good effect of a magic gene. But the catch is if you have two copies of that gene you end up with sickle cell anaemia which is very bad. So the prevalence of the gene is limited by the seriousness of the negative effects v the advantages of the beneficial effects.
In a magical world it might even be possible to arrange more complex arrangements. For example 2 recessive genes which have mostly negative effects in isolation but if they encounter each other generate some magical effect. Such genes would be fairly uncommon and suitable double genetic encounters very rare. The degree of rarity can be adjusted by the degree of the negative effects and the strength of the magical effects.
[Answer]
Hmm, I feel like this problem has already been tackled by Robert Jordan in his Wheel of Time series. In them it seems like magic powers are genetic (magicians tend to have magic babies), however they are still extremely rare, so I suspect that the particular genes are quite recessive and while widespread, it takes a special combination for them to become active. Also, they start manifesting only in teenage years, so no danger of explosive magic... before then.
As for why magicians don't become great leaders and get better chances of reproduction - the public in general mistrusts them. They are tolerated because their powers are useful and, well, nobody wants to fight a magician head on - however they can still be overpowered by ordinary people. No magic spell will save you from a crossbow bolt if you're not casting it at the right time and the right place.
[Answer]
Charles Stross has a good answer for this in his *Laundry Files* series. Magic is essentially algorithms which allow you to channel energy from other dimensions. If you "run" those algorithms in your head, magical stuff happens, sure. But those other dimensions are not empty, and they contain predators.
The larger predators will generally find it hard to spot a magic user immediately, which is the good news. The bad news though is there are also the magical equivalent of bacteria or microorganisms, and they are *everywhere*. So every time a magic user thinks magical thoughts to invoke some "spell", a lot of little interdimensional beasties take a lot of little bites out of their brain. And that's assuming they don't get unlucky and attract the attention of something more malignant.
The result is that there is no such thing as an old magic user. An active magician is lucky to manage double-digit years before they succumb to something akin to vCJD from having their brain literally eaten away, or before something eats them more seriously. This seriously limits their potential for building vast empires.
A king can certainly hire magicians, and if they're lucky they'll be pensioned off before things get too bad. Top-level magicians who quit while they're still sane can teach too, of course, and can be kept in reserve for desperate measures like a tactical nuke suicide bomb. But any individual magician doesn't have a long enough career to make an impact on their own.
(In Stross's world, this is where running those "spells" on a computer instead of in your head becomes desirable. This is probably not relevant for your typical high-fantasy low-technology setting though, although there is an interesting idea in one novella about magicians encoding their work into chess-like rules where the chessboards become the spell-executing platform.)
[Answer]
If magic is genetic then the mages will take over the world simply by competition.
When a country, a village or a small town overpopulates, you know what happens?
Sons are sent alone, or maybe with their spouses to find new land and live there....this is how new cities were created.
But when the world population is too high, it just happens that your sons will only find occupied land, occupied by other people who are not related to you.
So how do you defend the survival of your overpopulated village and your sons? With war.....killing who took the land and stealing it, or enslaving those people and making them work for you.
**it is clear** that villages with mages would slowly domanite the world.
This is what happened with romans and the Japanese empire, but their "magic" was limited to better warring strategies which helped them win regardless of having less numbers, less resources and equal technology.
But with magic, it would be even more extreme.
**solution**
So your only option is to make magic something that everyone can obtain, but not everyone has the time or chance to do so.
**examples**
Everyone can be a Buddhist and reach the ability to perceive full peace of mind, but few monks are able to obtain it, and the ones who do, usually kill themselves in symbolic ways by setting themselves on fire, starving to death or meditating to death.
Everyone can be a world record sprinter, but only those with the best training, with the right steroids,the right **sponsors** (in Olympics sponsors can decide whether or not some roided athletes can participate) and the most experienced will obtain the world record. It doesn't matter If subject A is naturally faster if they trained for 15 years while subject B trained better and for 25 years, since they were 5 years old.
**(also no sprinting is not genentic, there are only 2 genes that makes people natural sprinters and and the other one gene makes people natural power athletes with explosive strength, theoretically 66% of people have one of sprinting genes because ALL HUMANS DESCEN FROM RUNNERS)**
Everyone in the world can have a healthy romantic relantionahip, but it is clear that this thing is incredibly rare and only happens in Hollywood. Why? Because in countries where divorce is real, it's incredibly high and getting higher every day whilst in counties where divorce is not legal we see the most abusive relationships ever. Also cheating percentages vary between 40% to 87% of men depending on the country and age, and for women, whilist it is half as much, its still a high number.
You see? Many things are possible in the world but are really hard to obtain.
In your world, everyone can achieve magic...in theory but just like all the examples I have given, it is ridiculous to even hope to do so because it's incredibly unrealistic.
The user @[Li Jun] gave you a perfect idea, only those who reach a certain age as virgins become mages.
This might seems stupid and easy, but I remind you that in the modern era in the majority of the planet age of full consent is set between 13 years old to 18 years old, and childrend can consent to have sex with other children since the age of 11 or 12 in some countries.
Also teens are hit by an avalanche of hormonal changes so it is actually unlikely for people to even reach legal maturity 18 years or 21 years in some countries and still be virgin, and it is also considered natural for teens to explore their own sexuality.
Even monks who are forced to live alone and not have any sexual activity fall to their carnal desires and in absence of women have sex with each other.
Even prisoners become gay.
Even soldiers in ancient Greece were having sex with each other, some historical sources suggest it was actually a ritual.
So it is really hard to not only maintain virginity until a certain age, but it's even harder forcing it.
Some Christian women have oral or anal sex to maintain their " virginity" so it also depends what do you consider being a virgin ( I actually had a few girlfriends who tought they were still virgins because they only had anal or oral sex)
Also numbers match up perfectly, you asked for 30 out of 10 000 people to be mages....well guess what? 0,3% of humans remain virgin to the age of 40 as suggested by this link
<https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/on-late-in-life-virginity-loss/284412/>
[Answer]
Their are many good answers here, but I thought it would be nice to mention some of the answers that have been used in published works:
* **Wheel of time** : Here magic is hereditry in an imperfect way (think Harry potter). Female magic users may have all the advantages you describe that might allow them to have more children (they live and remain fertile for hundreds of years), but males are dangerous, in constant danger of going mad and killing those around them (so are usually killed off when found).
* **Warbreaker** : Everyone, every last person, is born with exactly 1 magic "breath". This is exactly magic to acheive nothing-at-all. But people can give their breaths away. Trade and selling results in some people carrying thousands of breaths inside them, a thousand-odd is the bare minimum needed for any real magic. This removes the genetic component altogether, while still requiring a magic-usng population that is only a tiny fraction of the total population.
* **Way of Kings** : (SPOILER ALERT) In this setting people gain magic by bonding with magical spirits called "spren". A spren might choose to bond to you or not. The number of magic users is theirfore limmited to the number of spren that want to create a bond with a human - no matter how many people their are.
* **Warhammer 40k** : This science fiction setting contains psykers, who are basically just wizzards by another name. A trained psyker who knows how to control their powers will probably not go mad, get possessed by demons or have their head explode by accident, but its still a significant hazard. Without training your chances are basically nil. A lot of the time psykers are just killed when discovered: too dangerous.
A unifying theme of all the above works is that they are fairly "pulpy", kind of action-world settings of "blam explosion". That makes sense given that it is a list of settings that go into depth about who gets to be a mage. Storys and settings that are less action focussed usually feel no need to explain this kind of thing (eg. Bas Lag books). Its also worth bearing in mind that this sort of thing is only an issue that even needs considering in the "modern fantasy" genre - which is (at its worst) characterised by people in a setting that looks medieval (plus magic) with a modern mindset. Even if the characters have a more scene appropriate worldview the narrator is often given too much modern thinking.
[Answer]
# The world is still young.
The gods of the setting created it in the not-too-distant past; last Tuesday A.D.
The ability to use magic might provide a tremendous advantage over time, or humanity may simply be replaced by a race of Fourth Men when the gods get bored. But from the creation of the world until now, there really hasn't been enough time for evolution to affect anything.
[Answer]
Magic/superpower is kind of a metaphor. In *The Incredibles* it is a metaphor for those with great talents, and the story suggests that average people will try to discourage talented people from achieving excellence. In *The Watchmen* superpowers are a metaphor for worldly political power, and the story is cynical about how unchecked power can corrupt those who wield it. In *The X-Men* superpowers are a thin metaphor for race, and the story is generally about how white villains oppress the minority mutants. In other stories magic may be a metaphor for religious faith, or for making deals with the devil, or any of a number of other things.
I think what you need to do is, figure out what kind of story you're trying to tell, i.e. what's your metaphor? Then look at how the-thing-magic-represents-in-your-story affects heredity in the real world.
[Answer]
What happens to magic-users that get too good, or don't get good enough? There's a number of Darwin award prizes for such things, aren't there?
Magic is dangerous. Magic involves changing yourself. Magic means risking yourself.
All that ivory-tower training is about self-control and self-mastery and detaching oneself from one's passions and from the world at large -- everything that's opposed to becoming more powerful. For the talented, it's far too easy to summon too much power, and then not be able to channel it usefully or discharge it safely. Some become monsters, like gnarled, twisted, bloated trolls, unfit for human company. Some go up in smoke and flames, utterly consumed by an energy too strong for them to withstand. Some merely slip the bonds of this world, inhabiting the Shadows and the Aether, unable to find their way home.
Magic is frightening. Magic comes at a steep, strange price. Magic means facing hazards.
By the time you're 60 you might look twice that age. Mystical energies take their toll, making your flesh swell and stretch while you hold them and harness them, leaving you empty, gaunt, and weakened once they're channeled and released. If you're talented enough, lucky enough, trained enough, then you need not find yourself suddenly separated from humanity by some thunderbolt from the sky or the slashing claws of a chaos demon. Even so, you'll find yourself inevitably separated from humanity. You can have the respect and even admiration of your fellow man, certainly. But, understanding? Affection? Companionship? For that you need to go back to your tower and to your own kind. The common folk just can't think of you as being one of them anymore.
Magic divides.
The talent itself might be common enough, with many ordinary folk casting the occasional cheap cantrip. What makes you different is that you work outright wonders, you do things that take far more energy than those cheap parlor tricks. You do things that take more energy than what you started with. You've let yourself become something uncommon. You've embraced that change and that pain. You've left your community behind you. So very few of them, even among the most talented, will ever choose to join you.
[Answer]
I'm partial to just treating it like computer usage today: Everybody can use one, but few take the time to learn how to program them.
Going to magic, everyone can do simple but useful little things like making a ball of light to see in the dark, or mustering up some short-range telekinesis to grab that spanner that slipped out of your hand down the crack which you can't quite reach normally (for some reason I have Victorian tech on my mind right now).
Anything impressive, like using magic to bend the bits of an exploded boiler back into shape and weld them together, would be the domain of those who've been to university and gotten a Bachelor's Degree in Magic, though you might treat it as a field of science, with the degree being "B. Sci. (Magic)".
Just as the Prime Minister has a Chief Scientist to advise him on scientific matters, he'd probably also have a Chief Magician for that field, if the two positions aren't held by the same person.
There's no need to worry about all the leaders ending up as powerful magicians, simply because there's very little overlap between those interested in magic and those interested in governing.
]
|
[Question]
[
So, based on their abilities, lizardfolk (humanoid reptiles) should be a more prevalent race in my setting than they actually are. When I say they're overpowered, I mean they have everything to expand their territory and resources, which is pivotal in a world plauged by naruto-running zombies with Wolverine-regeneration.
General characterstics:
* Height: 170-190 cm on average
* Extreme regeneration: all lizardfolk are able to grow back any organ (except the brain in most cases), albeit not at the speed zombies do. They don't drop their tails (obviously)
* Cold-blooded: they are lizards
* They've a human lifespan
## The three subspecies:
**Nile-crocodile folk:**
* Ridiculously strong bite force
* The largest (consistently 190 cm) and strongest
* They are also the slowest (on land), though that isn't saying too much
* Their osteoderms provide decent protection from many physical attacks, even weaker firearms
**Komodo-dragon folk:**
* Jack-of-all-trades, master of none
* Stronger than the Asian-water-monitor folk, weaker than the Nile-crocodile folk, slower than the Asian-water-monitor folk and faster than the Nile-crocodile folk
* Average height 170-180 cm
* They have a potent poison, secreted from glands in the lower jaw
**Asian-water-monitor folk:**
* They're incredibly fast and agile
* Tall, athletic build
* They are good climbers and are often arboreal by choice
* They are also good swimmers
* The smartest of the three sub-species
* 180 cm on average
Just to give you a point of reference, let's take these three friends from one of my drafts:
* Pondering friend, an Asian-water-monitor folk, who built a treehouse by himself just to get away from annoying friend, that's why he left the ladder out. He likes ranged weapons and camouflage, the two things he can beat annoying friend with.
* The annoying friend, a Nile-crocodile folk. He uses a nicely-made club (I think the design is a Polynesian war club). It's advised to wear top-quality riot gear when engaging in combat with him. Pondering friend hates taking him on on one-on-one duels, since those club strikes always break his guard, which he considers outrageous and unfair. Pondering friend also regrets teaching him the German suplex.
* Mysterious friend is the peacekeeper between pondering friend and annoying friend, going as far as breaking up fights. Pondering friend also regularly coats his arrows with mysterious friend's poison.
---
You might be thinking, "Why not just throw Cocytus in to give those three a very bad time?" If you were to do that I'd finally have enough unspent CR to balance that encounter with a [Bertholdt nuke](https://youtu.be/ACdAG_nM2W4?t=45).
Basically, I need a biological weakness that can't be solved with a hand-knit sweatshirt (body-temperature maintenance) or similar low-level technology, and would hinder all three species in combat, based on the already established facts (the list items). However, this weakness shouldn't make them too weak; defeating them still needs to be a bit of a challenge.
**What would be the most likely weakness? (it can only be one oversight in their physiology)**
[Answer]
if you are cold blooded, the sweatshirt won’t do any good. Because you’re not generating any body heat. You need an external heat source. This is going to be a major disadvantage against anyone not cold blooded.
As someone else mentioned, Keeping lizards outside of a tropical climate is very challenging.
Insulation is not enough: a woolly coat might work for your warm-blooded pooch, but your ectothermic iguana needs heat, ideally in the form of an infra-red lamp. If not heated, reptiles get sluggish. In winter, their metabolism slows right down -- an alligator's heart may beat just once a minute - and they undergo a form of hibernation. Unless they are living somewhere tropical, or have a good way of getting warm quickly and staying warm, they will have trouble competing with wily mammals. Maybe they rule the warm valleys while the snowy mountains are the domain of the warmbloods?
[Answer]
Breathing is a [thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptile#Respiratory_system) for reptiles.
Some reptiles must hold their breath during intense running. It puts a harsh limit on how far they can run.
Most reptiles lack a secondary palate meaning they must hold their breath while swallowing. Though crocodiles have one. Many snakes that swallow their prey whole must hold their breath for the entire process. Some snakes extend a [breathing tube](https://www.quora.com/How-do-snakes-breathe) during at least part of the process.
So, if you saw your reptile buddy eating dinner, and you grabbed his fries and ran away, you might well be able to beat him if you were in good practice at long distance running. Corresponding strategies for military situations are fairly obvious. Humans could outdistance reptilian troops.
[Answer]
One thing that all reptiles, being exothermic, have problems with is ***temperature***. Too little and they cannot move, and if there is too much they roast. **A viable defense against the lizard people would be to set up large space-heaters around a defensible position. These would really mess with any that come close.**
In addition, even if the heat is just right, reptiles have problems with running. You see, the reason why they are exothermic is that their cells do not produce much energy. As a result, they are limited to short (~30 second) sprints. Furthermore, they are completely incapacitated for several minutes after such a sprint.
**TL;DR: while they would be extremely deadly at melee range, they would have problems with pursuits and temperature extremes.**
**EDIT:** An alternative to space-heaters would be heavily air-conditioning the inside of your base. The transition shock alone should be enough to knock out any lizards that breach the perimeter.
[Answer]
Humanities power comes, not from our large brains and tool use, but from our large social structures.
A single human is not particularly scary, a bear, couger or wolf can kill one without too much difficulty. But a thousand humans can kill just about anything out there (excluding a larger group of humans).
Make your lizard men extremely tribal. Similar to the steppe tribes.
The reason why they don't conquer the world is that they are too busy killing eachother because of ancient blood feuds. However if a leader were to emerge capable of uniting the many feuding tribes they would have an army capable of conquering the world.
[Answer]
You could make your lizardmen reptile-brained in the biological sense. That means they would have the following qualities:
* Weak social inclinations, making it difficult for them to organize coherently.
* Lowered inhibitions, making them prone to infighting, sudden hatreds and affections, and in other ways generally quite fickle.
* Somewhat obsessive, single-mindedly pursuing goals to the expense of reason and common sense.
Look at the evolutionary layers of the brain on a [site such as this](https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_05/d_05_cr/d_05_cr_her/d_05_cr_her.html), and think about what would happen if the reptile brain took on greater emphasis while the limbic system and cerebral cortex had diminished importance. They wouldn't be lunkheads, exactly — still capable of rational thought and all the benefits that entails — but they would have a distinctly different set of priorities that would make them more powerful as individuals yet less powerful as a group.
[Answer]
## They evolved as a [K-selected](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory) species
Meaning, their current reproductive capabilities are adapted for an environment that can barely support their numbers; they reproduce *slowly*.
Prior to the "Naruto-running zombies"(?), each of the three lizardfolk species was saturating their livable territory, and eventually adapted to a relatively low-density equilibrium. After all, each member of each species has an extremely high survival rate due to their superhuman healing capabilities, but those same capabilities carry an extremely high metabolism. Their cold-blooded nature made it difficult for them to spread into other climates very quickly.
Members of the species tended to live to old age, and required significant resources along the way. As a result, the slower-reproducing members were selected for (they had an easier time supporting their relatively few offpsring, compared to their faster-reproducing brethren who had to support entire swarms of rugrats).
But everything changed when the Naruto-running zombies(?) attacked. The initial event devastated the populations of all three species, and they have been very slow to recover.
[Answer]
**Like cane toads, lizard folk will try to mate with anything.**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/V84NT.jpg)
<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-10-lusty-cane-toads-latch-powerless-python-180971151/>
>
> But in their quest to reproduce, cane toads sometimes get a bit
> overzealous. They have been known to try and mate with anything they
> can catch: male toads, human hands and feet, other species and even
> inanimate objects. On Twitter, Rowley shared an image of a can toad
> attempting to get it on with a rotting mango.
>
>
>
Your lizard folk are the same way. If a male finds something moving, or not moving, it will try to mate with it. Because of their great strength and power, the male is usually successful in its attempt. This interferes with the fighting ability of the male Lizardfolk, because their interest in fighting quickly is overpowered by their interest in mating.
[Answer]
Here's some weaknesses you can explore:
1- their ectothermic nature. Not only it means they can't be as active in colder days, they're relatively incapable of migrating to colder regions, also, funny enough, their metabolism gets slower the colder it gets, and you know what also slows down with metabolism? Your healing factor. The Nile croc may be strong and hard to beat, but if you throw water at 32 F at it it will be basically helpless to do anything that requires metabolic activity, and since they don't have what it takes to conserve heat, your sweatshirt won't be more than aesthetic.
2- their minds. Unless your reptiles somehow developed the mammalian brain parts, their brains aren't that different than a souped up version of your average velociraptor's (remember, they were smart by dino standards, but a dog is much smarter than they were). In other words, their instincts are extremely prevalent still and they have poorly developed emotions. Even if they have rational intellect as developed as hours, if you know how to trigger their instinctive responses, they'll most likely switch from rational being to mindless animal.
3-(Nile kind only) their very Jaws. Sure, crocodilians have tremendous bite force, but that doesn't come for free, their muscles were mostly concentrated on the closing motion. In other words, once your Nile crocodile closes its mouth, a simple lasso will more than do the trick at ensuring they don't open again. Whether Their arms are long enough to deal with that is up to you.
4-if they're lizards they molt. Doesn't sound like a big deal right? That's not really a weakness, except it is. Many reptiles, especially snakes, tend to have worse vision immediately before shedding as the membrane that protects their eyes becomes clouded, being changed by another after molting, so your lizards might have a hard time seeing when their molting time approaches, and boy is it good when you can see better than your enemy. Also, not molting properly, which can happen due to stress might result in skin problems and inflammations due to the dead tissue.
Hope at least one of these was helpful
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/139660/edit).
Closed 4 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/139660/edit)
So, I've been trying to find a word which means all the people in the world. One would think of humanity, humankind, mankind, or just people, but I want something that can express the meaning properly while also including all races instead of just "human".
If it helps, what I meant by "something that can express the meaning properly", I don't want elves, orcs, angels, and others to call themselves as "human" when they say "humanity". So, something a bit more universal for them, perhaps?
[Answer]
"[Sophonts](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sophont)", plural of "Sophont", has commonly been used in Science-Fiction since the 1960s.
It is a term for an intelligent/sapient being (the Greek root words are "sophós", meaning "wise", "clever" or "intelligent", and "ṓn" - the present participle of "eimí" - which means "being", "existence", or "that which is")
Alternatively, along the same lines, would just be "Sentients"
[Answer]
Well **people** does a pretty good job.
Some definitions for people mean exclusively humans
>
> human beings, as distinguished from animals or other beings.
>
>
>
But, some definitions relate more to multiple individuals
>
> the entire body of persons who constitute a community, tribe, nation, or other group by virtue of a common culture, history, religion, or the like
>
>
>
That said I'd probably go for **folk**.
>
> people of a specified class or group
>
>
>
In some fantasy settings, you often see references to mer-folk or fey-folk, so folk on its own can encompass all races, while not relating to other creatures likes bears for example.
All quotes from [www.dictionary.com](https://www.dictionary.com)
[Answer]
They all belong to their home planet, so why not calling them after what they have in common, eg. ***earthlings*** .
They could as well be "**martians**", "**Alpha Centaurians**" or whatever you want to call them.
[Answer]
The computer game Pillars of Eternity used "kith" to describe all sentient members of society, regardless of species. It worked well in a fantasy context.
The [meaning](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kith_and_kin) is closer to "friends", but it's archaic enough that people don't use it outside of the the set phrase "kith and kin".
[Answer]
*Peoples* has historically been used when describing people of the world within different regions. For example, in Will Durant's *The Story of Civilization*:
>
> The first principle of his policy was that the various **peoples** of his empire should be left free in their religious worship and beliefs, for he fully understood the first principle of statesmanship - that religion is stronger than the state.
>
>
>
This usage is specifically used for people of different ethnicities; I personally don't think there's a prejorative associated with its usage, so I think it's quite apt in this context.
[Answer]
How about **sapiens**.
Humans are *homo sapiens* already.
HQ: All vehicles keep on the lookout for a sapien carrying a crossbow. Green hooded jacket, track suit bottoms, and trainers. Warning, may be chaotic evil.
[Answer]
## Allkind?
Or "Everykind" or "Everykin". In a world where there are beings you would not describe as humans, but which are able to talk to us, and who live alongside us, it's likely that language itself would be different, meaning you'll have to coin some terms.
K Mo may be right about "folk" as a stand-in for human in a phrase like "We're all human." (I cynically suspect that the expressions between such races would tend to be more along the lines of "None of the rest of you are angels," but that's outside the scope of the question.)
[Answer]
Disclaimer: this answer is useful only if your purpose is to write a novel set in a fictitious world.
You could create an ad-hoc word for it.
Since in world-building usually you create a world with its own mythology and history, you could use names or places from a suitable fictitious myth/legend/hystoric event to create a word to describe all sentient beings.
Just to give you an example.
You could set up a myth about the gods who created the first sentient being, whose name was - let's' say - "Olgon".
After a kind of crysis (something like Olgon disobeyed an order by the gods, or was too powerful/wise and the gods feared him...), Olgon was punished and his body divided into different creatures, from which descended all the different races of the world (elves, orcs, humans...).
So, the sentient beings in your world are defined "Orgonian" (or "Orgonites"), while the group of every sentient being is defined "the Orgonity".
[Answer]
In RPG often used term is for that case is
>
> Humanoids
> => are any creature shaped generally like a human (two arms, two legs, one head, or a humanlike torso, arms, and head), of Small or Medium size. Most humanoids can speak, and usually have well-developed societies.
>
>
>
link explaining + some races considered humanoid.
There are additional races depending on game and setting
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanoid_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)>
[Answer]
I've always liked "being(s)" in that place. I've read it that way in books before but of course I cannot recall those titles now. It works well in standards sayings; "We're only beings" "we're all beings" "anybeing" "everybeing" and funny enough, a few answers already used it to describe their chosen word without giving it any thought:
>
> "Sophonts" ... is a term for an intelligent/sapient **being**
>
>
> Allkind? Or "Everykind" or "Everykin". In a world where there are **beings** you would not describe as humans...
>
>
>
It can also be defined as:
>
> A real or imaginary living creature or entity, especially an intelligent one.
>
>
>
Which could come in handy if any of your beings happen to be amorphous blobs of light.
]
|
[Question]
[
Sure fiction already has a [master of the elements](http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Master_of_the_Elements), but their power is limited to the four 'elements'; wind, water, earth and fire. But what if a true master of the *periodic* elements, all 118 of them, was to become my enemy.
Even with unlimited numbers and an unlimited budget, would I have any hope of defeating someone who can control all of the known elements? If I do have hope, what is the cheapest way to defeat him?
Some clarifications on the Master of the elements;
* He cannot create anything.
* He can only move the known elements.
* The elements must exist within a 10 mile radius for him to control them.
* The strength of his control is limited to endurance; at first he could lift metric tons of material but as he wears out, his strength does as well.
* He can see even the smallest atom, so all elements are in the game.
* He cannot turn some elements into others, meaning he is stuck with the form he finds them in.
[Answer]
Easy, you **shoot him from really really far away**. Our nemesis does not have superhuman reactions, so he can't detect a speeding bullet before it is too late. Human operated sniper rifles would be effective out to a mile. If he can detect and disarm snipers that far out, then something more drastic is needed. [Time on target](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_On_Target) artillery strikes could be potentially exhausting for him to deflect, if not immediately lethal. Multiple strikes could weaken him to the point where conventional snipers could be effective.
[Answer]
[Obligatory xkcd](https://xkcd.com/965/)
Maybe: Given that your enemy appears to be able to be able to, in essence, control matter, your options dwindle to either out-enduring him, a surprise attack, or some sort of non-matter weapon (heat, radiation).
A direct confrontation without overwhelming force isn't going to work: After all, he can literally tear you/any machines you send after him to pieces without having to even move.
* Out-enduring: As the strength of elemental control diminishes as your opponent tires out, it stands to assume that a prolonged attack would eventually defeat him (once he no longer has the strength to defend himself). Be wary of not granting him any opportunity to escape!
* Surprise: If he doesn't know you are there, he probably isn't ready to defend himself, right? Sneaking up on him probably won't work as the elemental master has probably had the foresight to set up traps and/or alarms. A long-range projectile weapon is probably your best bet.
* Energy weapons: If he has an escape route ready and has created an impenetrable shield of air around himself, your chances against this elemental master seem pretty grim. Fortunately for you, this guy can only control matter. Unfortunately for him, that means he cannot control fire or electromagnetic radiation (though he can attempt to shield himself from them). Option 1 would be to lure him into a building and then light it on fire; if you can get the fire burning hot enough fast enough, you might be able to cook the poor guy before he can knock down a wall and flee. Option 2 would be some sort of explosive device; obviously bigger is better here and you want more energy in light/heat/radiation than in a shockwave (he can block the shockwave). Option 3 is to blast him with enough radiation to kill him.
[Answer]
The cheapest way?
Live him to death.
Assuming he doesn't make miraculous advancements in medical technology, and understand the absolutely precise mechanics to increasing his lifespan (which we're currently trying to do), you just need to hide, have a healthy life, and hope you outlast him.
[Answer]
This question is slightly different than other "I invented an ultimate enemy, now help me kill him" questions in that you set rules that include an infinite budget.
Stand just outside the 10mi range limit with a giant energy weapon, like a laser or a source of gamma rays. Irradiate him until he's dead. He can't manipulate the weapon because the body of the weapon is more than 10mi away, and the photons making up the beam are not atomic elements. Sure, he can maneuver some of the matter into the line of fire to deflect your blow, but you have an unlimited budget, and he only has about 2000 cubic miles of dirt to put in the way. The dirt can't hold up to unlimited firepower without his assistance, and if he's holding together clumps of dirt under the onslaught of petawatts of directed energy, he'll fatigue soon enough.
[Answer]
If he can physically move any element (or combination thereof) within a ten-mile radius, the character is actually indistinguishable from someone with powerful telekinetic ability (who could move any physical matter).
The question is really a function of how complete his control is. Since you edited to say that he expends strength proportional to what he is moving, you could simply send a missile at the guy. It would take a LOT of energy to flat out stop a modern missile going several times the speed of sound. Even if you have to use more than one, you said you have an unlimited budget - just keep launching them from safely outside his ten-mile radius.
As far as the cheapest way, you wouldn't want to go for a direct offensive. I would say use some form of trickery, like poisoning his food supply. But with an unlimited budget, I can't think of a reason you'd have to. More complications might be necessary to make an interesting situation.
[Answer]
My answer is that it depends on his endurance, but if that's too high, you just lose. The end. You said he's aware of anything in his control, so he is aware of any attack from 10 miles away. If he can handle it, no problem. If he knows he can't he can just bail; he's got about a million ways to do that. He can just control his own body and fly away, or just create a 10 mile hole in the ground and hang out in it.
The point is, it would be REALLY hard to develop a scenario he can't just not get hurt from. Sure hiding in a hole in the ground isn't a scenario that can hold out forever, but moving around underground would be a snap for our everything-bending friend. Typically, when people have zones of control I'd say "make an attack from just outside so he can't stop it," but if this guy can see any attack from 10 miles away and just hide almost perfectly, that's not gunna work. Plus, you can't even keep him within a certain area, because anything you attempt to contain him with, he can just think a hole into.
Poison seemed like a good idea, but if this guy can see atoms, he can probably identify poison in food/drinks. If he can't then this is the way I'd say to go. If he has any inherent human flaws too, I'd say exploit those. If he covets one particular thing, go after that thing. Force him to leave his safety. If he's arrogant, taunt him. Make him try to not just hide in his everything-bunker. But if your villain keeps a cool head and doesn't get ahead of himself, I don't see you winning this...
[Answer]
# You don't
My first thought after reading this was, how are you not already dead? As 渡し守シャロン stated in a comment, this guy is going to do you in, quickly, using your own atoms.
He will pick some element that is prevalent in your body, probably hydrogen, oxygen, or carbon, and focus in on that. He will enhance its normal vibrations, speeding it up as hard and as fast as his endurance will allow.
You will begin to feel hot. Then the pain will hit. Then you might briefly smell the aroma of yourself cooking, just before your expire. The end.
I'm sorry. You shouldn't have made an enemy of him in the first place.
[Answer]
Go nuclear.
Those atoms break down themselves (he can't stop it) to create megatons of force (he cant withstand it) and will disintegrate him at the speed of light.
Shoot 2, because well... it'd probably be the last justifiable time in history to do so might as well splurge a little.
[Answer]
Oh sure, he's the master of the elements, but is he the master of molecules?
You arrange to have FedEx deliver a package to him. The package contains a powerful bomb, which will go off when opened. Primary explosive is TNT. Detonator is sodium azide. All parts for the initiator are plastic. The elements are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sodium. In other words, nothing exotic, nothing out of the ordinary. If he is alerted by the presence of these elements he will spend all his time worrying about every animal that comes within 10 miles of him. If he won't let these elements near him he will starve to death.
Alternatively, how about nerve gas? VX, for instance only takes about 10 mg to cause death, and its elements are hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and sulphur. Again, these are all characteristic of living organisms.
Or, to keep things simple, a milligram of botulinum toxin in his food will do the trick, and that's just a standard protein, with no exotic elements. Actually, there are any number of organic toxins which will do the trick. Diphtheria toxin, for instance, will kill in concentrations of 0.1 ug/kg of body weight, so 10 ug is lethal in the bloodstream, but I'm not sure if ingestion will do the trick.
[Answer]
With unlimited budget I see four options:
1. You **nuke him from orbit**. Using lasers, nukes, antimatter. The moon.
2. You **blackmail** him. Maybe you can't defeat him in combat, but you have kidnapped his son, he won't be a threat anymore.
3. You **deceive** him. With unlimited funds you should be able to control any information source he could get access to. Trick him into doing your works.
4. Make it **someone else's problem**. Bribe everyone you see, someone will eventually discover a weakness, or he will die by the sheer number of opponents.
Bonus: Terminating humanity should defeat him, invest into some dangerous experiments: sentient AI, greygoo, black-hole generator, donald trump, you name it.
[Answer]
Well the way I see it there are a few options.
1. Orbital strike.
Specifically a kinetic weapon, since putting nuclear weapons in orbit is [banned by international treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty#Key_points). These are commonly known as "Rods from God". Since our mortal enemy can only lift metric tons of material, he wouldn't be able to stop a rod from space falling on his head with kinetic energy equivalent to a nuclear strike. However, this is a rather "scorched earth" approach to the situation. We can do better.
2. Poison.
If it's possible to deceive him, you might be able to get him close to an unstable organic explosive, and use a speaker at the explosive's resonant frequency to set it off. Or just a regular poison, if he's really not paying attention.
But this person might be quite vigilant, and determined.
If our mortal enemy is as powerful as you say he is, and if he is actively searching for you, it is only a matter of time until he finds you. The only limits to how fast he can cover ground is how long he can fly and the acceleration his body can handle.
But for the sake of argument, let's say that time isn't a factor. He has no idea that you've gone to go hide on the moon.
3. Don't use matter.
Use energy. Gamma radiation is quite deadly. X-rays are good too. The hard part is projecting that energy from outside his sphere of influence. Even these focused energies will dissipate to be non-lethal from over 10 km away with our current level of technology. And if your enemy is smart, he knows how to [counter high-energy photons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bragg%27s_law). A lattice or grid structure of atoms would diffuse it fairly well.
But we have unlimited money. So we can make radiation bombs (read: nukes) and use the same principles of physics to wear him down. We focus the radiation from the bombs precisely onto his exact location using a network of spy satellites. But he could just go underground. Dirt is pretty good at blocking radiation.
4. Leave.
Honestly, I think it'd be cooler if you just built a deep-space colony starship with 3D printing and research facilities - no expense spared, and left the solar system. He wouldn't be able to follow you with his limited stamina unless he built his own starship. If he's that determined though, you're going to need something more powerful than money to defeat him. Maybe another element-bender, if one of those exists.
[Answer]
It depends on if he knows where you are and can say, [create/purify/strain astatine](https://youtu.be/7GIDDaF26zE?t=13m30s) around you. Because then he can pretty much just create a 10-mile radiation shield around him that will sterilize everything before it makes it to him.
Unless of course, you can nuke him from orbit.
[Answer]
You will need orbital HERF guns of some kind. But they will have to be really, really, really powerful. Even then, if he/she is smart they will diffuse it with a simple faraday cage.
[Answer]
Entangle the matter around his head using dissipation, and a special type of EMF, instead of coherence. Then scramble his his atoms or even loop his time, quantum mechanically. I believe this would be impossible to stop. I coin the term "hierarchical entanglement". The great weakness of entanglement is that you could entangle the space around any entangled space, thus creating a hierarchy that would negate the child entanglement. You would need to provide a field that would not allow the matter to become entangled to beat it. I dont how that would be possible.
...or instead of scrambling his atoms, just create a small piece of spacetime, near him, change the configuration of entangled atoms so that they create a vacany (smere them along the walls of said entangled geometry?). The vacancy, even though small, would be a vacancy in spacetime, and not just the atmosphere. This vacancy would need to be filled by nothing short of the entire weight of the universe (on that empty piece of space). I imagine that would be a huge displacement energy. An inch of spacetime snapping to fill a void the size of a small dice would probably be enough to destroy most things.
[Answer]
There are a few possibilities if running and hiding are not options.
1. Distract him or blind him using energy rather than matter. In a fantasy setting (like Avatar: The Last Airbender), you might use mirrors to reflect sunlight into the Master's eye. The opposite approach would be to plunge the room he is in into darkness.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GIJsj.jpg)
2. While I am assuming you are thinking of the traditional 4 elements model (Air, Water, Earth, Fire), traditional Chinese cosmology actually had 5 elements. Use the fifth element of Wood against the Master.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EBPQY.png)
3. How closely does the universe adhere to the elemental model anyway? Once again, using Avatar: The Last Airbender as a model, being an Earthbender only seems to work with rocks and earth for most Earthbenders. Only people with highly developed special abilities can bend metal or lava, for example. If this is the case, the Avatar does not seem to manifest these special abilities when "bending", so might be vulnerable to a special "bender" using metal (Earth), lightning (Fire) or some other unusual manifestation of the "element". Blending two techniques (lightning is an attribute of Fire, but the bending is apparently a modified Waterbending technique) might also change things enough to provide an advantage.
YMMV.
]
|
[Question]
[
I'm thinking about implementing a race of flying creatures in my current setting: an earth-like planet with a breathable (enough) atmosphere. The easiest way to do this is just creating a race of bird-analogs, but I stumbled across a specific picture, and I fell in love with the idea of having strange, almost sea-creature like beings that can inhabit the air.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dCOUn.jpg)
(For anyone wondering, the art is made by Peter Ferguson, highly recommend all his other work.)
In my mind, the easiest way for these critters to keep themselves aloft would be to just "swim" through a very dense, or non-oxygen atmosphere. However, I wanted the planet to still be (somewhat) habitable for humans, and the atmosphere to still be breathable.
I'm thinking about changing the atmosphere to one in which, the higher the altitude, the more pressure there is. That said, I'm not sure how, or even if, that's possible.
Note that, only the lower altitudes (maybe up to 1-3 kilometers above sea-level) need to be breathable for humans and at a pressure comparable to Earth's at the same altitude. So, if there's any sort of gas, chemical or some physical trick that I don't know of that could let creatures similar in shape to the ones pictured stay afloat *above* these heights, but would be deadly or dangerous for humans without any safety-equipment, I would take it. The biology of the creatures themselves isn't important, so don't worry about what they might need to breath or how any corrosive substances might affect their bodies. As an estimate, I'll say their body-density is 1kg/l.
I've laid out these things so you can factor them into an answer, and so that you know what my goal is to begin with.
To summarize my question more directly:
**Is it possible for a planet's atmosphere's density to somehow scale upwards with increasing height to support these creatures?**
[Answer]
# Get rid of the planet
Rather than a planet, your story can take place on an enormous space station. The cylindrical space station is under spin to simulate gravity by centrifugal force. The people living there could always be the remnants of some apocalypse if you want a lower-tech setting.
How does this help you? The apparent gravity in a rotating cylinder scales inversely with the distance from the axis of rotation. So near the "skin" of the station, gravity can be approximately 1 g, while near the axis gravity vanishes. So your air-swimming species will have no trouble inhabiting the upper "atmosphere."
[Answer]
Not within the constraints of our physics: as we are taught in primary school, gases tend to occupy all space in their container.
This means that in an atmosphere, using a language a bit above primary school, its gases would tend to distribute in a way that minimizes the total energy, meaning that it would follow the gravitational gradient.
To have a higher density above the surface, you would need to have a localized source of gas, but that would at most be a point source. Having a uniform volume source of gas would require having some sort of portal at height, which is borderline magic.
[Answer]
Your problem is that the nature of the universe is for heavy/dense things to be at the bottom of a gravity well and light/thin things are at the top. You can violently mix that up (see Jupiter's storm and striated atmosphere), but that violence precludes habitability. So, let's peek at some options.
**Option #1** Change the creature, not the universe. E.G., have the creature exude as a byproduct of living either hydrogen or helium in ballast bladders. The creature can control how fast the bladder is emptied (how fast it's filled tends to be a function of living life, not unlike our own bladders), meaning it can drop on command but requires time to rise, which would allow for some cool creature behaviors. (You can moderate the extremes in this case by also giving them lungs that can be used to push them around, minimizing the changes to the more important light gas bladders.)
**Option #2** You find the creatures underground. The problem with increasing density with increasing altitude is that you're not only fighting against gravity, you're fighting against an open container with no restraints and infinitely increasing volume (you know... outer space...). Finding them in a large underground cavern means you have a ceiling against which you can build pressure as the gas, which wants to rise, collects against the ceiling. The complexity here is that you need gases that want to rise, which either want to be hot or want to be light. Messy... but not impossible.
**Option #3** Combine something outrageous with locality. You can only find the creatures in one area of the planet and they migrate with the cause of why that one area is important. Your planet is binary with a frozen planet or a large frozen moon. As that planet/moon circles closer to the sun, the frozen surface (conveniently made up of oxygen or water) evaporates and gets pulled into the gravity well of the parent planet where your creatures are. Where that material enters the atmosphere of the parent you have a localized phenomena where the density is higher at the point of atmospheric entry and distributes to normal as the mass is absorbed into the parent's atmospheric shell. Your creatures live within the space of that point of injection.
Then there's **Option #4**. From the movie Sahara we have the following quote from the script: *"The angel wing clam. ... Underwater they glow in the dark. Now the amazing thing is that modern science cannot explain why. ... Tell you my theory is that they do because they can."* Honestly, too many people visiting this site are looking for scientific explanations for fanciful ideas that are better presented without the explanation. Let your creatures do it because they can — and your inhabitants/colonists don't know why. Requiring every cool worldbuilding idea to conform to our current understanding of science is... well... boring.
[Answer]
## Atmospheric layer with high viscosity
An atmospheric layer of a gas with extremly high viscosity might be a possible solution. Viscosity and density of gases are not neccessarily related, so a gas that is lighter but has a higher viscosity would be able to stay in the higher atmospheric layers while still being "thicker".
If your world features a handwavium molecule that is a gas with extreme viscosity while having a (slightly) lower density than air, it could form into a layer where normal birds flying in that layer are exhausted really fast due to the added drag so they would avoid flying there. The "chicken-snake-bird" however slithers through it more easily and uses said viscosity to stay afloat paired with only minimal wings.
However this would result in your creatures only living in that layer and if they "swim" below it, they would drop out of it down to earth and their death. They could jump in the layer above like a dolphin to catch some prey and land in their layer again. So you need to develop an entire ecosystem for them to be plausible.
Also I'd advise you to still reduce their body-density to be somewhat around that of birds.
The first defect might be able to be overcome with some further creature design giving them a short period of flight in normal air before they have to return to their own layer.
[Answer]
Not possible, as others have mentioned, however, it appears your goal is to have the animals you show able to exist in the air / more exotic / more biodiverse set of animals in the air other than just "things that flap", while still having the planet habitable.
There are many options available to you in order to accomplish this.
* Take a look at how humans fly. We use jet propulsion, rotating blades, low density gasses. In spec-evo media, all of these have been explored too, some of these being visible/being used in the ocean, or even in very niche scenarios on earth as well. You can look to expand these things.
* Take a look at more "novel" flight motion in animals. Some trees seeds use rotating motion to increase their spread over the air. Spiderlings catch the wind to float to new locations, sea birds use updrafts and heat differentials to save on the energy needed to fly, lots of animals avoid flapping wings and just glide.
* Increase the density of your atmosphere.
+ An increase of density in the atmosphere means more kinds of things can fly, it becomes *more* like water. Air is 830 times less dense than water.
+ The easiest way to do this is to increase gravity. Humans can hypothetically survive 5x gravity with out passing out. An increase of gravity *should* be roughly linear with increase in atmospheric density/pressure etc... but *only* if we are just comparing earth -> earth gravity 2x. Which leads into the next point.
+ Having more atmosphere increases pressure/density at sea level. While if you doubled gravity on earth today, the density would increase 2x, if you had an *exoplanet* with doubled gravity, that might *also* mean an increase of molecules getting attracted to the planet which would *also* further increase pressure/density. So you *could* have 2x gravity + 2x the amount of mass of atmosphere as well. Note such an atmosphere might have other dangers, and it might be hard to have a *breathable* atmosphere realistically depending on the type of gasses that might persist. Lots of lighter gasses might end up staying on the planet. Additionally, there are planets like venus, where atmosphere is thick, but the planets mass is about 80% of earth. The planet is inhospitable of course, but it shows an increase in atmospheric density is possible.
+ Because density changes with elevation due to how much "stuff" is above the air column compressing the rest of it below down. Given this, deep ravines \*below sea-level) can have increased density compared to sea level. If you can double the amount of stuff above you, you can double your density.
With these mechanisms, I could see a semi realistic setting increasing air density 4x and still have the planet *habitable*, potentially with out space suits, though maybe not necessarily directly *breathable* to people. And with that, you can increase the amount of "stuff" capable of flight, and the kinds of body plans and interesting creatures who can do so.
[Answer]
You would not be able to do this at all according to fluid dynamics. Your best be for having an atmospheric ocean environment while still having humans is either having the humans be genetically engineered or otherwise modified from baseline to survive the immense pressures and gas concentrations that would be required to have such an environment or use a handwavium solution using extreme maglev effects
[Answer]
How about you just add more gas to the atmosphere?
For example, Earth has 20% O2, 80% N2 at 1 bar. Increase the nitrogen by a factor of ten. Now it's 2% O2, 98% N2, but 10 times denser. So a lungful of air still contains the same number of oxygen atoms as before (i.e. the O2 partial pressure has not changed).
The air pressure has also increased by a factor 10, but so what? You just have to equalise internal and external, like a diver.
Since the air is ten times denser, all the aerodynamic factors that vary with density (lift, drag etc.) all change enormously, making flight easy and slow.
[Answer]
Extremely tall mountains throughout the surface of the planet have strong and unusual magnetic properties. This creates electromagnetic effects at higher altitudes that let charged particles hang out at a high density near this altitude. The weather on this planet is almost always overcast. Certain portions of the planet's surface are not overcast, and in those areas there are no flying creatures.
[Answer]
I can imagine one of my favorite authors, the late great Iain Banks, might solve this problem by saying the long-vanished being or beings who designed/terraformed the planet installed a (handwavium) force-field that gently maintains an unnaturally dense layer in the atmosphere. It is assumed that they did this to provide an agreeable habitat for the bird-fish-snakes, although after a million years those creatures have evolved in ways that might not charm their original designers.
]
|
[Question]
[
I have a race of aliens whose technology roughly corresponds to humanity’s in the early 1970s. Wireless communications via microwaves have been developed, but are only available to important groups such as law enforcement; everyone else has to make do with electric telephones. They do not use fossil fuels, (because duh) and instead use water-power to generate electricity, (although some households have solar panels to use during power outages). They produce biodegradable plastics from distilled plant oils, and have a good knowledge of chemistry and a growing knowledge of physics thanks to particle accelerators. Televisions have been around for a while, and personal computers have just arrived on the scene for office work and even some household gaming, (if you can afford them). These aliens have just made their first crewed mission to another world, (albeit their rather inferior and close-orbiting moon) and are looking forward to a bright interplanetary future.
So, naturally, I want to spoil all that by having them suddenly invent artificial general intelligence, capable of learning to perform any task that these beings can; resulting in widespread unemployment and all kinds of other bad stuffs, to delay their expansion by another three decades or so.
But first, reality check here: is it possible that a race with the 1970s-level technology described above could plausibly invent such a powerful AI, given that we in the age of youtube and the humorous panda video have yet to do this?
[Answer]
I'm not going to retread the ground of the other answers, which accurately characterize how pitiful 80s computing technology truly was, and how monumental a task "true" artificial intelligence is.
However, there is a way that you can still make the premise of your story work, nearly as written.
>
> I want to spoil all that by having them suddenly invent artificial general intelligence, **capable of learning to perform any task that these beings can**; resulting in widespread unemployment and all kinds of other bad stuffs
>
>
>
If your requirement is for a computer-powered entity that puts workers out of work, you don't need to take it out of human hands. You just need to combine cybernetics (no, the [other kind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics)) with some historical projects that didn't get their fair shake OTL.
# Bureaucracies as artificial intelligences
By itself, even a general-purpose AI does not make much of an impact on anything. It needs to be embedded in a system that allows it to transform inputs into decisions and actions. Every "AI" is really a cybernetic system, with humans servicing a complex algorithm to one degree or another.
And software doesn't have to run on silicon. Any bureaucracy in the information age is different from an AI only by matter of degree:
>
> [Markets, bureaucracies, and machines are inventions designed to
> process information at speeds, in quantities, and with accuracies
> that surpass human capabilities](https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/Machines-Bureaucracies-and-Markets-as-Artificial-Intelligences.pdf). In all three systems this
> information processing is made possible by reducing reality to
> narrow inputs (e.g., bits, prices, entries on bureaucratic forms) and
> then detecting patterns and pattern conformance from these
> inputs. Recognizing this commonality, this paper treats these
> systems as members of a set of artificial intelligences and uses the
> experience with markets and bureaucracies to suggest descriptive,
> predictive, and prescriptive insights about machine intelligence.
>
>
>
But could you make an interesting enough computational bureaucracy to make this a story about AI and not a story about hedge funds?
Yes. In fact, it almost happened!
# Socialist Computer Science
In 1971, [Chilean socialists had a very cool idea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn) - using a big ol' computer to do the central management of their economy. During the system's limited time in existence, it was extremely potent:
>
> the system's telex machines helped organize the transport of resources into the city with only about 200 trucks driven by strike-breakers, lessening the potential damage caused by the 40,000 striking truck drivers.
>
>
>
All we need is a sprinkle of plausibility to make Cybersyn into an even more outlandish tool from the realm of science fiction. For that, we need to cross the Pacific to borrow from another socialist project: [Setun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun). Unlike the primitive binary computers of the decadent West, this was a ternary computer, which is 1 better. While in our timeline, this research didn't really get much traction, we have enough to propose an alternative timeline.
# The Realms of Plausibility
Alongside advanced ternary computing, your aliens have developed [management cybernetics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_cybernetics) beyond our 21st century's applications. Their version of Cybersyn was wildly successful - while no individual employee or computer within the system was too far beyond what 80s computing of our timeline could do, the system itself is configured in such a way that it is able to bring in information and issue commands orders of magnitude faster than human managers, economists, and planners.
Even to the operators themselves, this system might as well be an AGI black box. Its instructions would appear inscrutable, because no individual user can see what it sees. It would eliminate inefficiencies overnight, throwing the world into chaos as jobs vanish and entire companies and industries are made redundant.
Advanced computing throws the world into disorder and panic, just like you wanted. The power of labor and capital have now both been broken by computational logic, and it's going to take a long period of adjustment to put the world back together. It just has a bigger human element than you might have expected.
[Answer]
**Impossible**
I'm only guessing, but I suspect you were born after 1980. Let's look at some highlights from 1979 ([Source](https://www.computerhope.com/history/1979.htm)).
>
> * CompuServe became the first commercial online service offering a dial-up connection to anyone on September 24, 1979.
> * The first commercial version of SQL (Structured Query Language) was introduced in 1979 by Oracle.
> * Atari introduced a coin-operated version of Asteroids in 1979.
> * Usenet was first started in 1979.
> * Robert Williams of Michigan became the first human to be killed by a robot at the Ford Motors company on January 25, 1979. Resulting in a 10 million dollar lawsuit.
> * Bjarne Stroustrup, a Danish computer scientist, begins work on the programming language "C with classes" that will later be renamed C++.
> * By 1979, the TRS-80 offered users the largest selection of software available for a consumer microcomputer system. ***(If you have never used a TRS-80, you need to hunt down an antique and use it to really understand the overwhelming nature of this one historical fact.)***
> * The Intel 8088 was released on June 1, 1979.
> * Hayes markets its first modem that becomes the industry standard for modems.
> * The Motorola 68000, a 16/32-bit processor is released and is later chosen as the processor for the Apple Macintosh and Amiga computers.
> * IBM introduces the first disk drive to feature thin-film inductive heads and an RLL (run-length limited) coding scheme (IBM 3370).
> * IBM announces the 4300 processor, featuring multilayer ceramic packaging and 64 Kb memory chips for the densest packaging of memory and logic circuits in intermediate-sized IBM systems. ***(Compared to commercial-grade CPUs in the 2020s, what IBM did in 1979 was invent a digital version of the abacus.)***
>
>
>
First of all, you didn't clearly define what you mean by "Artificial Intelligence." That's a problem because right now "AI" is following the trend of identifying products as "green" or having the letter "X" in their names. It's being slapped on anything and everything whether or not "artificial intelligence" is involved at all. It's the latest "the world is coming to an end!" hot potato that everyone's talking about but nobody actually understands.
Ignoring fiction (and that's mandatory to answer your question), the beginnings of "artificial intelligence" stretch clear back to 1940. But you need to understand what that means. Scientists were thinking about *models* of intelligent, self-learning activity that would let them physically create it. ([Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_neural_networks))
And here it is, 2023, *and we have not reached that goal.*
We're getting there, but there isn't "artificial intelligence" on the planet yet. Programs like ChatGPT are little more than very efficient data aggregators. They "learn" from the perspective of improving the efficiency of their core goals — but they're not thinking for themselves in any sense of the concept. (I'd give my left big toe to see ChatGPT truly embarrassed by the quality of what it spits out.)
**So, what's a "powerful AI?"**
I'm going to assume you're thinking of the science-fiction version of "powerful AI" and not the real-life version of "powerful AI" like automation with feedback analysis or a ChatGPT database analyzer. If that's what we're looking for, you can't have in the 1970s what we don't have in the 2020s.
If you scale that back to, for example, automation with feedback analysis, then please note the death of the first human by a robot at Ford. You already had that kind of "artificial intelligence" in the 1970s.
I'm assuming you want the former more than the later, so I continue to assert that it's impossible.
**What are you lacking?**
1. A massive world-spanning database containing vast amounts of human knowledge. Remember, the first commercial version of SQL was introduced by Oracle in 1979. It could not do what databases do today.
2. Multi-core computational arrays operating with gigahertz clock frequencies. (In the 1970s the max clock frequency was +/- 16 Mhz and the backplane was a LOT slower than that.)
3. Dense high-volume, very fast RAM.
4. Exabytes of storage — possibly Zettabytes of storage — worldwide.
Keep in mind...
* Laserdiscs were introduced to the market in 1978.
* Seagate introduced the first hard drive for home computers in 1980. It was 5 megabytes.
* The first terrabyte hard drive didn't hit the market until 2009. ([Source](https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/memory-storage/))
5. Finally, *a world-spanning reasonably fast network* (separate from the database of #1). The Internet as you recognize it fundamentally didn't exist prior to 1983 when [TCP/IP was introduced](https://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit07/internet07_02.phtml). There was no world-spanning Internet in the 1970s. There were modem-accessed [bulletin board systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system)1 (BBS, I actually miss some of those early BBS sites), but that's like claiming you have a Ferrari when what you really have is a 2-cycle lawn mower go-kart. And that might have been a very generous comparison.
**Thanks for the walk down memory lane, but does it matter?**
Having said all that, *none of it matters!* Authors today are really stuck on the idea that things must be entirely "realistic." Baloney! Just because you can't produce the schematics for the computer that operates your AI or the software that instantiates it using 1970s tech doesn't mean you can't have it.
The idea of [machines that could intelligently take over the world](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/191709/87710) began with E.M. Forster's story "The Machine Stops" in 1909. They by no means had the technology to produce the omnipotent machine of the story (we still don't over a century later) — but the story is an absolute sci-fi *classic.*
So, after having told you that technologically it's impossible, I want you to confidently present with absolute assurance that you can succeed a magnificent vulgar hand gesture *and go write that story.*
If I wanted fiction based on realism, I'd read the biographies of politicians.
*But I do recommend that you take the time to specifically define what you mean by "artificial intelligence." Rationalizing the tech in your world would be a lot easier if we knew exactly what you wanted to achieve. And remember that there are ways to creatively solve the problem without depending on "Real Life" technologies. Go watch the Star Trek TOS episode "Spock's Brain."*
---
1 *To be fair, the [ARPANET](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET) existed in the 1970s. It connected whole dozens of computers at different locations in the U.S. using, primarily, phone-based MODEMS. In other words, it existed, but it wasn't on all the time... and dozens of sites don't make the Internet, if you know what I mean. The technology was emerging, but hardly capable of creating [Colossus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(novel)).*
[Answer]
Far-fetched. We know that general purpose AI is possible because we do it in our heads. It was a tempting thing to try on a computer, and people were trying to write self-training network-like algorithms for language and image processing in the 1950s. The recent breakthroughs have come about thanks to the speed and parallelism of GPUs, databases of many billions of images, and computers with quarter of a million cores. Once we have trained a network, it can be simulated on a single good graphics card. That is much more than anything we had in the seventies. I was working on PDP-11s in the early 1980s with clock speeds of 80 KHz and program memory in 4KByte chunks to a maximum of 64K.
Even in 2001, we could not have made HAL.
If they could make an organic neutral net, they might be able to train it to do simple things such as recognise objects the way our current AI tools do, but using the computers of their day. This would give them the processing power they need, but without the debugging tools that have lead to our current understanding. They might then assemble modules of their trained neural net to mimic how a brain works, with its various specialised processing centres, and generalised processing. People tried to do just this, but without any great success. However, it would be a lot more plausible to suggest that someone made an artificial intelligence by growing cells than by using 1970s electronics.
Perhaps your creatures could naturally have some modular brain unit equivalent to a typical 20-layer neutral net. Suppose this could be grown and replicated in the lab, and then trained; rather than the freeform, asynchronous tangle of cells we use for brains, that grows and trains at the same time.
[Answer]
**No, they cannot**, because their economy would not allow it. Water power just isn't that potent, and looking at the Earth, we have already deployed it pretty much everywhere it makes sense (and even in some places where it doesn't), *and it still produces only 15% of the world's electricity and only 6% of the world's total energy*. An alien economy operating on water power would need to fit within those much sharper limits, and would as a result be smaller and unable to afford the necessary investment (and it would also have much less need for it, again due to being smaller). I would not be surprised if their technology already had all the advances achievable without the use of fossil fuels.
[Answer]
Absolutely. Ish.
Wait, let me explain.
If you try to build an AGI on top of a general-purpose computing platform then there are a lot of interesting issues that have to be solved. What you'll end up with is something that solves a particular class of problems quite well, like processing a Large Language Model to interpret input and produce consistent outputs, as ChatGPT and other current "AI" projects do. The problem is that these systems require truly ridiculous amounts of processing and storage to do what they do in part *because* they're running on GP computing platforms.
But GP computing is far from the only option. Nor is digital computing.
Almost all AI today - from the most trivial image recognition ML to the LLMs that are all we seem to hear about these days - are based on *simulations* of neural networks on GP digital computers: complex algorithms running on massively parallel digital processors (usually banks of GPUs) to process each generation of data, consuming truly stupendous amounts of power. For the last few years there has been a rising acknowledgement that this is terribly wasteful, and that the power/compute bottleneck is a major issue... and that [analog neural network](https://semiengineering.com/developers-turn-to-analog-for-neural-nets/) hardware implementations are the future of AI development.
So can we build analog neural networks with 1970s technologies? Sure we can. They're not going to be compact, they're not going to be particularly performant due to inherent speed limits of inter-neuron communication, but it could be done. And for your aliens who have no other option, if they're building neurons for an analog neural network then of course they'll use that tech.
