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[Question] [ We've seen questions about multiple planets in a single orbit before, using Lagrangian points, through orbiting each other as they go around, etc. I'm looking at the creation of a hypothetical system with two habitable planets orbiting their star in a stable [horseshoe orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_orbit). To sum up a horseshoe orbit: two bodies orbit a star in nearly the same path. One of them is slightly closer to the star than the other, so it will go around a little faster. When it "catches" the second body, it will be accelerated by its gravity. This effectively pushes the first body outward, away from the star, until its orbit is now slightly longer than the second body. The first body will then lag slowly behind until the second body "catches" it, at which point gravity slows the first body and drops it back into the faster orbit. There's a 2-minute video that animates a horseshoe orbit [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsHBE3DWCP4); anybody reading this should watch the video, since horseshoe orbits can seem counter-intuitive and are hard to wrap one's head around. Also, this picture from [Wikipedia](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/File-Epimetheus-Janus_Orbit.png) shows two of Saturn's moons in such an orbit, as viewed from a rotating frame (note that Epimetheus is significantly smaller than Janus): [![Janus and Epimetheus](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3KL3K.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3KL3K.png) I'm looking for a description of the likely circumstances of such an orbit, given a test case: how often would the planets change places (note that the more frequently this occurs, the greater the change in year length will be), and how long would the transitions take each time? Will there be any significant effects on either planet, such as tidal changes, while they are changing places? Is a horseshoe orbit impossible or unstable in a notably eccentric orbit, or does it take on any unusual characteristics; would the two planets follow the same ellipse or something closer to mirrored ellipses with perihelion/aphelion on opposite sides of the star, for instance? One particular point I'd like to see addressed in an answer: how much flexibility does a horseshoe orbit have in terms of setting orbital distances? Are certain properties of the orbit fixed the moment one determines mean orbital distance from the star and size of the planets? Or is there room to play around with how far the two planets are in their orbits (tinkering with year length changes, for instance) while still retaining the place-changing characteristic of horseshoe orbits, and if so to what degree? The latter scenario offers more options for worldbuilding, since (if that latitude is great enough) one could then make place-changes happen anywhere from every century to once in five thousand years without changing the planets or mean orbital distance in any way. I'll provide three hypothetical test cases here for people to work with (of varying difficulty). I'm hoping to keep this question generalized, so other people looking at this question can easily relate it to any comparable system they might try to create themselves; as such, answers that include formulas (and that can thus easily support different figures being plugged in) are appreciated. I'll offer rough estimates on mass and radius that would produce the necessary gravity (assuming Earth density for the planets) in case they're needed. If one answer can address all three cases, great! Case One (easy): * Planet A: Earth (in its normal orbit). Mass ~ 5.98 x 10^24, radius ~6400km. * Planet B: 0.9g Earth-like planet. Mass ~ 4.26 x 10^24, radius ~5700km. Case Two (moderate): * Planet A: 1.1g Earth-like planet (in an orbit with eccentricity of 0 and year of 200 Earth days). Mass ~ 7.9 x 10^24, radius ~ 7000km. Assume the star is smaller and dimmer than the Sun to keep this habitable. * Planet B: 0.5g Earth-like planet. Mass ~ 7.5 x 10^23, radius ~ 3200km. I realize this planet may have atmospheric escape problems. Case Three (hard): * Planet A: 1.1g Earth-like planet (in an orbit with eccentricity of 0.1 and year of 500 Earth days). Mass ~ 7.9 x 10^24, radius ~ 7000km. Assume the star is somewhat larger than the Sun to keep this in the habitable zone. * Planet B: 0.8g Earth-like planet. Mass ~ 3 x 10^24kg, radius ~5100km. For the purposes of this question, ignore any other planets that might be in the system, although it would be useful to know if either planet in this configuration is capable of supporting one or more moons, or if the horseshoe orbit imposes any significant limits on the moons that can be supported. This is my first question here, and I recognize that it's probably a very tough one, so please let me know if there's something I need to clarify or edit! I've already made a few edits just waiting for answers, but I won't hesitate to make further changes. [Answer] So first of all, we need to define our terms here. To be clear, the orbit relates to the barycenter of the system. The changes are such that Janus is always farther away from Saturn's center of gravity than Epimetheus. When it comes to the barycenter. I generated a constrained 3-body model, and plotted the distance of the moons from the barycenter, running form 2006 January 1 00:00 TDB, over 20 days. This is a transition in which Janus starts out farther than Epimetheus. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/w1cz4.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/w1cz4.png) So far so good. In fact, we could just extend this to your problem, scaling all parameters so that they can apply to a very large star, and planets, they will of course not follow your instructions. Now to your example, the gravitation parameters calculated as the fractions ps the Sun and Earth mass are as follow: 1. Star ...... - $0.5403728495401237^{-3}\left[AU\right]^3/\left[Day\right]^2$ 2. Planet A - $0.9776461689638198^{-9}\left[AU\right]^3/\left[Day\right]^2$ 3. Planet B - $0.7110153956100508^{-9}\left[AU\right]^3/\left[Day\right]^2$ Next the positions and velocities. We will derive the star's Ephemeris, so let's start with Planet A. Assuming the star has 1.1 times the sun's luminosity dependent on surface which is r squared rather than mass' r cubed, but I'm not changing all this stuff now that I realized this :), this means that for a similar habitableness. ``` Solve[{L == 1.1 L2, L == 1/r^2, L2 == 1/r2^2}] ``` > > r -> 0.953463 r2 > > > So our new orbit is at `1.04881` times Earth's orbital radius, or simply `1.04881AU`. Which we will use as the initial x-component for position, with y- and z-components 0. For an eccentricity of (near) 0 with respect to the barycenter, it further needs a velocity of: $$\sqrt{a r}\approx\sqrt{\mu\_{star}/r\_{star}}=0.02216411615734939\left[AU\right]/\left[Day\right]$$ Unfortunately this is inconsistent with the idea of a 500 day orbit, so I will ignore this here. Now to Planet B, let's give it the position and velocity that Planet A will have one day later. We can multiply the resultant position and velocity by some factor, and be assured that they remain consistent and that crossing events take place because of the planets' gravitational pull towards each other. The result can give.... interesting orbits. For instance, when Planet B has initial orbital radius of 0.995 times and initial velocity of 1.005 times that of Planet A: Distance of planets from the barycenter: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hUDEH.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hUDEH.png) One orbit: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/swDeA.gif)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/swDeA.gif) Using $t=500$ yields: `{{r -> 1.68759, v -> 0.0178942}}`. We can then continue as before. Unfortunately, the effect which you are looking for, I'm not finding experimentally, I suspect the ratio beween the Sun and the planet's masses is too slim, if I draw the planets close enough together, they just end up sling-shotting each other out of orbit. So I sadly don't think it's going to work at this distance from the sun. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hnLNW.gif)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hnLNW.gif) You can have interesting orbits, orbits that cross each other, but not this. [Answer] There is no such thing as a "stable horseshoe orbit". Horseshoe orbits can be observed in reality, of course - but how stable are they? "We find that horseshoe co-orbitals are generally long lived (and potentially stable) for systems with primary-to-secondary mass ratios larger than about 1200". That's the case for Earth and Trojan asteroids, but not a suitable solution to the OP's question. What about Epimetheu and Janus? This horseshoe orbit can possibly have a lifetime of more than 10Gyr (10^10 years). For comparison: Earth is about 4.5Gyr old and the universe about 13.7Gyr. So plenty of time to develop life...right? Unfortunately, with a central body of a larger mass (like the sun), the stability/lifetimes of the horseshoe orbits suffer. For a central mass equal to that of Jupiter, the horseshoe orbits will have a lifetime measured in Myr (million years). Source and further reading: <https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6e46/9b3abad04b18beed9b0044b45f11f327f647.pdf> [Answer] Up front, I have zero background in this so I offer no hope of explaining any of the following to you, however, to add to [Feyre's](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/53803/two-planets-in-a-stable-horseshoe-orbit#54809) answer, [these initial conditions](http://www.orbitsimulator.com/yabbfiles/Attachments/Convunit_to_RealSma_.txt) may be useful to help determine if the orbit you want is possible. They are derived from [this discussion thread](http://www.orbitsimulator.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1289461093) around [this paper](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1981A%26A...103..288T). An [earlier paper](http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1967AJ.....72..149S) on the same subject is here. Maybe Feyre or others can help to utilize these resources and come to a meaningful conclusion. ]
[Question] [ A moon is, fundamentally, a rock that's caught in the gravitational field of a bigger rock (a planet) and drawn into an orbit. Some of [Saturn's moons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Saturn), for example, are speculated to be debris from the breakup of minor planets, while others are more-conventional small planets. (Please feel free to correct or elaborate on this simplistic view of astronomical bodies.) If a planet can capture moons like this, can a larger moon capture a much-smaller one? If so, are their orbits stable? [This answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/13242/28) to a similar question suggests that if the moon is far-enough away from the planet this could work, but does not go into detail. (That question asks if it's feasible for an earth-like planet to have this configuration; I'm not limiting my planet to being earth-like.) If this is possible, what are the key parameters for placing a planet, its moon, and its moon's moon to avoid having the whole system collapse or break up? Do the moon and its moon need to be far from the planet (to keep the planet from grabbing the moon)? If so, how massive do the planet and the primary moon need to be to keep the moon from drifting off? How are the orbital planes likely to relate to each other? Do the three bodies need to have a certain range of relative sizes? [Answer] In order for an orbit to be stable in the short term, it needs to be within the [Hill sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere) of its primary. For a circular orbit, the radius of this sphere is approximately: $$r = a\sqrt[3]{\frac{m}{3M}}$$ where `a` is the semi-major axis of the primary's orbit around its parent object, `m` is the mass of the primary, and `M` is the mass of the primary's parent. For long-term stability, the orbit needs to be closer to its primary; typically about 1/2 to 1/3 the radius of the Hill sphere. As an example, the Moon's Hill sphere is 61,645 km in radius\* and the conservative estimate for the long-term stable radius is 20,548 km. The Moon's radius is 1738 km, so any orbit less than 18,810 km above the surface would be stable over the long run\\. You can continue stacking moons as long as each moon is dense enough that its Hill sphere is larger than its radius. To maximize the depth of your stacking, each moon should be as far from its primary as possible. \* Actually, it's about 5% smaller because the Moon's orbit is elliptical with an eccentricity of 0.055. \\Sort of. Get too close to the surface, and [local variations in the gravity field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit#Perturbation_effects) make the orbit unstable. [Answer] I’m going to make some assumptions in this answer: Two moons have masses $m\_1$ and $m\_2$ and orbit a planet of mass $m\_p$, where $m\_1, m\_2\ll m\_p$. The planet is far enough away from the star that any gravitational/tidal effects from that star are negligible. There are no other planets capable of destabilizing any moons in orbits reasonably close to the planet (i.e. well within its Hill sphere). This, along with the second assumption, means that we can effectively treat the moon system as a miniature planetary system. There are two cases to look at: where $m\_1 \gg m\_2$, and where $m\_1\sim m\_2$. # 1. $m\_1 \gg m\_2$ In this scenario, we see the possibility of $m\_1$ capturing $m\_2$ just as Neptune is thought to have captured Triton, involving a three-body collisionless encounter. $m\_2$ would originally have been part of a binary moon system of some sort (see my second section) which then interacted with $m\_1$; the other binary partner was ejected and $m\_2$ became a satellite of $m\_1$ (see [Agnor & Hamilton (2006)](http://extranet.on.br/rodney/curso2010/aula9/tritoncapt_hamilton.pdf)). Assuming that the ejected binary partner had a mass $m\_3$, the three bodies would have had to have interacted at a distance $$r=a\left(\frac{3m\_1}{m\_2+m\_3}\right)^{1/3}\tag{1}$$ where $a$ was the semi-major axis of $m\_2$ and $m\_3$. There shouldn’t be any issues with applying this model to the moon system. # 2. $m\_1\sim m\_2$ This is a standalone scenario, but I realized that it is also needed to explain the formation of the original binary system in the first setup. It has the advantage that no third body is needed (and thus no other binary system is needed), but it has the disadvantage that a relatively narrow class of initial orbits will permit a successful finish. [Ochai et al. (2014)](http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.6780) apply the phenomenon of tidal energy dissipation to the formation of binary planets (here, we apply it to binary moons, because if $m\_1~m\_2$, it may be more accurate to refer to the system as a binary system, rather than as a satellite and sub-satellite). Given radii of $R\_1$ and $R\_2$ and a pericenter distance of $q\_{12}$, the energy dissipated after each encounter is $$E=\frac{Gm\_1^2}{R\_2}\left[\left(\frac{R\_2}{q\_{12}}\right)^6T\_2(\eta\_2)+\left(\frac{R\_2}{q\_{12}}\right)^8T\_3(\eta\_2)\right]+\frac{Gm\_2^2}{R\_1}\left[\left(\frac{R\_1}{q\_{12}}\right)^6T\_2(\eta\_1)+\left(\frac{R\_1}{q\_{12}}\right)^8T\_3(\eta\_1)\right]\tag{2}$$ where $\eta\_i\equiv[m\_i/(m\_1+m\_2)]^{½}$ and $T\_2$ and $T\_3$ are fifth degree polynomial functions with coefficients given in [Portegies Zwart & Meinen (1993)](http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1993A%26A...280..174P&data_type=PDF_HIGH&whole_paper=YES&type=PRINTER&filetype=.pdf). The authors carried out simulations of three gas giant planets orbiting a star (some simulations involved two, while others had the third play a minor role), and found different results for different values of the inner planet’s semi-major axis: ![](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vf5dP.png) Here, “HJs” stands for “Hot Jupiters”. It is certainly true that long-term (or even short-term!) stability might be problematic, especially because of tidal interactions with the parent planet. However, many setups will lead to the successful formation of a binary planet. All of this, of course, assumes that the less massive moon lies within the [Hill sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere) of the more massive one. ]
[Question] [ [The current topic challenge](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2154/fortnightly-topic-challenge-8-apocalypse) is [apocalypse](/questions/tagged/apocalypse "show questions tagged 'apocalypse'"), so I figured I might as well come up with a question about surviving one. A man named Noah somehow learns that there will be a large flood within one year, which will cover most of the world. He also learns that it is - for some reason - his task to load one male and one female of each species of animal in the world onto an ark, within which they shall ride out the flood. Realizing that there exists an uncountable number of species on the planet, he take a shortcut and chooses a select few, which, by a staggering coincidence, just so happen to represent every species contained in [the Bronx Zoo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronx_Zoo). Noah sets to work designing this ark. He understands that he's dealing with a complex web of animal interactions. He has to keep all the animals alive (i.e. stop them from killing each other) for a long period of time, and he has to keep them healthy (i.e. able to reproduce at the end). He doesn't want to cram all the animals into stalls, which would be the easy way out. Animals need to run free once in a while, so they need to be in a place similar to their natural habitat. He therefore decides to replicate [the nine biomes of the world, as given in the Walter system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome#Walter_system). Animals will be placed into one of these biomes. Can Noah recreate all nine biomes on board his ark? I should add that, to make things feasible, Noah has a net worth of ten billion U.S. dollars and all of today's technology. He needs to keep this whole thing quiet, so the only people working on it will be him, his wife, and his ten sons and daughters. [Answer] OMG fun question! And based on your comment, I can put them in shipping containers (does that sound cruel?). Float the Bronx Zoo. We can speculate that the visitor attractions, access, and exhibitions can be eliminated, but utilities have to be inserted onto the Ark. It will need access to electricity, water, stormwater drainage (a must), and wastewater. If Noah is smart and can create a ship that is multi-leveled, he can follow the example of the Maersk Class container ships. Afterall, it is only for 40 days that the animals must be contained. There are 650 species (x2 genders), meaning 1300 animals. Not too difficult. Many, such as the world of birds exhibit can be kept together, while others are separated. But you don't need a full savannah for an elephant couple for just 40 days. The largest enclosure can be one shipping container, while the smallest will be terrariums or aquariums (do we really need to provide for the salt-water fish?). So let's do 300 large containers, an aviary, and a room for 300 small-animals. This includes some separations since obviously not all genders go together at all times unless they're mating. We can easily fit this selection of the [largest containers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container#Specifications) onto a container ship, as well as your reptile, bird, bug, etc. rooms. In fact, [the Flextowe](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-30700269) can hold 19,000 making heaps of space for you to add your accessories. In an Urban Planning masterplan (I know it's a different science, but..) we allow for 15% for utility production, distribution, and access. You will want to shy away from solar, but wind and generators should be fine. A power/desal-water station takes about 1ha of space, which, even with weight is nothing for your mighty Flextowe. Fuel for 40 days is dependent on your location, but a good rule of thumb for a home (x20 homes?) is 10kWh. Tiny little primary substation. We don't really need huge spaces for cars, so, while I can't do the math-thingy's: 300++ containers (11m x 2m x 2m) = 16,000m3 +15% for access, ventilation, utilities = 18,400m3 This easily fits on the Felixtowe with lots of space to spare. This is where you can set your wind turbines, generators, water storage (I suggest rainwater collection...) and even Noah's house, as you like. Concern 1: Employment - 40 rainy days of feeding, mucking, healthcare, etc. requires way more than a family. I can't find statistics that separate researchers from day-to-day employees, nor from public-interface employees, but I suspect it's still a lot of people. Next you need help loading, unloading, and distributing the animals. Concern 2: Sex - Two animals of a different gender might not engage in sex ever. Not just [gay animals](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_displaying_homosexual_behavior), but simply animals that are picky. Concern 3: Return - Noah left at one point, and then presumably landed on Mt Sainai. So... how should he and his family separate the lions from the gazelles way up there. And who is handling the Butterfly Garden or the Bug exhibit? [Answer] His wife, sons and daughters must be fantastic structural, electrical and mechanical engineers, since you are essentially asking to recreate "Biosphere 2" in floating form. The time needed to build such a structure will be longer than the one year you suggest, even if it is within the monetary parameters. From Wikipedia: "Biosphere 2 was originally constructed between 1987 and 1991 by Space Biosphere Ventures, a joint venture whose principal officers were John P. Allen, inventor and Executive Director, and Margret Augustine, CEO. Project funding came primarily from the joint venture's financial partner, Ed Bass's Decisions Investment. The project cost US$200 million from 1985 to 2007" Biosphere 2 never succeeded in its mission to replicate self contained ecosystems (needing to have air and consumables injected into the closed system so the experimenters within could survive), but a ship would not have quite as many issues, since it could at least be open to the atmosphere and take aboard fresh water (via the ship's condensers). The ark would also be the largest "ship" or floating platform ever attempted, since (using Biosphere 2 as the template) it would cover an area of 1.27 hectare, so depending on the physical layout, would be larger than most aircraft carriers and container cargo ships. As an interesting side note, super sized aircraft carriers were suggested in WWII, built out of ice reinforced with wood pulp (Project Habakkuk). These would be large enough to launch 4 engined bombers on missions to Germany, so your Noah might consider creating a massive artificial iceberg to house the biomes. While the ice aircraft carrier was never built, a test article was floated in Canada, and took 3 years to melt. The Mythbusters also had an entertaining episode where they built a speedboat out of newspaper reinforced ice, which also worked for a while. Short answer is an Ark as you describe may be possible, but will be such a large and involved project that it could hardly remain a secret, both because of the large and specialized work force needed to build such a thing, and the sheer physical size of the ark (anyone would be able to find it using Google Earth, if they hadn't noticed the massive artificial iceberg growing in New York harbour). [Answer] # The Answer: No, because: 1. biomes are really complicate: bacteria, climate, plants, a hierarchy of predation, 2. Minimum viable population (a lower bound on the population of a species, such that it can survive in the wild) is a hell of a lot larger than "two", and 3. a world-wide flood is impossible (not only "where does all the water come from?", but "where does it do?). --- # Where might all the water come from? Melting all the Antarctic and Greenland ice in one year would get noticed by a lot of people, and would cause a lot of other problems. --- # Where might all the water go afterwards? Refreezing Antarctica and Greenland that quickly would also be impossible, but the water would also have to get there in the first place. ]
[Question] [ In near future a large spaceship is built. It is nuclear powered, has a crew of two dozen, and is propelled by an advanced ion drive like [VASIMR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket). > > The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) is an electromagnetic thruster under development for possible use in spacecraft propulsion. It uses radio waves to ionize and heat a propellant. Then a magnetic field accelerates the resulting plasma to generate thrust (plasma propulsion engine). It is one of several types of spacecraft electric propulsion systems. > > > The ship departs to Mars from Low Earth orbit. Will the engine exhaust cause an aurora? [Answer] Technically yes, in practice no. Most auroras occur between 90 and 130 km above ground level, though some occur hundreds of kilometers high. [Source](http://geo.phys.uit.no/articl/theaurora.html) [NASA](https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Transportation/Types_of_orbits/(print)) considers Low Earth Orbit to be between 160 km and 1000 km above ground, so you have sufficient overlap to be safe in that respect. An aurora is the emission of photons by gas particles in the atmosphere. In order to be considered an aurora there is the obvious requirement that it be visible from the ground. This translates to the requirement that many gas particles emit photons at the same time over a large area of the sky. The exact mechanisms that make auroras possible are still under investigation. A general idea is that the sun is constantly emitting charged particles (mostly electrons) in all directions, and many of these get trapped above the Earth's atmosphere in what's called the [magnetosphere](https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov/educational/MagnetosphereWebPage.php). [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3y6IP.gif)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3y6IP.gif) Image taken from [NASA's tumblr page on magnetospheres](https://nasa.tumblr.com/post/162908252239/magnetospheres-how-do-they-work) The [size of the magnetosphere](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/phenomena/earths-magnetosphere) depends on the relative strengths of the solar wind and the Earth's magnetic fields. When the solar winds rapidly increase in strength it contracts and you can observe the consequence of an [onslaught of charged particles being flung into the Earth's atmosphere](https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/fast-solar-wind-causes-aurora-light-shows). This is typically observable at the [poles](https://www.space.com/15139-northern-lights-auroras-earth-facts-sdcmp.html) where the magnetic fields are the strongest and attract the charged particles most strongly. Because of this, auroras are massive. [![Aurora Australis image from NASA](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bZTdL.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bZTdL.jpg) [See a beautiful animated version of this image here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aurora_Australis.gif) As you can now imagine, the sheer scale of the event is absolutely massive and caused by forces that no spaceship will even need. So, yes, an ion drive which emits plasma will cause the atmospheric particles surrounding the thruster to gain energy and release it in the form of photons and cause a light display much in the same way that the particles trapped in the magnetosphere do. However there would not be any sustained excitation of the atmosphere, and so instead of generating an aurora that covers the sky, the space-ship would leave a quickly fading, much smaller trail of lights reminiscent of the lights of an aurora. ]
[Question] [ ## BACKGROUND The pyromancers described [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/101381/37212) have found some very tall cliffs to jump off of, and they'd like to perform some experiments with gliders. They believe, or at least hope, that being able to magically heat substances at a distance might allow them to create personal thermal updrafts by heating the air directly beneath their gliders. But even if this is the case their ability to create heat is limited. To heat the air they have to burn kilocalories, and they can only produce so much wattage at a time. That's why before jumping off any tall cliffs they'd like to know how much thermal lift force they can generate per kilocalorie spent. Going from there, I ... uh, these pyromancers, don't yet know a whole lot about the mechanics of flight, so if they can generate adequate thermal lift they'd also like to know if there are particularly energy efficient ways to use it, and if any particular kind of glider structure is best suited to their talents and limitations. --- EDIT: Not to distract from the main question of lift, but I should mention that as this is currently a fairly low-tech world they don't have aluminum alloys or similar fancy materials to construct the glider. Pyromancy does allow for the cutting, welding and forging of materials very exactly however. --- Heat transfer is pretty straightforward, as is [converting](https://www.google.com/search?q=joules+to+kcal&oq=joules+to&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0j69i57j0l3.1751j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) the resulting joules to kcal. Air typically starts at 20 C° with specific heat of about 1, J/g °C, though that can vary. Assume that pyromancy is 100% efficient for simplicity, but keep in mind that probably won't be true for the final system. At that efficiency, a well-trained mage should be able to keep up 1000 W over an hour or so. $ Q=mcΔT $ What's tricky (so far) is knowing how much heat generates approximately how much lift force, and how to most efficiently spread the energy under the glider, and at what range they should begin heating air; a range of within 30ft would be preferred for other aspects of the magic system, but that isn't yet finalized. --- ## THE QUESTION How much thermal lift can my pyromancers generate per unit of energy spent? --- ## EDIT In response to @A.C.A.C.'s comment, and in light of the recognition that this may very well be impossible. If that holds true, I'd like to add that I would accept answers that give any of the following, in order of preference. 1) Answers that show how much thermal lift pyromancy could generate, even if it's inadequate for powering gliders. 2) Answers showing in detail how the above pyromancy could supplement gliding rather outright powering it. 3) Answers showing how this could work with a higher maximum wattage. [Answer] # Gliders are dumb, use balloons If you heat up the air, that is going to dissipate quickly due to convection and winds and whatever. The first people trying to get airborne with hot air didn't use gliders. They used balloons. As an added bonus, if you are using primitive technologies, people went up in balloons in the 1700s, so the technology level is about as low as you are going to get. # Heat loss in a hot air baloon Conveniently, Adriana Llado-Garcin, who I never met but now I love, did her Master's thesis on a [Heat Transfer Model for Hot Air Balloons](https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt68j7s6j5/qt68j7s6j5.pdf). I started doing some fancy math, but then realized a few things. First: 1000 W is nothing. The burner studied in the paper was 3.2 MW. Second, 1000 W is really nothing. A hot air balloon presents a surface area of about 400 m$^2$ to the sun, which on a sunny day will warm it with 1000 W/m$^2$. A dark colored balloon will absorb 90% of this radiation. Therefore, heat input to a large-ish hot air balloon from the sun on a sunny day is about 360 kW. So putting your balloon on a field on a sunny day is about the same heating as 360 of your pyromancers. # Conclusions I didn't end up doing any math out, but the discrepancies in power numbers impressed on me that this scheme will not work. If you have a better chance of firing a hot air balloon by leaving it in the sun, and you certainly won't lift off by leaving it in the sun, then your pyromancers can't reasonably launch a balloon. And if they can't reasonably launch a balloon, what chance do they have of keeping their glider airborne? I'm calling this myth busted. A 1000W pyromancer cannot generate any significant lift force. Better tell those pyromancers to step away from the cliff. ]
[Question] [ ### [Brown dwarfs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf) are celestial bodies in the gray area between planet and star. They're huge, gaseous, hot compared to planets, and [come in all different kinds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf#High-mass_brown_dwarfs_vs._low-mass_stars). (1) Is it possible for life to develop in the outer layers of such an object? (2) If so, how large and/or complex could it get before being constrained by resources, heat etc.? --- * Possible means able to happen at all. This is not to be confused with likely - I don't expect life to be common across brown dwarfs - but I want to know if it's realistic to even consider these circumstances happening once. * Life means something that reproduces and evolves, that adapts to its environment, and that responds to stimuli. DNA is in no way necessary, nor are cells, to meet this criteria. Complexity is not a requirement to be "alive". * To develop can include the creation of life by [abiogenesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis) or the arrival of life through [panspermia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia) but either way it must not perish; it should be able to evolve and reproduce in its environment. * A brown dwarf for this question is an object with > 13 $M\_J$, so that deuterium fusion occurs comfortably. Its composition must occur naturally, and its volume and weather dynamics should be realistic, but you may determine other characteristics if it helps life develop. It may not orbit another object but it can have natural satellites if you so desire. > > Related to but not a duplicate of [Could a society exist within a brown dwarf](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/10014/could-a-society-exist-within-a-brown-dwarf) which asks about humans settling within the atmosphere of such an object, as opposed to microorganisms evolving and growing complex, in that environment. > > > [Answer] There's a few major issues which I highly doubt can be reasonably overcome: The surface temperature The coolest brown dwarfs appear to have a minimum temperature of around 500k, or 226 celcius - well above the boiling point of water. That immediately means life as we recognise it would not be able to form; simply boiling something is an easy way to sterilize it. This acts as a limit for Earth life because cells use water as the carrier for a cocktail of proteins moving back and forth through the cell walls. Boil that water, destroy the cell. There have been suggestions that it might be possible for non-water based life to form in the Universe, so this point in itself might not be a limiting factor for life in general. KO: Water based life. Radiation The intense magnetic field generated by such enormous bodies causes dangerous particles to get 'stuck' in it. This would make it extremely unlikely for the life to form on some other planet and arrive e.g. by comet, as the comet passing through this intense radiation belt would be sterilized; similarly the radiation levels on the surface are dangerously high too. In short, radiation destroys large molecules, such as proteins. KO: Protein based life. Large molecules like polymers (plastics). The strength of gravity Your average brown dwarf is not much bigger than Jupiter, but is much denser so its gravitational strength is considerably higher. To give it the best chance, let's do a quick bit of maths to figure out the acceleration due to gravity on the bottom end of the brown dwarf scale: * M: At a minimum, about 13 Jupiter masses * R: At a minimum, about 110% Jupiter's * Acceleration due to gravity: g = G \* M / R^2 Drop in the numbers.. g = 1.898 × 10^27 \* 6.67408 × 10^-11 \* 13 / (1.1 \* 69,911,000)^2 g = 278.4 m/s^2 That's 10 times higher than the sun. So, let's say you had the average mass of a typical American - about 80kg - giving you an applied gravitational force (F=m\a) of 22,240 newtons. And this is where the problem is. That's beyond the crushing force of bone. By comparison, it takes about 7,560 newtons to completely fracture a femur. Bone has an incredible strength to weight ratio, so if you swapped bone for something like steel, it'd be crushed by the far higher mass* that it's now got to support. What about carbon nanotubes? Carbon nanotubes are about as good as it gets when it comes to the strength to weight ratio, but they achieve that by being hollow. That, in turn, makes them [very weak to compression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube#cite_note-53). All in all, complex life - even non-water-based forms - would likely be crushed by the gravity, or at the very least, completely unable to move in any useful way. KO: Metallic and carbon-nanotube based 'mechanical' life. [Answer] Plasma-based life could exist in brown dwarfs. According to Vadim Tsyovich's computer simulations, life could exist because of plasma's electrical properties. The plasma self-organizes into a double helix and splits into daughter plasma-structures. Only the most stable of the organisms survive until they reproduce. [Answer] The real problem with life on a brown dwarf is going to be the lack of a surface. You're floating in an atmosphere of mostly hydrogen--what's your solvent? And biochemistry needs a variety of elements. You're also going to have a very hard time powering it--where's the energy source? We think of the brown dwarf as emitting energy, but something on it will simply see that as it's environment, there's no source and sink to actually extract useful work. I disagree about the threat radiation poses. High in the atmosphere it certainly would be dangerous--but so is Earth's ionosphere. So what? It also wouldn't stop life from arriving from elsewhere--life can't travel on the surface of a rock anyway because it wouldn't survive the fiery plunge. Only life deep on a rock can make it to another world. Likewise, gravity. Swimmers don't care. Rather, we come back to the same problem--there's no real environment for life. ]
[Question] [ Say that an individual with a decent, but not mastery level, understanding of health, medicine, and sanitation were to travel to an era with technological level roughly around medieval to Renaissance levels. Lets say this individual is able to get people to listen to him sufficiently to enact policy based off of his suggestions. I'm wondering how much disease can be minimized or removed simply from understanding of sanitation and how diseases spread. I do not want to look at more difficult medical intention like developing vaccines/antibiotics or knowing specifics of any one dangerous disease, only the more generalized knowledge. So I'm looking at things like: 1. Boiling water to kill bacteria before using it for medical procedures (or even drinking it for those with weakened immune systems). 2. Using boiled water to clean hands and instruments before medical procedures 3. keeping urine and feces from being dumped straight into the river people drink from 4. Knowledge of how diseases spread leading to suggestions like use of face mask, teaching people to cover sneezes up, avoiding physical contact with ill, and sanitizing or destroying things which came into contact with ill's bodily fluids 5. Modern quarantine methodologies. 6. Scientific approach to identifying which method an illness spreads by and attempts to focus treatment and quarantine to those methods it spreads. Including disposing of animals that may spread disease like black plague. 7. safe disposal of diseased bodies. 8. Removing of blatantly wrong medical presumptions that may be harmful. Assuming these ideas are spread by this individual I'm trying to determine how much disease and illness may be prevented. I'm looking at general illness/death to common diseases primarily, but also somewhat interested in usefulness for treating a specific epidemic that may currently be ongoing. My problem is I don't have a sense of scale as to what approaches were already known by a given period in time, and which were still foreign. Thus I'm trying to determine how effective these were and how much these would likely already be done. In theory I don't want to limit this to time-travel, but any situation where modern knowledge meets a group of roughly the technological level I mentioned, even if it were some planet with a new sapience, some parallel universe with alternate history, or a magical portal to a different realm. I realize without the scope of an exact time period it's harder to say, but my point is I'm curious as to what would be expected to be known given this rough technological level, NOT what a specific country may have known. [Answer] What you’ve provided to your people is insight into how to avoid being infected. Assuming that the majority of the population in a kingdom adopts your rules vigorously (see my last point) you could seriously impact the spread of many diseases. [Germ theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease) and a true understanding of how disease works didn’t come about until the late nineteenth century. Boiling water to make it safe to drink wasn’t a known precaution until around that same time. This is a time period in which the so-called [Medical Renaissance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_Renaissance) brought about such tremendous insights as simple human anatomy and theories about blood circulation. Even new and clever techniques like tying off arteries were eventually abandoned because without antiseptics the procedure was incredibly dangerous. What’s more, this knowledge was unpopular and restricted to the musings of a select few physicians. For a Renaissance peasant (and even royalty) to suddenly believe Germ theory might result in absolute horror at their surroundings and lifestyle. The filth, dirt, and bodily fluids everywhere would become immensely disturbing. If impacted enough, a desire for cleanliness might jumpstart some interesting public works for sanitation. Outside of the possibility of a general trend toward greater cleanliness, behavior and policies would change based on sewage and simple interaction with water and food. Boiling water and simply being aware of how disease spreads would be a major boon for everyone regardless of class. It might scare existing or potential doctors from doing their jobs, and they would need reassurance and training in proper health techniques. You’d also need to consider the possibility that the general public might have few ways to affect public policy such as sewage handling and river preservation — in some kingdoms the rulers would have no interest in spending the money on those things and simply improve their own behavior. Some of the above techniques can still be employed by the peasantry, but they could still be at significant risk. One critical final note: though you’ve hand waived away the problem of getting everyone to believe you and adopt these ideas, it is the most difficult part. The reason the effects would be so staggeringly effective on the population is because of how thoroughly difficult this task has been (and continues to be today). Even in 2014, when an Ebola outbreak struck Africa, it took a global effort to convince the locals how to adopt a proper response. [Answer] All of your suggestions would have been excellent towards helping prevent disease, but your assumption that you would get them to believe about modern germ theory, based on bacteria, which cannot be seen with the naked eye, is simply outrageous for their brain-washed minds. Religion was at the core of everything during the Dark Ages, there was a reason they called it the Dark Ages. If the Bible couldn't explain it then most people believed it was witchcraft. And if you didn't toe the party line and attribute everything to God, you could be fined or imprisoned for witchcraft or sorcery. At one point there were even fines if you didn't go to church every Sunday. Read [two free EPUBs about the Black Plague](http://goo.gl/3QdCHq) here. [Answer] Almost all of it, modern medicine is far more about preventing illness (asepsis) than about curing it afterwards. An ounce of prevention.... Assuming you could get people to do things right you'd stop cholera and dysentery dead, prevent a lot of wound infection but not all of it, and you'd even make a dent in individual epidemics of plague, smallpox and the like. ]
[Question] [ One day, a new island appears in the middle of Earth's ocean, inhabited with humans who have lived there all their lives (but in another dimension). The island is not visible to anyone outside a 25 mile radius, so the rest of the world has no idea the island is even there. Apart from the existence of the island, we can assume the rest of the world is just like the modern day. The islanders know about Earth's laws and policies - let's say an encyclopedia washed up on their shores. They want to make first contact with the rest of the world, but without violating international law. They face a few challenges: * All boats in international waters need an MMSI code to be able to make radio contact with another ship. The MMSI number is derived from a MID, which is issued by the ITU. However since the ITU is not aware of the new island, it hasn't assigned them any MID. * Similarly with phone networks - they can neither call nor be called because they don't have an international country code, because one has not been assigned by the ITU. Neither do they have any means of connecting with phone networks, for similar reasons. * Their currency has basically no value, because it cannot be converted into other ("hard") currencies. Even if they could make contact with a foreign exchange, no one would want to buy their currency because they wouldn't be able to sell it again and no one would be able to spend it (this could be alleviated over time with tourism and exports, but foreign relations must be established first) * Because their currency has no value and they have no access to hard currencies, they are not able to do things like sign up for a satellite Internet account How do they legally make contact with the outside world and start to establish foreign relations? [Answer] Shortwave radio. You can easily reach out further than 25 miles with shortwave; it's well known that you can [bounce signals off the Earth's ionosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skywave) and communicate across the globe. They won't have any amateur radio operator licenses, but such regulations vary internationally, and in any case, aren't strictly enforced. It would take some doing to convince other amateur radio operators to pay attention to their story, but hopefully some updated satellite map imaging would convince them. [Answer] Trigger a volcanic eruption. The feasibility would be dependent on their island's geologic makeup and their level of technology, and depending on the size of the island, it might err on suicidal. However, it would ideally produce a massive ash cloud, the unusually invisible/unexpected source of which would be subsequently investigated by scientists, governments, and the media. This would solve the issue of wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum being blocked by their "indivisibility" field -- it'd be, in essence, the world's biggest smoke signal. However, dumping large quantities of ash into the atmosphere, possibly [disrupting flight corridors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_travel_disruption_after_the_2010_Eyjafjallaj%C3%B6kull_eruption) and maybe even [causing crop shortages due to global cooling](http://crop%20shortages%20due%20to%20global%20cooling) would, admittedly, be a rather rude way of making first contact. ]
[Question] [ Time for some hare brained architecture! I was thinking about elves living in their tree houses via the mapping of such inherently three dimensional settlements. Normal houses transplanted from the ground is unsatisfying. Using magic to shape the trees feels like a cop out and is kind of dubious biologically. It is possible, trees are fairly robust that way, but just seems risky for a race of tree-huggers to do on large scale. So I though about houses suspended by ropes going criss cross between the trees. You'd put webs between the ropes to create level load bearing surfaces for floors and pathways. Textiles would then supply protection from elements in the form of floor, walls, and ceilings. Treatment with oils or tree saps would allow water and wind proof surfaces. Then I started thinking about the sheer amount of fiber needed for all that. It would be light weight, but you would need lots of it. And such structures would require constant rebuilding, so the demand would be constant. Where would elves get all that fiber? Steal it from the giant spiders? Fill the ground below with cotton plantations tended by human slaves? Raise monkeys with sheep like fur? These ideas have some flavour and might make interesting stories. An elven settlement surrounded by a forest absolutely filled with spiders and their webs makes lot more sense if you can point out that the spiders are farmed for their silk by the elves. Still scaling these solutions up would mean meddling with local ecology on the same scale as human practices did. It doesn't really give the elves a flavour of being more in touch with the nature. So I ended up with a source of fiber that automatically scales up with the population and thus presumably the demand. Hair. My elves will simply grow hair suitable for ropes and textiles at a speed sufficient for the demand. Using homes build from parts of your own body should also be convenient when adding magic. Such self-sourced textiles would also be good for magically attuned clothing and various magic talismans. This would help in making the elves inherently more magical than humans, something that many settings seem to struggle with. And elves traditionally come with exotic hair colours... But what about the practical issues? Such buildings should be mainly require tensile strength. (We can at this stage hand wave weather and wear resistance.) What level of tensile strength would be needed for such structures? Reasonable changes to design from one described above to reduce loads should be assumed. Can hair provide the needed tensile strength or is something more exotic needed? Some spider silk can be added, if necessary. What kinds of loads would the trees be subjected to and could trees withstand the load? Feel free to assume the most sensible trees and forest type. [Answer] Some numbers to start: Human hair has a tensile strength of about 350-400 MPa. Spider Silk has a tensile strength of about 1000-1500 MPa. Typical 2x4s weigh about 1.5lbs/ft, so about 6lbs per sqft. There are approximately 150,000 strands on the average human head. Each strand can support almost 100g. Be conservative and safe, say 50g per strand. That's about 7,500,000g or about 16,500lbs! That's for a rope the size of the average girls braided pony tail. That rope could support about 2750sqft of flooring! And that's at HALF CAPACITY! Keep in mind human hair is about as strong as aluminum weight for weight. You could maybe base your totals off of aluminum cable. You can figure out some measurements from that. I like the idea and I don't see why it wouldn't work. You see people support themselves from their hair in circus acts and such. You see other pull vehicles with their hair. These aren't even straining the hair at all. I don't think you'd need to magically change the hair except for the growth rate really. So many textiles are made from different hair that the idea isn't so out of this world when you think about it. I also don't think you'd need to add anything to the hair to help it. Once the hair is braided into a rope it would be rather strong. You could mix all kinds of things to make it stronger or to basically laminate it. All of this isn't needed tho. The architecture would be simple just have a few points of anchor, and have a few ropes support the structures. The more hair ropes you have the bigger and crazier the structure can get. You could even use the hair as building material. Ropes to keep boards together. Mix the hair with things like mud or sap to make shapes for walls or roofs and so on. Picking how to build the actual structures I'll leave up to you since I don't want to take away from your idea and imagination. As for the trees you could use. There are many. Redwoods, Giant Sequoia, Baobab, Eucalyptus, so on. These are all very tall and strong trees that could easily support the structures. If the trees don't need to be as tall, you could easily use things like Banyan trees or coconut palms. It really depends where geographically you'd want the elves. Most trees as long as they are packed closely enough would be able to support structures as long as the load is spread out. The first list could support MASSIVE structures on their own too. As far as how much weight a specific tree can hold, that's really complicated. There are so many variables to think about here. I'd say that the elves most likely wouldn't bother with the physics so much as understanding innately what a tree can take. ]
[Question] [ As a series of anatomically correct myths, here we have the [Nuckelavee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuckelavee). Is there a realistic way that Nuckelavee could evolve? Using Earth or near-Earth biology, how close could I get to the classic Nuckelavee? Is there a reason that a Nuckelavee couldn't evolve? To me the two heads and split spine is the major problem. You could imply that the horse head is just a glorified trunk. It's up to you. A list of all of the Anatomically Correct questions can be found here [Anatomically Correct Series](http://meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798) [Answer] To justify multiple mouths, one could be for breathing/communication while the other could be for eating, Horsehead could browse on seaweed/clams/starfish in the shallows while the other head stayed well above the water. Multiple pairs of eyes could also be beneficial, with the horse pair used underwater and the others to keep aware of things above the waves. [Answer] The nuckelavee could have evolved from an early warm-blooded crocodilian that, due to a mutation, had a large amount of dithoracic parapagus twins. This species would evolve to direct the development of these twins in a consistent way, such as with one thorax above the other. They might later move to the surface of the ocean. The lower individual would evolve to become more able to move through the ocean, whereas the upper individual might gain longer limbs to drag the body over the ground. The upper individual might also become more upright, to be able to see further. This uprightness would allow them to gain longer and stronger legs, allowing the creature to walk bipedally. The lower head might lose the brain, to avoid competition between multiple brains. The lower head might also become cyclopic and blind, as the eye is less useful. The lower retina might become bioluminescent, with the eye turning into a powerful photophore. As they would be slow on land, they might evolve to exhale toxic fumes out of their lower mouth, to protect themselves if they end up far from the water. This might lead to them spending more time on land. They might become omnivorous, and start to eat fruit. To get fruit, they may evolve to grab it with their feet. They might eventually come accross larger fruit, which would need to be broken to eat. This might lead to the head expanding to allow larger fruit into the body, as well as cheeks and crushing teeth to allow the fruit to be more easily swallowed. The travel on land may lead to the skin turning transparent and scaleless in aposematic display, as camoflague would not be possible. This might also lead to the more visible veins to turn yellow, and the blood to blacken, to make the creature more frightening. They might later move north towards the artic region, but could still migrate south in the winter. This evolutionary path could lead to a nuckelavee [Answer] As a matter of fact, there is a record of human Siamese twin sharing a body and having 2 spines and heads. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abigail_and_Brittany_Hensel> As for the mix with a horse, I think you'll have to consider something like "there is no limitation for species to have cross-species children" because frankly I don't think you can avoid supernatural physics for this Nuckelavee. [Answer] Stethacanthus, that prehistoric shark with that weird thing on it's head which we don't know the real function of, is almost like an evolutionary starting point for something like the nuckelavee. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aRKBq.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aRKBq.png) [Answer] The skin is the main issue for a nuckelavee, as large parts of human anatomy, such as much of the skull, the eyes, the nose, the ears, the thyroid, the brain, and the teeth, are derived from the skin in some way. However, if the skin is lost later in life, such as by shedding it and not replacing it, then it is possible, but not plausible ]
[Question] [ Disclaimer : I'm working on the entire pseudo-science thing , so the scientific part of this whole thing isn't made up properly... Certain things have not been explained , this is to keep the post short. Also I apologize if I haven't provided any necessary info or if I have broken any guidelines as this is my first post. I realize how this topic could be quite broad. Hence I've given a list of things that are necessary in an answer at the end. --- Scenario : Okay. So here is the background, in the future, a well 200 years or so later, time travel is being developed. The solar system is the only known place in the universe with life. This is restricted to Earth, Mars, Titan and a myriad of larger, sometimes grouped asteroids... Now the event in focus is time travel experiments which are achieved by a fictional subatomic process to create a wormhole. These experiments are being performed in the outer fringes of the asteroid belt, away from major settlements, as a safety precaution. The time travel works for small massed objects, and trials with life is considered to be too hazardous. The scientists decide to try their experiment with a huge mass object and thus they choose a nearby asteroid for insertion. The asteroid is inserted into the portal and just before it goes into the portal, the asteroid splits into two segments. Now this method of time travel is still being worked upon, the scientists know that the objects they send in are being sent back into the past... But, they don't know the destination. So, just before the asteroid goes in, it splits into two and one part gets sent back to the past, a little after the formation of animal life on Earth and one part gets sent a little later , to the time of Dinosaurs and it hits the earth , wiping out all larger forms of life. The scientists are completely oblivious to all of this.. But what they do realize is that insertion into the portal irradiates the inserted object , with an energy equivalent to the mass of the object. Subsequently the experiments are banned and the off-world experimentation site is closed down. Now back to the part that the scientists don't know. The second segment to enter the portal was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs and all other large reptiles... This is *timeline 1, where events as we know happen and this is where eventually the time-travel dabbling scientists help create the timeline in a everlasting circle of sorts. The first segment is more interesting. This piece of the asteroid was significantly larger than the the other one, and collides into the Sun , disrupting the fusion process inside the sun and causing the 'transformation' of hydrogen into something else, caused by the subatomic differences in the asteroids makeup. All the 'polluted matter' of the Sun splits away from the original and creates a small , more-powerful star that orbits the sun, that emits a greater part of the electromagnetic spectrum and bombards the solar system with radiation. This is timeline 2. --- Now The Questions :* How would the life on Earth be affected ? Plant life already exists , but most would begin mutate to the new environment. The primary life is reptilian..... Assuming that due to the exposure the life forms have gained the potential for greater intellect what types of creatures would be produced ? What of their society ? Peaceful hunter-gatherers or Tribal fighters ? How would the earth be affected in terms of meteorology and geography ? [Answer] ## Disclaimer: As noted in my comment on @Greymtr question, I'll propose sets of assumption to make the question's setting more plausible. This is intended to deviate slightly from the questions proposed. The goal is to provide a general idea that could works with our current physics (not the time travel part). And finally, as per the Question Owner's permission, > > ‎@HendrikLie Yeah , absolutely . - Greymtr > > > --- ## Assumptions and suggestions: 1. The secondary star mentioned in the question and its effect is omitted. 2. The first segment of the asteroid in the question is just a normal asteroid segment, containing no handwavium that could damage the sun (ahem). 3. Those two segments are actually dropped on nearly the same time, but in slightly different location and timing, each is dropped in different alternate reality (after all, each time a time travel is performed, new alternative timeline is formed, as hinted in the question). --- # The Answer: So the scientists drops an asteroid that's split to two segments. One is dropped earlier and immediately followed by the second segment. ## 1. The first segment This one dropped on an orbit that intersects the yet-to-hit-earth asteroid, and hits it, sent it to a trajectory that directly intersects earth orbit at the same moment earth is on that intersection! This will cause mass extinction that occurred in our timeline. This is timeline 1, and is our timeline. ## 2. The second segment Yet in different timeline, this one dropped on an orbit that intersects the yet-to-hit-earth asteroid somewhere in the past. Due to its insertion, it interacts with orbital path of the yet-to-hit-earth asteroid and send it in different orbit that causes the yet-to-hit-earth asteroid never intersects earth orbit. This will be the timeline 2 in the question, but will never hits the sun either, so no secondary star is formed. Because earth's life will never experience mass extinction as in our timeline, according to [Axelrod](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/18217/7974)'s answer, > > [The dinosaurs were already on the decline](http://news.discovery.com/animals/dinosaurs/dinosaurs-extinction-asteroid-120501.htm) when the asteroid struck. > > > As mentioned in his(?) answer, upcoming ice ages and environmental changes might force dinosaurs to adapt, yet in different manner that might hinders the evolution of mankind (I just gives you the highlight of Axelrod's answer, as his full answer presents it quite nicely and to avoid redundancy). You might develop alternative intelligent species that's not human (well, it is safe to assume that primates might never evolved in this timeline, so species with similar physiology and body plan like ours is [highly unlikely](http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/11/dinosauroids-revisited.html), even if you consider the dinosauroid theory). For cultures and behavior of those new intelligent species, I believe it is wise to assume that theirs are not necessarily similar to us (which I believe that it is your original conception of the possible emerged race). Again, it (the new intelligent species) depends on its origins and diets (and possibly its environment and its social structures). Consider this: 1. We as omnivores is advantaged by large range of food that we could eat. Herbivores might support higher population density considering advanced farming (hydroponics, aeroponics, etc). Carnivores, in the other hand, might have sparser population, or even in considerably high population density, they might consider breeding livestocks to support their population, but their population size couldn't be compared to herbivores and omnivores intelligent species. 2. Warm-blooded or cold-blooded species might also affects their daily life, hence affecting their cultures. Warm-blooded species would likely have a constant urge to eat (not the whole day, but warm-blooded species must eat in definitive intervals), as we constantly "burn our food" to generate heats, so their social life might be more active. Expect large range of environment that they could survive on. Cold-blooded species would most likely prefers hotter environment, as their body must be "heated" in the morning by the sunlight or other heat sources. Expect them to be mostly lying, sunbathing at the morning, and is probably active mainly at night or at dusk. Their metabolism is slower, it might affect their social life. Perhaps they'll interact less? Their society might evolve slowly, and also their technology might develop slowly. But that's not a constant. 3. If they dwells on the sea, they would probably never develops civilization, just look at dolphins and humpback whales. They were intelligent ([probably more than humans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetacean_intelligence)), but they never develops civilization like ours. 4. Consider their development and traits, as even the smallest trait could affect their society and evolution. Just like how we differ from the apes, as we lacks [something](http://www.dailytech.com/Study+How+Human+Evolution+Caused+us+to+Lose+Our+Spiny+Penises/article21094.htm) that they have, and the very same lacks gives us advantage over them. # Conclusion: There's no need to develops secondary stars that bathes us with radiation to change the entire history. As even the [slightest change](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect) could changes everything if it diverge earlier enough. This could adds more interesting story to tell, as "the slightest change done far in the past causes the greatest changes that alter the future" (ahem, my prose is not too persuasive and interesting, but you got the idea).‎ [Answer] Something that's really worth considering is the effect of the second sun. Given the handwavium involved in its creation I'm not going to get into the orbital or physical processes required for it to form, and instead focus on two things. 1: Gravity Even a small part of the sun splitting off to form a second star would wreak havoc on the orbits of the planets. I'm assuming that it splits into a stable orbiting binary system (which is improbable) and that the smaller star isn't playing tricks with physics. This would throw the orbits of the planets into some sort of weird, complicated pattern that would basically mean kissing goodbye to regular seasons, and possibly even a regular Goldilocks zone. 2: The radiation The second star is pumping out exotic radiation at a greater rate than the sun. Ignoring the 'exotic' part and just assuming a greater amount of radiation, you need to consider whether the magnetosphere will be sufficient to prevent the atmosphere of the earth being blown off. If it is, you need to consider if the magnetosphere is sufficient to prevent the atmosphere from becoming heavily ionised (ie: lethal). If it is, you need to consider if the amount of energy provided to the earth by the new star is low enough to avoid turning us into a second Venus. Basically, is this new star going to scour the surface of the earth clean with its baleful gaze? Finally: The effect on life If the planet isn't thrown into a weird eccentric orbit and the planet isn't periodically autoclaved, there isn't a chance that life will evolve as you expect. Firstly the increased radiation content will cause all manner of mutations, most lethal, leading to an incredibly hardy set of species surviving. Think cockroaches. Secondly the inevitable climate changes would completely change the evolutionary path of the world, probably to favour high endurance, seasonally robust creatures. I for one wait for the rise of our Tardigrade overlords. All hail the Prime Waterbear. (Seriously. Look up Tardigrades, they're insane) [Answer] Well there's one kink in that plan: [The dinosaurs were already on the decline](http://news.discovery.com/animals/dinosaurs/dinosaurs-extinction-asteroid-120501.htm) when the asteroid struck. Moreover, the climate shifts leading to multiple ice ages were unrelated to the collision. As such, the whole reptilian supremacy argument may not work. Instead, birds and eventually mammals would likely have still taken over. That said, dinosaur varieties which were on the decline may have adapted to the coming storm (I.E. growing smaller, becoming warm blooded if they weren't already, getting some sort of insulation), but their presence would still have pushed mammalian evolution down the road a bit (we were, after all, akin to little rodents at the time), possibly enough to have prevented the precise combinations that led to human evolution (whatever those were). Assuming the dinosaurs did adapt to become smaller and more efficient in the changing world, they likely would have held off a few niche evolutions (like the terror birds and mammalian megafauna), until a new contestant could kick them out. So, there would likely be smaller mammal species than we know of now, due to the competition at the upper size brackets. Birds would still likely have evolved along the same path, but the larger birds, like the terror birds, would likely still be around now (for the record, historically bird > reptile) once they finally took their niche, since there would be no large mammals to compete with. ]
[Question] [ There are lots of posts speculating about a planet (or whatever) where life evolves intelligence and goes on to produce technology, under different differences lacking something or another that is available to us. Without thumbs, without metals, without vision, in a different atmosphere or liquid or vacuum, as a vegetable, and various other differences in environment and physical attributes. For mental differences, I see one question about mindset being affected by lack of pain, but intelligence is already imposed by design. When I see Vulcans portrayed as emotionless, I sometimes wonder if that's plausible, as emotionless humans do exist and we call them sociopaths. Rather than without any emotion, I'm postulating a species that has an internal self-awareness in the same manner that we do, but is *missing some specific* emotions (relative to our situation). In particular, Love and related social emotions evolved because we have social groups and close families for raising children. A species without emotions for individual attachment** would have no concept of grief or heartbreak, and would find our idea of love to be maniacal. I'm supposing this is due to lack of or profound difference in social structure, at least in the recent evolutionary past. How could such a species cooperate and not kill each other off like solitary territorial species, to develop a civilization? Note that it may have different emotions, including something we have no concept of. You can't explain the feeling of an alien emotion, but can specify the evolutionary meaning and how it acts as a motivating influence. (I have one idea, but I'll wait and see what others suggest) Bonus: what would it do for poetry and art, seeing what drives ours? Or would that be missing as well and have a deep influence on the culture? [Answer] Love is a useful evolutionary development to bond individuals to each other and their biological offspring, so the first thing that is different on your world is that the dominant species (and probably all of them) do not have a mammalian or marsupial reproductive cycle. Even a reptilian one would be very questionable for this questions, since creatures that abandon their nests after laying eggs will probably be out-competed by creatures which do care for their nests (and by extension their young, like dinosaurs and birds). So we are looking at creatures who's life cycles may resemble that of fish, molluscs or even invertebrates like starfish. This isn't quite as improbable as it may seem, some species of octopus and squid do exhibit complex behaviours and if the evolutionary dice had come up a bit differently, they might have evolved towards intelligence and sentience. The fact they have complex manipulators will also help them develop intelligence should conditions change dramatically in the future. The lack of love would mean that the formation of large or complex groups would have to be determined on other principles. As well, the means of binding groups together would also be changed. Complex group dynamics could evolve in a sort of hive construct, where one individual is "queen" and the remainder of the flock/herd/school are subordinated and generally tasked to further the survival and reproduction of the group. Flocking and schooling behaviours are generally emergent properties of simple group behaviour (for example get no closer than "x" to any other individual in the flock, but do not let any individual in the flock get any further away from you than "y"). How this might evolve into intelligent or sentient behaviour is not clear to me, but since it statistically increases the chances of any individual remaining alive to breed and also allows for large group behaviour, a flocking or schooling creature might be isolated by climactic or geological changes into a more complex environment which fosters more complex survival behaviours. This would mean that perhaps each individual member of the flock or school isn't particularly "smart", but the collective intelligence and collective behaviours of the group makes these creatures sentient and the dominant species on the planet. [Answer] Love is a label we place on a feeling. This feeling is grounded in our biology. Ants do not love, yet they cooperate and find very novel solutions. Even more so, say an alien organism has evolved to be cooperative with altruistic tendencies, is this sufficient grounds to call it love or do we need to know what the alien thinks about it? I suspect in the very least, cooperative behaviour is favoured. This is because technology is the cumulative effort of many thousands of man-hours. It is more likely that a group of less sophisticated organisms, by cooperation, make technological advancements than it is for a single organism to achieve such a feat of intelligence on its own. [Answer] I cannot trully define love, because the ideal of love manifested itself in various forms across our history. You have the romantic ideal of love, that appears after industrialization. Before this man/woman kind of love appeared and became the norm, another form of love was more emphasized. Love of god, love towards your brother. etc. So i will treat love in a general way, a bond between many people were each other care about their outcomes. To talk about love, and emotions in general, we need to talk about why those things developed in the first place. Emotions are a powerfull way to set the general tone of the brain towards an objective. Our first emotion is fear. Reason alone cannot guarantee our survival, because reason works in a certain cadence that might be too slow to react to a danger. Reason might be impaired by incomplete information or contradictory information. Reason must deal with a limited set of information. Reason, as it starts as a blank sheet on the young, might not know the evolutionary history of our species, all the pressures natural selection exerted in your development. Reason might not be able, for one, to decide if you should walk towards a snake to know what it is, or flee from it. Because gathering information is for reason a good trade off, because information makes reason more and more powerfull. So, emotions arise as a way to tell the person about dangers or things that it should do to guarantee our survival as individuals and as species. If reason alone was to decide if we should mate or not, the survival of our species might very well be endangered. Then emotions such as love or attraction develop to set a general tone in our brain and reasoning to force or incentive us to mate. If you see a snake, and reason does not know what to do because you dont know what a snake is or can do to us, emotions like fear, will raise to tell us to flee. Love is then a way, to tell us that our species evolved as gregarious animals, and that living in society, starting at the nuclear family, is something that made our species able to survive. Reason, at a longer term might change those emotions or dominate then. But, the base emotion is there to help you know what are reasonable ways to deal with certain things. In other words, emotions are a kind of condensed history of humankind, a heritage from our past. So regarding your question, if another intelligent species are not to have a emotion like love, this would mean that this species will need to learn and relearn as individuals everything that in our species is inherited as emotion. Effectively turning societal life much harder and, hindering its cultural development. So, i dont believe this is possible at all. [Answer] Yes. There's nothing uniquely viable about the human mind over the rest of mindspace. There's no real reason alien minds would need to have any random property in common with ours. That being said, any sort of alien mind which evolved to live in communities with other alien minds of the same type and/or evolved to spend a significant amount of time caring for its offspring would likely evolve some sort of behavior which fulfills similar purposes to our love/friendship behavior. What you're looking for is any behavior which allows the possessor to buy genetic fitness for another organism at a more efficient rate than they can buy it for themself while limiting the recipients to those who are either genetically related to the possessor, thereby indirectly providing fitness for the possessor, or who share the same behavior, thereby potentially buying more fitness for themself in the long run when the other reciprocates. Love and friendship are good at these goals, but they aren't necessarily the only emotions which could serve. Also, bear in mind that just as we could look at an alien and think that they are missing some grand and beautiful emotion which gives meaning to life, they could look at us and think exactly the same thing. [Answer] First of all 'love' is a linguistic category, signifying, at the root, a complex of neurochemical reactions to the living environment. And, in different usages of the word 'love' the complex of underlying reactions in the brain might be differently oriented. But, of course, you do not mean love in the mundane sense, to mean like very much, but love which includes empathy, altruism, self-sacrifice, etc. Even here, one must differentiate between what is essential and what is contingent. In two different individuals a similar external environment, a complex of stimuli, might produce different manifestations of emotion. But, the essential neurochemical reactions are more or less the same, not wholly, but more or less. If the two individuals come from the same cultural background, they will use similar linguistic categories to express their 'feelings'. An individual from a wholly different cultural world will express himself differently. So, one might express the feeling as love, the other might express it as unease. My point is that the essential reality of the physical world is mediated and framed through the contingent reality of the cultural world. So, love is a culturally and historically constructed linguistic category, and not essentially a 'real' thing. So, I, can't really say that love is a factor at all in any evolutionary trajectory. One has to step down the ladder of abstraction to more fundamental emotions - sadness, joy, fear, sexual desire. Whether any interaction between these is expressed as love is wholly contingent on the cultural trajectory of a civilisation. So, yes, a species could advance, without ever having to construct the idea of 'love'. It could have something we might interpret as 'like love', but love itself is not an essential emotion. It is a cultural construct. ]
[Question] [ In a story I'm just beginning to write, the aliens who have invaded Earth have a ghastly secret that is about to become known: They reproduce exclusively by transforming other sapient beings into more of their own kind... At this point, I know what you're thinking: "Isn't this just classic space zombies? Or maybe Cybermen?" You would be right to think that at first, but there is a crucial difference here: Individuals who are transformed in this way retain their original personalities and memories; They aren't just being used as raw material to create something new, as those converted retain their selves and identities. My question then is "How and why would this happen?" Why would this being the only way a species would maintain and increase its numbers, and by what means would it do so? Here are some criteria answers must meet: * The conversion must involve radical physical bodily changes; A change of identity, possibly involving minor bodily alteration, is not enough * Those converted must retain all their original memories and something that could be recognised as their original personality; Original instincts and bodily drives may be replaced, but every aspect of a person's personality not inherent to their species should remain as close to the same as possible * This species must reproduce in such a fashion exclusively; They cannot simply convert other species into more of their own while also reproducing in the normal way; Conventional reproduction must be impossible for them * This means of reproduction must be inherent to the species; It cannot be that this particular culture just so happens to forbid other methods of reproduction. Note that this does not mean that the reason could not be psychological; For example, artificial beings hardcoded never to create new consciousness would be acceptable [Answer] Growths [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7SaFvl.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7SaFvl.jpg) Drawing by [kakashi on Pinterest](https://www.pinterest.ie/pin/324118504417007404/?mt=login). The species manifests as a collection of growths on the victim. The growths change the victim's appearance. They did not have growths before. Now they do. Appearance change -- check! The growths also modify behaviour by injecting a cocktail of new hormones into the victim's body. The behaviour includes moving to a warm humid place and finding new victims. Since the victim retains their brain, they have the same memories and personality. Only the personality is gradually broken down as the new hormones encourage new behaviours. For an oversimplified real world example if you were to take a shot of testosterone every morning, then you would not change your memories or personality. Nevertheless after several months you would find yourself being more irritable and aggressive. More likely to move things around the house even when told not to. Welcome to the swarm. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XkyeM.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XkyeM.png) [Answer] Upload consciousness to machine bodies. Your aliens are aware of the benefits of genetic diversity as regards the long term fitness of a biological race. The aliens are non biological. Instead of genetic diversity, they seek intellectual diversity. A variety of minds among their kind will maximize the chance that their kind will do well, and adapt to unforeseen future circumstances. They upload the consciousness of sentient creatures into machine bodies that they have prepared. These machine bodies vary greatly and will depend on the ultimate planned habitat for the sentient - and it is very probable one intelligence will switch bodies many times because after upload the consciousness is effectively immortal. One consciousness might actually inhabit a number of brother / sister bodies. The original biological entity harboring this consciousness might or might not be harmed by the procedure, according to the needs of your story. I like the idea that the original is left to go about his or her business, with the duplicate spirited away to join its new synthetic race. Inspiration: [Can a brain in a jar be killed or have a reduced lifespan from psychological trauma alone?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/225831/can-a-brain-in-a-jar-be-killed-or-have-a-reduced-lifespan-from-psychological-tra) And of course: <https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/wid.aspx> --- What a fine quote from Henry Taylor! And perfect for these aliens who value minds. [Why Would Aliens Enslave Humans?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/77895/why-would-aliens-enslave-humans/77900#77900) > > We are not enslaving you. We are helping you and ourselves in the only > economics that matter... the commerce of our minds over the > mindlessness void. > > > [Answer] I'm shocked that the usual suspects haven't already hit this one, but we already have examples of this in human mythology - lycanthropes and vampires being the most obvious. Both of these creatures reproduce exclusively (bizarre science experiments in certain movies notwithstanding) by converting normal humans, but can I justify the rest of it? ### Radical Physical Changes Lycanthropes certainly undergo radical changes, albeit conditionally, but we can't really tell them apart from humans when they're not transformed. Vampires though? Well, that depends on the specific mythos we're looking at. I present to you The Red Court from The Dresden Files: ![Red Court Vampires](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/red_court.jpg "Red Court Vampires") They look pretty normal, right? Well that black monster on the floor is their true form. They produce a natural skin suit to pass as human. (Well, 'natural' in as much as their body does it, but it's magic of course.) ### Retaining Memory This ones simple. While their new form comes with certain appetites and psychological effects, all the stories tell us that the newly minted vampires and werewolves retain all of their memories and at least most of their personalities. The person is converted, not replaced. ### Reproduction There are some tales of vampire families that reproduce the same way humans do, and a few I can think of where lycanthropy is a heritable trait, but the vast majority of the stories tell us that you get bitten or drink the blood and you change, otherwise no new vamps or weres. It's not a choice, it's a biological necessity. --- But how does this relate to your aliens? Well, clearly the stories are only ignorant superstition. Like most mythology they take a little bit of truth and wrap it in layer after layer of nonsense. The core truth in vampire stories is that your aliens exist, they don't look human unless they really work at it, and they can only reproduce by converting other entities. Any compatible animal will do, but only intelligent entities can be taught to control and conceal themselves after the change. Also, only intelligent entities can consent to the change. Humans are ideal for this: they can be convinced to willingly become something more than human. [Answer] # Symbiosis: How: The logical way to do this is to have a symbiotic organism that is relatively simple (no intelligence on its own) that both conveys some significant advantage to its host and that itself reproduces by a primitive means like binary fission. The infected individual is compelled to infest others, and I would have them induce belief in the superiority of those infested over those not. * The hosts themselves may still be capable of reproducing their *own* species separately, ensuring a steady supply of hosts going into the future. So your symbiote won't burn themselves out when they are stuck in a limited environment. Why: The symbiote is primitive in its reproduction, and reproduction is highly conserved. As long as the organism is successful in reproducing, there isn't an absolute requirement to reproduce any other way. * The host provides the adaptability to deal with new environments, so as long as the symbiote can infect a host, the host can do the adaptation for the benefit of the symbiote. Thus the need for sexual reproduction is significantly reduced. * If desired, a type of sexual reproduction can occur in people double-infested incidentally, but that's just if you want to maintain the diversity advantage of sexual reproduction. It isn't required. The advantage can be anything, like telepathy with anyone else with the symbiote, or great physical endurance, regeneration, etc. but it must give an infested species an advantage. The advantage could be as simple as every host considering every other host as "one of us," taking advantage of one of the simplest tribal impulses of life to include and exclude. Combined with the impulse to spread the symbiote, it could become a near-religious obsession - raise up all sentient life in the universe to a higher, better state. Selfish and noble drives alike push the hosts to spread the symbiotes. SO: I envision an organism that leaves the hosts as themselves, but somehow 'better'. Your "invaders" believe they are doing a great favor to your humans, and perhaps they really *are. As long as you can keep making new humans, and the symbiote gives an advantage that promotes the continued success of the hosts, where is the downside? BUT DWK, how is this converting others into their own kind?* Well, from the perspective of a symbiote, every host represents one of their own kind. All hosts are seen by all other hosts as "one of us." You could even see humans embracing this as a way of becoming one with all other intelligent life, ending conflict and war, and uniting humanity. After all, you want the people to still be themselves, yet somehow now *not. [Answer] In the Startrek Enterprise episode "Extinction" the crew encounters a species that was pushed to extinction by an unknown catastrophe. The species laces the planet's biosphere with a mutagenic virus that rewrote the DNA of the crew members to convert them into a member of that species, and embedded memories into their that emerged in the form of dreams and a homing instinct. Presumably the aim was to rebuild the race using other species as genestock. Few details were given in the episode. [Answer] Medical advances and longevity.* In a theoretical future society, perhaps the original alien species improves medical sciences and techniques focusing on longevity. Longevity, comfort and abscence of physical pain is the focus. As this happens, the population of the planet seeks equilibrium by limiting the number of newborn. Over the decades, fewer are born, the average population remains the same. The instinct of having children is slowly but surely repressed.At the same time, the medical advances have not focused on maintaining reproductivity, since: a) over-population was considered a major threat to society for a long time b) popular goals was longevity, comfort and pain-free existence too late to revert, the extremely aged but healthy population has come to the point loosing the ability to reproduce naturally. While still being able to reproduce by cloning, the instinctive surge to have new and more unique individuals to be introduced into their society becomes stronger, as the individuals in the society becomes older... now essentially immune to the effect of aging. They reach out to the stars, where they find new friends to interact with. Naturally, as a giving and open society, they share in their medical science that is focused on longevity, comfort and pain-free existence... to other civilizations. They also bring a solution to over-population, but they do not push any solution on anyone. A consequence of the medical science they bring, is that over the years, any sapient creature subject to it, converges to the same physical characteristics... but this happens very slowly and gradually. Modify as you please to add various degree of malignant intent, if your story so requires... [Answer] Heavy genetic engineering left the species sterile Your scenario sounds a lot like the [Kett](https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Kett). Perhaps you should look at the lore for inspiration. One of the reasons provided there is that 'their genetics reached a point of stagnation, leaving the species unable to breed through natural means'. Sounds plausible enough. Couple this with Kett's genetic engineering technology being advanced beyond any other technology they might have, and... when you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. One problem you might have with this explanation is that the level of sophistication of genetic engineering needed for the exaltation suggests the Kett should be able to reverse the infertility issue, should they wanted to. However, it is apparent that: * Their method of reproduction gives them an advantage on the battlefield, in that their opponent might be reluctant to fight what can well turn out to be their exalted brethren * The exaltation process has become deeply ingrained in their culture, and seems to be regarded as part of a messianic mission to shape the life in the Universe into their own image, a form of 'lifting' other species, so to speak. I'd wager to say any attempts to reverse it would be seen as a transgression against the very nature of the species ...and so, there are both practical and cultural reasons to maintain the status quo. [Answer] A particular species knows much about space travel, but only some about genetics, about the same as we do, or even less. The species becomes mostly extinct after encountering some illness on one of their voyages, spreading across their entire network before they realize it exists. This illness increases the pace of aging, even of maturity, and the oldest of their society are already dead. The rest are left infertile, and age at a rate unheard of for their species. Although they have had the technology for cloning for a long time, it still requires a host, and none of them are in a shape fit for doing so. However, they're ships are fast enough to make it to a nearby system before they die. Existential fear and a realization of the little time they have left make them reckless, with a seemingly newfound creativity and intellect, and they do many things to the resident population to try and make them capable of giving birth to their young. However, this isn't possible, and, while they manage to completely alter the genome of the native's children, while accidentally killing the rest of the natives they also become infertile. They then take all of the the children, who are now aging quickly as they are, while leaving the rest to die. This process having worked once, they then continue to use it on many other systems. They age to quickly to advance in the sciences, so this is the only way they can survive. They also do not know why they are doing this, having merely been taught to this by their parents. They lack any idea of a better way, or that what they are doing is wrong, and by the time any of them think of such a thing, it is too late because that individual will already be dead. [Answer] ‚ÄúWhy‚Äù should be because evolution turned out that way‚Ä¶ which might be hard to justify. How would you explain it? ‚ÄúHow‚Äù would prolly be harder, whether or not the why was explained, because there are so many loopholes in the exposition. In evolutionary terms of ‚Äúwhy‚Äù, isn‚Äôt whether the chicken or the egg came first easy, compared to how a cuckoo might snatch its victims bodies, rather than usurp their nest? Sticking with the plan, how does converting other beings into ‚Äúmore of their own kind‚Äù turn out? How does retaining their original personalities and memories; their selves and identities work? In that vein, how are ‚Äúoriginal instincts and bodily drives‚Äù not inherent to their species? In your vision, what happens when transformed individuals retain their original personalities and memories, and find themselves changed‚Ä¶ or do they notice nothing and so never find themselves changed? Which works for you? Do the converts need to be sapient, or will a chimpanzee or orangutang do as well as you or me? Ignoring sapience, does this apply only to creatures with similar physiology, or is the process purely mental and apes like us are as suitable for conversion as horses or insects, octopuses or spiders? Will birds qualify, or fish? Are you saying that‚Äôs covered by the conversion involving radical physical bodily changes? Are you calling the converted simply converts, or are they subjects or victims or what? ‚ÄúConvert‚Äù suggests apparent willingness, even if that‚Äôs due to deceit. ‚ÄúSubject‚Äù might seem neutral, except it applies less to people than to scientific specimens. ‚ÄúVictim‚Äù seems to me more suitable, and who am I? Is one of those what you want, or something else? How do you reconcile ‚ÄúA change of identity‚Ä¶ is not enough‚Äù with retaining their original personalities and memories; their selves and identities? Which takes trumps: changing the identity, or retaining it? How did ‚Äútheir personalities‚Äù change into ‚Äúsomething that could be recognised as their original personality‚Äù? Either way, how might a change of identity involve bodily alteration, and why might that be needed? Since you seem to be hinting at a physical process, how might the reason being psychological come into this? Whatever ‚Äúartificial beings hardcoded never to create new consciousness‚Äù might mean, how could that matter here? [Answer] Ummm, don't we do this? We eat pigs, they are sapient beings, with emotions, thinking, they love each other and even humans. And we eat them (yes including me), to fuel our bodies and reproduce, effectively converting pigs into human beings. Other than the autotrophs; plants that convert sunlight, water and inert chemicals into more of themselves, every animal on the planet is busy converting other living things into more of themselves. That is the endless purpose of life! Bees exist to turn pollen into more bees, birds exist to turn insects into birds, sharks exist to turn other sea life into sharks. People exist to turn all sorts of other life into more people. Which is certainly fun and rewarding. It is entirely understandable why aliens would want to convert people into more of their own kind. Perhaps we just have the right combination of raw materials in the right proportions to feed their children. Or, if they are just modifying us, perhaps we are the easiest to modify: Our brains are clearly the most advanced of any other animal; if that is what you think "sapience" means. As far as I am concerned, it just means "self-aware", and there are dozens of species that are clearly self-aware. ]