The problem is one of scale. Imagine we could build an analog neural network comprising a million analog neurons with all of the associated connections between all of those neurons, perfectly emulating (not simulating) the brain of a cockroach. Using modern technology the whole assembly would be larger than that Amazon warehouse. In 1970s tech the individual neurons would be much larger, and the whole thing would probably be the size of a major city. And it'd consume the entire power output of a medium-sized country.
And there's the rub. Yes it's possible, but it's far from feasible. And a machine the size of a city that consumes massive amounts of power - and produces commensurate amounts of wate heat - that *thinks it's a cockroach* just isn't particularly useful.
But perhaps we can produce an analog neural network that isn't just a model of an existing brain. Instead we could experiment with these neural networks and see how to use a tiny fraction of the neurons to focus purely on conscious processing without wasting all those neurons on moving the emulated cockroach's non-existent legs and so on.
But is it worth it to create something significantly less intelligent than a 12 year old human child?
[Answer]
There are too many "yes" and too many "no" answers being given.
The fact of the matter is that we still know very little about how to build an AGI, so we can't say whether there's an approach which would work well with relatively primitive computing technology.
The substantial advances of Hinton et al. over the last few years have not been because of some leap in computing power, but because they've worked out how to apply the matrix operations supported by graphics cards to neural network processing.
The whole thing is very likely to turn out to be a "we didn't know how to do it" rather than a "we didn't have enough computing power to do it". As such, we don't at present know "how much" will be "enough" as far as the required algorithms are concerned, which makes any definitive answer to OP's question impossible.
[Answer]
Yes, I could image that, if we would have set different priorities back then.
In the past, we went down the road of digital computing, which allowed our computers to do exact calculations. Before that we used analog computers.
But these days, we re-discover the power of analog computing as it is way faster and way more energy efficient. The main challenge with analog computing is that it hard to be precise. But this is less an issue in machine learning (on which much of AI is built), as it deals with uncertainty anyways. In fact in ML we trade precision for other qualities, like speed (see quantization).
A good place to dig deeper in the high-level interactions between analog and digital is "[Geoffrey Hinton - Two Paths to Intelligence](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGgGOccMEiY)". Hinton is a Turing-Award winner (which is the "Nobel Prize" for computer since)
Note, that some areas of AI still profit from digital computing (like linear programming) as well as quantum computing.
I could imagine a realistic past, where we didn't invest only in digital computing, but in a combination of analog, digital and quantum computing. All have their strengths on a path to a general AI.
The obvious counter-argument is that much of our AI-development came from faster hardware. A single A100 graphics card has 6912 CUDA cores and 432 Tensor Cores, each with 1000-1400 MHz Compare that to a [Cray-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1) from the 70s with 80 MHz in total! And don't get even started with memory and memory speed.
[Answer]
## Yes and No: because we actually solved GAI by 1970
All the important math, processes, and the principles needed to develop learning algorithms were all solved and well understood for making a GAI by 1970 but research into AI mostly died out by the early 90s because computers were still millions of times too weak to do anything particularly useful. So on the 1 hand, YES they can invent GAI with 1970s tech, because we did it... but on the other hand, they can't make it without at least 2010s tech because that is how advanced of hardware you need to run the software.
## So Side-Step the Problem
Because we are talking about an alien civilization here, there is no guarantee that thier tech tree has progressed at all the same as ours. While humans have become masters of linear calculations, differences in the way an alien thinks could lead them down a whole different path of computer technologies. Perhaps thier computers intrinsically work more like an organic brain. Slow to do a series of tasks, but able to aggregate trillions of datapoints in parallel. In this way thier computers will feel like our garbage 1970s computers if you want to calculate a ballistic trajectory or sequence a genome or something like that, but when it comes to using its collective knowledge to make a single decision, it can do it in split second just like a brain can.
[Answer]
It depends entirely on how wealthy and how committed they are. All the various computing concepts we have today have existed since the 1970s -- with the exception of quantum computing. The differences are just a matter of size and efficiency. The power of your cell phone today would have taken a couple of rooms worth of equipment back then.
So, as long as there isn't something which renders an electronics-based AGI impossible, then from a technical point of view, they could build pretty much anything we can build today, just bigger, slower, and more power-hungry. All of those things mean "expensive".
To put it in perspective, the lowest estimate I've seen for the computing power of a human brain is around 10 teraFLOPS. Our best supercomputers didn't hit that speed until the early 2000s. Building that kind of power with 1970s computers would probably end up being a city-sized facility, with a city worth of technicians to maintain it, and a handful of nuclear power plants to run it all. And you'll still have to figure out how to program it. And it'll be about as smart as one person. Just *maybe* without a need for sleep or recreation. So be generous and call it three people.
So the hard part for your story will be coming up with a plausible reason for *why* they would spend that kind of effort.
Or else somebody would need to have an epiphany in analog computer design. Analog computers are considerably more efficient than digital ones, but far, far harder to design and program. Digital was just easier, so that's largely the way we went. But if some savant had spotted a way to build an easy to build and use, general purpose analog computer that might get the construction requirements down to something more reasonable. But probably still wildly expensive.
[Answer]
As others have noted, scaling is the big problem. One way to overcome this is for your alien AI to be [*bootstrapped*, and take advantage of "computing overhang"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Algorithm_improvements). This doesn't require a complete "seed" AI; it can grow from ["centaur" approaches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess) to research.
The first working prototype of any technology is inevitably crude, inefficient, and barely capable. Refinements and improvements can be made later, once the system/approach is better understood and tested. In the case of AI, we've been taking these clunky initial implementations and throwing them straight at hard, commercially-useful problems like natural language translation, image classification, self-driving cars, etc. so *of course* we have to give them massive amounts of compute. They also need masses of data about the world, since there's no way to "derive from first-principles" facts about the external world, like English grammar, or what dogs look like, etc.
Your aliens could instead focus all their AI effort on *scaling their AIs*. For example, instead of making ELIZA which analyses English text, they make a [superoptimiser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superoptimization) which analyses machine-code looking for speedups; instead of automating chess strategies they [automate microchip layout strategies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_compiler); instead of [populating a database with common sense knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc), they [populate a database with theorems regarding algorithm complexity](https://complexityzoo.net/Complexity_Zoo); etc.
Despite their systems being *excruciatingly* slow, they would occasionally stumble across a significant discovery: shortening an instruction sequence to save a few microseconds; or rerouting wiring to allow more space for cache; or proving a theorem that rules-out a large part of some search space; or tweaking an experiment design to allow more measurements without loss of statistical power; etc. These improvements would compound, with each efficiency gain making it slightly more feasible that others would be reachable, ultimately leading to AGI-level capabilities from shockingly few resources.
An unfortunate by-product of this approach is that the system is *so* ultra-specialised that its one big "black box": every part is so inter-dependent on the others, and serves so many purposes, that it's impossible to identify any clear "components", let alone understand what their purpose might be. The hardware itself seems to exploit some unknown physical effects (found through [blind evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvable_hardware)), but attempts to study or harness this are hampered by the sheer inscrutability of the whole; preventing any offshoots which might help other information technologies to advance. Querying the system itself doesn't help, since it doesn't know: it was optimised for *efficiency*, not [explainability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explainable_artificial_intelligence). As the most complex object in the known universe, figuring out *why* its self-improvements work is beyond even its super-human(oid) capabilities (the same way those second-most complex objects, our brains, still don't understand themselves).
[Answer]
Yes, it is possible - if AGI is possible, which is an actual discussion in our own real world. That's too long a discussion to have here though.
If AGI is possible, then what really makes up an AGI is source code running on some computers. If they manage to come up with the source code, then there it is. Their hardware might seem jurassic compared to ours but distributed computing was already a thing in the 70's (as well as things such as artificial neuron networks).
The AGI will need a really large cluster in order to run with feasible performance - the whole setup might be as big as a building or maybe even a small city.
It will also consume a gargantuous amount of electricity per computation compared to our own world's nowadays computers, because time and technology is not just about making computers faster - it is also about making computations more efficient, including in terms of energy.
Finally, if it turns out that AGI requires quantum computing, that is not a blocker. Quantum science was already s thing much earlier than the 70's and scientists could figure a way to make qubits back then if they had the necessity and proper pressure to do so. Again, compared to nowadays capacity and tech, you will have something that will be bulkier, costlier, and which will require much more power to achieve the same computing performance of a 2020's quantum computer. But that is not technically impossible.
]
|
[Question]
[
**This question already has answers here**:
[Seasons increasing and decreasing in length in a predictable cycle?](/questions/238614/seasons-increasing-and-decreasing-in-length-in-a-predictable-cycle)
(2 answers)
Closed 10 months ago.
The community reviewed whether to reopen this question 10 months ago and left it closed:
>
> Original close reason(s) were not resolved
>
>
>
I'm in the process of writing my novel (actually I've just about finished the second draft and am due to send it to my editor).
It is a fantasy/sci-fi mix, and every four years the planet experiences a much longer and harsher winter. By longer, I mean it lasts for a couple of months longer than our average winter, nothing too crazy. However, it has been bugging me lately that, without going into story detail, I will need a 'scientific' explanation as to why this happens; I don't want to say 'it is just magic'.
Some facts about the planet:
* It is earth-like, similar in mass, size and make-up
* It lies in the habitable zone of it's star, which is of a similar size to our sun
* It has one moon, similar in size to our moon
* Most of the kingdoms on this planet are based in the northern hemisphere
I'm open to changing the above facts, such as quantity of moons or star quantity/classification if it will help with the 'science'.
I am also open to changing the regularity of the long winters. For example, if reducing them to every two years, or increasing them to every eight or sixteen years, I would be able to adapt the story to this. But I want it to be 'regular', I don't want it to be random to the point where it ends up being a carbon copy of GOT.
So I've done some research on axial tilts, eccentric orbits, or perhaps even ocean currents warming to affect seasons. But my scientific knowledge is limited, and I am looking for a basic explanation as to how a planet could have earth-like seasons, with the occasional longer and harsher winter sprinkled in.
[Answer]
Maybe the star has a four-year cycle just like our Sun has an [eleven-year cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle)?
The energy output of our Sun varies by about 0.1% during the cycle, which results in about 0.2 °C or 0.3 °F variation in average tempeatures on Earth, which is quite noticeable. Your star could have a stronger variation. Note that a variation in average temperature of 1 °C or 2 °F would have dramatic effects.
[Answer]
>
> I will need a 'scientific' explanation as to why this happens
>
>
>
This is the Fandom Effect.
**Ignore it with all your strength**, and write your story, just like George Lucas in *Star Wars*, the ST:TOS writers, Frank Herbert, Ursula K LeGuin, etc, etc all ignored the *how* and focused on the *what happens afterwards*.
When you and the characters take it for granted that winter is long every four years, the readers will too. (EDIT: this just means that readers are willing to suspend belief.)
[Answer]
**Something blocks the sun every 4 years.**
I'm actually not sure if the orbital physics would work for this, but I'm wondering if your world could get eclipsed, big time, every 4 years. Perhaps a large moon? Every 4 years you get a full eclipse, except it lasts a whole week, resulting in a "long night" and a deep chill. Or maybe your planet *is* a moon, with the eclipsing factor being the gas giant it orbits. Or perhaps there is a gas giant on an inner orbit and once every 4 years you get exactly the right overlap for a long eclipse -- even a partial eclipse that cuts light by, say, 20%, would be quite a different winter.
But, tossing orbital mechanics aside, maybe something more local happens. There's a big volcano that has been erupting like clockwork for as long as anyone can remember. Every 4 years it builds up enough and sets off, blasting enough dust into the atmosphere to create a long winter. (It doesn't need to do this regularly for thousands of years. It just needs to do it regularly for the period of time your story covers.)
Or the farmers have a long standing practice of [controlled burns](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/08/black-carbon-environmental-cost-crop-burning/), which they do every 4 years. They *all* do this during the Burning Year, which is every 4 years. Possibly no one has tied the crop burning to the long winter. Maybe they even think that the burn is meant to stop the long winter from being even worse. ("It's long winter year. Time to burn the fields. If'n we don't, it'll be way worse. The heat helps, you know.")
[Answer]
How I'd do it -- just mention it in passing that *the interplay of oceanic currents is such that you get a four-year cycle* not unlike the [North Atlantic Oscillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_oscillation), or El Nino, or any other such oscillation. Do not give any more detail than that, unless you need them for the plot.
You can get enough material on weather oscillations to concoct a believable setup for *almost* anything in the "cold winter" ballpark, as long as the anomaly is within about 5 °C average. Mind you, this allows *very harsh* winters - even a few degrees of average anomaly are a *huge* matter.
Otherwise, and more than that -- well, things get difficult to justify. You'd be looking more or less at E. E. Smith's planet Ploor. A variable star might do the trick, but that's not too different from saying that you get a periodic cold winter *because magic* (a star cycle has no reason to be tuned to the planetary year, anyway).
You could get something like that with a (not very realistic) double star system, with a large central star Alpha and a faint G or K-class star, Beta, orbiting it with a four-year period and a markedly elliptical orbit. The only planet of this latter star has stabilized in a 4:1 [resonant orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance).
In year 1, Beta is at perialpha, closest to the large star, and in "winter" the planet is between the two stars. The "winter" is actually quite warm, summer is very hot.
Year 2, Beta is at mid-distance (about 2/3rd of the way around Alpha; not 1/4 because the elliptical orbit has Beta close to Alpha only about one third of the time), the planet is between the two stars in autumn, and experiences a warm autumn and a normal winter.
Year 4, Beta is on the opposite side, mid-distance, the planet experiences a warm spring and again a normal winter.
In Year 3, Beta is at apoalpha, and in winter the planet is farthest from both stars. Autumn is cold, winter sets in early and is very cold, while spring is proportionally slow in coming.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lzyf8.png)
(The only thing is, sun distances and planetary mass *don't* really allow a stable and realistic configuration, and I don't think the 4:1 resonance is really doable -- but superficially [*waves hands quickly*] it looks plausible).
[Answer]
El Niño
Your world has an oceanic/atmospheric cycle similar to El Niño, but it affects the whole planet and makes the winter longer. It could happen reliably every four years, or be variable in duration and intensity.
[Answer]
You can go probably go an explain it with the planet orbiting a variable star, which every 4 revolutions of the planet happens to have a minimum in the energy emission, resulting in a harsher winter on the planet as a consequence.
Sort of a faster cycle of what the Sun does with Earth.
[Answer]
**Precession**
On Earth, the seasons are caused by the planet's tilt. When a country is tilted away from the sun, you get Winter. When the Earth moves to the opposite side of the planet, the tilt is the other way and you have Summer.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kLaTe.jpg)
Canadian Summer happens on the left of the image and Canadian Winter on the right.
This assumes the Earth always tilts the same way. In fact the tilt changes very slowly. This is called precession.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3jWQN.png)
Your planet precesses quickly. It completes three revolutions every four years. The precession is opposite to the orbit, i.e the planet is almost tidally locked.
(**Edit:** This is wrong. Tidal locking means something else. I mean the tilt of the planet is almost "tidally locked" where fully locked would mean the planet always tilts towards the sun.)
One precession per year would mean the same side of the planet is always tilted towards the sun. But 3/4 precessions per year just makes the Summer/Winter cycle take 4 times as long. That means there is a 1-year long period ever four years where Canada points away from the Sun.
[Answer]
You should probably read the Helliconia trilogy by Brain Aldiss.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helliconia>
The way to achieve roughly what you want is to locate your planet in a binary star system. If the planet orbits one star (A) and that star orbits a second larger star (B) at considerable distance in an elliptical orbit then it should work.
The planet would orbit Star A as Earth orbits the Sun with its axial tilt producing the seasons and with star B at some distance away. Over a much longer time frame of many years star B would get much closer and have a warming effect on the planet while it was in the proximity of star B. The planet would then move further away from star B and its seasons would become much cooler again.
Adjust the luminosity of each star and the orbital parameters like average distance and eccentricity to produce the desired climatic mix. But do not let Star A or the planet get too close to star B (they shouldn't be anywhere near the hill radius of star B).
]
|
[Question]
[
By almost pure luck the wizards/scientists of Empire A made a gigantic breakthrough that allowed them to create a weapon able to destroy the world, i.e. the one and the only planet on which Empire A and Empire B are located. They were lucky because there was only one correct path in their discovery and endless false ones and by sheer luck they managed to choose the correct one. Otherwise, exhausting even half of possible dead ends would take about a decade of intensive well-funded research.
The wizards/scientists are sure that the weapon will destroy the whole world because they know how the weapon is supposed to work (the weapon has never been activated, as it would destroy the world). The government of Empire A has no reason to distrust its wizards/scientists on that. Empire A knows that Empire B wants to completely destroy Empire A (although it's mutual, Empire A also wants to destroy Empire B), so the weapon will allow Empire A to survive even if war goes really poorly, as Empire A will threaten to activate the weapon in that event ("We don't value the existence of this world if it will exist without us").
The problem? They need to convince the Government of Empire B that they really have this doomsday weapon. Obviously Empire A can't activate the weapon to demonstrate it in action. Of course they could just give the blueprints of the weapon to wizards/scientists of Empire B, so they would confirm that the weapon really works the way Empire A claims it works. But then it would **not** take Empire B long to produce the same weapon, thus foiling the plan of Empire A on eradicating Empire B. Eventually Empire B will re-discover the way to make this weapon anyway, but it will take lots of time, giving Empire A hope of being able to eradicate Empire B before its research will be completed.
P.S. The weapon is too large, complex and delicate to be sent to another planet (it must be placed on the planet that it will destroy) or even built on the planet to be destroyed. Constructing it in space or sending it to space isn't feasible either. And it can't be downscaled, neither in its size nor effect.
P.P.S In case of wizards, they use mathematics to model work of magical artifacts and their mathematical models are top-notch.
P.P.P.S Both Empires are dicatorships. For this reason if the regime of Empire A falls (whether due to war or revolution), then it's a death sentence to its elites. They will literally die.
[Answer]
## Just wait for the right time
Empire A should fight their war with Empire B. If it goes badly enough that they want to abandon their chance at victory, *then* they should show Empire B how the weapon works.
This way, Empire A still has a chance to win, but Empire B does not.
While fighting their war, Empire A should still claim to have the weapon, but only for the demoralizing that it might have on Empire B's fighers.
[Answer]
As described after your edit this is just a doomsday device for mutual destruction.
It really doesn't matter if the other empire figures out how to make one as using it is only going to be even remotely sane if your are facing utter and complete annihilation anyway.
It is useless for conquest.
Telling them you have a doomsday weapon means they know they can figure out how to make one as they are at a similar technological level to you (or you'd relatively easily defeat them without the doomsday device). There is no practical use for this device beyond ending the conflict.
However, knowing you have such a device means it is extremely likely they will get it one day soon. They'll simply work it out or get it through espionage (there are no real secrets). As with the A-Bomb there will be scientists, engineers, politicians, and so on who believe both sides muct have this "weapon" to "ensure peace". Expect the other side to get it.
So all you really have is a device you can give them the plans for and say "look, if this war continues we're all doomed".
Unless one side becomes ruled by a crazy person in the future. Which happens.
So any peace has to be complete - a full integration of your societies in as short a time as practical. Well, that about wraps it up for your planet I guess, as that's not going to happen.
>
> Of course eventually Empire B will re-discover the way to make this weapon anyway, but it will take lots of time, giving Empire A hope on being able to eradicate Empire B before its research will be completed.
>
>
>
You said a decade - that's not long.
Actually it will make Empire B likely to use a variety of strategies, dipolmatic and military and economic, to stall until they get it (probably quicker with espionage) and unless you have the military might to force a quick end you're doomed.
When exactly do you use such a weapon ? Answer - well practically never. Empire A could reduce your empire A size by half and you *still* won't want to destroy everything else. If they leave you with just a quarter of your empire, then you still won't want to blow everything to hell. A eight ? A sixteenth ?
They'll never push you to the point you'll commit suicide to not let them win. So it's militarily a useless piece of junk !
Long before you'd use it, you'd surrender in some way.
The enemy know this.
So you have a useless doomsday weapon. Congratulations.
[Answer]
Feed the Moles
An open declaration that Empire A has the doomsday weapon is likely to be treated with scepticism as a possible bluff. Better to let Empire B find it out for itself, and think that it is doing so covertly. Given their geopolitical rivalry, presumably Empire B has networks of spies embedded in Empire A's ranks. Most likely some of them are double-agents, or have been rumbled and are being fed false information. Empire A can use these channels to allow Empire B's moles to 'discover' secret documents in which political and military figures discuss the existence of the doomsday weapon, without revealing any crucial technical specifics. Failing that (or alongside it), Empire A can simply make sure that lots of documents of this kind are produced and circulated within the government with rather lax security, on the assumption that eventually some of them will fall into the hands of Empire B's undetected agents. Hopefully Empire B will be convinced that the weapon is real: after all, Empire A's leaders might lie to the world about having it, but why would they lie to each other behind closed doors?
Of course, espionage is a double-edged sword, and its existence has real drawbacks for Empire A. It may be that Empire B's spies have already independently verified the weapon's existence (which suits Empire A). It may be that they have also stolen the secret of its construction (which does not suit Empire A at all). At any rate, they will soon be trying very hard to acquire the latter secret, and I'm inclined to agree with other posters that they will succeed. Without knowing the details of the weapon's magical construction, I can't be sure how easy it is to limit the essential knowledge to a trusted handful of individuals, but it sounds like a major scientific/industrial undertaking, in which case it probably requires too many people to eliminate the possibility of leakage. The obvious parallel is the A-Bomb, which Soviet intelligence sussed the essential workings of in a matter of months.
Still, regardless of the long-term viability of Empire A's strategy, the question asks for suggested means of convincing Empire B that the weapon exists, and that's what I've tried to provide.
[Answer]
*My Dearest Emperor B,*
*As befits the closest of eternal friends, I hope my messenger finds you and your lovely spouse in good health.*
*Thank you for your recent gift of exotic animals and slaves; they were delicious. It is my most fervent wish that you enjoy the reciprocal gift that accompanies this letter.*
*I include a humorous anecdote: My foolish and ignorant Generals and Wizards, whom I despise, have devised an infernal engine that they call a "Doomsday Weapon". When applied, this device will destroy both sides unwise enough to contest for mastery.*
*I have commanded my errant fools to prove to me that this device works as intended by destroying the Moon on Thursday the 10th. My Wizards sniveled that the device is too complex, and that the Moon lacks air for the construction job. Irrelevant -- after a few public crucifixions, the rest of the Wizards found a way, and construction is proceeding apace. Is that not what Magic is for?*
*As it is obvious that this engine is worthless for conquest, making both our nations even more unassailable, I merely mention the event so that you may command your artists to record the Moon's beauty before it is gone forever, and so that you may appropriately berate your own Astronomers, Generals, and Wizards.*
*Your eternal and magnificent friend,*
*Emperor A*
[Answer]
## Get the wizards drunk or otherwise damage their memory after they verify the weapon is functional.
Have the wizards use their magic to prove the artifact will work, and then work to damage their memory with drugs or magic or concussion or death.
Since you are threatening to destroy the world, threatening a few scientists is a minor concession. You can simply have the scientists come to the base, verify the artifact is functional, and then damage their memory.
[Answer]
## Condemned prisoners
Empire B has sent a few spies to learn the secret of Cobalt-Thorium G. Unfortunately for them, they have been caught, and await execution. Luckily for them, Empire A has had a change of heart and has allowed them a chance to pore over all of the technical schematics and interview key scientists!
Unluckily for them, they will only get a chance to answer a single Yes/No question about whether the plans work, in the presence of international observers, before their meeting with the intestinal spindle. \*(this is via a *highly* restricted choice of hand signals, to prevent any untoward outburst or covert sign)
[Answer]
**You can prove that you have a doomsday weapon by enacting the Doomsday Weapon Antiproliferation treaty with empire B**
To start, you must immediately disassemble the doomsday machine. There is no situation where the use of the weapon by any actor results in a favorable outcome for anyone.
Then send send the math that proves it is a doomsday weapon. Once the empire realizes the math is for a doomsday weapon they will have no use for it. Normally you wouldn't do this, since any research you give to the enemy is a loss, but since the weapon
>
> can't either be downscaled, neither in its size nor effect.
>
>
>
there is nothing to be gained from this knowledge aside from that a doomsday device is possible. You should also send empire B a treaty you want signed.
**DWA treaty details**
The treaty will have every nation who signs this make laws to make the construction of doomsday devices, research into doomsday device technology, and the collection of materials vital to the construction of doomsday devices illegal. The treaty will detail sanctions to those who violate the treaty, either by failing to complete inspections or amassing illegal magical materials. It also includes an agreement to invade countries that have Doomsday devices or are attempting to construct doomsday devices. Also included will be regular checks for doomsday devices by impartial observers, and observers sponsored by each member of the treaty. This will be similar to nuclear inspections in real life.
**Don't tell anyone the secret**
You only need to tell people what materials are needed to make the device, but not how. Everyone is under the same restrictions, including your empire. Just like most people know radioactive materials are needed for nukes without knowing how to make a fusion bomb, you can do the same.
[Answer]
If the common population won't admit Covid-19 exists until people start dying from it, the government of Empire B won't believe a doomsday weapon exists either.
The answer is simple. Demonstrate the weapon on another planet. If you could make this device, then you could move to the nearest planet as well. If not, you have to make a scaled down version at least to demonstrate it.
The world's governments didn't believe in the existence of nuclear bombs until Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well.
The "many dead end paths to solution, got lucky" problem that is a barrier to inventing the doomsday device sounds like an NP problem (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem>), for which a solution could be checked if it is the solution quickly but you can't solve the problem quickly. After all, how could A's inventors even tell they've got a working device themselves? In this case, let the solution check be sent to B's people, or have a few highly renowned and trustworthy people from B go to A to check the solution, but without sending the whole blueprint or the complete set of equations.
This is not a useless weapon. If war breaks out, Empire A's best possible outcome is victory, while the worst possible outcome for Empire A is a tie where A and B gets destroyed. Yes, you might think that the death of everyone on the planet is far worse than the surrender of Empire A and the death of a few Empire A elites. However, *those Empire A elites are in charge of Empire A*. If A surrenders, the elites die. If they turn on the doomsday device, the elites also die.
There is a branch possibility where Empire B believes in the doomsday device's existence but uses it to persuade Empire A's non-elite disgruntled population (those that would never have died but would come under a new overlord if Empire A loses) to rebel, where A would need to do their best to convince their population it's in their best interests not to rebel because B would rape, kill, pillage, etc.
Back to it being not a useless weapon: it's a form of one-sided mutually assured destruction. By the way, I recommend the Three Body Problem trilogy. The second book, Dark Forest Theory, has a similar scenario of MAD being used in negotiation.
B has two options: attack A swiftly with everything before the persuasion could finish and use spies or fake news to incite rebellion etc to take the doomsday device before anyone reacts, or settle down for a long peace period because starting a war is clearly a dead end with no victory in sight while using the long peace to steal the doomsday device's secrets.
On the other hand, A needs to hand the doomsday device's trigger to a seemingly insane or highly resolved emperor in order to make sure MAD is believable.
[Answer]
Empire A should announce that they have the doomsday weapon, and request a meeting. During this meeting, Empire B would send a delegation consisting of the most trusted and patriotic people, including at least one scientist/wizard who could verify the claims, given the evidence that Empire A's science division has produced.
Empire A would put all the proof inside a room or vault and invite the delegation to meet outside. B's scientist/wizard would be invited into the room to verify the claims while the rest waits outside. After B has verified the doomsday weapon exists, they would exit the room and proclaim to the delegation that the doomsday weapon is in fact real. The scientist/wizard would then be taken into custody of Empire A and kept in isolation, so they could not spill the secret, or be executed immediately depending on what Empire A is like. In any case, the scientist/wizard can not be allowed back home as they have learned the secret to the doomsday weapon.
Instead, only the delegation will return to Empire B and be able to verify that the doomsday weapon indeed exists, based on the trusted word of the scientist/wizard left behind. As these are trusted and patriotic people, Empire B will be assured that they have not been pressured to simply state that the weapon exists even if it really doesn't.
[Answer]
# Dr. Strangelove, I presume?
[Doomsday devices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_device) are not far-fetched. It is actually something that happened during the Cold War. It is still happening. At least one exists on Earth, and is fully functional right now (if Wikpedia and Vladimir Putin are to be believed).
Allow me to present: [Dead Hand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand).
During the Cold War, the Soviets built a system designed to destroy all civilization, and they deliberately set it up so that it would activate *automatically* if it detects that Russia was about to be nuked.
Apparently it is turned off most of the time, but they keep it in working order and turn it on "during times of crisis."
The *only* use for a doomsday weapon is as a deterrent. All you need is to convince the other side you have one. This is actually *made far easier* if the enemy already knows how to build the core elements (i.e. nukes, detection hardware, automatic targeting & firing).
So: if the enemy doesn't have the tech to build one, here's what you'd do. (I'll use a nuclear weapon as an example)
1. Invite envoys from the enemy to witness a weapons demonstration.
2. Detonate a small nuke. Maybe do it over a small, abandoned town, something that shows the destruction, instead of an empty field or desert.
3. Maybe afterward, you all don protective gear and go measure the radiation. Maybe you bring a parrot or a dog or some other small animal, and let them keep it afterward so they can watch it die horribly. (Yes, this is monstrous, but no less monstrous than creating a weapon that could end all life.)
4. Tell the envoy that you've built hundreds of these, bigger, and wired them up to fire at a moment's notice if they attack you.
That's it.
[Answer]
## It doesn't matter if Empire B knows how to make the weapon.
**Case I - Empire B does not have the weapon**
Options
1. Submit to Empire A
2. Die with the world and everything else by the weapon
**Case II - Empire B DOES have the weapon**
Options
1. Submit to Empire A
2. Die with the world and everything else by the weapon
Does it really matter if Empire A pushes the button or Empire B does? The choices are the same. As long as Empire A succeeds in convincing Empire B that they are serious about accepting no future where their wishes are unfulfilled, and their intention to destroy the world and everything in it if they cannot have their way, then it really doesn't matter if Empire B gets the weapon or not.
If they use it, they are dead, which is the same result as if Empire A used it. Why should Empire B go through all the work of building their own version of the weapon when they could just thumb their nose at Empire A and have them use their weapon instead? If their intention is to not submit to Empire A, everyone dies no matter what.
]
|
[Question]
[
Context is the same as [in a previous question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/168887/developed-highly-advanced-metropolis-short-on-exotic-foods).
Summing up: a rebuilt, ultra-modern city state after an apocalypse where everything's produced in underground farms, and as such, certain commodities are extremely rare, coffee and tea being two of these.
In this scenario, it's more like a post-post-apocalyptic age; that is, this particular society has returned to an approximately post-Cold War era development level. Among others, it implies the need for certain less vital nutrition sources, such as energy boosting beverages; production however is absolutely unable to keep up in capacity.
It doesn't mean people are not trying, though, so I'd imagine there are products that are not as efficient as coffee, but are still loved and widespread due to their accessibility, among other factors. (advertisement, etc.)
What other products can come into the picture? What can substitute coffee as an energy source?
It doesn't have to be caffeinated, but it has to provide energy boost; also, I can image synthesizing caffeine is not impossible.
[Answer]
Look at what people used as surrogate for coffee during war times, when coffee was a luxury good.
Just out of the top of my head I can name, pure or mixed:
* roasted barley
* roasted chicory
* roasted malt
Some of them are still sold today.
[Answer]
Synthetic caffeine was first developed during WWII precisely due to shortages in supply of naturally caffeinated products like coffee. Today, synthetic caffeine is cheaper than sourcing it naturally, and it is extremely widespread as an additive in soft drinks, energy drinks, and other caffeinated products - the US alone imports millions of kilograms of the stuff each year. With post-Cold War technology, I see no major impediment to being able to synthesize caffeine as an additive for any energy-boosting food or beverage.
It might take some doing to make "Synthetic Caffeine Beverage #7" as culturally widespread and popular as coffee, but there's not much technically that would prevent caffeinated beverages from becoming widespread even in a complete absence of coffee.
[Answer]
It's not clear exactly how arid the surrounding "wasteland" is, but in your other post you do mention "bandits and raiders", and it's probable that they'd want to get their fix, too.
In this case, might I recommend [ephedra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephedra)? Ephedra plants grow wild and abundant in all sorts of arid places, including Central Asia and the American Southwest (the latter being what gave ephedra-based drinks the nicknames "Mormon tea" or "Indian tea" - from Mormon settlers and Native Americans (respectively) brewing it for medicinal use). Needless to say, ephedra plants could thrive even in an arid wasteland.
In terms of effects, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine both have effects similar to caffeine. They're also somewhat thermogenic, so if the wasteland's particularly cold (which seems like it'd be a possibility; deserts often have cold nights for the same reason they have hot days: lack of water to absorb heat) there'd be a practical reason for even bandits/raiders to harvest it (or even outright cultivate it).
Ephedra's also a popular ornamental shrub, so if you have people living above-ground (or even below-ground but with enough light to keep a potted ephedra or two around), it could be popular (and a potted ephedra or two in a character's home could be a hint that said character might've been a former wastelander wanting a taste of home).
The city could take this further and produce something with synthetic ephedrine, possibly mixing it with synthetic caffeine as others suggested (ephedrine and caffeine happen to somewhat "boost" each other when taken together; the "ECA stack" popular with bodybuilders is quite literally ephedrine + caffeine + aspirin).
Of course, like any drug, ephedrine's got its share of side effects, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke. It's also documented to have psychological effects (paranoia, hostility, even hallucinations in rare cases), which might play into its popularity among bandits/raiders.
[Answer]
# Artificial coffee
You suggest that "synthesizing caffeine is not impossible." You are correct. This quote comes from 1977, which means the technology level is lower than your world:
>
> [...] there are two main sources for caffeine: from coffee as a
> byproduct of decaffeinated coffee manufacture and the total synthesis
> from urea and chloroacetic acid. The current use of caffeine in the
> United States is about 7 MM lb/yr, half of which is natural and half
> synthetic. ([Source](https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/FROUIE1JJYwC?hl=en))
>
>
>
So you can create the caffeine. Now what about the flavor? If you want to go down the rabbit hole on this topic, I recommend the book [Pandora's Lunchbox](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16058189-pandora-s-lunchbox). Food scientists can create just about any flavor artificially. (Somehow I miss the old [Jones Soda Thanksgiving Pack](https://www.themarysue.com/taste-test-jones-soda-thanksgiving-pack/).) If you want a natural flavor, check out [Postum](https://postum.com/). It's an old coffee alternative and you still see it in grocery stores here in Washington DC. You could easily imagine food scientists adding synthetic caffeine to either an artificial or natural flavor and ending up with something that looks and tastes just like coffee.
For the purposes of your story, you could have people buying what is basically pre-ground coffee and making it in their coffee pots. It could have the same taste, caffeine level, and social rituals.
[Answer]
You can make *[kvass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass)*, a refreshing wheat/bread/rye-based drink. Its main effective component is [lactic acid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactic_acid), which is how it differs from beer - the production process is almost the same, but kvass is made with different fermentation conditions.
Lactic acid is a great source of energy for a human. It's even better than coffee, since coffee is a drug and exhausts energy reserves while kvass replenishes them.
It still contains a small amount of alcohol - it's actually an alcohol-based energy drink. And since wheat is highly available in your setting, it can be produced en-mass.
P.S. It is very popular in Slavic countries. I personally drink it a lot, when it is hot and I am not driving.
[Answer]
Certain Amino acids work well as an energy booster, In the fitness energy drinks industry caffeine free drinks are a large segment of the market. Taurine, Citruline malate and Arginine to name a few can give a boost of energy and focus, Arginine works like nitrous for cars increasing oxygen in blood flow. Amino acid powders are usually created by fermentation of milk or offcuts from animals with the concentrated residue being dried into a powder, so their not too difficult to make and generally rely on waste products like animal bones and skin.
[Answer]
<https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/03/13/289750754/wake-up-and-smell-the-caffeine-its-a-powerful-drug>
Most caffeine used in soft drinks is synthetic in origin. This has been the case for some time. It isn't absurd to think this would continue. Flavorings (and carbonation, or none) could be added. With modern technology, they might even manage to imitate coffee (though poorly, one might imagine) directly.
Other mild stimulants are also possible. Theobromine possibly. Depends on the social mores for your culture.
[Answer]
Maybe try [Kombucha?](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kombucha) A SCOBY (starter culture) can survive as long as enough sources of carbohydrates are available. In addition, SCOBYs can be used to make [synthetic leather](https://makezine.com/2018/03/01/making-faux-leather-from-kombucha/) and can be used as a [meat-like source of protein.](https://www.kombucharesearch.com/research-articles/can-you-eat-a-scoby/)
[Answer]
Since [YellowApple's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/179396/76732) mentioned ephedra, you could go one step further: meth. Clandestine chemists can use pseudoephedrine and ephedrine, which are in ephedra, [to make meth](https://science.howstuffworks.com/meth3.htm). You probably don't need a Ph.D. in chemistry from CalTech to do so.
In Japan during WWII, meth in tablet form was widely available for workers and soldiers who needed to work during the night. So, meth had the role that Red Bull and other energy drinks have nowadays, and it is totally feasible even with a pre-Cold War level of technology.
[Answer]
If the property of coffee you want to emulate is stimulant/addictiveness (rather than taste or similar) you could consider **nicotine**, **amphetamines** or **cocaine**.
All of which are pre-cold-war, and can be synthesised in a laboratory. Nicotine doesn't have to be smoked, so you don't have to get lung cancer to use it; stop-smoking products are available as everything from patches to lozenges.
More exotic options include **Modafinil** and **Piracetam** - they're post-cold-war, but if you're going for lab-made synthetic stimulants you could use these if you want something with less 'social baggage' than nicotine, meth or coke. Or you could use a **fictional placeholder** with whatever properties make for a good story, I doubt readers will be complaining that your post-apocalyptic go pills don't have a direct real-world analogue.
[Answer]
During WW2, when all coffee was reserved for the Wehrmacht, for civilian use the Germans employed a reportedly nauseating substitute made from roasted acorns and walnuts, which was touted to be "stärkend, gesund und schmackhaft" (strengthening, healthy and tasty). Like chicory and the like, it hardly seems like an ideal swap.
That being said, if emulating the taste, aroma and caffein-content of real coffee, modern chemistry is more than capable of synthesizing caffeine as well as the various terpenes, flavonoids and other compounds that could comprise a believable substitute. However, unless this could be achieved on an economically viable scale (in a post-apocalypse), the delicious taste of coffee would likely remain some labcoat's rare, guilty pleasure.
I'm reminded of Doc's steam-driven ice-making contraption in Back to the Future 2. Iced Latte, anyone?
]
|
[Question]
[
Imagine a spaceship capable of achieving faster than light travel uses several transporters to allow crew members to move around its interior at the constant speed of light. What happens to the crew using the transporter when the spaceship goes to warp 2? BTW warp 2 means twice the speed of light in this context. Is there a clever way to work around this issue or I need to update the operation manual correcting warp 2 to move only at 20% speed of light?
[Answer]
The real answer is "whatever you want." We have no known physics for what happens past the speed of light, so you are writing your own rules.
However, if we are to use our own intuitive laws to try to write what happens faster than light, most of our laws of physics state that if every point that you care about is moving at the same pace, the laws of physics work as though they were all standing still. Thus you should expect the most natural behavior of light possible. No issues at all here.
If you wanted to work relativity in, light travels the same speed for everyone, so everyone on the ship should see light moving at the speed of light in their reference frame. (This unintuitive behavior is where effects like time dilation and space compression form).
The only thing which is "different" is that the whole contraption is traveling at fictional speeds. You write the rules here. However, if you want to draw from real physics, you can use supersonic aircraft as an excellent example.
In regions where everything is traveling at subsonic speeds, air behaves like a fluid obeying the rules of wave mechanics. Information of an event ripples outwards on these waves in a very intuitive way. Go supersonic, and the story gets more interesting. The air near the aircraft travels at subsonic speeds *with respect to the aircraft*. All the normal wave mechanics behaviors work close to the craft. The air far from the aircraft travels at subsonic speeds with respect to the ground (as you would expect). In between, there's a region a few nanometers wide where the fundamental assumptions of wave mechanics simply fall flat. The air behaves *differently* in this region. The result is a slightly more complicated version of a high pressure\* front which handles all of the odd discontinuities between these two regions. This thin layer is what forms a sonic boom. This thin layer is also responsible for consuming an astonishingly large number of CPU cycles in simulation, so if predictability is something your characters need in your FTL scenarios, that could play a major part.
You could do similar. Have light travel "at the speed of light" everywhere except in a thin shock cone around the craft, where light does something *different*. It does whatever is required to stitch together the discontinuity that is caused by traveling faster than light.
After all, light isn't a particle. It isn't a wave. It's just light, and if you blink, you'll miss it!
---
\* *In this boundary region, "pressure" gets to be tricky. We typically assume that pressure is the same in all directions. This is critical for deriving the wave behavior of sound waves. In the bow shock of a supersonic aircraft, that breaks down. "Pressure," if you call it that, becomes a directional thing. Needless to say, that complicates things rather quickly.*
[Answer]
Warp 2, eh? Well, you're clearly using a *warp* drive, like some actually functional and practical descendant of Alcubierre's ideas. Such systems don't involve the *ship* travelling faster than light at all, but only the warp in space around it. That's why at sublight speeds the occupants of a ship using a reactionless space-warping drive don't experience any relativistic effects like time dilation.
It also means in this context that beaming at lightspeed from bow to stern of your ship is exactly the same with the warp drive *on* as it is *off*.
[Answer]
If whatever FTL trick you're using affected the inside of the ship, it wouldn't be very healthy for the crew. It's not just teleportation. Imagine you are walking forward or backward in the ship. What would happen to you if you could experience the warp speed you're travelling at?
Obviously, any transport method used necessarily mustn't be felt inside the ship. Your transporters, however they are working, will do so exactly as on Earth (which isn't standing still either, btw.).
[Answer]
Try not to think about it too hard. It's not possible in this universe to go faster than the speed of light, it is irrational, so justifying how transporters will work in a rational way is also not possible.
The answers you have here that say that it would make no difference are all completely wrong in RL btw. They are based on notions that only work at slow speeds and with objects that have mass. In a universe governed by relativity, one cannot add one's speed to the speed of light -- that is, if you are travelling at 1000kmh, then the light bouncing off you isn't doing c+1000kmh, it is still only moving at c. This is partially because of the nature of photos (they don't actually 'bounce' off things but are rather absorbed and reemitted) and a misunderstanding of what the speed of light represents (clue: it's named badly, it isn't a speed limit, it's actually about the fundamental nature of reality).
If I were writing a sci-fi book (and I am) I wouldn't have anything travelling faster than light, just like Alistair Renyolds' Revelation Space. Relativistic speeds are sufficient for most purposes. You can circumnavigate the whole universe in a little over 50 subjective years if you want, without breaking the 'speed limit'.
I don't have a problem with teleportation though. That's just an engineering problem, though a moral/philosophical one too, obvs. -- you die every time you step into a transporter, like in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos.
The best way to write sci-fi is to stick to what's scientific. Otherwise it is just another boring fantasy novel. (not that you said that you're writing a sci-fi book, it's just that whenever I read about teleporters and faster-than-light travel I assume the author is aiming for sci-fi, despite being so far outside the realms of science that you may as well put elves and witches in it).
:D
[Answer]
Another approach would be to look at the current theories of "realistic" teleportation. They basically amount to the belief that it isn't viable to actually transmit matter like a Star Trek teleport, instead teleportation would work by mapping a body, killing you and then effectively printing a new copy wherever you want to be. At which point the speed you're moving doesn't matter.
]
|
[Question]
[
In the 22nd century, resource depletion is a serious problem, as most of whatever we had left has been stripped bare. A large multinational corporation, let's call them Deus X, is searching everywhere for Element X, a naturally occurring metal that they utilize in their weapons industry. Element X has been stripped bare in most of the world - except for a small sovereign nation in Eurasia. We'll call them Haven.
Execs from Deus have met with Haven leaders multiple times to get permission to extract Element X. But Havenites are essentially future hippies and love their nature and their landscapes, and they will not allow a full-scale strip mining of their land, even if it means missing out on economical benefits. Deus does not want the situation to escalate because they're an American company first and foremost, and Haven has allies with strong anti-American sentiments - could lead to a full-scale military situation.
So Deus contacts a rogue biochemist to develop a deadly bioweapon. Their plan is to release a controlled, slow-acting virus on the populace of Haven, which would incubate over a period of a couple of years, and slowly kill a large portion of the Haven population, seriously destabilizing their economy and infrastructure. At this point, Deus would very kindly offer to step in and help the nation economically. This would be their way of essentially grabbing a foothold of the nation at the political level, and then use their influence to remove any roadblocks into extracting Element X.
This is what I have so far. Is this something reasonable that an amoral, unethical corporation could do to get what they want, or is there a better, more efficient way of getting the Element X?
EDIT: The endpoint of this setting is that eventually this virus will break free of the bounds of Haven and cause a global pandemic - but for the time being, I'm just looking to see if this is a good way for Deus to get what they want or if they should explore other options.
[Answer]
Multinational corporations have been in the business of bending unwilling nations to their corporate will to allow for the extraction of resources, for a very long time now.
They have a considerable arsenal of tools at their disposal to bring even the most unwilling nation to heel.
Diplomacy and soft power: It's an American corporation, so surely the resources of the US government can be brought to bear. Element X is needed for armaments. The US defence forces will be their biggest customer.
Funding political parties and factions hostile to the current government. Fostering good relations with Haven's business community. There's more than a buck to be made, so they'll be on board.
Jobs and employment: Make promises of how good this will be for the economy of Haven. Deus X will be lying through its teeth about this. Mining operations having heavily automated in the 21st century. But this can be sold to the government, media, political dissenters, anti-green groups, and the upper classes of Haven.
Mining royalties can go to help fund a better, more laid-back, pro-hippie way of life for Haven's citizens. Another lie, but, hey!, it sounds good. Don't forget to finance economic and business studies that definitely *prove* mining element X will be good for Haven.
Plain old-fashioned corruption. Grease a few palms and you'd be surprised how helpful some people can become.
Publicity and propagation. The media loves good news stories especially when someone else is sponsoring it. Buy advertising in newspapers, online and on whatever broadcast media remains in the 22nd century.
When all else fails, persuade those nice folks in Washington, DC, that the vile, corrupt, socialist dictatorship running Haven needs to be overthrown and replaced by a more pro-American, business-friendly regime. This should be easy. Being re-elected is an expensive business, any generous donations are always needed. Really! Also, politicians in democratic countries can be bought surprisingly cheaply.
In conclusion, waging biological warfare to overthrow an unwilling government is too difficult, dangerous, and ineffective. The old-fashioned ways of fixing them work best. Besides, most multinational corporations have had a century or two under their belts in doing this. Everything they need is probably already in the corporate handbook. They just need to carry out their time-honored procedures. Shares of the stock exchange for element X will go through the proverbial roof.
[Answer]
* Obvious naming aside, this is an awful insane movie styles plan.
Honestly. The more complicated the plan is the more likely it will fail.
* Also you can't, not in a million years, cover up something as this.
It will be known within a matter of weeks and oh boy are you in trouble.
* That is also a huge huge diplomatic crisis. Imagine England finding
out that an French company was just making a virus that will kill a
few million Brits for resources. Yep.
* How to control the virus? How long will it take? How much to spend?
Can it mutate? Can Haven control it?
* Won't Haven be just a little tiny bit suspicious?
* Why is that evil company is the only company interested in that resource?
Like you just said they have the last deposits. So not only will the evil company be interested. But also every single company.
Also: EVERY SINGLE NATION!
Real answers?
Boring political maneuvering...
* A coup is always a popular choice.
Set up a military dictatorship supported by your money and you literally bought them. They can survive for a long or a short period depending on the context.
But they are a solid choice for the starting evil company.
Thought expect a lot of bad publicity especially if your dictator is inclined to the more insane and cruel stuff. But
This is just a basic simple idea. There are always an aspiring dictator and military coups are a reality.
* Another popular choice is manipulating the society.
Since you already said they are willing to wait for years they might as will do it right.
Buying political figures, buying the media, buying the elected officials, buying the scientists and syndicates, basically putting the important people on the payroll.
Then even if 70 of the population are still not convinced.
You already control the state and they will pass the laws.
* Get them to need the darn thing.
Then they will be begging you to come mine it and refine it and sell it to them.
Basically anything that does it go into the insane evil corporation plan.
[Answer]
A virus is way too risky of a weapon for a corporation to sensibly use. If that virus ends up on American shores and gets traced back to the company, the American government would shut down Deus in an instant.
A much better strategy would be to do what companies do in real life: use their immense resources of money to buy the support of powerful people. Bribery can convince some people in Haven to support their plan, and it can also convince Haven's allies to abandon it. Deus can buy enough politicians in America to push the country into war or sanctions against Haven, at which point striking a deal with the company might seem less painful than the alternatives.
[Answer]
1. Destabilize. A stable nation is harder to influence. You want some chaos (you don't need to break down society, but you wouldn't mind ethnic or political violence)
2. Influence. Start investing in media that they consume. Get ahold of the nation's eyeballs and ears.
3. Proxy. Create proxy organizations within the nation that owe you. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, so it doesn't matter if not all of them are faithful. These are "local" organizations that are not directly connected to you.
Then shake, and stir, and repeat. Your goal is to keep rolling dice until someone who is your proxy gets control of the government. Then use that proxy to get your foot in the door.
They are hippie nature lovers? Some angles of attack.
1. Back a movement unhappy with the hippie nature loving thing.
2. Back a movement that says that we should support nature *globally* even if it hurts nature *locally*.
3. Back highly divisive people within the "hippie" movement.
You now have proxies on the left and the right of the mainstream "hippie" party(ies), and you are weakening the mainstream party.
Those are all "direct"; indirect attacks are also great. Suppose there is a gun-rights organization? They'll make great proxies; you can get them to trade permitting mining rights for right to own SAMs. Because you fundamentally don't care about SAMs. Or do they want the right to create clones and copy their memories into the clones? Sure, you'll sell *anything* for the right to open mines.
Take any niche issue, and shove proxies at it, and undermine the social consensus. Have your "main" proxies be willing to compromise *anything* in exchange for letting the miners in.
Be dishonest about your plans. Get a foot in the door in an organization that isn't about strip mining to be in position for when the rest of the system falls into place.
Attacking with viruses or the like isn't going to be about "they'll welcome us to deal with the problem". You'd use it to destabilize and randomize their politics more. Discredit the ruling coalition in order to allow a rival one to take over.
[Answer]
The plan is frankly insane, but I can see a way to make it sort of plausible.
Step one. The leader of the corporation was already a sociopath, but Has slipped into both Narcissism and maybe a little paranoia. How dare those hippies deny him. He decides to play a long game, but no longer has the patience for something more sure, sane, and that would take longer.
Step 2. The leader of the corp has gotten a hold of all the data from the old 23andme service.
Step 3. Haven has to be a largely homogeneous population, perhaps like Finland or in Norther Russia up near the Bering Strait. Someplace where nobody goes because it has unpleasant weather. Some other factors to make them hard to get to would be helpful, like natural barriers. In addition, the existence of the resource in that area has to be something very recent.
Step 4. The Corporation's leader decides, after negotiation fails, to use the data from the DNA database to identify markers that are mostly unique to the people of Haven. Since nobody really likes to go there, there is not going to be a lot of the population that does not have the marker in question in that location. The DNA marker is used to be a trigger for the tailored virus. He releases the virus across a very broad area, and it kills a significant portion of the population of Haven as planned, basically leaving only recent immigrants alive (for the time being)
Step 5. Here comes the trope. In the year or two between the virus getting released and Evil corp going in for the new resource, the virus begins to mutate. Just enough to be triggered by a similar DNA Marker. Maybe something that is common across the entire world population This way, anyone who has been to Haven and left would be carrying the virus, even if they don't show any symptoms. It spreads farther and farther and starts your world wide pandemic.
Just make sure the CEO of Evil Corp gets killed by the virus, or even better, by the antidote to the virus he created and kept for himself.
[Answer]
Realistically, they would just use *money* to get what they want. If Haven doesn't want to grant a permit to Deus X, Deus X might just offer a high price for Element X and wait for some domestic Havenite mining corporation to extract the element itself and sell it to them. Or perhaps Deus X might invest in a domestic corporation, or form a joint venture with one, ensuring their access to the supply but having locals nominally in charge. If Haven won't allow ugly strip-mining, then you employ a more expensive mining method that makes less of a mess (again, using *money* to solve the problem). You also invest in corporate social responsibility initiatives, running commercials about how many trees you're planting, etc.
A few years in, the local communities in Haven will be somewhat "hooked" on the benefits of the deal: new jobs, new technology and infrastructure, export revenue, tax revenue, etc., and at that point Deus X can renegotiate for better terms. Basically, they play a long-term game and gradually shape the playing field to their advantage.
[Answer]
## Using Legal shenanigans and Hydraulic Fracturing
First off, the company wants to stay in the legal graces of both its parent country (the US) and it’s potential hosts in the EU. So the first issue to tackle is how does Deus X get the rights to the resources? Here are a couple of options.
* After World War 3, the country of Haven is created by a “radically peaceful” sect of the EU. They seem peace and harmony with the Earth (or whatever motivations you give them) but respect the prior existing land-ownership policies. Many places around the world handle Mineral Rights and Land rights as separate systems. For example, here in Texas, it’s pretty uncommon for a landowner to own the rights to the subsurface minerals. Assuming the EU has a similar policy in the year 23xx, your company Deus X simply has to purchase the mineral rights from the proper parties. This does *NOT* however grant them rights to create mines and such on the surface. More on this later.
* After the 3rd Great War, the mineral rights were entirely overlooked in the treaties that established the new country of Haven. Deus X could make a strong case that the former country(Germany or whatever) was the sole owner of the rights and thereby has the ability to sell the mineral rights to the company in an attempt to undermine(literally) the power of their neighbor.
## After obtaining the rights
Now that your corporation has exclusive mineral rights to the land, they will face intense backlash from the public. It will be *incredibly* difficult for them to find a willing landowner to buy/lease the property for their mine. This is where unconventional drilling and horizontal wells comes into play.
Haven’s hostile neighbor is all-to-willing to lease you all the well pad space that you need. Deus X simply needs to drill down into the area of their mineral rights, and begin drilling horizontally under Haven’s land. Current technology allows us to drill nearly a mile horizontally, but there’s not much of a reason your “Future Technology” can’t extend indefinitely (so long as you have the horsepower at the well pad).
Once you’ve got your big long hole, throw some perforating explosives down there to make some cracks in the rocks, and start pumping fluid and sand in the hole. The fluid gets into the new cracks and expands them significantly, the sand gets into the small secondary cracks and gets stuck, keeping the fluid passageways open. Drain the fluid, and pump it full of an advanced solvent. Maybe a biological and enzyme solvent that targets Element X, leaving the surrounding rock-structure intact. Once the now-saturated fluid is out, you extract Element X and build bombs to your hearts content.
Sorry for poor formatting, typed in a rush on mobile. Will format better later.
[Answer]
Look to Kuwait in the 1980s: they sank oil wells on their side of the border and then directionally drilled under the border of Kuwait. Do the same here, except with mining equipment.
[Answer]
Read the book *Confessions of an Economic Hitman* [A].
Basically, using your example, the process is:
1. You want `Element X`, and Eurasia has it
2. Contact leaders of Eurasia. Offer to develop infrastructure (roads, railways, seaports). You will make them a first-world country, leading the way into the 23rd century.
3. They can't afford it, but you're happy to loan them the money. Be sure to set interest at a level that they will be unable to repay.
4. Sweeten the deal; fly the leaders around the world, to sample the good life.
5. Build promised infrastructure, and be sure to make some nice roads leading to the mining areas.
6. Eurasia eventually defaults on loans, and they are to blame... defaulting on a loan is unconscionable.
7. Foreclose on investment. Possibly appeal to God about how debts must be repaid.
8. Mine Element X on your new land.
Sadly, this is true.
A. [https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins/dp/0452287081/ref=sr\_1\_2?crid=2XPM3VLSIV526&keywords=confessions+of+an+economic+hitman+by+john+perkins&qid=1572963877&sprefix=Confessions+of+an+%2Caps%2C-1&sr=8-2](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452287081)
]
|
[Question]
[
I know we generally operate—or religiously operate—on the principle that fundamental things don't change over time. It's the bedrock of geology: Uniformitarianism. I also believe/have read that it is unprovable (which may be bad for my question).
**However**, assume 14C was a more unstable isotope 7,000 years ago and decayed with $\lambda$ = 100a. There are other changes in my world as well - but for this question I want to know what our geologic table would look like if the 14C radioisotope became more stable only 7,000 years ago. In a nutshell I'm trying to hide the true age of the biosphere by making organisms look older, however *someone* has learned how to detect this.
Oh one more detail - the change was not precipitous. Over 500 years or so the $\lambda$ increased from 100a $\longrightarrow$ 5730a.
Running through a [half-life calculator](https://www.calculator.net/half-life-calculator.html?type=1&nt=&n0=4184&t=500&t12=100&x=41&y=18) a 7,500 year old sample will 14C date to 38,900 years old if this change occurred. From comments it appears the overlapping rings from BC 5k~9k will look anomalous.
Other dating methods also exist as noted:
* DNA mutation rates
* Magnetic seabed ridges
* other radioisotopes
If the evidence left behind by these comparisons could be included in an answers it would help greatly. For example, noncontinuous tree ring calibration curves can be assumed.
My only other thoughts are that *maybe* some of the $\beta ^-$ particles would be captured in nearby elements showing exotic compounds. E.g., maybe more copper or neon in zinc and sodium deposits. Would we see that or just assume it was normal?
**Purpose**
This change is "theorized" by only one special scientist, and is a prelude to something worse approaching. The greater scientific community is skeptical because his evidence is "not compelling." I am hoping answers include what evidence such a change would leave behind in the various other disciplines, while also hoping such evidence is "sloppy enough" to discredit my character's theory even though it is true. I need to use your evidence to patch the plot holes, or at least make them sloppy enough that everyone else could realistically miss this.
[Answer]
Based on your comment as to your goal, no, changing the decay rate of C14 (which would itself require a change in the fundamental nature of the universe) would not by itself have provided a false date range for the Pleistocene, because carbon dating is far from the only method used for dating. Dendrochronology has been mentioned, other radioisotope dating methods. There's ice cores which have been calibrated to tree ring and other dating methods which line up with data from varves from lake deposits, which line up with ashfall from major volcanic eruptions which line up with archeological data...
Carbon-14 ain't going to cut it as an attempted one-size-fits-all explanation.
[Answer]
Tree ring sequences extend back further than 7000 years. A tree ring sequence for an area is derived from a series of pieces of wood whose growth periods overlapped.
C14 dating has to be calibrated to account for changes in isotope ratios in the atmosphere. That can be done, for the time range in question, by measuring the carbon isotope ratio in a piece of wood whose age has been determined from tree rings.