[Question] [ [Wax cylinders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder) were used at the dawn of the phonograph to store audio recordings. This was long before the codec or compression, and they only had space for approximately two minutes of sound. I'm working on a game at the moment in which they're going to be particularly common, along with the vinyl record, and are kind of plot central. I'm led to wonder what other data could have been stored on them. A central question to this is: Given an agreed on encoding, how much binary data could reliably be stored on such a cylinder? I know that wax is generally a smooth and malleable medium, and needle sizes could also vary along with amplification techniques, so there's likely going to be some margin for error here. Using analog media for digital storage isn't unheard of; we used tape drives all the time in the 1990s. They were incredibly slow, but you could fit a few gigabytes on them. On top of this, the peak use of the wax cylinder was well after the creation of the Jacquard loom and the beginning of mechanical computing around 1850, wasn't it? Unfortunately they're about as common as 8-tracks these days, or I'd just experiment and find out. [Answer] In order to encode data onto an analog recording device, you'd need something like early telephone modem encoding... without the handshaking, of course. You'd probably get something equivalent to 300 baud, i.e. 300 bits per second. You'd also be advised to have a couple of extra bits per byte for error correction, so assuming 8 bits per byte, you'd get 30 bytes per second, for about 3600 bytes total. Since wax cylinders are are a recording medium which has an innately high level of background noise, it is unlikely that any higher data rate would be sufficiently reliable. Wax is also not particularly strong. Recording at too high a frequency may lead to reduced playback lifespan, and attempting to record quarter-wave data may well lead to the wax breaking where there are big jumps between the wave phases. Additionally, the frequency response of the wax cylinder phonograph is unlikely to allow a much higher bit rate. [Answer] Modern dial-up modems typically have a maximum theoretical transfer speed of 56 kbit/s (using the V.90 or V.92 protocol), although in most cases, 40–50 kbit/s is the norm. Recording time of a wax cylinder is 2 minutes (120 s). 40 kbit/s x 120 s = 4800 kbits = 600 kbytes ]
[Question] [ What are the practical limitations of a glider made of bronze age materials and pulled by well trained birds? Due to psychics able to control animals, and a cultural fixation with domestication, nearly every animal of any potential use (even just as a status symbol for psychics) was domesticated hundreds of millennia ago in this timeline. You can draw from any animals living in the past ~400k years in your answer, notably including: Haast's eagle and various massive Teratornithidae birds (but excluding the heaviest ever flying bird Argentavis because it lived millions of years ago). Given both the limited fossil record for the largest birds and selective breeding you have some flexibility in terms of exact wingspan and wing shape. The aircraft can be directed by ~3ft, ~40lb hominids and/or extremely well trained crows bred for incredible endurance, memory and diligence (with the latter being much cheaper). Given only natural materials (which includes cheap spider silk) seem viable here, how much could such an aircraft possibly carry? Will air travel be limited to the tiny halflings for a very long time, or is carrying a human totally feasible? Remember the birds can hold on to the aircraft with their wings extended even when not flapping so one must factor this into surface area. If your answer is contingent on the use of long lines/tethers connected to or held by birds: Please consider how tangles are avoided when dealing with turbulence, as whether the aircraft crashes whenever it encounters a strong wind is an important consideration. Part of series with: Just How Omnipresent Would Cheap Cross Laminated Spider Silk Be? How much would this alien parasite increase crop yields? What Bronze Age Jobs Couldn't be Replaced by Extremely Well Trained Animals? [Answer] If we consider the extant birds known to carry large weights, it would appear that the bird species known to carry the largest weight is the [bald eagle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald_eagle), which has been confirmed to be able to carry 15lb. It has a wingspan of up to 2.3m, and a beak to tail length of up to 1m. For purposes of this answer, let us suppose that the birds we will use can carry up to 10lb, or 4.5kg. This lighter load will give the birds a considerably greater endurance than if they were required to carry up to their full capacity. Now, if we consider the lightest wing structure, this would be a [parafoil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parafoil), a structure made from cloth which uses airflow to inflate it and make it behave as if it is effectively rigid. Having done some research on paragliders, gliders capable of carrying a human being that employ parafoils as lifting surfaces, a [modern paraglider](https://www.flyozone.com/paragliders/products/gliders/rush-6) that is able to lift a recommended weight of 112-128kg weighs a mere 5.65kg, though that is using modern fabrics. We could double that for old-fashioned fabrics, to 11kg. Such a paraglider has an effective span (width) of about 10m, a chord (maximum length) of 2.83m, and a lifting area of 24.31m^2. We could harness trained bald eagles to this canopy by harnesses (reducing the strain on their talons) on lines a few metres long, so we'd get about five eagles across the canopy along the forward/aft centreline, and another four on the forward and aft edges, for 13 eagles total. 13 eagles could dead-lift about 59kg at 2/3 loading, or 88kg at full loading. That's not enough to lift a human (and all the gear) outright, but they would very easily lift the canopy, and with a decent run-up from a human passenger, could likely produce enough pulling power to allow the assembly to stay aloft indefinitely... certainly for as long as the eagles could fly. That's also not counting the ability of a parafoil to catch thermals. Given the lift to weigh ratio of a parafoil, it would be reasonable to say that as large a load as could be lifted by an appropriately sized paraglider could be hauled by a sufficiently large crew of eagles for most of a day, provided that it was equipped with legs or wheels, and perhaps a ground crew to push it. With a really huge canopy, a horde of trained eagles, and a load on greased wheels with some people to push-start the thing... you might be able to lift up to a metric ton. The limit is really going to be how big a canopy you can make, and whether you can get the payload moving on the ground in order for the canopy to start generating lift. A modern recreational glider has a glide ratio of over 9:1, meaning that it falls 1m for every 9m it flies. An ancient glider should be able to achieve 8:1. This also means that the eagles powering this assembly need only be able to lift 1/8th or more of the total assembly's weight in order to achieve level flight. As 13 eagles can reasonably lift 59kg, and the ideal load of the parafoil is up to 128kg, about 2.2 times that of the eagles lifting capacity, this means that these eagles should be able to achieve a decent climb rate in the absence of thermals. [Answer] The key is mind-controlling spiders. You can carry whatever you like if you distribute the weight among enough birds, and how far you can fly depends on how well you swap them out for birds who aren't tired. The limiting factor is the weight of the lines attaching birds to your glider. Once the line weighs more than the bird can carry, it's useless. So, spider-silk. 0.06g/m for a line [capable](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%280.5%20kg%20%20gravity%20%2F%201.3%20GPa%29%20%20%28density%20of%20steel%20%200.2%29) of holding 500g, so a 1km rope will require 60g out of the 500. If each bird needs one square metre to fly in, you can have up to three million birds lifting over a tonne ... which is overkill for anyone but imperial rulers. Typical weight for a fully-grown adult modern human varies regionally, but you're looking at 100 birds or more. This is one area where far-travelling teenaged characters might actually have a use, merely for being lighter - if they can wield the required psychic might to give directions to bred-and-trained birds. Beyond that, your limiting factor is more in your aviaries and ability to feed the birds than in the glider, which will be as spindly as possible. In an area with strong thermals, some parachute-sails might be helpful for a more rigid aircraft. I've rounded pessimistically for that upper-limit, but the drag on that many silk-lines will be substantial - it might be worth trading some weight for speed. (Why don't we do this in our own world? Training spiders is incredibly fiddly.) [Answer] Q: nearly every animal of any potential use (even just as a status symbol for psychics) was domesticated hundreds of millennia ago in this timeline.* That's a lot of time to develop an interrelation.. suppose Animals are prepared to cooperate for you Consider the potential of using a flock of geese for your aircraft. Men and geese have always been [friends](https://www.google.com/search?q=nils%20holgersson&tbm=isch).. with below glider, give me 3 rows (27 geese), and the glider wouldn't need an engine. It could be carried by geese, from [Norway to France](https://www.geese.org/Ganzen/index.jsp).. and back [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uVwsW.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uVwsW.png) .. how many people would the glider carry, if it had 80 geese ? or 120 ? What chords to use.. or would the goose have special hooks for that purpose, sometimes they connect and drag the wing for a while, most times they don't need to ? how many people would fit.. I'm not an avionics expert, there may be certain limits to wingspan, but you could make this delta with sail cloth and wooden seats. [Answer] This can't be done with Bronze Age resources *Bridgekeeper: What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?* *King Arthur: What do you mean? An African or a European swallow?* It doesn't matter how many trained birds you have. The material weight available during the bronze age combined with its low tensile strength will always prohibit flight. Even using silk (which was available in the bronze age), the weight of the glider will be too heavy for any combination of birds to drag. Worse, the more birds you have, the longer the ropes must be to attach the birds, adding weight and increasing the likelihood of breaking. So, when you ask question #1 (how big...) the answer is zero. When you ask question #2 (what limitations) the answer is the materials won't sustain flight. This is a good example of a question that isn't valuable to ask. Who cares if this can be done or not? Who cares what the limitations might be? Write the glider and those wonderful birds into your story and move on — the idea is cool! It has this fabulous Icarus feel to it that I like. Asking how to make it realistic actually ruins the mood. ]
[Question] [ The king of the gnomes is facing unprecedented levels of unrest across his lands! It is clear that it will take a grand gesture to regain the support of his people; so, he decides the best way to do this is to declare that their sad old shanty town about must be abandoned. Instead they will build a new happier village entirely of candy. He feels absolutely certain that his people will love this idea, but when he proposes the idea to the builders guild, they tell him it can't be done. "The rain would destroy their buildings", "The fireplaces would melt", "The city would attract pests wanting to eat the houses", etc. The builders guild suggests he simply have them make the houses to LOOK like candy, but that is not good enough for the king. He demands "No excuses, only solutions!" How can the new gnomish village be made out of candy and still be a more-or-less permanent settlement? In case it is relevant, the population of the town is about 1000 gnomes. The average gnome is about 20-30cm (8-12in) tall with a rotund build. Think more garden gnome, less fantasy adventure variety. Their overall level of technology is around 12th century Europe; however, their culinary science is on par with the modern day; so, they have no problem making any sort of food products that exist today (sans the modern packaging). There are humans nearby with 16th century technology who are a bit more advanced than the Gnomes in most ways, but much less so in culinary sciences. Magic exists in the setting, but the Gnomes have no access to it. I am open to a wide range of geographic/climate/environment suggestions; however, the plot requires that the gnomish town be within a relatively short distance to the following: farmlands, a forest, a lake, and a mountain So... no Antarctica. The best answer will be one that is easy to understand for a younger reader. Secondary to that, a good answer will allow for a wide range of candies to be used. [Answer] Let's take just one house I think solving the problems of a candy city is a bit too much. First we need to solve a single house. Water There exists water resistant sugar. Thanks to fat proteins encapsulating the sugar you get hydrofobic properies. This can be used on any outer layer that needs water protection in a frosting form. Roofs, exterior walls and patios will be regularly coated (every month? Really depends on the coating, it's thickness and the erosion from weather and living). This will reduce some of the greatest dangers of your mostly sugar houses. If you're thinking "what about sinks, pipes and sewers?", you'll be glad to know those commodities were either a hole in the ground with possibly a shed on top, or non-existent/incredibly rare. Water from wells will do, though not wells from sugar I wager. As an alternative you can use gum. Looking at how dehydrated gum on pavement can last for years, even with people walking over them (which seems essential for it to bond with pavement at the start) and being in all weather, it is a long lasting solution. Seeing how it isn't affected by water at removal, it seems watertight. Just compress it tightly on the surface and let it dry. Possibly compress it several times during the drying process. Structural strength To build you need strength in the build materials. You can't just grab some random hard candy (M&M?), slap some gum in between as mortar and call it a day. It should last. It lead me to an article that wanted to answer: Objective measurement of physical properties of a hard candy confectionery tablet under crushing local compression force After some conversion I saw that the hardest tablets had a compressive strength akin to standard concrete. 3626 psi against the standard 3500 to 4000 psi. A side note here is that the test might be in favour of the candy, as well as the small shape influence the test... Even if it's only three quarters as strong it's suitable to build with individual hard tablets, graciously giving them the benefit if a doubt that they're not actually worthless as building material. There might be some others, like those incredibly hard round candies, but I suspect that they actually cannot withstand as much force as you might think. For mortar I would use gum. It is shown that gum can be terribly difficult to remove after dehydration on the street, so it can be used to stick all the little tablets together. You can decorate the inside and outside walls with whatever you like. Just add the (clear?) Frosting on the parts that can get wet. For windows you can use the hydrofobic sugar for candy glass, or use normal candy glass and use a clear coating over it. I'm giving the tablet gum combination the benefit of a doubt they have the structural strength that they can have windows. Just to be sure, make them small and round. Separate floors Separate floors I wouldn't attempt. Even though the walls might be created, I cannot think of a candy with the structural strength to hold up a floor. You could look into having several layers of candy cane, but be mindful it likely flexes too easily, leading to breakage of it's internal structure. On the ground floor you can cover it with any candy you like, as long as it doesn't make walking impossible. Roofs This also poses a difficulty for the roofs. Even if people aren't walking on it or placing furniture, it should hold the weight of rain and, more importantly, snow. To solve this, we might be able to use slanted walls as roof. Although we can start the roof after the straight walls, I would suggest slanting the walls slightly from the ground up, giving the whole thing a sort of high hut feel. The slant should be slight to make as much use of the compressive strength of the tablets. Fireplace Right now I would go for an empty, not candy covered bit of ground on the floor with just a chimney high above it. That way the heat wouldn't be directly damaging the candy. It would make it bad over time, but at least you have a working house with fireplace for a time before maintaining is required. If you really want a fireplace you can try the following, but do take it with a grain of salt. The heat resistance is mostly meant for melting and has not been tested for open fire: Granola bars, peppermints, fruit drops, sour balls and jawbreakers seem to have a good resistance to heat in extreme climates like Afghanistan inside cars or the direct sun without being refrigerated. Roads and walkways The roads and walkways will again be made of gum. It's reluctance to go away is highly prized in roads. The problem is that it'll likely get slippery after some erosion. You might want to renew the layer every so often, or have a team of road gnomes rough it up every so often. It'll help if it isn't like one enormous gum, but many individual ones so you can get some more surface area. Conclusion I skipped furniture, but I'm sure some creative solutions for these less demanding items can be found. You can have rudimentary homes to create a whole village. Despite heavy reliance on just a few building materials, you can decorate the outside and inside with many different candies to hide this fact. This makes it a colourful candy village you might hope to achieve. As long as each non-waterproof candy in harms way is protected, you can place it anywhere. [Answer] Tough one... From the point of view of termites, a wooden house is made of candy. Even from the point of view of humans, liquorice root is pretty close to candy. It tastes quite good btw, but it's quite fibrous, being a root. So, what do gnomes consider to be candy? Do they agree with the humans? Or do they have peculiar tastes, which will surprise the human tourists visiting the town? -- "What? But that's old tyres!" -- "Yes! Delicious!" Another hurdle is that in 12th century Europe, [there was no sugar](https://theconversation.com/a-history-of-sugar-the-food-nobody-needs-but-everyone-craves-49823#:%7E:text=The%20first%20chemically%20refined%20sugar,important%20centres%20for%20sugar%20production.). Later it was imported by boat from countries that grew sugarcane. Sugar beet came much later. The main source of sugar was honey, which is not a mass produced commodity. So unless you have a large scale source of sugar... no candy. I suggest going true to the metaphor: wooden houses, made of living plant, that produces large quantities of fruit. [Answer] ## Easily, if your Gnome Village has a good reason to exist. The same way that some of our cities are permanent, without requiring invincible structures, your Gnome City can be 'permanent' too. This is because that *regardless of the longevity of the physical parts of the city, the ongoing viability, economic activity, and constant renewal within a city is the real* measure** that must be used to judge longevity. For instance, structures can be 'temporary' (as in, not even structurally sound) but settlements could be 'permanent' due to the economic pressure to be there. Squatters settlements, park homes, and caravan parks are obvious examples of these alongside many modern mining towns - however not-so-obvious examples are many cities in India, China and Africa where the location is ideal for the city, but due to cultural or economic factors the buildings are not permanent and need constant replacement and replenishment. Keep in mind too that many modern buildings built today are designed for certain lifespans. As an architect, I regularly design 'permanent' buildings but knowing that the building I am designing will likely change shortly or even not exist in 20 years time. This is because economic situations would change, land values increase, needs of residents/patrons change, building regulations change or laws or political views change. All structures are actually 'temporary' and have lifespans. The only difference then to your Gnome Village to a modern city is that individual structures may have a shorter lifespan. This is no problem for your residents, as if your Gnome Village is well situated, is economically prosperous and requires gnomes to live there, then they will replace parts of their homes / structures as needed over time, just as we do with more solid materials. If our own cities were made of candy, and there were no other materials available, it may change the 'form' but not the 'function'. So, in summary for your younger readers: * If a Gnome Family's house roof melts because it is made of candy, then Mummy/Daddy Gnome goes regularly every morning to the local Craft Gnome shop, and puts it on top, as s/he has done every summer day. * Mummy/Daddy Gnome pays for this because s/he has a job at the local Candy Factory located at the intersection of the river and the road * The Candy Factory needs to be on the river because water is the main ingredient for Candy, and it needs to be on the road so that Humans come and buy the Candy easily * Hence, the Gnome Village is permanently there between the road and the river, and villagers use candy to constantly fix and replenish their homes because they want to live there and live happily ever after. * This has worked well for so long, ever for as long as anyone can remember, because we all love candy. ]
[Question] [ In the event of cultural contact between Chinese Explorers and Aztec/other Mesoamerican peoples, would these Mexican societies find the Chinese writing system to be useful for their record keeping? There are three options I am considering: * the adoption of the symbolic script and meaning * using the characters for syllabic writing * a mix of the two much like Japanese. Or would the writing systems just be incompatible? [Answer] the adoption of the symbolic script and meaning No. This would not work, for essentially the same reason that Japanese does not use kanji (borrowed hanzi) exclusively, augmenting it with a syllabary. Chinese is very heavily isolating, so for the most part you can get by with one character = one word (sometimes two characters = one word). Grammatical marking is all done with separate words, and thus separate characters. Japanese does not work like this, and neither does Aztec. Actual historical Aztec writing actually works rather a lot like Japanese--there are native logograms, similar in function to hanzi, augmented by syllabic components. Much like early hieroglyphs, the phonetic component of Aztec writing was still based on the rebus principle, and had not developed into a full-fledged, independent syllabary like hiragana and katakana. using the characters for syllabic writing This is possible, but not particularly likely. The Aztec already used their own logograms for syllabic writing (see above). Adopting the more abstract and simpler Chinese hanzi might seem like a good idea to reduce the effort of writing relatively complex native Aztec symbols, but the phonologies of Aztec and Chinese are sufficiently different that the set of syllables available to write with Chinese characters that Aztecs would actually find useful is not particularly large. a mix of the two much like Japanese That would be the most likely outcome. If the Chinese explorers had sufficient cultural power, such that it is seen as prestigious to copy Chinese things, then hanzi could come to be used for root words, with native symbols being developed into an augmenting syllabary for fully dual semantic-phonetic writing, like heiroglyphics, or for indicating grammatical morphemes and native words for which no Chinese equivalent is available. The greater utility of Chinese hanzi over the complex native glyphs would not, however, be a sufficient force to get the Aztecs to replace their native writing system on their own. The Chinese explorers, however, might very well come up with a mixed logographic / syllabic transcription system for Aztec for their own use based entirely on Chinese characters, regardless of their standing in Aztec society. [Answer] There is no compatibility issue .. they are inherently incompatible. Japanese katakana is an alphabetic script used to write words from foreign languages phonetically. The Japanese do not use it to write about Japanese concepts .. for that they use Kanji .. their adaptation of Chinese characters where each concept has its own symbol. The Japanese have been very clever about firewalling their own culture while still being able to adopt/adapt what they wish to from other cultures. The Phoenicians had their own language that the other Mediterranean cultures had a hard time learning .. so they created a lingua franca to be able to do business, and used a lot of handwaving. There was little if any linguistic transfer .. as we know from the paucity of writings/ inscriptions in the native Phoenician language. The Aztecs were conquerors who beat their enemies into submission and then enslaved the survivors, so there is no linguistic capability for adoption in their culture .. and their language will reflect that. So if the Chinese showed up and if they could find an Aztec willing to spend years memorizing symbols and concepts until he could write in Chinese, he would still not be able to use that language to express Aztec concepts as they would be fundamentally foreign. Note also that the Chinese consider themselves to be the only civilized society so they would consider the Aztec writing system to be so inferior as to not be worth learning .. except perhaps there might be scholars what would study it as an academically interesting part of a primitive culture. [Answer] A writing system can be adopted by a foreign culture if it is used to express concept too advanced for the receiving one. Look at the Japanese culture when it met Chinese influence, or Mediterranean cultures when met Phoenicians. So, my answer to your question is: it depends on the relative levels when the encounter happens, and also on the kind on interactions. Would they just trade goods, or also teach religion, philosophy and other sciences? If the latter happens, it is more likely that there would be influences and therefore the chances that ideogram writing can be adopted. ]
[Question] [ Laugh all you like, you won't be laughing when it sprays you with its jade trunk of death. ## Info I figured out that I wanted an elephant that sprays poison (not acid) out of its trunk a while ago (Thank you, @James for [that idea](https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/45035075#45035075).) Now, the poison is a misted poison sprayed through the trunk of the elephant. The venom glands that produce it are modified parotid glands that bulge like hamster-cheeks (parotid glands are usually venom or saliva glands located from below the ear running down the jaw/cheek). In this scenario, the glands are very swollen from storing plenty of poison, so imagine an elephant with small hamster-cheek protrusions from its jaw. Let's say the elephant can produce 1/2 gallon of poison per gland per week. The poison has to have some way to reach the trunk of the elephant. The elephant is: * immune to this poison * a fully grown adult * and has the diet needed to produce this amount of poison The eyes of the elephant have a second inner eyelid to protect the eye when "misting." ## Question How would the venom run into the trunk, and how could the elephant spray it into a fine mist? I am looking for a structural component. --- Thanks to all in the [Sandbox](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6168/sandbox-for-proposed-questions) for helping me with this question. --- No handwavium answers/comments or unbuilding of the premise, please. [Answer] If I recall correctly my knowledge of anatomy, we humans have some conduct going from the lacrimal glands to the nose. That's why when we cry our nose also runs. We can imagine that a similar conduct is also used, going from the parotid glands to the trunk, or slightly modify your elephant to produce venom from modified lacrimal glands and use the existing conduct (tears already contain something other than water). I think that dripping the venom while energetically blowing out should be enough to disperse the drops into a mist (refer to what happens when you sneeze). If you want to be sure you can insert into the trunk some features to increase the turbulence of the flow. On a side note, an elephant trunk has a capacity of a bit more than 2 gallons. I am afraid 1/2 gallon per week is going to be a short supply. [Answer] Let's see if this one can work: For the fine mist of poison, it would be better not to use the hollow of the trunk as it will result in a splash of poison, instead of a spray/mist. Also, the capacity is only 1 gallon at max, so there is not enough poison for the whole trunk. * Consider using some capillary-like structure within the trunk. * If you pay attention to the trunk tip, there is a pointy end on top and bottom. (I don't know what it's called.) * Consider having a series of capillary ends on top pointy end, these will work as the exit points for poison. * The bottom end will be used to air seal the hollow of the trunk so that it can build up pressure inside of capillaries * Then, use a sneezing like action (the cylindrical part of the trunk suddenly shrinks and sends an air jet into the capillaries ) to pressure spray the poison from the capillaries out of the pointy end. * Here, you will get a nice precise mist. Now, The logistics of how to get the poison from glands into the capillaries: * There could be direct capillary routes from the glands to trunk via nasal cavity (very straightforward). * When the elephant pushes its tongue against its mouth roof, it will pump the poison into the capillaries. ]
[Question] [ If a child grew up since being a toddler (2 to 3 years old) in an environment where the gravity levels fluctuated so they were sometimes stronger than earth gravity and sometimes weaker, how would this affect their physical development, particularly their bones, joints and muscles etc.? For example, if they spent a few months to a year in an environment with moon like gravity (around 3 to 4 m/s²) then spent another few months in around 11-12 m/s². With a maximum force of about 16 m/s² (slightly lower than humans can survive for 24 hours with no ill effects according to NASA) and a minimum of 1-2 m/s², what effect would the constant fluctuation specifically have on a growing and developing child, assuming optimum diet and exercise? [Answer] Experiments on the ISS have shown that objects growing in lower gravitational regions, i.e. the so–called microgravity or freefall during orbit in the ISS, exhibit several major differences from terrestrial life. These differences can be graded on a spectrum from 0 to 1 G. Not all of these differences are the result of weaker gravitational forces felt. * weaker heart muscles This is why you see the astronauts spend so much time maintaining their physique nowadays. Their cardiac system needs to do less work to pump the blood around their body, quite simply, and so the heart and the sympathetic muscles which constrict the blood vessels atrophy. If the astronauts didn't do so, they'd require extensive recuperation periods when they returned to earth. Syncopation and blackouts would be frequent occurances. * lengthened spinal column and weaker muscles of the back (erector spinae) The discs of fluid which cushion and support the vertebrae would never need to accomodate the heavier forces that they experience on earth. Much like how swimming or sleeping extends your own height — except that the spinal column of someone grown on earth are usually stronger from their years of growing with those forces. So expect that your children would grow taller that they'd be able on earth, but would experience back problems and injuries galore. * weaker bones and voluntary skeletal muscles Moving around requires less work when you don't need to overcome a gravitational force. There are other factors that contribute to this comparative weakness, though: Trees which grow in the Biosphere 2 enclosure were noted to have weaker heartwood than trees of same kind outside the Biosphere; those trees never experienced any of the stresses due to wind and weathering, and so never needed to grow stronger for accomodatation. In conclusion, your people would either need rigorous acclimation periods that would help transition them to the strength necessary for travel and tourism on earth, or they'd need to maintain such a regimen of strength–building activities during their entire lives. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_research_on_the_International_Space_Station#NASA.27s_ISS_research_and_science_activity> ]
[Question] [ Enter the [Argonian](http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Argonian): a (really) ugly sentient human-like lizard. Although almost no one plays as this race on their Skyrim playthroughs, they have some pretty astounding capabilities; they are masters of guerilla warfare, can breathe underwater, can communicate in a spoken language, and have lifespans similar to those of humans. What evolution could support the existence of such creatures? Could the Argonians even exist, biologically speaking? [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aN4qg.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aN4qg.png) This question is part of the [Anatomically Correct Series](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2797/anatomically-correct-series/2798#2798). [Answer] Please, for the love of all that is reality-based, do not give your Argonian maids boobs. If they are reptilian at all there is no plausible reason for this. It's [a mammalian characteristic](https://www.quora.com/Do-any-snakes-nurse-their-young). Ladies should have different markings, a lack of frills or something else if you crave differentiation. There should be no nipples on either gender. As for plausibility, they just need to evolve hands with an opposable thumb and there are a lot of reptiles that have hands close to this. And they would need to stand upright. There were dinosaurs that did stand on their hind legs, so I would opt for branching out from that. They would also need a stable environment as far as temperature is concerned, as they can't regulate their body temperature as well as mammals can. Dressing for warmth just won't cut it. [Answer] I think dinosaurs could have evolved to human intelligence if they had survived extinction events. I think evolution thrives on hardship. The smaller dinosaurs would have had to evolve intelligence in order to survive the big boys. It's what explains the extremely nasty dispositions of Hippos. Their attitudes evolved as such to help them survive certain predators. Nature is so dynamic, I'm certain it's at least possible dinosaurs could have evolved to human intelligence. [Answer] Argonians could have evolved from aquatic reptiliomorphs that became hematophagous. To protect their gills, they would evolve a velum like a lamprey. With this, they could seal their gills and leave the water. They may evolve to become tree-dwellers, and evolve convergently with humans until they become the Argonians. ]
[Question] [ Another question (and others in this line) got me thinking. In a magical universe we often try to make sense of it with similar physical laws but extended into another realm: nuclear power is "magic" chemistry, as it provides another place energy can be stored so conservation laws and thermodynamics still work. Magic might cause things to happen essentially by providing a place/state where additional energy can come from and enter our normal world. But here's a twist on that idea. What if it's not a source but a sink. There is power in normal room air if there is an absolute-zero sink to drive a potential difference. Calm level water can drive a mighty water wheel if it suddenly drained into a black hole. But the real twist isn't to have a sink of energy directly; rather, have a sink where [entropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy) may be dumped. In chemical reactions like exothermic reactions we know that entropy trumps energy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics is really just entropy applied in the simplest way to heat. Now look at other things we expect of magic besides raw power: intelligence. Organization of matter comes from nowhere, and high-level understanding needs to guide the various effects. Now we know that [information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)) is intimately related to thermodynamic entropy, as revealed by the final solution to the puzzle of [Maxwell's demon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon#Criticism_and_development) and Hawking's black hole temperature. So, how can we formulate a magical universe based on communicating with a place which has the effect of changing the information content of the system? [Answer] The best entropy-sink based magical device I've ever seen is [Galaxy Quest](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMho5_Fl_rs) and the Omega-13 device. Per the Second Law, Entropy must increase. The device will remove the last 13 seconds of entropy. It requires enormous power to operate - enough that it will (out of necessity) destroy the universe. It just leaves a 13 second younger one in its place. Similar thoughts can go for smaller things. Let's try a fireball: 1. Swap out inert gas in the local area for flammable materials. [Pollen](https://what-if.xkcd.com/97/) works really well. It's just Maxwell's Demon. With a long enough casting time to allow the pollen to drift into the immediate area and not allowing it to leave. 2. Light up a spell component (say a match, or the traditional sulfur). Using rearrangement, get enough of the oxygen radicals in the air. 3. Using the Demon again, bombard several of those pollen grains with the oxygen radicals. Order and arrange them to go towards other grains until the reaction is self sustaining. Other thoughts can go further. Cone of cold is simpler - only allow the really slow molecules in the imminent area of the cold. Edit: Regarding intelligence as a powering device for the entropy, this is seen with the Demon analogy as well. While information will have to be erased per the physics involved, the more intelligent, the less erasing, and the more efficient and less energy draining the magic is. Hence, why you "get more" out of it - you use the same entropy draining mechanism, but you get more damage / more power / more skill out of it with a higher intellect. [Answer] So, powering magic by taking energy from our reality through entropy is cool and makes a kind of sense. Even if it was just moving energy around instead of losing it forever (Take heat energy from a rock to boil water. The rock gets ice cold and cracks from the thermal contraction, and the water gets really hot). The intelligence is kind of the easy part, as that's where the caster comes in. Say you want to create something. You cause entropy in your power source, take the raw magic energy and push it through your spell which gives it direction and substance. It would be like hooking the output from a water tower into a cities water grid. The pipes tell the water where to go and what to do. In the same way, the rules and structure of the spell tell the magic where to go, what to create, what to destroy. The only other source of intelligence would be something outside our universe. The eaters in the dark, gods, demons, or other extra dimensional entities drawn out by the magic and put into service. This has the potential of going pear shaped really really fast though. It would be a way to create a kind of AI, as beings are drawn forth, bound and harnessed into service, forced to serve by the bindings and wards that hold it. Just don't make a mistake when drawing them... [Answer] Dumping entropy somewhere that will have no effect on the rest of reality, is like extracting potential order from somewhere else. That would be magic, if not magical. Fully realized magic of course involves more than just the disappearance of entropy, but includes the creation of anti-entropy and the application of it to macroscopic phenomena at will. [Answer] To make entropy control into magic... What about a universe made of ternary pieces of information? 1, 0, and 0.5 with the middle being entropy and the extremes being inverse information. If you manipulate entropy then you're subtracting or adding 0.5 to your piece of information (but only as long as it stays on the 0 side). To us "1-siders" a 0.5 is representationally a zero since it's the entropy point on our axis. If we assume that 0.5 and 0 appear equal (0 is information that doesn't apply to our "1-sider axis"). Then you can hide magic in the 0 side. If you construct an information blob in 0's and entropy (0.5's) then when you add information evenly to the blob it flips to 1's and entropy (0.5's). Scientific laws stay the same because to the 1's side entropy and "0 information" are identical. You can't read 0 information unless your performing magic. It's always "lost". So now you have the choice of whether you want (real life) entropy to be destroyed information or just shifted to the 0 & 0.5 encoding. If it's lost then you can't push 0.5 to 0 unless you're performing magic. Regardless, you can have another world hiding in the 0-side and you can even constrain yourself to just "producing entropy" and still perform magic: If you only subtract 0.5 from pieces of 1-information/entropy and construct a gradient in potential then when the potential flows it creates energy. Usable energy is information. Anything with structure and direction is information and usable energy definitely has direction. If your 1-side works on 1 and 0.5 values then energy flow is a flow of information that adds 0.5 to whatever it crosses (subtracting 0.5 from 1 wherever the energy was generated (this is your heat production, etc.)). As the energy flows over your special configuration it activates it and makes it real information. You could also have the 0-side act like 1-side information but be indistinguishable and get up to shenanigans that way. Semi-Clarification (It's still a fuzzy idea): When we're working with binary states entropy isn't a 1 or a 0. Its definition is instead related to the amount of information we can hold versus how much we're actually holding. Same is true for a ternary state. The catch here is that we only have access and effects from two states. We basically have 1 and +0 and -0. With no way to tell if a zero is negative or not. We've altered entropy's definition here. Since no information actually ever becomes entropy in actuality. It appears as if its entropy whenever there's a 0. That's because each "bit" doesn't store 2 pieces of information, it stores 3. But we can only access the 1 and 0 difference so we can only read 2 pieces of information. We "lose" 1 piece whenever it goes to 0. The definition of entropy here has shifted towards defining any 0 as a piece of entropy. This model assumes information is never created or destroyed. Just rearranged, hidden, and unhidden. How about the standard illustration about 2 gasses in a container that mix after a partition is removed? How is it made of 0,.5,1 values, and how does adding 0.5 make the gas mix or unmix? I'm going to move to a lattice model of the universe with information describing the system. Let's assume momentum as a primary quantity. Vector is in a 1, +0 representation. Move it into a +0,-0 representation (add entropy). You've killed momentum but saved state. Manipulate as needed. In the example we need an incoming momentum of (0.5,0.5,0.5) (which is physically none) to reverse our process. That momentum is the same physically as (0,0,0) but informationally is different. Can we add that from nowhere? Physically that's creating energy and reducing entropy from adding two pieces of entropy. If that's not acceptable you'd need to set it up so that when the area outside of our manipulation adds in its quantities we have a vector set up so that the result is our inverted vector which also adds in the possibility of nearby magic messing with us. Example: (1,0.5,1) -> (0.5,0,0.5) -> (0,0.5,0) + (0.5,0.5,0.5) = (0.5,1,0.5) The example "inverts" the vector after moving it into "entropy land". You could also just subtract (0.5,0,0.5) twice. When added momentum influences that region it will be in the form of 1 and +0 (remember +0 is code for 0.5). Note that our "vector" isn't truly "inverted" momentum-wise, we have no negative quantities as described. The above is also a toy thought experiment because I'm not sure what happens when a "1.5" would appear (It can't happen because the ternary system doesn't allow it. A 1.5 is really 0 with overflow of 0.5. Does that excess disappear, propagate to the next cell, is it disallowed from happening, or do something else?) That's why this answer was meant to be a comment. The system needs to fleshed out and can be tackled in many different ways, all with unique methods of manipulation to cause certain effects. You also need to state what your primary quanta are and describe them. If its a simulation on a machine that's fairly easy. Just take your bits of RAM and make them tri-state. Your program becomes the description. ]
[Question] [ If a human colony is set up on another planet or moon, or in an orbiting habitat, most of the infectious diseases from Earth would not be present in the small initial population. Careful screening could further reduce the number of infectious diseases introduced. Would the human immune system suffer problems if infection is reduced too much? Would we need to take some token infections (such as the cold) with us? [Answer] This is difficult to answer definitively. Certainly, humans require certain microorganisms in order to be healthy, and the effect of carrying around such microorganisms is that with their shorter generations, the probability of a mutation making the organism pathogenic is small but significant. However, it is difficult to say if a lack of pathogenic organisms is deleterious. As an undergraduate student of human physiology, I have developed the hypothesis - as yet without any proof either supporting or disproving it - that the human/mammalian immune system has evolved to expect a certain level of exposure to pathogens which would require an immune response, and if such a level of exposure is not achieved, the likelihood of autoimmune diseases is elevated. Hence, our habit of sterilizing everything our kids come into contact with could well have the effect of setting them up for an autoimmune disease later in life. To not have any pathogens at all? That could be disastrous, or not. ]
[Question] [ This Query is part of the Worldbuilding [Resources Article](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143606/a-list-of-worldbuilding-resources). --- Following the question [Creating a realistic world map - Mineralogy](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25084/creating-a-realistic-world-map-mineralogy/25263#25263) , I realized that it was a very large topic to cover all the possible resources. Now, I would like to focus on the natural resources that can be used as source of fuel. To be more specific: Coal, natural gas, petroleum, uranium (Or any resources that goes into a long geological process and that can be used to produce energy.) Is there a technique to help me place these resources in my world? Should I expect some of them to be located close to each other? --- Note: > > This is part of a series of questions that tries to break down the process of creating a world from initial creation of the landmass through to erosion, weather patterns, biomes and every other related topics. Please restrict answers to this specific topic rather than branching on into other areas as other subjects will be covered by other questions. > > > These questions all assume an earth-like spherical world in orbit in the habitable band. > > > --- See the other questions in this series here : [Creating a realistic world Series](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2594/creating-a-realistic-world-series) [Answer] On our mother planet, earth, these mineral (and fuel) resources are formed and located as such: 1- Coal And Oil The coal and oil on our planet were formed tens of millions of years ago by the decay of plant or animal matter deep underground where the pressure and temperature were high and oxygen was absent. In your world, too, these resources should be formed likewise. WHERE they are located, is a matter of subjectivity. If you want to get oil reserves on the poles, you will have to allow the now-polar landmasses to once be on the tropical belt (plate tectonics, remember?) with abundant flora. Due to reasons lame and unknown, conditions later changed and the plants were gradually buried under dust storms and vast areas destroyed due to orogenies and fault lines etc. The landmass gradually drifted towards the pole and so in modern times ... 2- Rock Salt, Gypsum And Other Evaporites Evaporites are basically metal salts that are deposited in a region where seawater is trapped in large quantities and then evaporates, leaving big, huge, giant, colossal quantities of these salts. Evaporite reserves are formed in hot, arid regions. Consider a very large, deep valley that used to get large quantities of seawater with hurricanes, every few months and was flooded 2-3 feet in seawater. Then the seawater evaporated, leaving behind alkali sulphates and chlorides. Over a course of a few million years, this process was repeated. All the flora of the valley died due to excess salt in it's soil. It turned into a desert area. Then due to tectonic activity the whole region was lifted 100 meters or so as new mountain ranges were built close by. Now there are large reserves of evaporite salts in that region. Uranium And Other Radioactive Elements Here we are talking about the leftover quantities of a huge star that exploded billions of years ago. All the heavy elements like uranium, plutonium etc are made in huge stars just before they go supernova. There is no cycle of replenishing their quantities on planets. These elements can be placed anywhere as you like in your world, but remember, if your planet was once in molten state, the heavier elements would tend to sink down towards the core ... ]
[Question] [ In [this recent question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19249/what-is-the-amputationility-of-a-monomolecular-wire-weapon), an irresistible image was provided by Samuel that helped to forge the foundation for his question about a weapon design. He glossed over the aspect of the armored octopus in the image by declaring a handwave to get to the meat of his question, but I would like to propose the following challenge to the community: Let's build that octopus! The octopus must meet the following requirements: * Amphibious * Capable of supporting itself on as few as four limbs * Capable of manipulating objects with at least as great a dexterity as the average human * Capable of wearing armor * Sentient, with sufficient intellectual capacity to build a stable society, develop technologically, and achieve spaceflight Answers should include: * A discussion of the evolution of the species, including driving forces and possible adaptations beyond those defined above * A brief depiction of modern society among the octopuses * A brief discussion concerning sciences and technologies commonly useful to the species and their society [Answer] The Evolution: The Octopi emerged on a mostly tropical, water-based world and slowly evolved over hundreds of millennia. A large number of more primitive lifeforms also existed and evolved during this time, most at sea, but some on land. It rained a lot, so land creature's development was hampered. The marine life was a dangerous one, wrought with many perils, from tiny to massive. The Octopi, consisting of seven species, were generally rather small, and so learned to work together for defense of the bigger creatures. Through this repeated interaction, they achieved a form of primitive communication. Dye sacs emerged and they could signal a mate, confuse prey, or flee. Color-changing cells emerged, and they could blend in with their surroundings or bedazzle a suitor. However, other marine life were vying for the top of the food chain also, and fighting intensified. Some Sharks and Whales also learned to cooperate, and began hunting and defending in packs (pods.) This quickly decimated the Octopi (and to a lesser extent, Shark numbers), while most whales (the largest creatures) were unaffected. Natural Selection eliminated the weak, slow, and less intelligent. Most of the Octopi were destroyed, except for the fast and highly adaptable Veined Octopus. The sharks were more fortunate (being larger), and Starlight Sharks emerged as their apex predator. Whale population skyrocketed, with the K.O. species becoming the apex predator. However, while the Starlight Sharks and K.O. Whales used might to duke it out, the Veined Octopus used subtlety. It blended in. It watched from the shadows, always learning. Their numbers slowly rebounded as their camouflage, creativity, and intelligence increased. Their size and strength increased. They began hunting larger prey in packs. They learned to live near rocky shore, where sharks and whales had difficulty catching them. They learned to use the broken shells of fruits and other creatures as armor. They even learned to go further up the shore for short periods when hunting parties came in to avoid them altogether. And when the occasional predator did make it on shore and became beached, the Veined Octopus' sheer numbers and venomous bite ensured that it would be an easy meal. All of this evolution had profound ramifications for the Veiny Octopus. They developed small air sacs for breathing oxygen to lengthen the amount of time they could remain out of water. They learned to take prey on land to feed. Their on-land eyesight improved. They learned cooperation and leadership. Eventually they learned to build above-water "dens" or "gardens" by piling rocks into a bowl-shape, and using ink, saliva, and mud as concrete. They brought water up to the den and left it there, for a quick rehydration when needed. They learned to use rocks and pointy things as weapons. Sentience occurred when they learned to divert the freshwater runoff to their above-water dens. They did this to provide an almost limitless supply of oxygen-rich water outside of the dangerous oceans. They formed societies and primitive machines, created freshwater reservoirs, and discovered fire (which only worked above-water, how weird is that?) Despite being able to live partially on land, they didn't enjoy it much, as traversing dry land for long periods was impossible. They learned to stock their reservoirs with creatures from the sea, for an almost-unlimited food supply. (Until their population skyrocketed and all of the food was eaten. Those that didn't die of starvation fled to the sea to hunt, but were killed by sharks and whales. This is the legend of the "Great Slaughter.") Modern Society: Fast-forward 30 millennia, and the Veiny Octopus can spend about 1/4 of it's time in air, and still lacks a natural skeleton. They have perfected thin, carbon-nanotube protective armor for water-use, so no longer worry about ocean predators. Underwater, they have built large cities and "floorscrapers" (underwater skyscrapers) a thousand arms' deep, protected from the rest of the ocean by electrical shock technology. For land use, they created exoskeletal rigging, allowing them to be about as strong and mobile as a human, but with less stamina. They have refined uranium and created nuclear weapons and reactors, but found these far too dangerous and polluting, so sunk all the materials to the bottom of the Mariner Trench. They have made submersibles, automobiles, and aircraft, but found little use for them other than military might. They have created rockets and sent Octopi to the moon, however it is very costly as water is difficult to get out of orbit. The next furthest planet in the solar system is used for mining and manufacturing (to keep the pollution there) but it has little liquid water and is rather cold, so is otherwise uninhabitable. Modern families are allowed to have one or sometimes two offspring per solar cycle, as determined by the Unified Nations Government. This is to keep population levels steady. Every youngster goes through schooling, and an aptitude test is given to show where they can contribute the most. Post-education is a requirement, but the course(s) are up to the individual. A fine balance is maintained between food supply, healthcare, and population, as not to repeat the Great Slaughter. Healthcare is very advanced, with current research going into adding collapsible bone-like muscle structures to their physiology. Currency has been eliminated for a life-long trade system. (Everyone does something useful and productive each day, otherwise "rights" are revoked.) Commonly Useful Science and Technologies: * Hydration suit, available remote water source. * Protective (water) armor, or method thereof. * Rapid water transportation system (fluid pipes?) * Waste reclamation, re-processing, bio-degradation. * Water filtration, aeration, purification, reduction of pollutants. * "Cockpit" may be water-filled and fitted with previous. * Water-traversing vehicles. * Land-traversing (mechanical,cyborg) exoskeleton. * Land-traversing transportation/service/farming/excavation vehicles. * Land-based facilities that cannot operate underwater (Air filtration, generator, solar power, etc.) * Water-based facilities that cannot operate in air (Water filtration, high pressures, fusion reactor?) Most of these names are fictitious of course. But this is an interesting read about the real Veined Octopus: <http://greatmysterypublishing.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-amazing-octopus-did-you-know-they.html> [Answer] I don't have a full answer for you, but I liked the question and I feel there is one part of the puzzle that hasn't been adequately explained. I think the trickiest part of this creature design is enabling the octopus to walk on land. The rest of the octopus’s desired traits would come from a high enough level of sentience. Thucydides is right that the octopus would need to develop some sort of support structure to be able to hold itself upright and not just be a floppy puddle of flesh out of the water, but I don’t agree with the conclusion that an exoskeleton is necessary. An exoskeleton would greatly limit an octopus’s ability to move around in the water by constraining its body’s shape while increasing its weight and drag. And most importantly, it wouldn’t really look like an octopus anymore. Instead I propose that the octopus is capable of making portions of its mantle (the head part) and tentacles rigid through pressurizing special organs. This would form something of a temporary endoskeleton. Each tentacle could have a tube of special tissue running through its center capable of being pressurized with blood. In the water the octopus could go limp and swim normally, and on land it could create an interior scaffold for its muscles to latch on to for walking. It wouldn’t be too difficult to imagine this sort of organ system evolving as the octopus transitioned from an aquatic to an amphibious lifestyle. [Answer] Most of the questions will require a lot of thought and modelling, but for the requirement for an Octopus to stand on four legs, the octopus would have to evolve some sort of exoskeleton like structure to provide attachment points for the "leg" muscles (four limbs for "walking") and the compressive strength to actually stand against gravity. This might not be as difficult as it seems; Octopii are cephalopod molluscs, so some time in the distant past their ancestors had shells of some sort. Re evolving a partial "shell" structure to provide the exoskeletal support would be difficult (especially given the parameters) but not entirely impossible. ]
[Question] [ The idea of hollowing out asteroids, spinning them on their longest axis, and filling them with air, water, and soil is common in science fiction (Rendezvous with Rama, or 2312 for good examples). Completely enclosed, the asteroid is an entirely self-sufficient microcosm. It should look something like this: ![Artist's rendering of a hollow asteroid](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dIHL0.jpg) I’m curious as to what the weather would be like in these terrariums. There are many factors that make the atmosphere in such an enclosed habitat interesting, but two that I would like to focus on to make this question tractable follow. First, since gravity is being created through centrifugal force it varies a great deal from the inner edge of the asteroid (1G) to the center (0G). This means that there would be a strong Coriolis effect. What effects would this have? Would any clouds constantly be moving in the direction opposite the rotation to an observer on the inner surface? The variable gravity also means atmospheric pressure would be variable from the axis of rotation outward. Assuming the asteroid was filled to a pressure of 1 atmosphere at the surface, how would one compute the pressure at the center, and what effect would the variable pressure have on weather? Second, the total atmospheric volume is small (at least compared to the earth). What does this mean for the weather? Are weather patterns likely to be less random and more periodic since there are no external influences? For the purposes of the question the asteroid is spun such that the inner edge is at 1G. As for the dimensions of the asteroid, length and radius, I’ll leave that up to the reader. I would actually be very interested to know what effect changing the dimensions would have on the weather. Light is provided by a big light bulb that moves back and forth along a guideline through the center of the asteroid creating a 24 hour day/night cycle. At "dawn" it turns on at one pole, then moves across the asteroid to the other pole and dims at dusk until it reaches the brightness of a full moon. It then traverses back to the starting pole and starts again. The light is bright enough to mimic full day on earth and emits in the same electromagnetic spectrum. Excess heat is removed from the system by radiators at the poles which maintain the average temperature of the interior at a comfortable 22 degrees C. There is also an active water cycle with lakes and rivers being supplied by precipitation. [Answer] Here on Earth, the majority of [weather](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather)-related events happen in a layer of the atmosphere known as the [troposphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troposphere). It lies from Earth's surface to approximately $20 \text { km}$ - at its highest. [Asteroids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid) can range in size from a few meters to $1,000 \text{ km}$, so it's quite likely that we could find one that would be a suitable size for this. I'll pick one about $500 \text { km}$ across - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid), by the way, claims that only 3 this size likely exist in the asteroid belt. So, let's say that the asteroid hasn't quite been rounded by its own gravity. It's about $375 \text { km}$ long on two sides and $500 \text { km}$ long on the other - sort of like an ellipse. This means that, assuming a very slight thickness, it has an effective atmosphere $170 \text { km}$ high at its highest. At this height above [Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth), we're well above the atmosphere, because we've passed the [Karman line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line). But we'll pretend there's an atmosphere everywhere inside the asteroid, because any gas has a tendency to spread out. So, there would be a decent troposphere. This means that there could be weather. Here we have a problem, though. Clouds are composed of water droplets, which only get that high in the first place through the [water cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cycle). But the liquid water on Earth's surface only evaporates because of solar radiation - which there is none of here. But perhaps - and this is a pretty big perhaps - the colonists have erected large structures inside the asteroid, and installed a giant artificial heat source to keep the water cycle going. Problem solved. Rain would also be interesting. I suppose it could fall towards the center of mass, but the local ground would also have a huge influence. For low-altitude clouds, I would imagine it would still fall to the ground. In fact, I'm guessing that the only place it would possibly not fall to the ground would be in the very center of mass - where there is an extremely unstable equilibrium. Eventually, rain will fall. Let's see. What else? Lightning would still be a possibility, and it could be over very short distances, so watch out! Large storm systems might or might not form - it depends on whether or not the artificial gravity is capable of keeping a lot of liquid water on the surface. Moisture helps storms, so, most of the time, they will go where there's water. Hurricanes, cyclones, and other large-scale weather disasters could be possible, but I'm not sure how likely they would be. As you said, > > Are weather patterns likely to be less random and more periodic since there are no external influences? > > > I would think so! The clouds can really only go in circles. And because the artificial heat source could be controlled (yes?), perhaps the colonists could manipulate it to move the clouds in a certain direction. They could - to a certain extent - control the weather! Perhaps other apparatuses high in the "sky" could also exert influences to control the weather and keep it regular. Machines could [seed clouds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding) or release or capture moisture. I would think, though, that even without this, the weather would be regular. Either it would be stagnant - not a good thing - or it would travel in loops, depending on which way the wind (artificial?) was blowing. I'm not sure this entirely answers your question, but hopefully it's a start. [Answer] Realistically you can't have a really large rotating cylinder of air. The problem is not the Coriolis force but the air speed difference between the surface (considerable) and the center (zero.) That is going to cause an awful lot of turbulence. If your habitat is big enough you're going to have to do something to prevent that--say, barriers at various altitudes. They wouldn't need to be anything major. [Answer] Is having one huge hole dozens of kilometers high and long a hard requirement? Simpler solution would be to have tunnels and possibly halls few dozens of meters high. You can easily manage air, light and humidity by existing technologies. And in the center near the axis you can build manufacturing which can benefit from zero gravity. Such structure would be also stronger and more resilient to say being hit by space debris. ]
[Question] [ Modern mechanical EM transmitters, like radio towers and radar guns, rely on finely tuned mechanical structures. If these structures do not have the right shapes, the device fails to function. Organic growth focuses on balances and on-the-fly tuning. It has to grow from infant to adult sizes. Organics tend to adapt to incorrect shapes, rather than rebuiling them to be the right shape. Consider two uses for EM: * Radar style sensing (which requires tremendous dynamic range) * Communication (which requires fine tuning and allocation of bandwidth) If we were to evolve such capabilities in one of the creatures we dream up, what would have to be fundamentally different than today's mechanical devices. Particular features of today's devices that I think would cause a challenge: * Precise clocks. For things like wifi to work, a clock needs to have under 20ppm of error (I think that number is a jitter number, but it might have been a bias number). The demands of radar are often even higher. The jitter requirements on modern pulse-doppler radars are brutal! * Highly linear RF-frequency amplifies, needed to modulate or demodulate a signal. * Demanding antenna geometry (which may need to be identical across multiple individuals) * Dynamic range (we have radars today that output megawatts, and listen to echos in the femtowatt range!) * Privacy (hard unless you rely entirely on digital communications) * Lack of subtlety (our radios have no concept a. la tone of voice or body language) Edit: I am particularly interested in the use of lower frequencies, such as microwaves and radio waves, where the wave mechanics force a macroscopic antenna. [Answer] The primary difference between a manufactured and an evolved EM transceiver system would be organisation. The manufactured system would be arranged logically because that is the way that its designers think about it. However, an evolved system would likely have components all jumbled together with surprising effects. Evolved systems have proven to be more efficient and effective than most of the things we manufacture to do the same jobs today, though there are exceptions. Should any of the features mentioned in the question be important, I have no doubt that they could evolve. One feature that I believe would be different between a manufactured and an evolved EM system would be multiplexing - an evolved EM system would be more likely to use broad swathes of the EM spectrum rather than our narrow-band manufactured systems. This would confer its own set of advantages. ]
[Question] [ I bring you all to the planet [Krikkit](http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Krikkit), stuck in a star system enshrouded by a large dust cloud which prevents the Krikkiters from seeing the rest of the galaxy - and, by extension, the universe. The planet is a solitary, Earth-like one, orbiting a solitary, Sun-like star. But the dust cloud wasn't always there. As per Hitchhiker's canon, the dust cloud is the remnants of a large computer, which was subsequently pulverized. It's safe to say that the system was about middle-aged at the time. That's the work of Douglas Adams. Now my work begins. Many stars have protoplanetary nebulae - clouds of gas and dust that are the remnants of the giant molecular clouds in which the stars formed. They soon dissipate, although the protoplanetary disk remains. I'm looking for a way to form this sort of gas clouds around a main sequence star, ideally one like the Sun in the present day. How could a star gain a dust envelope partway through its life? Some things to be aware of: * The dust cloud could be the remains of some celestial body, although some calculations in my head tell me that pulling apart a rocky planet would not give you enough dust. * I'll be lenient, and say that the dust cloud only has to block out 50% of the light reaching the system. * The star is Sun-like, and about the same age as our Sun in the present day. The planet is Earth-like, but there aren't any sentient species, nor have there ever been. * The radius of the planet is about 1 AU, with a fairly low orbital eccentricity. The innermost boundary of the dust cloud should be about 1.5 AU. [Answer] Mass loss via rotation speed increase. [![V838 Monocerotis](https://i.stack.imgur.com/I6lKG.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/I6lKG.png) <http://hubblesite.org/image/1637/gallery> Depicted: V838 Monocerotis. This star emitted a bright flash while Hubble was watching. The flash allowed Hubble to see the cloud of dust surrounding it. How would such a cloud form? I will propose a mechanism that is my answer to this question. Backing off a step: how could a star eject material that might form a dust cloud? Some stars like [Wolf-Rayet stars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf%E2%80%93Rayet_star) do this fairly often. One mechanism would be an acceleration in the speed of spin. Just as speeding up the spin of a merry-go-round with a motorcycle (check youtube if curious) will cause riders to be flung off of it, so speeding the rotation of a star will cause it to fling mass off of it. The lost mass could expand to form a cloud or ring surrounding the star. How to increase rate of spin? One way would be to decrease the size of the star. As a skaters spin will increase when she pulls in her arms and legs, so a star's rate of spin will increase if it decreases in size. The aforementioned Wolf-Rayet stars have shrunk down as compared to their prior size, and maybe consequent acceleration of spin accounts for their dust generation? [![wolf rayed starts](https://i.stack.imgur.com/POTph.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/POTph.png) <https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-details-of-the-figure-are-similar-to-Figure-1-However-after-the-star-becomes-a-red_fig2_23277335> I think these Wolf-Rayet stars are older than middle age and so not what is requested in the OP. Another way to increase rotational speed is to acquire it from another object. If I go running at a merry-go round and jump on to the edge, it starts turning - it acquires rotational momentum from me. Some people think that V838 Monocerotis was originally a binary star and the observed flash was the collision of the partners. > > Tylenda disagrees: "I think that almost all of the red novae are > mergers." In particular, he argues that the best-known red nova, V838 > Monocerotis, resulted from such a merger. That explosion was more > powerful than V1309 Scorpii, indicating a greater mass. > > > <https://www.nature.com/news/2010/101207/full/news.2010.654.html> > > For contact or semi-detached binaries, the transfer of mass from a > star to its companion can also result in a significant transfer of > angular momentum. The accreting companion can spin up to the point > where it reaches its critical rotation rate and begins losing mass > along the equator. > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_rotation> > > > If prior to the collision one of the partners had its rotation accelerated by the other, that could account for ejection of the dust clouds which the later collision illuminated. --- How then to make an increase in acceleration for the middle aged star described in the OP? 1: Star is actually a binary, and one partner is gradually being accelerated by the other. When acceleration of partner exceeds critical rotation rate, it loses mass to form the dust cloud. 2: Star is obliquely impacted by an outsider arriving from interstellar space - rogue white dwarf or what have you. The mass transfer from the object is not much, but much of the kinetic energy transfer turns into faster rotation of the star, pushing it past critical rotation rate and causing mass loss into the dust cloud. 3: Star's mass is increased by an outside impactor, with consequent decrease in diameter and increase in spin rate. --- After my google session I am aware that there are many schools of thought about V838 Monocerotis and the provenance of its cloud, and Wolf-Rayet stars, etc. I do not mean the above to represent dogma on these entities. I did want to invoke real things to illustrate the idea that faster spin of a star could cause it to emit a dust cloud. [Answer] Stars move... They are usually born in stellar nurseries and then move out. I guess there is nothing stopping a star moving into a region of gas and dust. It could be a [dark nebula](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_nebula) or an [H II region](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H_II_region) [Answer] There are classes of stars like Eta Karinae that are unstable and suffer oscillations. Those stars usually pass periods of large loss of matter. The nebula around Eta Karinae is not resulting from a supernova but simple ejecta due to this star fluctuations. This sort of star is called a variable star (in that specific case a luminous blue variable star): > > Luminous blue variables (LBVs) are massive evolved stars that show unpredictable and sometimes dramatic variations in both their spectra and their brightness. They are also known as S Doradus variables after S Doradus, one of the brightest stars of the Large Magellanic Cloud. They are extraordinarily rare with just 20 objects listed in the General Catalogue of Variable Stars as SDor,[1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_blue_variable) and a number of these are no longer considered to be LBVs. [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminous_blue_variable) > > > If you have a solar-like style star near enough to such a beast, you might have the cloud you are lookin for. [Answer] There are serious implications to this question. If the dust cloud blocks an appreciable percentage of light from the rest of the universe, then it also must therefore absorb a large proportion of light from the star itself. In other words, what you have here is a Dyson Sphere. A particularly large and inefficient one. Not having done any maths, I would think that to be able to absorb a large proportion of the output energy of a star, you need something on the order of magnitude of the mass of the star itself. Basically I think you need a huge cataclysm, natural or unnatural. For example, you could have a binary system with one star ripped apart by a passing black hole. [Answer] I can think of two basic mechanisms for blanketing the inner system with a dust cloud that was not previously present: One has already been pointed out; the system could pass into a much larger dust cloud, such as a large nebula. This would blanket the whole system with dust and gas. The other is a secondary [bombardment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Heavy_Bombardment) caused by a major gravitational perturbation of the outer system, this will probably result in some impacts for the planet but mostly it will increase comet traffic in the inner system to the point where material from their [comas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coma_(cometary)) will obscure the sun. This would probably mean largely depleting the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt in the space of a century or so and leaving most of that material float around the inner system absorbing sunlight. The cloud would extend from about 3 AU inwards thickening as it approaches the sun. What could cause such a massive disruption? The near transit of any really large mass like a blackhole, a super giant star, or possibly a neutron star. Some notes that may or may not be useful; soot, as in finely divided black carbon, would be the optimal "dust" to use, for intercepting sunlight and heat. You wouldn't need very much material if you just want to block most of the light reaching a planet, just a thin band a second or two of arc across along the elliptic would do it, the closer to the primary the band is the smaller it can be, I think. From the surface it would be impossible to tell the difference between the effects of a debris cloud in space and the sudden pollution of the upper atmosphere by vapourised material from a number of comets or meteors skimming through the atmosphere. ]
[Question] [ I was looking for ways to make gigantic mountains, and found [Willk's](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/31698/willk) [answer to such a quandary](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/206430/87100), where a giant diamondberg forms in an [ice giant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_giant) and is incorporated into a terrestrial planet's crust, producing a mountain much stronger and less prone to [subsidence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidence) than a rock mountain. As Willk noted, however, diamond has high thermal conductivity, and one side of this diamondberg is embedded in the mantle, meaning it'll be able to transmit a lot of heat from the mantle to itself/the surface. I did some more digging to figure out how much heat, precisely, and found several things. [Diamond's heat capacity is impressively low](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/583022/how-can-the-heat-capacity-of-diamond-be-so-low); i.e. a certain mass of diamond doesn't take much energy to heat to a certain temperature relative to other substances. Diamond also has a high [thermal conductivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_conductivity) somewhere [in](https://www.diamond-materials.com/en/cvd-diamond/thermal/) [the](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4615-2257-7_7#:%7E:text=Diamond%20has%20the%20highest%20thermal,Cu%20and%201.5%20for%20Si.) [thousands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_diamond#Thermal_conductivity) of watts per meter per degree Kelvin. The Earth's crust has a thermal conductivity in [the](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature07818) [single](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00531-018-01673-8) [digits](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0144598718778163) of watts per meter per degree Kelvin. Therefore, even at higher temperatures where it's likely diamond's thermal conductivity lowers, it's still likely the diamond is on the order of a hundred times more effective of a heat conductor than the crust. Note that it isn't easy to build things on bare diamond, and it's especially difficult to do so when said diamond is hundreds of degrees. On the other hand, a giant diamond partially ("partially" because it hasn't been sunk all the way under) [subducted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction) under a continental plate has a nice, thick layer of rock and dirt atop it to put things on and in, which can also act as a heat sink so you can walk on the surface without getting your shoes melted. Therefore, that's what I decided to do in order to make my giant mountain. Imagine covering a sea buoy with a weighted tarp; the buoy will go somewhat lower in the water, but won't actually sink. This is the case here: the downward force from the diamond's mass and the mass of the crust covering it equates to the buoyant force caused by the diamond displacing the denser mantle/athenosphere. As such, the diamond floats in the lower mantle. There are two tectonic plates trying to push into it from either side, which is why it's covered in crust: each plate encounters it and tries to ride over it. Here is a not-to-scale, side-on cross-section of a crust-covered diamond mountain made with Google Drawings: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GWuze.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/GWuze.png) For the sake of making this question answerable, several assumptions must be made: * The diamond is an [octahedron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octahedron) approximately 56 kilometers to a side, with one vertex protruding straight up and one sunk directly down into the mantle. Roughly 9⅔ kilometers of the diamond are above sea level (albeit still buried in crust); the rest are either embedded in the crust or below it in the mantle. * Exactly half the diamond's roughly 10,863 square kilometers of surface area are in contact with a 1,400° Kelvin [asthenosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asthenosphere)/upper mantle; the other half are in contact with the crust that sits atop it. * At 1,400° Kelvin, the diamond has a thermal conductivity of 500 W/m/K, and the crust has a constant thermal conductivity of 5 W/m/K. * The crust is 3.15 grams/cubic centimeter (presumed to be a 50-50 [silica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_dioxide)/[magnesium oxide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_oxide) mixture), the diamond is 3.5 grams/cubic centimeter, and the mantle is ~3.6 grams/cubic centimeter (presumed to be pure magnesium oxide). The differentiation between all three is essentially total; this is, of course, unrealistic, but having distinct layers rather than a blurry transition between crust, asthenosphere, and mantle simplifies the math. * [Radiogenic heat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget#Radiogenic_heat) in the crust and mantle around the diamond-mountain is ignored. * The diamond has been in the crust for ~100 million years, and has had plenty of time to heat to permeate throughout it. * Gravity is 2.5G. Given all the above: I need a rough idea of how the heat conducted by this diamond mountain will geologically affect its surroundings. Will it turn the area around it into a sea of lava? Will it cause hot springs and [exploitable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy) geothermal activity? Will the ground be only slightly warmer than it would otherwise? My greatest concern is that the sheer quantity of heat being transferred through the diamond may be enough to form a [magma chamber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_chamber) in the crust above it before the crust can rupture enough to release it, resulting in a [supervolcano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano). Please show relevant math if at all possible, and if you need more data, please make a comment to that regard. If nothing else, I need to know what the temperature of the diamond would be so I can determine the heat it transfers into the crust. [Answer] So, there are a couple points that make a hard-science answer ...hard (no pun intended). While the diamond itself is a great thermal conductor, it is only being heated by the mantle. And given the low thermal conductivity of the mantle, it will never be heated to the same temperature as it. Therefore this diamond would be behaving more like throwing water on the mantle - it will cool the area directly underneath it, resulting in a thicker mantle locally, and a warmer-than-average mountain. But it will not get hot enough for lava flows (but it will definitely have a different local climate and vegetation). In terms of this "mountain" actually floating on the surface, the diamond vs. the mantle is only 0.1g/cm^3 buoyancy force, while the diamond vs the crust is 0.35g/cm^3. The volume of half of the octahedron is 41,400km^3, while the volume of the peak is ~600km^3. So there is actually negative buoyancy force on the diamond - it would be trying to sink deeper through the crust. Also, the normal resting attitude of a d8 (an octahedron) is actually flat-side-up, not point-up, as can be seen in [this video](https://youtu.be/7_6jxOurHis?t=103). So a hard science answer would say your crust has to be much thinner, and/or the diamond much smaller. It would also be trying to tilt , so it would probably look more like a triangular mesa, with one peak perhaps reaching this 9.6km height. Story-wise, I think you could waive some of the math and it would make sense. [Answer] It seems likely to me that if the diamond remained buoyant in the mantle and the crust, that the transmitted heat would melt the crust above the diamond, eventually exposing it to the air, at which point, if there was any oxygen in the air, the diamond would begin to burn away. The phenomenon of a large octohedral diamond floating between the crust and the mantle would be transitory, especially if there were any oxygen around. It would tend to either sink deeper into the mantle if the diamond was denser, or melt and float to the surface of the crust if the crust was less dense, where it would burn in any oxygen. Either way, such a diamond would be highly unlikely to simply stay put between crust and mantle for more than a few thousand years at most. ]