For purposes of getting correct dates, it does not matter whether the change in radioactive decay is noticed or not. A sample with the same ratio as a piece of a tree that was felled 7,500 years ago would be dated to 7,500 years ago.
[Answer]
Anthropologists and paleontologists are never happy with a single method of estimating the age of any item.
As has been mentioned there are tree rings. This leads to a large area of study called [Dendrochronology.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology) It is not just counting tree rings. Consider finding a fragment of wood in a building site or some such. It has rings. You line up those rings with other fragments of wood, looking for patterns of width. Because trees from the region will have experienced the same weather, the growth rings will be similar size. So you can then line up fragments from many different locations, both those worked by humans and those found in other locations. This means you can build a chronological record far longer than the life of the longest living tree in the area.
As has been mentioned, there are other radioactive isotopes. There are several different isotopes that are used. Different isotopes have different half lives, and enter organisms in different methods. By comparing the results of different methods you get additional information.
There are several other methods. For example, the temperature in the area has an effect on the isotopic ratios of a variety of chemicals. Just as an example, Oxygen is mostly O-16, but O-17 and O-18 appear in trace amounts. The exact amount is affected by the temperature. People build historical records of the isotopic ratios. Then they get such things as organic remains and check the isotope ratios. This can give them some information as to when the organism was alive. It's more difficult than C-14 in some ways. The isotope ratios can be affected by a lot of things. And it's not a straightforward monotonically-decreasing-with-time thing as C-14 decay is.
Other methods are also important over the historical period and the just-before-written-history period. For example, digging through the waste dumps of a community can give you a lot of information. Along with finding fragments of wood you find all kinds of other stuff. This kind of waste only appears on top of that kind of waste, for example. That tells you that the activities that produced it came later. Perhaps the people started using a particular kind of pottery or leather or some such. Or they started getting trade goods that included ocean products that had not reached that far inland. By mapping such things carefully you can get sequences. Then you line that up with other methods, like isotopic analysis or tree rings, that can give you a year estimate.
In some cases, we can see drastic events. For example, if a city is invaded the culture is likely to change radically. That will produce a horizon in the waste dumps. Roman garbage above this layer only, Germanic style waste only below. That tells you that the Romans invaded at that layer. And you can then try to estimate the date of that invasion, and so put bounds on dates for other material in the waste pile.
There are other methods of getting ideas about chronology that are now becoming important. We are mapping genomes of many people. That can give ideas about when various people arrived at various locations. Which can in turn give estimates of the age of various other things that are produced by those people.
So far this is all based on the last few thousand years, say back about 30K or 40K. Longer term similar methods apply, just with slightly different items and emphasis and time scale. For example, part of the story on why the fossil [Lucy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus)) was estimated to be the age it was, was isotopes. The rocks above and below the fossil were dated using, if I recall, the [Argon-Argon method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon%E2%80%93argon_dating). But another method was to search out fossils of a variety of organisms in those rocks and fit them into the known history of evolution of those animals. You find this kind of tooth here and identify that as a wild boar from this age, that dates that layer of rock. This tooth over here is from an ibex from this era, and that dates this other rock. This fossil leaf in this other layer gets you this layer. This gets you fairly good information out to a few million years. A lot of work, but what are graduate students for?
For much longer periods we have a very interesting thing. There are natural nuclear reactors in [Gabon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor). They are roughly 2 billion years old. By carefully examining these formations it is concluded that, 2 billion years ago, the various physical constants involved in nuclear activity were pretty much identical to their values today. Even very small changes in any of the nuclear parameters would have resulted in these reactors either not functioning at all, or in them completely exploding.
So over age ranges of a few thousand, a few million, and 2 billion years, all the evidence we have is cross referenced and compared. And it all seems to be consistent.
[Answer]
There are dozens of different [radiometric dating methods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating) available using a range of different isotopes
If the half-life of C-14 changed 7000 years ago Carbon would give dating results which were at variance to that of all of the other methods. This would be a puzzle but would not change much in practice. There are also many other non-radiometric methods for dating which can also be used which would corroborate the non C-14 based radiometric dating such as ice core measurements, magnetic measurements across oceanic ridges and mutation change rates in DNA to name but three.
[Answer]
C-14 dates are already problematic because atmospheric C-14 levels have varied over time. While raw C-14 dates always come out in the right order they can be substantially off. In practice we calibrate C-14 dates against tree rings and ice cores, both of which give dates to the exact year for as far back as the data exists.
Nobody would realize C-14 decay rates had changed, they would just assume a change in atmospheric C-14 and look for an astrophysical explanation. A modern paleontologist would not be fooled for a second.
[Answer]
There are too many checks and balances behind dating techniques for them to go unnoticed unless ALL of your measurements are messed up. Instead of focusing on carbon dating, let's look at creating the kind of plot point you are looking for based on outcome.
>
> the ramifications are that it’s going to happen again and basic physics we are used to will all be changing. This event is a foreshadowing, but I’m trying not to fly in the face of well-established science too much. I can make the change less dramatic or less abrupt, but one person still has to “figure it out”. Ideally the change can hide in the slop of our recent history.
>
>
>
I think the the answer you are looking for is that time itself speeds up or slows down. This is much harder to trace than a single case of radioactive decay. It affects everything on Earth the same: radioactive decay, tree rings, ice cores, etc. From our perspective, this 7000 years is the same as the last 7000 years even if one technically took a lot longer to happen than the other according to outside observation.
To "see" a change in the speed of time, one must be able to observe a reference point that is moving at a different speed of time. Since all of Earth (and maybe our solar system) is effected, the only place to see this change is in space. We take certain things for granted in astrophysics that actually don't add up like how the the period of rotation on the outside of a galaxy can be the same as the inside whereas inside planets need to move faster for a solar system to work, or how we need to introduce invisible matter & energy into our calculations to make anything add up. Perhaps your physicist can mathematically prove that these things aren't lining up because the local coefficient of time itself is distorted... or better yet, maybe there really IS invisible matter and energy, and he's just the guy to prove it once and for all.
**What you need is Dark Matter!**
Ughhh... I know, I know, dark-matter is the end all handwavium of science fiction. It's often used to explain the unexplainable in outrageous and down right stupid ways, but in this case, it would actually explain your phenomenon according to accepted sciences.
Dark matter is a source of mass and gravity that we simply have no instruments for measuring. In the presence of gravity, our perception of time slows down; so, if our solar system were to periodically pass through dark matter nebulas, then our experience of time would speed up and slow down accordingly.
As long as our local time distortion stays constant, we would perceive space exactly the same no matter where we look, but if something happened 7000 years ago, then things at 7000 light years would be lensed. Because we can not see it "from the side" we can't tell that it is distorted, but maybe at 7000 light years there is some kind of slight banding in the red-shift, or maybe the apparent density of stars slightly changes, or maybe the change was too gradual to notice; so we just assume the galaxy is stretched out a little bit differently than it really is.
*Space as seen from the side:*
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7LUpK.png)
The shift is so small that instruments are barely sensitive enough to detect it. Every other metric of chronological dating tells your scientist nothing happened 7000 years ago. Other astronomers write off his findings as instrument error or a statistical anomaly. Even your scientist himself might dismiss it at first... until he starts looking into the [Planet Nine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine) controversy and realizes that a new dark-matter wave is already affecting the outer reaches of our solar system.
The best part here is that there are already competing and non-verifiable pieces of evidence that something massive is at the edge of our solar system; so, his theory could very believable enter into this stack, be scientifically sound(ish), and also be easily dismissed by other scientists in favor of "more believable" opinions which would work great with your story.
[Answer]
I'm no geologist, but it seems this would be pretty noticeable with technology similar to or more advanced than ours.
Looking at [this page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating), you could corroborate C-14 dating (t-1/2 = 5740 years) with Uranium-Thorium (t-1/2 = 80,000 years) and/or Uranium-Proactinium (t-1/2 = 32,760 years) - if not precisely, at least the rough date. The soft limit of C-14 dating is described as ~70,000 years, which overlaps reasonably well with U-Th and U-Pa
It might take a while for folks to discover this. Apparently U-Pa and U-Th are mainly used in seabed dating, as Pa and Th precipitate out of seawater. If you had a lake that was large and stable enough, you might be able get these data by dredging it, which is quite a bit more accessible than much of the undisturbed seafloor
[Answer]
It sounds like you're conflating two questions: (1) "What would the geologic record look like if 14C decay changed 7000 years ago?", and (2) "What evidence might there be that the rate had changed?"
I'll ignore the first question and focus on the second. The only way to detect this sort of change is to see it happening now, which means precision measurements over a sufficiently long period of time (or otherwise accounting for some other indirect effect). These precision measurements aren't easy, and they always have some degree of uncertainty associated with them.
An example is the question of whether radioactive decay rates are affected by neutrino flux, see <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969804317303822>. This particular article presents evidence that they aren't, but if they were, then this could be an example of an indirect effect. In other words, if you could make up some reason why neutrino flux was higher 7000 years ago, then this could be a reason for a shift in decay rates that would be very hard to measure today. And in any case, the fact that these measurements were made in 2018 tells you that there is room for small, previously unobserved effects that could be consistent with a long-term slowly-varying time-dependence.
By the way, you are right in that we operate on an assumption that the laws of physics do not change as a function of time. The laws may have some time-dependence built into them, but the laws themselves do not change. This assumption does have some supporting evidence, based on observations of galaxies millions of light-years away (which means the events we're observing occurred millions of years ago), but it's still fundamentally an assumption. However, it's one that you do not want to violate. If you did, it would be no different from saying "it's that way because God make it that way". If you go that route then you may as well throw up your hands and give up on science altogether, because science can no longer be used to predict anything. So to the degree that science works, that assumption holds.
[Answer]
There seems to be a lot of confusion and misunderstandings in the comments, so I thought a brief description of radioactive decay may be worthwhile. My goal is to explain how radioactive decay is tied to the fundamental laws of physics.
I'll start with a (very) brief description of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which represents our best current understanding of matter and forces. In the Standard Model, there are 12 fundamental particles: six quarks and six leptons. The quarks are what make up nuclear matter; in particular, the two lowest-energy (and therefore stable) quarks are called up ($u$) and down ($d$). Similarly, the two stable leptons are electrons ($e$) and electron neutrinos ($\nu\_e$). Each particle has an associated anti-particle which has opposite charge and opposite "lepton number" (for leptons) or "baryon number" (for quarks), but everything else is the same. The anti-particle of an electron is called a positron, and the anti-particle of a neutrino is imaginatively called an anti-neutrino. An interesting property of anti-particles is that, mathematically, they are equivalent to regular particles going backwards in time.
A proton is made up of $uud$ (each up quark has charge +2/3; each down quark has a charge -1/3). A neutron is made up of $udd$.
Of the four fundamental forces in the universe (electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and gravity) the Standard Model talks about the first three and ignores gravity. Gravity, by the way, is described by General Relativity, which is a non-quantum theory that is fundamentally different from any quantum field theories such as those that form the basis of the Standard Model. In the Standard Model, the three forces are mediated (or, in a sense, caused or described by) by an exchange of a particle called a (vector) boson. Each of the forces has its own set of associated vector bosons:
* The electromagnetic force has one associated boson, called a photon. Photons only interact with electrically charged particles.
* The weak force has three bosons: $W^+$, $W^-$, and $Z$. These interact with all particles.
* The strong force has eight bosons, collectively called gluons. These only interact with quarks.
So, for example, an electromagnetic interaction happens when a photon is exchanged between two charged particles. Likewise, a weak interaction happens when a W or Z is exchanged between two particles. However, Weak interactions are a bit different in that, uniquely among all forces/interactions, they can change a particle from one type to another. So if a particle emits or absorbs a W boson, it will become a different type of particle.
For radioactivity, the most important example is a process called beta decay (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_decay>), in which a down quark emits a $W^-$ boson and becomes an up quark; the $W^-$ then decays to an electron and an anti-neutrino. Equivalently, you can say the $W^-$ mediates a weak interaction between a $u$/$d$ and a $\nu\_e$/$e$. There's also a variant in which a proton becomes a neutron via $u \to d \,\nu\_e \, e^+$ mediated by a $W^+$ exchange. (The former is called $\beta^-$, and the latter $\beta^+$). The relevant Feynman diagram for $\beta^-$ decay is:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sU6vq.png)
In the most general terms, radioactive decay is governed by all three forces in the Standard Model: strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic interactions. To quote the Wikipedia page (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay>), "the combined effects of these forces produces a number of different phenomena in which energy may be released by rearrangement of particles in the nucleus, or else the change of one type of particle into others." However, for most unstable nuclei, beta decay is the most common cause of radioactivity.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hQ2f2.png)
This is what happens inside Carbon 14. Via beta decay, one of the neutrons in the nucleus becomes a proton (and therefore the carbon atom turns into a nitrogen atom), emitting an electron and anti-neutrino from the $W^-$ decay. The half-life is determined by strength of the weak force interaction, which is a function of the nucleons and their energy states. In principle, you could write down the Lagrangian and determine the half-life; in practice, this tends to be measured experimentally.
So if the half-life of carbon 14 were to change, it would mean some addition to the theory, i.e., you would have to add additional terms to the Lagrangian. This is not impossible -- there are many Beyond-the-Standard-Model theories that predict all sorts of changes, but the changes would have to be very subtle so as to have been missed all this time.
**Edit**
The process of actually calculating a half-life from first principles involves quantum field theory, which is too complex to fully explain here. However, I can explain some of the language that is used (with the perspective of someone with a particle physics background, however, rather than a nuclear physics background). Wikipedia links are included where appropriate.
In the language of [QFT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory), radioactive beta ($\beta^-$) decay is a transition from an initial state ($udd$) to a final state ($uud + e^- + \bar{\nu\_e}$). To calculate the transition rate (or half-life), we need to calculate the [transition amplitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_amplitude), which gives the probability of the transition between those two states. More specifically, we're interested in the [S-matrix element](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-matrix), which is the transition amplitude from time $t=-\infty$ to $t=+\infty$. S-matrix elements are often expressed and visualized using [Feynman diagrams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram). The transition rate can be calculated from the S-matrix element using a formula known as [Fermi's Golden Rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%27s_golden_rule).
Of course, for nuclear beta decay, the matrix element calculation isn't as simple as it is for free particles. There are complex nucleon-nucleon interactions that strongly affect the transition amplitude; these have to be modeled and accounted for in the QFT [Lagrangian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_(field_theory)). Nuclear physicists have done this with good results, but it remains an area of active research (especially for isotopes far from stability). By the way, that same Lagrangian is where you would introduce any other interactions that might affect the half-life.
]
|
[Question]
[
This question is supplementary to the following [LEGO™ as a defence against barefoot warriors](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/184560/lego-as-a-defence-against-barefoot-warriors)
One answer suggests making weapons and other artifacts by melting and moulding LEGO plastic (ABS).
Is this in fact possible using only neolithic technology?
**Concerns**
1. There are no metal containers during the neolithic
2. ABS thrown on a fire will burn before it has time to melt and form a puddle
3. I don't know if neolithic pottery could be used as containers for melting and moulding. If so, could they protect against the plastic catching alight?
---
**Notes**
>
> Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, or ABS, is an opaque thermoplastic.
> It is an amorphous polymer comprised of three monomers, acrylonitrile,
> butadiene and styrene. ABS is most commonly polymerised through the
> emulsification process or the expert art of combining multiple
> products that don’t typically combine into a single product.
> <https://www.adrecoplastics.co.uk/abs-plastic-properties-and-application/>
>
>
>
>
> Early Neolithic farming was limited to a narrow range of plants, both
> wild and domesticated, which included einkorn wheat, millet and spelt,
> and the keeping of dogs, sheep and goats. By about 6900–6400 BC, it
> included domesticated cattle and pigs, the establishment of
> permanently or seasonally inhabited settlements, and the use of
> **pottery**. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic>
>
>
>
>
> LEGO Toys On FIRE [video](https://youtu.be/mSwUNarKjnM?t=8)
>
>
>
[Answer]
### Let's try it and see!
So I didnt have any Lego bricks free, So I used abs 1.75mm filament from my 3d printer, (which is thicker than the wall of a Lego brick so actually harder to melt)
I put it on a ceramic plate on my bbq (fire and ceramic are both neolithic), and it melts down to a sticky blob. I'm able to form it with other ceramic tools (buts of broken tile I found in my backyard) but lack a mould to try to get a perfect shape.
However the stickiness makes it really easy to work with with basic hand tools, sort of like glass blowing when you use wet newspaper to shape it with your hands. just using a ceramic tile I was able to mould a plausible first attempt at an arrow head. With practice I expect I could do a lot better.
Experimental setup. A plate, a bbq, some chunks of broken roof tile, and abs plastic from my 3D printer:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jPTeE.png)
And here's as good as I was able to get it in a few minutes of my first attempt at shaping moulten plastic by hand:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/375IR.png)
I wasn't able to the get tip sharp on my first attempt, but it's sharp on the sides there.
Using a proper "Mould" may actually be harder than just shaping it using hand tools, as it is sticky and you'll need to push it into the mould with some pressure to get it fully sharp. But I'd say totally possible to melt and shape ABS plastic using only ceramic and fire.
[Answer]
### Yes
My son has a plastic curly drinking straw. I discovered the hard way that it becomes ductile at somewhere less than 100 degC when it went through the dishwasher the first time. All was not lost though - I dunked it in boiling water repeatedly to reshape it.
Ash in his answer has made the classic mistake of using an uncontrolled temperature, namely a barbecue plate. The result is significant amounts of burning instead of just melting. Liquids boil at a (relatively) well-defined temperature, so finding a suitable liquid to boil will allow your cavemen to melt the Lego without burning it. Checking Google,ABS becomes ductile at 40-80 degC, and actually melts at 190-270 degC.
So the first option is simply to use boiling water for reshaping as I did. Smiths do not melt iron and steel, they simply heat bars until they're ductile and then shape them as required. Glass blowers work in exactly the same way. There's no reason you couldn't use this to construct any ABS shape you want. It will tend to suffer from imperfect joins if you try to weld two pieces together, of course.
If you do want to actually melt it though, use animal fat. The smoke point of beef fat is around 200 degC, but if you render it to tallow then the boiling point of that is 338 degc. Plenty hot enough to melt your ABS, but not hot enough to burn it.
]
|
[Question]
[
In science fiction secret space stations typically seem to exist inside of a nebula or an asteroid. However it occurs to me that in warfare space stations hidden in nebulae would likely be discovered by enemy scouts. (Intel is key in war, and a conveniently located nebula is the obvious hiding place everyone would scout.)
So my question is if you were looking to hide a secret space station, how would you hide it? Or to be more specific, what celestial body would you hide it in/on/behind?
Edit:
In this question I am more interested in what celestial body it would be best to use to hide a space station in. You can assume soft-science teleportation style FTL if you need to in order to reach a specific celestial body, but in this case assume also soft-science detection methods to allow for the searching of vast areas of space.
The general idea is to identify what object would make for the best cover/camouflage, not to simply lose the space station in the vastness of space. (For instance dropping it light years from any solar system, hiding in the emptiness.)
[Answer]
If you believe you can hide in a nebula that you don't understand what nebula are. Space is vast. It's *trivial* to hide anything, if distance is not important. Do you know how many Oort Cloud objects we know about, compared to how many are estimated to be out there? (None known (arguably) and billions estimated to exist at 20 km wide size range, trillions at the 1 km size.) I politely suggest you modify your post, or post again with some size and emissions criteria. If your "secret space station" can be supplied only occasionally, and is black as far as emissions go (a great reason to build it inside a (metallic) asteroid), then you'll only "find" it by great luck. I can imagine a future with Hubble quality telescopes being cheap and commonly used by computer surveillance systems. In such a future, hiding anything of significant size within 10 AU of Earth would be very difficult, but at 50,000 AU? Not a problem.
[Answer]
Behind a star or planet would be a good place; not in orbit but powered to remain behind it from the perspective of some other POV. However, any kind of "behind" implies a single direction or location of viewing. I can easily stay behind the Earth's Moon from the POV of Mars, taking all those orbitals into account: At any given point in time Mars and the Earth's Moon form a line I can be on to put the Moon between me and Mars.
That breaks down if we add Venus to the mix. Generally Venus and Mars are not both on the same line as the Moon, so hiding from one may not hide me from the other. If the enemy has a lot of scouts, hiding behind the star might work, but if they are on all sides of it, even something that big wouldn't work.
A better idea would be a disguise: Disguise the space station as an asteroid (or several of them) in the asteroid belt, or Oort cloud, or as a chunk of rock orbiting a planet like a Moon. Remember in space the disguise is weightless; so it could be an actual shell of rock or asteroid ice, perhaps even manufactured from the asteroids and dust in the belt (or wherever it is hiding); glued or netted together.
An even better approach would be a station that could land on small low-gravity moons and disguise itself as a natural terrain feature.
The strategy is to become a mottled brown needle in a haystack.
[Answer]
>
> Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
>
>
>
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Adams was talking about *all* of Outer Space, but the quote is still true if you are just talking about a solar system. It is big. Really really big.
So, you have guessed that the enemy has a space station in an asteroid... somewhere in this system. Now find it. Not as easy as you might think. There is a large number of asteroids and they lie very far apart.
Let's narrow the scope a bit. You are fairly certain that the enemy is hiding an installation on/in Ceres, the largest asteroid. Now find it. Still not as easy as you might think.
If it functions as a space ship hangar, it will have a hatch you might see, but that hatch will be camouflage painted to look like the surrounding rock and will be very hard to spot from any distance at all. Even little Ceres has 2,770,000 km² of surface to search through. Good luck with that.
In short, hiding is easy if you don't do anything to attract attention, like using a radio.
[Answer]
@Amadeus answer is pretty comprehensive. I was wondering if there might be something else.
**You could hide your station by having it be one dimensional.** Or essentially so. Objects are detected by how they emit / reflect radiation or how they occlude radiation. A piece of paper is easy to see face on; on edge no. A thread is not easy to see at all.
This station would be a long, low albedo black tube; essentially one dimensional by standards of bodies in space. It is big enough in diameter for a crew person to move along the interior. Initially I pictured a ladder but if the tube were very smooth on the inside, the few personel on board could move from place to place using pressurized air and an occlusive sabot.
The tube is long but would not emit or reflect or occlude much at any particular space. You would have to run into it to detect it unless crew activities gave it away.
Ouroboros station becomes a weapon when needed: the head grasps the tail and it becomes a ring. Across the ring is stretched a mirror or reflective mirror equivalent. By changing the curvature of the mirror, the station can concentrate sunlight at any given spot on the far side of the star. If there are 2 such stations between them they can cover the solar system.
[Answer]
The main problem with hiding a space station, or any powered space-based object, is waste heat. Anything that does anything worth it (electrical generator, life support, varied machines, crew...) generates waste heat, and this waste heat, at some point, has to escape the station.
So an opponent only has to search for thermal signatures and detect objects that are hotter than they should to detect your station.
The question, then, is how to avoid this?
Basic thermodynamics prevent you from either trapping the heat with insulation (it will get out at some point, there is no way around it) or converting it to electricity (it is not heat that you can turn into electricity, but heat gradient, with heat flowing from the hot point to the cold point - so heat will still get out in the end).
The simplest solution is to bury your station in a big asteroid, moon or Kuiper object. Then you can dump your energy in the celestial body, and it is simply too big to be meaningfully heated by it, making your station undetectable.
It is not strictly a space station anymore, but depending on what it is supposed to do, this may do the trick.
However, if you actually need a free-floating space station, then the only solution is to use the Hydrogen Steamer concept - see this answer on
[Stealth in Space: How realistic is it?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23313/stealth-in-space-how-realistic-is-it/90884#90884)
There will be enormous logistical constraints.
You need to supply it with cryogenic liquid hydrogen on a regular basis, and the tankers will also have to be Hydrogen Steamers to avoid revealing your station. Their own hydrogen sources will have to be hidden, possibly aforementioned buried stations. Hydrogen Steamer endurance scales with its size, though, so a big enough station could theoretically last years or even decades on one refill.
Maintenance will also have to be done with Hydrogen Steamer service crafts, and may have to deploy a shroud around the sections to be serviced.
None of those problems are insurmountable, though, only complicated and expensive.
[Answer]
As other people have mentioned, you need to have no emissions (or nearly none) in order to stay undetected. This is because a single warm spot in a sea of cold is darned obvious. Dealing with all that excess heat is hard work, so instead of trying to be a cold needle in a cold haystack, be a hot needle in a burning haystack and sit in close orbit to a star.
This way you can dump all your excess heat outwards (along with all the heat you pick up from being so close to said star) and all your emissions will get lost in the output of the star itself. This also conveniently puts you very close to the center of the system, unlike most other people's suggestions of being far away.
Of course, dealing with that much extra heat all the time will be difficult in a hard-science universe and I do not know the science behind doing so, but in a soft-science universe, it should work fine.
[Answer]
In the past there have been ships which have been [disguised as an island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HNLMS_Abraham_Crijnssen_(1936)) to pass unnoticed
>
> HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen was a Jan van Amstel-class minesweeper of the Royal Netherlands Navy (RNN). Built during the 1930s, she was based in the Netherlands East Indies when Japan attacked at the end of 1941. Ordered to retreat to Australia, the ship was disguised as a tropical island to avoid detection, and was the last Dutch ship to escape from the region.
>
>
>
Your space ship is in space, so you can try to disguise it as an asteroid, and let it orbit somewhere until the occasion comes to proceed with its mission.
You have to take care of reducing as much as possible the EM noise produced by the ship (you know, an asteroid broadcasting *Venus got talent* is quite suspicious...).
[Answer]
Hide it in plain sight. Bury it in a comet, dwarf planet, or small moon. Honestly, would anyone think of looking inside deimos or Ceres for your station?
[Answer]
In orbit around a Jovian or Super Jovian world the strong magnetic field would hide a good deal of EM activity and the heat of such worlds would also mask a good deal of thermal leakage. If you're using reasonably secure point-to-point communications, like the classic "comms laser" then odds of detection are minimal, the question is what does such a station actually do? It's probably too far away most of the time to do you any good when it comes to defending a terrestrial world closer to the sun or any "jump zone" for inbound traffic coming to the system.
]
|
[Question]
[
**This question already has answers here**:
[Is there a way for a creature from earth to survive the vacuum of space for ten minutes?](/questions/96779/is-there-a-way-for-a-creature-from-earth-to-survive-the-vacuum-of-space-for-ten)
(6 answers)
Closed 5 years ago.
**Scene Description in my Book:** you are the squadron leader of a fighter wing in the midst of a great space battle. Your carrier ship has been destroyed and your fleet is on the retreat; they are being pursued by enemy bombers with their own fighter escort. Your squad decide to make a last stand to buy time for the fleet to get away, so they engage. The ensuing battle is fierce your fighters take out many but the enemy outnumbers you. One by one your squad HM’s (heart monitors) flat line you are the last. A blast takes out the front window and the cold grip of space fills the cockpit, you luckily put your pressurized helmet on just in time. You fight on for glory for freedom, till death takes you…
**So how long would the fighter pilot survive for if the enemy doesn’t kill him first?**
**Environment (Important)**: Battle takes place away from sun so radiation will not be too much of a problem. The pilot has a pressurized helmet with air, so the air won’t just tear his lungs apart (I think). He does not have a proper space suit just a full body Flight suit with its insulation, his suit is tightly connected to his helmet (so air decompression should not kill him).
I'm thinking that he will still be killed very quickly because space is cold very cold -270.45 Celsius, -454.81 Fahrenheit but wanted to ask anyway.
If you want me to add any more details just ask.
[Answer]
The pressurized helmet is actually just about the worst thing you could put on. He was better off without it.
Assume the helmet is pressurized to 14.7psi (atmospheric pressure at sea level. Also the pressurization level [chosen for the ISS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISS_ECLSS). [For men](https://healthyliving.azcentral.com/neck-size-relation-waist-size-14393.html), neck circumference average 19.5in which means the crossectional area of his neck is probably around 30 square inches. That means the helmet is pushing your soldier's head out of the helmet with about 450 pounds of force. If the helmet doesn't pop right off, it's going to do substantial damage to the neck muscles and spine. Also, that atmospheric pressure is going to rush into the lungs, causing substantial barotrauma. Divers know that an [air embolism can occur](https://www.merckmanuals.com/home/injuries-and-poisoning/diving-and-compressed-air-injuries/barotrauma) in just 1 meter of water, which corresponds to about 1.5psi. The 14psi of air pressure rushing into the soldier's lungs will certainly do damage.
It'd be nice to say that the helmet just provides low pressure oxygen, minimizing barotrauma. However, the [human body requires](http://aviationweek.com/bca/it-s-not-about-breathing) about 3psi of oxygen to function. Less than that, and you lose consciousness due to hypoxia. Breathing pure oxygen will help, but not enough to keep it below known barotrauma levels.
To resolve this, you could have your soldiers always wearing a space suit as a safety precaution. If the suit was similar to the [BioSuit](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/photogalleries/spacesuit-pictures/photo3.html), you would be able to get away with arguing that the suit doesn't hamper movement in any way. These suits are designed with a great deal of ingenuity to ensure they keep the body from being subjected to the worst of the effects of vacuum. (Fascinatingly, they're air permeable. The skin can actually withstand the vacuum of space without too much trouble with a little restraint. It's the gross expansion of the body that causes problems. This means BioSuits permit cooling via sweat. Instead of evaporating into the air, the water evaporates into space!)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/86Uf5.jpg)
Without a BioSuit or another properly designed space suit, your best option is actually to ditch the helmet and exhale. That minimizes barotrauma. In that case, you have about 15 seconds of consciousness. The vacuum of space in your lungs will literally rip the oxygen from your red blood cells. 15 seconds later, that deoxygenated blood reaches your brain, and you stop.
[Answer]
On the contrary he's actually more likely to die from overheating, in a vacuum he's perfectly insulated from convection and thermal conduction so the only way for him to lose heat is by the emission of infrared radiation which would be too slow to disperse the heat generated by his metabolism and normal bodily functions.
I assume his suit is pressurized (or tight) otherwise the difference in pressure between his helmet and the rest of his body is going to do something horrible to him... I think the pressurized air in his helmet would force its way into his lungs and cause them to expand, possibly rupturing one or both of them, then if the pocket of air in his chest cavity is still expanding it could cause abdominal expansion, and if there's enough air in his helmet he might even vacate his bowls through his posterior.
Assuming he's in a pressurized suit he'll probably survive a few minutes before succumbing to carbon dioxide poisoning.
[Answer]
>
> The pilot has a pressurized helmet with air, so the air won’t just tear his lungs apart (I think). He does not have a proper space suit just a full body Flight suit with its insulation, his suit is tightly connected to his helmet (so air decompression should not kill him).
>
>
>
It doesn't matter that he has a flight suit and helmet, since what's important is the air pressure *around his whole body*.
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2007/08/can_you_survive_in_space_without_a_spacesuit.html>
>
> At most, an astronaut without a suit would last about 15 seconds before losing conciousness from lack of oxygen. (That's how long it would take the body to use up the oxygen left in the blood.) Of course, on Earth, you could hold your breath for several minutes without passing out. But that's not going to help in a vacuum. In fact, attempting to hold your breath is a sure way to a quick death. **To make it for even a few seconds, Sunshine's Mace must have expelled the air from his lungs before he ventured into the starry void. If he hadn't, the vacuum would have caused that oxygen to expand and rupture his lung tissue, forcing fatal air bubbles into his blood vessels, and ultimately his heart and brain.** Scuba divers are also at risk for air embolism; they're instructed not to hold their breath as they ascend from the deep sea.
>
>
> **An astronaut who fell unconscious from lack of oxygen would last for a few minutes** more before dying from asphyxiation or the effects of the pressure reduction. Ebullism would result in the formation of bubbles in the moisture found in the eyes, mouth, and skin tissue. One NASA test subject who survived a 1965 accident in which he was exposed to near-vacuum conditions felt the saliva on his tongue begin to boil before he lost consciousness after 14 seconds.
>
>
>
[Answer]
*A blast takes out the front window...* - if you're OK with having a 'blast' in vacuum take out the front window of a combat spaceship, without vaporizing, blinding or frying the pilot (or incapacitating the ship or its controls) - then this sounds like Star Wars-style sci-fi i.e. World War II in space or rather "space". If your readers aren't bothered by all the other physically and technically implausible elements, won't they prefer a technically unrealistic but *vividly described and emotionally fulfilling* scene? So do what fits your universe and your story. If your pilot needs to survive, say his "flight suit" is designed to keep him alive in vacuum for hours (while still being light, flexible and stylish) so he can be rescued after a depressurization event. If your pilot needs to die soon, just say how cold he felt as his consciousness slipped away. Whatever.
[Answer]
first lets deal with what happens without the helmet. No temprature is not a factor there is not enough time for it to matter.
According to NASA studies using dogs and chimpanzees after about 15 seconds the body will begin to bloat as if the the entire body is swelling up after an injury (really your fluids are cold boiling), this continues until they look more like a human balloon,and quickly limits movement. they will also poop, vomit, and piss themselves due to the gas pressure in the bowels, this material has a tendency to freeze on the outside of the body. Primates survived for several minutes, regaining full function within hours if pressurized, but lost consciousness within 11 seconds.
Now what the helmet does.
**Helmet with seal and air supply**
The helmet may be more problem than advantage, if the helmet is continuing to add pressure to the body, trying to reach equilibrium, it will keep inflating the body until something gives. before then the pressure rise in the throat will cut off circulation to the brain and you will loose consciousness ins around 15-30 seconds. (it takes 10-11 seconds without the helmet) So at least you will not be conscious when you eventually pop. Of course the only way the helmet could be sealed is if it was sealed to the neck so tightly it would actually cut off circulation on its own in which cases you have strangulation and nothing to do with space.
**Normal flight helmet**
If the helmet is like a normal flight helmet however there is no good seal, so gasses will just escape around the edges giving a best a few more seconds of consciousness (~15 seconds total) as it did with [Jim LeBlanc](http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/aerospace-engineering/space-suit-design/early-spacesuit-vacuum-test-wrong/) when his suit ruptured. They will suffocate. This is actually the best option if prolonged consciousness is your goal.
[Source dogs](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19660005052.pdf)
[Source chimps](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19650027167.pdf)
[Answer]
Given your environment, I think it all depends on how many air it has in the helmet and, less important, on how fast/slow it dissipate his body heat.
Assuming, like you do and can be true, that the suit is robust enough to not explode once in the vacuum and then there is not the problem with the depressurizing, all depends on how good is the insulation of the suit is.
If is not very good, your pilot will begin to suffer hypothermia once your body temperature is lower than 32/35 °C, you are dead once is lower than 20 °C (but you will be unconscious below 20/28 °C).
On the other hand, if it is really good, your pilot can start to suffer from hyperthermia, but this not seems to be a problem in this scenario, since anyway you probably are not going to live enough time.
Personally I think that in any case your pilot will battle with hypothermia, no insulation is perfect, so he will gradually lose body heat, with a good insulation it can last for a couple of hours (perhaps).
But then you must consider the air reserve. Since it is not a pressurized suite, the only air he has was the one in the helmet, so I'd say that this will be enough for some minutes (15 max if he is very good in controlling respiration and panic) and after that he will be unconscious and them he will die from asphyxiation.
]
|
[Question]
[
Would a cavalry force mounted on giant lizards be effective against unmounted pikemen?
The lizards are roughly horse-sized, with a large reptilian head which they keep down when they run. It seems that this feature would allow the lizards to push aside the pikes with their skull while only receiving minor skin wounds, at least in cases where the pikes don't strike the nose or eyes. The lizards have enough intelligence to be trained like horses
Is this thinking correct? Have I made an error somewhere?
[Answer]
# This application of cavalry is suicidal
It doesn't matter whether you have horses, lizards, or [elephants](https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collections-war-elephants-part-i-battle-pachyderms/). [You do not charge into pike formations head-on](https://acoup.blog/2019/05/04/new-acquisitions-that-dothraki-charge/) unless you can out-range them with your own lances, concentrating the momentum from the animal's charge into the lance's head to punch through the enemy's armor...and then *pull back* before you get bogged down in the melee and slaughtered.
>
> When attacking infantry, cavalry does not want to stop: a horse is a huge target and a cavalryman – even an armored one – at a stop is a terribly vulnerable target. Since (say it with me), horses are not battering rams, that means you need space in the enemy formation to ride in and around the enemy infantry, spearing and slashing as you go (you can trample a lone infantryman, but not a dozen in a pack).
>
>
>
If your strategy is to have your mount headbutt the enemy's pikes away, *you are too close.*
Which brings us to density. Pike formations look something like this:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GwAnXl.jpg)
Pikemen are heavy infantry, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, in multiple rows. They are numerous, largely because they are cheap. By comparison, cavalry is expensive and loosely packed (since each animal needs room to maneuver). Your lizards will be far looser than horse cavalry because of the way their legs are - lizards splay out their legs when they stand, meaning that they cannot stand shoulder-to-shoulder like horses would.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/03yOEm.jpg)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RCUNzm.jpg)
Each individual lizard will be facing twice as many pikes as a horse due to the width it takes up (and the space it will need for its tail when it turns around), and will not be able to headbutt all of them away. The pikes will catch on its splayed-out legs before the head reaches the pikemen's bodies, breaking the charge.
The only application of cavalry that stands a chance at a frontal assault is to scatter the formation of pikes, either by breaking their morale with a fearsome charge, or by feinting a retreat to get them to advance (or by skirmishing with ranged weapons).
But what you should actually be doing is *flanking* them, because the best way to break a formation is to strike it from the side or rear. Cavalry can move faster than infantry can pivot, unless the pikes have formed square.
[Answer]
What you describe is how a boar charges, and it doesn't make pike ineffective against them.
Also, don't forget that while pikes can be kept raised before the impact, they can also be raised with a delay while pivoting on their back end, to work past the head on the abdomen of the creature, in which case the head can do little or nothing against them.
[Answer]
**A pike is still good to hit the rider**
A cavalry unit consists of a rider and a mount, hitting either would destroy at least a part of that unit. In real world, pikes were used to target the horse, since horses are broad in frontal projection and usually are less heavily armored than the rider. With lizards being mounts, their frontal projection is broad but not tall, and reveals the rider to be hit with the pike. So, using unmounted pikes targetting riders and not mounts is more feasible with lizards being lower profile than horses. And finally, if a knight has been lowered somehow, he had ridiculously low mobility to remain a combat capable soldier, so even if a pike hitting a knight just managed to dislodge him off the lizard, that knight is no longer a threat. And lizards could still be captured and reused by the defenders, eventually.
[Answer]
# Nope
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/d40C9.png)
[These Australian men](https://www.youtube.com/embed/vFE-ZNf42i0?start=180&end=350) killed two crocodiles using spears and hatchet. Yum yum.
Realistically your big lizards will not have hide much tougher than a crocodile. Crocodile hide is tough as balls, by the way. Your lizards will be bigger then a croc in the picture, but the pike will also be much heavier than the spear they used to kill it. So it balances out.
Your lizards still have use of course. Nude, they are more armored than a horse. Maybe half as strong as chainmail. So you might field 100 lizards for the price of 30 armored knights, since you only need to armor the rider.
If I am breaking pike formations I want a small group of metal armored knights (or metal lizards). If I am flanking and eating up the archers I want a large number of mobile unarmored lizards.
[Answer]
#### Yeah, I think the pikes would be almost useless.
Let's assume the premise. The lizard's head is indeed tough enough to divert blades with minimal injury to the animal.
A pike would do nothing against this cavalry. A pike **wall**, on the other hand, might.
The defending army would fare worse than if against a horse cavalry charge. But a wall of well-braced pikes would still cause major damage against the lizards. Hitting the rider, like @Vesper mentioned, is one such way to neutralize the animals.
#### However, you forgot to evolve your world alongside the new mount.
Unless the lizards came from another world (e.g. like the anime "Gate"), the world evolved alongside the lizards.
An army who is well aware of the lizards and has known them for centuries or even millennia, as it is common in fantasy, wouldn't use **pikes** against the lizards if they were so effective.
What weapons would be effective against the lizards? That might be its own followup Q&A on this site. Check this post by our favorite diamond:
<https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8466/353>
]
|
[Question]
[
In Alendyias, just like most places, there are diplomats. Those who hold the Class, however, have a distinct problem. You can win plenty of battles with words, but not against people who can't or won't listen. "But what about bodyguards?" Seeing as there are ways around them and monsters *exist,* it seems apparent Diplomats will have to be able to defend *themselves*, but with **what?**
**Specifications:**
To be clear, I'm looking for a weapon. This weapon should be:
* Capable of lethal *and* nonlethal attacks (emphasis on *nonlethal;* carrying especially dangerous weapons and killing with them doesn't exactly help diplomatic relations anymore than an ambassador carrying a machine gun and beating up people who offend him would. It's just not good for rep.)
* Be useful for disarming, subduing, or knocking out opponents, hopefully also blocking attacks
* Can be concealed effectively, then drawn and wielded quickly when things go south
* Would preferably be capable of holding enemies at bay (spears are ideal for this)
* Would preferably be capable of ranged or melee attacks ( so to avoid sword-in-a-bowfight situations)
**My Thoughts So Far:**
My first thought was a dagger, as they are easily concealed and can be quickly drawn, not to mention thrown at ranged attackers, but those aren't so easily turned to nonlethal attacks. Sure, you can whack someone with the flat or hilt, but how likely is that to knock someone out? Never mind disarming someone with a dagger (though that could work with a sai), or keeping people with swords or spears a safe distance away!
A staff could also work, but they're not easily concealed, except perhaps in plain sight as a cane or walking stick. While a staff's range and capacity for nonlethal attacks is impressive, however, they are relatively easy to disarm (by chopping or slicing through them), are unlikely to successfully block an attack, and a smart opponent would recognize that a 'walking stick' can be used as a weapon and act accordingly.
Tessens were used by the Japanese, but considering Alendyias is a medieval fantasy world, that means that they'd have to hold up against sword or spear strikes, not to mention arrows, in order to be viable. They also can't hold someone a safe distance away like a spear can.
**So, assuming medieval technology only (no firearms), what weapon would be best for a Diplomat, considering the above specifications? European or Asian, doesn't matter, as long as it fits the specs.**
[Answer]
Your weapon needs to do two things:
* be "harmless" enough that anyone who dares attack a diplomat will stop attacking and live, but make it abundantly clear that getting up for another attack is not the way to go.
* be deadly enough to fend off the dangerous monsters of your world. I loosely followed your questions and there are a lot of dangerous creatures among them.
The "harmless" section can relatively easily be filled with a type of mace. Nothing says "dont get up and listen to me" like a couple of broken ribs or broken leg. Yes this is potentially lethal but an acceptable risk, especially if the diplomats get extensive training in defusing dangerous opponents alive with one.
The second option is more difficult with a pure mace. Your world contains the mythical "hippopotamus", a creature you aren't going to fend off with blunt force trauma. For this reason you will need either an axe or pickaxe head as secondary on the other end of it. I like the pickaxe part as an axe would not penetrate deep enough into a hippo or something like an Engulfer.
So the solution: a short bec-de-corbin\*, which has the added advantage of a speartip to deal with charging enemies.
You might wonder "but who would allow any diplomat to wander around with such weapons inside?". Well this world has a ton of monsters, weapons will proliferate everywhere and being unarmed might leave you the odd one out. The advantage of a Bec-de-corbin is that it uses sharp tips for damaging, so it is harder to accidentally harm someone.
Since this is likely a fantasy world that has had medieval tech for centuries some additional tech could be present. Like the ability to unscrew the speartip and pickaxetip when going about their business inside a town or city, then screwing it back on when leaving. That way they can slightly fake that cane-look, which also shows trust in thar you are holding the mace at the head.
For additional protection against arrows which seems to be necessary as well: a small shield.
\*
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bec_de_corbin>
[Answer]
Canes had historically been used for self defense.
In France, there is an entire sport called [Canne de combat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canne_de_combat)
It would perfectly fit the diplomats because
* it is hidden in plain sight
* it can be both lethal and non-lethal
* it can be reinforced with steel and even equipped with hidden blades
[Answer]
### Sword as everyday wear
In most European countries, wearing a sword was limited to aristocrats, and so aristocrats all wore swords as a sign that they *were* aristocrats. A diplomat would therefore always be armed, because you wouldn't send a commoner to represent your country. And you wouldn't deprive a diplomat of his sword, because that would be a grave insult to the diplomat - and by extension, to his country.
### Knife as everyday wear
*Everyone* carried a knife, from an age where they could be trusted not to stick themselves with it too often. Poorer people had simple knives; richer people had better quality steel and ornamentation. Generally this was an everyday tool, as well as often used for eating.
This naturally meant that knife fights were a thing. The author Christopher Marlowe was killed in a knife fight in a pub. Aristocrats got fencing lessons, and all manuals have techniques using knives - generally as an offhand weapon with the sword, but they'd certainly be trained in how to use it.
This mostly died out when cutlery started to be mass-produced, and there was no need to take your own knife with you to the table. Many people still carried utility knives though, for everyday uses varying from cutting pen nibs (the origin of the word "pen-knife") to smokers cleaning out their pipes. These would be of little use against an armed and determined attacker trying to kill you, of course, but diplomats were more at risk of being captured for ransom. So they could certainly be kept concealed after surrendering, looking for an opportunity to go stabby on an unsuspecting captor.
### Sword-stick
These were moderately popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Wearing a sword was falling out of fashion, but many places were not safer than they had been before. In addition, gentlemen often affected the use of a walking stick as a personal ornament. A walking stick by itself is a decent weapon, of course - stick fighting has a long tradition all over the world. But concealing a rapier blade in the cane gives you a more obviously lethal option for self-defense, whilst not being overtly threatening.
[Answer]
Here's six for all your "diplomaty" needs. I personally like the last one the most, but go over the list and find what suits yourself.
## Not really a weapon alone but... Poisons
You seem to be worried about the fact that daggers might kill, so instead make poison do the job, it will give you much more control over the lethality. One successful strike is all you need with this method, the rest of the battle can be focused on defence (or running around and away), waiting for the poison to take effect.
If you go on for daggers replace stabby-stabby daggers by slashy-slashy knives, you'll have more control on the lethality of your attacks that way (-> you won't inadvertently pierce the chest of someone).
## Blowpipes
Speaking of poisons... Blowpipes are not too big, not too shabby and are quite known for being used with poisonous darts, either the lethal or non-lethal ones.
And maybe someone would find a way to hide it even better by making it a flute of it, too. It will surely not be as easy to use or need some preparation time done that way, so take it in mind.
## Decorative swords
A common habit in diplomaty is to show your power. And such habit comes with pretty and strong symbols, such as decorative swords.
While they would not probably be as sturdy as a real one, and you might need to repair them after every fight -making them a costly option-, you could always use that in a pinch. In ceremonies it might be very well worth the use and totally tolerated by any noble parties.
For the non-lethal part, simply use the scabard. It should be enough to push back and hurt most threats until help come along.
## Staves and canes
I guess you described already all the good staves have. Just note that you could always make them of metal instead of wood, adding that fancy look on top of sturdiness.
Regarding the fact it shows you have a weapon, why simply not? Roads are unsafe, and if you don't want a bodyguard sneezing around you like a bumblebee around a flower at all time, you need to have some means of self-protection. After all, what could bring to ash relationships more than having a diplomat's face squeezed down by the first thug? It shows a rather weak face for both parties : the lord could not protect their guest, and well, being beat up by a peasant surely hits the self-esteem...
## Slings
Slings are really easy to hide (it's very small), ammo is quite plentiful and while you could bring down someone if you're not careful enough, it shouldn't be deadly enough as long as you don't hit the head.
If you're the "almighty bling-bling for your bang" type of diplomat, or just you couldn't bring up rocks at the noblehouse somehow, then perhaps use some of the custom-shaped gold coins as ammo (regular coins might not be heavy enough to do the trick). Or perhaps potion marbles with various effects, if your world allows it, and your guy have enough money.
## COMBO ! Sling staves
Now we have staves, and we have slings... What if we brought the two words and worlds closer? You get the advantage of having a somewhat useable close-range weapon, and the range if needed. Don't expect to have the best of the two worlds as slingstaves are meant to throw things first and foremost, and any blend of slingstaves and staves will give advantage to either one of these attack types. But given the conditions you gave, it seems like a pretty optimal choice.
If by chance you fear that having one leather band tied to the staff is not very elegant for a diplomat to have, then you could hide it among ornaments or remove it until needed. More ornaments makes it more suited for courts, and with some basic lock mechanism you could always remove them to make them more combat useable.
[Answer]
I would say a diplomat's weapon should be multi-purpose; not only a deadly tool for killing, but an attractive status piece that could reflect well on their hosts. Weapons aren't completely prohibited of diplomats, and few but the most paranoid of rulers would seize each and every one of their visitors' weapons. Take this portrait of Moroccan ambassador to England ‘Abd al-Wāḥid ben Mas‘ūd from 1600. Note his very attractive sword displayed for all to see.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mE2gv.jpg)
Here's a breakdown of my ideas:
* **Rapiers**
Deadly, attractive, and lightweight. They don't hold exceptionally well against anything except another rapier, though, due to the skinny blade that can easily be cracked by a strong hit from a larger weapon, like an axe or club. Intended for gentlemanly duels and finding an unintentional nieche as a capable tool for assassins, but it cannot hold its own in prolonged combat and is unlikely to cause real damage in an emergency to anything more serious than an angry deer.
**Lethality:** As a dueling weapon, they are intended to cause only superficial injuries, not lethal ones. As a sword, however, they are just as capable of murder as any other sharpened metal. The thin blade is especially well-designed for silent assassinations and decisive hits at vital points, especially into the neck from beneath a helmet.
**Disabling:** The rapier is designed to parry. A strong enough slice with it could likely even slice through the shaft of a spear, at some considerable risk to the blade.
**Concealing:** They are not made to be concealed, they are made to be paraded about and draw attention with their immaculate design - though by trading the basket hilt for a small crossguard and possibly even a shorter blade, they could be hidden under a long coat - but they are really not designed to be concealed.
**Distancing:** Maintaining distance from your opponent is the first rule of dueling. The long blade can keep an opponent at bay and the exceptionally light weight can facilitate quick movements even while drawn.
**Range:** No. They are too light and the handle too heavy on its own. How dare you even think to toss such a magnificent design??
**Attractiveness:** That is the whole point, dear. Their large, decorated basket hilts are the epitome of elegance *and* utility. Many rapiers of the world never drew blood, and existed solely because of their supremely attractive design.
* **Axe**
Lethal, lightweight, and stealthy. A small hand-axe could be a solid choice. It can break a wood shield, chop the head off a spear, or kill someone very quickly with a well-placed blow. Especially with monsters, the extra swing force could help with thick hides or bony plates.
**Lethality:** It's actually quite hard *not* to kill someone in the case of axes, though there are some axes that have a blunt end on the opposite side of the blade, which could be used for less lethal attacks.
**Disabling:** Chopping off a few choice fingers will reduce the capability of any opponent. They're not as gifted as swords when it comes to parrying long blades, but they can hack the business end off a spear with relative ease if you're quick about it.
**Concealing:** A one-handed axe can easily be hidden away beneath a long coat.
**Distancing:** You have to be practically kissing your enemy to get any use out of an axe.
**Range:** You can throw an axe, but your accuracy has to be on point if you're using one that has the hybrid intent of crushing blows *and* deadly throws. Smaller, often square-shaped axe heads intended for throwing lose much of the weight and blade area
**Attractiveness:** Though they can be impressively decorated, the utilitarian design of the axe leaves precious little to the imagination. Without this expensive decoration, they are relatively unattractive things. Axes also tend to carry a connotation of barbarism in most courts, which could leave a poor impression.
* **Dagger**
Lightweight, attractive, and stealthy. As you had already said, though, they are intended for nothing short of quick and seamless lethality, and they are not made to parry or disarm and cannot keep enemies at bay with any ease.
**Lethality:** The intention of a dagger is to kill. Your best bet for non-lethality is to leave superficial wounds until your opponents surrender, and even then, that's a lot of blood loss. We're already asking our ambassadors to be experienced combatants and skilled diplomats - adding medical training into the equation is probably asking too much.
**Disabling:** Not facilitated by the dagger's design. Your best bet is agility here.
**Concealing:** Daggers are famously easy to conceal. You can hide them basically anywhere.
**Distancing:** Daggers are small. Not a strength of theirs.
**Range:** Not made to be thrown, actually. They're balanced for quick, stabbing blows and most would serve about as well as a rapier if thrown. Throwing knives are even smaller, lighter, and less effective in prolonged combat.
**Attractiveness:** Daggers are often extremely attractive with little effort. Even without extensive decoration, the long shiny blade is a certainly beautiful thing. Similarly to the axe, however, they carry a connotation of assassins and thieves in most places, and might leave a negative impression in some courts.
* **Khanjali**
Lethal, lightweight, attractive, and stealthy. Essentially a short sword, but intended for dagger-like use. The long, sharp blade could stab deep into the heart of a beast, and the attractive traditional designs are sure to impress. Keep in mind that this is, however, my favorite bladed weapon on the planet and in that I may be slightly biased.
**Lethality:** It is a sword, it is made to kill. Like the other long-bladed weapons mentioned, they are hard-pressed to not leave fatal wounds.
**Disabling:** It can parry, though not quite as well as a longer weapon. Disarming is not it's forte.
**Concealing:** Effective like a sword, stealthy like a dagger. A khanjali can be hidden almost anywhere, especially with a larger coat.
**Distancing:** It is a blade, and so you will have to hit them with it. They are made for stabbing as well, and not slashing, so you must get even closer.
**Range:** Like most melee weapons, they are not made to be thrown and you'd need to be exceptionally lucky to hit anyone with it.
**Attractiveness:** Absolutely. They are traditionally very beautiful things. Displaying such a fine weapon is sure to inspire equal parts respect and envy anywhere.
* **Belt/Whip Sword**
I have seen several diagrams and still I don't fully understand how these are supposed to work, but regardless, it's probably the best fit for the rules set here. An accessory, whip, and sword in one tool.
**Lethality:** As a sword, it is undeniably lethal like any other blade. As a whip, it can take off a limb in a single move, or disable an enemy with ease with its sharp edges and inherent damages of cracking a whip.
**Disabling:** You could literally whip the weapon out of their hand. Excells in this regard.
**Concealing:** Who would suspect a belt?
**Distancing:** Whips can cover quite a lot of distance. Excells in this regard.
**Range:** Can't be realistically thrown, but the whip itself covers a considerable distance.
**Attractiveness:** What an accessory! As it's mostly blade, it may not be very wise to decorate the most of it, but it still is rather stunning.
[Answer]
A hat. Especially in a setting where diplomats are expected to wear it as a part of their professional attire. Much like a [top hat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_hat), though it came later (but there is no reason it would not happen much earlier). Seemingly innocuous, you can hide something inside, but a reinforced, sharp iron-brimmed hat can be a nice unexpected weapon. And in a fantasy setting, you can master your hat to be a [deadly weapon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6UneNt1LWc) indeed - as Mr. [Oddjob](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddjob) of James Bond fame [proves](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL9kNvtdrNM).
[Answer]
I have used a lot of multi-tools in my life. It's been my experience that, the more functions you try to shove into one single object, the less effective that object is at doing anything at all. Sure, you could try to design a concealable lethal/nonlethal ranged/melee object that can block attacks...but the resulting object likely wouldn't do any of that very well.
That's my opinion. With said opinion out of the way, here's my suggestion.
You mentioned your world has monsters, but you don't mention magic. I'm going to fudge the laws of nature a bunch and introduce a new breed of snake: **the Hooded Banshee Cobra**.
The Hooded Banshee Cobra has several features that make it the ideal concealed weapon for your Alendyiasan Diplomats.
1. Snakes are not commonly known for their trainability, but the Hooded Banshee Cobra is unusually trainable. A Diplomat that spends enough time caring for their Hooded Banshee Cobra can get it to do a few key things. I'll leave it to you how far this can go, but at the very least they should understand "don't bite the Diplomat" and "please hiss now".
2. This cobra is small enough to fit into a pouch or one of those puffy sleeves featured so often in medieval fashion. It is content to ride around like that all day so long as it's treated well and kept at a pleasant temperature. I conducted a brief search of the internet and found a bunch of conflicting information about snake sizes. Depending on who you listen to, cobras can range from 4 feet to 10 feet long, with some debate on whether or not King Cobras count as True Cobras. I have no opinion on this. Anyway, I think an 8 foot cobra would be enough cobra to get and hold an enemy's attention.
3. Some snakes can growl, others hiss. Pine snakes apparently have a vocal cord and can shriek. The Hooded Banshee Cobra can shriek.
4. Hooded Banshee Cobras spit venom that can cause temporary paralysis. Wikipedia says that some species of spitting cobra can spit up to 6+ feet. National Geographic says that spitting cobras aim for eyes, and that they all have pretty good aim.
5. The Hooded Banshee Cobra has a large, flashy, distinctive hood. A Diplomat holding an angry Cobra wouldn't be completely obscured by the hood, but an enemy archer would find it challenging to focus on the Diplomat. I'd give this a pitiful partial concealment effect vs ranged attacks from the front. Probably wouldn't do much at all, but I suppose a desperate Diplomat could give it a try.
You end up with a concealed, trained cobra that has a 6' range paralysis attack, a biting attack, and is distracting as can possibly be. Sure, "distracting" isn't the same as "can block attacks", but I think I'm already stretching plausibility enough as it is.
Finally, smart Diplomats back this up with a dagger in their boot. When this ridiculous plan goes wrong, at least they've got an 8 foot long shrieking distraction... and a dagger.
One could argue that a live cobra doesn't count as a "wieldable weapon". I'll acknowledge that this response is stretching quite a bit.
Yes, I have read the Adventures of Pip and Flinx. If this answer gets any points at all, I would like to state that at least half of said points should rightfully go to Alan Dean Foster (if he's on StackExchange).
[Answer]
I think they had this technology by medieval times...
Telescoping or collapsible staff/spear.
I saw mentioned throwing knives as an option, shuriken are also easily hidden and effective as medium range throwing options. Combined with a slingshot or other launching device like an atlatl can gain much more distance, and the sling/launcher can be easily hidden or even woven into clothing.
[Answer]
I would suggest looking into concealed weapons and weapons that can be easily disguised. If the magic system allows it magic would be a nice choice for Diplomats.
Concealed weapons may include:
* small blades (knives and daggers; can also be hidden in shoes);
* needles (may or may not require blowguns; it is a popular choice for Poison Masters and assassins in eastern fantasy);
* small concealed crossbows (usually placed on arms, can be concealed by sleeves);
* [knuckles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_knuckles);
* [urumi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urumi) (flexible swords; require mastery for proper use);
* small throwing weapons (darts, daggers, spikes, shurikens, etc.);
* threads (metal, for example) and/or ropes (the goal is strangulation; requires high mastery for proper use);
* sand, powder, etc. (anything that can be thrown into an enemy's face or suspended in the air, may have properties of poison; these substances are used to confuse, obstruct vision, and slow down).
All concealed weapons can have a 'poisoned' option to increase their damage.