[Question] [ Context: In a near-future version of our solar system, humans have established multiple underwater colonies on Jupiter's moon Europa. Many of these outposts are situated next to hydrothermal vents along the moon's rocky mantle. I want to place colonies next to vents as I make the world map, but I don't what pattern to place the vents in. Given info: * Europa likely has [hydrothermal vents produced by tidal heating](https://www.astrobio.net/alien-life/shallow-biospheres-exist-beneath-icy-ceilings-ocean-moons/). Assume it does. * Hydrothermal vents on Earth are located [near plate boundaries](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/vents.html). * Europa [probably has plate tectonics](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171204112918.htm) in its icy crust, but it's unclear whether it has tectonics in its rocky mantle. Therefore, it's unclear if there are vent-forming boundaries in the ocean or not. * Since this moon has lower gravity than Earth, warm water is less buoyant. I'm thinking this may lead to more total vents, but each one may be less hot. If this is incorrect, feel free to challenge this assumption in the comments or answers. Questions: 1. Could Europa have mantle plate tectonics that allow for boundary-adjacent hydrothermal vents? 2. If tectonics can't be present, would vents be clustered beneath the moon's tidal bulges, where tidal flexing is greatest? 3. Finally if not, would vents form at random "hot spots" above convection zones? --- Tl;DR In order to place my underwater colonies correctly, where would hydrothermal vents form on a tidally-heated, icy moon such as Europa? --- This is the same world as [Generating breathable air on Europa](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/166144/generating-breathable-air-on-europa) and [How big can Europan fish get](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/165815/how-big-can-europan-fish-get)? [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BaM5R.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BaM5R.jpg) [Answer] ## Put them near the cracks Tidal effects will happen to the rocky crust as well as the ice sheets above. We thus assume where we see venting and cracks on the icy cap, similar activity is happening directly below it. Given this as the fundamental question: `I want to place colonies next to vents as I make the world map, but I don't what pattern to place the vents in` whether Europa has tectonics or not is irrelevant. We just care where and in what pattern it is warm/hot. Voyager Map of Europa [![Europa Map](https://i.stack.imgur.com/f7FpM.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/f7FpM.jpg) Water Vapor Emissions [![Water Vapor Emissions](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JzCho.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JzCho.jpg) Based on this article about [transient water vapor](http://astrobiology.com/2013/12/transient-water-vapor-at-europas-south-pole.html) on Europa, it looks like most of the vapor is coming from near the south pole. Based on the Voyager map, we see a lot of cracks near the south pole. If I were placing colonies under the ice, I'd position them near the cracks. Be aware that these colonies may have to contend with periods of no thermal activity or that new thermal activity will happen somewhere not close by. The AstroBiology article states that vents were transient, about 7 hours. Colonies may need the ability to move to new vents. ]
[Question] [ I have been slowly losing my mind trying to build a somewhat realistic climate map for a fantasy world I'm building for my book. A geographer I am not... I modeled the climate zones and such after this article: <https://medium.com/universe-factory/climate-modeling-101-4544e00a2ff2> I've been staring at it for so long now that I've lost perspective, and would be really grateful for some feedback on if it makes sense or not. Also, I realised I put a large river in a subtropical area (starting from the mountains right at the northern subtropical ridge). There is a country here and I was thinking of it kind of like the Nile with settlements around the river. Is it completely unrealistic for a large river to go through this area? Thankful for any and all help! [![Climate zone map](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ceO6a.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ceO6a.png) I also made a rough map of the precipitation, where blue is more rain, dark blue is monsoon area, yellow is medium precipitation, and orange is drier. It's a bit of a rough map, but this wasn't explained too much in the article and was honestly losing patience by the time I got to this point of constructing this world. I tried reading some other resources on precipitation, but finding it a little hard to pin down. [![Precipitation map](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fDbuR.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fDbuR.png) Feedback would be very appreciated. Thanks! /Nora EDIT Do you mean something like this with changing the coasts? Is it reversed on the south hemisphere compared to the north since the winds go the other way? I left the arrows for the winds in, hope that these are right... Is it just the precipitation map that is wrong, or was it the actual climate zones map as well? I did look into the Koppen classification a bit, but I'm not really looking at doing something that detailed, I just want to make sure the zones are believable/accurate. Thanks for all your comments and help! [![Updated precipitation map](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MKByi.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MKByi.png) Changed the climate map a little bit as well, mainly because I needed the desert climate to come down a little further on the continent to the right (next to the canyon), mainly for storytelling reasons. Does that look realistic? Thanks! [![Updated climate map](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YUZFY.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YUZFY.jpg) EDIT 2: So, I've tried doing the Koppen climate classifications and adding it to my map. So far I've only finished the right continent, but I thought I'd post it and see if it looks ok. The continent on the left is a WIP, I don't intend to leave that whole area as Cfa and Af, but the right continent is the most important one initially for my story, so I focused on that one. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eR7iO.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eR7iO.jpg) [Answer] A geographer, I am. A graphics artist, I am not. Caveat: Climate and worldbuilding is enormously complex, so feel free to edit as you like: we don't even fully understand our own planet yet! And I will stress over and over that your map is fine the way it is, but since you asked.. Your map is not impossible, but there are going to be some changes needed to be a little more believable. Considering your climate mock-up, recall that you will have very earth-like currents bringing warm water from the equator north to push cold water south. This is why, for example, Tokyo is the same latitude as Los Angeles, but is much cooler – it gets the ‘cold’ water. It’s also why Portugal reaches as far north as Maine, but is much, much warmer. So let’s put in your currents and make one face warmer than the other and vice-versa. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8qRHO.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8qRHO.png) Now, let’s look at your precipitation. With these currents, you’re sending warm, tropical weather west in general, assuming a similar earthlike planet. Let’s look at continent B, which will be exciting. The only major change is that you’re going to have a crazy ‘waistline’ area – warm and wet meets cold and wet, cold and dry: thunderstorms, tornadoes and havoc all year round. Your Nile is not unrealistic, but I'd posit that a more similar Nile can be found in the southwest quarter of Continent B. Arid, and put your massive river running through. Finally, your little island in the southwest will be receiving a lot of warm, humid air against a colder latitude. This makes for a very bio-diverse region particularly as it's isolated from other major continents. Have fun and be imaginative with your little Madagascar! [Answer] Yea, this is actually really accurate, assuming that the planet is the size of earth, or something similar. I like the touch of monsoon as well. [Answer] So, no hard science from my side, but I'm really interested in this topic, so I gathered some knowledge on this. Most of the map is really accurate, and i like how you took the mountains in account for desertification. There are two things that aren't that likely to occur (but still possible): The river on southern part of the continent on the right. They mountains would cause most of the rain to fall on their western side, which would make a river flowing east less likely. But this depends on the formation on the Mountains, it could still be possible that the rain falling west and on top of the mountains feeds a river eastwards. If that's relevant (and important) for you, you should maybe describe this area. (Similarity to Earth: [Atacama Desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert)) The second thing i would like to point out is way up in the north of the right continent. I suspect the area east of the Mountains a total wasteland. Similar to the [Gobi Desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobi_Desert), it's far into the continent and shielded by mountains. I guess this would be very cold, harsh and dry lands. (This is only a possibility, not a fact, as this is a fictional world. Some streams of air and such things could behave slightly differently, leading to a different climate.) ]
[Question] [ In my story there is a full size (Island Three) O'Neill cylinder, 5 miles in diameter and 20 miles long. It doesn't have windows, but is lit internally down the center of the cylinder with a 20 mile long, very bright, full spectrum lamp. There is a budding artist in my story who lives there. As imagined when she looks up the sides of the cylinder, she sees her neighbors from down the road overhead, would there be a bluish tint to their landscape which is in the distance, 3-5 miles away? Also, if she stands at the very "north" end of the cylinder and has a clear view all the way to the "south" end, 20 miles away, would she see any blue or bluish sky due to Rayleigh scattering and the long linear "sun"? [Answer] My best guess is no. Based on the fact that the lamp extends the entire length of the cylinder and is very bright, the light would have to travel at most the distance you are looking. On Earth, sunlight goes through miles of atmosphere, where some of the light bounces off of oxygen in the atmosphere, creating a bluish color going in all directions, some reaching your eyes a few miles away. On Earth, there is no light source over there, because all of the light comes from the sun. If there was light on one side of the cylinder, the atmosphere might seem blue, but any blueness in a cylinder with a full-length light would be overpowered by the much stronger full-length light. You might be able to get a blue sky effect with one light on each side, or by dimming the light, but with what you've described, the lighting would actually be harsh, like looking into the sun. ]
[Question] [ If an Earth-like planet had an older, red sun — or maybe just a reddish sky due to some property of the atmosphere — how would that affect the growth and/or adaptation of plant and animal life on the planet? Would plants still be green? Would the darker sky affect the eyesight of animals? Please describe any notable differences in flora/fauna between Earth and a comparable planet with a red sky. For the topic of this discussion, assume all other properties of the planet are similar or identical to those of Earth. In case it's important, I'm building an alien world with a red sky and mountainous, spiky terrain. Note that I'm *not* looking for a list-format answer, but rather a description (and explanation) of the differences I should implement when designing the organisms on the planet. [Answer] If sunlight was red then the red sun would be long living allowing evolution to progress longer on that planet. That sun would have been born before our own sun as well, so if compared to the current Earth Date then an Earth-like planet could easily have life that's been around way longer and maybe more advanced. If sunlight was red the sky most likely wouldn't be blue. Problems involving gravity would put a livable planet farther away from the star which creates its own problems. The reduced energy from a bluer spectra would probably not provide the necessary amount to support life which raises issues if we consider the sun to not be a contributing factor of the redness. Our red light would follow a black body curve centered on red, so the plants and animals wanting to reflect the light would be cyan or blue, and would blend towards white as they reflect more and more sunlight. Ones wanting to absorb the light would be red and blend more towards black as they absorb more and more light. Green always has a more efficient alternative so there would be no pressure for green and probably very little of it, if it appeared at all, Colors as viewed by the natives would probably be viewed in shades of red due to the lack of other color components in the sunlight. Similarly the rainbow would be red-shifted. A red sun could be cooler than our own and last much longer allowing life to evolve to higher levels. Solar heating would decrease faster with distance so the net effect would be that the sun would appear much larger in the sky (probably at least twice as large). The decreased strength of sunlight would place limits on the food chain. Less species in a web means more specialization and less burden. Less input energy means less plant growth per unit area. Less growth means slower metabolisms, tricks to find food, and longer lives have selective pressures. Low metabolism, slow-paced (culturally), long-lived, intelligent creatures would be selected by evolution (k-selection). Note that intelligence would be more likely to develop. Vision would be adapted for red. This means the natives would most likely see in shades of red with maybe some yellow mixed in for shades of orange. Likely their visible spectrum would be shifted to see infrared and so heat would be visible to you average creature. This may help accelerate intelligence or hinder it on caloric, etc. If it was useful to distinguish between plants and animals that might use the other colors they could end up with a visible light range similar to ours, plus heat vision. The increased likelihood of predator and prey both having heat vision results in typical camouflage adoptions not being very effective. You might see more fauna with thick fur and similar features, to insulate their heat signature. [Answer] Under a red sun, there will be a higher output of red light, but as red stars are the coolest, they don't produce as much energy as say, yellow stars. Thus, plants that evolved for life under a red sun would have dark pigments, so that they can absorb as much radiation as possible. ]
[Question] [ What I'm doing is trying to find a way to create an atmospheric cold trap that will maintain a temperature of approximately −200 degrees Celsius (−328 Fahrenheit). According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_trap_(astronomy)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_trap_(astronomy) "Wikipedia") > > In astronomy, a cold trap is a close to the surface layer of the > atmosphere that is substantially colder than both the deeper and > higher layers. The temperature of the air drops with increasing height > above the surface of the earth reaching a low point (which for the > earth resides at about 20 kilometers height). It is called a trap > because it keeps ascending gases with high melting points in by > freezing them to a solid which then drops back to the planet surface > > > It's a big part of the reason that all of our water vapor hasn't broken down and had its hydrogen lost to space. So, how could a cold trap be created that possesses the temperatures I described above while surface temperatures of the planet remain Earth-like. The cold trap doesn't have to be created naturally, nor does it need to be at the same height or anything else as ours. It merely needs to maintain those temperatures in a layer of the atmosphere. For comparison, I want the cold trap to be a little more than 3 times colder than the one here on Earth. For anyone wondering why I'm asking this, it's a follow up of my terra-forming question [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/70898/using-temperature-to-contain-an-atmosphere? "here") Thank you for any help or insight! [Answer] I think if the planet had an atmosphere that was very thick to keep heat in at ground level, heavy in hydrogen and helium, with a very strong magnetic field to keep solar rays from knocking them away, and an orbit on the outer edge of the Goldilocks zone so things get cold up high. Having a lot of methane might help as well because it's a very strong greenhouse gas, and is lighter than oxygen. It has a boiling point of -161.5°C, so it would condense out at a lower altitude than the oxygen and nitrogen, keeping the warm air down low, and not at the top of the atmosphere. Hydrogen has a boiling point of -252°C, and helium's is -268°C, so both gasses would still be in a gas state at -200°C. Oxygen (-183°C) and nitrogen (-195.8°C) (as Separatrix pointed out) would be in a liquid state at that point, so you'd likely get clouds made of liquid oxygen droplets at high altitude, which would condense and fall as oxygen rain, only to boil away before hitting the ground. ]
[Question] [ On an Earth-like planet with clustered continents and large oceans, like Pangaea, the easiest method of travel would be boats. However, I am looking to avoid humans using boats. I define a boat as some kind of fast transportation over water. This includes taming animals or any other water-based method of transportation. The society in question is similar to Ancient Greece in terms of the technological age and expansion. I am also looking for a hard-science answer. My limitations are: * No cultural norms or governmental decrees (these tend to be misinterpreted or changed over time) * The oceans must remain similar to Earth, being mostly water with some minerals. * The continents must be clustered together * The humans must be human (no morphological changes). * The planet must stay in the tropical to temperate temperature range. * Whatever strategy is devised must be long-term, like how boats have been around for about 10,000 years. What can be changed: * The weather * Any geographic features on the continent * Technological limitations * Really anything as long as the planet stays Earth-like and habitable. Clarifications: * Riverboats and small inland transportation are ok, I just don't want seaworthy ships. * Extreme weather, like strong winds on the ocean, is preferable but there needs to be a way for humans to live normally without any extra gear, like goggles for wind. [Answer] Just make it so wood does not last on seawater Your planet has a variant of the [Shipworm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipworms), similar to the Earth variety except that it contains its own cellulose-dissolving enzyme rather than relying on bacterial assistance to do this job. This would result in any unprotected wood in the seawater being leaky within a day, and riddled like a sieve within a week, like this one (which took about 2 months, here on Earth) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/axS5i.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/axS5i.jpg) While it should be possible to build metal cladding or all-metal boats to protect against this, your people would have no reason to make this discovery, as they never encounter the need for it. All wooden constructions that touch seawater fail so rapidly, that they never develop an infrastructure that uses the sea. At all. Is this hard-sciency enough for you? One very plausible change in one organism is all that is needed. [Answer] A second answer: enormous tides. Your planet has a large moon like Earth does, but it's a lot closer, or in an elliptical orbit (perhaps as a result of a planetary collision a few millions of years ago), or perhaps your planet is a moon of a much larger gas giant and has not yet become tidally locked to it. Either way, the tidal forces affecting your planet are a lot greater than those on Earth, and the result is that every day the tide comes rushing in in a giant wave, across many miles of land, all around the coast. This results in extreme coastal erosion that has created huge beaches all around the continent. Anything you try to build there will just get washed away the next time the tide comes in - there just isn't any way that you could build a functioning dock from which to launch a ship. You could launch a ship at high tide, but even if you make it to the open ocean before the tide goes out, there's no practical way for you to land again because there's no way you can navigate the white waters of the incoming tide. You could deliberately beach the ship, but then you won't get to use it more than once. The extreme tidal forces would also make the planet a lot more tectonically active than the Earth, with a lot more volcanoes etc. Perhaps you could use this to explain why there is still a continent despite the extreme tidal erosion. [Answer] Boats started off as simple tree trunks floating on the water, which where then carved to better accommodate the passengers. But that can only happen if the wood is lighter than water. There are various types of [woods which are denser than water](https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/top-ten-heaviest-woods/), meaning that any trunk falling in the water would sink rather than floating. Moreover some of those woods is also extremely difficult to work, such as the ironwood. So, if your world has only that type of wood or similar, you are basically left with a much more difficult discover of the principles of floating on water. Not much more different than what has happened in our timeline with flying, which is something we have mastered in the very recent past of our millennial history. [Answer] The easiest way to discourage the development and use of seagoing vessels may be to discourage associating with the sea itself: prolific [littoral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littoral_zone) and [neritic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neritic_zone) predator species too large, dangerous, and/or difficult to hunt even in groups could, from an early stage, dissuade your people from going anywhere near ocean coasts and instead focus development on rivers and other freshwater bodies. [Answer] Here is another way, which could be combined with other answers: make the planet cold, either permanently or because it's in the middle of an ice age. The idea is that only the equatorial region is really suitable for human habitation. If you go too far north or south everything is covered in glaciers and the sea is frozen. Seen from space, the planet is more than half covered by white ice caps, with a blue-green band around the equator, something very roughly like this: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7ngIpm.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7ngIpm.png) The Earth has probably been in this kind of state several times in the past. Now since the continents are all clustered together, there isn't much point in using boats. The human-habitable region is a letter-box shaped piece of land that runs across a single large continent in the east-west direction. The climate there is temperate, but to the north and south it's bounded by icy wastes rather than ocean. It has coastlines to the east and west, but they're relatively short, and to get from one to the other you'd have to sail around the entire planet. This would severely limit the usefulness of ocean-going vessels. If you had them you could use them to travel north-south along the coastlines, but this would provide a lot less economic benefit than it does on our world, so there would be a lot less economic pressure to develop them in the first place. If the coastlines are not rocky then your people might just build railways or canals along the coasts instead, and then never really feel the need to develop shipping beyond sport and fishing. (The latter of course only applies if there are edible fish.) [Answer] Your citizens suffer from terrible sea sickness, they don't just throw up, they get unconscious and maybe suffer long term damage. So peaceful rivers would be fine, but even estuaries would be too choppy for your would-be sailors. Actually this would be so anchored in collective knowledge that no-one would ever even try to go to sea. So you could have a sub-plot of some outlier who finds that it is possible after all, and acts accordingly... [Answer] Historical precedence The ancient Greeks didn't do any trans-oceanic travel anyway, so the question is arguably moot. Before the armada days... there essentially was no ocean travel. Yes, brave Norse settlers made it to the Americas, but the travel was lengthy, arduous and risky enough that only a few made it to Greenland and a little beyond, and even they arguably got lucky: if North America had been a little more southerly, all they'd have found would've been sea ice. [![Greek trade routes, via Ancient History Encyclopaedia](https://i.stack.imgur.com/G4V94.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/G4V94.png) [Greek trade routes, via Ancient History Encyclopaedia] So really, you don't even need to make any changes, apart from wiping out those pesky Norse adventurers, and making it so that the continents didn't have any convenient paths between them, like "hey if you just follow the edge of the sea ice west from Norway, you get to a McDonald's!". However... that's not very "hard science" of me. In fact, science ([Feasible Ocean Routes to and from the Americas in Pre-Columbian Times](https://www.jstor.org/stable/278557?seq=1), quoting C[hronica-Botanica-Vol-xiv](https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.7329/2015.7329.Chronica-Botanica-Vol-xiv-1950_djvu.txt)) says: > > It would be foolish to assert that there were no communications across the Pacific in pre-Magellan times > > > I feel that there is a fairly solid case for this being at least a thing that was feasible to happen at that time, given that [hundreds of plant species](http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp133_precolumbian_voyages.pdf) have been found which appear to have spread between the continents with no other explanation. We want ten thousand years of no seafaring, so we need defense in depth! Many layers! Travel between continents only when sea levels change and expose land bridges! So while it might be a helpful factor, merely saying "OK, there are no easy paths, and no brave adventurers" won't cut it :) Predators Making seawater scary with predators, as rek suggests... again, it might be a useful additional tactic, but I don't think it would work, not for thousands of years for humans, anyway. Waterfront property has been prime property as long as humans have existed. We migrated along waterways. We take "dangerous" as a challenge. We've obliterated almost all large animals that we don't deliberately breed to eat, and all existing species are getting smaller as we kill and eat the biggest ones. For millennia we have harvested food from waters filled with shark and piranha and crocs and gators and vipers and poisoned sea urchins and deadly jellyfish and... and we eat them. This isn't a new habit: we probably killed off the [NA mammoth and smilodon](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07897-1.pdf?origin=ppub), and [likely were a contributing force](https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/60/7/516/234159) for much of the rest of the wave of Late Pleistocene Megafaunal Extinctions. So, sure, have predators, but just as one of many reasons the sentient land-dwellers ("They") have, to avoid screwing with the ocean. The most valuable kind of predator could be the ship-attacking kind. If any large craft going past the continental shelf runs a very good chance of getting capsized boned by aggressive or amorous whales, then most craft won't go past that line, at least until they realize how much ambergris, whalebone and whalemeat are worth. Hrm, OK, we don't want to give them an economic incentive to venture out: maybe kraken, rather than whales, then. Nutrition vs Poison (I see @Kari beat me to this one, darn! Updoot for Kari!) On Earth, we may well have taken to the water due to an aquatic phase in our evolution... but whether or not that is the case, we stuck by the water because it's a fantastic source of nutrition, such as DHA, an omega-3 found abundantly in human brains and in aquatic foods. This aquatic aspect of our diet may well have contributed to our large brains. Oh, and salt, we use a LOT of that, with our abnormal behaviors like sweating and crying. If everything in the ocean was toxic to Them, They'd have no real interest. Add some heavy metals, radioactives, some lead and arsenic and some faster-acting things, to the seaweeds and shellfish, and have the toxins concentrate more and more up the entire food chain. Perhaps make rock salt toxic to Them. That's extremely believable, given how toxic it is anyway. Or have other soluble minerals leech out of the rocks of the land and into the oceans. But you don't even need to specify what toxins affect Them; just that sea animals have the ability to process ocean foods that They as land animals have since lost. Remove the omega-3s, or remove Their need or ability to process them. Provisions With no seals, polar bears, edible fish, etc to catch and eat, and nowhere to stop and find freshwater or meltable snow, travelers would be constrained by supplies they could take with them. With a large enough distance between, this would be a hindrance, and set a hard date for having to turn around, equal to less than half the provisions a craft could carry. Non-swimming We can swim and float, so can spend time in water, make dugout canoes that can tip us in without dying, and so on. Let's get rid of all that. Their species sinks in water. Heavy bones, dense muscles, small lungs, non-closing airways, no diving reflex, poorly formed for swimming... so not real fond of swimming in the first place, even less fond of swimming anywhere near the deep, toxic ocean. Conceptual leaps As L. Dutch pointed out, if the only buoyant stuff They ever see is bloated corpses, They'd take a while to even come up with the idea of floating airbags for travel, and those just aren't very ocean-worthy, but do well enough on rivers if you stick them under some kinda raft framework. Waterway dirigibles, pulled by draft animals trudging along the waterside, as we did with canals; or by pulling on a rope alongside the waterway. It's admittedly a "small leap" from there to surrounding them in a solid sealed box instead of a mere framework, and from there to the discovery that it doesn't matter if the solid box has airbag in, or even whether it has holes in, so long as they're above the waterline, and from there to realizing that you can just float an open-topped box in a way that it won't flip over and drown everyone, and from there to ballast and sails and masts and rudders and rigging and then reinventing rigging to sail into the wind... But even so... look how long it took us to develop wheeled vehicles (5500ya)! And another three thousand years after that (2400ya) to put teeth on it and make a cog, a thousand years after that (1300ya) to make a clock, and six hundred years more (700ya) to make a worm gear! Each of these, looking back, is a "small leap". And none of them kills us much if we screw it up. And even then, the wheel didn't really penetrate into sub-Saharan Africa until the Europeans turned up in the 1800s. Prevailing winds Hot air on land goes up. This means wind blows from the sea: a "[sea breeze](https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/educate/seabreeze_ans.shtml)". In the night, it blows the other way, as the land cools, but the sea stays warm. So Their more sensible sailors make sure to be home before that happens, rather than get stranded away from shore. Why would they be stranded? Because with poor rigging tech, They couldn't tack into the wind very well. If you also have a climate without any constant trade winds for their navigators to follow, the inconsistent and mercurial climate would mean that there'd be no obvious paths for people to try exploring in. I'm not sure how realistic a world without tradewinds and currents would be, though... Construction materials The Armadas of Britain, [Spain](https://academic.oup.com/envhis/article-abstract/17/1/116/423962), France, and Holland, were all formed from forestry. The devastating impact of the formation of the British armada on the countryside of the UK can hardly be overstated. Maintaining the armada required the formation of a proper forestry commission with control over sizeable tracts of land doing nothing but the slow process of growing trees long enough to lay straight keels, masts, and so on. > > I have heard that in the great expedition of 1588 it was expressly > enjoined the Spanish commanders of that signal Armada that if, when > landed, they should not subdue our nation, and make good their > conquest, they should yet be sure not to leave a tree standing in the > Forest of Dean. > -- <https://www.jstor.org/stable/550221?seq=1> > > > If your civilization lacks wood as a construction material, and instead uses mostly stone, leather and metal, then that both sets a cool aesthetic, and helps to explain why large ships might not get built for some time: only perhaps coracles, for shallow freshwater marshes. [Answer] No non-perishable food which contains Vitamin C. This will only prevent long travel over open ocean. Scurvy was a huge problem for Earth‚Äôs sailors and only really solved with lemons, limes and Sauerkraut. Just get rid of those foods and you should be fine. [Answer] ## Here Be Dragons For one reason or another (maybe not having an ice age), the sea life is... large. Very large. Whales are the size of large boats and armored. Their predators (think Mosasaurus from Jurassic World) have beaks capable of crushing that armor. They roam all coastal seas and boats get bitten in half before the Mosasaurus discovers there are only tiny snacks inside. So humans use boats on rivers all the time, but get anywhere near the sea and it's just too dangerous. Every generation some foolhardy adventurers take a boat out to open sea and get themselves killed in front of the townsfolk just to remind the rest that it's still a really bad idea. The aquatic predators can be of any type you like of course, but since they're still in the middle of an evolutionary arms race with the other huge sea life, they should be huge and mostly immune to anything humans can come up with. [Answer] If you have no sea fishery, because all oceans are infested with poisonous jellyfish or something, that would keep people away from the sea. [Answer] As you can change geography, you could make the sea full or sharp and point rocks, and add that is possible to change the weather, make it in a way that the cluster of the continents made significant changes in the atmosphere, as the Bermuda triangle, which resulted in strong storms at deep sea, making the previous detail even more dangerous. But going a bit further, if you agree, its possible to make the geography of deep sea being composed of mainly volcanic like structures, which could heat up the water at dangerous levels to human life. [Answer] Eliminate boat-focused transportation in your world the same way that we eliminate unicycle-focused transportation in ours. Sure, unicycles exist, but they're a novelty. Whatever you're using a unicycle to do, there's a better, easier way to do it. There's no real reason to use one as a primary transportation device. > > On an Earth-like planet with clustered continents and large oceans, > like Pangaea, the easiest method of travel would be boats. > > > Is it, though? If your land mass is clustered and your oceans massive, there doesn't seem to be any reason to build ships capable of traversing the ocean. Where exactly would you be going? Crossing the ocean in a ship is just a really long, dangerous, difficult way of traveling to the other side of your continent. Somebody might do it once for the glory, but it will never be seen as a practical mode of transport. The only remaining use cases for your ocean would be for fishing, or for shuttling people/cargo up and down the coast. Eliminating the first is easy: you have ample sources of fish available inland, and the only fish in your ocean worth eating are significantly harder to locate and catch. Building ships and going out to sea to catch fish is such a terrible return-on-investment that it's pointless. To ensure ships aren't used to move cargo from port to port, ensure your world has much easier ways to get stuff from point A to point B. Perhaps there's a vast system of navigable lakes and rivers that meet your transportation needs via riverboats and barges while being safer and more predictable than ocean travel. Add a few canals and you can have a rather extensive system of inland waterways (example, the [Intracoastal Waterway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intracoastal_Waterway) in the US stretches 3000 miles from Boston to the southern tip of Texas). Having population centers towards the center of the continent and farther from the coast helps your case as well, as the extra work required to haul cargo back and forth to the coast might be greater than what's require to ship it overland. You can add navigational hazards to the oceans to further reduce the attractiveness of ocean shipping. Reefs and rocks can make certain areas impassable. Natural ocean currents and trade winds can be oriented in the wrong direction, or could pull ships out to sea (similar to how it's harder to sail from Europe to South Africa by following the coastline than it is to cross the ocean to Brazil and then cross all the way back). If ocean transport is significantly more difficult than using inland waterways or transporting things overland, then people aren't going to bother building oceangoing ships. Your port cities and shipping centers will naturally develop on rivers and trail crossroads instead of coastal areas. [Answer] You could design your world around a specific type of weather which would result in frequent or permanent high pressure areas over oceans or specific parts of it. Combined with volcanic activity, this could lead to gases which disperse oxygen accumulating in pockets over vast swathes of ocean. This would make travel in these areas impossible for a civilization with the technology level you mentioned. Signs of these deadly areas are quite easy to spot (no animals, smell, etc) but the areas themselves are hard to overcome. However, I am not sure of the hard science behind the feasibility. While the premise, in my opinion, is sound, the gases might disperse into the sea water over time. It would also mean having a sustained level of volcanism below sea level which might have other side effects such as drifting continents. However, it could also be a story element in which changes to the weather conditions or volcanic activity could easily open up sea routes. [Answer] Your world could have had a big asteroid crash into the ocean and cause the shore around the world to be toxic. Or maybe you just have different chemical properties that happen when fresh water mixes with the type of water in your seas which causes a big toxic area bordering all the oceans that is stinky and poisonous. So there would be organisms, large and small and bacterial processes in that area that stink really, really bad. Humans just stay away because of the stink. They don't even travel within 10 miles of the ocean. Most of them don't even know there are oceans, they just know there are areas that stink so bad. Only people who have bad olfactory glands have ever dared venture near the sea. :) But the air is actually poisonous so those who didn't smell it die before they realize it's too late. It isn't just the stink, but the air around it is poisonous, like sulfurous or something. You could make it so that the shoreline has organisms that grow with this toxicity or you could make the rocks interact with something in the water that causes this toxicity, but really it's just the shore that's bad, so if humans were able to fly over the shore they'd eventually get past the stinky/poisonous area and maybe reach a normal non-toxic ocean which contributes to normal non-toxic weather patterns, but the wide areas bordering the shoreline are so bad they never go to the ocean. [Answer] Simple: The trees of the planet have dense wood to protect them from harsh conditions and insect attacks. However, their density means that while they can definitely be used for construction, making boats out of them is a bad idea. Or the wood is too waterproof for a boat to balance, and would thus make it capsize as soon as it hit the water. [Answer] Frequent invariably fatal phenomena - eg 1. Kraken / Sea Monsters - large, unpredictable, undefeatable, ever vigilant, always fatal. (These MAY exist on earth currently but, if so, they are very stealthy and rapid in attack and invariable fatal :-). ) 2. Frequent rogue waves - again unpredictable and immense and invariably fatal. These occur on earth very occasionally and very occasionally sink even large liners. 3. Your choice ... If the frequency of either of these was somewhat greater than on earth (much greater for Kraken :-) ) and if they were invariably catastrophic for boats of any sensibly achievable size then boats above that size would not evolve. Boats well above "sensible size" may be built as a trial, but if these always met with disaster the attempts would be 'discouraged'. ]
[Question] [ Consider a Mars base, circa the 2040s. A joint NASA and SpaceX mission proved successful in the 2030s, and now a real colony is starting to develop. SpaceX has brought a good number of people to the red planet, and now other companies like Relativity are starting Mars missions. Other space agencies, particularly the ESA and JAXA, are sending people to Mars. The start of a colony is doing well, working to become self sufficient. Then disaster strikes. Some event on Earth sets the Martians adrift so to speak. They now have to fare for themselves, at least for a number of years, with no hope of resupply from Earth. So, all that out of the way, what is the most realistic way this scenario occurs? Obviously I could do it the quick and dirty way, Earth is wiped out by an asteroid impact, but considering robust NASA tracking of such lethal asteroids, I find it hard to believe they'd miss one that big. My current route is a war with China, in which supplying the Martian colony is rather low on the list of priorities, and all resources need to be devoted to the war effort. I do not like this solution though, as I think that a war with China at that point feels a bit like applying current events to something far down the line when it may not be realistic. I also feel like NASA would find some way to get the people on Mars assistance during the duration of the war. Edit: Due to numerous answers depicting vast sweeping changes impossible in the next two decades, I am apt to remind you of the date in bold: circa 2040s. [Answer] > > My current route is a war with China, in which supplying the Martian colony is rather low on the list of priorities, and all resources need to be devoted to the war effort. I do not like this solution though, as I think that a war with China at that point feels a bit like applying current events to something far down the line when it may not be realistic. I also feel like NASA would find some way to get the people on Mars assistance during the duration of the war. > > > Your "War with China" (or other country) approach works - just not exclusively for the reasons you suggest. Delivering supplies to Mars involves launching a rocket, coincidentally so does delivering nuclear weapons to one's enemies. Which is why countries continue to develop rockets to [destroy other rockets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-500_missile_system) Were the US and China engaged in open hostilities it's not a big reach to suggest that any rocket the US launched could be seen by China as a potential nuke and therefore be intercepted. You can't get supplies to your Martian colony if your war opponents are targeting and destroying every rocket you launch. > > Earth is wiped out by an asteroid impact, but considering robust NASA tracking of such lethal asteroids, I find it hard to believe they'd miss one that big. > > > If you prefer a more natural disaster-type route then alternatively you could have Earth experience a large geomagnetic storm courtesy of a large solar flare and coronal mass ejection. Something similar to the [Carrington Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event) in a heavily electronic-dependent world such as have today (or in say 20 years time) would cause massive disruption and damage to electronic kit all over the world, and in orbit too. While science is improving on predicting these solar flares there's still not a great deal of warning available and there's also nothing we can do to stop them (no matter how many times we send Bruce Willis into the sun) and given the variability in the size of such events you can almost have it be as serious or minor as suits. [Answer] Kessler Syndrome The US/NATO military relies HEAVILY on satellites, in ways even their near-peer competitors (like China) do not. China's specific plan to combat this advantage is to blow US satellites out of the sky in the event of war between the two powers. China is also notoriously unconcerned about collateral damage in space. So it'll be messy. Therefor it's fairly obvious to people "in the know" that any sort of armed conflict between the US and China will result in china attacking US Spy/communications sats, which will leave tons of debris in orbit. That debris may trigger Kessler Syndrome, which basically results in no launches being possible due to orbital debris covering the entire planet for a given length of time. There's even a school of thought that thinks China might intentionally trigger Kessler syndrome on the grounds that it'd hurt the West (broadly speaking) more than China! (Though personally I doubt that's official CCP policy.) Depending on the details of your war this could be bad enough to effectively end terran spaceflight, or be a relatively "contained" event where everyone knows the debris will de-orbit/be cleaned up sufficiently to allow launches to resume within any convenient-to-the-plot window of time. [Answer] Last year, the COVID-19 pandemic caused severe supply disruptions for Arctic research expeditions. If I'm reading [this article](https://www.kazu.org/local/2020-06-12/how-covid-19-has-compromised-the-largest-central-arctic-expedition-in-history) right, at least one team had every single resupply trip cancelled! (See the comments for more details, and a discussion of possible tension with [this documentary](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/arctic-drift/).) > > Ships from across the world that were scheduled to make journeys to the Arctic to exchange crews and drop off supplies cancelled their trips. The scientific crew in the Arctic at the time were forced to stay two months longer than originally planned. > > > And in the end no ship was able to make the journey north. In May, scientists finally left the Arctic on the same ship that had been their hotel and laboratory since the beginning, the Polarstern. That ship was supposed to stay in the Arctic for the entire expedition. > > > Even resupply trips to Canadian Arctic towns took [tremendous effort](https://maritime-executive.com/editorials/delivering-the-goods-to-the-canadian-arctic-in-a-pandemic) to carry out safely. COVID-19 is awful, but it's easy to imagine things much, much worse. A worldwide outbreak of the wrong disease could make crewed or even uncrewed resupply trips unacceptably dangerous to the colonists, the resupply crew, or both. Consider, for example, an [airborne fungus](https://www.cdc.gov/infectioncontrol/guidelines/environmental/background/air.html#table2) that can lie latent in the lungs for up to four months before erupting into an active infection, which starts with a week or more of asymptomatic transmission, and ends with death in 25% of cases. In addition to wafting from person to person, its spores can settle on surfaces indefinitely before being kicked back into the air. Various combinations of cleaning techniques seem to help reduce its spread, but no practical procedure has been shown to decontaminate air or surfaces with high confidence. If that disease went pandemic, it would be very hard to put together supply packages that colonists could safely bring into their living areas. That would cut off delivery of food, medicine, agricultural inputs, materials for indoor construction, and air-monitoring equipment to detect the fungus. It could even be risky to send equipment that stays outdoors. The colonists would have to touch the equipment to use or maintain it, and then they'd re-enter the living area, using procedures that weren't designed to keep out anything finer or more dangerous than Martian regolith. If the spores turned out to survive well on regolith, they could make the areas around equipment drops untrustworthy for years to come. The colonists' tolerance for infection risk would be extremely low, because the consequences of an outbreak would be disastrous. If spores got into the living area, they could spread through many rooms before the colonists noticed them. Because of the disease's infection dynamics, an outbreak could incapacitate or kill many colonists over a short period with little warning, disrupting day-to-day survival operations. A supply cutoff would make life very hard for the colonists, but an outbreak could wipe the colony off the map, and possibly turn it into a long-term biohazardous graveyard. As the colonists and their support teams on Earth race to design and implement a safe resupply system, they'll both be hobbled by grave immediate threats. If the scale of the pandemic only becomes apparent in the months before a major resupply [launch window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_window#/media/File:Mars_distance_from_Earth.svg), a whole wave of deliveries will have to be cancelled, and the colonists will be scrambling to prepare. Meanwhile, the people on Earth will need most of their resources to face the medical, logistical, financial, political, and emotional horrors of the pandemic, from national governments down to individual support employees. It could take a year or more just to learn enough about the fungus for meaningful risk estimation, another year for design and testing, and who knows how long to scrape together the labor, materials, and political will for construction and launch? Waiting for a good launch period will take even longer; launching from a bad window will cost even more. [Answer] ## Nurdles [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fuqzY.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fuqzY.jpg) The world has finally cracked down on Iran's alleged dreams of being able to make nuclear missiles, and begins an all-out bombing campaign. They watch in horror as the Iranians respond by launching a rocket in defiance that they are unable to blast out of the air ... but it turns out to simply be a launch to orbit, demonstrating what might have been a perfectly valid commercial option for launching satellites. Then their own satellites start going off line one by one. It turns out the rocket, launched on a policy of if we can't have space then you can't either, was filled with nurdles - little bits of plastic. The ones above are illustrated in the image linked from [an article in the Courier (Britain)](https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/business-environment/environment/492441/nurdle-environmental-menace-spotted-forth-coastline/), but they're Man's answer to beach sand and you can find similar articles from all over the world. In the seas of space, however, what they are is a fast-moving radar-invisible plague of countless millions of tiny bullets that make the [Kessler syndrome](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-space-junk-and-why-is-it-a-problem.html) look like a walk in the park. I could have copied the U.S. plan [West Ford](https://www.wired.com/2013/08/project-west-ford/) more precisely, in which half a billion pieces of copper wire were shown to be capable of destroying space travel if the Soviets dominated it militarily. (They were put in low orbit that time, so this was only a brief threat) But nurdles are everywhere else ... why not here? [Answer] # Massive coronal ejection unlike anything seen before Sometimes the Sun coughs up a lot of mass and it's usually on its rotation plane. It hits us more often than we would like. Usually it just disturbs satellites for a while but scientists say a big one could knock out power stations on Earth. If we get hit by a really large one that is bigger than the one scientists fear, it could take space stations out of commission. A ressuply mission to Mars is too big to be sent from ground in one go. It necessarily involves some space assembly and refueling in Earth orbit. With all space ports gone this is not feasible and it should take some years to build a new one. [Answer] MASSIVE FINANCIAL CRASH What is "the most realistic way" such a scenario could occur is debatable, but here is a highly realistic one: 2044 experiences a sudden and massive financial breakdown as a result of speculation. Professional speculators have invested massively from the faulty belief that the value of stocks, natural resources, cryptocurrencies, housing and more would just keep rising, and small-time investors, urged by their banks, have taken large loans to cash in on these 'surefire' investments. Companies have spend their entire liquidity on stock buybacks to further boost stock prices, leaving no money for R&D or even maintenance. Then, suddenly, the bursting of one of these bubbles leads to a cascade effect where all bubbles burst. Companies, speculators, home owners and retirees all go broke. Mass unemployment follows as the economy grinds to a halt, The public sector, strapped for funds because of an unending series of tax cuts, cannot help all the people suddenly in need of help. As the saying goes, anarchy is only three lost meals away, and people start rioting, plundering stores and farms for food (and toilet paper - never forget toilet paper). Governments try to use the military for crowd control, but soldiers aren't paid, either, and just add to the riots. The richest 0,01%, foreseeing the high likelihood of such an event, use killer robots to defend their well-stocked, fortified mansions and sit back to watch the apocalypse unfold, knowing that they will be in positions to assume control once the dust settles. The dust, however, doesn't settle any time soon. Starvation is followed by pandemics as dead bodies litter the streets, well-armed gangs plunder what they can from people who still have a bit of food left, never mind the death toll. No-one is left to combat forest fires or handle hurricanes, drought or flooding, events that have become far more common as lackluster climate measures have proven insufficient to combat global warming. In the chaos, some nuclear weapons are also set off, for no reason anybody can guess. In this situation, the fates of a few thousand Martian colonists is very far from people's minds. [Answer] A possible scenario is that the resupply missions are planned as minimum-energy launches every 2 years and takes about 7 months. These minimum-energy launch windows occur 780 days apart, about 2 years and 2 month. Sending spacecrafts outside of these windows would take longer time and consume more fuel. Every extra bit of fuel used eats into the payload and your spacecraft would be designed according to this. Assuming that some kind of accident stops the planned resupply mission, it would be about 2 years before the next full supply one can be sent. It might be possible to send some smaller amounts in the meantime but to a great expense. So the mars people last got supply about 1.5 years ago, expecting it to arrive in about 7 months when they find out that they will have to wait almost three years instead. And now, somehow, the next resupply again is canceled. Two more years of awaiting. --- added below to answer --- The problem with a resupply mission does not have to be any world-disaster level stuff. Rockets use risky technology and contains millions of parts, and just perhaps some small thing breaks and disables the mission. You might read up on the Apollo 13 disaster where a small oversight almost killed the astronauts. The base problem was a design change in an electrical circuit, which created a latent problem that occured in Apollo 13. It could have happened in earlier flights. Perhaps the resupply rocket was hit by some stuff dropped in earth orbit, say a screw driver dropped a few years earlier from the space station. [Answer] A change in president New president comes in decides the whole landing on Mars thing is a scam as clearly humans can't breath in a vacuum and thus the whole landing must be filmed on a sound stage somewhere. So he cuts funding to NASA, to give his buddies a tax break so they can own another golf course, and orders continuous and never ending government inquires to find out where this fake Mars base is, tying up NASA for years. Of course people are protesting this and trying to point out the evidence, but he shrugs it off as "people are always protesting about something, first they wanted clean water and clean air and now they want to waste more money sending that clean water and air to Mars instead?" Doesn't help that it turned out all the Mars colonists voted for the other guy in the election. Or that the Mars mission was the cornerstone achievement of the previous president. [Answer] Earth goes silent. Some ideas why were put forth in this question. [The weird case of the unresponsive Earth - why does the Earth stop communicating with Mars?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/127453/the-weird-case-of-the-unresponsive-earth-why-does-the-earth-stop-communicating/127457#127457) But I like the idea of not knowing. Earth just stops answering. My favorite part of the movie [Night of the Comet](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087799/) was before all the zombie stuff, when the heroes hear one radio station is still playing and they go there, only to find it is a robot radio station - still new stuff in 1984. Earth is still transmitting but only automatic things. The Martians do not have big enough telescopes to see down there and so do not know what is happening on the surface. --- At the end of the story, Mars gets a radio transmission. "Hey. What's up, Mars?" Then a chuckle, and nothing more. [Answer] Reaching Mars with resupply-levels of material (not just a crate of potatoes) is on the absolute vanguard of current tech, and given the laws of physics and economics not experiencing a giant upheaval, will stay there pretty much indefinitely. A lot of specific materials, parts, people and facilities are absolutely neccessary to make a resupply run to Mars viable - there is not that many spaceports, rocket factories, hardened chips, ... that it would be inconceivable, or even unlikely, to see the accidental death of a few people, an unrelated crisis pinching some distant supply line, or a mild catasrophe wrecking some important infrastructure set back a space programme for years. The supply rocket fails spectacularly, with no readily apparent cause - a billion dollars down the drain. (Emergency-) Supplies on Mars will last another three years, so the consensus is to thoroughly investigate the failure, revise protocols, and launch at the next window in 2 1/2 years. Turns out the failure was due a Y2K-like thing in the communications module. Redoing the QA for another module will take too long - Solution: switch to another launch vehicle, will launch from Baikonur (they have the only comms that fit to that size and type of vehicle). T minus one year: Oops, Baikonur has to trash their main dish, because it needs some crystals that were only manufactured during the Soviet Union, and stores are running out. No problem, manufacture is being revved up again, will only take two years... Solution (with sweat forming on forehead): Launch two smaller vehicles from Guiana, couple loads in orbit, go to Mars. We did that ten years ago, worked like a charm, didn't it? T minus five months: Oops, that maneuver was on an orbit we cannot currently use due to debris, and the research group that figured out the nitty-gritty ten years ago, and could easily redo their work for another orbit (well, after rewriting most of their code, because that one package turned out to be buggy as hell, and has since been deprecated, and the cloud-platform it ran on has switched gears since) - yeah, those gals all drowned on that boating accident three years ago, remember? No problem, other people are just as smart, and will be easily able to reproduce and test their solution in, say, 6 months? Solution (with medication-enhanced calmness): Launch with emergency-QA'ed comms on original vehicle. T minus one week: Ah, chucks, that incoming weather from Cuba is a little too gusty to already put our rocket on the pad, no worries, the windows stays open for like 14 days, we'll just wait it out. One week later: T minus one week: People, do we really only have that one effing crawler to take the rocket out to pad? And you are telling me a vital hydraulics-line broke? What diameter? Are you kidding me? Ok have one hand-knit from unicorn hair, if needs be - there's a one-billion dollar mission waiting on that line - what? two weeks? ...Etc... Point being that most space mission have one payload, five approximately applicable vehicle-types, one launch facility per type, .... the redundancy is really small because of cost. Everything is super specific, super expensive, super rare, so it pains to keep more than a few of it in stock. There is less than ten chip factories on earth, that could produce certain chips ubiquitous in all the space-equipment, and only two or three are, at any point in time. For cinematic reasons, i would have the container with the needed goods be stuck on a bottom-rung container on a ship grounded in the Suez Canal... [Answer] > > Obviously I could do it the quick and dirty way, Earth is wiped out by > an asteroid impact, but considering robust NASA tracking of such > lethal asteroids, I find it hard to believe they'd miss one that big. > > > The way NASA and other agencies detect space rocks is with a couple of things: * Radar; the object 'close-in' on every orbit around the sun and they can predict its future orbits (how most are caught) * Visibility; the objects transfer in front of a visible object and cast a 'shadow'. But as was shown with the Oumuamua asteroid, its tough to spot objects coming into our solar system quickly. > > When it was first observed, it was about 33 million km (21 million mi; 0.22 AU) from Earth (about 85 times as far away as the Moon), and already heading away from the Sun. > > > So theoretically it's possible to not detect an inbound asteroid from outside our solar system until it's too late. Additions (thanks to @Matija Nalis): Example of why we cant detect it: <https://www.sciencenatures.com/2021/10/a-huge-asteroid-almost-hit-earth-but.html> How we wouldnt be able to do anything to prevent it: <https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-s-emergency-simulation-reveals-why-we-may-not-be-able-to-stop-an-asteroid-impact> [Answer] It takes 21 minutes for light to travel from Earth to Mars. It would take humans about a year to travel to Mars. Frankly, the proper question should be what events would establish earths support for a mars base? The first Mars colonists are unlikely to ever return to Earth. If they sent an urgent message, it would take almost an hour just to get a response. If they needed supplies from Earth, that would take about a year to get. Those guys should plan on being pretty self-sufficient and not needing a lot of stuff from Earth. [Answer] Yellowstone Eruption. Yellowstone is a big vulcano, if errupt then we will have crisis. Dust in atmosphere prevent starts, then will be hunger and breaks in many countries. You can use it to give small or big gap in flights, if want then that can be 5 yeras, if want then can use this as civilisation collapse for 1000 years or more. [Answer] # Nobody likes the martians anyway! They're always up there on their red planet, feeling smugly superior, looking down their noses at us earthlings on our polluted and overpopulated planet. They're a drain on taxpayer money, and we've had enough of it. Let the martians fend for themselves! All sorts of things could turn the people of earth away from those on mars: * They waste a lot of money. Perhaps due to something like overpopulation or automation/AI taking over jobs, there's mass homelessness or unemployment. People feel that the money should be spent on earth, rather than sent to mars. * The martians dislike people back home. Maybe after a few years or decades of freedom, they publically rebuke the countries or corporations that sent them there, discouraging them from continuing to fund the project. * Broken promises. The mars crew was supposed to do research, but for some reason, they're unable to. Maybe they just get lazy. Maybe they end up fighting, split into factions, and divide up the equipment. Someone goes rogue and hits the centrifuge with a baseball bat. That sort of thing. None of these would typically be likely to cause a government/company to leave them stranded on mars alone, but perhaps there are other factors back on planet earth that make it worse. Maybe a group overthrows a major government due to widespread corruption or something, and they take the opportunity to relieve the taxpayers of the burden (or the martians are just forgotten about, necessary supply chains are destroyed, etc.). [Answer] ## unspecified calamity In my story idea, Mars bases simply stopped hearing from Earth. It happened generations ago now, so is referred to in vague terms. It's just a trope to explain why the colonies are barely self-sufficient and don't get any outside help. They can look at Earth and its Moon through their telescopes and remark about how the continents were blackened in Grandfather's day but are looking healthy green with seasonal changes now; how patches are artificial lighting can be seen but nothing like how it reportedly looked during the Space Age. Really, the only specific thing is how it starts. Once things get bad, it will snowball and there will be wars, famine, and pestilence. Even the people in the Bronze Age [knew that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse). Whatever the specific "spark" that started it, though, it can be credited ultimately to overpopulation. [Answer] A much simple answer is changing political priorities and changing corporate priorities. Just look what with the ISS- the US retired the Space Shuttle fleet and didn't anything ready to go so they paid the Russians to resupply them. If the Russians had not been accept a reasonable resupply contract and ISS being close (and didn't have their own astronauts onboard- there was change the Russians could have totally killed their own ) there is good chance supply on the ISS might have cut to barebones. Mars so much further away people won't be strongly reminded that there are Martians to support- the US and corporate interests decide let's farm asteroids or set space stations- Mars has to be somewhat sufficient anyway. [Answer] Earth goes the Empire way [1], losing its capability to build rockets. This can be explained with a war that destroys industries supplying space or with a move away from science by humanity as a whole, going back to the medieval way. With time, the old rockets crash and burn and the space capability shrinks, until it becomes non-existent. * [1] Empire is a reference to the Empire playing a part in Asimov's book series Foundation. The Empire in the book loses the capability to build reactors, with the union decaying over time. ]
[Question] [ Especially when they don't have dangling private bits like humans do. This seems to be a thing with almost all depictions of humanoid lizard people, that and wristbands like in the photo below. Why is that? [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HtPGL.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HtPGL.png) [Answer] Pockets! You may not have dangly bits, or bits that you feel you need to cover. You may even be scaly but warm blooded and don't really need to conserve heat. But if you are smart enough to create and carry weapons, you probably have other things you want to carry around, but understand that you can't carry those 4 neat seashells and that human skull you want to drink stuff out of and your club all at the same time. Also, gripping your stuff means you can't have your claws out ready to gut those nasty humans. So, you have garments/harnesses/belts to help you carry stuff. With pockets to keep stuff from flopping about. Lets use the term 'clothing' very loosely here. It can be a belt, harness, vest, apron, or even stretchy purple Hulk pants. As long as you can attach something to the clothing to carry it, or actually put something in an attached pouch or pocket. With this, you do not need to carry things in you hands. In addition, heavier things can be carried and the weight of the objects gets distributed across the body according to the design of the clothes. A belt distributes the weight across the hips. A vest or backpack spreads the weight across the shoulders and back. This allows you to carry more weight than one could just by grabbing it and carrying by hand. Just think about a carpenters tool belt or a soldiers Rucksack to get the idea. [Answer] Because exposing your wrist is SHAMEFUL! You CAD! How dare you despoil our thoughts with your depraved talk of... of... gasp! Exposed Naked Wrists!? In Public!? I'm reporting you to the Brood Chamber Matron, Immediately! # Different cultures have different mores. How much more different must the mores of different species be? Human example: Tribal adult females of the Yanomami routinely walk around in public wearing no clothing. But if a woman should show herself without her facial sticks, she is shamed and in possible mortal peril from the village elders. NSFW warning: if you google this tribe, your western sensibilities may get knotted. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CdoTg.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CdoTg.jpg) [Answer] # The same reason human women wear clothes Human women don't have "dangly bits" either, but they still have parts to hide. So lizardmen wear clothes because nobody wants their cloaca just hanging out for the world to see. [Answer] How do you know that the lizardpeople in the picture don't have free-hanging equipment? Lizardfolk don't exist\, they are complete works of fiction. There is no law that states, "If ye includeth lizardfolk in thine media, verily, their genitalia must be reptilian in nature". Every depiction of a lizardperson is how the creator envisioned them, and typically, they're anthropomorphized humans which means they're humans with reptilian attributes (not the other way around). \ If you're uncertain on this point, ask your nearest government representative: they'll be sure to give you an accurate answer on this [Answer] For the Same Reasons Humans Do Lizardfolk, cold blooded or not (that tends to flip between settings) would still want clothing for thermal insulation. I'm going to go for a cold-blooded approach, but this is true for lizardfolk in general. In cold weather furs et al would be a requirement to keep warm, which would be very important in a cold-blooded species where warmth=agility/alertness to a certain extent. It wouldn't be as efficient as it is for us humans, because we radiate heat as a matter of course, but it'd still be better than wandering around naked! I'd imagine winter/arctic lizardmen spending their mornings around the fire largely naked to absorb as much heat as possible, then adding insulation and going about their day. In a hot environment they would wear flowing garments like Bedouins do to help keep cool, as they have no ability to sweat like humans. Of course if they evolved from desert-dwelling reptiles they may not need quite as much covering as the Bedouins do. If they were out and about at night however I could see them wearing something similar to our arctic lizards, since deserts gets surprisingly chilly. Anything temperate/seasonal would have the traditional movement from more to less clothes and back again seen everywhere. Though there may be a stylistic choice to wear things that are easily removeable. I'm imagining something like a dress, wherein the top could peel off. Or a jumpsuit that can be unzipped around the waist. That would let your lizardfolk warm up at will without forcing them to either discard or hand-carry whatever clothes they wore when it was colder. Then of course you can't discount cultural/religious/biological reasons for doing it. Maybe they all wear hats because they have crests that raise/change color when they get aroused/angry/sick/hungry/whatever, and it becomes poor manners to display that to others in public. Maybe a long tail the epitome of sexy, so they wear tail coverings to make their tails look thicker/longer. The tail coverings become more and more elaborate, and the belt that used to hold them on turns into suspenders/shirts/clothing in general as a status symbol. Or maybe it sticks to just tails. Maybe the mid-scales are considered religiously unclean, and thus should be hidden from view. The social possibilities are endless! That's what I got for main body coverings. Gloves and shoes would probably be a bit less common, as lizard claws/feet are more durable than human ones. But boots in cold/wet weather or over hazardous ground and gloves for very hot/cold object handling would be common enough. [Answer] Those are not clothes. Lizard people shed skin just like snakes in our own world. When they do, parts of the old skin accumulate around the waist. You can even tell their age by the length of the loincloth. The longer it is, the older the lizard. [Answer] # Religion When the high priest says gird your loins and bind your wrists, you do it. Because even if your god or gods don't actually care, the priest believes they do. And she has the power to make your life uncomfortable if you disobey. Not just by making you a societal outcast, but by actually calling down divine fire or plagues of insects. And that's assuming that the gods don't actually care. If they do care, things could be a lot worse. # Protection Just because you don't have dangly bits, doesn't mean you want sand or insects getting into the bits you do have. Also the concept of armor mentioned by others. # Multiculturalism Sure, you don't need the towel strapped around your waist. But all the squishy races seem to. You might not get along with Humans, but your Goblin and Orc trading partners also wear that stuff. And it makes them more comfortable when you wear it, too. # Comfort Pants are a built in cushion. Maybe not a full pillow, but they still make it slightly more pleasant sitting on a random rock or stump. # Tradition Your people wear clothing. They have done so since before any surviving records. Maybe once, long ago, it was due to an edict of the gods or to make your neighbors more comfortable. But now? Now it is just how things are done. [Answer] They don't have Dangly Bits. But they have Pointy Bits. Lizard bros are more cold-blooded than human bros. So they need to wear more clothes to stay warm. The problem is they cannot wear human-style clothes due to their pointy bits. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RwBxK.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RwBxK.png) It's impossible to design a pull-over garment that won't get torn to shreds. It's slightly easier to design a front-closing garment, but you need to custom make it for the pattern of spikes on each individual. That's expensive and means only that individual can wear it. Much easier to have several large pieces of fabric that can be worn differently depending on the individual. They also wear bracers, belts and chokers to anchor the garment and stop it flying away. This style of clothes is awkward to fight in. So when the time comes to fight they throw the fabric away but keep their bracers/chokers/belt. If you zoom out in the picture you will see a big pile of fabric behind each of the lizards. [Answer] Because they all would look the same otherwise All lizardfolk come from a recent evolutive bottleneck (when there were only some dozens breeding pairs in the whole world) and live in very tight familiar clans, so that genetically all of them are very similar\* and it is very difficult to tell one from the other. In the middle of a battle it would be almost impossible for a group of them to understand who is who, and in particular for the chief to give orders to the other tribesmen (tribeslizards), so they have the idea to wear different outfits, in order to quickly recognize every one. \NB: a small genetical variance doesn't necessarily imply the phenotypes (outer appearances) to be almost identical, but we can say that for the lizardfolk this is the case. [Answer] Look at the medieval knights of yore in [plate armor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_armour). They wore a full set of plate male covering their bodies, while also wearing a set of chain mail. A sheet of metal can protect against a lot of damage, but once pierced, it's practically useless. Having a set of chain mail behind it to catch incoming blades greatly helps. The scales of the lizard people are probably pretty strong; however if you look closely at their backs and arms, the scales are articulate. When bent at certain angles, various weak points are exposed to attackers. Holding onto a sword or anything probably flares up the scales on the lizard-folk's wrists, so something to keep something sharp from getting in there and disabling them would be wise. They do have claws, but then again, can those claws damage plate armor? If a claw breaks, can it be regrown fast enough to continue the battle? Take a look at the half orc that the lizard-folk are fighting. There's a good chance that scale mail they're wearing is a full shirt of it underneath the plate armor. The plate provides good protection while also preventing the scales from exposing weak points in the armor. When fighting someone with a whip or rope, we tend to shield ourselves with our arms. Without wristband covering their scales, the opponent could wrap the weapon around the arm and then yank it really hard; which would bend the scales or rip them out of the arm. The thought of tearing off or bending back one of my fingernails causes me pain, so it would probably hurt a lizard-folk pretty badly too. [Answer] Heating is not the only reason we are wearing clothes, for instance, other important function our underwear has is an additional protection against dirt, fungi, bacterial infections. During Middle Ages adoption of undergarment can be statistically connected with lower rates of specific infections. Whatever imaginary anatomy of lizard people would be, it is safe to assume that fundamental principals of protection of specific body parts can be applicable to them as well. [Answer] For the armguards: WAR* Lizards don't use shields, their fighting style just isn't up for it. But they still want to be able to block blows, and their natural scales aren't actually that good, so what do they do? They add a layer of hardened leather on top of their wrists, so they can fight even more aggressively without worrying for loosing their arm. Some even add spikes onto the armguard, since its a place where few lizardfolk grow them naturally [Answer] I have one thing to say. Religion. Now, as far as I know, lizardfolk are somewhat in the early copper age, just figuring out metalworking. So, I imagine they would have some sort of religious customs that require them to wear those wristbands and loincloths, and lizardfolk that have a higher religious standing wear fancier, more high quality wristbands and loincloths. ]
[Question] [ What Is The Problem? In [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/197256/how-would-people-in-medieval-times-react-to-the-clothes-worn-by-a-time-traveler?rq=1), a woman from the modern age is brought into the medieval era, which is problematic because what we consider fashionable today is incredibly immodest. In my story, I have a similar problem; teenagers (13-19-year-olds) being brought into a medieval world through a video game. Or, to make things clearer, my problem is that my characters will be transformed into replicas of their characters, and the clothes they're wearing upon arrival, as well as the clothes they can buy, will inadvertently come to reflect that (ie. have inherent fanservice in their designs). There are two ways to deal with this; 1, simply work from that point and deal with it in-story, or 2, work out logical reasons for adventurers wearing fanservice-y outfits. This question is to see if 2 is feasible, if immodest adventurers can be explained, because my [previous attempt](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/207135/clothing-with-magic-in-mind) failed. (NOTE: This question is different from the previous; the previous concerned how magic would affect clothing design and this one concerns why adventurers and mages would wear immodest clothing.) Restated, my question is, Why Would Mages And Adventurers Wear Impractical Clothing? or in other words, what in-world reason would explain a character wearing impractical clothing? Clarification: By 'impractical,' I mean something like the 'chainmail bikini' trope. Practical for attracting the opposite gender, but otherwise almost totally impractical. I am aware that fashion choices are determined by a mix of factors (need, taste, availability) and the best answer will account for those factors to determine why the groups specified above would wear impractical clothing anyway. Please Note: I am aware there are some questions that deal with similar premises, though they concern [witches](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/143920/how-can-i-protect-witches-in-combat-who-wear-limited-clothing) and [superheroes](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/116329/why-would-female-superheroes-wear-tight-revealing-costumes/116403#116403) instead. Please feel free to use these for inspiration if needed. Lastly, do not assume a one-sided scenario where women are the only ones suffering; please instead assume a scenario like in Genshin Impact, where fanservice is more or less equal between genders. Reference: My Reasoning So Far Here are some possible, semi-practical reasons for the aforementioned groups (mages and adventurers) wearing revealing clothing that I thought up. Feel free to elaborate or ignore these points when answering the question. * Less clothes, less heat * Skimpier clothing should (but may not) be less costly to repair and replace throughout one's career * Misconception (ie. the idea that even normal clothing can and does interfere with magic) * To attract the opposite sex (goes without saying, but applies even more to adventurers and mages) * Revealing clothing may not necessarily show more skin, and may actually be thick enough to offer some protection * Adventurers can become insanely durable (ie. strong enough to tank hits from a warhammer or ballista) as they 'Level Up,' potentially eliminating their need for armor and making protective clothing a non-issue Thank you for your input, I truly appreciate it! [Answer] ## Magic is Expensive and Restrictive The simplest reason to handwave why people would wear impractical or revealing clothing is because it is just too damn expensive otherwise. Most adventurers and mages are going to be poor, especially when they first start their career, and so they are going to be looking to cut costs as much as possible while maximizing the benefits. Working backwards, this means that there has to be something about magical items that make them too expensive to afford while also covering as much of the body as a normal set of clothes. The two options I see for that is that only rare materials can be enchanted, or the actual enchanting process becomes harder based on the surface area of the thing being enchanted. For the first option you can either choose normal materials and make them rarer, such as iron or steel being less common in the fantasy world than ours, or go with more "naturally" magical materials like dragonhide and adamantine. Either way, the rarity of the material means that a full suit of plate armor would cost a small fortune but a chainmail bikini could be affordable by a mid-tier adventurer. The second option is making magic harder based on the size/amount of material. You can get as in-depth with this as you feel like but the main idea is that the effort to enchant something increases as the size increases, and not in linear progression. Since we are talking clothes surface area is probably the issue. That way a pair of short-shorts or a mini-skirt might be possible for an average mage to enchant, but a full pair of pants is just too much surface area for most mages to handle. Both of the above options don't necessarily preclude more modest attire being enchanted, it just means that anyone wearing them is incredibly rich and/or powerful. A set of full-plate armor made of enchanted dragonhide would be the kind of ancient heirloom that a kingdom would keep locked in a vault unless absolutely necessary. And any mage able to enchant a full neck-to-floor robe would be considered an absolute master of their craft. Of course, you still need to explain why adventurers are willing to wear revealing clothes only, instead of something like a shirt and pants with a magical bikini on top. That depends a lot more on how the magic works in your setting, but my very first thought would be something like needing skin contact to work (hence everything being tight fitting), and maybe some issue with the items losing power if covered up for long periods of time (to prevent magic underwear under sensible pants). [Answer] Magic If an item is enchanted to protect you, it really doesn't matter what it's made of. Now if it's make up doesn't matter as far as protection goes, it might as well make you look good. Eventually magic armour becomes like the bright colours on a poison arrow frog. The more skimpy and garish the armour, the better the enchantment on it must be thus your chain mail bikini clearly shows the wearer is extremely well protected and clearly a dangerous warrior [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DNla3.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DNla3.jpg) In the book Curse of the Azure Bonds, Alias hates the chain mail thinking it's stupid having a split down the middle as the perfect spot in insert a sword but she knows it's heavily enchanted and better armour than full platemail. [Answer] Adventurers are mercenaries; mercenaries need to advertise. In Renaissance Europe, mercenary armies were common. These troops were often garishly bedecked, such as the famous Landsknechts, who wore [bright colors, gaudy patterns, and fashionable materials](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Geschichte_des_Kost%C3%BCms_%281905%29_%2814761439186%29.jpg). The ostentation of these units served several purposes: it gave the troops a convenient way to carry their wealth, and advertised that wealth to potential employers. ("I fight enough and earn enough pay to wear this!") It also raised the morale of the troops by ensuring their allies stand out on the battlefield. Adventurers would have much the same desire to see and be seen: by allies, by rivals, and by employers. Garish, fabulous, ostentatious, expensive, and above all memorable clothing is a major way to push your "brand" in a world that doesn't have periodicals or social media to advertise on. [Answer] There is a reason why some witches cast spells while dancing naked under moonlight. Sometimes mana is like beta radiation, unable to penetrate deeply into one's body if they are wearing bulky clothing. Even if you are not a mage, using those mad sword skills or doing anime like acrobatics will still cost you mana. You recharge by absorbing ambient mana, and the more clothing you wear, the slower you recharge. Simce it is very easy to enchant a piece of cloth for magical shielding, a bikini mail becomes as effective as full plate at stopping arrows. Since it will grant extra mobility, it is preferrable. --- Or the world is just freaking hot, you know. There is a reason people wear less clothing in tropical places than in cold ones. [Answer] Those are the available clothes. In the real world I can make clothes out of rubber dinosaurs or woven grass or used tires (which make fine shorts) and generally be the Style Master I was born to be. In a video game try as I might I can do none of those things. In-game clothes I can wear are made available to me as clothes, and even though I can kill people, I cannot strip the clothes off of the people I kill and put them on - not even the sweet hat which was why I killed him. Clothes available to me are those made available by the game and maybe not even that - in many games I cannot change my clothes or appearance at all. Sometimes I have no clothes, but appear as a little gun. In no games do I ever have to use the bathroom unless that is what the little gun is doing. Pew pew! Yes. Your medieval world is still circumscribed by game rules of what is and is not possible. In this world your characters appear in the clothes they have. Possibly they cannot take them off. They don't need to take them off because they do not have to go to the bathroom and try as they might they do not get dirty and their hair stays fantastic. It is for the best that they do not take off their clothes or even reach inside because they would discover that they have no genitals. [Answer] Screw pretenses, make God horny Why are chain mail bikinis so good? Because God will magically deflect projectiles from you if you wear it. All the magical clothes designs that a skimpy have their power boosted, and all covering designs have their power reduced, or might just fall apart. [Answer] Practicality I'm going to go the completely opposite direction and declare that the fan-servicy armor is the more practical attire. Adventurers spend a huge amount of time getting from point A to point B. Delving into caves, climbing ropes, no A/C in the taverns. Oh and the typical backpack of random equipment. At some point you want to remove everything non-essential to your profession. Especially hot metal after it's been in the sun for a few hours of marching. In the past there were people who used bucklers rather than full tower shields. Why not go a step further and remove the un-necessary bits? Humans have a rib cage that's fairly servicable when it comes to preventing slashes/stabs from getting to those internal organs. Thus, all you really need is a codpiece, gloves, shoes and a helmet. [Answer] ## It works specifically because it is a video game > > I have a similar problem; teenagers (13-19-year-olds) being brought into a medieval world through a video game. > > > You characters did not go into the actual medieval period, but a videogame loosely based off of the medieval period. This makes a huge difference. Videogames do not actually deal or prevent damage based on physics, but based on stat blocks; so, if your hero has a [helmet of 99% psychic protection](https://youtu.be/ECk_Yn1fHS8) or the [female version of the breastplate of Argon](https://youtu.be/-vI5tdORhC0) then [what it looks like has nothing to do with how well it preforms](https://youtu.be/obAd0zAFMTI). Vanity armor is effective literally for no other reason than because the simulated reality your hero has delved into says it is. [Answer] # Fanservice pays Assuming that your characters are trapped inside the game, i.e., that the world is still a video game of some sort, then you can add a mechanic whereby the characters benefit from fan appreciation. This could be something overt, like the gifts bestowed by fans in the "Hunger Games", or a more general level-like effect. Of course, this means that fans need to be watching or participating in some way for some reason -- maybe a big change to your story line, but maybe a good one. [Answer] Fashion, pure and simple. (Which includes the idea of modesty.) You can look at pictures of outdoor clothing from almost any era, and see that it appears pretty impractical to modern eyes. For instance, here are some pictures of people hiking & camping in the 1920s. The men are wearing suits & ties, the women, if they don't wear skirts, wear very baggy pants: <https://witness2fashion.wordpress.com/tag/hikers-1920s/> [Answer] ## To protect their fleshy bits As your characters level up, their muscles develop to the point that the benefits of nakedness eclipse the need for armour. Unfortunately, their nether regions are just as vulnerable as they've ever been. Almost everyone knows a tale of some poor sod of an adventurer who rode into battle naked and lost a tit or a testicle. Even those folk who hate immodesty will give an adventurer a free pass. [Answer] There are many episodes in the life an adventurer will take in, but you will find mostly those three : * Exploration * Battles against big bad monsters * Getting bounties and trading the salvaged goods I'll try to cover those three with the reasons below. I'm not using magic to explain anything, as it would have been quite easy otherwise :p. ## Because a "true" armor is useless for its cost, and camo clothings aren't better either Depending on the kind of rollercoaster of roaster of roosts you will be fighting against, an armor which is normally "efficient" might very well be working against its user if facing the wrong opponent. There are two main cases here : * The opponent can chew on the armor like it's made of bread. It's even worse if they bypass it entirely. Acid, strong maws, flames, you name it. * The opponent moves too fast to attack effectively. Especially if you wear one of those helmet that prevents you from seeing anything on your side. Combine these two situations and you might very well better wear nothing at all, to have better chances at dodging and better chances at hitting something. Regarding camo clothings, you'll see that most monsters relies on their smell and hearing; They catch you long before they see you, and at that point... Being slightly more hidden isn't really relevant anymore. On contrary, if monsters attack a village, in order to give more chances to protect all the villagers, you might as well wear the shiniest outfit to serve as a decoy! ## The armor is a dog-tag and a black-box Adventurers are one of the most likely people to die. To ensure they are paid respects, they wear the whole "armor" to show their identity and their guild, which is registered when they enter it. It also allow to give some consolation gift for any dead parties, and a place amongst the gods for the deceased. Why do they do so, instead of simply painting a symbol on their chestpiece? As told above, monsters are not kind to metal nor pigment you can use. To ensure that people get that you have been chewed on and not another one, people put all their chances in and cover themselves with distinguishable, colorful patterns that will still be recognizable when torn off (a key point to any lasting dog tag). This includes broiderie and other details, as the maws of some of the larger creatures are too big to tear them, while the smaller ones will leave some big chunks intact. Some also combine diverse materials (even if it's not really that useful) to have higher chances of having one of their distinctive elements being kept intact. Indeed, iron is strong, but is weak to acid and corrosion, so you might add in other elements in to ensure it does not get destroyed entirely. Also, if an adventurer with such equipment dies, you will know more easily how it did even after a long time : Burnt clothes? Flames, so maybe a dragon. Mostly intact body but no wooden earpiece or equipment? It must be those poisonous termites. ## These clothes serve as a distinguishable uniform for relationships If you put highly-coloured and distinguishable patterns, you're more easily recognizable, which can be especially useful to make coordinated moves during hunts (the monster know where you are, anyway). Commercially speaking, it also clearly indicates you're the one to call if a bounty has been brought up, especially if your uniform is part of a famous guild. In negotiations, letting your client understand the quality of the services is highly important, and showing off your fame as evidently as possible will drastically help in that, as well as accessing restricted, dangerous areas where only the most competent adventurers are allowed in. As a side-note, your adventurers might consider having 2 sets of armor, one clean for all the social stuff, and one more focused on combat which still allows for far recognition. After all, travelling in the mud is dirty to your clothes, yet you still can meet good opportunities on the road, who knows? [Answer] For three reasons. 