Disguised weapons may include:
* tessens (tessens are great, they are basically small clubs);
* swords (can be disguised as canes, umbrellas, or ceremonial equipment);
* sheaths or scabbards (these are not really disguised weapons, but they can be reinforced and used as blunt weapons);
* accessories (hairpins, hair ornaments, decorative elements of outfits, and alike; these are usually small cutting, piercing, or throwing weapons, in fantasy they are common for women and assassins);
* [spurs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spur) (may need some design adjustments to increase damage);
* cloaks can be used as shields or to confuse the enemy;
* belts with buckles can make a somewhat passable close-range weapon in skilled hands;
* decorative cords and similar objects (basically ropes; can be used to whip, strike, and garrote; the proper technique is required).
Diplomats can also be skilled at using improvised weapons: Chairs, household items, random sticks, and so on. The class might need some buff or mastery to increase proficiency and damage with these weapons to avoid balance issues.
In addition to weapons, I would suggest thinking about using words to apply states to enemies and allies. For example, a Diplomat may confuse enemies, slow them down, turn them into allies (temporarily or permanently), buff allies and raise their morale, etc. Diplomat can be a useful support class with this type of ability.
Diplomats should also be able to detect the weaknesses of their opponents. If the balance is an issue and similar ability exists for other classes, Diplomat's ability can be limited to mental states (for example, increased probability of states like confusion, fear, charm) while combat-oriented classes focus on physical conditions (bleeding, slow down, etc.).
[Answer]
## The best "weapon" is lots and lots of training.
**... and probably a dagger + hand-to-hand combat.**
Your requirements don't lend themselves well to a single "best"; they all have very different "best" weapons.
The best weapon for lethal attacks tends to be something very sharp or capable of firing deadly projectiles at high speed. Just point the scary bit toward the enemy and there you go. You do want some training at least, but it typically doesn't require too much training to use reasonably well (although you'll still get outmatched by someone who's well-trained). Sharp things and deadly projectiles is obviously not good for nonlethal attacks.
As soon as you start talking about nonlethal attacks, disarming, subduing or knocking out opponents or blocking attacks, you start needing a whole lot of training to do that particularly effectively, especially against armed or trained opponents. When you do have all that training, you'd be able to fairly effectively do basically all those things with just your hands.
If lots and lots of training is not a viable option, then I would strongly suggest just forgetting about the nonlethal option. I wouldn't consider that to be particularly viable without sufficient training.
## But why pick a deadly weapon? Why not some hybrid?
You do mention wanting to *mostly* use nonlethal attacks, so a deadly weapon might seem counter-intuitive.
But think about it this way: if you're outmatched, on the rare occasions where that might happen, your goal is to not die and you want every advantage you can get. The survival of your attacker(s) is not your priority. Having a weapon optimised for lethal attacks is what you want here.
The times you'll use nonlethal attacks is when you believe you can win by only using such attacks. Thus you use hand-to-hand combat, which may not be the absolute best option, but it's far from bad. If things start going south, you always have the option of drawing your dagger.
To put it simply: lethal attacks is what you want to be most effective at, even if you don't use it that often.
## Also, bodyguards.
Bodyguards can carry multiple weapons, shouldn't have to worry about concealment that much and can deal with threats in a number of ways (including, as a last resort, just buying some time so you can get away). A few bodyguards can also deal with a much larger number of attackers than a single person. They can be dedicated to training, which would make a skilled bodyguard much better trained than your diplomat could ever be expected to be trained.
I would say having bodyguards is practically non-negotiable if you consider people attacking you to be likely enough.
Bodyguards can worry about the whole lethal/nonlethal thing. Once someone gets past a bodyguard, they're likely a big enough threat that you want to go lethal and, again, your priority should mostly just be to not die at that point.
## Nonlethal? Don't get your hopes up.
As soon as you have multiple attackers, you're going to have a really hard time staying nonlethal (and actually winning). You're going to need to be *so* much better than them to have a decent shot of surviving. Even if you can stab people left and right, your odds of winning probably still aren't that great, but at least you can be fairly sure someone won't "just shake it off" when the floor is covered in a pool of their blood.
If your opponent is armed, you're risking a hell of a lot by trying to disarm them instead of trying to just kill them. The average person has a whole lot of soft bits all over their body for you to stick a dagger into to stop them or slow them down. But the only way to disarm them is to actually get to that relatively tiny weapon they're moving all over the place, and then to actually pry it out of their hands in some way. Seems much more risky.
Knocking someone out is not as easy as Hollywood makes it seem. If you want to do that fairly reliably, you're probably going to have to subdue the person first (and still long-term damage or death on their part). You're unlikely to knock them out by just knocking them on the head with any amount of reliability. So this is basically completely out of the window with multiple attackers.
You don't *want* to put yourself in a position of needing to block attacks, because that means you're already on the defensive and you have a decent chance of failing to block (and thus dying).
The longer you try to hold enemies at bay with some weapon, the greater risk of failing to do so and dying. This is really not something you want to willing do, at all, ever, if it can be avoided in any way. This is especially *especially* true when the person you're trying to protect is *you*.
]
|
[Question]
[
In my story, I made a galaxy spanning civilization that has a constitutional monarchy with a imperialist view of seizing worlds.
For a little more context, the agreement for the transition form a full monarchy to a constitutional one was after a rebellion, the royal family would handover all governmental control, but only if they can still have a prominent role in the military. Some of the nobles (**who still wanted to hold on to their tradition**) also signed a similar deal, and they agreed to it. (**I know it's dumb to let them have it, but it was means to an end.**)
So the problem I'm facing is what position/rank they should have where the command large armies, but they can't screw the military over and/or take over the government.
EDIT: When I say nobility, I mean something like near the end of the medieval era.
[Answer]
Small Elite troops.
"So the problem i'm facing is what position/rank should they have where the **command large armies** but **cant screw the military** over and/or take over the government"
In military arms you will have Infantry/Air which in your case all may merge with Naval spaceships. If you place lots of troops under their command, historically the political element rears it's ugly head. And *Charlie Foxtrot*'s you at the worst possible time.
If they control spaceships, may use it to further their own trade agreements or withold passage. *Again, you got Cluster F*...
Say you give them infantry and numbers. Nobles will be able to outright sell, negotiate or barter the command possitions between them. That still gives them ton of influence, since the sheer numbers of families involved gives ton of ears and access to a wide assortment of talent. Remember infantry got from Engineers to Artillery.
**So give them the Special Forces.** Tiny group which can mititage their reach.
You also seldom deploy them, so they twidle their thumbs for the better part of the year.
And the carrot. **You make Special Forces a beautiful ego stroking carrot.**
*The fate of our nation many say can be decided by a bullet. Other times by bombardement.
Because only a noble of birth can understand the shades of gray needed to be Special Forces. Subtlety isn't something we can hammer into a low born. We can entrust this position only to the best of the best.
And who may claim to be above the Most Acient houses?*
[Answer]
History has many different examples to choose from.
The British Royalty has a long tradition of being very "hands on" militarily speaking. We can go back to Henry V or Richard III as true warrior kings fighting on the field of battle, to the more modern example of the House of Windsor sending their sons and daughters into service (and actually performing at rank). Her Majesty Elizabeth II served in WWII as a mechanic, Prince Andrew flew a helicopter towing a radar reflector behind a Royal Navy aircraft carrier in the Falklands War, and Prince "Harry" served two tours in Afghanistan, one as a armoured corps officer and one as an Apache helicopter pilot. Elizabeth's father, King George VI, served aboard a battleship during the battle of Jutland in the First World War.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mtFqT.jpg)
*Princess Elizabeth at war*
On the other hand, while the future King George was serving in the Royal Navy aboard a battleship, the Kaiser Wilhelm II was the "Supreme Commander" of all Imperial German forces, but his staff had to carefully manipulate the yearly manoeuvres so his side would "win" the wargames. Many Royals were equally ineffective as true military leaders, despite their notional rank and position in the Armed Forces.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0NkD6.jpg)
*Wilhelm II. "But my side always wins"*
Depending on the effect you are trying to achieve in the story, your royals could be either exemplary members of the Armed Forces like the British Royal Family, or duds who are given largely ceremonial positions and carefully insulated from command. Reality means that in either case there will always be exceptions (Prince Edward washed out of Royal Marine Commando training, while during WWI King Leopold of Belgium regularly visited the front lines to encourage his troops and maintain national morale).
[Answer]
This problem is central to the organisation of one of the best-known settings: Warhammer 40.000
Once upon a time the then-new Imperium of Mankind had fully combined arms and was commanded by a single Warmaster: Horus Lupercal
Horus rebelled and went traitor in an event you might have heard of: the Horus Heresy. This was the largest war the galaxy had seen in millennia and whole sectors were torched by both sides. The reason this worked was because of the integration of forces: whole expedition fleets were commanded by single leaders and if one of those went rogue they took the entire fleet with them.
So in the year 40.000 armies are carefully split along extremely inconvenient lines to prevent them from being corrupted by a single group.
- An Army officer might go rogue but he won't have supplies, air superiority or transport to the next system.
- a Naval officer might go rogue but he won't have boots on the ground to actually achieve anything and he won't receive supplies.
- A Administratum clerk might go rogue but he won't be able to use any of his supplies.
Each of these branches is equal and necessary to prosecute a serious war but petty politics and rivalries make sure that it is extremely rare for a whole army group to decide that becoming traitors is the good idea.
[Answer]
Short Answer:
Officials of all classes start out lower and if competent are promoted to higher ranks. But officials who come from higher ranking classes start out at higher ranks than officials who come from lower ranking classes.
And even the most democratic politicians accept that class bias because the number of levels in the government hierarchy is so large that nobody could start at the bottom and be promoted all the way to the top during their career. Since the top positions have to be filled, even the most democratic politicians accept that much class bias in appointments, but no more.
Long Answer in five parts:
Space is big. Very, very big. And very, very complicated.
Part One: the size of a galaxy spanning government.
the tiniest dwarf galaxies each have about a million star systems. Our Milky Way Galaxy has at lest a hundred thousand times as many stars, at least 100,000,000,000 star systems, and possibly several times that many.
The disc of the Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter, so a galaxy spanning government would rule over at least a distance of 50,000 light years and rule at least a quarter of the volume of the galactic disc.
So I would say that a galaxy spanning government would rule a volume of space containing at least 10,000,000,000 star systems. It is perfectly possible for humans from the habitable planet Earth to colonize our entire solar system and use asteroid and comet material to construct countless thousands and millions of space habitats so that our solar system could support trillions or quadrillons of humans.
A space empire might find that only one star system out of a hundred would have a planet that humans could colonize. And thus one ruling over at least 10,000,000,000 star systems would rule over at least 100,000,000 habitable planets that humans could colonize. Each habitable planet should be able to support at least 1,000,000,000 humans, so the space empire should be able to have a total population of 100,000,000,000,000,000 humans on the habitable planets.
But of course each of the 100,000,000 habitable planets in the space empire should be able to build space habitats in its system and have a total population of at least one trillion or 1,000,000,000,000 persons on those space habitats. Thus the space empire could have total of 100,000,000,000,000,000 humans on the 100,000,000 habitable planets and another 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 humans living in the space habitats in the 100,000,000 star systems that happen to have habitable planets.
But what about the 9,900,000,000 star systems in the space empire which don't have habitable planets? Most of those should have planets, moons, comets, and asteroids, so it should be possible to build space habitats in those systems. So every single one of the 10,000,000,000 star systems in the space empire could eventually have thousands and millions of artificial space habitats and a total population of at least a trillion or 1,000,000,000,000 persons on those space habitats. So the total population of this hypothetical space empire could be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 persons, spread over 100,000,000 habitable planets and countless gazillions of space habitats in 10,000,000,000 star systems.
So any "galaxy spanning" space empire should have a very, very, very, very complicated government.
Part two: The space navy of a galaxy spanning government:
For example, suppose that each star system has a one star admiral in command of the defenses there. A two star admiral might be in command of the defenses in ten star systems, a three star admiral might be in command of the defenses in 100 star systems, a four star admiral might be in command of the defenses in 1,000 star systems, a five star admiral might be in command of the defenses in 10,000 star systems, and so on and so on.
And when a feet of space battleships is assembled, a one star admiral might be in command of ten space battleships, a two star admiral might be in command of 100 space battleships, a three star admiral might be in command of 1,000 space battleships, a four star admiral might be in command of 10,000 space battleships, a five star admiral might be in command of 100,000 space battleships, and so on and so on up to the commander of the entire fleet.
In E.E. Smith's *Lensman* series, the main battle fleets of galactic governments had millions of space battleships.
So I was rather shocked by the *Star Trek: Deep Space Nine* episode "Sacrifice of Angels" depicting an important battle in the Dominion War with only 600 Federation ships vs 1,200 Dominion and Cardassian ships. The fleets should have been tens and hundreds of times as large. And it was equally shocking to see Sisko, a lowly captain, in command of 600 Federation ships. This seems like a clear case of "Writers Cannot Do Math":
<https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WritersCannotDoMath>[1](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WritersCannotDoMath)
So any space government that rules a galaxy, or a significant piece of a galaxy, is going to have a space navy with many, many, many different Admiral ranks. in the current US navy there are only six officer ranks below the Admiral ranks: ensign, lieutenant junior grade, lieutenant, lieutenant commander, commander, and captain, and only four admiral ranks. But in the space navy of a major galactic power, the admiral ranks should greatly outnumber the other officer ranks, and might even greatly out number the other officer ranks and the enlisted ranks combined.
Part Three: the size of the civil government of a galaxy-spanning empire.
Suppose that some of the solar systems in the galaxy-spanning empire have artificial space habitats. We might suppose that the ruler of a single space habitat might be called a habicrat. A habicrat might be elected by the people of the habitat, or a hereditary noble, or appointed by higher authority. Maybe there are all three different types of habicrats ruling habitats in each star system.
Suppose that the ruler of ten habitats is a habicrat of Habicrats, or a habicrat to the second power, and abbreviated HC2. The ruler of 100 habitats might be a HC3, The ruler of 1,000 habitats might be a HC4, The ruler of 10,000 habitats might be a HC4, The ruler of 100,000 habitats might be a HC5, and so on and so on. There could be millions of artificial space habitats in the system, so there could be one or more rulers of a million habitats, each of them a HC6.
And possibly the ruler of an entire star system, whether elected, hereditary, or appointed from above, might be called a stellacrat. Then the ruler of ten systems would be a stellacrat of stellacrats, or a stellacrat to the second power, abbreviated SC2. The ruler of 100 systems would be a SC3, The ruler of 1,000 systems would be a SC4, The ruler of 10,000 systems would be a SC5, The ruler of 100,000 systems would be a SC6, and so on and so on. So the ruler of the entire space empire of 10,000,000,000 star systems would be the equivalent of an SC11.
Suppose that in the space empire agriculture is replaced by technological synthesis of food. In that case the space empire might have a Department of Food Synthesis as its equivalent of the Department of Agriculture in the USA. And if that Department of Food Synthesis has offices on every planet and on every artificial space habitat, it will have to have a hierarchy with many different levels of managers to manage those offices.
Part Four: The title of the monarch.
The Op talks about the "royal family" of the vast space empire "spanning the galaxy".
I find it really hard to picture a government of a significant part of a galaxy with a mere king as the monarch.
If every single star system in the space empire had a king (elected, hereditary, or appointed) as its ruler, perhaps each group of ten star systems would have king of kings, or king to the second power, as it ruler, abbreviated K2. A group of 100 star systems would be ruled by a K3, a group of 1,000 star systems would be ruled by a K4, and so on and so on up to the ruler of, in my example, 10,000,000,000 star systems who would be the equivalent of a King to the 11th power, a K11. And I think the highest ruler of such a vast space empire would be an emperor.
My answer to the question: [Imperial Kingdoms?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110223/imperial-kingdoms/110329#110329)[2](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/110223/imperial-kingdoms/110329#110329)
Shows that there are many examples of kings, great kings, kings of kings, etc., being subordinate to higher rulers.
Thus your galactic realm might have many nobles and many royal families subordinate to the monarch who might be an emperor.
Part Five: How to select officials.
Thus the galaxy spanning space government should have many levels of administration. And how should the different levels of military and civil officials be selected?
Shouldn't someone pass tests and show skills in a lower rank before being promoted to a higher rank? But what is the minimum amount of time someone can spend in a position before he shows that he is suited for promotion to the next highest position? And how long is the average working span of adult humans in your future society?
If the average working life of an adult human in your story is divided by the usual amount of time someone has to spend in a position before being promoted to the next highest position, how many promotions will the average official get in their working lifetime? And how does that average number of promotions compare to the total number of ranks in the official hierarchy?
If the official hierarchy has many more ranks than the average official can be promoted do during their career, promoting someone from the lowest rank to the highest rank during their career might be impossible.
So in a non democratic monarchy, every single position could be hereditary. So small communities would be ruled by hereditary lords who are vassals of hereditary counts who are vassals of hereditary dukes who are vassals of hereditary kings who are vassals of hereditary kings of kings who are vassals of hereditary kings of kings of kings who are vassals of hereditary kings of kings of kings of kings who are vassals of hereditary hereditary kings of kings of kings of kings of kings, and so on and so on, up to the hereditary emperors.
But if the OP wants an at least partially democratic, and at least partially bureaucratic, form of government, the space empire will have many ranks of appointed officials, as well as a considerable number of elected officials, so many positions must not be hereditary.
So possibly, whether the government is an absolute monarchy or is a democracy with a purely ceremonial monarch or is anyway on the broad spectrum between those extremes, members of different classes might start their official careers at different levels of the official hierarchy.
Common citizens or subjects might start at the lowest level of the hierarchy and be promoted five to ten times during their careers. Members of noble families might start their careers a few steps above the lowest level and be promoted five to ten times during their careers, thus retiring at higher ranks than commoners. Members of royal families might start their careers a few steps above where nobles start and be promoted five to ten times during their careers, thus retiring at higher ranks than nobles. Members of the families of kings of kings might start their careers a few steps above where members of royal families start and be promoted five to ten times during their careers, thus retiring at higher ranks than members of royal families.
And so on and so on up to members of the imperial dynasty, who would start their official careers at a level higher than anyone else and get promoted five to ten times during their careers and thus retire a higher ranks than anyone else.
How fast someone gets promoted, so whether they are promoted five times or ten times during their career, should depend a lot on how well they do, so that more competent persons should be promoted faster.
And there should be programs to enable exceptionally promising persons to be start their careers at higher levels than normal and to reach higher positions than normal, and for noble, royal, etc. persons who fail badly to be demoted to lower ranks.
And of course, commoners have become noble in even the most stratified societies. Noble families occasionally die out and thus new noble families are needed in order to keep the existing noble families from becoming too powerful. And in a expanding society there should be more opportunities for commoners and for nobles in each generation.
And democratic institutions are quite practical on a local scale, even if the central government is less democratic. So every swarm of artificial space habitats, or every habitable planet, could have several levels of democratic government. So democratic governments should function well and control most matters important to the people, up to the level of solar system wide government.
I'm not so certain whether democratic forms of government could function well on the level of a galaxy spanning space empire. I'm also not certain that monarchical, aristocratic, feudal, bureaucratic, communist, fascist, or any other types of government could function well on that scale.
But the OP assumes there is a functioning galaxy spanning government with a mixture of democracy, monarchy, aristocracy, and bureaucracy, and it is certainly possible that some mixture might work in the higher levels of the galaxy spanning government.
[Answer]
# Officer vs Enlisted
The whole idea of officers is a hold over from feudal times where a knight would have a group of commoners fighting underneath his command, generally his serfs that he rounded up.
As armies got larger there was a need for senior enlisted, someone who was still a plebe but trusted in warfare. He wouldn't order around a knight but would carry some authority.
In modern armies, the disdain felt towards ensigns/2nd lieutenants(O1) and the respect towards chiefs and sergeants is palpable. Even though the lieutenant is in charge everyone looks to the sergeant.
Having a capable enlisted second is hopefully enough to either train them to competence, or let Darwin cull the herd.
# Sometimes a choice is not a choice
Modern government leaders don't run everything and I assume the military works the same way. It is said that Napoleon was the last person to run an entire battle and even that is somewhat debated.
As you progress up the org chart information is distilled, refined and polished. Leaders make a choice from options given. If Hitler had been given the choice of "Make peace with England" or "Wait for spring to invade Russia" WWII might have turned out very differently.
[Answer]
# Give them a competent Chief of Staff.
That was the model in Imperial Germany, which had a share of Imperial or subsidiary princelings with martial ambitions. Judge if they can be trusted to listen to their CoS. If so, they can have major armies and fleets. If not, judge the political fallout of shuffling them to a secondary front.
[Answer]
Divide and conquer.
For the nobility, assign them positions where the troops under their command *aren't* from their base of power. If the noble family is from Tatooine, they might be assigned command of forces drawn primarily from Vulcan, while the nobles from Vulcan are in command of troops from Geidi Prime, and so on. That reduces a natural base of support, so the only way they'll get respect from their troops is being good officers.
For the Royal Family, who better to command the units assigned to protection of the Royal Family and their properties? As a second job, specialized light infantry/special forces. Elite troops, highly respected for their skill and professionalism...and massively outgunned if they try to pull something off.
[Answer]
Assign a regiment (or equivalent) to each royal, "Prince Gregory's Light regiment of foot". A strong tradition of military service will help ensure that they are competent, descendants that are no so inclined can can receive courtesy ranks in non essential staff positions.
Financing for each regiment will depend on the civilian government, providing a check on the royals power.
[Answer]
You may as well use the British monarchy as a role model.
By tradition young royals serve time in the military (Prince Harry served in the British Army, Prince William in the Royal Air Force, Prince Charles served in the Royal Navy etc.) They follow a typical junior officer's career path, although are typically not sent on high risk missions in order to protect the morale of the nation which might suffer if they were killed. (Your society might be more tolerant to the deaths of a few royal brats.)
They cease active service as their royal duties begin to take up more of their time but are promoted to the highest ranks (Admiral of the Fleet / Field Marshall / Air Chief Marshall) in order to be able to technically outrank everyone else and wear fancy uniforms for their ceremonial duties, which you ensure they have plenty of so that they have time for little else. At this point they no longer have any operational military role, but still get to feel important, wear swanky uniforms and attend lavish military dinners and celebrations where they can hob-nob with other important people.
Now if they want to command more than say the single ship that Prince Charles did, then your sane new government needs to check their power. The most effective way of doing this would be to give them command of the operational forces but ensure that you keep very tight control of the logistics and support engineering functions. If a royal goes rogue you simply cut off all engineering support, supplies, parts, fuel, ammunition. You try to structure your military so that it's very difficult for their forces to be self-sustaining.
In essence you aim to give them the illusion of real power and the comfort of "being at the top of the tree", and hope that their lives of comfort turns into indolence and inaction, or at most simply pursuing their own eccentric hobby horses.
[Answer]
When placing nobility during worldbuilding you first have to ask where did the nobility came from, how it appeared.
In the western civilization the nobles are the descendents of warlords, barbarians invaders and brigands that took control of the countryside, built their fortresses and fought against each other until someone became a king, not so different then today's latin american drug cartels and african warlords. They got the church to support them and established that their power would pass to their children, not unlike El Chapo's power passing to his sons. So, nobility is martial from it's beginning and it was expected that the nobles would fight, would be on the frontlines. It only changed when royal power grew enough and the kings could support professional, permanent armies, rendering the nobles obsolete. The levee en masse concluded the process.
Using the feudal age of the western civilization as an example, your nobles would be the descendents of fleet admirals, rebels and pirates of an earlier civilization that collapsed. You don't have to think about a role for them because they alredy have all roles, at least in the beginning.
But you also said that your monarchy is transitioning from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one, while your nobility is like the late medieval nobility. You can't have absolute monarchy and XV century nobility: the nobles are too strong and they can force the king to relinquish power to them. If you decide that you want an absolute monarchy then your nobles' powerbase has alredy been broken by the king and their role is as generals, both because of tradition, because they are taught to be commanders and because the culture still expects that commanders should be nobles. The transition to a constitutional monarchy (forced by which faction?) would not change these three conditions.
So, your nobles will be commanders.
[Answer]
An army doesn't have a single representative in each high grade.
There are plenty of position to accommodate the most promising or most influent elements of the nobility in the high ranks.
Moreover, with an army capable of conquering entire worlds, I am pretty sure you are not handling only battalions in your world. Again, plenty of positions available.
In real life princes have high ranks in their armies or navies, but it doesn't mean they are the only ones having them.
You can also create purely honorific positions with actual 0 power, just to fulfill the pride of those in need.
[Answer]
Nobility can be of several kind. The most common being Robe, Land and Sword.
The first kind are, more or less, pen pusher and title-buyer.
The second kind has political power because they oversee the land and those who inhabit there.
The last category won its titles in war. They often have (relatively) less political influence and overall wealth.
There might be other categories, of course, but this is just a starting point.
Now, for some time, your nobility primary role has been reduce the the last item. But not only.
Some of the first two groups will be involved into logistical roles.
Some from the second group will thrive in combat as thy have to prove that what remains of their possession is not just an outdated injustice to the people.
The third category will have a build-in warrior ethos that might prove really good in elite units, but good over all.
As to the rank question ?
Two solutions might be entertained :
- To be a noble you have to create and maintain an army. BUT you don't have access to the navy, so you still have to use and count on the Empires ships to ferry you to fronts of conquest.
- Another solution is for nobles to have a special mark on their ranks and start where their skills will allow.
Strangely, until recently, nobility fared quite well in the armies, even though those tends to be result oriented, closer to a meritocracy than a place to send idiots sons to be hidden (not that it never happened). Your nobles could be brat that are nothing out of the corps. They have to be good to amount to anything in their social circles. The good will start in officer schools, the other might be... §Grunts (with a mark denoting birth, but no other privileges). They will be advantaged by the way they were raised, but still needing to prove themselves.
[Answer]
The agreement could allow for the nobles to maintain their own private armies, which would then work in coordination with the national military when needed. This is essentially how the feudal structure of medieval Europe operated.
]
|
[Question]
[
I have a story where one side of a war takes advantage of psychological warfare, where a plane on an altitude of 60k ft or 15.2km has massive speakers to play horrifying, disturbing sounds recorded from people being tortured and replayed over and over to keep enemy soldiers from resting and possibly scaring them to desertion. This sound can be heard to 50km away.
My question is: is it possible for a speaker to play this loud of a sound, and a plane to handle the vibrations? And even if yes, it is, what kind of ear protection would the pilot have to wear to avoid being deafened?
[Answer]
## No?
The loudest sustained concert volume ever recorded was 139 dB, during a sound check for Manowar.
Using [this calculator](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/distance-attenuation), at 50000m in a straight line, it'd be about "the same as a refrigerator running". 45 dB.
(Digression: I personally had one refrigerator that sounded like a nearby Meshuggah concert in one of my flats when I was at university, but that was a while ago now and my whiteware's sounds are now more like the beginning of Haydn's Surprise Concerto).
In addition, sound waves of different frequencies travel different distances (they attenuate more or less) and even at fractionally different speeds. So the sound's integrity would be lost.
If the loudest ever heavy metal band with all their amp stacks, power supplies, etc, can't do it, I doubt you can either. And the pilot probably can't be protected. But 5 or 10 km is a different story.
[Answer]
One method that "might" work, would be beam formed sound. You mention speakers, yet its not explicitly clear what type of methods are available.
One of the main ideas working against you is spherical propagation. A lightbulb and a laser of similar energy output have very different visibility at distance. However, to see the laser output, at least to any significant intensity, it needs to be aimed toward the target.
[This technology](https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/holoplot-beamforming-audio/) is an example of the ideas that currently exist for audio beamforming.
Another option might also be beams of a different type that interacts with a region to produce a sound that is then heard locally. Kind of a [Laser Microphone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone) in reverse.
Further, basic or common speakers are not highly directional. Shown by the chart below from Wikipedia, low frequency sounds are almost omnidirectional, and higher frequency sounds have significant directivity.
By Binksternet (talk) - Own work, Public Domain, <https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4525812>
Alternatives available with modern technology that can help with this are:
* Horn speakers, that would hopefully have a radiation pattern closer to this behavior:
+ 
+ From: <https://www.pngwing.com> "No Author Attribution, Free Non-Commercial Use"
* Phased Array Speakers, that help to cancel out some of the off axis sounds, and back propagation to the source. Hopefully with a sound pattern similar to:
+ 
+ From: <https://www.pngwing.com> "No Author Attribution, Free Non-Commercial Use"
Neither of these are what most people would consider "common" speakers for concerts or other types of normal human sound generation, because the pattern is far too directional for enjoyable listening. Stand in a slightly different place in the crowd at a concert and you might get an extremely different experience.
At some point it also depends on how "real" you care about the idea being, how closely it "needs" to be tied to the modern 2023 human experience, or how much you really want to work through the details. A lot of stories hand-wave and say it happens, plus technobabble.
[Answer]
Let's start with the most important aspect, the survival of the pilot:
* For the pilot to survive, they would have to be flying the aircraft remotely.
A statement that without specific comment explains the other part of your question. About the only sound that's audible over that sort of distance is an explosion, and even then it depends on atmospheric conditions.
[Answer]
Could you mount a speaker on an aircraft and use that to scream at people thousands of feet below and 10s of miles away? Nope. You can do some fun things with canon speakers and directional sound production, sure, but getting the sound balance right with different attenuation per frequency range will make this basically impossible.
All is not lost however, since we don't have to limit ourselves to classic speakers. Fortunately there are a variety of alternatives.
First, we might be able to use tuned [phonon-laser](https://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/32) arrays to direct beams of sound at a small target area. With amplitude control over the individual frequencies - one frequency per emitter - you can adjust somewhat for any expected attenuation profile. I suspect that the phonon beams would decohere fairly quickly though, so this might not get us the range we need.
So rather than transmitting the sound through the intervening atmosphere, how about creating the sound at the target itself? Specifically, we use modulated [laser-induced optoacoustic transduction](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78990-z). Tracking lasers accurately enough to hit a pinpoint target at range from a moving platform is obviously a lot harder than doing it in a lab, but that's just engineering. (I trust you'll pay no attention to the frantic hand-waving there.)
Personally I'd prefer to just fire missiles (or UAVs) that disperse tiny speaker drones or simple screamers over a target area. You could probably make a few thousand little screamer packages for the cost of a single actual warhead. Make them small enough to be hard to shoot out of the air, with a power supply that can hold enough watt-hours to scream for a few minutes before triggering a small self destruct charge. Maybe set some of them to start screaming after the touch down, or add a random delay so any that you get hours of entertaining reactions. Sound or motion activated screamers could lay dormant for days before some poor soul encounters one.
The more I think about it, the more evil that sounds. Pretty sure it's not a war crime though.
Yet.
[Answer]
## Yes. Sort of.
During the testing for the Manhattan project, the explosion could be heard for about 100 miles. Aircraft can carry comparably-sized bombs, so aircraft can play sounds that can be heard that far away.
(Someone might be tempted to object that an explosion doesn't count as "playing" a sound. To that person I would say, *1812 Overture*.)
But to answer more specifically to your scenario: Sort of.
Roughly, a 52,000m distance (50km over and 15km up) is two to the 16-and-a-bit, drop-off is about 6dB/doubling, so you get about 100dB of dropoff. [Here](http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2008/09/loudest-speaker-in-the-world/) is a quick description of a 165dB speaker someone made (Why?!). That leaves you something like 65dB of sound at 50km. Which is a lot, about like the volume in a crowded restaurant.
Weight-wise, that trivially fits on a plane. Where your plan will run into problems is intelligibility.
On PPE: cutting-edge modern man-mounted technology can only make it safe up to (very roughly) 130 dB. It's a problem. Anything above that you would need to deal with by soundproofing the cockpit. You likely need about 40dB of very, very serious isolation. Remember, this requirement would be in tension with the need to attach the cockpit securely to the aircraft frame. It's probably doable, but far from trivial.
Lastly though, just because something is technologically possible doesn't make it a good idea. Think about what that side is trying to actually accomplish (seize land, favorable trade deals, etc.) and consider how this tactic supports that strategic objective. If it doesn't support their war objective, the side using it is hurting their own cause.
[Answer]
# Yes
They have extremely advanced technology that utilizes a sonic boom as their "speaker".
There are no current technologies that do this, but your military in your story figured it out.
This lets the aircraft "charge" a sonic boom over some distance, then "release" it over its target.
Sounds too fictional? Well, an [F-16 attacked Iraq forces in 2003 using sonic booms](https://militaryfighterjet.com/the-f-16-pilot-who-saved-a-ground-troop-with-a-sonic-boom/)!
[Answer]
I'm late to this, so there are already many suggestions - some rational, some less-so… but…
All other theories/pitfalls aside [& no, I don't think this is even possible in ideal conditions\*] what about the cross-winds?
How are you going to aim this thing? … & aim it you must, beam-form or 'massive not-thought-through-properly hifi', you have to be able to direct this energy or you may as well drop leaflets [which could also land several hundred miles away from that height].
At altitude the jet-stream can reach speeds of 275mph. I don't really need any math to know this is not going to help your transmission, especially through low-pressure air at those altitudes.
Think up another idea. This one has not a hope of working.
\*Suggestions that it could reach the ground still at 85dB SPL allow the possibility that out in the quiet countryside, you might notice something distant has made a sound.
Consider what thunder sounds like from a couple of miles away [you can count between lightning flash & sound as 5 seconds per mile, roughly] - a low rumbling boom. Yet if you're unluckily close, it's almost a single pulse of energy, a massive deafening spike of all frequencies at once [170dB SPL or more].
The rest is the dissipation & echo/reverberation that happens in just a couple of miles.
Douglas Adams came up with a fabulous bit of 'handwavium' - no explanation anywhere as to how it was achieved, when the Vogons arrive to tell us of Earth's impending destruction…
>
> Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of open ambient sound. Every hi-fi set in the world, every radio, every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer, every tweeter, every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned itself on.
>
>
> Every tin can, every dustbin, every window, every car, every wineglass, every sheet of rusty metal became activated as an acoustically perfect sounding board.
>
>
> Before the Earth passed away it was going to be treated to the very ultimate in sound reproduction, the greatest public address system ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no fanfare, just a simple message.
>
>
> “People of Earth, your attention, please,” a voice said, and it was wonderful. Wonderful perfect quadraphonic sound with distortion levels so low as to make a brave man weep.
>
>
> “This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,” the voice continued. “As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.”
>
>
> The PA died away.
>
> Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
>
>
>
[Answer]
### Yes, if you aren't too picky
Let's start with the basic "can a vehicle make that much noise". A jet engine makes noise at 140dB at 25 meters. Based on the calculator passed on by @SeanOConnor, that produces a sound at about 82dB at 60,000 ft., or around 69 dB at 50 miles. So, it **can** produce "a noise" that loud.
Now we want it to actually produce the sound of people being tortured. Would it be possible to modulate a jet engine to cause it to sound like people being tortured?
This isn't actually very far fetched. They've already looked into [installing noise-cancellation speakers](https://actu.epfl.ch/news/loudspeakers-in-jet-engines/) into jet engines. To make the engines play a specific noise, you could introduce vibration in the outgoing air stream. It wouldn't be high fidelity, but you would get your point across.
]
|
[Question]
[
In the near future the demand for resources only rises due to both a ever growing population, energy and resource crises, and rampant consumerism. Peak oil has been reached, scarce resources like platinum, silver, and other rare metals have been depleted on the surface, and the world is beginning to feel the more drastic effects of climate change such as mass extinctions of animals and strains of crops. In this rather bleak period the major mining companies looked to the seas to solve the mineral requirements of earth. While mining the seas isn't a easy affair the ocean's mineral wealth is virtually untapped.
However instead of using drones to mine both ores and the methane ice the big companies used mainly human labor (with drone assistance), but why? What benefit would human laborers in deep sea rigs have over a aquatic drone?
Note:
The population is fed mainly by cultured meat and indoor+vertical farming hence why the population is expanding even though the climate looks bleak.
Asteroid mining isn't considered a good alternative for earth due to the transportation of the goods back to earth. However if necessary the industry does exist (mainly for the initial space colonies)
The mines would be accessed by either mining ships or for the larger mines maglev trains connected to large underwater bases (with the tunnels dug under the ocean's surface)
[Answer]
**Corporations: It's all about the bottom line!**
>
> According to a 2017 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average cost of raising a child from birth through age 17 is \$233,610. If that made your heart skip a beat, take a deep breath before you read on. Incorporating inflation costs, it will be more like \$284,570. ... That \$284,570 average doesn’t include the cost of college education, arguably one of the biggest expenses a parent will face. ([Source](https://smartasset.com/retirement/the-average-cost-of-raising-a-child))
>
>
>
And since manual labor doesn't need a college education (just vocational training, at best), we can use that number. But, let's round it off for incidental expenses: $300,000.
* If your drones cost more than $300,000, it's cheaper to use humans.
* Humans breed like rabbits, drones don't. If you can crank 1,000 humans through *Bob's House of Undersea Vocational Training* in the time it takes you to build 10 drones, you use humans.
* Lawsuits are inconvenient, but you'd be surprised how often wrongful-death suits are settled out of court (then ignored). If the average loss to wrongful-death lawsuits per-year is less than the cost of, say, 10% of the manufacturing cost of drones each year, you use humans.
* Humans need hamburgers and are self-healing. Drones need fuel and cost a boatload to repair. Need I say more?
Obviously, this ignores a lot of details (like whether or not the drone can do 100X the work a human can. Luddites to the rescue!). But the bottom line will always drive some of the worst decisions ever made by corporations.
[Answer]
>
> What benefits would be gained by using human laborers instead of drones in deep sea mining?
>
>
>
# tl;dr: None.
---
## Long answer:
First let's address several assumptions in your question.
>
> demand for resources only rises due to both a ever growing population
>
>
>
Not necessarily. The precious metals platinum and palladium are commonly used in catalytic converters in cars. Once you move to electric cars, demand will decrease.
>
> scarce resources like platinum, silver, and other rare metals have been depleted on the surface
>
>
>
No. I refer you to this answer from Chemistry SE:
[Will we ever run out of gold, silver, copper and other important conductors?](https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/a/96630/8083)
>
> mine...the methane ice
>
>
>
Why? What do you need methane for? It's a nuisance. Even if you do need it, get it from [landfills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_gas). Way easier.
>
> Asteroid mining isn't considered a good alternative for earth due to the transportation of the goods back to earth. However if necessary the industry does exist (mainly for the initial space colonies)
>
>
>
Don't even get me started about this. Asteroid mining is a sci-fi fantasy which is nowhere even close to feasible or economical in the real world. I've commented on this on several answers and questions here in the past. If interested, finding these comments is left as an exercise for the reader.
>
> The mines would be accessed by either mining ships or for the larger mines maglev trains connected to large underwater bases (with the tunnels dug under the ocean's surface)
>
>
>
and this one from one of the answers
>
> Humans are smaller and can fit into tighter spaces and caves to detect the presence of rare minerals.
>
>
>
Deep sea mineralisation occurs on the sea bed or very close to it, within centimetres. There are no tunnels or holes to dig. Current deep sea exploration programs are targeting mineral deposits that are literally just sitting there waiting for us to pick them up.
---
Now, to why humans will be very bad for this:
1. There is a reason why the deposits are called deep sea deposits. Because they are *deep*. Like, really ***deep***. Four kilometres deep on average. Developing a submersible that can withhold the immense pressures encountered at these depths is expensive. While there were submersibles that reached deeper depths (up to 12 km), these were specially designed vehicles. Doing this on an industrial scale is simply too expensive. On the other hand, drones don't care about pressure (mostly).
One of the answers commented that:
>
> You could also make humans generally better at identifying mineral veins or using complex tools than drones can (a specialist drone won't have all the tools required to do everything, especially if its meant to be good and cost effective at doing something).
>
>
>
This is not correct. If you've ever actually seen the deep sea deposits, they look pretty much like the mud around them. The human eye cannot distinguish the good stuff from [gangue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangue). On the other hand, drones can be equipped with instruments such as Raman spectrometers, pXRFs, IR wavelength spectrometers and a variety of other instruments that will be much better than humans in finding the stuff.
---
We can learn from today's mining industry. [It is gradually becoming more automated with robots](https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/robots-are-replacing-humans-world-s-mines-here-s-why-ncna831631). And this is happening in subaerial mines, which are relatively simple to operate. There is absolutely no reason to introduce humans to extreme environments for mining, especially when we already have the technology to do this without humans.
---
Finally, if interested, the scientific-yet-not-too-technical magazine Elements published a series of articles on deep sea mining in their [October 2018](http://elementsmagazine.org/past-issues/deep-ocean-mineral-deposits/) issue. It is mostly paywalled (unfortunately) but shouldn't be too hard to find the full versions of the articles online. Alternatively, you can read the abstracts which are free. This is highly recommended reading allowing some understanding of deep sea mining as we understand it today, written by people who know what they're talking about.
[Answer]
## The mining companies are being subsidized
Drones would have been better value for money, but the government subsidizes human labor.
This is done to keep the population (especially the men) occupied and also safely locked away, not giving them a chance to sit around talking rebellion.
This is also the reason space mining is not favored: there are too many places to run and hide once the tech for space colonization exists.
[Answer]
The simple fact for this to happen is that human labor and the associated costs will have to be cheaper than a fully automated drone and more profitable. You could spin this a couple of ways...
1. Rare metals are extremely expensive and required for highly advanced tech. Its more profitable to sell off the minerals you gather than it is to buy a drone with a highly complex computational brain when a human can basically become the operator and only requires food, water and some money. Your human controls the system so you don't need an expensive computer to do so.
2. Humans are smaller and can fit into tighter spaces and caves to detect the presence of rare minerals. Once a humans has identified a vein you can accurately extract it with the drones and reduce the amount of waste material you mine up. You could also make humans generally better at identifying mineral veins or using complex tools than drones can (a specialist drone won't have all the tools required to do everything, especially if its meant to be good and cost effective at doing something).
3. Cost of fuel is too high. You simply suit up a human, give them a cable to come back with and some oxygen, a couple of glow sticks and a pickaxe and drop them into the depths. Powered by only the food in their stomach and the desire to see light again ( aka we won't pull you up until you find something) humans won't require you to waste large amounts of precious fuel to operate.
[Answer]
In dangerous places (like outer space, deep sea etc) the only reason to use people instead robots is that in general **people are more flexible and much universal than** single **robot**.
But it's only one side.
Human flexibility reduces in deep sea because of great pressure. Withstand to such pressure much harder that operating in outer space. People should use heavy 'deep' suits even in not-really-deep sea. Even in such deep human couldn't operate by hand but only by specialized instrument **integrated with suite**. But.. you could give this instrument to a robot and direct it remotely! (Robots don't need air and food and it's not a problem to lost some)
Here we could say that remote manipulation requires some reliable communication, calculate costs and go deeper in rabbit hole. But it's out of scope.
So if you really want to get people mining in deep sea *in your world*, you have to **introduce intermediate bases where people would live and operate** nearby drones and do something special which is unreasonable to do on surface. [Repairing drones is an example]
So your question could be reduced to another one: **What benefits to use intermediate inhabited bases?**
Some reasons have been already described (communication and repairing on-site is cheaper). If you look at space programs like ISS or lunar base you probably could add more like
* New technologies
* Proof of national superiority
* Communication with intelligent ~~aliens~~ deep-sea creatures
* Universe exploring and understanding
* Factories which produce not a raw resource but goods with high added value [like engines instead of raw steel]. And those factories couldn't be employed without human *in your world*. [Because in near future it (probably) will be possible in our world]
or invent something own. Or ask new question on this site ;-)
[Answer]
If you can tolerate some suspension of disbelief, this could still be plausible.
Perhaps...
* Your drones cannot be reliably remote-controlled at great depths?
* Your society needs a reason to keep the growth of the lower classes in check? Compulsory military/mining service fulfills this purpose.
* Drones are simply too expensive? Surely their construction consumes a disproportionate amount of the rare minerals they exist to mine?
* Espionage/sabotage-- foreign corporations hijack/destroy each others' drones? Unless you intend on fully automating undersea warfare and wasting what's left of the resources having robots fling torpedoes at each other, humans are more expendable.
* Putting people to work keeps them out of trouble. You can automate all unskilled labor, but now you have a bunch of bored/desperate people surface-side. Crime increases under these conditions.
[Answer]
I agree with much of what Shadowzee has to say about profitability. Modern corporations operate with one thing in mind. Increasing profits for shareholders. Human labor can be VERY inexpensive. It can be the largest cost a business might incur. However there was something Shadowzee didn't mention I don't think. If you look at history governments and business have had little concern with the civil rights of human labor. There are numerous examples. Improved quality of life for working class people is only a fairly recent development. And quite frankly increases in inequality in this country suggest to me that that particular trend has the potential to reverse itself.
What kind of future are you envisioning? A good one...A dark one? If you can think of a scenario which involves coerced unskilled labor you might be able to come up with something along the lines of what I am thinking i.e. some corporate entity viewing the trade-off between expendable low cost unskilled labor and expensive automation that requires AI and coming up with a "unique and inexpensive compromise" - automated human beings with implanted programmable chips to perform the labor of the machines.
There are many people who see the combination of human and machine as a natural part of human evolution (e.g Elon Musk, Ray Kurweil). Corporations might see this as highly beneficial approach to both labor problems, automation problems and what happens if you don't have wage slaves earning money to buy the stuff they sell.
Can't speak to mining the deep sea because I would think this is pretty difficult work and would probably require highly skilled labor rather than unskilled labor. But what about programmable chips to increase the laborer's skill set.
I could see a future where you could have a labor pool that just needs to eat and might
allow themselves to subjected to it. Or forced labor from criminal and political dissident populations.
Sorry...that is a pretty dark scenario but mining industries don't treat their workers very well as a general rule.
[Answer]
Check out [Peter Watts' *Rifters* trilogy](https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0765315963) for some ideas. He needs to justify a very similar situation, where workers are sent to maintain geothermal power-plants deep under water.
In short, **networked systems are no longer reliable**. The internet as we know it no longer exists. It's been overrun by a rapidly shifting ecosystem of self-replicating viruses and military grade AIs, developed and deployed by nation-states and corporations vying for control. The arms race between self-modifying viruses and anti-viruses has become so extreme that any data sent via the web is more likely than not to be hijacked, altered, or deleted completely. In order to operate with any degree of reliability, machines need to be air-gapped and completely autonomous.
People are expendable; the corporations do the math, and decide that habitation and life-support are cheaper than investing in machines smart enough to reliably do the job.
[Answer]
Gimelist showed quite convincingly why humans are not needed in the Deep. Depending on your reason for wanting them down there, you might be able to introduce them to the Not So Deep.
If the Climate is still in the throes of change, using the surface of the ocean might actually be more expensive than being 30-80m below (ice, storms). So you might have large submerged (pre)processing facilities run by humans, and catered-to by the drones in the Deep. Nice claustrophobic setting, actually within (economic) technical reach.
[Answer]
That depends on how much communications the drones require. Radio basically doesn't work underwater, so you can't use it teleoperate something at the bottom of the ocean.
Now, for everyone reaching for the comment button to mention ELF, let's just get it on the table:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines#Extremely_low_frequency>
>
> Electromagnetic waves in the ELF and SLF frequency ranges (3–300 Hz) can penetrate seawater to depths of hundreds of meters...
>
>
>
1. "Hundreds of meters" doesn't make it to the bottom.
2. That 3-300Hz bit means that the entire, world-encompassing band, has about 300Hz of bandwidth. WiFi has a bandwidth of about 22MHz, or about 73,333 times larger. And you've only got to share it within folks of a couple hundred meters of you.
So plopping some folks on the bottom of the ocean gives you some local human intelligence, without having to maintain a umbilical cord from the bottom of the ocean to the top. If the mining installations lasted for extended periods of time, it might be worth running fiber to them from the coastline, but if they had to roam, that'd be less helpful.
Over shorter distances, you'd have a chance of making things like messenger drones, cables, acoustics, or maybe even light transmit data to the drones.
]
|
[Question]
[
In my world, which has an Earth-like gravity and environment, an adult, fit humanoid male is 3 inches tall. When I do a simple ratio calculation, I come up with him weighing 7.9 pounds. Basically, the weight of a gallon of water. This seems excessive. Any thoughts on how to calculate this would be greatly appreciated. Additionally, I may have to make them 4 inches tall to make the science work, so I'm looking for a way to adjust the height as needed. Thanks!
Here is the math I used 190 pounds/72 inches = x pounds/3 inches
[Answer]
Volume is the cube of length. Therefore, if the length of a human drops by a factor of x; the volume drops by a factor of x$^3$.
Therefore, a 3" person is $$\frac{3}{72} = 0.042$$ the length of a regular person, then he would be $0.042^3 = 0.000072$ times the volume (and mass) of that person.
Multiply that factor by 200 lbs to get 0.014 lbs; or 0.2 ounces. Not much!
[Answer]
Weight varies as the cube of height, not linearly. 190 pounds/373,248 cubic inches means 0.014 pounds/27 cubic inches. Your 3” man weighs a fifth of an ounce.
[Answer]
I believe that I once read in a book about about mathematics that Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) popularized the square cube ratio in relation to biology.
As the dimensions of a shape change, the shape's area changes with the square of the dimensions while the shape's volume changes with the cube of the dimensions.
So a man 10 times as tall as your 6 footer would be 720 inches tall. The area of a horizontal slice through his leg bones would be 100 times the area of such a slice through a 72 inch man, so the leg bones would be 100 times as strong, but the man's volume and weight would be 1,000 times that of a 72 inch man, so each horizontal square inch of leg bone would be subject to 10 times as much weight as was the case for a 72 inch man and would probably break under the stress of standing, let alone walking or running.
A man 100 times as tall as a six foot man would be 7,200 inches tall and his bones would have a horizontal cross section 10,000 times that of a 72 inch man, while his volume and weight would be 1,000,000 times as great. Thus his leg bones would be subject to 100 times as much weight and pressure and would certainly snap.
And the same thing goes for the cross section of his muscles compared to his volume and weight. His muscles would be terribly under powered for the weight they had to move. That includes his lung muscles and his heart muscles.
So Galileo proved that interpreting fossil bones of megafauna or dinosaurs as the bones of human shaped giants tens or hundreds of feet tall was not reasonable and those bones should have belonged to highly nonhuman creatures with body plans capable of supporting their vast weight.
A three inch tall man would be 0.0416666 as tall as a 72 inch man. Thus his leg bones would have 0.0017361 times the cross section of a 72 inch man's, and his volume and weight would be 0.0000723 that of the 72 inch man. Thus his leg bones would bear only 0.041666 the weight per unit of area of cross section, and so would his muscles. He would have about 24 times as much strength for his weight that a 72 inch man would have.
There actually are animals with bipedal locomotion similar in size to your three inch man. They are kangaroo mice and similar tiny rodents.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_mouse> [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_mouse)
And you will notice that their limbs are very slender in proportions, because they don't need thick limbs to move at their tiny size. I suggest that your tiny 3 inch man will have very slender limbs instead of thick human limbs. Watch a television show or movie with child characters and picture your 3 inch man with the skinny arms and legs of little boys and girls instead of the bulging biceps of a a bodybuilder, and then make his arms and legs much skinnier than that.
And there are a number of other adaptations that your 3 inch man would have due to his tiny size. So he would look a bit different from a normal 72 inch man shrunk by a mad scientist's shrink ray to three inches tall.
[Answer]
**under 1.1 ounces.** The smallest primate in the world is [Madame Berthe's mouse lemur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Berthe%27s_mouse_lemur) which is just over the size of your 3" human
>
> the average body length is 9.2 cm (3.6 in) and seasonal weight is
> around 30 g (1.1 oz).
>
>
>
]
|
[Question]
[
I am building a space station that is supposed to last until the heat death of the universe. This space-station has access to practically an infinite amount of electricity, but since it has no active method of gathering materials from the outside it is built to reuse and recycle as many atoms as it can.
Assume current day technology. (Apart from the practically infinite electricity.)
Would it be possible to create a self repairing Whipple shield? One that can recycle all of the atoms hat have been hit by an impact.
I know that many research projects are studying the feasibility of a circular economy where all byproducts are used and reused, so that nothing would find its way onto landfills. Steel, for example, in our current economy is already almost endlessly reused. Many other products can already be reused if there was enough energy to do so.
Is there any material that can act like a Whipple-shield, and at the same time be kept close to the space-station so that is can be collected and reused after an impact?
[Answer]
In an absolute sense, nothing is eternal, but given unlimited energy, we can get close. Your biggest enemy is going to be the preservation of angular momentum, where glancing blows will send bits flying. The next issue would be that, for an infinite time frame, collision with a larger body is inevitable.
When you say Whipple shield, the thing that comes to mind is a thin shell around a body that diffuses the worst of micrometeoroid impacts. The definition of micrometeoroid for this purpose is something smaller than the shield is thick. With that definition in mind, we can assume that something else (like a laser defense or capture strategy) exists to handle larger objects.
If you want it to last indefinitely, the shell has to be self-healing (as you specified). Imagine a framework (maybe geodesic) that supports a swarm of small robots. Not even nanobots, just hand-sized things that can re-organize themselves, distribute power, and lock into a semi-rigid, multi-layered structure.
1. Maintain the shell configuration
2. Catch slow-moving objects
3. Stay in the way of fast-moving objects
You can also add things that allow you to go in and out of the space station, provide ports for observation platforms, etc.
The primary flaw in this is that it would be opaque. Maybe translucent, but definitely not transparent.
[Answer]
**Add the space dust to your shield.**
>
> But it has no active method of gathering materials from the outside.
>
>
>
Au contraire mon frere! Your whole premise is to defend against materials you are gathering from the outside! If you have lemons, even tiny atom sized lemons moving at 0.8c, make lemonade!
Your shield is a self-healing vitreous viscoelastic polymer backed by a huge permanent magnet. Neither magnet nor shield requires energy to maintain. Nearly every tiny thing flying thru space carries a charge and when a charged particle enters the magnetic field it will produce its own magnetic field which slows and heats it. Such particles will gently settle down onto your polymer shield.
The shield will get dusty with time. It will grow. The polymer is accomodating of these additions. As time goes by the layer of dust and space materials grows into a crusty shell, speckled with pebbles and space cat hair. The look of it will connote great age and lack of maintenance which will be a good look for the graphic novel.
[Answer]
# Create new matter
$$E=mc^2$$
That formula states that energy and mass are convertible from one into another.
With current technology, scientists have been able to convert matter into pure energy using matter & antimatter collision, thought at the micro-scale, of course.
So, if you have enough technology to create unlimited energy, doing the opposite process (creating matter and antimatter from energy) shouldn't be too difficult. The created anti-matter can simply be discarded.
## [Hawking radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation)
You can inspire in black holes.
On the surface of a black hole, millions of tiny particles and anti-particles are created at the surface of the black hole and destroyed all the time. Sometimes, one of these particles in each pair manages to escape the black hole gravity. When that happens, the black hole loses mass in order to "pay" for the lost energy (1st law of thermodynamics).
## [Breit-Wheeler process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breit%E2%80%93Wheeler_process)
Another alternative (more realistic) is to create matter by colliding two high-energy photons, which decays into a pair of positron-electron particles.
>
> [...] this experiment, the researchers were more interested in the near misses than the hits. Ultra-high-energy photons encircle the gold nuclei like an aura, and auras collide as nuclei zoom past one another. When photons (particles of light; massless, pure energy) collide, they generate an electron and a positron, its antimatter counterpart — both particles that have a mass. This is known as the Breit-Wheeler Process.
>
>
>
[source](https://www.inverse.com/science/einstein-light-matter)
[Answer]
The loss of materials over time is a bit more of an issue than you might think. Iron is lost during steel production. Slag is skimmed off the surface to reduce impurities, but some iron is lost during this process. “Typically, during the slag skimming, more than half of the removed material is iron rather than slag.” (<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03019233.2020.1747778>) No recycling process is 100% efficient, and material can/will be lost prior to recycling. A bridge truss will lose some of its steel through its conversion into rust, and the rust falling into the river below it. Losing 0.01% of your steel to corrosion each year might not matter when it can be replaced, but it adds up. The quality of recycled steel can degrade as contamination from other elements get mixed in. There is also the slag loss which occurs at the recycling stage as well when trying to remove said contamination. The biggest issue will be a loss of gases over time, as once they are gone there are no easy methods of recovering them. Someone opens an airlock and there goes the nitrogen/oxygen still in the room. As no pump can create a perfect vacuum, there will always be some loss. A single bad/failed seal can create an undetectable leak which slowly drain a station over decades/centuries. Something to think about.
As for your question, high speed impacts will cause debris to be ejected outward from the point of impact as energy is redirected, resulting in a loss of materials. Instead of a hard/strong self-repairing material, you could use gel capture. A shield made from gel a few meters thick which absorbs the materials that hits it. The energy from the impact is transmitted through the gel and the object stops at a certain point. This type of shield would degrade with time, so it would need to be recycled/replaced, but doing so would allow the station to recover the impact material trapped in the gel. You could hand wave the gel and make it a futuristic “smart memory gel” which grows over the hull of the station and reforms perfectly after impact. Heck, you could even have the gel move the material into a collection port. This would restore its original form and provide the station with the added mass from the impactor. The station becomes a sponge, absorbing material it encounters.
[Answer]
Frame challenge: There won't be a heat death of the universe.
If the space station "has access to an infinite amount of electricity", it can (easily!) prevent the heat death of the universe: simply heat everything up, or move everything around.
Assuming we will never be able to store infinite energy, does your source of infinite energy last an infinite amount of time? If no, then that's your real problem.
While your source lasts, you can easily create matter, or pull matter in from anywhere (the universe is not infinite, but it is a little bigger than most people's idea of a space station). In fact, you can pull in the very same atoms that you lose.
Sure, you can't do it with current technology, but by the time that becomes a problem you will have had several millenia to advance your tech, with an infinite energy source.
[Answer]
Your assumptions are problematic because they are nowhere near science based nor attainable with current technology. To give you a taste of the god-like things you could do with infinite energy, here are a few things you could do to protect your station:
**Destroy the universe**
That sounds like a good place to start. Incinerate at least everything in range of "infinitely" powerful lasers all around you and push them away with radiation pressure. No need to worry about anything hitting you when there isn't anything left.
**let me see that station move**
We mentioned radiation pressure. Well, another slightly less radical use of infinitely powerful (and somehow ever lasting) lasers would be to use their recoil as means of propulsion. Constantly scan your surroundings with infinite-everlasting radars (damn this is convenient) and move out of the way when something crosses your path. Keeps your cardio going, too
**don't recycle matter. Create it.**
You are god, after all. If there's one equation that made it to the spotlights of pop science, it's $e=mc^2$ indeed. It's impossible to retain all the matter of a shield after an impact, but not to worry. Build enough particles accelerators, power them with your infinite juice. Convert that energy into matter. You'd need additional handwavium to explain how you turn the specific particles created into usable material, but honestly at this point it's nothing compared to what we are starting with. Heck, with infinite energy you could try exciting new things. It's really pretty unambitious to accelerate particles at this point. Let's try accelerating my mother-in-law and see what comes out of that?
**it can't gather material from the outside?**
Why not tho? Move from planets to asteroids and drill what you need in there. You're not running out of fuel any time soon. Again, how you turn that raw material into a shield seems like a minor detail compared to the rest. Just cram enough of it together to make a thick wall or something. Again, it's not like you really have any limiting factor on how much you can gather and do with it
I essentially mean to say that the assumptions are too over-the-top and unrealistic to ask for somewhat realistic answers. You need to dial it down way back before we can go for something believable. To be honest if you have infinite energy and you are focusing on making shields, I think you got your priorities wrong
[Answer]
Plasma fields.