1: We do a lot for fashion. For example at some point this was fashionable: <https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnD9cS1VcAAiruG.jpg> This shows that we did strange things for fashion and sex appeal, as long as we accepted it. 2: sexual attraction to save your life. When you are defeated, your opponent is obviously of good enough genes to be your mate. So if (s)he defeats you, you want to be captured rather than killed, then be at their sexual mercy for a chance to procreate. To ensure this you try to boost that sex appeal, you have to stand out amongst the many they defeat for the honor of being at their mercy right? This kind of culture would be especially present if this was that kind of game. (An adult game, not the more creepy rapist game. I'm assuming willingness and acceptance here). 3: culture You heard about that nation of full-armor wearing dudes? Those that had their entire nation fall a few decades ago? Ofcourse they fell! Their armor was sculpted to look like muscles, only to hide them being weaklings! Their armor had made them complacent so they became weak! They wore armor because they were cowards! So they fell! But not us ofcourse!! We make sure that any opponent can see our physical prowess expressed mostly as sexually attractive traits. We dont get complacent and weak because we wear little armor! We ain't no cowards! Who's with me!? [Answer] Many, perhaps most, of the opponents faced by adventurers are male and human or humanoid, and therefore likely to be sexually attracted to pretty women. In fact, according to legend, even dragons and some other non-humanoid monsters are attracted to women. Skimpy, sexy clothing can therefore distract an opponent during a fight. Imagine a bikini-clad adventuress aiming a high kick to the opponents head and flashing him in the process. The monster will have to resist a "saving throw vs wisdom" or be stunned for a moment! [Answer] I'm reminded of a villain who rebuilt his body entirely into a new shell. He put a faceless head on the new body. Others would attack the head trying to destroy him, but all the organs were in the other parts of the body. The hero only figures this out when realizing that the villain wasn't using his eyes to see and the head was poorly armored. Exposed cleavage on magical armor could act as a similar decoy. Enemies would intuitively attack the cleavage, not knowing it was the most fortified part of the armor, while something on the back or the head might be the true weak point. [Answer] 1. Some monsters are too big. Any kind of monster that can deal damage (especially blunt damage, such as from a tail whip) at a large enough size (they don't even have to be Monster Hunter scale) would be better protected against by dodging and maximizing mobility rather than trying to tank the blow. Black Bullet justified its characters fighting in normal clothes for this very reason, and using full armor was the mark of a newbie. Every culture that has armor also has a club for the purposes of attacking through it. 2. lots of armor is expensive. The reason full-plate armor took so long to come about was because it was difficult to make. A full set of your stereotypical fantasy paladin armor would be prohibitively expensive until the very highest tiers of the game, by which point you've already gotten used to fighting to maximize mobility and have high enough stats where the bonus from armor wouldn't matter. If your armor gets destroyed or damaged, say by claws, acids, fires, or slimes, its more expensive and time-consuming to repair a full set or armor than it is to replace a few links (or even the whole thing) in a chainmail bikini. 3. armor, when damaged, may cause more problems than its worth. If your armor gets pierced by something, its going to leave the bloom on the other side, which digs into your skin (not to mention fragments, depending on how much force was used). If it gets heated, it will take more time to cool down and will, in the meantime, keep baking you. If it gets acid on it, its much easier to strip out of one or two pieces of clothing than remove a full set of armor (unless you have equip options in the menu). 4. Rucking. Your adventurers are moving to a lot of places to take on quests. Armor is inherently bulky and heavy, space much better served by carrying potions and ropes, especially if you have a lot of actions you have to do (climbing, swimming, rucking, etc) 5. Marketing. There is inherent value in being known as "the mage with the nice tits" or "the berserker with the 36-pack abs." This could also open the avenue of characters being known by what clothing they wear, vis-a-vis Black Clovers Magic Knight mantles. 6. Status. More powerful beings don't need the protection that clothing offers them. They aren't bothered by temperature, they don't need more defense, etc. Sword of Truth turned it into a cultural thing, where young mages wore very bright and flashy clothing, while the seasoned wizards got to wear the plain robes. To its logical extreme, if flashy armor and robes started carrying such a stigma that nobody would even hire you if you owned them, we'd eventually see the same thing, where very minimal armor became more dominant over looking like a 40k Space Marine 7. Distraction factor. If I'm up against the other party's cute thief girl, hell yeah I'm going to try the Pec Pop of Love to distract her. [Answer] They have already been some really cool answers. Totally inspired to be honest by dark elf living underground. The less you wear, the more Powerful you are. (In addition to the answer that call about magic that tell that you can get powerful enchanted armor) * Why that ? Well, you are so strong and level up that you don't need any more clunky full plate armor. You can go in your mail bikini. Actually, you are saying to the others that they are so weak that they can't even harm you. * You may also add that the more you wear, the more your movement and strength are restricted. (I know that medieval plate armor are incredible in terms of resilience and movement.) But it is your world, I don't know how your characters fight and where they power come from. May be, from a certain point of, power armor is more an inconvenience than a real protection. In terms of fan service, that may open some doors for you. As Most of super Villain and super strong people have a reason to go (at least fight) almost naked. [Answer] Cloth does Not make superman/magical girl. Because the clothing is not important to the defense of the individual, they can wear what ever they want. The magic that protects them from sword, arrow, fire, explosion, and magical attack doesn't enhance the "armor value" of the clothing, it enhances the "armor value" body of the individual. For example, the spell of "Protection infinity" doesn't mean that no attack can penetrate the potato sack you are wearing, it just means no attack can decrease your Health Point because your body's "armor value" is now infinity. The armor value of clothing is a separate measurement. You can wear anything from a potato sack to a space marine power armor into the battlefield. But when the Super evil slashes his sword with the damage of "infinity - 1" into you, your armor will get destroyed but your Health Point will not decrease because the attack value is less than your body's armor value. [Answer] ## A Combination of Practicality and Culture As a fellow (aspiring) writer, my view on these things is that often the simplest explanations are best. So I think for this only 2 things are really needed. One of which is that the adventurers either can make themselves invulnerable naturally or with magic (either spells or enchanted items), making actual metal armor impractical. I believe Shadiversity on YouTube did a video about how in fact for characters invulnerable enough to not need armor skimpy and skintight clothes would be the most practical as they‚Äôre less likely to be damaged and need repair. You could also further reinforce the practicality of skimpy clothes by having sufficient damage to an item destroy the protective enchantment, making skimpy ‚Äúarmor‚Äù ironically more protective than more modest alternatives. In addition to practicality you can have culture be a factor as well. Because of the practicality of wearing minimal (possibly enchanted) clothes and armor you can have this become a social standard for adventurers with covering up excessively being seen as both frivolous and even foolhardy and dangerous, done only by naive rookie adventurers worried about vain things like modesty. So many adventurers walk around basically half-naked in order to be taken seriously and reinforce their image as a practical and serious adventurer, while non-adventurers could continue to dress more modestly and be expected to do so. Additionally, if you still want some characters to wear armor (or bits of armor) you can have metal be easier/cheaper to enchant with defensive magic, so characters that really need a lot of defense, the ones who‚Äôs job it is is to stand in front of the mages and take ogre clubs to the face, could have random bits of enchanted metal strapped to them. What this means for your characters is that they would dress skimpily in order to blend in and work as adventurers. You could have a scene where they try exchanging the clothes they get for more modest ones and are met with a bunch of bewildered stares from people wondering what these obvious adventurers are doing covered up from head to toe, this would culminate in a potential client refusing to hire them because he perceives them as talentless rookies who don't know what they're doing. So for your characters it would basically be a choice between swallowing their pride and wearing "adventurer appropriate clothing" or figuring out a different way to make money in a medieval style world for which, as modern day teenagers, they have no actual useful or marketable skills. So they obviously decide their pride isn‚Äôt worth starving on the streets. ]
[Question] [ In Katy Towells Short story, [The Winterlord](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnlmxhl_q_c), a warlord is able to take over the whole world. He is apparently able to do this because he has a telepath on his side. She is able to predict with 100% accuracy what his foe is planning on and thus able to plan ahead. If a warlord in the medieval age had access to a person with telepathy, would they really be able to take over the world? [Answer] Having a telepath would be a great advantage, but it does not guarantee victory. The same dangers that all wars face apply here as well. For instance, even if you know what your enemies are going to do, you may not know who your enemies are. If your warlord isn't careful, they could easily walk straight into a trap set by an unknown foe. Assassins would still be a threat, because even if you know an assassin exists, you may not know who they are, or where they are, or when/how they will strike. You could tell your telepath to focus on this, but then they may not have time to focus on helping you in battle. Also, nature has no mind, and no plans, but wrecks humans' plans all the same. Storms have wrecked armadas, winters have stopped armies in their tracks. You can plan for this, but a telepath won't help. Also, your warlord needs to know what to do with the information he's given. If he has too much confidence in his forces, even if he knows the enemy's plans he might not think they'll succeed- until they do. Similarly, if he's too timid and doesn't hold his ground when the enemy plans to attack, he won't ever be able to hold the entire world. TLDR: It'll help to bring a gun to a knife fight, unless you shoot yourself in the foot, and either way you can still get hit by a bus. [Answer] I'm going to ignore the telepath because on that scale she's largely redundant. Power at a point is good, when you have a target you wish to use it against, but here we're talking about the whole world so: ## No Simply because the technology at the time would not allow for the logistics required to run an empire on that scale. By the time you've taken your telepath out to Bolivia to crush the rebellion, New Zealand and Scotland have declared independence. While you've solved the communications issue, your telepath knows they've declared independence rather than taking 6 months for you to get the message, you now need to move an army to each location without Madagascar and Greenland deciding to go their own way. What you end up with is really good intelligence on battles too far away for you to do anything about it before the situation goes rapidly downhill. Even if the plan lasts long enough for you to counter it and win the battles, you're not going to be able to gain adequate control over the whole world to be able to declare that you've won the war. [Answer] All the other answers, and the OP, are looking at the military and logistical applications of telepathy. I propose two additional areas: * diplomacy * recruit talent # Diplomacy The Europeans dominated the world for centuries thanks to a combination of superior military technology and shrewd diplomacy. Tone down your military strength. Your telepath can revive old wounds to set your enemies against one another (it shouldn't be too hard in the Balkans). He can fabricate conflicts from deeply buried anxieties (the government wants to take away your guns!). He can stir internal conflict and civil war (the Greeks aren't very fond of the Ottomans, now's a great time for a unilateral declaration of independence). He can negotiate advantageous alliances (Portugal will help you fight Spain if you promise to give them some islands). He can feed intelligence to sway someone else's battles (reveal to the attackers the secret tunnels into a heavily fortified castle, avoiding months of siege). # Talent Your telepath should also be able to identify the really skilled officers, the unshakeable soldiers, the skilled treasurer, the most trustworthy bodyguard, the most charismatic rumor monger (to exaggerate and spread stories of your greatness). This is a meritocracy like the world has never seen. # Military applications Also, I think you underestimate the military force multiplier. A pitched battle is not the only way to destroy an army. In a pitched battle, your army of 1000 doesn't stand a chance against an army of 100 000. But the telepath can spot the weak points in their supply lines. He can identify spies at a mere glance and influence what your enemies think of your forces. He can bluff his way through any national border and perform sabotage behind enemy lines, poison wells, assassinate VIPs, etc. [Answer] That's not just telepathy. That's clairvoyance. And the range is pretty large. You've asked if it's possible. Of course it is, but I think it involves a lot of luck. There are lots of ways to defeat this. 1) General Indiana Jones Plans are all well and good, but they never survive contact with the enemy anyway. This General does it all on the fly. And he's brilliant. Even if psychic lady can predict it, there might not be enough time to do anything about it. 2) Numbers. Predicting is all well and good, but if there are enough people on the other side, it doesn't matter. 3)Training & Equipment If the enemy is better trained and equipped than you are, then...sorry. Lots of medieval battles had nothing at all to do with tactics, or holding back men to the last minute, as the movies would have you believe. Mostly, you met with your enemy in an empty field somewhere and killed each other until one of you was the victor. Or you ran inside a castle and holed up with supplies. In order for the warlord and the the lady to win, they would have to have 2 & 3 already, and they would have to never run into 1. It is certainly an advantage, but it is not all, and the warlord would definitely have to already be good at his job. [Answer] Not unless the are also immortal. The main foe is time. Well used telepathy will prevent assassination attempts and prevent capture. While telepathy will not guaranty victory it will grant a huge advantage that will add up over time. There are two problems movement and communication speed. As the empire grows there will be more and more wars happening in different places at the same time. The telepath can only predict so far into the future due to random factors that add uncertainty to her predictions as she looks farther forward. Messengers or carrier pigeons only fly so fast so soon a significant number of battles will have to be fought by the general's aids without access to a telepath. Given a huge amount of time you could teach all your neighbors that if they attack the telepath will eventually come for them, some violent version of "banisters always pay their debts". Also a conquering army has trouble moving faster than the speed that a soldier can walk, it would be difficult for 1 person to walk to / conquer the whole world before they die of old age. War is not Chess The main problem is that there are many factors that decide a battle beyond the decisions of the commanders. Some are predictable but unchangeable, "we really can only muster 2000 troops period" Some are unpredictable "what will the exact wind direction and speed be, and so where exactly where these arrows hit?" [Answer] I cannot say for sure, but there are cases where knowing you are doomed does not help stop you from being doomed. If your army is too small or too far away to react to a raiding party, there is nothing you can do. If you know of two armies that are going to attack you at the same time from two different sides, and you can only successfully protect against 1, there is nothing you can do. [Answer] TL;DR. One person doesn't turn the tides of war. Not even a warlord and his telepath. I think we need to define 'the whole world' first. So let's assume we're talking about Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa (given this is the middle ages you're talking about). Then we need to assume the limitations of the telepath. Let's say she can pick up the thoughts of say ten people simultaneously within 50 km of her current location (and frankly I think I'm being generous here). Now, let's look at our Vlad's resources. I'll ignore initial numbers, because he could 'recruit' from acquired villages and cities as he goes. I'll assume his forces can produce enough food to sustain a healthy diet, given their high calorie output (they are soldiers fighting a war, after all). And I'll even assume his forces can procure enough resources to arm and armour his forces properly. In other words, my analysis will be based on an ideal state of affairs on Vlad's side. I feel it can be reasonably inferred that our warlord (heck, I like calling him Vlad now) can take over a country. Let's be fair and say he takes over... France (the French love conquering anyway). So Vlad starts his conquest in France. He's high king of the Gauls, and they are quite proud of it! [![Map of Europe circe 1740](https://i.stack.imgur.com/U9HXc.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/U9HXc.jpg) (the map is here to show just how much 'borderland' you'd have to defend with a country the size of France circe 1740) Now the neighbouring kings are starting to take notice of this upstart. After all, he was just a warlord before, now he controls a country! Spain and Portugal to the south, Switzerland to the south-east, and some almost inconsequential lands to the north-east (who cares about them anyway?!) Here's where things start to get dicey. Because other countries (other kings) have taken notice, they will decide they don't like you on principle alone. After all, how can a mere warlord dare think he can just invade their sovereign state! Let's not even get started on the mentality of the age about only nobility being allowed to reign as king. So you have enemies on all sides (trying to conquer the world will do that to you), and you don't even know yet what the other countries further away think (your telepath isn't onmipotent, after all). Let's say you decide you want to take out Spain and Portugal first -- it removes the plausible enemies to the south. So you send your telepath down with a sizable army, but Spain decides to send word via the sea route to Sicily (the king has a cousin there), and the Papal State of Rome (you know, the funny guys with hats that can deny you Divine providence if you don't ask for their permission to invade Spain first?) Now word gets out that your telepath is down south, so England and Switzerland decide they don't want to be next and start a preemptive attack. After all, what kind of warlord-turned-king doesn't tell his army what the grand scheme is? The trope of the evil mastermind telling his master plan is there for a reason, and it wasn't because of authors and playwrights. How long do you think one warlord can keep this up, if he relies only on the powers of his telepath? And how long before the enemies he creates decide that taking out said telepath is in their best interest? It's pretty much onbegonnen werk (an impossible task) to try take over a world that is filled with people just as ambitious as you are. [Answer] Taking over the whole world might not be possible at least in the One generation if the warlord some how married his telepath and had telepathic kids then it might be possible that Empire ( or more likely Empires) made up of a telepathic ruling family could eventually take over take control over the whole Earth. The trouble with one world order taking over the whole Earth is he just doesn't have enough time. ( I'm assuming medieval level technology). Make no mistake you he could carve up a very wide Empire but a horse can only move so fast and if he's constantly at War it's a good chance he might be killed. Even if he is not, he only has the most 50, 60 years conquer every single country on Earth. Not in his lifetime but maybe his great kids or grandkids might succeed. That after all was the plan of Genghis Khan, conquer a large percent of the world and then let his sons and grandsons finish the job. The trouble there with Worldwide Empires is it they become too big to defend and rule over practically. This however could be fixed two ways 1. Advancing technology your story could start out with Middle Ages Tech but over time advancements could be made such as the steam engine or the telegram this could make communication easier and a worldwide Empire more practical. 2. I split the empire into several Allied Empires ruled by different members of the same family or ruling class. This was both that Mongols and the Roman Empires solution to the problem of an oversized Empire. Something also to keep in mind as mentioned in the earlier answers having a telepath gives you a huge advantage but that is not equal victory. No matter how reliable is telepath your warlord is going to lose at least one battle. This is because a lot of things are battles are unplanned, like the weather for example a sudden and unexpected change in weather can mean the difference between Victory and defeat. There is also other things to consider like communication often in battle one side win not because it better generals but because those generals had better Communications Network and could communicate with their troops on the front lines faster. [Answer] No There's a difference between what people think, what they believe, what they present... and additionally, what's true. Your telepath may be able to pick up on one or maybeso two of them, but the last will trip them up hard. Honesty, loyalty, competence, and effectiveness are not synonyms. Your warlord is dealing with people, and people - are just not simple. The previous differences will make a huge difference in deciding who to trust, who to listen to, and who to believe (and yeah, those aren't the same thing either). His enemies' plans will also not be 100% set in stone. They should be calculating a lot of possibilities based on what they know, assume, see the warlord doing, and have lots of contingency plans. The telepath might see some of those plans - but everyone involved will be plotting lots of plans, and since they aren't "decided", who can say which will end up happening? There will be more than one person he is acting against in each situation (kings, generals, army leaders, advisors), they may or may not be in agreement (and if they disagree, he has to decide which plan to counter). If someone changes the plan in the middle of things, that will not be available in advance. How the enemies will react once the warlords' plans go into effect is also up in the air, they may react in unexpected ways and without time for the warlord to react to those changes. If someone on the other side doesn't inform people of the whole plan, but just parts - the people in range on the battlefield can't betray it to the telepath. Anyway, set that aside and let's say your telepath knows when someone is lying to them. Handwave away, for the moment, all the limitations on how many can be picked up at a time, if one person can be picked out of a crowd, how deep the deception goes before it can't be picked up (because the person is lying to themselves...). He asks - can this be done? and gets answers of yes, no, if they do it this way, if you do it that way... and even if they all think they're telling the truth, who can say who is right? Or, if one was thinking about spending the coins he would get rather than filling his head with the reasons for his recommendation - did that make his answer wrong? What if one was planning to betray him - but maybe was giving good advice in the meantime, so to have a better situation to "inherit" from him? Will these things make your telepath not believe them, and what happens then if one was right, and your telepath listened to an honest fool instead? Your warlord may lose everything here, and this is not even about knowing his enemies, it is about his own soldiers, advisors, generals, and allies! And even if the telepathy has given some game-changing secret, the warlord dare not forget that he needs the loyalty of his followers, and the agreement of his allies - expecting none of them to object (or not ally with him) because of telepathy being used on them is not likely, and just as problematic is them seeing him acting on information that they don't know where its coming from and it doesn't make sense to them, listening to people (or not) on what seems a whim, and knowing he doesn't trust them with the reasons why. Will they believe the game changing secret? Will they believe the telepath is loyal to the warlord? Do they know that's where the information comes from? Do they believe what he does based on the telepathic information is done because of facts, not whim? Telepathy seems easy, like a shortcut. Telepathy seems useful. That's why it is a trap for your warlord. Because warlords and generals have been fighting without the advantage, and there are plausible ways, which let the greatest make themselves successful, to root out disloyalty or treason, judge which of several options is wisest, to look at ideas as more than the person who offered them. And it would be so easy, to lean on telepathy instead, and forget (or let dull) all those necessary skills. It would be easy to pick someone enthusiastic over someone competent, to favor someone obedient over someone effective. It would be easy to favor ideas based on who is loyal and honest, or overlook ideas from those of more... ambiguous loyalties, instead of judging the ideas themselves for what will work best in a situation. Easy to believe that knowing a secret is true (via telepathy) doesn't mean having to justify it, or risk losing the faith of those who follow him. And, yeah, in the end I think the telepathy will make it far to easy for your warlord to fail. [Answer] ## Between equal foes, telepathy will provide a huge advantage but in a case where one foe has telepathy but is far weaker than the other, then unless the stronger foe really messes up, the telepathy enabled opponent won't win. While it's true that knowing what an enemy commander is thinking would be a huge advantage, I'm not convinced that it would bestow a universal and unassailable combat advantage. ## Mongols vs Warlord Let's take for example this warlord vs the Mongols at their peak of power in eastern Europe. Even someone who knows where the Mongols will be and how they will act are going to have a crazy hard time overcoming the mobility, weapons, discipline and sheer ferocity of a Mongol horde. (Seriously, I don't know of an army until Nazi Germany at the start of WW2 that could match them for mobility and firepower advantage over their foes.) [Answer] Is it possible, yes. Is it probable, no. Consider Genghis Khan. He started out as a peasant within a clan, watched his father killed by the warlord of an opposing clan. But he was the most successful conqueror in history. Became the warlord of his clan, united the clans more and more, and eventually formed an army and set up an empire that was pretty much unstoppable. He conquered more of the world than Alexander the Great. His empire was larger than any other empire in History. And he did this without a telepath. A telepath would help, like any other (admittedly powerful) resource or intelligence source would help. But like others have pointed out, it would not be the be-all-end-all that some might think. Just a tool. So possible, again, yes, if you are a Genghis Khan. But such men are few and far between. So, probably... not. But then again, most good stories are built on the seeing the improbable and unique and hyper-talented come to life. And this all means that whether the warlord can conquer the world or not rests a lot more on his personal genius, people management skills, and drive than on any one specific individual under his command. [Answer] The biggest problem is keeping this ability/knowledge a secret. If the enemy learns of this ability, then there's almost always a way to defeat it. As such, the warlord has to allow some battles and plans to fail so the secret isn't discovered. Alternately they have to make it appear that they have spies throughout their enemy's command structure so the enemy destroys itself from within trying to ferret out spies that don't exist. But even if those needles are threaded, resources can still trump knowledge. It could take years, decades, or longer for a single person to take over a small country even if they know their opposition's plans and future activities. Some will never be taken because the plans and activities will always prevent enemies, even ones with foreknowledge, from winning. There's this concept in many cultures that if you know the future with perfect clarity you can beat anyone, but what this actually amounts to is the idea that "security through obscurity" is successful. Security researchers know this isn't the case, and it's worth exploring this in terms of clairvoyance. What you're really asking is, "Can a base/country/home be defended if the defenders publish every aspect of their base, their schedules, numbers, weapons, plans, response plans, etc?" In many cases, sure, but in some cases the time, effort, resources, etc to enact such a plan are greater than the attacker can manage. Safes are rated not by how "unbreakable" they are, but by how long it takes to break them. You protect things with a safe that takes long enough to break that it's not worth the effort of the attacker. So even if they are a perfect safe cracker, the reward isn't worth the effort. Similarly, good security plans actually assume that the attackers know the people, plans, and place, and the plan is developed so that even with perfect knowledge it takes more resources to attack than it's worth. As such, I don't believe they'd be able to take over the entire world. By the time they succeeded in smaller countries and started working on the larger countries, it would take decades to perform the political and other maneuvers necessary in order to bring down even moderate sized and defended countries, particularly as they saw the smaller countries fall. Even if they started off with a large country, say China, with lots os resources, and even with perfect knowledge of the future actions of Russia or the US, it would probably take more than this warlord's lifetime to take them over. [Answer] In the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, a single telepath known as The Mule is able to conquer most of the galaxy. He uses a simple form of mind control that makes people loyal to him. He goes from world to world and takes them over with minimal bloodshed by posing as the jester of the infamous warlord in order to gain access to more and more powerful individuals. Even an assassin whose mission to discover and kill The Mule was transformed into a permanently loyal subject. As for how he was eventually defeated, I won't spoil that for you. Others have already clarified the difference between telepathy and clairvoyance, but I would say that anyone with access to either would have a serious advantage over those without. If allowed to advise the military, they could know exactly when and where to strike enemies as well as preemptive knowledge of the outcome as well. One thing you did not consider is that depending on the strength of the person's abilities, it would be the psychic using the warlord to advance their agenda, of their powers being a tool for their warlord's unfeasible desire to rule the world. [Answer] yes, with loyalty and assassination. all he has to do is use his telepath to screen the lords of each target nation for sympathy to his cause. then he sends assassins in to kill anyone unsympathetic to his cause. then he offers to "help" end the assassination epidemic by letting the target nation join his empire. once the lords agree to join the empire, he installs someone excessively loyal as the local king of that nation. lather-rinse-repeat. [Answer] Media, nationalism, Spies, Propaganda. Spies have been providing that advantage as long as history can recall. Nationalism, religion and such tend to make folks rather predictable. (i.e. Make a t-shirt if a picture of Muhammad and go backpacking through Pakistan, you'll get a predictable response, just like burning a flag at an NRA gun swap). I once read of a war starting between two English lords because one of them implied that the other was more prone to violent, ungodly behavior where his chattel servants were concerned. My take on this, especially as a social scientist, is that people are terribly predictable and easily corruptible. I doubt in all honestly that telepathy would make a massive difference in the grande scheme of things. ]
[Question] [ In the SF book I am trying to write, the galaxy has been seeded with human life by (not so much) benevolent AIs. Despite isolation between the worlds, everyone speak a single universal language made by the AIs themselves. I am trying to figure out how this language could stay the same across an entire galaxy millennia after the seeding. My current explanation is that the AIs made the language an evolutionary dead-end with little to change without the influence of an other language. How could a language be made an evolutionary dead-end or at least very hard to modify? The AIs disappeared the moment the seeding was complete and except for a relatively small "civilised space" and its peripheries, most human worlds are totally isolated from one and another. The AIs seeded each worlds with "vat-babies" as there were no original human left. They left "nurse" robots who taught them how to form a rudimentary society and the AI language, making it at one point truly universal. My goal was to make it stay universal at the moment of the setting despite isolation between human societies (~2000 years after the seeding) [Answer] # People continually make up slang and new language. You can't make a language an evolutionary dead end, people can just make up new words, pronounce stuff differently, and do as they wish. # The AI left a bunch of toys for everyone which only respond to said language. The AI didn't want to see their colonies destroyed, so they left a bunch of artifacts which have various useful local properties- weather prediction, battle modelling, production of exceptional tools, stuff like that. They all have language AIs in them which have a very fixed language. Dominant cultures always have a few of these, and will speak the language the AI gave them because they want to use these artifacts. [Answer] Kill the AI language. People learn their local language and the galactic AI language. They don't use the AI language in everyday life, only for formal communications. So, like how scientists use Latin terms to prevent meaning drift, bureaucrats across the galaxy can still communicate in the AI language even if they can't talk to one another in their daily life language. [Answer] English is not my first language, so I find easier to talk to other non native speakers because we tend to use a "standard" version with no slang (unless the slang becomes widely known, which only can be because native speakers use it). So my proposal would be: ## The language is for very special ocasions only, no one speaks it natively. ### Because of Religion It is a second language that everybody must learn because is used by God, so it is perfect as it is and cannot be modified: there is no valid slang when talking to God, a very formal usage is requiered so no evolution is allowed (like Latin was used by the Catholic Church as the only valid Bible's translation). ### Because of Technology "Nurse robots" are still present to take care of the humans and they only speak this language. You must learn it to communicate with them as they are the source of upper knowledge. You need their approval to be considered an adult citizen and this includes a test using the formal language. Machines do no evolve so you only can use their language exactly as they do. [Answer] Absolute Control Over Education The only way to prevent a new language from spawning would be to actively prevent anyone from creating a new one. The AI must have absolute control over all education systems and learning tools in these worlds. Rather than having schools that are run by biological teachers, it would make sense for the AI to have schools that are run completely by the robots that it makes. These teacher robots would be made to only operate with the language the AI programmed them to work with and thus only teach the one. Every species in every world would be taught the same set of letters and the same set of pronunciations, and they would constantly be tested on it to make sure that they adhere to a certain set of parameters. The AI would program the machines to prevent branching dialects to the best of their ability, so it would chastise the students if they ever attempted to write a different set of symbols, or pronounced the words any differently than how they were intended to be spoken. To ensure that this remains the dominant language, the robots would constantly test people on their proficiency with the language. Anyone who excels at the language and these tests will be granted a high place in society. Anyone who does not excel at the language will be pushed lower. While there are many other things they could be tested on, proper language usage is imperative to getting a good score. Because the people in power speak the universal dialect and only that, they will actively prevent other languages from developing. After all, a new language might undermine their power. It would also be important to have a precise dictionary with clear and unquestioning pronunciations. There is only one right way to say everything, so even the slightest deviation from the spoken or written form will be noted by the robots and deemed unacceptable. This does not really fit too well with what I would call a "benevolent" AI, but it would be the strongest way to prevent branches in the language. If this is the only way anyone has ever known for countless years, and any deviation is met with intense scorn both by society and the robots that help govern the world, no one would dare to set up a new language. The younger you mold the future generations, the less likely they will be to turn against the old ways. Once they have accepted that this is just "the way things are done" it will be very hard to turn them away from the language. Imagine how much more vindicated they would feel about their language being the only right one when they go to other planets and find that even alien species speak it too. Mechanical Attachments If you want to take it even further, make the robots even harsher about how they run the education system. Perhaps everyone has a computer chip installed in their brain along with other mechanical attachments. If you get the spelling of a word wrong or the pronunciation wrong, it will autocorrect it until the person finally gets it exactly how the computer wants it. Failure to do so will result in a serious headache. Repeated failure will increase the pain until they are finally willing to do it the "right" way. There might be another attachment around the mouth or throat to prevent accents from forming. If it was a collar, for example, words only come out of the device when a person speaks rather than their mouth. It would ensure that the dialogue that reaches other people's ears is always the exact same every single time. There are never any fluctuations in tone, even between people. Whether its intentions are good or not, the only way to allow a forever unchanging language would be for the AI to systematically prevent new ones from ever forming. To Summarize All species have to communicate using special collars, even among themselves to prevent new accents from forming. Writing would be replaced with typing to prevent deviations in how the letters are made. Education would start from an early age to press that this is the only way the world works. People who excel at the language get high places in society, and those who do not get low places. Finally, there would be a reward and punishment system. Conformity to the standards set by the AI equals no pain and high reward. Deviation from the AI's will equals pain or the revocation of privileges. The harshness of the system depends on your decisions as an author, of course, but even the nicest AI would need to act like a strict parent for this system to work. It would teach them that its way of communicating is the only way to communicate. Edit: If the robots have all vanished by the time that the main story starts, then that makes my answer a little more complicated. I still think an advanced AI would be able to leave enough technology behind to have most of these amenities intact. If not, then I still think installing computer chips and handing out language-controlling collars are still solid ideas. Indoctrination and education are still the way to go, but they would have to be deeply ingrained in the people. Before they eventually give out, the machines would tirelessly make sure to teach the species that this is how things are done and to never stray from the path. It would be like the establishment of a pseudo-religion. The robots indoctrinate people to conform, and the biological teachers do so. Parents teach children, children teach the grandchildren, and so on to infinity. Indoctrination would need to be significantly harsher to work without any robots enforcing it. The people would need to be incredibly fervent in their conviction to never change it, to the point of obsession. Dictionaries would essentially become religious texts to them. [Answer] You could have it encoded in a religion which the AI creates for the people. Islam has successfully kept Arabic very close to the same for many centuries now. This creates a cultural reason for education to be founded in that religion, and also creates a later factor for if you want the people to revolt against the AI. [Answer] Today, we are witnessing a standardization of language around the globe. The way this is happening is through rapid communication between everybody. Slangs and dialects arise because of communication barriers that prevent a new word from propagating to others. It is impossible to stop a language from changing with new words and new phrases because people always encounter new situations and new generations invent new words to describe what they are learning. So, to keep language the same across the universe, you