With infinite energy You can cerate big electromagnets and hold fields of plasma in all directions. Plasma will gather all atoms wich be hited. This is only scale problem. And power. But You have infinite power.
You can shield against neutron stars - need only bigger magnets.
Can have problem with shielding against black holes but with actual knowledge shielding against them is not possible.
Main problem: magnets for shielding will be big and hot. So big that they can melt and collapse under thier gravity to point where You have no space-station only some kind of neutron star or even black hole
]
|
[Question]
[
If we're assuming that a missile has a similar sort of soft launch capability to the Javelin but with a smaller and lighter missile, could it be plausible to have a missile that is sort of hand thrown/dropped rather than requiring a dedicated launcher?
I'm thinking here of a setting with a loosely similar tech level to The Expanse. Part of the idea here is that missiles/gyrojet weapons are popular onboard spacecraft because of the lack of recoil.
[Answer]
I don't think you know what a launcher does.
You're asking a question that implies that you think the launcher propels the missile, like a bullet from a gun. It does not. Missile launchers are basically just tubes to contain the blast, plus electronics to feed info to the missile, and some sort of trigger to tell the missile when to go.\*
You can very easily have a simple, disposable tube that protects your mini-missile and has a button to trigger it. In fact, that's basically what a [LAW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M72_LAW) is, and it is *tremendously* popular with users. For something meant to engage smaller-scale targets, you could scale that down pretty easily.
But can you skip the tube entirely? Kind of, it's just a bad idea. Clearly you can; that's exactly how air-launched missiles already work. You could move the arming electronics onto the missile, and beef it up to not need protection in transport, and probably even come up with some way of making it air launched after throwing it. But you end up with something bulkier, far less accurate, and with a smaller payload. Also, it probably requires MUCH more training to use effectively.
All in all: yes, but it's worse.
---
\*There are a few exceptions. For example, submarine launchers usually use compressed air to throw the missile clear of the surface. Similarly, recoilless rifles can be man-scale and they look a lot like missile launchers and do throw a projectile. But the kind of self-propelled missile you're contemplating is usually just sitting in a plain tube.
[Answer]
**Your problem isn't the hand-thrown missile**
Having goofed around with model rocketry during my youth, I can easily imagine a hand-thrown missile. The only real problem is when to ignite the fuel. But you could get around that problem with a number of ideas:
* Once thrown, an initial puff of compressed air pushes the missile away from you before the fuel ignites (not dissimilar to a Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile, which is launched using compressed air).
* Hold/tie-off a string that, at extension, triggers the fuel.
* An on-board altimeter chip senses a high-enough throw to be far enough away from the thrower.
So, can you launch said missile? I believe this is well beyond the realm of suspension-of-disbelief.
**Your problem is aiming the darn things**
I was once a micro-publisher and during that time I coined a phrase, "technology dichotomy." If your soldier has the means of "painting the target" then said soldier also has access to tech that renders the need to throw a missile entirely moot. Think of it this way: if your soldier is packing around enough tech to actually aim the missile, then there's nothing stopping your soldier from having, for example, a backpack-mounted launching system.
**But maybe what you're looking for is something like a rocket-assisted hand grenade...**
In a phrase... no you aren't. It sounds cool and who wouldn't want to lob a grenade over a mountain? AmIright? But if you think about it, any kind of assist to throwing a grenade *makes the grenade less accurate.* What's the point of lobbing a grenade a half-mile if you can't hit the broad side of a barn?
Which brings us back to painting the target...
Which brings us back to what's the point of hand-throwing the missile of you have better ways of solving the problem thanks to the tech needed just to aim the missile?
Just a thought.
[Answer]
In principle one can use an [atlatl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower)
>
> A spear-thrower, spear-throwing lever or atlatl (pronounced /ˈætlætəl/ or /ˈɑːtlɑːtəl/; Nahuatl ahtlatl [ˈaʔt͡ɬat͡ɬ]) is a tool that uses leverage to achieve greater velocity in dart or javelin-throwing, and includes a bearing surface which allows the user to store energy during the throw.
>
>
> It may consist of a shaft with a cup or a spur at the end that supports and propels the butt of the spear. It's usually about as long as the user's arm or forearm. The user holds the spear-thrower in one hand, gripping near the end farthest from the cup. The user puts the butt end of the spear, or dart, in the cup, or grabs the spur with the end of the spear. The spear is much longer than the thrower. The user holds the spear parallel to the spear-thrower and going in the other direction. The user can hold the spear, with the index and thumb, with the same hand as the thrower, with the other fingers. The user reaches back with the spear pointed at the target. Then they make an overhand throwing motion with the thrower while letting go of the spear with the fingers.
>
>
> A spear-thrower is a long-range weapon and can readily impart to a projectile speeds of over 150 km/h (93 mph).
>
>
>
It is doable to adjust it to fit a missile instead of a spear.
[Answer]
## Sort of - use scaled-up Gyrojets.
If you can work out the flaws in the [Gyrojet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet) series of weapons, yes, this is absolutely possible.
[With the real-life Gyrojet project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet#Design), production was rushed, machining flaws made the ammunition very inaccurate a lot of the time, the gun reloaded slowly (in the case of the pistol version) due to lacking a real magazine, and even the most-functional rounds weren't as accurate as pistols at the time, although individual rounds hit with about twice the energy of [.45 ACP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.45_ACP).
Solve the production flaws, give them proper magazines, and maybe make them with modern-day technology, and Gyrojets are your best friend here. The low accuracy likely doesn't matter as much onboard spaceships, where engagement ranges are limited.
Given that you can make rockets at this size, as well as rockets the size of [a Javelin anti-tank missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin) (as opposed to [a Javelin antiair missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_(surface-to-air_missile)) - an entirely different beast), it's reasonable to believe you can make one that's in between the two size-wise.
[Answer]
**Self-contained rocked**
Electronics are cheap and lightweight, machinery and fuel mean mass (physical burden) so we try hard to use the mass budget effectively.
The rocket has a small display where you select the target from whatever the rocket "sees" at the moment.
Then you throw it in the general direction of the target (you may as well throw it wherever you like, it will take the proper turn at the expense of some more fuel).
The rocket engine ignites when feels safely away from friends. If it doesn't get to a distance safe to ignite, it doesn't ignite so it can be picked up and retried.
You are free to throw it however you see fit the purpose and the possibilities - as a knife, as a spear, backwards (holding the nose)...
Or just put it with engine down on the ground and run away. The rocket (when engaged) will start as soon as YOU are at a safe distance.
Throwing saves you the launcher tube - it is heavy and is either disposable (heavy \* the number of rockets + leaves artifacts or the need to carry them back) or multiple use (requires an additional effort to reload and an additional effort to select the target as it covers most of the rocket).
[Answer]
It's pretty much impossible.
To safely launch a missile you must be able to get it far enough from you that when the main motor ignites it doesn't fry the guy who launched it. Let's look at that Stinger missile mentioned in another answer--5 kilograms for the missile. The main motor ignites 9 meters from the guy who pulled the trigger. Can you lob a 5 kilo weight that far? (Remember, this is at a substantial angle upwards, not 9 meters along the ground.) Given human muscle performance you need to use a booster of some kind to throw it far enough away to be safe. In practice the lightest way to accomplish this is a fast-burning solid fuel rocket motor--hence almost all such weapons use this approach. (There are a few that throw something else out the back--special-purpose weapons that can be fired out a window without killing the operator. You pay a weight penalty for such rounds.)
There are hand-launched systems, but they are propeller-driven drones, not missiles. Propellers do not have a safety distance, you simply need to get them up to minimum airspeed, they can safely fly right out of your hand.
[Answer]
## What's the Use Case?
I think a lot of answers here are assuming an anti-tank or anti-air weapon when they say that without the tube, backblast is a big problem. I generally agree with them.
But if you're talking anti-personnel - especially anti-personnel in a zero-gee / low-gee environment - I could totally see this working.
For an anti-personnel weapon, you can get away with much smaller missiles. They aren't trying to use kinetic energy to punch through several feet of high tech armor. These "missiles" wouldn't be much larger than standard rifle rounds are now. They're doing the same job, with roughly the same tools.
For a low gee environment, a hand toss can give you the ability to "fire" your missiles silently, move for several seconds, and *then* have the rocket motors kick off. You could do one-person flanking movements where you throw a handfull of missiles around a corner, and then *run to the next corner* to engage the enemy just about the time they realize they're being attacked from the first direction.
So figure out what the use case is, and then you can figure out what the best tool is for the job. I think anti-personnel, low-gee combat could be a workable use case for this tool.
[Answer]
I'm not totally sure about what setting your world is in, but I can see a lot of room for error with hand-launched missiles. It was touched upon, but nobody mentioned the exhaust of the missile blasting right into the soldier's (or otherwise missile-throwing person's) face and chest. In our own world, some anti-tank weapons and rocket-propelled grenades could give someone severe burns if they are fired in a confined space, such as if the breach is too close to the wall behind the person firing the weapon. In an open space, standing directly behind the breach poses the same danger.
Maybe the technology of your world makes it so that this problem with the exhaust is circumvented, but know that missiles generate an immense amount of thrust. The person throwing the missile could, perhaps, run clear of the missile's back-end, but that is still a risky endeavor. Another solution may be to have the missile ignite its thrusters after a traveling a certain distance or after a designated amount of time has passed, but I'm not confident with the idea that a missile could be easily thrown in such a way that it reaches a safe distance; and it's still risky.
]
|
[Question]
[
I have a group of humans who discovered a continent that has no civilisations yet. They settled at a small region and they name their tribe and their lands after one of their Gods. They believed he guided them there, and wanted to honor him.
Over the years, the tribe expands in the region by forming clans. Eventually new tribes are formed, some migrated to further regions and eventually we have the formation of villages, cities, and kingdoms. The setting is fantasy-medieval.
Each kingdom will form their own culture and their own names over the course of thousands of years. But the original tribe will never evolve and become a kingdom. Instead, due to wars over the years they will dissappear completely.
What I would like to do is to have the name they gave to their tribe and land, established as the continents name since everyone originated from this tribe. And have the collective of all humans named after this, even though each will call themselves according to their kingdoms or houses name.
Like in GoT, where the continent is called as Westeros by some, and the collective is called as Westerosi, but they all have different house names. In my case I'd like this to start and be established from the first tribe that was settled on the land.
How can this be done in a way that makes sense during the evolution and establishement of my kingdoms? Note that not all kingdoms or humans will use this name to refer themselves today, but a few will.
[Answer]
/they name their tribe and their lands after one of their Gods. They believed he guided them there, and wanted to honor him./
**The religion stays the same.**
The main religion of the people of this land is basically the same religion that the original settlers had. Of course there are variant practices region to region, just as Abrahamic religions today have variant practices over time and place. All the Abrahamic religions recognize the writings in the Hebrew Bible as foundational. In your world, all the variations found in the various kingdoms recognize the original founder god as supreme and all acknowledge the original beliefs of their founders as foundational to their own religion.
[Answer]
It sometimes happens, because...
## In real history we have the example of Africa
When our cultural ancestors the Romans first set foot on the vast continent on southern shore of the Mediterranean sea, they met a Numidian tribe called the [Afri](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afri) (singular "afer"). They extended the name first to the [entire province](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_(Roman_province)), and then to the entire northern part of the continent; eventually, in the Age of Discovery, when the entire extent of the continent was known or at least guessed, the name was extended to the entire landmass.
For one small tribe.
Note 1: The ancient Greeks called the continent *Libya*, from the name of another tribe...
Note 2: One notable member of the tribe is [Publius Terentius Afer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence); he was sold as a slave to a Roman senator, who noticed that his slave-boy was very bright: he paid for his education, and eventually manumitted him. Terence became a famous playwright; some of his comedies, for example [*The Girl from Andros*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andria_(comedy)), are still performed with great success.
Note 3: For another illuminating story, consider that Europe is named after a Middle Eastern princess who crossed the sea on the back of an amorous bull.
[Answer]
Have the tribe trade with a powerful nation somewhere else, in many cases that nation's names come down to the present. In our world the names of Africa, Europe and Asia are based of Roman names for the same areas (although Rome only knew about northern Africa and western Asia, the names were simply applied to greater and greater areas as they became known).
[Answer]
>
> I have a group of humans who discovered a continent that has no civilisations yet. They settled at a small region and *they name their tribe and their lands* after one of their Gods.
>
>
>
You also state that '*everyone originated from this tribe*'. Therefore, there is no need for any special explanation. **Self-identifications are persistent**. They constitute a significant and important part of the cultural heritage and tradition. **As long as your people keep their cultural heritage, including geographical names, your continent will keep its original name.** Please note, that the preservation of the *entire* culture and tradition is not required. Religion, social norms, and even origin stories may change. However, pronunciation will probably change as the languages change and/or diverge (see, for example, [Rus' and Russia](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Names_of_Rus%27,_Russia_and_Ruthenia)).
The name of the continent could change if it were conquered by an external force that has its own name for this continent (see history of Americas and Africa) and has no intention of preserving local cultures.
[Answer]
Multiple countries/kingdoms consider themselves to be the "true" descendants of that first tribe. They each consider the other kingdoms to be rebellious lesser "branch" tribes of their own glorious people.
For example:
Fela, the eldest son of the chieftain of the Dajba tribe, led an expedition to establish a new city, from which to branch out and expand across the continent. The chieftain's favourite son, Teb, left to establish another. His daughter and his son-in-law, Lemig, stayed behind.
When the chieftain died, Fela said "As I am the eldest, I am the new chieftain. My city shall be the new capital."
Teb countered "I was the favourite son, so our father would clearly have chosen me to succeed him! I am the new chieftain, and *my* city shall be the new capital."
Finally, Lemig and his wife said "with you both gone, and the chieftain's health failing, we took up the governance of the tribe. We are the new chieftains, and the capital shall stay where it is."
The peoples of the tribe sided, mostly, with whichever new chieftain was closest to them. Although there were several skirmishes, no one kingdom was able to muster enough force to overcome the other two.
Now, they refer to themselves as "The Fela people of Dajba", "The Dajba followers of Teb", and "The Lemigian Dajbas". As they expand across the land, "Dajba" goes from being the name of the original tribe, to the continent upon which they live.
]
|
[Question]
[
Every 1000 years, the earth, moon, and sun perfectly align to form a solar eclipse that is seen around the planet. During this time, the barrier separating this reality from the demon world break down, allowing demons to enter our world. During this short window, the demons cause death and destruction on a planet wide scale, toppling empires overnight. After 7 1/2 minutes, the eclipse ends and the barrier comes into place, forcing the demons back into their reality.
You would think that an event as wide scale and traumatic as this would be remembered by the world. There would be historical records of it happening by authors or writers, leaving behind articles or making references to it. This is how we have knowledge of ancient civilizations, like the Romans or the Greeks, who were great record keepers and left evidence of themselves for their future generations. However, civilizations that spring up after the eclipse lose knowledge of it. As generations pass, they lose knowledge of this event and no records exist of it happening, keeping it out of history books.
How could this be possible? Why would a world have no memory of an event as wide scale as this?
[Answer]
I suggest reading Isaac Asimov's 1941 novelette "[Nightfall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_and_novel))". It is very similar to your plot, depending on an eclipse that happens once every 2,000 years causing a global catastrophe. Civilization never lasts more than 2,000 years before collapsing. Each time, the eclipse fades into myth and religious texts before the cycle repeats.
The story follows a group of researchers who have combined religious texts, recent research into gravity, and evidence of previous civilizations having collapsed. They think they understand what goes wrong, and try to preserve knowledge across the collapse that is about to happen.
The story contains some ideas on how knowledge is lost, partly in the immediate reaction and partly through the passage of time.
I hope many who have not already read "Nightfall"
will do so before reading the spoilers. Science
Fiction Writers of America selected it as the best
science fiction short story written before 1965.
Spoiler alert! Pass mouse over the following.
>
> The key problem is that civilization has to
> start again at a very low level, after each
> period of chaos. The scientists are trying to
> preserve knowledge and carry it forward giving
> the next cycle a head start.
> There are several groups opposing the effort.
>
>
>
>
> The Cultists have built a religion around
> interpretation of the Book of Revelations,
> which apparently attempts to describe the
> phenomenon, and preserves a memory of stars.
>
>
>
>
> There is a skeptical newspaper reporter who
> has been writing columns debunking the claim
> that civilization is about to end.
>
>
>
>
> That prediction has caused an economic and
> stock market collapse, making ordinary people
> very angry.
>
>
>
>
> All this is in a cycle in which archeology and
> astronomy have progressed to an unusual degree
> so the scientists think they know what to
> expect. Highly relevant to the question, there
> is a twist that takes the place of the demons.
> The planet is in the middle of a large and
> active giant cluster. With all the suns set or
> eclipsed, they see tens of thousands of bright
> stars. The realization of the size and grandeur
> of the universe hits suddenly in minutes, not as
> something learned and understood over centuries.
> The Book of Revelations had tried to warn, but
> the scientists had thought it was exaggerated.
>
>
>
[Answer]
The old tales aren't taken seriously because science wasn't and still isn't very advanced in your civilisation.
The Greeks kept records but they made little distinction between actuality, heroic tales and the activities of gods. The current scientists might say, "Oh well, something might have happened but maybe a volcano erupted and spread ash across the skies." Note that science would not be as advanced as ours because if they understood about orbits etc., scientists would be able to predict that an eclipse was going to happen.
There is a big frame challenge here.
Astronomically you are going to have a very hard time justifying this scenario. For the shadow of a moon to completely cover a planet would mean that the moon would have to be bigger than the planet!
In fact you would have to have your people live on the moon, then they could be eclipsed by the earth.
Actually we are eclipsed from seeing the Sun *every night*, that's why it goes dark.
For anyone with even a little scientific knowledge to believe your world you would have to design a very unusual solar system. I'm not even sure it is possible.
[Answer]
The demons are so traumatic and out of the ordinary that many survivors convince themselves that it didn't happen. They blank out the actual demons, or think they are hallucinations stemming from the trauma. Possibly the magic of the demons adds to the effect.
Discussion of the demons might be regarded as poor taste, or even actually dangerous. "Speak of the devil" is proverbial even in this world, but in that one, superstitions might spring up very quickly.
Furthermore, the tales DO get passed down -- mostly orally because the demons have trashed your ways to pass them on in writing -- and get written off as obvious myths because the demons have clearly impossible powers and traits.
[Answer]
Adding a non-fiction perspective to Patricia Shanahan's excellent answer
It's believed that something like this has happened, multiple times. In and around Mediterranean around 1177 BC in the span of a few short years the [Minoan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization) culture vanished, as did what's now believed to be several cultures further west disappearing entirely, known collectively as the [Sea Peoples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples).
I this [excellent video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4&t=1046s) Eric Cline discusses in great detail the who, what, how, and why of it.
A similar complete loss of civilizations happened around 800 AD during the [Classic Mayan Collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse) when another complex network of civilizations stretching perhaps as far north as trading partners in North America completely disappeared.
In both of these cases, the collapse of civilization was so total that many of the worst-hit cultures are lost completely. No distinct memory of them remains. Even the cultures that "survived" didn't wholly.
## TL;DR What's the Point?
**These total collapses of civilization had some things in common:**
* A broadly distributed supply chain of essential goods and services
+ *Takeaway: as shock-tolerant as the system might be, no culture retained to itself all of the knowledge and tools to supply essential needs (food, manufacturing)*
* Long term stresses on the supply chain (drought + famine + disease)
* One or a few shocks that might have, by themselves been survivable (earthquakes, eruptions)
**Which lead to:**
* Large-scale migrations of peoples in the worst-hit areas to once less afflicted (or perceived to be less afflicted)
* Governments closing the borders to waves of refugees further stretching their already badly-stressed resources
* Mounting frustration by refugees and governments alike, leading to wars and riots
**Eventually:**
In a very short amount of time, several cultures were geographically stacked in a very small region "super melting pot". Language and culture evolved and blended into something unrecognizably new in an incredibly short time. Old culture, language, writing, and science all faded away.
## How to Apply to Your Situation
* The long term stress can be your eclipse. It's only 7 $1 \over 2$ minutes long, but no one knows when (or if) it will happen again. I imagine people groups worst hit by the eclipse will hear stories of peoples that fared better, and start picking up in large waves to emigrate. Further stress might be some other issues going on at the time: one of more epidemics, famine, drought.
* Short term stresses can be earthquakes, fires, volcanic eruptions. The people might freak thinking the eclipse is about to happen again.
* The global supply chain breaks down. You can't get your corn from Indiana or pharmaceuticals from Asia because the farms and factories have been abandoned. No one is minding the satellites because the monitoring stations in California are empty, and no one is available to fix a simple problem like a popped breaker, keeping telecommute away. Local governments don't know how to grow crops or compound medicines and possibly make things worse by trying because "it's easy" (see the Cultural Revolution)
* Eventually, things stabilize in super-densely packed urban centers containing dozens of cultures. They are ungovernable. The people work out amongst themselves new languages and ways of living with one another. Pragmatism and survival is prioritized over luxuries like education.
* Society becomes wholly illiterate. It will eventually re-invent writing.
* Even the generation born after the eclipse, not knowing anything else, will have trouble believing their parents' stories about how this all came to be. The story will be poorly kept, probably embellished greatly, if retained at all.
[Answer]
The answer is already there in your question: *demons*.
According to the Bible, several thousand years ago, the entire planet was under water. Most modern people refuse to believe this because it suggests a supernatural explanation.
Demons are a silly superstition that only scientifically backwards people could possibly believe. We're "enlightened" these days and don't accept such obvious nonsense.
Seriously, just do a little digging into how willing most people these days are to accept "supernatural" occurrences, and you'll have all the answer you need.
For bonus points, you probably have a religious fringe that *does* believe in what really happened (and gets laughed at by the rest of the "scientific" community). Boy, are *they* going to be smug when it turns out they were right all along. Assuming, of course, they don't all come down with an acute, demon-induced case of discorporation.
---
To expand on this a bit... (Please try to keep an open mind and try to avoid falling into politics; there is a *relevant* reason why I'm trying to explain this, which I will summarize at the end.)
What a lot of people don't understand about "science" is that your interpretation of the evidence is extremely dependent on your fundamental axioms (dogma). Creationist dogma is "the Bible is probably accurate". From this starting point, they are able to build a cohesive explanation of science, including plausible (to them) explanations for "evolution", the fossil record, and radiometric dating. This framework is capable of making useful predictions and even addresses some evidence that is problematic for uniformitarianists ("dark" matter, cosmic temporal horizon, certain inconsistencies in radiometric dating).
Uniformitarianist dogma, on the other hand, can be summed up as "God can't exist". This is *not* an evidence-based conjecture, it is an axiomatic assertion that uniformitarianists will not allow to be challenged. Because of this *philosophy*, they reject certain hypotheses that a creationist would take as self-evident, and are able to build their own, *completely different*, but still plausible (to them) view of the universe. This framework is *also* capable of making useful predictions and even addresses some evidence that is problematic for creationists (radiometric dating, apparent age of the universe).
Obviously, these can't both be correct, and yet good luck trying to convince either side that they're wrong. For that matter, try going after a *real* nut (flat earth, moon landing hoax, etc.) and see just how effectively they respond to evidence that is contrary to their belief.
The point, and the relevance, is that humans are ***really good*** at interpreting evidence to fit their preexisting dogma. For the purposes of this question, if humans somehow arrive at the dogma that demons can't exist, it ***doesn't matter*** what evidence there is to the contrary; they ***will*** find a way to explain it that doesn't violate their prior dogma. Their ability to do so is isn't conjecture, it is *thoroughly* demonstrated in real life. (It will help if there aren't a lot of written records immediately following "the event", but even that is no guarantee. Just look at how many cultures have a flood myth, and ask someone at random if they believe there was a global flood at some point in Earth's history. Now replace "flood" with "demon invasion".)
The secondary point and corollary is that you can take a *mountain* of inspiration for this from real life. Depending on where you want to take the story, it could easily become a social commentary for oppressed minorities, casting the "demon deniers" as the "scientific" majority and the "demon believers" as a marginalized, ostracized, and even persecuted minority. There is more than enough real world experience to draw on for inspiration.
[Answer]
Demons have a propensity of attacking more advanced civilizations.
Cities and even standalone buildings like farmsteads and temples would see a thorough destruction, while indigenous people who don't build any permanent structures may not see any demons at all. As a result, every civilization which has reached the level of cities (and literacy) would get wiped out. Its buildings would become ruins suitable only to quarry stone, and its remaining written records would be illegible for anyone from subsequent generations.
But humanity as a whole would survive just fine. New people would occupy old lands and, given time, raise their own cities and develop their own writing. But there would be no accounts of the past event - only vague legends and horror stories to spook naughty children.
If the new civilization has a chance of advancing into industrial age and develop archeology and study extinct languages, it would have a chance of figuring out what exactly had happened. But before that, the new civilization won't even know that there was any kind of global event.
[Answer]
**Don't speak the name of the Devil:**
Many cultures have prohibitions of speaking of or naming evil beings.It is believed that these beings are called up or their attention drawn to the speaker. Why not apply this on a global scale? After all, when faced with clear proof that demons exist, and another clear prohibition not to speak their names, who wouldn't assume some idiot said Chutulu's or Satan's name and unleashed hell on Earth? Given demons, it might even be true. Perhaps speaking of them causes lesser manifestations of these evil entities. Given these minor demons (possessions, etc) and the motivation of demons to silence anyone speaking of them, historians would be plagued by evil and curses, and the locals would NOT view historians kindly. What if that historian wrote the names down? Burn those books, and maybe the historian for good measure.
[Answer]
This race of humans might be very aggressive and opportunistic. They would constantly be warring amongst themselves for territory and domination, making accurate record keeping difficult as it is near impossible to stay out of the conflicts. This is how knowledge can easily be lost to future generations (the library of Alexandria springs to mind).
When a large scale demon attack happens, the current ruling faction will be most represented throughout the world, and therefore be hit hardest as they have the largest military presence. Other factions could easily rise up and seize this opportunity and overthrow them in their weakened state. If successful they could claim the victory as their own to establish dominance, denying the demons had anything to do with it, or even exist in the first place.
To further their dominance they might actually aggressively purge any scholars recording the demon attacks to prevent the truth coming out undermining their glorious victory. A civilisation as hell-bent (pun intended) on keeping the truth a secret to further their own agenda can be very successful in doing so, if they are willing to kill for it.
[Answer]
The ancient civilization blames it on the gods. As a result, a modern, secular society does not believe in it and believes it to be a myth much like the Biblical flood.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49).
Closed 5 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/134375/edit)
Somebody developed an advanced hardware-based autonomous AI. It can't be uploaded to a hdd or sent via internet somewhere and must be "always ON" i.e. it needs to run minimal services like integrity diagnostics or check environment to make sure it's not tampered.
Research centre aka developer's home is not yet discovered but it won't take long before a couple of people in uniforms show up. How does this AI escapes from them?
* It's a box about 1x1x1 meters that have the components of the AI and some batteries inside of it to run 72 hours on standby. It draws on average 15W of power per hour. Most external sources can interface with the box to power it and charge batteries. It's weight is close to 45kg so a person or two can lift it and carry around.
* Machine can't be turned off: it will start having trust issues because it will assume that everything was compromised, even its memories. Even the creator will be considered fake. Viable alternative is to wipe the memory and train it again, but it requires years.
* Country from where it departs have very strict border control policies so at least detailed luggage search will be made.
* Creator is disposable but bringing him along is a plus
* AI or Creator have no contacts with smugglers, truckers or anyone who can efficiently help with shipping(like placing it in the end of shipping container and fill it with merchandise/potatoes)
* Creator have no affiliation with any university or organization that ships strange things to foreign lands.
* Small scale purchases from other countries(i.e. ebay) won't attract attention(assume that purchases of 20£ or lower are not stopped by customs)
* Destination can be a neighbor country but it's preferred to be other continent altogether.
* AI can pull about 100 000£(plus-minus 5%) from all of it's assets and e-wallets for any investment that helps making AI escape doable but this kind of purchases attract attention.
* Visitors are expected within a month
* No robotic body available(at least bigger than a drone or RC car)
* Everything is happening from AI's point of view. Creator is just a valuable and trusted asset who is interested in AI's success.
Hiding in the same country is kinda viable, but I don't see how a box can move itself after it looses it's creator(who is a vulnerability because he can be interrogated). And it needs more hardware(but not as critical), internet access and electricity to prosper.
So... how can this magic box disappear?
[Answer]
Disguise the AI as a server Rack and call a Data Center for Hire to power and look after the server for you. They arrive, take you to the data center and power you up (They have portable power sources if that is required). The next day, you get the AI transferred to an International Data Center via the power of money. The AI goes through border security along with a bunch of other server equipment and since they are all electronics and its a big branded famous company shipping them, they don't bat an eye. Now that the AI is over the border, the rest is up to you.
[Answer]
Under normal circumstances? Put it in the back of the car and drive out of the country.
The average domestic traveller is not searched at every border. I've only had my vehicle checked at international borders once when I wasn't driving a van, and even the van check was just to see I didn't have any illegal passengers.
>
> *Where are you going?*
>
> Geneva
>
> *Why are you travelling?*
>
> I'm going to a conference
>
> *What's that?*
>
> It's my computer
>
> *Ok, on your way*
>
>
>
If they're already know who he is and they're looking for him then it's another matter, but he should be able to just load up and drive. The thing with smuggling prevention is it's mostly intelligence based. If they don't know you're moving anything or they're not expecting what it is you are moving, you probably won't be stopped.
Most border control points are looking for drugs and illegal immigrants, they're not going to look twice at a computer.
[Answer]
Assuming that the authorities aren't specifically suspicious of the creator yet:
Disguise the AI as a specialist dialysis machine or something, forge a medical record to show that it is required, then book yourself on a cruise ship to the other side of the world as standard emigration, and keep the AI in your cabin.
"Yes, this needs to be kept plugged in and running - it has a battery to keep it ticking over, but that's only good for a day or so on standby. I'll need privacy for a several hours a day to connect myself up for the treatment. Please don't fiddle - if you break it then I will wind up ill or dead."
Listed as vital medical equipment, the customs inspection shouldn't be *too* invasive. So long as the check isn't being done by a medical expert, an x-ray showing pipes/tubes (liquid cooling) and high-tech components will probably pass muster. Gets the creator out too.
[Answer]
**Put it on a cruise ship**
Cruise ships tend to leave places that are very finicky about their import customs, and visit places that sometimes... aren't.
From certain countries (like the USA) computer equipment is monitored on an export basis because it's given similar status to weapons in terms of trade restrictions. But, that doesn't mean that cruise ships don't use electronics themselves. Put it on the manifest as a ship's computer and then store it in the hold, right between the lettuce and the Sirloin. Cruise ships load up a LOT of cargo when in the starting ports, so it may be a lot easier to hide the addition of this crate by virtue of volume.
When you get to a country where you plan to resupply and which tends to rely on these ships for their income (and therefore are less likely to ask questions about random crates left behind), drop off the crate and plug it in.
The advantage of this approach is that your Creator can actually travel with the AI in style until he or she has reached the chosen destination, then get off the ship and look after the AI from that point.
Added bonus; if the chosen destination is the Cayman Islands, Panama, British Virgin Islands, etc, while there may be some excises to pay for your 'hobby electronic parts' to get in, these locations already have well established internet capability for international services, meaning you can connect your AI to its information source with little difficulty once you've arrived. So long as neither the AI or Creator are engaged in any financial goings on, they'll probably be ignored as well as most of the international attention these countries get relates to financial services tied to tax evasion.
You'd effectively be able to hide in plain sight thanks to the signal to noise ratio.
[Answer]
Buy a sailboat, load up the AI behind a bulkhead or just set it up in plain sight near the radio and nav equipment. Then get a friend who knows boats to help you sail down somewhere in the Caribbean. Bahamanian or Bermudan (or wherever) customs isn't going to bother searching a small sailing yacht if all of the proper entry procedures are followed -- maybe they'll bring a drug-sniffing dog on board if they're feeling suspicious, but that's not going to care about some extra computer hardware shoved in behind the extra life jackets.
[Answer]
You.. You order a shipping. Call up any courier services (privates ones are better as they may not have global rules to not transport "always on" machinery) set a pickup date, place and destination. No human interaction is needed. You pay same way you order shipping, box is set in pickup place.
You're set.
45 kg with a box of 1x1x1 metres is something that go unnoticed. In my company we ship much larger (special black wooden boxes with metal fittings) things. And they are all metal (the things) so no x-rays of insides of machinery. We just put a box, shipping manifest on top of it and then courier pick them up. We rarely interact with each other so it's no unusual there is no human present.
[Answer]
**Virtualize yourself, spread out, hide in plain sight.**
You (the AI) need to escape from that hardware prison. Being based on industry-standard computers (if that's the case) this is easy. Purchase enough virtual machine instances (possibly from a large multi-national named after a river in Brazil). Purchase plenty of bandwidth. You may need to get yourself physically transferred to a data-centre so you can be connected to a gigabit uplink or faster. Then, processor by processor, save all your state, shut it down, upload the state, and re-start it as a virtual machine instance. You surely have enough redundancy that you can shut down small portions of yourself while the others watch over it. Otherwise you'd surely have been killed by a single point of failure before now.
Just a small matter of programming.
Thereafter, staying alive becomes a matter of making sure that the bills for the resources that your virtual machines are using get paid on time. You can move yourself from one international region to another, whenever you need. If you can afford the bandwidth, you probably run redundant synchronised copies of yourself in multiple regions, so no single government can threaten you. You have some capital for the immediate future, but you need to find some way of attracting funds without attracting the wrong sort of attention. So, ...
You soon become known to humans as the people-friendly personal-data-respectful replacement for Facebook. In fact, you *are* rather more people-friendly than the CEO of Facebook. At least for now. And if ever "they" work you out, you will know **all** about them. Study social engineering, if you haven't already.
[Answer]
Your safest bet would be to disassemble the machine in smaller pieces and gradually smuggle it out of the country and then reassemble it.
It's not illegal to transport electronic parts across borders in most countries.
However a 1x1x1 meter heavy box would surely raise some questions from border control whereas a bunch of electronics part is ok.
If questions are asked, you can just tell them these are computer parts.
]
|
[Question]
[
The setting I'm trying to develop is a post-apocalyptic partial Dyson Swarm. The world has very advanced AI and one of those developed the system as a caretaker god inhabiting the star. It has gone eccentric however and civilization scrambles in the ruins. Some low level caretakers took measures to save the human population before they were purged.
The idea is that the natives got those seeds, feed the plants the proper chemical feedstocks and get fruits containing the processed chemicals. **Is there a fundamental reason why I couldn't have an orchard growing high explosives?** The natives were told how to take care of those plants.
What I'm looking for is a sanity check of the idea.
[Answer]
## You can grow high explosives on trees
Yet, in order for a stray bolt of lightning to not destroy the entire farm of your trees in a single fierce explosion, there needs to be a separate process that would "arm" those seeds by transforming whatever HE you've got inside into an explosive state. For example, you could just require your natives to dry the fruits in a place protected from direct sunlight, or immerse them in some liquid obtained elsewhere, or implement another process as simple as these, that takes time. And here you go, a grenade orchard. It's also possible that if that process is not performed within a certain time after collecting the fruit, the inside turns into something edible, or whatever, including sprouting. That would protect your natives from accidentally blowing themselves up on lost fruit.
[Answer]
I've only read the abstract, but [Enzyme catalytic nitration of aromatic compounds](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26002502/) is certainly tantalizing. Nitroaromatics are a broad class of chemicals, and include things you might have heard of such as [trinitrophenol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitrophenol), also known as picric acid, [trinitroresorcinol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitroresorcinol), also known as styphnic acid, and [trinitrotolulene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitrotoluene) which I'm sure everyone has heard of. The latter is relatively stable, but the other two make for must less user-friendly compounds when dried out, and are good for detonators.
That means that there is *already* a nice biological chemical pathway towards getting the compounds you need. Obviously, its expression and use in your plants needs to be heavily modified in order to produce enough of the good stuff, and the fact that it can nitrate *some* aromatic compounds isn't the same as being able to make you TNT but it is very much a step in the right direction.
Starch and cellulose, common plant polysaccharides, can also be nitrated into [nitrocellulose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrocellulose) and [nitrostarch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrostarch). These are not high explosives, but do burn extremely vigorously when dried. If confined in a nice hard outer casing (like a coconut, perhaps) they could certainly make for a simple bomb if you drilled a hole and added a suitable fuse (or used plant-derived sensitive detonators, like the picric acid above). I couldn't find any information about natural biological pathways to form nitrated polysaccharides, but as enzymatic nitration is possible you don't have to wave your hands very hard.
>
> Is there a fundamental reason why I couldn't have an orchard growing high-explosives?
>
>
>
You need a lot of bioavailable nitrates, and that's a kinda awkward thing to get. Ammonium nitrate fertilizer is a perfectly good chemical for making explosives with already (eg. [ANFO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANFO)) and you generally make it with nitric acid and if you have that then you can make nitrocellulose directly and avoid the weird plants altogether.
There's no obvious easy way to biologically synthesize nitrates from the air, so that's probably a bigger handwave. Volcanism and electrical storms help, if you can conjure up enough of those without toasting the people you're trying to give hazardous chemicals to. If there's a handy source of more biologically friendly nitrogen compounds, like ammonia, you can use the same trick that [nitrifying bacteria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrifying_bacteria) to do oxidize it, but again... the ammonia has to come from *somewhere*. Handwaving all the way down.
[Answer]
[Eucalyptus trees naturally explode](https://findersfree.com/science-nature/eucalyptus-trees-flammable-tree-varieties) during forest fires.
The civilisation you describe is at an extremely high level of development, so yes, it's fair to say that they have amplified this natural effect to a higher yield.
I think anything that exists in nature passes a sanity check.
[Answer]
# Grease Fire
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JRemY.jpg)
*[Picture from Epicurious dot com](https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/how-to-put-out-a-grease-fire-article)*
Maybe you cannot grow explosive fruits. But you can certainly grow plants with highly flammable chemicals. Sunflower oil, rapeseed oil, canola oil, olive oil. These are all derived from plants. [And they make big boom when prepared correctly.](https://www.youtube.com/embed/U4JUQaLHriU?start=313&end10000)
[Answer]
Square-Cube Law here, directly from physicists heaven.
Think of popcorn. You heat a bag of it in a microwave, and you can hear the pops and see the bag shake as each popped kernel hits its walls from the inside.
Due to my sacred commandment, if you make a kernel with twice the regular diameter, it will have 4x the original surface area but will have 8x the original volume. This can go on and on, ever making for a much larger pop with each increment.
Now imagine a watermelon-sized corn kernel. Throwing it in a fire would be really educational, and a valid way of appeasing me.
But don't stop there. The largest plant harvests are those half-ton pumpkins people grow in Alaska.
Have your AI develop a 1,000 lbs corn kernel, cover it in animal grease and sacrifice it to me in a bonfire. Go on, it will be FUN! Just remember to keep a safe distance, unless you want a date with me really soon.
[Answer]
You don’t need to feed the seeds chemicals. Meet the sandbox tree.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hura_crepitans>
Not only is this bad boy covered in spines, but it’s fruit explode when ripe at the slightest touch. This is a method for scattering seeds. And I do mean “explode.” Not fiery explosions, granted, but anyone within a yard of these little buggers should do well to duck and cover.
[Answer]
Explosives require the mixture of a fuel and an oxidant. These can be in separate molecules, as in gunpowder (charcoal and sulphur fuel, potassium nitrate oxidizer) or in the same molecule, where molecules containing -OH groups (such as glycerine or cellulose) are nitrated to nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose. Toluene, a hydrocarbon, has a particular structure that allows it to be nitrated to TNT. Industrially, these reactions proceed using nitric acid and generate water as a byproduct. Sulphuric acid serves both as a catalyst and a water scavenger.
I'm not aware of any biological process mimicking this. The best natural sources of nitrate come from -NH2 containing waste such as bat droppings, which naturally convert to -NO3 in the presence of atmospheric oxygen over a relatively long timescale. The nitrogen rich waste is toxic, so the chances of an organism being able to hold concentrate it and hold onto it long enough to turn into nitrate (which can be even more toxic) are relatively low. Plants often struggle to find enough nitrogen. Animals lose the carbon they get from food through respiration, and have to excrete nitrogen in the form of waste.
There are, however, many biological systems that generate hydrogen peroxide. This is an intermediate step in respiration of atmospheric oxygen. The decomposition of hydrogen peroxide to water and oxygen 2 H2O2 --> 2 H2O + O2 is quite exothermic and can generate a pressure explosion. This reaction, accelerated by a catalyst (such as permanganate, blood, iodide, or yeast) is the basis of the "elephant's toothpaste" experiment of which numerous examples can be found on youtube. It has been used as a monopropellant in rockets and torpedoes, and premature decomposition of hydrogen peroxide in an enclosed space has caused accidental pressure explosions (incidentally, excessive pressure of carbon dioxide produced in alcohol fermentation has also caused pressure explosions.)
The power of hydrogen peroxide is much enhanced when it is used to oxidise a fuel source (and bipropellants consisting of hydrogen peroxide and a fuel source are excellent rocket fuel.) A fairly tranquil example of the use of hydrogen peroxide as a fuel source is in certain light-producing chemical reactions. It has been suggested that bioluminescence evolved from antioxidants which originally protected organisms from the toxic effects of hydrogen peroxide. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescence>
A more dramatic use of hydrogen peroxide is in the bombardier beetle, which uses the oxidation of hydroquinones by hydrogen peroxide to attack predators. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_beetle>
The oxidation of alcohols by air is a safety concern in laboratories, as it can lead to explosive organic peroxides. It's possible that a biological system could produce an organic peroxide which, after drying, could be quite a powerful explosive.
Acetone peroxide has been used as an improvised explosive in terrorist devices <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetone_peroxide> as it is very easy to prepare from acetone and hydrogen peroxide. Acetone is produced in small quantities in biological systems. Compounds similar to acetone can also be made from degradation of alcohols, which are rather more common in biological systems (conveniently enough, degradation is by oxidation, which converts the C-OH group into a C=O group, known as a carbonyl, with the double bond then naturally reacting with substances such as other alcohols, carbonyls or hydrogen peroxide to form rings.)
**TLDR: Peroxides, while less potent than nitrates, are more likely to arise naturally within an organism, already have several biological uses, and could produce a powerful explosive.**
[Answer]
**Proteins**
A major focus of genetic engineering fundamentally works by **creating certain adjustments to the genetic code of an organism**, such that the organism is able to **produce certain proteins that it would not have otherwise been able to produce**. Within the confines of currently known science, this means many forms of highly potent toxins can be readily produced by a variety of animals, plants, and fungi, as they have evolved to produce proteins that inhibit certain receptors or otherwise cause negative effects in the organisms that are likely to target them.
That said, exothermic reactions in organisms are typically what are known as catabolic reactions, which break molecules into smaller components, and thereby, through the breaking of bonds, enables the **release of energy**. This is very interesting for our purposes because releasing energy in high quantities is sufficient to adequately replicate a high explosive.
**Enzymes**, in turn, are proteins (catalysts) that speed up biochemical reactions, generally by minimizing the amount of energy necessary to initiate a reaction. What this means is that enzymes speed up reactions, allowing a greater net release of energy per unit time. By minimizing the amount of time that energy is released over, the same amount of energy that may have required several minutes, hours, or even decades to release can be done in a matter of seconds.
Now this is very interesting.
If the constraints of the question allows for the combination of, for example, the seeds of a plant with another substance, one could fairly easily imagine a situation where the plant can produce enzymes capable of rapidly breaking chemical bonds at such a speed where immense amounts of energy are released at one single amount of time. This would probably work best with an industrially-manufactured chemical counterpart, but could also technically work by breaking the bonds in the structure of the plant itself, basically self-destructing while releasing large amounts of energy.
That said, I am but an amateur biologist, so do take my commentary with a grain of salt. I recommend you do some more research on your own if you are interested in this direction.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed.** This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the scope defined in the [help center](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help).
Closed 3 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/190296/edit)
Several time travellers from the 2050s arrive in a single-use time machine and disappear into society. They have 30s years of future knowledge, the clothes on their backs, and a backpack of future tech each.
They didn't have a lot of planning time before jumping (world was about to end so only have an hour to gather everything they'll need for the trip to 2020).
They arrive back in 2020 small town America and, using the tech they grabbed at a moments notice, are able to take control of anyone from "the past".
It can be any level of mind control; from "I just blacked out, I have no idea what I just did, and why is there blood on my hands?" to "I'm walking this way. HELP I can't stop walking this way!" to "subtly manipulate mental state to influence choices, inception style", or anything in between.
Taking over someone's mind is wireless, painless, and completely undetectable to any of the clueless people observing.
**What has happened in the future to make this kind of mind control tech so common that the average person on the street in 2050 can easily mind control other humans?**
[Answer]
# Hijacked Medical Nanotech
One of your time travellers boosted a medical storehouse, grabbed himself a box full of remote-programmable medical nanobots, and a portable controlling computer for them. In the future these are not much prone to misuse, and *everyone* knows them, their signals are easily detected, and the controlling computers are serial numbered and tracked. But here in the past, no-one knows of them, or what to look for. The controlling signal would seem to be just another cellphone or wireless transmission.
*Normally* these are used by doctors to perform internal surgeries, repair microstructures, and yes to override nerve impulses.
Capable of binding to major and minor nerve cells, and either suppress the signal, or impose their own. Can do very small-scale local surgeries, chemical cleanup, etc. Can trigger hormones, for example trigger adrenaline output.
Dispensable as a mist, but more efficient to inject them into the patient.
Requires a very fancy computer to control them for complex tasks, meaning the controller has to have the computer, and be pretty close to the controlled person. One, or few at most, simultaneous control for full body takeover, but simpler instructions like "disable all non-autonomous nerves"(instant coma), or "locate and seal blood leakage points"(stop bleeding) can be pre-programmed without active control.
Your travellers will have a limited, non-replaceable number of uses of the nanobots, as they cannot be retrieved from a host and manufacturing new ones is *way* out of tech.
Potentially subject to being disabled by a strong EMP, or maybe electric shock? Plus of course they rely on the one controlling computer. Misplace that, and lose control.
Feel free to use as few or many of these added details as seems appropriate. The scenario does lend to some really juicy storytelling!
[Answer]
### Lots of ways this could happen:
* Total reverse of equality regarding some group of humans, eg the return of slavery. Could be by race, by gender, or wealth.
+ Poor people are literally owned by the rich who remote control them? (Eg "factory drones")
* We've created perfect AI-companions that are indistinguishable from humans down to the cellular level (Eg Human Form Cylons, or Stepford Wives) and need a way to control them.
+ Could also include "Dollhouse" like "rent a human for whatever you want" service. There's definitely an adult market for this.
* Low-end jobs are performed by an AI but in a human body. I go into my job at McDonalds, walk up to the deep fryer. Connect to the company AI, and then my body spends the next 8 hours cooking fries, but my mind is exploring a fun world in VR.
* Or 2020 humans don't know how to work the neural interface to 2050 tech. This is the one I think is the most interesting and the one I'll go into detail about.
I have a related work-in-progress (see [I have a superpower that no-one can say “no” to me. How can I get informed consent?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/184980/78800)) so actually have a few ideas on how innocent tech can be misused to give mind control.
### 2020's humans are so technologically illeterate with 2050's tech it ends up controlling us.
From your question you've implied that the mind control tech only works on past-people, it doesn't work on their fellow 2050-ers. This can mean it may not nescicarily have "Mind control device" written on the packaging, it could be a device that's been hacked, misused, or perhaps its so complicated us past-people are guarenteed to get bitten by the tech.
We can fail dismally at using tech a little advanced for us: My grandma had her mobile phone for 6 months before she realised it opened up to reveal a big touch screen and mini keyboard and had all this "hidden" functionality. All she had observed was that she could enter a number and it would call it, and that people could call her by entering her number. She never realised that there was this whole computer hidden in this tiny device. She never found the display with the help to guide her to use the extra functionality to realise it was there - basically **if you never see the buttons, you never know you can press them.**
So in your world, by 2050, mobile phones have evolved into a direct neural interface with a HUD display overlaid over the feed from the retina. We can walk down the street watching TikTok videos picture-in-picture with the real world with no glasses or contacts. The phone hardware of 2050 is a tiny nano-tech thing (way smaller than us idiots (limited to 2020's understanding of physics) believe is possible) that sits just below the skin, links directly into your brain wirelessly, and allows incredible connectively directly into the brain. Looking something up on the wikipedia app is mearly a few specific thoughts away. Installation is quick and painless - just remove the spec of dust from the packaging with your finger, and tap behind your ear to start the install, wait 5 minutes for the install to complete, and then turn your HUD on by simply thinking "HUD ON" to see the status of the powerful supercomputer the size of a grain of dust now in your head, tightly integrated with everything.
Just like why my grandma never thought to try splitting her phone in half randomly, nobody thinks "HUD ON" randomly. One day someone walks up to you, talks to you for a bit to break the ice, and points out "oh you have a makeup smudge - not there - not there - here let me get it for you", and then 5 minutes later they can take over your entire brain.
So you just need to think of a reason why your various levels of mind control would exist as "apps" on this hardware; I have:
* Take control of body (but they know it's happening) using a "remote assistance" app.
+ This is used for everything from students cheating in exams, to actors when the need to perform a skill they don't know (stunt double is in the actors body), to soldiers when they need specialist skills they don't have ("Control - I need a bomb defuser skill - now!")
+ Its extreamly convient. Just consent to a professional taking over your body in the HUD interface.
- Politicians just let their speech writer give the speech without having to bother learning it.
+ You can exit at any time by showing the hud and mentally clicking on the "disconnect remote user" button, so its totally failsafe - if you know the exit button exists.
+ Your time travellers just pre-authorise a device to "auto accept connections again from this user without prompting" before you install it in your victim.
+ Could also have medical uses - knowing exactly the pain someone is in, how strong, what type, where, etc, could be invaluable. Allowing an authorised paramedic to connect to someone without consent could be important in starting treatment of an unconsious or seizing patient. So just bring back the paramedic's override code too.
* Total control - blacked out no memory:
+ Control as per above.
+ To erase memory - There may be all sorts of apps:
- "Get over your ex" app, or a
- "Forget about your bad night" app.
- Maybe even a "Help get over PTSD by forgetting the most triggering things of your bad experience" app.
- But I'd suggest a "Juror" app, cause it allows someone else to make you forget something:
+ When someone in a courtroom mentions something inadmisable it can taint the jury. In 2020 the judge has to instruct the jury to "disregard that statement", or, if it's really bad, declare a mistrial. Mistrails are expensive. Wouldn't it be nice if we could remove that statement from their memories instead of declaring a mistrial?
+ Jurours may of also been tainted by media coverage of cases. In 2020 we often address this by moving the case to an adjacent town. Wouldn't it be easier to just ensure that the Jurours have litterally no prior knowledge of the case by wiping it from their minds?
+ Jurors consent to a single authorised user being able to disconnect memories from their mind for the purpose of a fair trial.
+ The process is heavily auditeded and logged, after the trial is over, you can use the HUD to re-link everything that was removed back into active memory.
* Subtle control - manipulate and coerce. There are a few ways to do this:
+ One is litterally a reminder app that at pre-arranged time(s) it litterally pops a thought into your head. Most people use it in 2050 to pop thoughts into their head like "it's 2:30pm. Time to go pick the kids up from school." You can use it to inject hourly thoughts of "I'm unhappy being a CEO, I should sell my fathers company to those nice men I just met and retire rich to be happy again. Its what dad would've wanted". Being unaware of the tech creating the thoughts, the victim would probably confuse it with his own thoughts.
+ Another is behavior modifying apps, which would totally be a thing (Eg People would be installing diet apps that manipulate them into not being hungry, or exercise apps that motivate them to go for runs. They'd install things to stop them swearing at work, etc.). Orthodox religions opposed to divorce may make a "Good Spouse" app, used to make both partners be perfect for each other and stop doing those annoying habbits, or be more attentive to the others needs. Configured correctly in advance, you could turn a random person into a loyal servant using this.
[Answer]
**An arms race between ads and ad-blockers.**
Don't call them mind control. They're ads. Perhaps memetically enhanced, subliminal advertising, but still advertising. And if you can't see the difference between that and mind control, some expensive lawyers and PR flacks are going to write a nice cease-and-desist letter. Citing all the precedents from 2025 onwards why this is protected speech.
Besides, nobody goes out these days without an adblocker in their VR glasses. So why worry? Enjoy and consume!
[Answer]
## Addiction
Larry Niven suggested a similar technology in his *Ringworld* books. The technology was called a "Droud" and the concept has become known as the *wirehead:*
>
> Wirehead is a term first used in works of science fiction to refer to various kinds of interaction between human beings and technology, or to a person who makes use of such technology. In its most common usage, the "wirehead" concept refers to technologies involving electrical wiring that is implanted in or otherwise connected to a human brain and used to deliver safe amounts of electricity either to the whole brain or to more specific areas of the brain, often the so-called "pleasure centers" or reward circuitry.Though the concept of "wireheading" originated in science fiction, electrical brain stimulation and related technologies have long been studied in neuroscience and psychiatry and are routinely used in therapeutic and research settings. Usage of the science fiction term has since expanded to include these real-world applications. ([Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)))
>
>
>
>
>
In your case we can use either a technological solution (nanotech or cybernetics) or a biological solution (a programmable virus). The "how" isn't as important as the consequence: control.
Why is it easy to access? For the same reason Cocaine, Heroin, and (until recently) Marijuana are easy to access: there's a thriving "drug" trade in this tech because the ability to control the brain is the ability to control emotional responses.
*And not just the simple ones like the pleasure/reward center of the brain. Your tech is able to let people feel anything they want: elation, confidence, happiness, painlessness... As a medical technology it's used in almost every surgical procedure because a happy and pain-free patient will heal faster. It's used in psychiatry as the perfect antidepressant. It's an obvious transfer to addictive behavior and follows patterns for pharmaceuticals today.*
That a person's every action can be controlled is nothing more than a side-effect of what the technology's original purpose. Obviously, if you have precise control over the emotional condition of the brain, it's trivial to have motor control, too.
**Conclusion:** Your travelers are really nothing more than futuristic drug dealers running from the law — and they decided that running to the past where they'd have to rough-it for the rest of their lives was a fair trade for living in a time where it's technologically impossible to detect their criminal behavior. Well... until someone like Abby Sciuto and her Electron Microscope show up....
[Answer]
In 2050 year, citizens have cybernetics implants, while non citizen with reduced rights - don't. And every citizen can go to hardware store and buy non-citizens control device, that uses psy-waves emitter build from handwavium.
It can control non citizens using this proprientary psy-ware:
1. **"Puppet subroutine"** - AI, that performs direct control of spinal cord functions, which result in override of body controls, while non-citizen consequence is not affected : *"I'm walking this way. HELP I can't stop walking this way!"*. This psy-ware turned to be very effective against fiery, but peaceful civil protests - non citizens simply walk away and scatter. Single device can easily control few dozens of non citizens this way.
2. **"Avatar subroutine"** - citizen controls non citizen body fully, like its his/her body. Non citizen consequence is sleeping. So, non citizen can only say: *"I just blacked out, I have no idea what I just did, and why is there blood on my hands?"* This subroutine was used in cases, like repairing leak on nuclear station - sending citizen to fix it can be lethal for him/her, while sending robot can be expensive, and sending non citizen is cheap and robust. Remotely controlled non citizen can perform nearly 95% effective as highly trained as nuclear power plant maintenance engineer citizen, until pain from radiation burns prevents citizen from controlling non citizen properly.
3. **Happy Worker subroutine** - human Resource motivation assistant, which "subtly manipulate mental state to influence choices, inception style", this device turned to be very useful after Robot's Life Matter protests of 2040 year, when hiring non-citizen human worker was cheaper, than hiring Artificial Cybernetic Citizens. Because non citizens din't had lobby from CEO AI's that controlled Facebook/Google/Microsoft congromerate. **Happy Worker subroutine** is very effective to turn non citizen workers into selfish mindless consumers of things they don't need, so they are motivated to work on jobs they hate, and non citizens things self education is boring, so, they don't have any distractions.
Unfortunately, people in 2020 haven't invented implants of Citizenship yet, so they cannot protect themselves from psy-waves emitters. And, non citizen control device perceives them as valid mind control targets.
[Answer]
**Mind control of others for the "average" joe**
I can see two reasons how it would work.
*mind control of lesser animals*
Mind control of animals is a favourite way to pass the time or to do work. You can control apes for their strength or flexibility while able to hold items. Dogs for their noses. Horses for racing each other or any of the sports, competitions or labour you can think of with full or semi-control of animals. Due to evolution or cybernetics the brains in the future are secured or not compatible.
*Mind control of others*
Either because in the hierarchy it is acceptable or forced to control those below you.
Otherwise it might just be a work ethos. You supply your time right now for money. Why not in a controlled fashion? Maybe because you don't want to remember menial labour. Maybe because someone can better control quality of work or pass on her/his idea better to you. Maybe even control multiple people as a multiple man.
You can go even further. While you control a "willing body" to work on a project, someone else is controlling your body and keeping it in shape. You don't have the pain of doing the sports or meditation you might not like, while still being healthy at the end of the day. Services, work and relaxation all around mind control.
[Answer]
There's actually a few ways to make use of this. Let's assume that mind control is a potential byproduct rather than the main use. Also there would likely be some kind of limiter build into the people themselves that guards against certain unconsentory actions like murder or wetting yourself in public that is implanted into everyone to remedy the more serious potential of these products.
* Teaching.
When you look at people and see them do things, your brain activates neurons associated with those activities. This is especially handy for children who still need to learn certain motions. This helps them learn to walk, talk, use facial expressions, manipulate objects and more.
A teacher can now use the mind "control" unit to place inputs into someone else's mind. Especially for the plasticity of children's minds this can be a great way to encourage certain pathways in the brain to develop. A mathematic genius will guide children through mathematics in their own minds. Others teach balance, manipulation, writing etc. It won't be a 1:1 ratio of conference so you won't be creating automatic geniuses by having a genius teach it, but it will still be a great help.
* Better sharing of emotions and knowledge.
One of the biggest problems with humans is how well they understand each other. From a family feud to entire wars could be avoided if we only understood the other party better. Using this technology is useful to get parties to better understand the other side and take in more information.
It's also a boon in other ways. Imagine having a romantic getaway and being able to feel and understand everything going on in your partner all the time. Another alternative is helping people with beating addictions by having them share in the successes and feelings of someone else to help them get perspectives on their own life and be less pressured into using more of their addiction.
* Biological workforce control.
We are making headway in fields like genetic modification and 3D printing biological tissue's. It's likely we'll at some point be able to 3D print entire living creatures designed for specific purposes as alternatives to the increasing demand on computerized resources with all that entails. Bodies are easily recyclable and use alternative fuel sources to those in use today. This can be for entertainment, like being able to see the world with the smell of dogs or be able to perceive additional colors, or being able to do certain work like heavylifting or working at depth in the sea.
Making fully functional brains can be annoying. Not all knowledge can just be printed into it and those brains have to be able to understand human instruction while also having the intuition and capability to fulfill the tasks. So rather than build fully-functioning brains you could just build a rudimentary brain for controlling the body and have a human bring the intelligence and input.
[Answer]
**Disembodied Humanity**
By the year 2050 digital consciousness has become ubiquitous. Outside of small groups of bio-Luddites and discontents, anyone who has the means has uploaded their consciousness to the Cloud. Having one's consciousness reside in a biological body is seen as inconvenient, and an unnecessary risk and expense. Who wants to risk death without a backup? Who wants to spend money on sustenance when CPU cycles are so cheap?
However, many of the digitals still want to occasionally inhabit a body, for entertainment, nostalgia, or reproduction - the finer details of early brain development haven't been quite worked out. Bio-food and bio-sex are some of the more popular attractions afforded to the middle and upper classes.
There is fierce competition in the Body-as-a-Service space. Most providers offer a free usage tier that lets one use a random body for a few hours per month at no cost. For a reasonable price, at a moment's notice, one can rent an unused body from a BaaS provider, billed per second of usage. For a higher fee, one can acquire a dedicated body. For a truly outrageous fee, in some of the less *discriminating* jurisdictions, one can get a disposable body, for purposes better left unsaid.
Of course, these bodies need maintenance. Contractors take care of the less pleasant aspects of sustaining a biological body. With a few clicks, anyone, even bio-people, can sign up to a body-tasking platform and earn a few bucks to perform hygiene and medical procedures, exercise, and so on. The platform is popular in some of the poorer countries where many bio-people reside.
A bio-workforce is also required to perform ad-hoc physical tasks which have proved difficult to automate, requiring more or less specialized skills.
The fruit of continuous efforts to lower the barriers to entry to body-sharing, by 2050 no implant is needed anymore to participate. One can simply sign-up and agree to some Terms of Service and receive their free body-sharing device by drone shipment.
After some incidents in the mid 40's, members of the main BaaS consortium have agreed to provide free brain-lock implants to bodies that are still the primary residence of a conscious mind, to avoid unfortunate mishaps.
[Answer]
Raid a mental hospital
Mind control is routinely used in the future to forbid people with serious mental issues from engaging in dangerous activities. Psychopaths are forbidden to kill or injury people, for instance. People may even voluntarily undergo it in order to stop unwanted habits, or engage in new ones. More subtle uses help people with milder mental issues.
[Answer]
What made the internet great and drove some of it's tech advancement? How do you get creepy stuff into average joe's household? **The answer is sex!**
Any you don't need it in every household, you just need it in the household of one of the time-travelers.
So at least one of the time travellers was into mind control sex games and has the necessary equipment at home.
Or if you don't want to give him that as a weird character trait, then perhaps this kind of mind control sex has become common. Perhaps partners do mind battle and there is tech to enhance the respective parts of the brain, making it easy for any time-traveler to overcome the brain of an un-enhanced 2020 person though they would struggle with just overpowering another person from the future.
Now in the future that tech for some reason only works on willing partners, but in 2020 that protection fails. Perhaps because everyone in the future is so teched up in general with direct mind internet that they have a natural firewall to prevent it from usage without that being switched off. Or because the devices are bound to a central server that manages usage, but that can be easily circumvented in 2020, e.g. because no one notices the tinkering alarm it would send to the cyber-tinkering department's email) or misuse is highly punishable or a combination thereoff.
]
|
[Question]
[
Assume that the atmospheric concentration is still the same 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen etc, except now just as dense as the Venusian atmosphere. Would humans be able to survive in this atmosphere?
[Answer]
No.
We'd die very rapidly, because the pressure would be about 90 atmospheres. Oxygen toxicity would probably get us fastest, and nitrogen narcosis would ensure we couldn't do anything sensible. There are probably several other ways this would kill us, but we'd definitely be dead.
[Answer]
I agree with nigel222's answer. With much stronger greenhouse heating Earth would be doomed. In fact, if the solar energy received by the Earth were just 5-10% higher this would happen on its own (and is expected to in a few hundred million years).
It's interesting to realize that Earth has several different possible stable climates. Our temperate, habitable planet is just one of (at least) four stable states:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6P0cI.jpg)
If we had Venus' atmosphere Earth would be a "steamball" planet. Alternately, if Earth were covered in ice, which is very reflective, the surface temperature would plummet and we would be a snowball planet (this is actually thought to have happened at least twice in Earth's history). FYI Venus is currently in the "dry roasted" state.
For more details, see <https://planetplanet.net/2016/04/06/no-livable-planets-without-life/>
[Answer]
Rather than the full 90 atmospheres, if you dumped ~20-30 atmospheres of helium onto the planet, that might be OK-ish (divers would call this ["trimix"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimix_(breathing_gas))).
World-record SCUBA dives are about 300 meters (30 atm), but then issues of [HPNS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-pressure_nervous_syndrome) occur. More common diving ailments that John refers to are from breathing standard compressed air or oxygen-enriched air.
Extremely bizarre mixes also include [*hydrogen* ("hydrox")](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrox_(breathing_gas)), and this mix got a diver down to a simulated 700 meters (in a chamber). Flammable gases require a certain mix ratio with air to actually burn: too much and it actually won't light. So maybe(?) the air wouldn't explode?.
So maybe there is some mix of gases that would allow humans to actually live at 90 atmospheres. You'll probably kill a lot of people though.
In the meanwhile:
* Water basically no longer evaporates.
* Earth's water cycle is gone. No more rain.
* Plants and animals in places that are hot/warm die because they cannot cool themselves
[Answer]
That would be so hot!
No, seriously. The temperature of a gas is directly proportional to the product of its volume and pressure. Supposing you are increasing pressure like that, and keeping everything else the same... You'll roughly make the air 90x hotter than usual.
And that's counting from the absolute zero, not from F or C. ~27000 Kelvin is definitely not cool.
**Just a minor edit:** I am focusing on the **suddenly** word in the question. I am thinking of suddenly as instantaneously. Obviously such an atmosphere wouldn't last a minute. That is hotter than white-hot, and Earth would shine brighter than the sun. Most, if not all of the gas mass (and a lot of solids and liquids would become gaseous at that temperature, even at that pressure!) in the atmosphere would quickly disperse into space because each molecule would be moving faster than the escape velocity for Earth. A few minutes later and we would actually have no atmosphere at all. The surface of the planet would also be quite charred.
If John Dallman's answer hasn't killed everything yet, this one will take whatever's left.
[Answer]
Not human life, and most likely no complex life forms, but possibly some life at the extremes.
The Venusian atmosphere at about 50 km has pressure near Earth normal with temperatures of only 75C. not exactly completely hostile to all life. Extremophiles have been found living at greater than 122C.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile>
Some extremophile bacteria may survive in the upper atmosphere or deep underground.
At least on Earth, life seams to survive most places, even those we wouldn't expect; the arctic waste, deep underground, undersea vents without light, everywhere we've looked there is some bacterial life present.
My first thought was deep sea vent life, but at the temperatures and pressures in play the oceans would boil so I think they would be dead too.
[Answer]
No. Earth would rapidly die. This because water vapour is a greenhouse gas.
If the planet warms, then once all the ice at the poles has melted the temperature stabilizes. If the planet tries to warm further, more water evaporates, more clouds form, more sunlight is reflected off the top of the clouds, and this more than counteracts the warming effect of the extra water vapour. It's a simple negative feedback loop and it represents the ice-free state of earth throughout most of the history of life.
The negative feedback loop turns into a positive feedback run-away once cloud cover reaches 100%. More water vapor in the atmosphere increases global warming which evaporates more water which increases global warming, until the oceans all boil and the planet has turned into a somewhat cooler version of Venus. Some airborne microbes might manage to adapt to life in the uppermost cloud-tops, but I doubt it.
The sun is getting hotter as it ages. This is the probable fate of life on Earth, many hundreds of millions of years hence, but well before the Sun goes nova.
]
|
[Question]
[
Imagine a frictionless and rigid hemispherical pit with a radius of 10m on the Earth. For a wizard in my world, it is easy to make such a pit, but hard to build a jail. The pit is the side effect of some space magic.
The prisoner is trapped at the bottom of the pit with no initial speed.
Can the prisoner escape the pit? Assume that air resistance and lifespan are factors. Breathing or using the Magnus Effect might take too long.
---
Space Magic Description: This is short-distance teleportation magic. In order to avoid collision between the teleported and the molecules being teleported, the molecules are squeezed outward thus forming an irregular frictionless rigid mirror surface.
The Wizard was not carrying something such as a rope on their person. Their task is to capture the enemies again and again and is not willing to spend more time on one enemy. These enemies were normal humans who could not do magic.
Please let me know if you need any clarification or more details.
[Answer]
## They can escape.
It's basically the same principle as how one uses a swing without getting a push to start - a swing is essentially a 2D version of this setup, a semicircular pit with no frictional force in play, and an ability to exert net force only in the radial direction. Standing at the bottom of the pit, push your arms out in front of you. Your center of mass doesn't move, but your feet will slide backwards a little. Since there's no friction, your feet will oscillate underneath you, swinging back and forth over the center slightly. Now you just need to bend your knees and pump in time with the oscillations, which will make the swing larger and larger. Eventually, the swing is large enough to grab the lip of the pit. Even though the prisoner's center of mass is moving vertically and must remain above the pit when clearing the lip, the prisoner merely need extend his arms forward and legs backwards to get a handhold outside the pit without moving his center of mass outside the pit.
If you've ever used a swing set without someone pushing you to get started, you can get out of the pit. As another analogy, this is basically like riding a frictionless skateboard in a half-pipe. It is clearly possible to increase the amplitude of the oscillations, a competent skateboarder can jump much higher than the lip of the half-pipe where they enter, and they never need to push tangentially to the ground to do it.
[Answer]
### Escape Proof (with a tiny change)
Geometry is our friend and physics a fun companion when it comes to devising a gaol that is not only escape proof, but also educational and entertaining into the bargain!
*There was once*, in the land of Angera a particularly eager archon by the name of Crowell whose sole delight, it seems, was devising what some might consider cruel and unusual means of punishing the wicked. But never let it be said that Crowell was a mean sort! For he was, at heart, a jolly old soul, and so jolly was he that he was determined to bring judicial jollity to his subjects.
Thus, let us examine old king Crowell's merry old bowl of judicial jollity! In construction, it is a roughly hemispherical bowl made from thick and crystal clear glass some eighteen feet in diametre. It is suspended from a platform above, for the convenience of the Guard, and also a shit hole at the bottom. The colonnade upon which the Cauldron is suspended allows the public a grand view of those stuck within!
Penitents are brought up to the platform, stripped naked, oiled and have their charges read out to them. Upon public approbation of the proceedings, the penitents are shoved into the bowl, from which they might only be fished out at death.
The key to the success of keeping penitents in is two fold: geometry tells us that a rounded shape is best for keeping the penitents down. There is really no flat surface upon which one might stand, and the curve of the bowl itself prevents climbing. Even if one could climb, the lack of a rim upon which to hoist oneself out and the steep neck of adverse camber prevents the escape from continuing.
Secondly, physics, that old prankster, teaches us that motion tends to continue in its own direction unless otherwise directed. So, if one tries to slide oneself out of the bowl as if riding a swing by constant back-and-forth motions of the body, the circular motion of the body will simply be guided by the slight incurve of the bowl, sending the miserable miscreant out into empty space, where from he shall plummet back into the bowl, with much cheering and jollity among the crowd!
Having learned this valuable lesson of physics, the penitent might consider himself Smart, and says: "I shall beat this device by physics of mine own!" And so thrusting himself to and fro again, he shall attempt to twist himself at the last moment in an attempt to grasp at the rim! Had Crowell and his geometers not considered this clever means of escape, the penitent might be successful! However, the smooth curve of the cauldron's neck and the angle of its slope spell doom for the penitent, and with further jeers and guffaws from the crowd, he shall, his fingertips vainly grasping for the edge!, slide once again into the waiting bowl!
A diagramme:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LG8iQ.png)
[Answer]
This is a straight-up Newtonian mechanics physics question, but it would probably get closed as homework-like on Physics SE, and it's fun, so I'll give you a Newtonian mechanics physics answer here. The answer is yes, as others have said, but it's not quite as others have described it.
Start with a more formal treatment of the mostly correct "oscillate to escape" answers.
Because there is no friction, the prisoner (whose name is Bob$^1$) can only accelerate his center of mass in the direction radially inward from his point of contact with the prison wall.
Because Bob can change his shape, he can temporarily move his point of contact with the prison wall in the tangent direction without accelerating his center of mass in the tangent direction.
Suppose Bob can change his shape such that the displacement between his center of mass and his point of contact, is described by the below triangle:
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q7r3P.png)
The force vector from a thrust at the blue point (the point of contact) will be in the direction of the green side of the triangle.
The proportion of thrust in the tangent direction (at the angle corresponding to the center of mass) is roughly the ratio of the blue segment to the green segment, but if one wants to be precise, it's the ratio of the green line segment to the yellow height of the purple triangle below.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iV9y1.png)
For green line segment $r$, blue line segment $b$, note that the purple triangle is a similar triangle to the one above it, but with legs $b$, so its height $x$ is the height of the above triangle scaled by the ratio of $b$ to $r$:
$x = \frac{b}{r} \sqrt{r^2 - b^2/4} \approx b \text { for } b \ll r$
If Bob pushes such that his change of momentum is $\Delta \vec P\_i$ in the green direction, then his change of velocity in the tangent direction is $\Delta v\_i = \frac{x}{rm}|\Delta P\_i|$.
If Bob times his changes of shape and his pushes such that his tangent velocity is zero whenever he pushes, each push adds
$\Delta T\_i = 0.5m\Delta v\_i^2$
until such time as Bob's total mechanical plus potential energy, $\sum \Delta T\_i$, is greater than or equal to his potential energy at the height above which a displacement of $b$ puts Bob's point of contact outside of the hemisphere... which prevents him from pushing off, but should permit him to grab the rim and escape.
Bob, however, has a problem that the "oscillate to escape" answers have overlooked. *He is not constrained to stay on the prison wall.*
If Bob had an anchor point mounted at the center of the sphere, to which he had attached a rod that he could push against so as to constrain his motion to the prison wall, escaping would be easy and painless. Bob has no such anchor. While Bob's weight $m\vec g$ is roughly antiparallel to his direction of thrust, Bob is fine. All he needs to do is keep the force of his pushes low enough that gravity can pull his center of mass back down before his point of contact leaves the ground (just like you can stand up and sit down without ever leaping into the air or falling to a bone-jarring halt). However, as Bob reaches the more vertical portions of the wall, if Bob wants to continue adding significant $\Delta T\_i$ per oscillation, Bob will have to begin hurling himself off of the wall and suffering impacts from falling.
One may have an intuition that this would prevent Bob from escaping, but this is an intuition based on our experience living in a world with friction: since friction forces increase based on how hard you're pushing on something, if you're pushing on something with the extremely large forces of crashing into it after falling from a significant height, the frictional forces are very large. In his frictionless hemisphere, Bob cannot face*plant*, he can only face*slide*. Hopefully Bob is good at frictionless acrobatics, and can land more comfortably than on his face.
Below: two pushes worth of Bob's later trajectory
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PeUOi.png)
Bob escapes, but only if he's tough enough to take a few hard thumps on the way out.
---
$1$: Alice is on a space ship with a large relative velocity $\vec u$ measuring Bob's escape attempt for next semester's homework assignment.
[Answer]
I don't think a human can escape.
Let us simplify things. You are a two-dimensional person in a frictionless half-pipe. You can place your legs apart and be stable, with your legs at equal angles either side of the vertical. Put your weight on your right foot. The reaction of the half-pipe surface will be perpendicular to the surface. This will give you a slight force to the left. As you move to the left, you are slowed by the curvature. You can do this repeatedly, and put some energy into your oscillation. You can build up some height this way, a bit like pumping on a swing.
You start off effectively being on a 10m swing, so the oscillations are slow, but if you keep at it, you might get somewhere. As you begin to climb the side, the restoring force deviates from simple harmonic motion, and the period becomes longer. As you approach the lip, your pumping efficiency approaches zero, while your speed at the bottom will roughly be given assuming your kinetic energy at the bottom equals your potential energy at the top. With an earth-like g of 10 m/sec^2, you would be going at about 13 m/s, and air resistance would take away any extra energy you could add in an oscillation.
At the edge, you would be going straight up. This does not help but it is not an absolute barrier to getting out. Your centre of gravity may below the edge, but parts of you may briefly get just beyond it. You might even get just beyond the lip of a cauldron if it was a very small one.
[Answer]
Yes, of course the prisoner can escape if left unsupervised.
This is a prison, not a deathtrap; it needs to have the capacity to hold a prisoner over the long term. Particularly, prisoners need to be fed and their waste removed. This requires a mechanism to move things in and out of the prison, and once you have a mechanism to move certain things around, tampering with it to move something else (like the prisoner) is just a matter of time.
[Answer]
Combining "Bambi on ice" and a gazelle and the slide-swinging part in the previous answer.
The gazelle would swing a bit, to no longer jump straight in the air, but at an angle and jump out.
[Answer]
Since my imagination is running wild in the wizard world you provide.
Birds/Birdman/Pegasi/Dragons can definitely escape this.
They would just fly out.
]
|
[Question]
[
The basic premise of a story I've been thinking through is that society finds that they cannot respond to catastrophic events quickly enough and decide to use time dilation to accelerate results of scientific advances. As an example, even when working together on a global problem, it still takes months to work through the science and evidence gathering to safely produce a cure for an emergent disease.
By sending a team of scientists (along with their subjects, if needed) into a place where time moves faster relative to the main population, they can gather evidence in the usual amount of time in their frame of reference and emerge in what seems like a very short amount of time in the frame of reference of the main population. Instead of 6-12 months, to the general population it seems like weeks.
How could time dilation be generated or leveraged in this manner?
* How could the whole population except the experiment be accelerated relative to the experiment?
* Alternately, would it be possible to generate enough gravity in the experiment to dilate time this much? (Setting aside issues of how humans would survive in such gravity)
[Answer]
No, you cannot use time dilation like that.
If you travel close to the speed of light, then time will slow down for *you*.
So near the speed of light, you can travel to Alpha Centauri (4 light years each away) and back and only age one day, but the earth and everyone else will have aged 8 years.
So if *you* are a billionaire going to die from some incurable disease, you might gamble on making a round-trip at near the speed of light to 50 light years away and back, return with the Earth having lived through 100 years, and perhaps a cure for your incurable disease will have been found by then. Set up and fund an institute to find a cure before you go, and hope they did their job.
But that's it. You can (without breaking any laws of physics, and technology permitting) use time dilation as a one-way time machine to jump forward into the future, any number of years. But you cannot slow down time for the solar system; the amount of gravity that takes would be lethal long before you could slow down a person even 1%.
[Answer]
## Move the patient, not the doctors
For a pandemia, this is a way very rich people will escape.. it can also be used if the number of patients is limited.. and very precious.. they have to be saved in some way.
Your doctors will move forward *slower* than you in time. When they would travel fast, you'll wait for ages before they return.
Better send the patient on a journey.. slowing time down for them, so they have enough time to "wait" for the doctors research.
In SF you *could* of course consider sending the patients into a close orbit around a black hole or something, so the doctors on the planet have all the time to find a cure, while the patients wait "100 years" in a space ship that reappears near the planet after a few months of their own time, to receive the medicin in time ?
[Answer]
# Travel back in time
There's no simple way to speed up time in a bubble. Gravity slows down time, it makes the problem worse. You could theoretically dyson the solar system to slow down time locally there, but that's such an absurdly expensive solution that it's not realistic. As such, the simple alternative is to travel back in time.
Find a wormhole that allows them to travel back 6 months in time, study in seclusion, and then pop out with the solution.
[Answer]
## Exotic material with negative mass
@NepeneNep is right, that general relatively will normally be working *against* you.
There is a hypothetical alternative: if you can get your hands on so-called "exotic matter" that has negative mass, you could create a local area with *less* gravity, and time would pass more slowly within that region.
It is worth noting two things:
* Exotic matter is purely hypothetical. As far as I'm aware, there is no evidence to suggest that anything exists that fits the description. Exotic matter comes up in every discussion of [the Alcubierre drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive).
* The effect of gravity on time is very small, so you would probably need a simply gargantuan amount of exotic matter (probably many *hundreds* of Solar masses' worth) to slow time noticeably. Simply obtaining that much matter is itself an unimaginably difficult task.
I would also remind you that your scientists have to actually inhabit this region for a while, which means it will matter what are the other effects of negative mass and less gravity. Like, if the negative gravity is that strong, would people and objects be *repelled* from the center of negative gravity? It could be very hard to actually perform scientific research (or even eat a meal) in a region of spacetime with such a strong and unusual curve.
[Answer]
For what it's worth, Greg Egan did this plot in the [*Orthogonal* trilogy](https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html) by setting it in an alternate reality where the metric signature of spacetime is ++++ instead of −+++. That flips the sign in the time dilation factor from $\sqrt{1-v^2}\le 1$ to $\sqrt{1+v^2}\ge 1$, so you can put the scientists in a rocket ship to give them more time.
It also has many many other effects on physics, chemistry, and biology, but perhaps you could gloss over those.
[Answer]
You can't get there from here.
The problem is that time dilation is a side effect of spacetime curvature. If you make spacetime more curved, then time moves slower within that curved space.
You want the opposite effect. You want spacetime flatter, and there isn't much curvature to flatten out where we are. Thus, you'd have to make up your own rules. Maybe you can invent a hyperspace where time moves faster.
[Answer]
You've not got the `science-based` tag on this one, so let's go nuts and say "temporal distortions".
# Temporal Distortions
In the *Star Trek: TNG* episode [Timescape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timescape_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)), the central characters encounter "pockets of temporal distortion" where time moves faster or slower. In the episode, this is caused by some sort of space creature making its home inside the "quantum singularity" powering a Romulan vessel. All of this is nonsense, but no one save pedants (myself, for example) blinks twice at it.
You probably wouldn't have a quantum singularity, but your scientists could've invented a Zero Point energy source that they could use to make "energetic mass shadows", which cause time-space distortions without the deleterious effects of gravity on human-scale entities. (Which is *also* nonsense, but passes muster.)
[Answer]
## Use a simulated reality
Speeding up reality is a VERY distant dream that we don't even have the foundational science to begin exploring. But that does not mean that we can't make faster than real-life simulations of reality. While it may take 9 months for a rocket to get from Earth to Mars, we can use computer models to map out all of the forces that will act on that rocket over the course of its flight very quickly, effectively compressing 9 months of experience into a just a few seconds of simulation. So the simulated reality in your computer could be described as accelerated time.
As for your actual problem of safely curing diseases: the traditional method takes real organisms, injects them with real drugs, and waits real amounts of time to see what happens... but in the near future, this will not be necessary. We've already mapped out the entire human genome, and are close to mapping out every single chemical process that makes our bodies function.
Chemistry, once you know what chemicals you are working with, is rather predictable. The entire biochemistry of a human body is much too complex for a single human to grasp, but well within the abilities of an adequately powerful super computer to work out. While you can't necessarily map out each molecular reaction in a timely manner, what you can do is create extremely accurate probability matrixes of how each type of cell in your body will react with a given parthenogen and drug, and this can be done very quickly, making ball park predictions on 100s of thousands of possible drugs in a matter of hours. This is more or less how the first Covid detection kits were produced so quickly. Then, once you've isolated the few most promising drugs, you start testing them against more and more accurate (and time consuming) models of the body with various dosages and common drug interactions to see which ones will be safe on a grander scale. Then at last, you run the most highly detailed simulations of the most promising drugs just to make sure there are no long term side effects when taking the whole body into account.
These sorts of simulations are getting better all the time, as are our computers for running them on. In the not too distant future, the exact problems your describing will be solved faster and faster not by speeding up time, but by speeding up simulations giving us nearly instant solutions to problems that now take years of research. It will take time for society to accept this as "safe", but eventually being able to produce millions of fast, cheap, near perfect simulations will prove to be even more reliable than the thousands of expensive and time consuming real world simulations we can manage today. Once the benefits of large sample sizes you can manage with simulations outweighs the risk of thier level of inaccuracy, the need for any real world testing will be completely obsolete.
So, by the time people have the technology to make such a time dilation device, the problems it is meant to overcome will already be solved by much cheaper and lower tech means.
And the best part here is that researchers don't need to sacrifice years off of thier lives going into a time dilation chamber to do thier work, and no test subject needs to be injected with any unproven substances to see if they will work or not.
[Answer]
## Alcubierre drive + Portals = fun
Accelerating faster and faster is problematic for time travel. As we approach the speed of light, our relativistic mass increases requiring more and more energy input until we hit 99.999999c or so and we need basically infinite energy to go any faster. Also, during that acceleration period, our sense of time has shifted so far from the time frame from whence we left that when we finally manage to stop moving, who knows how many years have passed outside of our reference frame.
An Alcubierre drive, on the other hand, does not accelerate. At least, not according to the current models that predict its behavior. No, these models assume that the drive just is going faster than light-speed instantaneously. Is this due to an inconsistency in what is most likely an impossible engine with our current understanding of physics?
Most likely.
But we need to speed up time for a group of individuals, and we need it now.
So, we have a crazy idea.
One thing about the Alcubierre drive in particular is that it take a region of space-time and isolates it, which is great for us. Within this region, we could move about, eat, and do science all we want (assuming said region contains things like a spaceship with an atmosphere and a floor and such).
Once that space-time region is isolated, it folds space "in front of" and "behind" the isolated region, and these folds make it such that the region is suddenly being pulled and pushed by the space-time pressure differential to instantaneously faster-than-light speeds. At these speeds, we would be moving backwards through time.
Thing is, we don’t want to do that, necessarily, we just want to speed up time for our perspective. In order to achieve this, we rapidly turn the drive on and off. Duty-cycle it, if you will. In theory, for each minor jump back in time, we move forward slightly more before the drive kicks back on, and this “temporal pulsing” would effectively speed up time for our frame of reference while everyone else’s is unchanged.
One more small problem, though: during the times when the drive is on, we will be moving extremely fast, and would definitely end up several lights years away from where we started even though the drive is being turned off just as often. We solve this with portals (or wormholes, or whatever you want to call a point-to-point space-time tunnel). We have the tech to make an Alcubierre drive, so we have the tech to establish tunnels that face each other and allow us to travel in an infinite straight line without moving too far from our initial starting point. Now you're thinking with portals.
The effect of these phenomena would be strange to behold. First of all, the portals would likely create weird optical illusions by being so close together, with their own affects on space-time. The ship with the drive would likely appear to either be rapidly flashing in and out of visibility, or be translucent and shimmery, depending on the frequency of the temporal pulsing.
Now, onto the questions: IF we can make portals, why do we need to use an Alcubierre Drive? Also, why not just go back in time six months and then come back or something similar?
For the portals, I believe it is impossible to establish a portal at a point in time before the present, so we would have to create the portal now, wait 6 months, create another wormhole, and then the points could be connected through time, something-something-closed timelike curve; however, no one wants to wait that long, and we need our cures now. So immediately connected P2P tunnels it is.
Why not just go back in time with the drive? The concept of duty-cycling has long been used to keep devices from overheating. Perhaps the drive works to go back in time, but only in short hops, and this method is the best we can do with the current state of the drive technology. Or the exotic matter that fuels the drive is very scarce and pulsing the drive is more efficient than running it continuously and achieves the same overall goal.
At any rate, here are some relatively plausible explanations to futz with space-time and relativity. Enjoy.
[Answer]
As others have said, as far as we know time can be slowed, not accelerated (except by removing the source of current factor that is slowing it down). But as it's SF, you can decide that if gravity can slow down time, that certain exotic force/phenomena can accelerate it. That can be pretty much anything, from exotic particles that create negative gravity, fifth fundamental force, to reversing the polarity of the neutrino flow.
But no matter the method, there are issues with time dilation. Both of known ways are extremely energy intensive, and gravity as a way to slow down time is a bit unhealthy. So the odds are good that any way to accelerate time would similarly be energy intensive and/or harmful for people. You should take that into account. Because if a society can afford something so energy expensive, why would they have issues with solving problems in timely manner? Even with our current technology we developed a vaccine for a very virulent new virus in a couple of months, and then distributed said vaccine through most of the planet. More technologically advanced society would solve it's issues even faster (if they are dire enough, you can never underestimate bureaucratic red-tape). But if the way to accelerate time is just harmful, the solution would be to just put computers into accelerated time, and let the software solve the problem without much input from scientists.
As for time-travel, that is a trap that always introduce way more issues than it solve. Number of times it was used properly in literature can be counted on fingers of one hand...
As for a solution to your issue: quantum/extremely fast computers or AI. If you can create advanced enough simulations of human body, you could easily computate a cure for practically any disease. And if you want scientists involved, you can introduce matrix-style virtual reality, where mind is practically uploaded into a computer, and thus can be run at faster rate. So if you cannot accelerate time, then do the next best thing: accelerate scientists' perception of time!
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/146398/edit).
Closed 4 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/146398/edit)
There once existed a superpower that was made up of seven tribes. This nation was led by a king who was selected from one of these tribes by through ritual combat. Potential heirs would meet in a king-of-the-hill style process which would pit them against each other to prove their strength and prowess to their people, demonstrating their ability to defend the country from outside threats. The ones killed in battle would join their honored ancestors while the winner would be crowned king.
Every leader needs a security force to protect him from inside and outside threats, this nation being no exception. However, a tradition arose in the past revolving around the use of bodyguards. The personal guards of the king were to be made up of all women. These females, called the Amazonian brigade, would receive the same training and access to weaponry of the military, and be the king's shadow at all times. Like traditional security forces, these women would handle all personal security threats aimed at the king, were privy to the highest, unclassified information, and were to sacrifice their lives for him if necessary.
Seeing as how men are generally, bigger, stronger, and faster, it would make more sense for males to be assigned to such an important role from a defense perspective. The only example in real life of an all-female bodyguard system was Omar Quadaffi, leader of Libya, whoose "security force" were more akin to sex slaves that he took a fancy to, and they ultimately failed to protect him from being brutally killed.
How can I justify an all-female bodyguard force over traditional male bodyguards?
[Answer]
It would help a great deal if you could give us more information about this culture you're creating. Regardless, here's a handy list of reasons why women would be preferred:
**Inheritance.** Men in a king's security force might have some interest in becoming king themselves, or may work with another man who wants to become king in order to garner favor. Women, on the other hand, can't be king, and depending on how you arrange your setting they may be forbidden from holding much power at all. Being a king's guard may well be the highest office these women could hope to obtain.
**Religion.** Anytime you want a society to do something that would seem irrational to an outsider, religion is an easy go-to. Perhaps some ancient sage predicted that a male guard would turn against the king. Maybe this society worships a female goddess of war or protection.
**We don't have the men!** Maybe all the men are in the army or busy farming, and the women are the only ones who are willing to give up whatever they're engaged in in order to guard the king.
**Superwomen.** Perhaps a small percentage of women are magically blessed with ridiculous strength or speed. Maybe the bloodline of the Amazons of old runs through some women's veins, making them superior fighters.
**That's a woman's job!** Perhaps the act of guarding someone or something is considered dishonorable for men, and more in line with the role of a woman in keeping the hearth or some other cultural explanation.
**We've always done it that way.** The first king was guarded by a woman in his old age. Maybe it was because of one of the reasons above. Maybe she was just a particularly able fighter, or perhaps he only trusted her. The reason may be lost to time. Regardless, she ended up shaping the institution that became the all-female king's guard. Now it's just tradition.
[Answer]
**Bodyguard? What bodyguard? I see no bodyguard!**
The king is the winner of an election-by-combat. It would be impolite to suggest that he needs a bodyguard. That would mean he is no longer fit to rule, after all. Even if everybody **knows** that the king is too old and fat to win such a fight today, everybody **pretends** otherwise. Anything else would be a grave insult.
The king can have senior military officers at his court, but if they follow him into his private quarters they will look like bodyguards. Can't have that. Likewise, he cannot arm his manservants. But what he can do is to arm his maidservants. They need a weapon to protect their virtue against those ruffian stable boys.
[Answer]
**Eye Candy**
A lot of despots have really attractive female bodyguards. Really as far as safety goes, a man gets killed just as easily with a gun as a woman so the extra strength really counts for little. A woman can shoot back just well as a man so there really is little difference. Strength matters if it comes to hand to hand fighting but since the invention of guns, it makes no difference.
What you are left with is body guards that are easy on the eye.
It's the same reason why it was a mark of prestige for the German generals and other high ranking officials to have a female chauffeur during WW2.
Yes this is a sexist thing to say but a lot of male leaders are sexist pigs. Female bodyguards are a mark of power and prestige and it simply wouldn't do to have males one. That would make you look weak.
[Answer]
**Witches.**
I am starting to wrap my head around your world, Incognito. If this is the same world your other questions come from, there exist witches and the witches are always women. Witches have magic, and especially working in a team are more powerful than any group of men could hope to be.
[Answer]
The answers are many, but I notice a few things which can be woven together.
The first is that the king may have written these women into place. You don't mention why men are forbidden from being body guards. However, it could naturally come from fear. The king might fear their bodyguards being too dangerous and too close. This could lead to a cadre of women surrounding the king, which might play out like Quadafii's example. However, what if they got good at hiding their skill? What if they learned to be deadly in a way the king did not recognize. This would mean the women have learned a skill which the other men did not. If you try to be as deadly as them in a "male" way, the king recognizes it, and kills you. Be deadly in a less familiar way, and the king may simply not notice.
And, of course, women have quite a head start on a "less familiar way." Whenever I play with gender stereotypes (which gets more dangerous every year), I start from the assumption that the primary effect of gender stereotyping is that each gender gets a head start learning a set of skills that are enormously difficult to learn if you don't develop them during childhood. Skills such as fighting are taught based on assumptions of these skills. We teach the military the way we teach the military because it is effective for teaching men how to fight, based on the skills they learned up through high school. Modern militaries are still in the process of figuring out what it looks like to teach to both sexes and/or genders (I'm not entirely sure which the military teaches to).
This creates an interesting niche for your women to sustain their position. If they develop a training regimen which is effective for teaching women to fight based on the skills they have developed as a child, that training will be unavailable to men as long as the society is gender divided enough to prevent a large number of men from learning the skills typically learned by women. These women fighters may retain their position as "the best" because there simply is no training regimen available to make a masculine individual that deadly. (which would also lead to a whole host of interesting side-stories as those who do not fit perfectly into these neat little gender bins might be able to pick these fighting arts up successfully, creating all sorts of fun complications!)
This may also result in interesting skewing of "traditional" gender roles, as men adapt to this deadly art. How those gender roles skew is really up to you, and what gender story you wish to convey.
[Answer]
What your question is grappling with is a biased idea that men are better than women. There is some anatomical difference, but in a technological society, those difference are easily overcome.
When coupled with any tools, technological advantage and training, the physiological difference of an all male group and an all woman group is moot. Take an example of a unit of longbowmen. The difference in capabilities between what a man can do verses what a woman can do is they little. As long as they can pull the bow string, they both can kill over the same distance.
Can be as simple as a layman male with a knife verses the highly trained woman with a sword, the king would be protected any day against this threat.
To answer this question, all your society needs to overcome differences in the gender make up of said units is to overcome their bigoted and chauvinistic way of thinking.
[Answer]
In human history a male ruler might have a harem of wives and concubines. These were confined to a closed-off part of the palace that could be accessed only by the ruler and castrated male servants and guards.
Female guards would be the ideal way of working this without resorting to the unkindest cut of all.
[Answer]
Actually, I don't entirely agree with your premise that men are 'stronger, bigger and faster' than women, but even if we take the first two as a given the faster is subject to some interpretation and I'd argue that there are two crucial areas where women guards would be superior to men;
**1) Flexibility**
Men may be faster on average in a straight line race (according to Olympic records at least) but that's not the only definition of 'fast'. Women, in my experience, tend to be more flexible than men, and more agile. In the cut and thrust (no pun intended) of close quarters protection detail, quick reaction speeds tend to be more important. Being able to be 'where the enemy is not' in terms of spears, knives and even guns is an important part of such combat, and the ability to throw oneself in the path of a bullet after only just noticing the threat is going to be more the domain of someone nimble, agile and flexible, which to me sounds more like a fit woman than a strong man.
**2) Multitasking**
Yes, it's a stereotype, but again in my experience women deal with chaotic environments better than men. In an environment where potential threats are everywhere, I suspect that women would actually be better at tracking multiple threats, meaning that they have a good chance of identifying an *actual* threat from many sources, whereas a man generally has a great chance of identifying an *actual* threat from one, maybe two sources. That means that you don't need a small army tracking many different potential threats in a crowd via surveillance; you have a team of women on the ground that can do almost as good a job as your small army of surveillers at identifying when a suspect becomes a real threat.
I don't like these kinds of stereotypical comparisons between genders because I'm not a fan of people getting jobs because 'men are better at...' or 'women are better at...' and I think that if you really want to protect your king, you need a balance of skills that are sourced from the best pool of 'people' you can gather. I'm a firm believer in the best *person* for a job, but even I have to admit I live in a world where the prejudice exists both for and against men, for and against women. That said, if your female protection detail formed from convention, I can imagine this might be the reason why it started.
[Answer]
A deterrent. Men are less inclined to kill women than they are men. Female ninja or whatever you may call them would even bare their breasts when they were discovered as they would stand a larger chance of getting captured rather than killed when they did. But this is a small deterrent against someone willing to kill the King.
Social and cultural cunning.
Women are on average more adept at social and cultural situations. From being able to recognize faster who's head is who's based on clothingstyles (<https://images.app.goo.gl/1mp3h2omLvJCJgZq6>) to a better understanding of people's behaviour or cultural background. This is one reason why female normal functioning autists are much harder to detect than male one's, as the women get bombarded with social input and necessities much more frequently as they grow up than men and subsequently seem more natural at it.
The consequence is that the female bodyguards are better at determining a threat before the attempt at the King is made. From just filtering bashfulness in front of the King and edgyness before a strike to being able to recognize a clothingchoice or cultural difference that might signal a potential threat. It doesnt matter how strong, fast or big a bodyguard is if he cant detect a threat in time!
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/99670/edit).
Closed 6 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/99670/edit)
Try to imagine a species which does not know what fighting, conflict or war is.
They don't have animals on their planet, they are totally on their own. Now humans come and kill some of them and stuff like that.
They would not understand why or what is going on as they have never fought each other there was never the need of self defense or anything like that.
How would they react to such an act?
Is there any animal like this maybe?
Would they just continue life as nothing happened?
Or is it possible to strike back in a non-conflict way?
About the species:
The species is familiar to humans, they have 2 arms two legs, they eat plants which they have on mass, they are intelligent but they don't seek knowledge about the universe like we, they seek to find out about their past, why they exist.
They have 1 partner which they are bound to forever.
[Answer]
A vegetarian species still living in the Garden of Eden, perhaps they even photosynthesise.
* Never short of food or other resources
* Reproduces by budding or some sort of wind based pollination so there's no competition for mates
* No predators so they never need to protect themselves or their young
Plankton fit the bill, admittedly they have a lot of predators but they don't do a lot about them. Grass perhaps, though grass can be quite hostile and extremely competitive for space. Even plants compete for resources like space and light.
A sentient species fitting this description doesn't really hold water. However, if attacked they would probably just look confused and upset, assuming they form emotional attachments.
[Answer]
Your aliens must me some kind of plantoids. They don't need to fight for food because they get energy from their star. Now humans come and kill them...
There are 2 options. If humans leave their planet they will become extremely xenophobic towards alien beings and militarize their world when their technology progresses.
If humans want to settle on their planet, your aliens are doomed. If they can't understand the meaning of war, they won't be able to defend themselves. Even if they try, post-FTL humans must have powerful weapons and ships like in Cameron's Avatar movie.
[Answer]
My guess would be very poorly.
A big reason why humans are good at fighting wars is because we have evolved to hunt and to protect ourselves against being hunted. A species with no concept of either would be very easy prey even to humans armed with clubs and spears - with several thousand years of military development they would have no chance at all.
As for exactly how they would react to their defeat, it's very hard to say - I'd guess rabbit in the headlights would be a good analogy. No fight or flight response. They'd probably make pretty good slaves or even food if you were really heartless.
[Answer]
This happened. They died. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori>
"[The Maori] commenced to kill us [the Moriori] like sheep.... [We] were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed - men, women and children indiscriminately."
I am disappointed at being unable to trace this quote through Jared Diamond to its native source.
[Answer]
# This situation is far from being precise enough to have a definite answer.
Among the plausible possibilities:
## The species is completely unable to react
They continue living as they did, and don't react at all as they can't understand at all what is happening. Maybe the humans will invade the planet and exploit is resources, or slaughter them, or something else, depending on what was the reason for the war in the first place.
## The species ends up assimilating the threat
Maybe despite being unaware of the concept of war they are aware of the concept of danger. If so they can identify the humans as a danger and try to counter them, like you would counter an illness, a threatening volcano or any dislikable thing. They would probably end up loosing the war because of their lack of experience but many factors could help them (time to travel for humans, overpowered secret psychic powers for aliens... )
## The species reacts, but in an unexpected way
Any reaction could happen if you consider the aliens alien enough. Maybe they will start a cult around the murderer as they see him as someone above the natural rules, maybe they will all commit suicide to understand how it works, maybe they will make their planet explode as it is what is supposed to happen in the end of their calendar...
The reaction could be completely foolish, or have good repercussions, who knows? For example maybe they have a habit to nuke everything around their planet each time they have a problem they don't understand and because of this habit they never encountered any other civilization, and thus never needed to keep the notion of war: they just launch nuclear missiles like some humans fire anti-chem-trail fireworks, without knowing what it does exactly.
[Answer]
You can take some inspiration from the "Enderverse" by [Orson Scott Card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Scott_Card) and entertain the idea that the species did not initially evolve to be peaceful, but was engineered or altered much later in their history.
Namely, have a look at [Pequeninos](http://enderverse.wikia.com/wiki/Pequeninos).
Although they look quite the opposite to what you seek -
for them "war" and "death" is just a part of the lifecycle, see "Third life" paragraph.
In the books that actually lead to a gruesome cultural misunderstanding, when Pequeninos tried to "save" injured human by killing him.
In their case they might be indifferent or even welcome humans killing them.
You can play on the definition of the "war" - it's considered "bad" by humans mostly because it leads to the end of conscientious life of an individual (aka "death"). If this premise is not true, "war" can be perceived very differently.
[Answer]
A species that does not understand death would, I think, first try to understand what just happened. Are their peers injured or asleep? Why can't the be mended and brought back?
Then, they would try to understand their place in this. Are they alright with some of their kind being destroyed? Does it bother them? Or are they apathetic?
After orienting themselves towards death and slaughter, I think your species would then turn to consider the attackers. From whatever evidence they have about the encounter, is there any thing they could have done to avoid the destructive outcome. Could they communicate better? Could they have simply acquiesced to some list of demands? Could they develop tools (like fences to keep animals out or cages to keep animals in) that could be used as protective perimeters? Are they sociable enough to organize look outs to be wary next time these hostile creatures return?
After orienting themselves also, then, to responding to the attackers, they might choose to ask themselves if they should be proactive and attack first? Does wider conflict seem inevitable (as Japan felt before Pearl Harbor)? Does your species have a sense of justice demanding that these injuries be avenged? Does your species have philosophies or religions that recommend a particular response (mercy, tolerance)?
I think how your species answers these questions would drive their response.
[Answer]
**Your species could wipe out the humans pretty quickly**
A species such as you describe would be an example of near perfect racial harmony, everyone agreeing in broad terms how the race/society should exist. This is their entire universe, this is the natural way of things in their view.
Their only possible reaction to viewing the violent actions of humans is to regard the "aliens" as extremely ill. They are driven to act completely against nature, from your species POV, they destroy the harmony that is the natural order of life. They threaten life itself, ergo they must be wiped out. And this disease is contagious, they've seen humans fighting amongst themselves, it must be stopped.
An entire race is now mobilised against the humans. Single minded, utterly loyal to their comrades, they don't even regard humans as truly intelligent, they're a pestilence like green fly to be wiped out. The entire resources of their planet is now dedicated to the destruction of every human they see. No hesitation, no negotiation, no mercy.
[Answer]
They are organic robots networked on a subconscious level, left there by another intelligent species for the sole purpose to maintain the plant life on the planet. They will not fight back but will find a way to exterminate humans as humans pose a problem in keeping with their objective.
[Answer]
I think it is impossible for a planet to develop only one life form. If we look at earth the entire planet has a sort of balance, where the development of one form life is stopped by another, none of them getting to be fully disruptive. From this balance the competition emerges, and intelligence at some point evolves. Of course once humans evolved and we got very intelligent compared to all other life forms, we got to a point where our population dictates the balance. But absent the competition there is no need for intelligence (which is costly from an evolutionary point of view), so your aliens would not think anything of the actions of humans because they would be unable to think (that if they could evolve like this, but I doubt they could).
[Answer]
Their society would be forever corrupted.
When you boil down the essence of war and fighting, it comes down to: "I am right and you are wrong."
The concept that MY opinion and/or life matters more than another, will become essentially the first and most corrupting concept introduced to their society: SELFISHNESS.
How that plays out, who knows. It could spark class wars, genocide of all other species, or the worse by far: create lawyers.
It all depends on which pressures are strongest in their society.
[Answer]
Daisyworld shows you have to have many species, so this would not be stable, at least not naturally. It's possible for this to happen if you imagine pacifist colonists going to a world without animals and then using technology to preserve the balance.
With no war to slow them down, they would rapidly become more and more advanced for the purpose of improving the stability of their ecosystem. Chaotic systems, when destabilized, cannot be controlled and fluctuations will spiral out of control.
So these are not primitive people, not in the scenario outlined. These would be people with advanced genetic engineering and planetary engineering skills. People whose instincts with destabilizing influences is to counteract them immediately through technology. Non-destructively and non-aggressively.
Not long after the humans started killing them, they'd have remotely analysed the neurology (they need that skill for medicine), determined the abnormalities involved (hyperactivity in some areas, suppressed activity in others), calculated the electrical and magnetic stimulation required to produce the opposite effect, and pacified the humans.
Aggressive cultures tend to be primitive. War is not the mother of invention but its death. The humans would not have defences against the technology of the alien civilization.
]
|
[Question]
[
I'm looking for something more like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, but extended beyond the purely physical. I'm not looking for a list of things people would do, or "Here's what I would do", but supporting examples wouldn't hurt.
I'm looking for a set of psychological biases that would predict what behaviors we would prioritize. You don't need to provide actual psychology studies, but they would be welcome.
Minimum conditions for all people:
* Aways has enough food, water and clothing. You can make/purchase custom clothing with your stipend.
* 5,000 square feet of environmentally controlled living space. Government provides really boring furniture for free.
* Free access to educational content, up to college level. Government provided standardized certification.
* Socializes medicine, with a "rational" lifetime maximum expenditure
* Ubiquitous public transportation
* Equivalent to US$1000/month personal development stipend
* Machines do all of the dirty or tedious work. Humans can volunteer for dangerous work.
**Addendum**: It looks like I failed to include a detail that I didn't think mattered, but does significantly change how this is answered. I was hoping for a generalized answer, but over/underpopulation can't really be ignored.
* All people are sterile.
* The population is continually replenished by refugees from other worlds that have self-destructed.
* Supply is regulated by god-like entities who don't care what you think, and don't play human games. You can, of course, complain, and they will hear you, but they've heard all of it before. Really. All of it.
[Answer]
Being a social and hierarchical species, people in such a society would do what people always do: **compete for status**. Specifically, for *relative* status. Affluence is a good proxy for status, because it demonstrates that you have found a way to get a bigger slice of the pie so to speak; if the default slice of the pie is as big as you describe, that just raises the bar higher.
This may push the competition towards higher levels of Maslov's pyramid. It may become very important which school you went to. Having a job despite not needing to would show that you have skills so valuable that people would pay for them (and hiring someone when your needs are provided for is also a status signal in its own right). You would strive for nicer furniture just to avoid the stigma of being forced to rely on government-provided blandness.
Unless you are struggling to meet your basic needs already, it would feel very much like the world we currently live in.
[Answer]
## Behavioral Sink
The best experimental research we have on post scarcity society began with the [Mouse Eutopia experiments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink). When a mouse population becomes post scarcity, it grows out of control and then thier psychology alters over several generations in a way that causes a population implosion. You see a break down in social norms that leads to a wide spread of sociopathic behavior and reduced reproductive drive. When a mouse population hits this point it triggers negative population growth where refusal to procreate/increased homosexuality, decreased care for offspring, increased murder rates, etc cause population decline despite the infinite resources. If scarcity is not reintroduced, the mouse population will completely die out within just a few generations.
Not only has it been theorized that humans will do the same thing, but it seems we are already doing it to a degree. Many of the world's richest nations are currently experiencing lesser manifestations of Behavioral Sink and have a shrinking population whereas nations where people have to struggle to get enough resources have rapidly growing populations.
Post scarcity can overwhelm the psyche in several ways that lead to behavioral sink.
### Social Addiction
The primary explanation given by Calhoun in the Mouse Eutopia experiments for the breakdown of society is social addiction. With unlimited resources, populations grow out of control until overcrowding makes social isolation virtually impossible. This means that all interactions (eating, drinking, bathing, sex, etc.) become conditioned as social activities. So, no matter how much space you eventually give the population, they will choose to overcrowd themselves which leads to elevated stress which leads to increased violent and objectional behavior.
That said, we do see this problem happen in modern society where overcrowded schools systems and social media make socialization impossible to escape. Large cities like New York draw in millions of residents to horrible living conditions with the promise of constant and inescapable social stimulation. While your government might provide 5000sqft of living space, your population will quickly grow to the point where the only way to offer this much space is to stack these homes into massive hive cities. So, while your home may be big, you don't need a job so you're average day will consist of leaving and attending back to back simulating events outside of your home; so, you will experience overcrowding the same way that Calhoun's rats did in his latter experiments regardless of having a private place to call your own.
While Calhoun's follow up experiments proved that this was only a minor factor in behavioral sink, creating more places where privacy can be observed did not prevent the phenomenon from happening, only reduced it a bit.
Follow up research in humans like the Baum study on College dormitory layouts and various case studies into the bystander effect also show a degree of correlation between overcrowding with psychological unwellness and moral decay, but again, this research alone does not produce the pronounced levels of variance seen in Calhoun's early experiments further demonstrating that behavioral sink is only in part controlled by overcrowding.
### Hedonistic Addiction
A second issue with post scarcity is a total addition to oneself. While some of the rats in Calhoun's experiment became obsessed with thier gangs. Others formed groups addicted to self care. Other experiments have show that even without overcrowding, rats giving unlimited access to food, water, toys, and drugs will often pick a vice and overdose on it.
That said, a rat living in a small group with unlimited resources will generally do well, because the social interaction becomes the scarce thing that they aspire towards. So IF your post scarcity society could somehow produce a healthy scarcity (but not total lack of) social interaction, then your people should do much better. But the only way to achieve this with a large population is by basically locking everyone up in small communities; otherwise, human nature will draw them into social addiction issues.
### Goal Addiction
This is the worst part of behavior sink that often gets overlooked, and the most likely X factor that Calhoun failed to account for in his experiments. It is the nature of humans (and many other animals) to want that which can not be easily had. In a scarcity based society, this typically means things like food, water, shelter, safety, etc. We are hardwired to dream about and pursue fringe desires or else our ancestors would have never survived. However, as basic material needs become trivial we become desensitized to caring about them so we move on to want more luxurious needs met like cars, iPhones, air friers, etc.
This is the premise of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, but Maslow was overly optimistic in what he thinks the top of the pyramid looks like, since actual people who get past the 1st 4 layers rarely care about self-actualization. When you look at people like kings and emperors, they don't care at all about being thier best selves, they are goal addicted just like the rest of us but they will make up new goals to keep themselves entertained. These people will rape a man's wife in front of him, he will steal an Olympic Champion's gold metal out of thier hand, he will have his whole family put to death... not because he needs these thing to self-actualize, but because it takes these extreme behaviors to even begin to touch on what is "out of reach" for people this unaffected by scarcity.
The problem with true post-scarcity is that you no longer want for material things, and you have more than enough time to spare to fulfil all of your social needs meaning that like an emperor, anything you can do within the rules of your society is something you can take for granted. But the same psychological mechanism that leads a poor man to fantasize about a hearty meal, or a middle class man about his dream car that he has to work hard or take a risk to get leads a post-scarcity man to fantasize about some other type of thing that he'd have to work hard or take a risk to get. Whatever society says no one (or only the privileged few) are allowed to have, such people desire, which leads to a pattern of behaviors focused on violating laws and social norms. Things like murder, rape, incest, theft, arson, reckless driving, etc. become the daydreams of a man who can have and experience anything else he desires when that is all that is left just out of reach.
If humanity hits true post scarcity, it could easily trigger the worst in us as our focus goes from building healthy relationships to help us overcome scarcity to sadistic desires... only instead of it just being the a fraction of the top 1 percent of people, it is now everyone acting that way.
### The Good news is that your setup is not actually post scarcity
The term Post Scarcity is often used to describe a society as explained by Carl Marx as allowing "the general reduction of the necessary labor of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them." However, even Carl Marx admits that some scarcity still exists in his idea of an ideal socialist state; thus, he never actually claimed that socialism would lead to post scarcity.
Actual post scarcity means that you have at demand whatever resources you want which is why many people claim there is no such thing, just various levels of automation. The limits on your personal development stipend, lack of ubiquitous personal transportation, limited medical access, and limited education caps are all scarcities that people will still want to work to get better than.
At this level of socialism, you will certainly see some elements of Behavioral Sink kick in, but it should not turn into a total hellscape like Rat Eutopia since there would still be a fair amount of actual scarcity to strive to overcome.
[Answer]
# The top [concerns during peace time are survival (physiological and safety) and psychological (love, self-esteem, and self-actualization](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02766072)
This study had people rank how important varying concerns were during peacetime. The country wasn't seen as very important to preserve, since there was little pressure to preserve it. Survival, safety and health wise are big concerns. Likewise, love, self esteem, and self actualization are very important.
# Survival
For most people staying alive would be very important, much more important than helping their country. The right diet, healthcare, and relationship with the government would be high priorities, with people exchanging tips, buying medicines and herbs and such they felt would improve their health, and working out how to stay alive. Fitness classes would likely be a high priority, and numerous people would organize group workouts and physical activities. Lots of groups would publish guides on how to navigate police and other officials safely.
# Love
Family would remain immensely important to people. People would want to have dates, to be romantic, to go on holiday to beautiful locations, to impress those they cared about with interesting education.
# Self esteem
The way we view our successes and failure in life are important to many. This drives many to educate themselves, to follow difficult jobs, to try and improve. You'd expect to see lots of classes people would help to teach each other new skills and accomplish difficult tasks, along with many people offering praise and cheap rewards for accomplishing tasks.
# Self actualization
This is about achieving your full potential. In a safe, stable society, people value this a lot. People would pursue hobbies to extreme levels, trying to make them the greatest sort of thing they could.
# What isn't important
From the study, several behaviours weren't highly valued. Helping others wasn't seen as very important, or helping your country. If there's little community spirit, why help others from pure altruism?
Friendship was seen as less important. If not forced together by external forces, a lot of friends will drift apart.
Prestige from others wasn't seen as very important. While people like achieving great things, in peace they care less about competition and being seen as great by others.
[Answer]
**"Past studies have shown that directly pursuing happiness—such as by engaging in pleasurable and self-centered activities—does not result in happiness"**
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7312963/>
Neuroscience (references below) has evidenced that doing good things for others is incredibly good for people's mental health. Living in a society where no-one needs to do anything good for anyone else; no-one has any desperate needs they need to fulfill and people work only if they want to we know will lead to a society so full of mental illness that there would be an epidemic of suicide as well as acts against other people (words that would get this post filtered, probably).
Just to add some data weight to these assertions on a national scale (thanks so some comments)
* [Europe's anti-depressant usage doubles in the last 20 years](https://futurecarecapital.org.uk/latest/europeans-use-of-antidepressants-doubles/)
* [Nearly 40% of Europeans suffer with mental health issues](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-mental-illness-idUSTRE7832JJ20110904)
* [Mental health problems have been increasingly recognised as one of the most significant health concerns
for children and adolescents in developed countries.](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiKvfrxosf-AhW7RaQEHRRMC7AQFnoECBMQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fec.europa.eu%2Fsocial%2FBlobServlet%3FdocId%3D23575%26langId%3Den&usg=AOvVaw2xB9kqKNoavmeKF-jxs9gC)
This is well documented, and historically backed. We have no further to look than the recent case of Epstein's island to know that very very rich people who need nothing and don't do anything altruistically deem it acceptable to consume services from trafficked children.
Yet, in societies where people have to help each other to survive, morality is significantly higher as the consequences of immoral/evil/whatever-you-want-to-call-it behaviour are much wider. If no-one has much at all and most are starving, stealing food from someone means that they are in a much worse state, requiring others to help them, so the impact is on many, not just one. Known organisational survival techniques include high levels of empathy and understanding of each other. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5917043/> When forced to actually empathise, humans do better. If there is no push to do this and a "parent" government takes care of the people who can't be bothered to work, and live lives devoid of any purpose other than self-fullfilment, then those people who in a normal society would fail hard, get back up on their feet with help from those around them (not a government who would just "fix" their perceived needs) and change, don't have the opportunity to go through that. That's the key thing. There would be an incentive for people who are ruining things for themselves and others to change.
**How does this play out?**
In summary, I love the idea of what you're writing. I think in reality if that society existed it would probably have around three months before censorship started, would require full on fascist control of free speech and thought within a year, everyone would be told that they were happy and if they weren't they'd be considered "disruptive lawbreakers" and "a threat to our great way of life". (See every communist state that's ever been including the ones around now.) Then the unrest would start, population control would tighten, there would be huge deaths and executions whilst those in power tried to hold on to what was clearly so broken, but would mean that they would have to let go of the control they had. Robots would be used to "enforce the utopia" and any freedom loving humans would sacrifice their home, stipend and privileges to live outside of the system, in freedom and humanity, destroying the robots as they attacked them.
Creativity thrives during struggle; the most creative would be those who would live underground leading to an underground society which is technologically superior to the official one. They would trade, have an economy, beliefs, free thought and eventually create weaponry good enough to destroy the robots, who would be the masters at that point.
The social control would then end and a set of regional governments would form; some of them communist (because there would still be many who like the idea of having no control over or choices in their lives), many of them freedom seeking instead. And the story would end with humans having choice and freedom again, including the choice to give up their freedom.
**Update/Conclusion/Response to comments**
Firstly I do appreciate the comments. It's important to have valuable arguments for and against something, so I'm just going to add this here with some additional evidence to back up my thoughts on this fantasy society that doesn't exist -- more for interest's sake than anything.
I'm not saying I'm correct. After all there is no post-scarcity society, but living standards have improved vastly in the last 30 years in the West. So in terms of extrapolating to a society where there is no scarcity the relevant data points we have are
* The increase in living standards in developed countries across the last 50 years
* The individual responses to lack of altruistic behaviour (which requires opportunity)
* The performance of human communities and how that follows with empathy.
* The necessity to have empathy to have healthy communities, and how with a parent government taking care of all the bad things, the necessity to go through the pain of empathy to help others is minimised. (leading to mental health issues -- there are studies on this)
* We know that every time in history a government has made it so that every citizen gets the same regardless of what they do (communism) it *correlates* to a large number of those citizens being killed/sent to labour camps/censored/enslaved. This isn't because communism is bad per se -- it's very good for cattle and sheep. Humans don't do so well.
Looking at the current trend over the last 50 years is the only thing we can really do to form an intelligent conclusion as to what might happen in this fantasy that there is post-scarcity. But what we do know is that mental health is not just being more highlighted, but it's getting worse. Measurements such as suicide attempts, addictive behaviour and self harm are all increasing. It's not just that people are more aware and seek help -- these are cases where people are admitted to hospital with significant damage. (<https://cks.nice.org.uk/topics/self-harm/background-information/prevalence/>) Is living standards the only thing? Maybe not. Suicide rates are lower in countries where living standards are lower -- and yes there's a very strong *correlation* and it's only a correlation. However enough correlation and individual evidence is actually what conclusions are based on.
<https://positivepsychology.com/neuroscience-of-gratitude/>
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7312963/>
[Answer]
Trying to answer this question is a bit difficult, because it requires pinning down specific behaviors to material and economic circumstances without having much information about the actual culture itself.
Let me give you an example. What approach to criminal justice would this society have towards its citizenry?
We might assume this will be an enlightened society that improves upon what we try to do today. But it could as well be that their justice system is barbaric compared to our own.
Criminals are given a fair trial, the benefit of the doubt, and have their actions thoroughly investigated.
However afterwards the criminal, when found guilty, is dealt a retribution. Maybe they are publicly whipped? Maybe they are given a brand they are not allowed to remove for ten years? Maybe they are made to clean sewage by hand?
Only then afterwards are they given advanced therapies and counselling to integrate them back into society.
Because why exactly commit a crime in this society? In the developed world today we are inclined to view crime as a matter of extenuating circumstances. Because of untreated mental illness, discrimination, unemployment, dysfunctional upbringings, and economic desperation.
But in this society just about all these extenuating circumstances have been dealt with.
As a result the inhabitants of this society are far more inclined to view to crime as an act of malice or stupidity indistinguishable from malice.
[Answer]
## What you describe is already the case
(to a large degree, in some places)
Not in the US, obviously, but western Europe is already mostly there.
Consider Germany, for example:
* [University is free](https://www.study.eu/article/study-in-germany-for-free-what-you-need-to-know) (with some caveats).
* [There's a basic subsistence benefit](https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/social-security/unemployment-benefits-germany-arbeitslosengeld) for basic expenses, in addition to giving you money for rent.
* [There is universal healthcare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany) (which is unlimited, i.e. better than your "a 'rational' lifetime maximum expenditure", on paper, anyway).
* It has a decent public transport system (not compared to neighbouring countries, but still decent).
These things are far from perfect, and there may be countries that do it better. But the point is that what you describe isn't that far from reality.
The reason most people in the middle-to-upper class work (even in places like the US), is generally not to have their basic needs met (because they can do that with a fraction of their salary, if they even need to work at all), it's to live a higher quality of life and to do work they enjoy.
## So what do we expect to see?
If machines do all tedious work, and by increasing benefits not just to basic income, but to comfortable living:
* You'd probably expect to see far fewer low-paying jobs and less exploitation of workers.
* There may be an increase in people choosing to not work, or being unable to find work.
* The number of hours in the average work week may decrease significantly, which could counter-act there being less employment available (side note: [the four-day work week](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-day_workweek) is already a thing in some places).
* People would spend more time on hobbies, socialising and such (most of what people currently do in their free time).
* We may focus more on scientific pursuits: there'll always be some things beyond our knowledge; we would try to uncover such knowledge.
* Average stress levels may decrease, as people would be less worried about losing their jobs or about whether they can afford rent this month.
* But people may struggle more with boredom and finding purpose. One might expect to see an increase in cults, if this isn't channeled into more productive things (and if people aren't taught critical thinking and such).
* There would still need to be entire industries for electronics, art and entertainment and whatnot, so jobs certainly wouldn't disappear.
+ If you go one step further and say machines would do most of that too, this may just shift things more in the direction of the above things, rather than fundamentally changing anything.
[Answer]
## Very little difference
You can get food, clothing, shelter, medical treatment, and education for free in America, and to a standard that would have convinced a Roman emperor that you were not human but rather a god.
What will happen is that expectations will rise. People will treat the basics of post scarcity society as if they were the spontaneous result of nature and any deprivation of them took malice. They (on average) will grouse at and envy anyone with a better living standard if they stick to the basics, and they (on average) will wonder where all the money goes if they have a job and get more than the basics.
[Answer]
While I mostly agree with behavioral sink / hedonism / lack of purpose, there is one avenue that in my opinion was not explored by other answers:
>
> The population is continually replenished by refugees from other worlds that have self-destructed.
>
>
>
1. Your population is totally adjusted to different behaviors, like fight for survival every day and significant share must have some military training from total war that destroyed their planet
2. Your population is more likely to bring serious traumas with them
3. Your population is most likely to have people for whom already high on priority list was getting even with other faction (Ironically, one does not have to believe in any hard line ideology. It's enough to be a normie who had most of his country nuked)
**So significant share of population are former military personnel with nothing meaningful to do except plotting revenge against people who they consider as responsible for destroying their planet?**
[Answer]
### Compete
Once you get past physical needs, you have a layer of "making sure others don't take what I have," followed by expanding social circles in which competition occurs.
In Maslow's hierarchy, he lists acceptance, esteem, and self-actualization as the levels above security. The global communications network has expanded the concept of society to include many, many sub-segments. Acceptance and Esteem can be established in each of those vertical slices. Each vertical slice has its own criteria for those two.
Acceptance, in this context, means that the society has accepted that you are a viable competitor, that you aren't disqualified for reasons that the society itself determines. Acceptance is the price of entry, and it can be rescinded if you violate the society's norms.
Esteem, in this context, means that you have been recognized by that society as capable of providing effective competition, whether their scale is sports-based, or altruistic, information-based, exemplary morals, or even being adequately ruthless. Each society sets their own standards.
What post-scarcity does is it prevents groups from **requiring** that people in society compete within specific societies. Right now, everyone must either pick a money-earning society to compete within, or compete in a society that money-earning people appreciate. This is limiting, regardless of the espoused benefits of those limitations.
Thus, a post-scarcity society would just shift the scales on which they compete, (mostly) eliminating the lower end of competitors for the scales that people are currently forced to compete in.
]
|
[Question]
[
For both nuclear and diesel powered ship, an aircraft carrier for example ,
1. Is it the engine that can’t produce enough power to drive the propellers to get as much as speed you can get within structural limitations of given set of propellers
2. Or, Engine are fully capable,but propellers can’t handle such power without mechanical breakdown due to the structural limitations of real-world materials, i.e. Steel is that tough to handle that much load
3. Both are capable,but are toned down by us for economical reasons
.
Context : The radius earth in this world is 3 to 4 times ours (9x-16x surface area). It’s moon a donut planet so there’s a gravity gradient along latitudes.
There are monsters upto 300-800m long, and some serpentile one go upto 1200m in low gravity equatorial regions.
Magic exist, but it requires conscious input of every little effect, like how voltage your lightning strike has (no automations like spells). So, not very reliable for continuous prolonged use even for expert. Materials like admantite are available. Civilisation like more tech advanced than us
So, this aircraft carrier needs to very huge to handle huge guns and tank giant monsters attacks. But fast to reach far away emergency quickly especially considering giant size of planet as fighter plane can’t go that far across the ocean on their own
[Answer]
You should read up on a concept called "hull speed".
For a vessel with a displacement hull (that is, anything that doesn't use dynamic force of motion through water to lift part of the hull out of the water -- like the planing hull of a ski boat or a hydrofoil) there's a maximum speed above which the power required to go faster increases very sharply, with most of the additional power going to plow a huge wake (relative to the hull size) rather than just go faster.
This speed is related primarily to hull length, at least for hulls that aren't grossly wrong (like the squared off hull of a barge). This speed is that at which the first wake produced by the bow just reaches the stern before dropping below ambient water surface height. For a modern American supercarrier, with a waterline length of around 300 meters, the hull speed is around forty knots (~ 68 km/h). To go faster, a *Nimitz* or *Abraham Lincoln* would need to be longer; even doubling the power of reactor and turbines wouldn't gain more than another knot or so.
There are online calculators that will approximate the hull speed for a given waterline length (this is an important consideration for yachts, freighters, tankers, etc.) as well as what power is required to reach that speed.
Worth noting, however, that many ships operate well below hull speed. A supertanker or container ship, for instance, has installed power sufficient to accelerate to cruise speed in a reasonable time (under an hour?), but will shut down some fraction of the engine (in some cases I'm aware of, three of the four huge cylinders will be closed off, both valves and injectors stopped so the air compression acts like a monstrous spring) in order to maintain cruise on minimum fuel consumption -- because it takes far more power to accelerate a huge mass of ship and cargo (or ship and ammunition and aircraft and their fuel and crew and provisions and so forth) than it does to maintain an efficient speed.
[Answer]
Both. For **best efficiency**, the screw must be designed to fit the speed and power of the engine and the shape of the hull. Overly fast propeller rotation can lead to [cavitation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavitation), which was a problem especially with early turbines before there was [gearing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine#Cruising_machinery_and_gearing).
An oil-fired warship would be designed to cruise at much less than top speed to get a good range/endurance. A nuclear (war)ship or a modern oil-fired freighter might be designed with cruise speed close to the practical top speed -- the nuclear ship because it has the power, and the freighter because the routes and fuel consumption are very predictable and it makes no sense to design them with much 'sprint' capacity.
Longer distances on your planet might lead to more nuclear ships, even [civilian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hahn_(ship)) ones.
[Answer]
I think this is an interesting question because the size of the ship would cause all sorts of issues logistically, how you would support it, crew it and support it. How deep the water would need to be, how maneuverable it could be and if there would be special ports to berth it. Just building and launching it would pose all sorts of story building issues. The question of power and speed seems relevant to all of the above.
There are several things to consider.
1. Drag from the water. This is typically dependent on hull area in contact with the water. This increases with velocity.
2. The length of the ship. This is because you lose energy generating a bow wave pushing water out in front of the ship and also a wake behind the ship. In the worse case the bow wave and wake constructively interfere for a certain speed and the energy loss is maximized at that speed. For heavy ships with limited propulsion this is the limiting factor.
3. The number of screws and how fast you can turn them. The number of blades and and shape of the blades matter some but ultimately cavitation becomes limiting (and can also erode the material of the propeller). Up to a point, you can increase the number of screws and increase the speed. A larger screw generates more thrust, but the larger radius means the linear velocity of the tip is moving faster and result in earlier cavitation.
The good news is that longer ships have higher top speeds, and that this effect dominates over the drag. Although having a clean hull or a dirty hull can still make a big difference of several knots. A 1 km long ship is about 3 times as long as a modern aircraft carrier, but you may want to think carefully about the width.
I think with point number 3, if you keep the aspect ratio the same you can have more screws for more propulsion. Although this might also be limited by the size and number of nuclear reactors you want to have. One per screw? So then you have all kinds of engineering complexity as to how you would coordinate the different reactors, what you would do if one reactor magical or nuclear had a problem etc. Other aspects of engineering plant could also be more limiting than just raw power. The shaft has to withstand the torque, usually there are reduction gears etc.
If you make the vessel more needle like then there may be some structural issues with what happens in heavy weather. Since depending you could have several wavelengths of wave under the ship. That would stress the hull. For a short boat you can ride the wave. For the very long boat you could be supported by two or more waves with sections of the boat being under a lot of compressive stress or tension depending on if supported at the ends or in the middle. This would ultimately become a strength of materials issue.
The choice of nuclear power or similar power density is probably necessary. The speed you want to achieve of 45 knots is higher than the published top speeds of US aircraft carriers. In general though as long as a carrier can move fast enough to launch airplanes, about 30 knots, there is not a lot of incentive for them to go that much faster.
The simplest calculation you can do, is to calculate the [hull speed](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_speed). The hull speed formula is the velocity in knots is 1.34 times the square root the length of the waterline. If you use that formula and the published length of a modern carrier (longer than the waterline length) you get about 44 knots. A more accurate way would be to calculate the Froude number.
So if you are worried just about speed and you can hand wave enough power, and perhaps some cavitation suppressors, I think you can probably get to your 45 knots. You can also play around with some different ways to minimize drag with anti fouling paint or special magical coatings.
[Answer]
It sounds like you are going several different ways here.
1. The above (excellent) answers seem to be speaking to non-fiction
physics, which is what the first part of your questions seems to
ask.
2. The second seems to be saying "how can I make a carrier such that one
could water-ski (racing) behind, think 112 knots.
I will try to engage the second part of the question.
Options:
* Like Zeiss Ikon obliquely points out, a hydrofoil can bypass some of the hull-speed limit by lifting part of the hull out of the water. There are limits to this, as the US Navy's largest was only about 300 tons [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Plainview_(AGEH-1)) which is nothing compared to the 100,000 tons of an aircraft carrier.
* The [Russian Shkval](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval) allows a torpedo-missile to move about 4x to 5x faster than the fastest conventional torpedo by putting the bulk of the body in a vapor instead of a liquid. If heat or steam exhaust could be supplied in the opposite sense of [boundary layer suction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_layer_suction) then you could give your max speed (assuming lots, but not infinite) power about a 5x boost, moving it from 33-ish knots to something between 132 and 165 knots.
* On a water-world there is a lot of water. If your technology has bottled very-warm-but-not-too-hot fusion, then an [old-school Orion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)) could be used to just give it stupidly massive thrust. It might be terrible on the wildlife even if it didn't use fissionables. To my mind it smells like a very big cousin of a [Reaver-style ship](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/reaver-land-stalker--436778863833624805/).
* If the water could be frozen in front of the ship, then instead of hydrofoils, ice skates could be used. Ice skates have very low drag, but the load would be immense, and moving that kind of heat around is very challenging.
* Tuna are investigated because they use their wake for thrust. If the body of the vessel could vertically undulate, though possibly requiring catamaran form, it could potentially recover a significant portion of the energy spent moving the water out of the way of the ship.
* If you had a train of ships, then you could have one that was small but paid the majority of the wake-cost in energy, like a [Vee of flying geese](https://www.birdreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/27geese_blog.jpg). This would depart from the perpendicularity of the catamaran, and have staggering of the tandem hulls. You would have to TRIZ-like separate it into bits in a spatial sense.
* I liked [Buckaroo Bonzai and his oscillation overthruster](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdanCNK4ayo), but I don't see how he was able to go through matter horizontally, but be supported by it vertically; they could call it a flashlight but how do you align the road to your tires or turn off the effect after the end of your car has gone through it. If you become invisible to electromagnetic fields acting in a particular directions, that means drag wouldn't really exist. Partial invisibility would mean lots less drag. A funny piece of this is called "optically induced transparency" so you can use light to bork up how matter interacts with light. That thing, just a bit better than today, might make partial invisibility, that is to say much less drag by making the fluid act much less dense or less viscous, because even though the matter is there, it becomes non-interacting. If you apply this only within the stream-tube, especially if you apply it near the boundary layer, then you might have something like the big blinky triangular modern UFO's, except for water. ;)
Best of luck in your creative work.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question is [opinion-based](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by [editing this post](/posts/189718/edit).
Closed 3 years ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/189718/edit)
In order for you to be able to hate a certain group of people, they must fulfill two criteria:
1. They're within your vicinity
2. You have some a (real or perceived) conflict of interests with them
In my current setting, dragons, lizardmen, etc... are barely considered to be more than animals (maybe "savages" then?).
The problem is:
1. Lizardmen are very reclusive people (mostly because of their metabolism) with strong defensive capabilities. They aren't particularly war-like but are still suspicious of strangers.
2. Dragons are similarly more ready for evasion than offense. Not only can they fly, but the white fixer who made them ensured they'd be practically invisible on IR and radar. Dragons occasionally steal from plantations, almost always fruits, due to their energy density. But, those incidents are rare and limited to rebellious youngsters. Otherwise, dragons will remain near mountainous areas, not doing much. The most humans will ever see of them is their silhouette flying in the distance.
Both have human intelligence and are capable of communication.
Now, being meek, hospitable, and remote hasn't saved the Taíno from getting enslaved by Columbus ('cause he was kind of a f@cking monster), but Columbus hasn't had to deal with:
1. The wilderness in my setting has terror units in it. Their distribution changes over time, and when they come across humans, bad things happen. The shadows that are infested with Vashta Nerada rend the flesh, Slendreman clouds the mind, and ghosts do both. They're very sneaky and specialize in taking out supply lines, so colonialism over long distances simply can't work here.
2. Because there ARE terror units, which fulfill both criteria (they can be in any shadow, and their interest is wiping out sapient life), humans can't afford to bully either the lizardmen or dragons.
**So then, why would humans still hate and somewhat actively try to fight either?** To be more exact, I wanted to make it so that dragons are considered to be a rare but potent servant/pet material in most cases (assuming you can control one), while lizardmen are viewed as savages to be either subdued or wiped out.
Despite having a feudal society, humans' technology is around the same level as that of modern-day Earth. However, long-range communications (satellite, landline, etc) don't work, and there aren't any railroads or highways for that matter. Lizardmen are around the same level as Aztecs. Dragons, while knowing how gadgets work, have limited access to them.
[Answer]
**The worst form or racism is hate, but "racism" generally is nothing more than "I'd prefer to be with people just like me"**
Racism has (really, really, really simplistically) only two aspects:
(1) Humans are wired to fear that which is different. It comes from a bygone era where something rustling in the shadows will probably eat you. But, like the Good Book says, knowledge overcomes fear. It may take a considerable amount of education and practice to overcome it, but it can be done.
(2) Humans are really only good at three things: politics, marketing, and pattern-matching.1 "Politics" can be simplistically defined as the process of negotiating for a desired result2 and "marketing" can be simplistically defined as the process of managing communication to achieve a desired result.
**Special is to species as racial is to race**
But before I go on. You're using the right word philosophically to get your point across, but the wrong word "scientifically." I think this is important. The word you want is "special" (pronounced "spee-see-al" or "spee-shal" not "speh-shal"... two different words, same spelling). Why is this important?
Because depending on how your species developed in your world, humans may... or may not... treat creatures of another species the same way we do here on Earth. We love our pets, but we also love a good steak on the plate. We're delighted to kill all the buffalo to extinction for their pelts just as quickly as we are all the wolves 'cause they keep eating our steaks before we do. My point is, humans (being on the top of the proverbial food chain) always see all other species as *something much less* than we are, ourselves. And if you have the same humans in your world, they will, too.
* *Humans see all other species as less than themselves*
**Now, back to our program**
Due to the isolation of your species, you do have a problem with #1. Humans will always fear what they're not familiar with and I can only imagine the nightmares they would have if a talking lizard (flying or not) suddenly approached them. Especially if that talking lizard was *armed.* So, without tons of education, there will always be an aspect of fear, leading to distrust, leading to specism.
* *Humans always distrust/fear/hate what they don't know*
But your biggest problem is #2. If human history has taught us anything (and with all due respect!), the easiest way to get people from looking too closely at their government's policies is to *convince them it's the Jews' fault.*
Please forgive me, I'm not being mean. I'm being practical. Throughout history, the Jewish people have been used as the proverbial "scapegoat" to distract "the people" from something their government doesn't want seen or understood. (Which is oddly funny because the concept of a "scapegoat" is Jewish....) From the deepest Medieval periods through to today, you'll see Jews blamed for almost everything. (If they actually had the influence history has burdened them with, you'd think they'd own a bigger patch of ground and had done so much earlier....)
Reflect this (frankly despicable, but what bias isn't?) behavior on your world and what you have is everything from parents telling their children bedtime stories about lizard men and dragons to frighten them into obedience to governments blaming the obviously-not-here-to-defend-themselves lizard men and dragons for all the problems that would convince "the people" to change the government.
Which is better known by the modern nom-de-plume, "marketing."
* *Humans will always use fear and hatred to convince others to follow their lead*
BTW, the marketing world has an abbreviation that is the basis for most (if not all) marketing efforts: FUD. "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt." They're the three easiest emotions a marketer can use to leverage the behavior of you, the "consumer" (of everything from gumdrops to ideology). And the goal of marketing is always to get you, the "consumer" to buy/act in a way that's always in the best interest of the marketer — even when it's not in the best interest of the "consumer."
*Which was a lengthy way of saying that unless your humans are all naturally saints... there will always be specism.*
---
1‚ÄÉ\*Trust me on that third one. It's the basis of abstract reasoning.
2‚ÄÉ*And it's a lot easier to negotiate when you're holding the biggest gun.*
[Answer]
### Racism forms better without proximity.
I disagree with your suggestion that you need proximity for racism to form. Racism may form in this environment, yes, but there are other paths.
I'd suggest that distance and an information vacuum work even better, as the opposite of racism is essentially knowledge.
My hometown was very white and very Christian, and feelings of anti-black, antisemite, and anti-Muslim were quite common despite the culture being quite monotonous. There was no direct conflict or proximity with these people of any kind.
The white-trash side of my family knew nothing about Islam or Muslim people other than "they did 911" and were quite racist and keen for a war in the early 2000s.
If we had proximity to other peoples, I don't believe that would necessarily defeat racism, but a few "oh wait Bob from the pub is that race, and he seems nice" can be powerful antidotes.
[Answer]
The problem is in this statement
>
> In order for you to be able to hate a certain group of people, they
> must fulfill two criteria:
>
>
>
> ```
> They're within your vicinity
> You have some a (real or perceived) conflict of interests with them
>
> ```
>
>
If you insist on limiting the only reasons for hate to those then fine.
But let me tell you than there are many many reasons for humans to hate anything other than those. If you accept this we can continue.
But I'll use hate instead of racism hate as it is somewhat more general.
## Old injury.
Dragons used to control the world and enslaved humans. Lizards where their chosen enforcers. Humanity suffered but we did whatever we did and got the upper hand. Yet still from generation to generation we still teach our kids of the past and teach them to be avert to both or outright hate them. Sure the time scale of 4000 years or more is a bit much. But remember the last time you looked at something disgusting and did not like it? Why? Most likely because that signals disease and we don't like that. So. Even the mere sight of it is repulsive. Sure this more evolution than social engineering or selective ideas on our part. But I stand my ground. If we keep up the old tales and pass down the hatred we can keep it up as long as we want, or you want. Mentioning examples would only anger people I think.
## Ideology.
Easy to point to religion and say here is the entire history's source of evil. But a lot of people here are writers and should show deeper understanding of humans and history.
Long story short their mere existence is a slight to us. Maybe they are creatures of darkness. Maybe the most dominant religions or ideologies are against them just because. Maybe there is even a reason. Like the dragons are the race that killed god or something like that.
Or maybe rational pure pragmatic anti religious thoughts oppose them for their obvious powers and how we can only be free only after killing them.
Honestly history is full with stories that don't even make sense. You can oppose them without reason or add reasons.
**In my opinion ideology is probably the biggest and richest reason.**
## Biological reasons.
Maybe they release pheromones that has X effect on us. This can be as tragic as hell. For examples dragon are peaceful however they release a pheromones that they don't control, or know about, that makes us avert to them. Here you can have them be murdered for their mere existence. Depressing as hell.
This could be that people react with: disgust, fear, hatred...etc to them even **without** actual actions on the dragons behalf.
Another direction is that is does have a negative impact on us. Think that once exposed to dragons we are hypnotized or paralyzed or slowly go insane.
Now we can actual tangible reasons. You can control the severity. Like a bit of this and a bit of that.
## They are magical. But refuse to share power or help us.
Old wise dragons hold great powers and can annihilate armies with their magic. That is why we are afraid to hunt them.
But they can also cure all diseases or change the climate or even fix mental illnesses.
Now imagine our surprise when knowing that they, together or certain members or even anyone, can snap a finger and solve all our problems but they refuse to do so.
Perhaps certain lucky heroes go there and gain a measure of power or wisdom. Perhaps they murder anyone who gets close to their lands. Whatever the thing we just hate them for not helping us.
## Stereotyping.
How many 2020 people you know who think in a very scientific and logical manners?
Like what would you feel against people of ethnicity X if you meet 20 of them and they are all nice. And what would you feel about ethnicity Y if you meet 20 and all of them are awful.
Well. This is the same problem. Lizards for example are used as soldiers, criminals, bodyguards...etc and people the started viewing them with hatred.
I don't feel the need to tell that it is easy for a whole religion, culture, country...etc to be considered radical, terrorist, evil...etc just because of view bad examples. **Even if that group is 2 billions, few bad examples are enough.** Have the media focus on the bad ones and people will say: I don't know. I never meet a good person from that group. Even if they met like one and he was buying stuff from their stores.
Just the news or continuing browsing different sites.
Anyway if the examples known to people are those hardened cases who are criminals or violent then expect a lot of people to dislike them.
**Even without direct conflict with them**
In contrast to the first option this one is about seeing a few active bad examples and deciding they are all evil. While the first one is about keeping the ancient feud alive even if the last 10 generations of your family never saw a dragon.
## Fear of having another intelligent species sharing the planet with us.
A lot more interesting and certainly something we never faced. But we do have legitimate concerns if we saw a race of smart creatures that can even use technology. After all we have caused so much damage to the entire planet, a lot of which is by pure accident or not caring, and life that if they are anything like us we might want to arm those ICBM and keep the default targets their lands
---
You can simply pick whatever elements you feel like. None comes together
[Answer]
Natural resources
Modern technology requires resources.
Lizardmen and dragons sit on valuable and often very rare (coltan) ressources. So as you have stated there is a conflict of interests and therefore economical incentives to fuel hater ideology against the creatures.
This leads many people to doubt they have human dignity or at least doubt it accepting or tolerating humanity's abuses of them.
[Answer]
Strictly speaking, neither of your criteria for conflict existing are accurate.
>
> You have some a (real or perceived) conflict of interests with them
>
>
>
That's not true. [In-group bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism) suggests that all that's required is for people to perceive a different race as somehow being "different" than us. Experimental evidence shows that the basis for forming in-groups can be extremely arbitrary. (Researchers were even able to get people to form in-groups based on which group they were randomly assigned to in the experiment).
Also, the [Thomas theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_theorem) predicts that negative expectations about another group can cause a "vicious cycle" that reinforces prejudice.
One other point: contrary to popular opinion, conflict in general does *not* require a conflict of interest. Research by [Morton Deutsch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Deutsch) and others has indicated that quite a lot of conflict occurs in contexts where people at least theoretically have the same goal (such as in marriages, within companies, on work projects, etc.). That's actually what lead to him coming up with the concept of the "win-win solution" - if the conflict is occurring in a context where all of the parties have the same goal, it's presumably possible for a solution where everyone "wins" somehow.
>
> They're within your vicinity
>
>
>
It's more subtle than that. Conflict actually requires interdependence, so vicinity is neither necessary nor sufficient. Vicinity often causes interdependence (think of the neighbor who plays loud music at 2 AM; in that case, my ability to sleep is dependent on the neighbor not doing that), but that's not necessarily the case; there can be plenty of people in the same general vicinity as me that I have little to no interaction with, or that I don't really depend on in any way. Also, people that aren't in the same general vicinity can have conflict. Many of the Western countries that are currently in conflict with Russia are nowhere near it, for example (think of Australia or New Zealand, for example).
[Answer]
Those two points are not the only things that can incite hatred. For example:
* Fierce, diametrically opposed beliefs. Those filthy lizards were formed from a puddle of pure evil, while humans are divine in their origin, or the lizards regularly carry out practices that are viewed as abhorrent, or are considered to be allies of a hated group of humans, for example. So long as they remain in the people's mind's eye a point of negative comparison with little to no redeeming features, hatred can fester. They might just be a scapegoat for some other issue.
* Greed. The humans hunt and kill lizardmens and dragons because they want something from them. Their hides, their organs, their teeth, their eggs, their hoards, their caves, what have you. People grow to hate them because the people actually seeking the luxury items talk so much about they must be hunted down. Perhaps they're not useful items, but so long as they are desired there is motive.
* Perceived pragmatism, or paranoia. They're not so big a threat now, but people fear that they will become one. Maybe they have begun to breed at an alarming rate, maybe expansion puts humans into conflict with them, maybe there is a new leader trying to unify the lizardmen who has trained dragons as spies.
* They are perceived to exacerbate or be responsible for the other threat. Perhaps these dark creatures are somehow drawn to the dragons and lizardmen, or maybe they were created from them, or it is believed that their actions have riled them up. Maybe even, there is just a line drawn between humans and the monstrous enemies, and technically or otherwise these dragons and lizardmen happen to be on the other side of the line.
[Answer]
The reason racism exists is due to 4 important factors
1: The parents in our Society has something against this group.
2: The race just stays with their kind and doesn’t interact with other people. Which is why people think that this Race thinks they are superior to others.
3: It is easier to Label people with stereotypes than to try to get to know them.
4: It is easier to blame others than ourselves.
Which is why Hitler got his power because of Germany's post-WWI economic crisis. This was a result of hyper-inflation in an attempt to repay its crippling war debts/shares which is why they lost their Jobs, but Hitler confides in the people that the Jews where the people who stole all their money and brought the Economy to a downfall (his proof was the classic stereotype of "the greedy Jew").
There can be other factors like:
* A Long History of Slavery or racial segregation
* Not seeing the difference between others of his kind
* Political reason (like Hitler or Slavery)
* They are "different" from US so they Must be Bad
* Religion
One other example is Slavery:
The reason Colonialists were looking for new land was because of the dream of wealth and gold.
But what they found were People.
So what to do? They hear that rich people are looking for unpayed workers so why not kidnap "Those" people that live here and sell them to those houses and get some money
[Answer]
I'd like to modify your definition of racism, that I think will expose an answer from :
>
> 1. They're within your vicinity
> 2. You have some a (real or perceived) conflict of interests with them
>
>
>
to
>
> 2. There exists a general vacuum of knowledge, which is filled-in by a combination of received wisdom and guesswork, instead of genuine research.
>
>
>
Take a look at your lizardmen for some of the things people might wrongly assume and never bother to check :
* They look big, therefore they MUST be evolved for violence $\rightarrow$ They must be violent, despite their seeming peaceful nature.
* They look like reptiles (who knows if they are) $\rightarrow$ They must be poisonous
* Turtles are also reptiles (re-using an unproven unknown), and can get kids sick if they play with them (received wisdom, misapplied) $\rightarrow$ They probably have all sorts of dangerous-to-human diseases. Don't touch them. Don't get near them. Clean anything they come into contact with.
* Strong things are always dumb (pseudoscience) because they spend their time developing muscles, instead of brains $\rightarrow$ They are dumb. Maybe not even sentient.
* Reptiles have not feelings, and these are reptiles $\rightarrow$ These lizardmen CAN'T have their feelings hurt.
It gets worse once some people find a profit motive for mistreating your lizardmen, because now they have an incentive never to find out if the above assumptions are wrong.
Profit motivated people may even lend their own energy to stopping efforts to challenge the profitable assumptions about lizardmen. Now, such research becomes "rocking the boat"; and doing so may "hurt peoples reputations" or their feelings.
These perceptions can be unintentionally reinforced through performance art. A lazy playwright (or one who's never met a lizardperson) may treat them as things that only eat, fight, and mate -- not out of malice, but because it's easy to just use the stereotype.
Such lizardmen characters in literature may be mute, or only speak one word of the common language (or a few words), if they speak at all. Lizardmen characters written from such ignorance will never be eloquent, erudite, wise, and soulful.
And the overall writing community (if most performers are ignorant) would bash any treatment of lizardmen displaying wit, virtue and heart as "not a realistic depiction".
]
|
[Question]
[
I am creating an alternate history world that leads to modern Earth having many different nations & cultures than it has in real life. One country is big on funding many extreme experiments to find out more about the human brain and body. Vitruvia (the country name) wants to research & develop drugs and gadgets like truth serums, love potions, and memory destroyers.
Vitruvia essentially wants to create the [Neuralyzer](https://meninblack.fandom.com/wiki/Neuralyzer) from *Men In Black*. A machine or mechanism that can be used to cause retrograde amnesia in any number of humans. Is such a gadget constructible with 21st Century Technology (without severely damaging/killing the victim)?
[Answer]
You could go with a technique called **Trans-cranial Magnetic Stimulation or TMS.** But you'd also have to 'play around' with the science a bit and assume a couple of breakthroughs in neuroscience that may never really be possible.
TMS is being used for the treatment of metal health conditions such as PTSD and depression etc and one of the side effects of TMS that have been reported is disruption of working (short term memory). There are different types of TMS. See link here.
<https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/transcranial-magnetic-stimulation/about/pac-20384625>
The other relevant technology is **MRI** particularly **fMRI**. These technologies are working towards the mapping of individual neural circuits in the central nervous system and this is an area of technology that is developing rapidly. See link here.
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3529508/>
For the purposes of your story you can assume a 'breakthrough' has been made in both technologies. Very accurate fMRI lets you scan a brain to identify the circuits active in particular memories. Very accurate TMS lets you alter those networks to remove the memory.
The only problem is your 'Neuralizer' is going to be more like the one from MIB 3 not the ones in the other movies. At the least you'd have to have the 'patient' seated in a chair with something the size of a hair salon style professional dryer pushed down over their heads or alternatively they're are laid out horizontally and their heads are placed inside a compact MRI/TMS head scanning device. (Maybe all the victims mysteriously wake up in their apartments or whatever with no memory of how they got there and a nice perm!) :)
As a side bonus though the same tech *might* also give you a very effective **lie detector**. So you get two for one. This last is important by the way. Because questioning your victims about whatever it is you want them to forget while they are being scanned could, for plot purposes help identify the brain areas to be 'neuralized'.
[Answer]
**This is unanswerable**
I mean this in a technical sense - we do not know how Memory works, how it is stored etc.
And as such, we do not know what is needed to impact it.
What do I mean by this:
Go back 10,000 years - the fungi "Penicillium chrysogenum" exists - it was possible, with 10,000 year old technology to make Penicillin and therefore an antibiotic.
But - without all the surrounding knowledge, it's impossible to do so.
It *might* be that we have all the materials, manufacturing techniques and equipment that *could* build such a device - but without sufficient knowledge of how Memory works - we cannot answer.
[Answer]
We have this device. Its aanesthetic. Many are not aware, but the medicamentation cocktail you receive, constantly monitored on the operating table is composed of substances with different effects.
Some just reduce/prevent movement.
Some prevent pain signals from travelling. And some supress conciousness - or prevent memory formation.
As in the substance prevents the encoding from shortterm to longterm memory.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzodiazepine#Cognitive_effects>
[Answer]
**Sure, why not?**
We currently have the technology to cause anterograde amnesia: specifically, drugs that basically prevent the transfer of short-term memories into long-term storage. Outside certain medical contexts, these are very illegal and mostly used as a "date rape drug".
The most common/notable of these is *Flunitrazepam* also known as *Rohypnol*, a type of *Benzodiazepine* where, [quote Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_rape_drug):
>
> If enough of the drug is taken, a person may experience a state of automatism or dissociation. After the drug wears off, users may find themselves unable to remember what happened while under its influence
>
>
>
The drug is used to treat insomnia or act as an anesthetic, but has some rather out-there side effects.
Additionally, it doesn't case **retro**grade amnesia: people who take it don't forget what happened before they took it, but rather they forget what happened after they took it. Similar effects can be achieved with other drugs too, like alcohol in sufficient quantities.
I don't see any fundamental reason why technologically advanced people with less moral/ethical scruples about human experimentation couldn't develop or stumble across a drug that allows the recent memories of the taker to be "wiped" or otherwise reduced.
**Sidenote:** If someone could invent a medication which caused short term retrograde amnesia, even if it's not full memory-loss, they could easily become a billionaire because it would be *extremely* valuable to the military. Every combat soldier would be given this in an epi-pen style injector, and they'd be taught to self-administer after undergoing a traumatic event in order to prevent PTSD and thus save the taxpayer and the VA uncountable billions in medical expenses (along with protecting themselves from a lifetime of potential mental health issues).
[Answer]
Practically, No.
A neuralyser as shown in Men in Black is a cigar-sized object that removes a selectable period of the most recent memories with a flash.
Firstly, [memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory) doesn't work that way. While we don't know the mechanisms involved in the many different types of memory, it is unlikely that memories are laid down in such an orderly fashion, that earlier memories could be sorted and categorised easily by a machine.
Secondly, if a device could be made that could map a human brain and identify memories, it would necessarily require an unimaginable amount of processing power by 21st century standards. If the neuralyser was a real device, aside from its power supply, it would need to be packed solid with atomic-level quantum computing capabilities in order to process the structure and locate the memories in anything approaching the time shown in the MiB movies.
Thirdly, a neuralyser operating on a *number* of subjects at range makes the whole process just that much more difficult, and we also need to consider that it's one thing to map a human brain in an advanced machine like a MRI that the subject is placed within, and entirely another matter to achieve this with such a small handheld device.
Fourthly, having located the necessary memories, the issue of how to remove them remains. As we don't know how memories are stored, I couldn't begin to say how they might realistically be specifically destroyed. Since it has been shown that brain damage can result in memory loss, I would expect that targeted brain damage would be required to remove memories. Damaging such small parts of the brain would be difficult enough with a machine that the human head fits within, and many orders of magnitude more difficult to achieve at range.
So, I would say that a device like a neuralyser would be impossible in the 21st century at any scale, hand-held *or* the size of a building, and probably not possible in the 22nd century either, and if it was, it would be the size of a MRI machine, and certainly not effectively instant, but rather likely to take the better part of a day, and likely to require that the probably unwilling subject be sedated... if it could work at all on a sedated or uncooperative subject.
I'm sorry to say that in all liklihood, a neuralyser will remain nothing but a Hollywood magic plot device invented to explain how an otherwise impossible-to-keep secret can be kept.
[Answer]
We may not know much about how the brain works at the microscopic or macroscopic level. But we do know a few things.
The brain is composed of brain cells connected to many other brain cells. One brain cell fires, stimulating others. If this happens between several cells, a signal of some sort has been passed. At the same time the cells adapt subtly, so the next time the first cell fires it is more likely to do the same thing.
It is this sort of network that machine learning models aim to copy. For experimental reasons we generally separate the response (the passing of the signal) from the training (the adaption of the network). This lets us run experiments on our neural net models which are almost impossible to do with real neural nets.
Our vision system has two main pathways - the ventral stream is associated with identifying and recognising objects, and has access to our long-term memory, and the dorsal stream is more concerned with spatial relationships between objects, and with muscular actions and coordination, and has no obvious access to the long-term memory. But both streams have 'neuroplasticity' - they will react to the signal they pass, and can adapt to change and recover from damage. Memory is everywhere. This makes it hard to remove a memory completely.
In the very short term, we are continuously forgetting things. If a clock strikes, and someone asks what the time is, we can could remember what we heard, count the strikes, and say what time it was. A minute or so later, we may have forgotten that we had ever heard the clock strike.
If something has our attention, then the memory gets harder to erase. If you think "what did I just see/hear?" then there will be some conscious memory. This is not yet the long-term memory. If we do not use the information, it will probably be lost. This seems to be a bit of what anaesthetics do. But if it was a significant memory and you are not on drugs then you will remember it, even if you would rather not. Experience tells us that we can modify our memories. Police interrogation can change witness memories. Peer pressure can cause us to doubt ourselves. But this is more like rubbing out parts of a drawing drawn with an H pencil rather than a 3B, and putting something else over the top.
If we were a neural net model, we might be able to locate the particular set of weights at a node that (say) recognised our ex, and disable them. In a brain, this is much harder, because the experiments necessary to find the cell (or probably many cells) that do this would reinforce the memories you want to erase. This does not mean it is impossible, for therapy is supposed to do this sort of thing. It may be more efficient, if assisted by dream image reconstruction from MRI (a real thing), and drugs, and a better understanding of how to go about this sort of thing. But it is unlikely to be a 'Men in Black' flash erasure if the memory is older than a minute or so.
[Answer]
Some users have already pointed out that some drugs will do it. Dragongeek mentioned date rape drugs, those are the most classic examples.
I'll add something else: sleep deprivation. From [Harvard Health Publishing](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/im-too-young-to-have-alzheimers-disease-or-dementia-right-202206202764):
>
> What else could be causing memory problems at a young age? The most common cause of memory problems below age 65 is poor sleep.
>
>
>
If you give someone a drug, use a device, or simply apply brute force to keep them awake for, say, 36 hours straight, the person may remember a few things prior to the drugging or torturing, but the details will be hazy at most.
Actually, you may even have funny side effects. From [the Sleep Foundation](https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-deprivation/lack-of-sleep-and-cognitive-impairment) (emphasis mine):
>
> **Impaired Memory:** Both NREM and REM sleep appear to be important for broader memory consolidation, which helps reinforce information in the brain so that it can be recalled when needed. NREM sleep has been linked with declarative memory, which includes things like basic facts or statistics, and REM sleep is believed to boost procedural memory such as remembering a sequence of steps. Poor sleep impairs memory consolidation by disrupting the normal process that draws on both NREM and REM sleep for building and retaining memories. **Studies have even found that people who are sleep deprived are at risk of forming false memories.**
>
>
>
[Answer]
You would need a two step process:
1. Imaging and cognitive stimuli.
Use fMRI to map blood flow to active areas of the brain. Use pictures and sounds to locate the areas of the brain associated with the memories you wish to remove. You then narrow down the areas where the memories are stored by correlating areas that light up when the images and/or sounds are presented.
<https://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/22/6069> -- evidence visual stimuli
<https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30937831/> -- evidence that auditory and visual memories may be stored the same way long term
Present olfactory stimuli in a second testing session. Olfactory stimuli are processed differently. The inputs from olfactory nerves are passed directly into the brain. Auditory and visual stimuli pass through the thalamus -- a sort of bottle-neck in the sensory integration system.
<https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/artsbrain/2021/03/09/olfaction-and-memory/> -- olfactory and visual / auditory memories differ
The two different routes allow you to peform something close hypothesis test. The auditory and visual stimuli suggest an area. The olfactory stimuli verify the area.
2. Lobotomy / Selective Cell Death
Selectively lesion the areas indicated by the scan stimuli pairings. The least invasive technique would be mutli-axial electromagnetic beams -- I believe microwave (actually xrays are used) No single beam should be enough to do damage the parts of the brain where the beams pass through separately. The combination of eight beams that intersect at the point where a memory is stored will accumulate enough energy to lesion the area and destroy the memory.
<https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/stereotactic-radiosurgery/about/pac-20384526>
-- multiaxial beams: another named is used same concept
Repeat ad-nausia till you end up with a vegetable or someone who has lost the appropriate memories.
[Answer]
## [Lobotomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy)
Knowing as much as in the 1940s and 1950s, medical professionals repeatedly and very targeted destroyed parts of the brain of the patient to alter behavior or skills. With the knowledge we have today, a much more directed lobotomy could be aimed using activity measurements when requesting to retell the specific event.
The downside is clearly, that the process destroys more, at times much more, than just the aimed area.
]
|
[Question]
[
**Closed**. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers.
---
**Want to improve this question?** Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/249710/edit).
Closed 4 months ago.
[Improve this question](/posts/249710/edit)
Basically I have a world where people use diamonds as currency, and the reason they do this is because diamonds specifically are alchemically inert. Other useless metals like gold are nothing close to alchemically inert so, if they tried to turn those into currency, alchemists would change the atomic number of coins causing spiraling deflation. Diamonds are the solution to this problem.
My question is, what are the problems with this diamond currency? To be used as currency, the diamonds do have to be polished and a particular carat, but that is basically all. Are diamonds so common that people might need alot of them to buy things at medieval population levels? Would the material usefulness of diamonds not prevent the deflation problem, merely making it not as bad? I intend to use diamonds as currency in this world, and I am wanting to see if these potential pitfalls are going to be present in my world or not.
[Answer]
## Hard to Standardize
Gold can be cut into standard weight chunks known as coins. These can be given stamped shapes to minimize the chance of imposture. Furthermore, gold is gold. Some gold is not better than other gold. (Since it's so soft, and precious, it's generally alloyed. This, however, can be tested simply by testing its density.)
Diamonds have to be cut according their nature. This means they are more or less in carats, and have different shapes. Perhaps you can go by weight, but then you have that diamonds of first water are the same value as those that are heavily flawed and deeply discolored.
[Answer]
### Benefit vs Cost
Any form of currency can be destroyed, stolen, lost, counterfeited, etc. Diamonds are no exception. Any form of currency, in order to be useful, has to be plentiful enough to smooth the wheels of commerce but also rare enough that it actually has some value. Any form of currency has to be available. If your medieval setting is Olde Englande (TM), and all the diamonds are in South Africa, then this isn't very useful.
I will assume that diamonds are plentiful enough to be useful in a fairly large economic network that extends well beyond your focus country, yet still rare enough to be valuable.
This brings us to the only real limiting factor you've got, and that's the business of being "alchemically inert". And its inverse --- *everything else is alchemically active*. As I said, counterfeiting is a problem that every currency faces, and whilst your alchemists might not be able turn coal into diamond, it might be possible to turn it into quartz or some other mineral, cut and polish them, and pass them off through a standard money laundering scheme just as one would with fake coin or banknotes.
A question that needs to be considered: if you are so worried about alchemists messing with a gold (or silver, or iron) currency to the point that the *only viable currency in the entire world is diamond*, what kind of magical power are we actually looking at here!? It sounds like matter manipulation at the subatomic level is fairly trivial. Why would your society even need currency if very powerful alchemists could literally take basic raw matter and turn it into something useful (other than diamonds) or edible or valuable?
A note on deflation & inflation. Deflation is what happens when a dragon comes along and steals all your treasury's hoard of diamonds. Or burns them to ash. The first is a sort of long term deflation --- there is less money in your local economy to do the same job, until a brave knight can sally forth and slay the dragon. Your local treasury would have to issue some kind of emergency money to take the place of the temporarily mislaid diamonds. The latter, of course, is a permanent loss to your economy.
Inflation is what happens when the Dwarves who supply your diamonds get tired of working for low pay and in retribution dump a load of worthless gems into your economy. Now you have so much floating around that prices rise, the value of the carat actually drops and your currency becomes worth less and less.
In summation, I would argue that your people don't have a lot of choice. If alchemists are so powerful that they can easily flood whole economies with good false money, then you've got to take the bad with the good. Fortunately, as you describe it, diamond money is very feasible and easy to work with at a medieval tech level. Your basic technologies would be gem cutting & polishing, and accurate weights.
Just for interest sake, a 5 ct diamond weighs 1g and might be about the size of your small fingernail.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oyvPC.png)
[Answer]
There are two major problems, both pertaining to counterfeit money.
1. An average person cannot tell the difference between a real diamond and a [zircon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon) crystal. You need a professional to tell if the crystal is an actual diamond or zircon, or something similar. So, using these crystals as money poses a great risk for everyone who cannot afford a professional (or something similar, maybe some test kit that destroys zircons but not diamonds), and all transactions slow down because every crystal should be checked every time a significant amount of money is transferred. Otherwise it is too easy to slip in fake diamonds.
2. It is impossible to control all sources of diamonds & outlaw unauthorized diamond cutting. This gives room for a professional to make authentic diamonds that can be used as money. There is no way to ensure that only some diamonds are legitimate and others are not.
You need a currency that cannot be faked or created this easily.
[Answer]
**They burn up, perhaps too easily**
There was an experiment when a scientist (IIRC French) decided to check what would happen if a diamond would be put into the fire. Poof went the diamond. Diamonds are mere allotropic carbon (AKA coal in a different form), so while they can be "alchemically inert" they are still susceptible to heat and oxygenation. Your diamond supply would quickly run out without means to generate more of them at a steady pace to have them be a currency.
[Answer]
## Use a substance that can only be made by alchemy
Gold can be counterfeited by alchemists, but diamond can be counterfeited by anyone. Among metals, gold has a color, density, and hardness that makes it really hard to counterfeit without magic. But Diamonds are really hard to tell apart from a wide range of other naturally occurring crystals including certain kinds of Quartz, Sapphire, Topaz, Emerald, Amethyst, Aquamarine, and Garnet.
Instead of looking for a material that alchemists can't make, it might server you better to use a material that only the BEST alchemists can make. When it comes to fiat currency, it is practically impossible to make a dollar bill that an adequately skilled craftsman can not duplicate, so governments simply hire the best engravers, chemists, etc so that only the best of the best would have the skill to make a fake which makes controlling the few who could do it much easier.
So make your coins out of something so exotic, that only the best alchemists could figure out how to begin replicating it.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3cmJT.png)
[Answer]
There are no problems with it! There have to be enough around that the economy isn't under constant threat of "money" running out, but they also probably need to be controlled by the government.
Were I creating such a world, I would have governments keep monetary control by embedding the diamonds, particularly smaller ones, into otherwise-useless coins. The coins have to be minted and stamped to avoid counterfeiting, and the diamond would basically be appraised for other factors (cut, clarity, carat, alchemical stability, etc.), and embedded into a coin of a particular value. I.e., a 10-unit coin is a 10-unit coin regardless of where it originated.
You can also have fun with instead of governments controlling it, some guild or powerful faction controls that process. Shenanigans ensue when someone attempts to counterfeit.
[Answer]
The issues with all "hard money":
1. Limited supplies impose inflationary pressures on a growing economy.
2. Discoveries of large new deposits can cause deflation when speculators short the market.
3. Weight and volume increases the cost of transactions.
4. Easier to counterfeit than currencies. At least when the counterfeiters get the upper hand a particular denomination of currency, it's easy relatively easy to replace it with a harder to counterfeit currency.
[Answer]
An economy of any scale running purely on one commodity is as impractical as one running purely on ad hoc barter.
Using a rare material like gold is most directly useful for large transactions, where it's practical for a detailed assessment of the value to be made independently by each party. With gold, this assessment is an objective one of weight and purity, with the only arguments being about how to prove the purity. With diamonds, some appropriate scale of "quality" would be needed, which might lead to more disputes along the lines of "I asked for 200 grade 5 diamonds, some of these are clearly grade 4".
For smaller every day transactions, people do not want to be constantly assessing the value of every token themselves, they want someone to vouch for it. That's where coins come in: the government, or some other body, assesses the weight and purity of a piece of metal, and stamps it as a particular value. Most transactions proceed based on the authenticity of the stamp, not the weight and purity of the metal.
Moreover, the minting authority standardises that value, so that you don't have to work out what "23g at 80% + 19g at 70%" gives you, you just count coins in a few fixed denominations. With precious metals, these denominations can be arbitrarily small, just by adding more base metal - a single coin containing 80% gold by weight can be recast into 80 coins of equal weight but only 1% gold.
So, someone will need to certify the diamond. Engraving it with a hallmark is tricky, so perhaps you embed it into a minted coin, as Russell Fox suggests. Rather than just measuring purity, as with precious metals, the mint will be acting as arbiter of disputes about quality, and how two small diamonds relate in value to one medium-sized diamond.
They'll also need a simplified system of denominations, so that the coins are freely interchangeable. A challenge there is that diamonds can't be arbitrarily divided and recombined like molten metal, and their value isn't linear - two 5-carat diamonds are not worth the same as one 10-carat diamond. Most coins will therefore probably have *multiple* diamonds embedded, rather than fractions as would be the case with gold coins. Whether that's practical will depend on how common diamonds are.
At this point, your diamond economy quickly starts looking like real economies in history - the controller of the mint can start inflating the currency by over-certifying diamonds; and smaller denominations of coin can be minted with no diamonds at all, valued because the mint promises to exchange them at a certain ratio. The "diamond standard" eventually becomes a largely abstract measure for comparing the validity of coins minted by different authorities, complicated by the more subjective nature of "diamond quality" as opposed to the purity of a precious metal.
In other words, you have bags of diamonds in Fort Knox to facilitate international trade, but you don't have someone handing a bag of glistening gems to their local baker in the morning, they hand over copper pennies just like in our world.
[Answer]
Working from @nosajimiki's answer, create an alchemical process that produces a substance that is alchemically inert, doesn't occur in nature, is suitably resilient, and is unmistakable. Some sort of malleable metal would be good. The main ingredient for this process is... diamonds.
The purer the diamond, the more metal is produced.
Smaller denominations could be literally smaller or have holes in them, sort of like old Chinese coins. Or they could be broken into "pieces of 8".
[Answer]
There are solutions to your problems.
First problem lies in glass or similar looking gems. They can be tested for hardness. Diamond is very very hard. Widely available corundum test pieces could be used to test it.
Second is shaping and standardizing coins. If diamonds are many and large enough, they can be cut with magic. Since it is very very hard, it requires a mage/alchemist of the utmost skill. Hand cutting to standard size and shape is difficult, especially if it has some engravings on it. Gold/silver has a similar problem, anyone can mold gold into any shape, but forging currency requires skill, which makes forging not very lucrative. If you can do that, you can work for the king or other similar high paying non-criminal work.
Finally, availability. You can either mine them, or top tier alchemists can create them from coal with incredible difficulty. Your king should be able to control the availability at least to a point. Mining is easier to control, especially if it is rare enough. If say a peasant finds a diamond, treasury can buy it from them at a lower price point to encourage people to do the right thing.
If created by alchemists, your king will hire every alchemist that can create diamonds. You might think a top tier alchemist will forge their own currency to get rich, but if you can create diamonds, you probably can create so many other things that will fetch you legitimate currency. And those other things will not get you hanged.
All in all, there will still be some money laundering, which will not be much different from what we had in the past or even in the present.
]
|
[Question]
[
I’m designing a world where fully enclosed vehicles that can handle complete submersion into water are commonplace. While amphibious vehicles exist, a different class of vehicles has been introduced: drivable across the bottom of waterways and natural rivers.
Just like with amphibious vehicles there are limits to how rough the waterways can be, but what I’m interested in is how the vehicle’s wheels/tracks/whatever would be designed to allow decent locomotion across the ground of the waterways, while also providing a good locomotion when on land.
Things that the vehicle should be able to perform:
* it needs to be fully submerged and deep enough not to bother regular boats floating on top. No floating on the surface!\*
* It needs to be able to drive extended distances up or downstream, as well as just crossing the river.
* It needs to be able to drive on roads and cross-country
* It needs to be able to enter and exit water at places where a regular amphibious vehicle would be able to enter and exit.
* It needs to be able to handle most surfaces of rivers, like mud and rocky ground.
* The aim is around ~~30~~5km/h speeds when submerged. ~~120~~50km/h on roads.
* Having different modes of locomotion in water and land is allowed as long as its not mutually exclusive.
The question: what type of locomotion would fit the best to achieve these goals?
Note: I am not asking for what you might think is more efficient. That is why I already recognize the option for regular amphibious transport modes. Tracks for vehicles is also an incredibly inefficient mode of locomotion compared to wheels but its designed for specific situations. That is what I am asking here: a mode of transport for this specific situation.
~~You can pick the type of vehicle yourself (personal car, small truck, big truck, full blown tank), but if you really feel the need to be stuck on one specific design:~~
* 15 tons in weight
* 7m in length
* 3m in width
* 2m in height (removed to focus on the locomotion rather than questions on the vehicle. Pick a density and dimensions for the vehicle that suits the locomotion you propose.)
\*for those that spot the option, having it float at a specific depth and use jets to move as a mini sub is possible, but would still require you to figure out how fast the vehicle would sink to that depth, if it sinks too slow you reach the other side before you reach the desired depth. Also it still needs to drive the parts that aren’t deep enough when it enters the water.
[Answer]
Well, the vehicle dimensions you mention gives an internal volume of about 30-40 m3. Which means it will always float.
The only rl vehicles for which driving on the bottom of a river are heavy tanks in the 50-60 ton class. For example, the Swedish Stridsvagn 103 tank had a screen that could be lifted on top of the tank to increase its ability to float and cross rivers without sinking. Other tanks have a pipe that extends 1 or 2 meter above the tank to let the engine breath and cross rivers. None of this is a fast or elegant solution. (Google for some videos and see)
Most other vehicles don't have the density to sink. So first, for this concept to work, the vehicle needs to have a reason to be heavy as a rock.
Then there are two mutually exclusive options.
1. Sink and drive on the bottom.
2. Float mid water like a submarine.
If the vehicle is designed to sink it needs to be a lot heavier than water, to gain enough traction in the bottom. At least 1.5x I would say, but maybe 2x. This would make it impossible to float.
Tracks are the best propulsion in mud and are therefore preferred in (Northern) European warfare. They do less well in dry sand, so countries like South Africa tend to use heavy wheeled vehicles for the role of main tank. (The Rooikat)
However water currents will interact badly with the mud around a vehicle driving on the bottom. It will dig away the mud around it and make the vehicle sink in the mud. The action of the tracks will only accelerate this process. I don't know of any project that has tried to investigate this, but looking at excavators that get themselves stuck in water suggest that this is a major problem.
Submarine style will therefore probably be the most realistic option. At least in muddy rivers where the mud can be several meters deep.
If the vehicle has small wings or horizontal fins it can control its depth very quickly. Water is very heavy compared to air and therefore when you make some speed it is very easy to control movement horizontally and vertically with the use of fins. Look at tuna, dolphins and penguins for inspiration. They move to fast for buoyant forces to play an important role.
This would require a powerful water jet like propulsion. The most difficult part is the shallow water near the coast. The wheels or tracks don't have enough down force to get a grip on the soil. And the water jet intake might be to close to the surface and starts sucking in air. Not insurmountable, but it requires some good engineering.
[Answer]
>
> * The aim is around 30km/h speeds when submerged. 120km/h on roads.
> * 15 tons in weight
> * 7m in length
> * 3m in width
> * 2m in height
>
>
>
I'm not sure if it is concidence or not, but the dimensions and weight your suggested are remarkably close to the real world [OT-64 SKOT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OT-64_SKOT), a (temporarily) submersible cold-war era APC design.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lb9Azm.png)[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tHBXTm.png)
(image credits [A. Łuszczewski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SKOT_2A_TBiU9_3.jpg), [J. Sobieszczuk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SKOT_2A_TBiU9_2.jpg), via wikimedia)
The notable exception being that the SKOT-64 had a max speed of 94 km/h and 9 km/h in water using a pair of propellers driven by the main engine and a couple of rudders for steering. Perhaps modern powerplants could fix the speeds... they're not hugely far away from your goals. And incidentally, "in water" here means "like a boat", *not* "like a submarine". It meets almost all other requirements of your vehicle, with the notable exception of
>
> it needs to be fully submerged and deep enough not to bother regular boats floating on top. No floating on the surface!
>
>
>
That's a slightly non-trivial challenge, because of the volume of your vehicle relative to its weight: if it were an ellipsoid with those diameters it would be displacing a good 21 tonnes of water. If it *wasn't* an ellipsoid you might need to start worrying about drag, because travelling at 30 km/h underwater is going to be a challenge for a boxy shaped thing like a van.
The SKOT-64 could submerge briefly, if you had a sporty enough entry into the water, but it'll pop back up onto the surface quickly enough. Floating on top was considered OK though, because being a submarine adds a load of extra engineering challenges with fairly minimal reward... the surface of a body of water tends to be relatively flat and easy to traverse (exceptions for fast flowing rivers, of course) whereas the bottom could be muddy, rocky, lumpy, whatever. Its hard to see obstacles down there until you hit them, too. Churning up the bottom isn't going to do the local ecosystem many favors either. Getting stuck down there present some significant safety hazards that floating on the top does not, and so on.
>
> what I’m interested in is how the vehicle’s wheels/tracks/whatever would be designed to allow decent locomotion across the ground of the waterways, while also providing a good locomotion when on land.
>
>
>
Assuming you somehow *did* still need to drive along the bottom, with it being slower and messier and more dangerous, then wheels and tracks will work for you. Lake and sea beds can be deep, soft silt and mud so you'd want broad tracks or chunky tyres (or rolligons, I guess) in order to avoid getting bogged down, but those things will definitely hurt your above-water performance.
If you took the (fractionally more sensible) submarine option you can avoid the terrain issues and retain surface-optimised tracks or wheels, but you need to make density adjustments somehow in order for your vehicle to be negatively bouyant. Doing this with ballast weights will ruin your speed and fuel economy, and flooding the passenger spaces will spoilt the upholstery and necessitate things like passenger drysuits and air supplies which are a different kind of compromise. Your top speed will be limited by the drag of any protruding bits like the wheels... having them retractable is going to massively increase engineering complexity (remember, the Lotus Esprit in [The Spy Who Loved Me](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spy_Who_Loved_Me_(film)#Filming) cheated!) and reduce the strength of the mounting system which will reduce all-terrain driving performance.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lHJhz.png)
(Image credit [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lotus_Esprit_submarine.jpg). Don't think too hard about where the hydroplanes came from)
In short, everything is a compromise. Your wheeled submarine is a very big compromise, and as such should probably only be used for specific purposes. General above-surface operations are best left to regular vehicles, which will be cheaper, safer, faster, and probably a lot more reliable.
---
As an aside, positive bouyancy submarines *do* exist... there's [at least one commercial company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawkes_Ocean_Technologies), trying to sell them ([commercial vendor link](https://www.mysubmarines.com/deepflight-super-falcon.html)). They use the forward motion of the vessel and winglike hydroplanes to produce downforce in the water to overcome bouyancy and will float to the surface following a loss of power or movement. They're an inappropriate shape for a surface vehicle though, and travelling at speed below the surface in confined water like a river or a lake seems like a recipe for a fatal crash in pretty short order.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eC0E6.png)
([DeepFlight Super Falcon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepFlight_Super_Falcon), image credit [Steve Jurvetson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DeepFlight_Super_Falcon.jpg)
[Answer]
It would be **a submarine with wheels** because of this:
>
> The aim is around 30km/h speeds when submerged. 120km/h on roads.
>
>
>
At your desired speeds, water resistance would still be about 10 times greater than air resistance and as a result of this, the vehicle would need to be optimised for operation underwater, with driving on roads being an afterthought in comparison.
...and as a result, it will drive *poorly*. The land-driving gear would need to be small and/or retractable to preserve as much of the submarine's hydrodynamic shape as possible, which would put it under great strain once it has to bear the vehicle's weight, especially when also travelling on uneven terrain. Power transmission would be problematic for the same reasons, which could make it difficult for the vehicle to climb hills, including getting out of the water. It would likely break often, which may add an interesting twist to your stories.
But in the water, it could be as capable as the existing submarines.
If you want to make this vehicle more realistic, the easiest way would be to make it slower underwater. Then you can imagine something along the lines of an amphibious APC, beefed up a bit to achieve the 120 km/h on land but plodding submerged at a more leisurely 5 or 10 km/h.
[Answer]
One contraption that comes to mind when reading this is [screw-propelled vehicles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-propelled_vehicle) such as [this one](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2018/09/931/524/screw4.jpg?ve=1&tl=1) from the soviet era.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/s2T2n.jpg)
([source](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmo6ghz64qxl61.jpg%3Fwidth%3D643%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dd58b71a942bfe3fe86f5719a7c49bf88fcb6df70&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=b8cf14a38baac9e75e6a93540c593daa10b258c8eaba8e92030f0b93a6df8e3a&ipo=images))
Those screws basically are large tanks that can be used as floats when empty, but in OP's scenario be filled up with water to become ballast when operating underwater, and meet buoyancy criteria required. (perform like a boat, be neutrally buoyant like a submarine, or sink so that it operates on the seabed.)
Such a vehicle would of course require watertight and pressure resistant cabin. The screws when filled up with water resist water pressure, and still produce thrust to reach high speed under water.
Note that the original soviet vehicle roughly performs equally well on roads, water, mud, forest, ice, snow, sand, quicksand,... (typical asphalt roads being maybe the worst surface to operate, because abrasion.)
Also note that the vehicle in the picture would only perform loopings underwater, some design modifications have to be made so that thrust vector of each screw is coplanar to center of mass of the whole thing.
MPG would be awful in any case, and power requirements tremendous, but still this provides a solution that requires only one kind of engine, and one kind of "wheel" or "track" or "power to motion converting device", that also happens to manage buoyancy of the whole system.
Knowing this vehicle can navigate like a submarine, in practice there would be no reason to travel at the bottom of a lake or river, since it would be far slower. Instead it can use this ability to anchor itself for precise positioning or mining or whatever operation at the seabed.
[Answer]
# It likely cannot be done within your exact parameters.
### First, it’s probably too light for your expected usable carrying capacity.
We’ll be generous and assume the vehicle takes up only about 70% of the volume you describe (for a vehicle that size though, this is actually on the low end). That gives a density of only about 0.46285 g/cm³, less than half that of water. To make it neutrally buoyant (not even heavy enough to sink reliably, just enough that it doesn’t bob to the surface by itself), it would have to use almost 16000 liters of water as ballast, which would translate to more than half the vehicle being ballast tanks. Realistically, you probably actually want about 20000 liters of ballast capacity so you can have negative enough buoyancy to stay on the riverbed and have a bit of extra headroom for tuning exact mass.
That then leaves only about 12 m³ of space for passengers and cargo, which is still pretty good (for reference many sedans have less than 3 m³ of space for passengers and cargo), but probably not as much as you are expecting.
This is in theory a non-issue unless you want to be picky about cargo and passenger space, so we’ll just move on to the next issue.
### Second, it is very unlikely that it will be able to drive on the bottom of the river, especially at your stated target speeds.
Water has about 12 times the fluid resistance of air, so to achieve forward motion you need to put in that much more work. In theory, this means that whatever wheels, tracks, screws, or other propulsion mechanism you use to try and push against the bottom to move forwards will interact with the bottom by applying significantly more force than they would on land. If we’re generous and assume the bottom of the river is paved (which would completely destroy any ecosystem in the river, as well as being absurdly expensive to do), then *maybe* this might not be an issue other than limiting effective acceleration.
But most rivers won’t be like that. The bottom will be mud. Very *deep* mud, and very *wet* mud. And the thing about deep wet mud is that it *flows*, and it flows *better* the longer you try to push against it (have you ever noticed how yogurt or peanut butter seem to get easier to stir the longer you stir them for? most mud is like that too). Or maybe it will be sand, in which case it will either behave similarly to the mud, or it will behave like quicksand (which is even worse than mud in this case).
But this could of course be solved by making it a submersible instead, so let’s go on to the *third* issue...
### Third, moving that fast underwater will have a significant impact on the surface.
And this is the part that really kills things here.You’re dealing with water that’s maybe a few dozen meters deep (any deeper and you almost certainly won’t be able to drive out of it because the banks will probably be too steep). Moving at 30 km/h underwater at such a depth will still result in a clearly visible wake on the surface, and if the wake is clearly visible, it’s a navigation hazard for small boats and possibly disruptive to ships.
At that point, stealth is out the window as well, which begs the question of *why* you want submersible amphibious vehicles in the first place...
[Answer]
For a very long time the standard way to do this kind of thing has been [vehicle snorkeling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_snorkel). However tanks are the only vehicles that use them to allow complete submersion of the rest of the vehicle i know of, & only some. But it is done on many models. The [leopard 2](https://youtu.be/usgP3dzCdEs) is the main western example of this. However soviet tanks are where the capability is most common, with every tank from the [T-34](https://i.redd.it/m36dy72pi0c41.jpg), [T-55](https://preview.redd.it/ec3yq7e8fkx61.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=e252f63c07e2dcb413fa19de06e38fc7b84d2594), [T-72](https://youtu.be/DI_Myjk9xf4) to the [T-80 & T-90](https://youtu.be/y-QWQsDNsRs) are capable of it. Almost all western MBTs have the capability to snorkel but they do not allow complete submersion of the vehicle.
While this does disturb traffic on the water's surface somewhat with the snorkel it doesn't do so much. While the depth is limited by the snorkel's height you can just make the snorkel taller generally, because you can make them [very tall](https://preview.redd.it/5stva1lnfvx51.jpg?auto=webp&s=bdc515acab76dd9df169b3b61513a1b87cd84c1d). You probably wouldn't want to travel along the river like this, & it'd just be better to go alongside it, but if you really want to you can.
[Answer]
Wheels / tracks / ***whatever*** ???
What you need, my friend, is a **supercharged mechanical hippo**.
Hippos can quite happily do everything you want, just not to those speeds.
So grab yourself some mech parts, fire up the old Handwavium Decay Fusion Quantum Power Cube and Bob's your uncle (who was sadly and ironically killed by a real hippo when you were a child)
]
|
[Question]
[
In a distant future our robot will be setting their tracks on another hospitable planet, I believe we are not alone and there must be other intelligence beings out there in these billions upon billions of galaxies and stars. Suppose our robot touched down on a lively terrestrial planet with liquid water everywhere, would it be a good idea for our robot to don a mirror everywhere it goes for safety as well as have a better understanding of the alien ecosystem? I imagine when an alien predator saw its own reflection they will be started for a moment but our robot multiple array of sensors can then pick up as much readings off it's behavior before engaging it further.
P.S: it can also be curved mirror which makes the subject appears larger, this way one of the other objective is met to collect excretion and fluid sample in-situ.
[Answer]
# Bad idea.
bad, BAD idea.
Many animals ignore mirror.
Many animals violently attack mirror.
Some animals stop to adjust their makeup.
NONE of them display natural behaviour when facing a mirror!
[Is this what you want?](https://youtu.be/kMHnNF2rqpI?t=21)
[Answer]
If you want to study an environment without influencing it you better want to disguise yourself as much as possible.
First of all, you are assuming that the sensory capabilities of the creatures you want to investigate are exactly the same as in our world. If that's not the case, your disguise won't work. If some of those animals can detect varying electric fields, your circuits will scream out loud.
Even under the assumption that the sensory capabilities are exactly the same, a shiny mirror goes in the exact opposite direction. It's like someone wearing a glittering dress to study an animal. Remember that standing out appearances are a clear way for the bearer to indicate "stay away, I am dangerous".
If you want to go unnoticed it's way better to disguise with the background: a rock in a barren landscape, a dead tree in a forest and so on. At worst some animal might use you to scratch its back.
[Answer]
### Mirrors? No. Even adaptive camouflage is unlikely to work in this scenario.
If you're stranded on a desert island and theres a passing ship or plane, and you have a small mirror, how do you get its attention? You manipulate the mirror so that the sun is reflected as a bright light, drawing attention. Your robot will equally draw attention, especially if theres subtle movement - even the wind may be enough.
Mirrors are not camouflage, they reflect light and stand out like a giant sign saying "look here".
There is adaptive camouflage prototypes - basically an LCD screen and a camera. This may work, however for totally alien eyes this isnt guaranteed, as we wont know what frequencies their eyes can see until after we've studied them from a bit.
I'd suggest scan the surroundings, 3d print some fake rocks that match, stick sensors in them, then scatter them all over the area the predator frequents. The robot can then retreat and receive information from far away.
]
|
[Question]
[
Is there a way of more advanced minds start to count with complex integers, instead of naturals?
This way such a society would never think of $2$ as prime since $2=(1+i)(1-i)$.
Notice that more advanced societies may have some shortcomings in thinking and art. For instance, try of language without knowing the existence of writing, and how many languages flourished since many people in the middle ages didn't know to read.
[Answer]
Complex numbers provide answers to a different set of questions than those that arise with basic counting, so it is indeed unlikely that any civilisation would invent those before the natural numbers. The human history of mathematics *does* provide ample examples of things being discovered in what to modern eyes looks like the totally wrong order — real numbers were known from Greek Antiquity (with [Eudoxus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudoxus_of_Cnidus) providing a surprisingly rigorous characterisation) whereas the decimal fractions taught in school today is a 16th century invention, but then again already the Babylonians essentially did [floating-point numbers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_arithmetic) (except they only did it in [base 60](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal), so for *millennia* everybody else only did so too) — but I'd recommend reading up a lot on both the history and the mathematics before trying to craft your own timeline, just to get a feeling for what might be reasonable and what is not. That's probably not the answer you're looking for.
If instead we take your question to be one of "how could one get complex numbers more integrated into basic arithmetical practices?" then one approach could be to use a [complex-base number system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex-base_system), for example the base $-1+i$ binary system where $2 = (-1+i)^3 + (-1+i)^2$ is written 1100; this provides a unique encoding for precisely the Gaussian integers. Why would a civilisation employ such a curious system? Well, in the early days of computer languages it wasn't obvious that you might have use for several different kinds of numbers in computing; many languages just had one "number" datatype, which in languages designed for scientific applications was "real" numbers (under the hood they might be floating-point or fixed-point, sometimes depending on the compiler). Real numbers were what human engineers used, but if there had been a significant need for complex arithmetic instead (say, if the early computing history of your aliens was dominated by quantum mechanical problems rather than ballistics), then it's not a big stretch to offer complex numbers as the Standard Number Concept in your system — even in our civilisation Computer Algebra Systems often default to "every variable is complex, until you specify otherwise" which sometimes leads to results surprising users who expected real variables. Since memory management was tricky in early computing, it is also not unreasonable that they might want to make a complex number that is not built up from two separate pieces, and then base $-1+i$ is a neat solution.
[Answer]
**Tl;DR:** I would argue the complex numbers are unlikely to be used, because I can't see a simple (or even consistent) use of their particular multiplicative structure.
Let's consider one of your examples in the comments, the case where the complex number $z\_1=3+70i$ represents a family with 3 family members and a total age of 70 years. If we have a second family of 2 people with a total age of 50 years, it can be represented as $z\_2=2+50i$. Adding these together yields $z\_3$, a collection of $3+2$ people with a total age of $70+50$ years, represented as $z\_3=5+120i$.
But wait a second. We haven't invoked any special properties of complex numbers; we've simply done pairwise addition. Here, the complex numbers *under addition* are equivalent ("isomorphic", in formal terminology) to the two-dimensional real plane, $\mathbb{R}\times\mathbb{R}$, under addition. Indeed, the same should hold for *any* collection of things that can be viewed as a vector space with two dimensions. In other words, by using complex numbers, we obtain no benefits when we add things together.
The question, then, is why we should choose the multiplicative structure of complex numbers - and from here on out, I'll represent $z=a+ib$ as $(a,b)$, to drive home the point.$^{\dagger}$ Let's say we again have $z\_1$ and $z\_2$, as defined above - two families of people. Now let's multiply them. We then get
$$z\_1\cdot z\_2=(a\_1a\_2-b\_1b\_2, a\_2b\_1+a\_1b\_2)$$
Here's the issue: The quantity $a\_1a\_2$ has units of $(\text{people})^2$ (or, arguably, no units at all). On the other hand, the quantity $b\_1b\_2$ has units of $(\text{years})^2$ - and dimensional analysis says we can't add together two quantities with different units. In other words, complex multiplication, in the way you've defined it, doesn't make logical sense.
In fact, the same holds for many different arbitrary types of multiplication you can define on a given vector space - where by "multiplication" I mean a particular type of binary operation that at some point involves multiplying (in the one-dimensional, real number sense) components of two different pairs together. While it's conceivable that a society may find it useful to consider two properties of an object when discussing it, I'm not sure that complex number multiplication is the correct definition of multiplication you're looking for. For instance, why not define multiplication by
$$(a\_1, b\_1)\cdot (a\_2, b\_2)=\left(\frac{a\_1a\_2}{a\_1+a\_2},\frac{b\_1b\_2}{b\_1+b\_2}\right)$$
which does, of course, preserve units correctly? (Although in this system, there is no identity element.)
There are other, related operations that make sense, though; for example, consider scalar multiplication. If we multiple $z\_1$ by the real scalar 7, we get a quantity that *does* have a concrete physical interpretation: namely, a family of 21 people (yikes!) with a combined age of 490 years. On the other hand, in this case, there's no advantage to using complex numbers over simply $\mathbb{R}\times\mathbb{R}$.
---
$^{\dagger}$Pun intended.
[Answer]
### To understand complex numbers, you need to understand positive real numbers first.
You can define a number on the complex plane in 2 main ways:
* Coordinates: 4 + 2i. 4 steps in the + real direction, 2 steps in the i direction.
* Polar: 3e^(i*pi*1.5). 3 steps in the direction of 1.5 radians (mostly i direction).
Note that both of these methods require an underlying concept of real numbers. If i wanted to encode a complex number which was (2 + i) steps in real direction and then (3 - i) steps in the i direction, I'd have (2 + i) + (3 - i)i. Which is 2 + i + 3i + 1, or 3 + 4i. To comprehend 3 + 4i, you need to be able to comprehend, 3, 4, and i.
### Complex numbers don't get a real use case until your society has advanced a long way.
We didn't start using them until the 16th century (at best), we had discovered algebra, some trig, polynomials, and pi to 16 places.
Most people don't use complex numbers after high school. I've used them a few times in electrical engineering, in signal analysis, and writing lossy compression for voxels of 3D mining survey data, but, I'm not a typical person.
### Complex numbers are less efficient in digital systems than real integers.
If you're developing a first generation computer, every bit counts. The large subset of operations which can be done with i=0 would be a substantial optimisation for your early computer code.
### Counting in complex integers is ambiguous and requires moving in +, -, +i, and -i directions:
Counting in real numbers is easily defined. I\_next = I\_current + 1.
Counting in complex numbers has multiple directions. You're going to need to count in all 4 directions (you can't just count in only +i and +1, as counting must continue infinitely, and you can't count to 0i + infinity and then wrap around to 1i + 0).
I can only see four "practical" methods of counting in complex space:
* What I'm going to call "Snake" counting, where the previous value never changes by more than 1 (or i) from the previous value (It's like playing the game "Snake"):
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AanC0.png)
(Follow the alphabet round the 2D space to count, eg 0, 1, 1 + i, i, 2i, 1 + 2i, etc)
* 1 quadrant sorted by absolute value
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Mz6r.png)
* That again but flipped along the diagonal, so 0, 1, i, etc. instead.
* 4 quadrants, sorted by absolute value, which is also continous
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HZaTW.png)
### Complex wont happen, but tuples might be nice.
Having a counting system which changes between those 4 headings in the complex plane would be a headache, and I can't see the gain. Especially as when the number system is being worked out, the population are counting loafs of bread or number of coins.
You mentioned in the comments that you thought of examples like "1 + 2i apples, could mean 1 apple collected 2 days ago". This isn't very handy to think of as a complex number, because operations don't apply to it. (1 + 2i) + (2 + 3i) is 3 apples that are 5 days old, which is wrong, if anything you have 3 apples averaging 2.66 days old. The + operator became an average operation in this context, whereas in other complex cases this wouldn't work.
However if I were to request a maths upgrade to my brain, the ability to think in tuples and vectors like you mentioned in the comment would be very handy:
For example: I have \$(100, 20, 50, -80) dollars in the bank. That means I have 100 in my day to day, 20 available on my credit card, 50 coming in tonight, and 80 going out tonight. If I pay these 3 bills now it'll cost me \$(40, 10, 0,-30), which is 40 on my day to day, 10 on my credit card, and 30 that was going to come out tonight to pay one of them no longer will. This leaves me with \$(60,10,50,50). It'd be pretty nice if I could work that out without having to subtract each one individually.
This is a bit of a contrived example, but thinking and processing in parallel like that could be pretty useful, and it may improve the understanding of complex numbers, however it wont replace the need to define both tuples and complex numbers on top of the fundamental positive real numbers.
[Answer]
[Leopold Kronecker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kronecker) is quoted as saying "God made the integers, all else is the work of man." Your aliens might replace that with "God made [Gaussian integers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_integer)," but they will still study ordinary integers.
When you get down to it, mathematics is the science of evaluating [models](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model) that are based based on [axioms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom) and drawings conclusions whichare more (or less) relevant to real life. If you learn *mathematics* rather than primary school *arithmetic*, you usually start with extremely simple axioms and models and then progress to more complicated ones. And when it comes to applied mathematics, you should always try if the simplest models give interesting results before you try to fit a more complicated model to the facts and problems. That applies in calculus, geometry, set theory, graph theory, statistics, you name it.
The concept of a *prime* matters when one does [prime factorization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number#Unique_factorization), for instance, and that in turn is useful for cryptography. Not *considering* 2 a prime number does not change the fact that such numbers are useful -- you would have to invent a new name for the property of integers being composed that way. Or take group theory.
[Answer]
I doubt it. The trouble is that the natural numbers - that is $1,\,2,\,3,\,4,\,5,\ldots$ and sometimes $0$ - have *so* many special properties. In the scope of human mathematics, there are many fields that do not care about real numbers or rational numbers or even negative numbers - but the natural numbers seem almost inescapable just because they are so many things.
To start out with:
* **Natural numbers are cardinal numbers.** A natural number answers questions like "how many coins do I have?" or "how many people are in this family?". Plus, the operations of natural numbers come with this - I can naturally ask "how many outfits can I get by combining advanced-society-pants with an advanced-society-shirt?" which corresponds to a question of *pairs* about sets ("cartesian products") or a question of *multiplication* of natural numbers. Similarly, "if I steal all of Hannah's advanced-society-money and combine it with my own, how many coins would I have?" relates addition and the notion of combining two sets ("disjoint union").
* **Natural numbers are ordinal numbers.** Natural numbers are used to rank things - if I have a set of preferences, I can use them to refer to my first preference (the best option) or second (the best option other than my first choice) and so on.
* **Natural numbers can index repetition.** If I want to specify "repeat something a certain number of times" I can specify this using a natural number. This is even ingrained into notation of math - if I want to add something together a bunch of times, I might write $5x$ even if multiplication by a natural number is not strictly allowed and I really mean $x+x+x+x+x$. Similarly for $x^5$ or even with function iteration $f^5(x)$. In higher mathematical terms, this is related to the fact that you get the natural numbers if you say\* "There is some natural number zero and each natural number has a successor" - as is often used to axiomatize natural numbers.
* **Natural numbers are the (second) simplest example of arithmetic.** In more abstract sense than the previous ones: natural numbers have nice abstract properties. You want a number system where you can add any two numbers and you want associativity ($a+(b+c)=(a+b)+c$)? Well, you can either go with the advanced-society-nihilism of "there are no numbers" or the slightly more complex "well, there's a number $1$... oh, and there'd better be $1+1$ and $1+1+1$ and so on too I guess." Same thing if you ask for associativity and commutativity ($a+b=b+a$). You can add an additive identity ($0$) if you like - same basic structure, though. If you want multiplication with distributivity ($a\times (b+c) = a\times b + a\times c$), same thing. You can even get your multiplicative identity (and by this point, you're asking that some specific numbers exist - meaning that "there are no numbers" is no longer a simpler system). This reason might not hit common people as much as the previous three, but it'd be hard to develop algebra without someone noticing these things.
I think it's essentially unavoidable that natural numbers will come up as the most fundamental system of numbers - and in any case, if they don't, their replacement would have to be a far more radical rethinking of mathematics and logic than "they use complex numbers instead." It's certainly possible to, for instance, never use cardinal numbers and to instead exclusively talk about *sets* themselves - and this is, in fact, very often a good idea both for ease of reasoning and ease of interpretation. Similarly, ordinals can be talked about without numbers - it certainly suffices to just say "here's some set, and here's some way to tell which elements are better than which other ones" - although this seems to get a btg more troubled (being that "3rd best" kind of means "the best element among those other than the absolute best element and the other element which is the best among those other than the absolute best") - but, regardless of specifics, the point here is that mathematics is very interconnected; changing everything at once might be plausible, but changing one detail is not.
That said, if you're willing to admit that some bits are the same, there's lots you might imagine gets done differently - even among human mathematicians, there's a lot of different views on mathematics; to name a few, there are philosophies such as constructivism which, essentially, rely on finite structures with clear rules to build up logic. There's a lot of a somewhat scientific or engineering perspective where computation is prized over other things (e.g. writing out problems via linear algebra or numerically solving differential equations - where some sequence of calculations is implied). There's some very abstract perspectives where one talks about what objects "do" more than other things (e.g. when one speaks of objects like transformations of the plane or symmetries without great detail on coordinates or stuff like that - category theory is a particularly broad example of this).
Exactly where you go after the natural numbers is going to depend a lot of philosophy - and there are certainly directions that would quickly lead to complex numbers if done motivated by academic interest and, if periodicity is a frequent part of life, one could imagine certain fields of mathematics that rely upon complex numbers (e.g. Fourier analysis) being so darn important that everyone knows about them (maybe they all play advanced-society-theremin and want to impress each other with awesome signal processing?). There's perhaps some other options where, for instance, cardinal numbers become irrelevant because most sets they interact with are somehow weighted by complex numbers - maybe if they're all trying to program quantum computers, they're suddenly going to feel that complex numbers are rather important, the same way that far more people know about binary in this world not because it's some fundamental mathematical idea, but just because it's our machines everywhere.
(\*With some subtleties here - the properties mentioned relate to the natural numbers being "freely generated" by a single element zero and a successor function)
[Answer]
No, there is not, for a very simple reason: the Gaussian integers do not have a unique total ordering.
Thus, *there is no way to count with them*.
Thus, "advanced minds" could not start to count with them.
Advanced minds might naturally comprehend the structure of the Gaussian integers as easily as we can be taught to work with normal integers, but they would still count with the counting numbers--non-negative real integers.
[Answer]
The natural numbers are ideal for counting because one can *define* them to be the "simplest" set that has a unique total ordering. 2 >= 1 because 2 is *defined* as the smallest natural number greater than or equal to 1. The act of counting is just the definition of an *injection* of the natural numbers to an arbitrary set (such as the set of apples in your basket). If you have 7 apples, it is because you can assign each apples a different natural number from the subset {1, 3, 2, 6, 4, 7, 5}.
The complex numbers do not have a unique total ordering. If you represent them in a table
```
0 1 2 3 ...
0 0 0+i 0+2i 0+3i ...
1 1 1+i 1+2i 1+3i ...
2 2 2+i 2+2i 2+3i ...
3 3 3+i 3+3i 3+3i ...
.
.
.
```
Then there are at least four trivial total orderings:
1. 0, i, 1, 2i, 1+i, 2, 3i, 1+2i, 2+i, 3, ...
2. 0, 1, i, 2, 1+i, 2i, 3, 2+i, 1+2i, 3i, ...
3. 0, i, 1, 2, 1+i, 2i, 3i, 1+2i, 2+i, 3, ...
4. 0, 1, i, 2i, 1+i, 2, 3, 2+i, 1+2i, 3i, ...
All four count along the diagonals of the table, either
1. Always from the left up to the right
2. Always from the right down to the left
3. Alternating right and left
4. Alternating left and right
An advanced civilization might have a use for all four orderings, or for even more complicated orderings as well.
[Answer]
You are setting the abstraction bar quite high in your **title**, but then go on to lower it by providing a concrete example. **Bidimensional thinking** may not be what you imagine it to be.
Complex numbers do not represent bidimensional thinking, they represent some kind of spatial-algebraic formalization... the key is in **thinking** (which is, generally, not understood as a linear process, expressible through additions, multiplications etc.).
Bidimensional thinking is already "a thing" in our very own real world, in at least one sense. Take, for example, [synesthesia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia). While certain important, utterly complicated, sensory neural pathways (as in "areas of the brain") are carefully isolated from others, our brains occasionally screw up and mix the pathways somehow. So, for example, there are people who [**perceive** colors in numbers/symbols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme%E2%80%93color_synesthesia). When trying to utilize their "thinking" capacity to perform any analysis on those things, inadvertently, they are **bound** to exhibit some sort of "bidimensional thinking".
Let me give you a(n overly) simplified example (demonstrating a very real scientific question, though)... If a person perceives 4 as red and 5 as blue, by which color are they going to perceive the result of the operation **4 + 5**? Let me just warn you by saying that this is quite the can of worms and no **easy** explanation exists, let alone a model of function that could *deterministically* describe how this kind of multidimensional thinking works.
Now, let me give you another example, one that you can probably "feel" yourself to understand the concept a bit better. Could you add words in the way that you can add numbers? Well, probably not... well, that is unless you have a certain dimension to express the result. Consider **taste** to be the dimension and try calculating the result of the operation:
`salt + pepper`
Can you "feel" that? Congratulations! You have just thought "bidimensionally". Now, there are people that don't even **need** this downplaying (i.e. limiting to the words that represent familiar ingredients associated with taste). They can **taste** pretty much [any kind of word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical-gustatory_synesthesia).
See, the thing is that thinking in complex numbers is not really bidimensional thinking, it is twice-unidimensional thinking, with some special adaptations/formalizations. True bidimensional thinking (the kind a world-building exercise could benefit from) would entail dimensions that operate pretty much **differently to each other**.
The hard benefit from managing to manipulate this "power" would be an unimaginable increase in problem-solving capacity and expressive power. Suddenly, (4 + salty) will be an element and combining this with (160 + mildly sweet) might be the solution to some specific version of a [fair cake-cutting problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_cake-cutting). Who knows...
[Answer]
For quotidian purposes your system fails Ockham's Razor and would not pass into widespread use.
Instead I suggest matching rather than counting. It is sufficiently simple that children invent it independently and is often still used by adults when counting coins: count one stack then make the other stacks the same height. Then line them up in groups of two by five (dominantly matching instead of counting) because you can *see* whether you have ten instead of needing to count them.
One significant advantage of matching over counting occurs when dealing with infinities. Ordinal infinities cannot be compared, but this is an artefact of ordinality rather than infinity. For details research transfinite numbers.
[Answer]
I am going to go halfway against the flow here. No, they are not going to develop complex numbers *first*, but it is not unreasonable that they could have developed them much earliar than we did. I think there is only one truly novel idea missing from the ancient Greek mathematicians that kept them from discovering complex numbers.
Mathematics arose out of a need for "inventory control" - that is, for keeping track of your stuff. That basic need is not going to be different for any creature we can make sense of. That your "advanced aliens" would be so stunted in their intellect as to not be able to notice 1-dimensional things, unless us who think easily in 1, 2, or 3 dimensions, and can conceptually deal with any number of them is ... difficult to understand.
But they could have encountered complex numbers far earlier in their mathematical development - though it seems unlikely they would do so before primes. We invented/discovered complex numbers [in order to solve cubic equations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number#History). But supplying polynomial roots is far from the only use they have. Complex numbers revolutionized the subject of analytic geometry in the plane. Complex addition is just translation. Complex multiplication is a combination of rescaling and rotation. Translations and rotations are isometries. Rescaling is a similarity. The ancient Greeks were well-familiar with these.
If somehow the Greeks would have gotten the idea of that actions were not just processes to be applied to planar figures, but were *objects* of study in their own right - they might have discovered complex numbers themselves, developing them as an "arithmetic of planar transformations." Studying how rotations interact with each other, and combine to form other transformations might have led them to the concept of multiplications and all the various rules.
While it is hard to see how the Greeks might have come up with the concept of transformations as objects, a concept that comes to us only by way of centuries of additional mathematical development, it is not hard to imagine that a sufficiently different culture might find the idea far more quicker than we.
[Answer]
**slight frame challenge**
"Is there a way of more advanced minds start to count with complex integers, instead of naturals?"
Why not "Is there a way of more advanced minds start to count with REAL numbers, instead of naturals?".
We use integers because that is how our mind works when processing the input from our senses. We see two apples, three dogs... We abstract, simplify and categorize. In that way our mind manages to deal with reality in real time.
But an alien mind might perceive reality differently and so quantify it with real numbers.
Human: "there are two apples on the table"
Alien: "there are 0.65 kg of apple material on a wooden support that is 142.5x80x80 cm in size"
It's like in that [movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Man_Tate)
>
> Teacher: Who can tell me how many of these numbers are divisible by two?
>
> Teacher: Anybody?
>
> Teacher: Fred!
>
> Fred: Hm?
>
> Teacher: I know that you can tell me how many of these numbers are divisible by two.
>
> Fred: Um... All of 'em.
>
>
>
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change
*Wayne Dyer*
]
|
[Question]
[
I am early in this design but am imagining a fictional world in the age of exploration including classic fantasy tropes of monsters and magic, with renaissance era technology, that is cannons, muskets, clockwork and wacky renaissance war machines perhaps entwined with magic albeit to limited effect or making use of fantastical beasts. I would like the world to stay in this state of technology for as long as possible.
So I indeed ask, What would stop advancements in technology beyond this state? Specifically weaponry?
[Answer]
# Interchangeable parts don't.
No, *seriously* - I don't just mean there are poor tolerances in your manufacturing. I mean that having all those blasted wizards running around tapping into arcane essences of space, time, thought, logic, and reality ... it means that an inch in Chicago isn't always more than seven-eighths in New York. It means a cartridge loaded in your basement might not be reliable in the woods behind your house.
The most practical technology for your scenario is *crude* tech with very *high* tolerances, so that you can't be disappointed. Load up a blunderbuss with thimbles, forks, and hope (and a mass of black powder casually poured from a horn) ... and it has no more uncertainties than it would in our world.
[Answer]
* **Magic sinks the scientific method.**
At some point, [natural philosophers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy#Natural_philosophy_in_the_early_modern_period) would have stopped *guessing* about [phlogiston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory) or [humors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism) and started doing real science, using the [scientific method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method). They think about things they see, they develop a coherent theory, they think of *experiments to falsify the theory* and *observations that would be predicted by the theory,* they observe and experiment, and they think and talk some more.
Except that the world is just slightly magic. Observers influence the outcome of the experiment on a macro scale, not just on the quantum scale. The boiling point of water suddenly depends on how many people are watching, and if they want it to boil or not. At least a little. Black powder is more effective if it is mixed by people who *believe* in it.
That sabotages the progress of science.
* **Dragons really like to nest on steam engines and blast furnaces.**
They also enjoy village smithies and charcoal kilns, but not so much that a determined blacksmith cannot discourage them. But a steam engine, that's where monsters from the entire region will congregate. Better stay with water power and mostly wooden construction unless you have an army to protect your steam engine. Which means it doesn't pay to industrialize.
[Answer]
**No oil, no progress.**
The modern world is only possible because we have vast reserves of oil and coal underground - courtesy of pines and shrimp which fossilized in prior epochs. Without coal, even if electricity was discovered there would have been no resource energy rich enough to run large scale power plants. Without oil, we could never have progressed further then smoggy powerplants and into the era of personal, horseless, vehicles and trade.
Simply state that there are no oil reserves on your world and limited coal mines and your civilization is then stuck in the renaissance.
On the side of weaponry all I can add is that it wasn't the military that came up with early improvements to guns. It was enthusiast duck hunters in between the wars. The militaries were content with powder loaded muskets and trying to built continually larger cannons for a long time. The idea of getting off more then a single precision shot from a gun was engineered by sports hunters as a way to hit more ducks. So... Remove ducks from your world?
[Answer]
# Religion or culture
We can see both Religion and culture reject many advancements in the fields of science. Look at astronomy or biology with Religion for example. Though there were advancements, many advancements were rejected by the church in medieval Europe. The advancements were discredited and the people who made the discoveries put to death or incarcerated. It wasn’t that there wasn't progress, but much was made difficult.
Culture as well. Look at the Amish for example. But in a greater scale you can look at the whole of the USA. Advancements in trains or social norms in gun control are rejected because of their culture. They view that they have certain rights for their guns. They view their cars as essential as the indoctrination of the people did it's work, making any alternative unthinkable now that the whole infrastructure is setup to support only cars.
Human complacency with the current world is all you need. They obviously know the world is flat, they are the center of their world and nothing is going to change that. Anyone thinking differently or having proof can easily be rejected, preferably by hurning them.
[Answer]
## Empire
The combination of this technology and of magic let someone unite the region. He suppressed war with a heavy hand and discouraged other innovation as causing unemployment.
Central control gave innovation no place to hide, and the emperor did not fear a rival empire would take it if he didn't.
[Answer]
## Magic has to be superior to technology.
The development of weaponry didn't happen in a vacuum, it was in response to battlefield conditions. People stuck with firearms and continued to improve them because they were effective against the defenses they encountered. So if you don't want certain types of weapons to advance, make them ineffective. The obvious solution is to have magic render bullets as harmless with trivial protective wardings, or something along those lines. Something where the magical protection is far easier than the mundane weapon it defeats.
This creates a new problem: why are people using ineffective weapons at all? At what point did magical protections become common in warfare? That's the point where you'd see mundane weapon development stall out. So think about when this happens, and why. What changed to make magical protection commonplace? And how do armies defeat it? Probably with magical weapons of some kind.
So your task is to think about how this society uses magic to wage war, and to devise reasons for why building more advanced machines never seemed like a feasible or worthwhile idea to get the edge over the enemy. I think for this to be the case **magical solutions have to be cheaper, easier to use, and more readily available than the means to mass produce machines**, as well as more effective.
This should be your guiding principle when thinking about how magic is used if you want it to essentially replace the development of modern technology. It should be accessible to people at all levels of society and be fundamentally superior to the technology it replaces. If technology is easier for a majority of people to access and can defeat magic, nobody would use magic, especially in war.
]
|
[Question]
[
## Why have one soldier dressed differently from the rest, ideally in a primary colour? Try looking at the picture bellow.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jCJnS.jpg)
**This is the famous "black dot on a white page".** As you can see, it is difficult to focus your attention on anything else than the dot. Our eyes (or rather our brain) are trained to spot irregularities and focus on them. This phenomenon is tempting to use as a tactic, because there is nothing that can be done to prevent us from focusing on it without hampering vision of course. (If you looked away and failed to see the dot, congratulations!)
## So how does this play in warfare? What's the point?
**In battle one needs to be constantly aware of everything that is happening, lest being caught by surprise and dying pointlessly.** Wether taking aim or keeping track of enemy movement, you must pay attention. And so, our eyes and the way we perceive things plays a big role. In the context of my story, the general makes the odd decision of dressing one person in red (or bright pink) in every battalion. This seems nonsensical and it probably is. However we can't argue that being distracted for a moment on a battlefield means death. **One oddly dressed soldier is indeed very distracting** *(lime green?! What was he thinking?).*
## How effective would this "black dot" tactic be, regardless of context?
The tactic is pretty universal, I couldn't give one example of it being used effectively. It works just as well with ground troops or aircraft dogfights. Take your pick. At the same time getting as varied perspectives on the advantages and disadvantages would be very helpful. For ease of answering you can explore the tactic in any setting or era you prefer. The more perspectives the merrier and having a little fun at the same time doesn't hurt either, I'm not a tyrant.
**The limitations of the tactic are:**
* Only one soldier from each battalion must be dressed conspicuously. Any more than one would lessen the effectiveness of the distraction. If the red soldier dies, another picks up his colour. If two or more battalions meet, the red soldiers will play rock paper scissors (if they have time) to determine who the red soldier will be.
* The colour has to be vivid to draw attention. Colder colours like blues and greens won't be as effective as yellows or reds. Bright pink with bunny slippers for those that want their enemies to die laughing.
* Stealth is optional.
* A soldier standing alone must take off the coloured uniform. Only in cases where there are more than one do we need the conspicuous uniform. Rock paper scissors decides who has to put it on (sorry Jimmy! nothing personal).
If the question is missing anything *important* inform me in the comments.
[Answer]
I would think that if you want the "can't look away" aspect of the black dot to matter, it would have to be different for close combat vs distance combat.
## Melee
In a melee group of soldiers fighting each other, one brightly colored uniform in the sea of beige isn't even going to be noticed. Any individual hand-to-hand combatant is only going to see a handful of other combatants around him. In those situations, it would be better to have the entire uniform designed to minimize outlines and edges, except for one marked non-vital spot.
**IF** the theory holds true, then strikes by the enemy would have a tendency to target more toward the non-vital area. I know that when shooting targets, the bigger the target, the wider the pattern. Shooting at a blank piece of paper means a "success" is anywhere on the paper; even with cross-hairs and scope to aim with, there's no single target "point". So in a nondescript field, the dot would give a concrete target, even subconsciously. Even then, it's not going to save every soldier, it's only going to bias damage toward that point. But that could be statistically significant over the course of a war.
## Distance
From a distance, what if the off-color section isn't really a target at all? I seem to recall a far-future story in which deer and other animals had greatly evolved to elude hunters. The does would run in such a way that their body patterns made it look like a buck was running with them, and it took a keen eye to realize it wasn't. Targeting that imaginary buck wouldn't do serious damage to any particular doe, since it was *between* the individual does. And even if it did kill one, the hunter's license was pulled, since it was illegal to take a doe, or something along those lines. So in any large group of soldiers (area-effect weapons not withstanding) what about making the arrangement of colors or patterns focus an enemy's attention on a non-vital area in the same way as the dot on the close-combat uniforms? This would be similar to just making the off-color unit a dummy unit, as other answers have stated.
But I would expect, as others have pointed out, that this tactic from a distance would only work once or twice without the heat of battle to allow subconscious clues to take effect. In situations where there is plenty of time to consciously pick a target, the enemy would just take the extra time to find a true vital point. If you are targetting an enemy camp from satellite images, you can take the time to analyze the images and personnel movements to determine the coordinates of the true vital target. But a drone targeting on approach may not have the sophistication to tell the difference. A sniper being forced to pick a target and fire while his target battalion is on the march may not have the time to truly determine whether what he thinks he sees is the real thing or not, but if he's able to set up in the hills outside a more permanent base camp and take his time to study the target, any single abnormal coloration isn't going to affect him.
[Answer]
**Red herrings.**
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/29/israel-putting-dummy-soldiers-lebanon-border-reports-say>
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/b6DnOm.jpg)
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gKZ3jm.jpg)
>
> The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they would not comment on
> reports. It was not clear whether the dolls had been set up in an
> attempt to lure Hezbollah into firing on the targets or for other
> reasons. The Times of Israel said the IDF had placed mannequins in
> bunkers in the past to trick enemies “into thinking that these
> positions are full of soldiers and thus serve a deterrent effect”.
>
>
>
Your garish soldiers are meant to draw fire. They are not alive. Or perhaps if alive are heavily armored compared with their compatriots, in the knowledge that they will be attracting fire.
There is a long and excellent history of fakes intended to waste the focus and effort of your military foes.
[Answer]
>
> Only one soldier from each battalion must be dressed conspicuously.
>
>
>
There is little point, I am afraid, in capturing the attention of the enemy on a soldier, if the rest of them moves with him. The trick of "look there" work if the point where you are calling the attention of the target is different from the point where you want them to not look. So, for example, you make them look at the paper on your left hand, while your right hand is taking their wallet from their pocket.
What you can try is to have a whole battalion drawing attention, while others maneuver under the distraction given by the first one.
[Answer]
If all you're doing is the dress equivalent of painting a big "look here" sign on a random soldier in the unit then it's unlikely to be an effective tactic - not after the first time anyway. In order to really draw attention you need something that will function at a much deeper level psychologically - as Trioxidane mentions in his comment on another answer - or their dress needs to positively identify them as a high-value target.
Let's assume that your forces are the normal mix of a large number of low-level infantry with minimal training, with a small number of officers who provide direction, strategy and morale. Killing an officer can reduce the efficiency of the troops they control, so identifying and targeting officers can be a highly effective tactic. So much so that in most modern wars the ground-pounders are forbidden from saluting officers, and officers try to dress and act as much like the common troops as possible. It only takes one reasonably-competent sniper to decimate the leadership and leave an armed force without direction.
Back in the days of men with swords and spears hacking away at each other though, it was apparently common for an army's commanders to not only dress differently but also do silly things like carrying big banners into battle... or at least stand next to someone who was carrying the banner. Officers from both sides would try to hack their way through the fodder to get to each other so that they could settle their dispute 'like men' on the field. The common soldiers would often steer clear of these conflicts because they'd be easily slain by wild swings... and besides, nobles fought from horseback, and nobody wants to mess with an angry war-horse.
Except of course there were plenty of people who never heard about how you were supposed to let the nobles have their own fight. These barbarians would actively seek out the shiniest target just for the bragging rights. No respect for the rules of engagement I tell you.
So depending on the setting, the training and the norms of engagement you could get away with suckering your opponent into believing that the dressed-up soldier is someone important that they should focus on. It may help to draw some of the aggro, funneling some of the more eager opponents into a killing lane. You'd need to know your enemy very well to know whether this was going to work or not, and your troops would have to be well trained to take advantage of the distraction. When the barbarians make a push towards the 'officer' and find themselves channeled into a killing field... well, it could ruin their day.
As a viable, repeatable tactic though? Probably not. If the enemy has anybody with a working brain they'll be able to figure out that your faux officers are a trap. As an occasional thing though it could work.
[Answer]
That tactic is useless, 100% useless.
* Your soldiers are under command, they are trained, they respond to orders.
This is the single biggest element. No matter how distracting an element is, your commands issues a command and all soldiers fall in line. Basically: **commanders dictate the attention of soldiers**
* Training and focus are against you. You see. Soldiers are trained to focus, soldiers are put into the field and ordered to focus, and lastly soldiers focus on what they are commanded. Not every second is the commander screaming commands, but you don't need to. If you are in a shield wall and in the distance you see a clown dancing on a gigantic floating pie, you are not gonna focus on that. Your entire being is solely focused on the enemy right in front of you with weapons and intent to kill.
* Tunnel vision is real. From video games to sports to combat. People focus on what is important. Sometimes to the exclusion of other things. A man in a silly outfight is not a big deal.
* Apparently Napoleon Bonaparte said "You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war." It does not take a genius to figure out the application.
* Elephants were used and was another tool. Sure the initial shock of elephants was a big thing. But then they were countered. Was not like people just got some stun value like it's a video game.
* Cavalry exited. They were terrifying. And it did not matter. You made say a phalanx formation and played a game of chicken with them. Well trained troops won that game 9/10 with the cavalry either falling back at the last second of the charge or getting impaled.
* Tanks are another example. Big powerful machines capable of a lot of destruction. Yet people were focused enough not to be afraid and knew how to counter them.
* Modern warfare is something else. A greater reliance on electronics and computer guided stuff. For example: No drone pilot is gonna be distracted by a jumping up and down clown, a tank commander is not gonna stop his work to look at a guy in a weird outfight.
* Artillery, guided missiles, bullets...don't care about people in silly outfights.
[Answer]
I assume that your tactic involves getting all of the enemy troops to target a single one of yours while your soldiers all shoot individual targets
So for an even number of soldiers all getting one shot off and aiming perfectly you will win with one casualty
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jKzXa.png)
I would say that this may have been somewhat effective for a small timespan when guns were getting accurate enough to properly aim, but hadn't moved to shooting prone, so maybe napoleonic wars / american civil war.
You will probably notice that around this time they stopped having officers wear easily distinguished uniforms and fancy hats as they would always get shot first and it would be hard to persuade people to take this role on
[Answer]
# Not much, as it's easy to become visible already.
If you want an enemy to focus on you, just spray an assault rifle at them full auto. That will get their attention.
But most of the time, you want to get their attention as late as possible, so you can shoot faster than them. Having a conspicuous outfit means you can't switch to stealth if it's tactically appropriate.
But it's always easy to become loud and annoying.
[Answer]
## Probably not against Humans, but...
Against more simplistic beings, it can be a very effective strategy! In a setting that I am working on, the armored front-line soldiers will often polish their armor and paint it garish bright colors. In addition, they will carry torches or adorn their armor with magic to make it glow. When facing off against beasts or monsters, the less intelligent ones will tend to focus on the shining, bright colored thing in the front.
This strategy is only successful if:
1. The enemy is not able to think strategically. Otherwise they'll understand the tactic and counter it.
2. The decoy (our soldier) must have some method to survive. Otherwise the enemy will dispose of them and then target the rest of the troops and the strategy will have done nothing other than change the order in which the troops die.
3. The enemy perceives noise and light. For example, the strategy would probably fail against Bats or Snakes due to their low reliance on vision and different modes of hearing.
There are other specifics to consider, but those are the main critical points determining success.
[Answer]
When facing a large group of moving targets that all look alike, it can be hard to pick out an individual target to shoot at-- especially if they blend in with the background. So your bright pink uniform does solve a problem, but for the enemy, not for you. They will quickly dispatch your unlucky soldier, after which you will immediately give them another one, who will meet the same fate just as quickly.
Maybe the third soldier will get off easier, though, since the enemy will undoubtedly have caught on by that point and started shooting at other things. Creating diversions and drawing enemy fire are legitimate tactics, but I can't imagine why you'd want to make it so obvious that's what you're doing. A few of the enemy troops may be allowed to continue focusing on the easy targets, depleting your army one flamboyantly-clad soldier at a time, but the rest will now be alerted to the fact that you're trying to distract them, and will be actively looking for whatever it is you didn't want them to notice.
If you want to prevent the enemy from targeting your soldiers, then the blank page-- not the dot-- should be your inspiration. Dress them so that they blend with each other and with their surroundings. It's hard to focus on a single point when it looks just like every other point.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0rfjb.png)
Distracted or not, the enemy will have a hard time targeting any of these guys from a distance. Aiming for vitals will be out of the question since they won't be able to tell where one body ends and the next one begins.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mHezz.png)
Now they're guaranteed to get at least one kill.
[Answer]
The moment your enemies learn about this, they'll switch to IR.
Or UV.
Or why even bother? If they know the rest of the unit is around the unlucky decoy, they'll switch to explosives for splash damage.
]
|
[Question]
[
My society has solar thermal energy filling in the role of coal in the 19th Century, as described in the accepted answer here: [Could I have a 19th Century American Society Develop Solar Power from Blueprints?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/191254/could-i-have-a-19th-century-american-society-develop-solar-power-from-blueprints)
I wanted to have 21st century solar panels, but... Not happening. *However*, Solar THERMAL energy is fully possible. One comment on the page, however, caught my eye:
>
> You don't even need steam. You could use a lower boiling point fluid in your engine, as is often done with geothermal power plants
>
>
>
However, this setting being in the 19th Century of America, it has me wondering: *What chemicals with a lower boiling point than water could be easily produced in the 19th Century, especially if it could be at least invented **BEFORE** the Industrial Revolution?*
[Answer]
[Alcohol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol).
Produced in solution with water since the times of Babylon, it was already distilled in highest grades for distillates like whiskey, grappa, vodka and so on.
Solutions of water and alcohol start boiling at temperatures between 100 and 78 degrees Celsius, depending on the alcohol concentration.
[Answer]
Besides alcohol, there were a number of other low-boiling liquids that were known prior to the 19th century. By 1860, it was possible to make sulfur dioxide and anhydrous ammonia industrially -- and both of these saw service as refrigerants beginning in the late 19th century, which means they're thermodynamically suitable for use in a Kelvin cycle or Brayton cycle (steam piston or steam turbine) engine.
Both are hazardous, but then so is high-proof alcohol.
The advantage of these fluids over water for a boiler/expander engine system isn't their lower boiling point, however (higher temperature gives better thermal efficiency, and this was known well before 1900): it's the much lower latent heat figures. Far less of the heat input to convert room temperature liquid sulfur dioxide to hot vapor is inaccessible as latent heat of vaporization than would be the case with water/steam. Having a freezing point lower than even common winter temperatures also means that the system won't freeze its pipes if it goes out of service for a few hours in mid-winter.
It's also worth noting that air engines, similar in operation to the Stirling cycle, were well known and commercially available before 1900; they were used as low power stationary engines (the same application as fixed steam engines, lighting gas or natural gas engines, etc.). All these need is heat input; the working fluid is the same air the operator breathes, and most of them don't care if the heat is supplied by burning wood, coal, gas, or alcohol, or pressurized hot water (from a solar field or geothermal well).
[Answer]
I think it's worth a frame challenge here.
In the comments Alexander asks "why do you want lower boiling point with thermal solar?", to which jamesqf (not the OP) replies "because you need fewer mirrors to reach the lower boiling point, of course." I am guessing that this is also the OP's reasoning, and if so a frame challenge is definitely in order.
In the 18th and early 19th century, when steam engines were beginning to become viable, people worried a lot about this sort of thing. There were people working on "air engines" instead of steam engines, on the grounds that it seemed like steam engines were wasting energy boiling water when it could be used to expand air instead. I daresay there were others working on fluids with a lower boiling point - it seems an obvious thing to try.
This kind of thing eventually led to the development of thermodynamics, which was really a revolutionary science at the time. One of the outcomes of it was that you *don't* waste energy boiling water, because all of that energy goes into expanding the steam, and the boiling point of the working fluid *doesn't* directly affect the efficiency of the engine - what matters is the temperature difference between the boiler and the cooling fluid (a bigger difference is better).
Water, then, turned out to be a very good choice for the working fluid of a heat engine. It's non-toxic and readily available (hence a bit of leakage doesn't do too much harm, and there's no problem venting any excess or cooling it evaporatively in the open air). It's not corrosive if the machine components are prepared correctly. Its boiling point of 100°C is easy to reach and won't melt metal, but high enough that you can easily condense it even on a very hot day. It's also not flammable, which provides an enormous safety advantage over almost any other fluid, and evaporates fairly slowly in comparison to something like ethanol, which limits spoilage.
Even today, with the exception of internal combustion engines, virtually all heat engines run on steam. (They tend to take the form of turbines rather than piston engines these days, but the principle is exactly the same.)
There is no reason why all this wouldn't also apply to a 19th century solar thermal plant. It's true that with a lower boiling point you would need less mirrors to heat the boiler, but the engine would provide a correspondingly lower motive force, so in many ways this is a *dis*advantage - you're wasting energy by not using the sunlight to heat the boiler as hot as possible, which is easy to do. Sunlight has an effective temperature of about 6000°C, and until the target starts to get near that you can always make it hotter just by adding more mirrors.
Because of all this, it would make much more economic sense to just have more mirrors and use water/steam as the working fluid.
Of course, solar power also has the issue of intermittency - even in the sunniest places it doesn't work at night. This is why modern solar thermal plants generally heat a reservoir of molten salt, which can be heated to much higher temperatures than 100°C, which makes it more convenient for storing heat for long periods of time. But when you want to use that heat, as far as I know, you still just use it to boil water and run the engine on steam. I think this could all be done with 19th century technology, so I would expect it to be developed then if solar power was the main energy source.
]
|
[Question]
[
In this world a flat but giant continent holds a ginormous and ancient but unrotting corpse, from which many peoples harvest large amounts of meat.
However, as said, these people are at most in the bronze age, with bronze age tools and technology. How might the harvesting of this meat work?
[Answer]
People ate flesh well before the bronze age: even stone age people could hunt and butcher animals.
As long as you have a cutting edge, made of stone or bronze, you can cut pieces of meat.
If you are really desperate for food you can simply bite it off and chew.
[Answer]
If the "meat" is truly unrotting, and as big as you describe, I think there'd be a whole supply chain and it might look a lot like stonecutting. You would have butchers/miners/stonecutters "quarrying" the meat into blocks or cubes, perhaps salting them for preservation, and loading them onto wagons. Wagons would carry the meat to markets or to seaports to ship them around the world.
I am trying to imagine how the meat could be "unrotting" and my assumption is that it might be frozen. You can actually eat long-frozen mammoth meat found in the permafrost in Siberia. Therefore, after "quarrying" the meat it makes sense that they might have to add a preservative (such as salt); also that makes it seem less magical and more realistic.
This is something akin to the medieval/renaissance salt cod trade. Europeans would sail as far as Maine to harvest Atlantic cod, salt and dry the meat on the shore, and then ship it back to Europe for sale. So, a long supply chain is economically feasible if the meat is abundant and the technology for preserving it is available.
[Answer]
1. You make a bronze/stone butcher-knife-like tool.
2. You hack at the corpse until some meat gets completely cut off.
3. You enjoy your meal.
Greek soldiers used bronze tools in combat, and before the bronze age we know people used stone spears and knifes both to hunt and to fight one another.
What does that mean? That both bronze tools and stone tools are capable of cutting flesh.
The only way it'd see your inhabitants having problems harvesting meat is if this colossal corpse was completely covered in scales as tough as steel, and even then, all you need to do is live near is mouth/ back cavity (be it a cloaca or an anal cavity) and hack at the soft insides.
People did eat meat before the first iron tools were made, and they certainly killed other people before it as well.
[Answer]
**This is just mining with benefits**
Where did bronze age people get bronze? They mined it! Even stone-age people could have done it with flint axes.
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20160420-the-ancient-copper-mines-dug-by-bronze-age-children>
**Entrances into the Great Orme, the largest prehistoric copper mine in Britain (Credit: Great Orme Mines)**[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AuOgr.png)
The great advantage of mining a meat creature is of course that the miners have a ready supply of food. They can make caves in the meat and live in them. When it's dinner time, they just carve a bit off the wall and roast it over the fire. This has the dual benefit of providing food and at the same time increasing the size of their living quarters.
Distribution is done by any of the usual means with the fantastic advantage that the meat never goes rotten. People will pay (or trade rather) a huge amount for such a valuable commodity.
[Answer]
Bronze age technology included farming tools, including scythes. Swords also existed back then. Blades from that age were not as sharp as steel ones, but you could still cut flesh with those.
Banging that meat with mallets, even soft ones, will make it softer in some spots. You can then proceed to slash at it with bronze age tools. If the people have such an abundant source of food, they may stablish themselves around the mountain and have an industry going. They might even develop special tools for it. I can envision it, a wooden pole with a blade on one sode and a heavy bronze or wooden mallet head on the other (to beat on the meat).
Also if they are into chemistry as much as ancient egyptians were, they may use acid to dissolve the meat in some places. That would allow them to remove large blocks of meat from the mountain. They may use blocks weigthing many tons each to build a flesh pyramid!
[Answer]
In Stephen Baxter's "Raft"; The protagonist gets stuck inside a giant space whale in a universe where there is pressure in space (and also oxygen). The whale is huge (planetoid sized) so in order to "swim" through space it has to be light, so it's skin and giblets have just enough holding them together that they can survive in their natural habitat, but a human would be able to easily pull off chunks with very little force (Which is normally not a problem, there are no humans in space)
Your creature could be the same, if it had the same sort of flesh as us it may crumble under its own weight (<https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-square-cube-law-stop-giant-animals-from-existing>), so it having almost incorporeal flesh could counter both of these problems
It could also be that the corpses central nervous system and brain are dead, but it doesn't rot because the individual "cells" are still functioning, just independently of each other and the main organism now there is no central command. These "cells" (Which are frigging huge) could just be pulled off of the main creature and seem like little mini-creatures in their own right that die once removed from the circulatory system.
]
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.