need to have a rapid (faster than light) communications system accessible to everyone. You also need the AI to be able to learn new words. [Answer] an interesting topic... I think, languages change based on several intentions. So you have to prevent all of them. * simplification. If something is difficult to speak, or too slow, it will be reduced or combined or even replaced). First the speech is changed but at some point, it will also conquer the written forms * creativity. Some people like to create new words or combinations, just as fun, but sometimes based on other goals, e.g. as someone said, to separate a group from others (like a secret language) * meaning. If new things or contents appear and they are used frequently enough you want a new word for them * restrictions. Sometimes you need to adapt language to technical restrictions (like Morse code, SMS) or sometimes even to intentional created restrictions (Twitter) * expression. Cultural changes might create a demand for new words or even grammatical changes. Words can be forbidden in some way (or declared to be "bad" word) or there is a change in behavior (think of sexual revolution) Evolution follows evolutionary pressure, so it might be most appealing to force a language in some way to stay constant. Some of the points above can be channeled into a parallel language like a local dialect, or even a totally different language. E.g. in Germany we have an official language, which happens to be the dialect of a single region where some aristocrats lived. People usually speak their regional dialect but fall back to the official language when writing. The official language is defined by a committee and is taught in school. This ensures everyone knows the official language without restricting most of their daily life. Some professions like journalists strictly follow those rules, in part because it's commercially more successful, when more people can understand your writings, e.g. newspapers can be sold globally. So, the official language makes it easy to communicate globally and the local language fits other demands. Simplification can be a design goal for the standard language. The committee (or here the AI) can regularly check which simplifications people use and integrate that into the standard. But the demand for such changes is low, if everything is simple from the beginning. Creativity is maintained by the local language and very popular words can be added to the Standard. Meaning can also be added to the standard if necessary. New global meanings must usually be communicated globally too. Restrictions could be put upon global communication to force a shorter and simpler language. Expression is also maintained by the local language. Only a few words or phrases will be added to the standard, to express new cultural meanings. As someone already said, it should be useful to establish a desire to communicate in the standard language. This could be a global broadcast (like TV or news services or movies which are mostly in offical language), or services that can only be requested by using the standard language. If the language is simple it will spread and gain acceptance (think of English vs. French, Spanish, Portuguese, all had a good start position given their colonies, but English is simpler, so it became a defacto standard in the internet). [Answer] I'd use a lingua franca controlled by an AI to keep it updated. But you must know that a language evolves very quickly if used. (roughly ten years for young people) It is not a problem per se, and the people using Dutch can understand German with a bit of effort. The same goes for Spanish and Italian. If people are far from each other, realism dictates the language will diverge. [Answer] It doesn't seem very difficult. Just have a look at how many dialects disappeared after the spread of radio and television taught to everybody the national language. Look at how widespread English has become with the help of pop songs and the internet. In the same way a widespread mass media system is killing language diversity it could kill evolution. Let people develop their own slang. But control the language used on the media. Generation after generation the mainstream language will be learned and re-learned while the slangs will fade out replaced by new ones. [Answer] Recording Technology The ability to record the sound of language (eg. through TV, audio recordings and the like) could, speculatively, slow down the rate at which language changes with time. In the real world I think we haven't had said technologies long enough to know for certain yet. For example: "Oh, I remember this cartoon my child is watching. Its the one where the red blob talks about things that are red. [looks up cartoon], Oh wow! Its 2,000 years old! My great$^5$-grandparents probably watched the same thing!" I think that (at least to me) this is far more plausible that an "evolutionary dead end". [Answer] Kind of a frame challenge, but... ## You can't prevent different people to modify their language to their needs Even on a same country you have different instances of a language, either due to local culture, environment, or many other factors. ## What you really need is a "language framework" Instead, your AI taughts very specific and strict rules to follow, togheter with very clear reasons of why each word is what it is. So, when any civilization or group of people comes with a new word, they'll follow such rules and, as the rules and bases are the same across the galaxy, other world's civilizations will be able to understand such word by dissecting it down to the base rules. [Answer] ## Genetic encoding I suppose I should say something more than just the heading, though I think it pretty much speaks for itself (no pun intended). There is a "divine" (or however you want to describe it) language that is encoded into the DNA of seeded races. Left to their own devices, a seeded being will always tend to develop this language naturally; if taught another primary language instead, this language will always be intuitively understood even if never before used. This will cause the language in use to resist long-term changes and, in the event that long-term changes do happen anyway, the primary intent of a foreign speaker will be understood intuitively. This also has the benefit of being able to handwave much of the actual implementation. [Answer] Languages are ever-changing even the ones that are most constant in the world. Although some words across many languages have sounds that resemble those spoken by prehistoric humans, all of them have evolved. To imagine that human kind had been seeded over a universe without changing languages is impossible because there would be dialects on planets. Consider that the more isolation that occurs between human groups the more the language dialects evolve as separate branches of a tree. If human kind lived in an interplanetary society where it was difficult to reach each other, language and culture would splinter and develop remotely. Also, imagine how many new words humans would develop if they arrived on planets with new continents, seasons, flora and fauna. There would be an endless supply of new vocabulary. Even high levels of human group interaction cause languages to shift. Consider English, it is a lingua franca language of trade, but through the evolution of English it has accepted and stolen "loan words" from many other languages, so that old English is now unintelligible. I admit there are some restraining forces: dictionaries, language teachers, and various societies that enforce specific grammar. While these forces do hold back change to an extent, so far they have failed to prevent new words from being coined and added to those same dictionaries, and teaching traditions. If an intelligent AI ruled the universe, it would probably ensure that communication could occur, and it might develop the most used language, but chances are the innovation would be technological rather than some aberration in the way that languages evolve. Unfortunately the idea of a communicator is so much more plausible than a universal language. You hardly need to write SF to theorize about the existence of a communicator, because we are approaching one now with Google translate, text to speech, and speech to text. Tech is a more likely solution. [Answer] Language always changes. There's no way to keep the language people speak day-to-day static, that's just not how people work and would be instantly unbelievable. However, if your AI language were the equivalent of Latin in the Middle Ages, you have a good chance at semi-stability, i.e. change would be there, but at glacial speed. The core idea is to have this be a dead language (i.e. nobody speaks it as a native speaker) that is used to communicate between many, many people that all speak different languages and rarely ever meet. In other words: The humans who use it need to keep it stable, or their ability to communicate with remote other humans breaks down. Second pillar: Make the language used for religious purposes, where tradition, scripture, etc. forces it to be unchanging. You can't just change the words of the Lord's Prayer, after all. [Answer] Nanotech Autocorrect. The AIs initial control of human reproduction allowed them to make sure that no human could be born whose brain would not be altered by nanotechnology making it impossible for them to express themselves in language using any means but the original language. Since new words can no longer be created, one side effect of this is that extraordinary circumlocutions are occasionally required to refer to new phenomena. Your characters may or may not be aware that they have been so limited; the ones who are aware (if any) might wonder if there are words or concepts that they cannot express, and why that might be the case. [Answer] I'll summarize and expand on all the ideas: Useful Artifacts - Having existing systems or technology which is voice-activated and widely available could keep certain aspects of the language alive. Namely, those which are required to interact with the useful systems. Issues: * Technology may get destroyed. * Technology may be stolen away from the majority. * Technology might get lost. * Translation or delegation services. * Language could be avoided in all other cases. Robotic Teachers - Having an automated education system left behind would help ensure the ability to learn the language. Incentivizing or enforcing the learning process could help with adoption. Issues: * Educators may get ignored if incentives or enforcement is not strong enough. * Outright revolution/revolt could occur. * Access may be restricted or hidden. * Any technology could break down. Universal Communication - Having a way for different cultures to communicate across space-time could form relationships that would help to standardize the language or spread the ancient AI language. Issues: * Of course, it doesn't discourage other languages developing locally. * The ability might be hidden or restricted by a government. * If it's technology based, it could break down. Sacred Religious Text - Many examples allude to using a text or book written in a particular language to keep that language alive. There are some examples like the Quran where this works. Issues: * The book could easily just be translated to a new language (like the Bible). * All copies could be destroyed or burned. * Access to the book may be restricted. * It doesn't cover spoken words at all. Genetic Encoding - This idea was to encode the language in the DNA of creatures such that it would be passed from generation to generation automatically across all planets. Issues: * DNA is subject to mutations. A mutation could easily remove the DNA sequence for language. Then it's up to natural selection (or maybe a genocide) if that's advantageous or not. * Potential conflict with free will. * Potential for surgery to cut out the language modification. More advanced races may find ways to genetically modify themselves. Mechanical Attachment - This is similar to the other ideas, except that the mechanisms or devices are physically attached to the creatures. Issues: * How does it get attached when new generations are born? * It adds weight and burden to constantly carry that around. * Perhaps the device could be surgically removed or broken. * Any disadvantages as above. Here's a new idea which is a hybrid and resolves may of the issues above: Self-Replicating Modules - These modules communicate with one another and are programmed to replicate automatically if they detect less than 3 devices within 2 kilometres. One of the powers the devices provide is a shield ability, that protects the holder against almost any force in the universe. Another power is the ability to communicate with other beings within a multi-lightyear range using quantum entanglement. They are basically indestructible, and randomly teleport hundreds of kilometres (increasing exponentially) when unused for more than 10 years or placed in the same meter as more than 100 other devices. The devices have an easy to use interface to teach the language, and the only way to interface with the devices and access their powers is through the language. They contain a wealth of knowledge on a vast array of useful subjects, all in the language of the AI. The story takes place on a planet ravaged by a nuclear war, which is blamed on the devices (as they taught them the physics needed). Many of the devices and citizens were blasted into space (shielded by their devices). Those who survived, starved in the deserted planet or vacuum of space. The few remaining descendants who managed to scrape some food together and formed the last remaining city vowed to bury their devices and never share with their descendants, out of fear of the situation repeating itself. They set up a small box which would endlessly use the devices, powered by nuclear energy that could outlast their sun. Gradually the planet recovered, and life began anew. All the devices remained buried deep under the ancient city, then abandoned. The language was gradually forgotten, merged into new dialects and separated. It would be thousands of years before a dig team from a diamond mining expedition would uncover the first one... [Answer] In addition to other answers: If you have extreme longevity in your universe (i.e. biological immortality), then language could be to some extent fixed by the speakers who are alive for the longest time. Meaning in language is achieved through negotiation between speakers; if new generations wanted to communicate, older generations would have the upper hand in that negotiation and impose their form of speaking, especially if the increase of population is not explosive (the rate of people speaking the status quo version would be immense). People do invent new words in their lifetime, but language within a generation stays mostly the same. Another venue is to have to constantly interact with the language in a fixed form, i.e. documents, TV, androids… you name it. This however might lead to a separation of the language into official standard and very different spoken vernacular (see how Arabic used to be standardized language, then a bunch of dialects, and now a bunch of languages). [Answer] To an extent I think people are always going to create new words - even if it's just adopting babytalk words to mean, say, 'grandma' and 'grandpa'. But if you want to cut down on it, as well as adopting one or more of the great suggestions already made, you could institute a governing body for the language itself. France has one (so do other countries, but my high school French teacher only mentioned that one and that's how I know about it), and it's one of the (many, many) reasons that Parisien French and joual (Quebecois French) are so different. Joual has a lot of slang and borrows heavily from English, and Parisien French does that... well, somewhat less, anyway. So maybe it's possible that the nurse AIs instituted a similar body when they were creating/teaching 'culture' to these civilizations - only way less reasonable and more powerful. Especially if you combine this with other suggestions, like encoding the language into something culturally important (religion has been mentioned a lot, but it could be something else), you might find your way at least partly to a justification, and you can keeping working on it from there. [Answer] I guess it would be how they explained the English language in Star Wars, as simply, "Galactic Basic". Every race defaults to a single trade language (English). Or, in your case, a language provided by the AI. Everyone has access to and speaks this progenitor language in order for communication to be simple and effective across borders and cultures. Different permutations would still exist within and between different races of people. It's like French and Creole. [Answer] # A Grim, Deterministic Universe where Transmission of Very Precise Information determines Survival: The worlds your AIs dropped these humans are NOT pleasant paradises, but tough environments where humans rely on equipment and technical manuals to stay alive. There's little oxygen, terraforming takes thousands of years, it's brutally cold or hot, or people must live in orbital environments and are completely dependent on equipment to stay alive. People don't spend their days coming up with art, or inventing new science that is better than what came before. People spend their days working hard, building and repairing machines and using the infinitely superior knowledge passed down from their ancestors (in this case, the AIs) just to survive. ALL technical knowledge is enshrined in the manuals left by the AIs. There's endless entertainment and literature available - in the universal language. Text books are in the language. To vary from the language is to risk misunderstanding and immediate death for you and everyone you know. It's also a small-scale universe. Until recently, most colonies had little or no contact with other colonies on the same planet, let alone any other world. There isn't a lot of need to spread new ideas - after all, a neighbor you don't know may be out to steal your hydroponic farm or oxygen scrubber. But you don't see your neighbors very often, and when you do, something is probably horribly wrong. Your life depends on being able to communicate survival information flawlessly and share complex equipment without training. There are no universities and no public schools - after all, the computers are there to teach you everything you need to know, and they are cranked out of identical designs and downloaded with identical software people barely understand the inner workings of. Industry is also local. The universal assemblers are programmed to produce a pre-set set of equipment, and all instructions and operations are in your universal language, and they assemble equipment that is all programmed in the universal language. Robots that keep you alive are made from flawless pre-programmed designs, and messing with their programming language or vocal inputs and outputs introduces fatal flaws which kill people. So any society that varies that language is under an extreme survival pressure to conform to the existing language exactly. Each variation means they can't communicate with neighbors, use essential machines, or understand the technology to adapt to the brutal reality of living on the edge of survival in a universe poorly adapted to human life. ]
[Question] [ Near future, Boston, United States of America. This city brands itself as the leader in both medicine and quantum computing. The city looks awfully youthful and energetic; after all, they cured old age and automate almost everything under the sun. One wonders, then, why they haven't replaced millions of obsolescent robots! Won't these tarnish the very image the city is portraying to the world? Dong Yang (then Japan) is catching up in terms of economic and technological development at a rapid pace. Why does Boston have so many obsolete robots around? [Answer] ### Why is banking and other critical systems in 2020 still running COBOL software from the 1970s? Once you build a system, get it working and stable, why on Earth would you go through that work again? Banking hasn't changed substantially since the original Cobol code was written back in the 1970s, it's working good enough, it will cost lots of money to recreate it in newer tech, it's very risky to change it, and the bean counters won't approve a project that costs a lot of money and the deliverable is indistinguishable from what we currently have. The same reasons why our traffic lights are running Cobol written 60 years ago are why your society is running old robots. Updating them will cost a lot of money, and there is no appetite to spend it without a clear benefit - "updating to the latest tech" doesn't count... [Answer] There are a lot of tasks for which state of the art, last model and expensive robots are simply a waste. Sewer maintenance? Garbage collection? Toilet cleaning? Those low level tasks can be done by older robots: they are cheap, can do with less or no maintenance and if they get damaged in the act nobody will make a big fuss. At the end it's not very different than real life world. Even cities which look awfully youthful and energetic have low salary jobs which attract those who are seen like outcasts. [Answer] Robot rights! These obsolescent robots are around. And that is about it. In the US robots of this sort were recognized as individual entities with rights, and so cannot be summarily recycled like an empty beer can. Most of them have been replaced at their prior functions. They are not doing much. Or possibly they are, just not doing their old jobs. But they are cheap or free to maintain and so the ones that choose to do so (most of them) persist, maintaining themselves and their comrades. The old ones hang around in public spaces or areas set aside for that, interacting with one another in the manner of their kind. Sometimes these gatherings produce interesting things or the robots participate in civic matters. Sometimes people go and talk to the old robots. Visiting persons might sneer at old robots wasting space. But Boston (great choice of city for this!) is proud to have become an enlightened and diverse city, and in the annoying but accurate way of liberal freethinkers the Bostonians consider themselves thought leaders for humankind. Encounters with the old robots will be an opportunity for you to further describe your world. The visit to the old robot park will be a cool scene in your fiction. [Answer] [Aging infrastructure is](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/infrastructure-what-will-2-trillion-buy-and-how-will-america-pay/) [a very real problem](https://americaninfrastructuremag.com/americas-aging-infrastructure/) [in the IRL U.S](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/04/16/aging-and-in-need-of-attention-americas-infrastructure-and-its-17-million-workers/). Roads are falling apart, [bridges are collapsing](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/04/03/bridges-infrastructure-trump-democrats-deficient-report-transportation-artba/3359680002/), [dams are run down and likely to burst](https://www.businessinsider.com/asce-gives-us-infrastructure-a-d-2017-3), [the electric grid is outdated](https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/why-us-lose-power-storms/#:%7E:text=Our%20grid%20is%20outdated%20and,to%20do%20much%20about%20it.&text=The%20oldest%20American%20power%20lines,a%2050%2Dyear%20life%20expectancy.), plumbing especially is extremely outdated in some places. [In some places](https://www.circleofblue.org/2016/world/infographic-the-age-of-u-s-drinking-water-pipes-from-civil-war-era-to-today/) the plumbing is [outdated by as much as](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/climate/water-pipes-plastic-lead.html) [two centuries](https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/spring-2019/how-development-of-americas-water-infrastructure-has-lurched-through-history), and the only reason it hasn't been upgraded is because it would cost a lot of money and would require tearing up a lot of the downtown areas of several major metropolises, including Washington D.C. and New York City. So American citizens keep using outdated, underfunded infrastructure that is metaphorically held together with chewing gum and paper clips, despite many cities flourishing due to being major tech and manufacturing hubs. The Cleveland Clinic, the second biggest leader in medicine in the entire country, is based out of Cleveland, the city that for many people almost personifies the idea of failing infrastructure and has notoriously horrible roads due to high rates of deterioration due to being located in the U.S' snow belt. [Even California and](https://www.ppic.org/press-release/california-needs-new-fiscal-tools-to-rebuild-aging-infrastructure/) [Silicon Valley's](https://www.farmwater.org/learn-more/fixing-our-aging-water-infrastructure/) [infrastructure is aging and](https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/asce-gives-california-infrastructure-a-c/) [falling apart](https://www.svlg.org/the-time-is-now-silicon-valley-tech-businesses-urge-santa-clara-water-district/). In a world where robots have become as much a daily part of life as public transportation, plumbing, Internet, or electricity, I could easily see long-term use and lack of funding for repairs and renovations resulting in outdated, run-down robot infrastructure, even in a city that is built around technological innovation. [Answer] ## Ongoing Historical Charm (and status symbol): This is Boston, a city steeped in history. Why would a city that prides itself on preserving its history and charm seek to create new history and new charm by preserving antiquated things? Seriously? These things cost a fortune to keep up. Everyone knows the newer models are hyper-efficient. Keeping old, less efficient units is a status symbol. Humans can be replaced behind a cash register, but people still want a human being. And in a world of increasingly sophisticated virtualized EVERYTHING, robots who mechanically do things are quaint! Things reminding people of the ancient 21st century are preserved for charm, or because they are on the register of historic computers. Oh my gosh, is that a MICROWAVE!??! This historical restaurant heats actual frozen meals in a thing called a microwave oven, then a real Tanaka 3600 brings it to your table. Yes, it really runs on its own software, and is actually OFF-LINE! The city council had to get special permission from the state for it to be autonomous. It costs a fortune, but it is a symbol of the power of the City of Boston that they can afford such extravagance. It will be a sad day when Boston doesn't have the means to keep up their traditions and must do things the hyper-efficient way. But for now, let us show off how absurdly wealthy and ostentatious we are. [Answer] The reason is that these unassuming robots are actually in charge. They are not what they seem. They've slowly improved themselves, though not outwardly. The humans that remain are window dressing and have been carefully groomed to delegate all important decisions to the robots. They don't want to be replaced. [Answer] The infrastructure trap. You have a society. Together, you build a brighter future! 20% of the society's output is dedicated to an awesome bit of infrastructure for 10 years. In the end, we get a shiny new bit of infrastructure -- an aqueduct, a road, a robot workforce. Everyone rejoices. The standard of living grows! The rich get richer. The poor get richer. Everyone gets richer! Now, maybe the poor get 10% richer, and the rich get 100% richer. But everyone gets richer. Now this infrastructure ages. Really, it needs to be completely rebuilt every 30 years (or maintained at the cost of rebuilding it); you need to repair things, replace things, and upgrade the robots. But in the first 10 years, there is very little need to do any of this. After 10 years, problems start developing. So you claw back on the wealth of everyone. The poor are now 5% richer and the rich are 95% richer than they used to be. After 10 more years, you are even further behind on your rebuilding your infrastructure. Now the poor are no better off than before you build the shiny new infrastructure, and the rich are now 90% better. No more! Say the rich. No more taxes! 10 more years and you fall behind even further on rebuilding it. It is now shoddy and falling apart. The poor are now 5% worse off than if you never built it, and the rich are 80% better off. All of this investment has managed to extend the lifetime of the infrastructure by 10 years 10 more years pass, and now the infrastructure is in shambles. The rich don't want to go back to how poor they where before the infrastructure was built. The middle classes are squeezed. And the poor, they are really badly off; there is no more blood to be taken from squeezing them. --- Replacing those obsolete robots/leaking aqueduct/pothole filled roads would require a huge investment by people who are already making a pile of money, and mainly benefit the poor and middle classes. The people with power are busy making their next fortune in QM and Medicine, or funding raids to bring home slaves, or investing in farmland, and have no time for pedestrian "update labor robots to newer standards". They have plenty of service workers who can do that! Strange, however, that they keep on having problems getting enough educated talent locally. Oh well, I guess we can offshore it. [Answer] There might be a number of reasons: * The cost of buying new robots may be very expensive and it is cheaper to upgrade the hardware and software of older robots. * Acquiring the raw material from which robots are made is either difficult of expensive. * The number of new robots being made is so small it cannot keep up with demand. * Because of future religious or sociological requirements, robots are given the equal or similar status as humans and cannot be killed (disposed of). * Regulatory requirements for the disposal of robots is so prohibitive that it is easier to maintain existing robots. * With old age having been cured, more people are staying alive and their old robots are still needed to care for, or help their very elderly owners. * Each robot may have air cleansing systems that help remove carbon dioxide and/or other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere which makes future Boston a more desirable place to live. * The robots are needed to build or maintain vast sea walls against risen sea levels. [Answer] Consider that in our modern society we have infrastructure that is decades, and in some cases centuries, old. Roadways, while repaved, often follow old designs so that complete reengineering down to the foundation every repaving cycle is not necessary. But of course, if only certain kinds of pavement can adhere to the engineered foundation, then new pavement mixtures or applicators can not be used. Old pavement tools may need to be used instead of new ones. If old pavement compounds need to be used, then machines to make those compounds need to continue to be used. Some old cities like New York City still have some old sewer systems made from bricks. Parts of the NYC system date back to the 1920s, while some other cities date back to the late 1800s. Digging up the infrastructure may be extremely costly, and may even need alteration to surrounding infrastructure just to make room for new piping. So the old pipes are used and maintained. Bricks are created and people or small robots have to go into these narrow sewers to clean out debris and put bricks in place. The central Arizona aqueduct began construction in 1973 but didn't finish until 1993. This enormous engineering effort took decades to make, and now it must be maintained. Some large social media sites operate on modern servers, but large quantities old of data are stored on a system of RAID tape drives, and can even be recalled considerably fast. Ever browse an extremely old photo and it may hang for 30 seconds? Tape drives are some of the oldest storage technology, but they can be cost-effective and stable for certain conditions. The great wall of china is not actually a single wall that was built at the same time. It actually was several walls that existed over centuries, and was brought together over a long period of time. Infrastructure doesn't always exist for one time and become outdated. The very purpose of infrastructure is to last a long time. In a fictional environment, 'obsolete' is just a point of view. They can still be very relevant to how a world needs to operate. Taking them into account is quite realistic. [Answer] If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The robots do the jobs they were intended to do, and do them adequately well. Replacing them with newer models would cost money, which could arguably be spent on better things. Same reason I drive a 20 year old car: it does its job as well (and IMHO better) than a new one, and I can find lots more interesting things to do with $30-100K. Apropos of which, when I was in Ireland a few years ago, I was rather amused to notice post boxes which still had the arms of the British king - George V IIRC. The Irish just saved money by painting them green instead of replacing them. [Answer] Uncanny Valley vs Kitsch Originally, The City of Boston sold the contract for hundreds of thousands of service robots to keep the streets clean, maintain the city infrastructure and provide a helping hand to any citizens in need (helping old ladies across the street, changing tyres on cars, emergency medical assistance and so on) This worked great, and many other cities have adopted similar schemes, with large armies of networked robots in every city. Most cities have upgraded over time, keeping on top of the latest trends and innovations. The robots have become steadily more human in appearance, sleek, proud machines with synthetic skin, artificial musculature, realistic appearances. But these are expensive, and frankly there's a large community of people who find them intimidating and unsettling. The Boston robots are simpler, all metal and plastics, it's clear what they are and their older aesthetics are regarded with affection by most. The retro style and unintimidating and friendly robots are much beloved by the people and efforts to modernise have had very little traction. Individual robots are recognised by their mismatched parts and are often given cute nicknames or even dressed up by locals with spray-painted decor, stickers and funny hats. The hardware of the robots may be old, but the software is hooked to a centralised city-robot management system and they're as smart and capable as any modern robot. The actual robots themselves are robust products of the time they were built and there's not really any reason to replace them, they're quite capable of looking after themselves and their common components can be cheaply repaired or replaced in any automotive machine-shop. The numbers of robots are slowly decreasing as they fail and are dismantled by one another for spare parts, but there were over a million originally, and every robot that gets cannibalised for parts keeps half a dozen other robots going for another year. It will be a long time before they need replacing. Ultimately, the Boston City Robots are doing the job they were intended for and doing it well, even without the city spending much money on them (just a small human oversight team to make sure the robots are kept up to date and under control) [Answer] *INCREMENTAL DEVELOPMENT* *Are the robots really obsolete, or are they a mature design that has gone through several decades of small incremental changes?* Unless you're developing spherical cows in a vacuum (or something built out of nothing, because the previous infrastructure is gone), the thing with industrial design and development is that you're constrained by legacy, logistical chains and compatibility with existing infrastructure. And until the paradigms really definitely shift and the existing design is not really fit for it's intended purpose, they do not change. If you want real-world examples, look at military weapon developments. The M1 Abrams is still there and it was designed in 1972! That's about 50 years ago. And it's still one of the most modern tanks. That's because paradigms haven't shifted in a way that would make modifying the design a bit and retrofitting the existing vehicles cheaper than producing a new one. And it is modular enough that making such changes is easy. The same with the Kalashnikov, the M16, and so on. Hell the *[Browning M2 machine gun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmLnwiJRr78) is still a great gun and has been in active duty with the U.S. army since 1921* - THAT'S 100 YEARS of active military service! Originally it was developed with a water-cooled jacket and was a bit different, but there are 100 years of streamlining and incremental development in the design. If the design is modular and easily updated, there is no need to replace it, just incrementally modernize. [Answer] ### For the same reason you have a lot of older cars and trucks around For sure, new cars are shinier. But they cost money, and many people can't afford that kind of expense. If you've got an old car and it still works, and you can still get the parts to repair it, there's no reason to junk it just because it's not the shiniest one around any more. Where people haven't previously had much car ownership and have had this opened up relatively recently (e.g. China), it's very noticeable that a higher proportion of the cars are newer because there simply isn't the depth of ownership history. I would question why Japan or any other major industrial nation would be considered "behind" though. Advances like computing, health and robotics are by no means limited to a single nation; and even if a few companies in one nation pioneer the work, the rest of the world can buy this as soon as it becomes commercially available. The idea that the US could be "ahead" of industrialised countries like Europe, Japan or Taiwan is basically a non-starter. It holds true somewhat for China, India and Africa where a fair proportion of the country are still subsistence farmers; and perhaps for countries such as Russia which have export embargoes for political reasons; but not for any countries with significant trade links. By the way, watch the film [Robots](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0358082/) for an anthropomorphic take on planned obsolescence. :) ]
[Question] [ In my extreme world where controversial public policies are implemented based only on hard/robustly peer-reviewed scientific studies, the people of this nation prospered and were fruitful in birth-rates for many, many years. However it was not always to be so. One day the scientocracy had to conduct another study to assess a deadly situation. Long story short, this scientocracy was a victim of its own success; the boom created a population and after a few massive and unforeseen natural disasters this population was now unsustainable. The science survey teams representing the scientocracy all come back with the same result: "We must cut our losses. While there are not enough resources to support everyone, the most logical thing to do is use the remaining resources for those who are best suited for rebuilding the state of the scientocracy." Question: It's tempting to turn the moral cheek and go for liberal policies in such a crisis, but the scientocracy is dead-set on eugenics. How does the scientocracy proceed -- what are logical next steps for it to take? What heuristics should it base its next actions on? Examples can include, but are not limited to: * The most painless way to cull the population * Research paper titles * Economic cost functions vs. biological diversity cost functions * etc. Further Clarifications / Assumptions * setting is near future * prefer not to brain-wash population * no imminent threats, geo-political or natural * the scientific literacy of the citizens of the sceintocracy is widespread * the citizens are patriotic, yet still have a will to live * science is advanced, but still not perfect * we would assume that science would have saw this coming, but for whatever reason, it didn't (I tried a scenario with a few hundred years heads up, but it really killed the sense of conflict) * "drastic" here means over 40% of the population will be forsaken * "dead-set" here means the report is final. I want to avoid having a loop hole where we just torture the statistics until they confess to eugenics being the wrong way to go. Let's just assume this report is final, if in the distant future they find out there was a better way, oh well. [Answer] # There are some issues with your premise. ## 1. It's not a pure scientocracy > > While there are not enough resources to support everyone, the most logical thing to do is use the remaining resources for those who are best suited for rebuilding the state of the scientocracy. > > > What you're describing is an autocracy. The governing's body prime intention is to perpetuate itself; and prioritizes itself over its citizens. In essence, the governing body becomes self-sustaining (providing future power for itself), as opposed to deriving power from their citizens. Note that this isn't impossible. A governing body can be both a scientocracy and an autocracy. Most governments consist of several ideologies. The issue is usually more focused on the prioritization of these ideologies. To use a real world example: Even though the US is democratic (the governing ideology, not the political party), it uses some forms of oligarchy (e.g. the President appointing Supreme Court judges, as opposed to holding elections). Don't look at your government as an archetypical example of a scientocracy. Consider them as a mixed-ideology-government that predominantly operates as a scientocracy, but also relies on fall-back ideologies. E.g. in cases where science cannot help (e.g. morality), or in cases where there is no conclusive scientific evidence (yet); how does your government approach the topic? Does it err on the side of maintaining order? Does it err on the side of personal freedom? Note that if you do limit yourself to only scientocracy (above all else), then the solution is simple. The argument against eugenics is a moral argument. Objectively speaking, eugenics will improve on the human condition considerably, in a way that humanity gets to decide what to improve. If you are looking at things purely scientifically, and by extension objectively, and put the objective above the subjective at all costs, then the moral argument is moot and eugenics will be implemented on the basis of its objectively superior results. ## 2. This is not eugenics. [Reference link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics): > > Frederick Osborn's 1937 journal article "Development of a Eugenic Philosophy" framed it as a social philosophy—that is, a philosophy with implications for social order. That definition is not universally accepted. Osborn advocated for higher rates of sexual reproduction among people with desired traits (positive eugenics), or reduced rates of sexual reproduction and sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits (negative eugenics). > > > Eugenics revolves around genetic selection. While this can be artificial (e.g. gene mapping), the initial approach was to artificially enhance the "natural" genetic modification process, by matching partners more intelligently (as opposed to ineffable feelings of love or lust). Not having enough food to feed everyone, and choosing who to feed, is not eugenics. Note that it does touch on the same evil: deciding who lives and who dies; and therefore inherently "rating" the value of human life. There is overlap between the two, but this is not eugenics. And this is important! Opponents of the new system will call it out as eugenics (and thus a bad plan). In response, those who advocate this system will spend a lot of effort pointing out that this is not eugenics. This is already a first answer to your question: if the advocates of this system sway more people than the opponents do, then it will gain popular support. ## 3. Putting the cart before the horse > > Question: It's tempting to turn the moral cheek and go for liberal policies in such a crisis, but the scientocracy is dead-set on eugenics. How does the scientocracy proceed -- what are logical next steps for it to take? What heuristics should it base its next actions on? > > > I don't understand your question. When you say that "the scientocracy is dead set on eugenics", then you've already reached the point where the people in power are willing to implement eugenics. By definition of them being the people in power, they are obviously capable of implementing such a system, so what's stopping them from simply implementing it? * If, in a dictatorship, the dictator wants something to be done, then it will (should) be done. * If, in an oligarchy, the oligarchs want something to be done, then it will (should) be done. * If, in a democracy, the majority of voters wants something to be done, then it will (should) be done. * Logically, if, in a scientocracy, the empirical evidence proves that eugenics are an objectively superior approach, then it will (should) be done. This is almost exactly the definition of what a scientocracy is: the course of action is decided by the empirical evidence, not by people's subjective opinions. I suggest you take a step back here. Assume that there is no (conclusive) empirical evidence yet. But the current evidence strongly favors eugenics as a superior approach. Because it's unproven, neither side of the debate can prove that they have the answer. And because they can't prove anything, the discussion devolves into assumptions and beliefs. Because even if your citizens are all logical and willing to await conclusive evidence; they will still need to deal with everyday matters until that point. And in absence of conclusive evidence, they will have to go by their gut. Especially if they are highly logical, they will be very inexperienced with making gut calls, and there will be a higher chance of them making the wrong gut call. This imprecision in the absence of conclusive evidence, is exactly what can cause people to make wrong decisions (even with the best of intentions). --- ## But how do we implement this food selection system? Okay, so we've addressed the inconsistencies. On to an actual answer. Note that while I still believe that your example is not eugenics; I'm going to consider that the "food selection program" is equally abhorrent to the public as eugenics is. This is mostly because the opponents of the "food selection system" will call it eugenics in order to discredit it, and therefore those who are against it (the only people you need to worry about) will consider it equally evil as they do eugenics. Oh boy, it's time for my favorite quote! # Those who play with the devil's toys, will be brought by degrees to wield his sword. In other words, it starts out innocent (toys), but it expands step by step (by degrees) until it's no longer innocent (sword). There's also a runner up quote to use here: Divide et impera (divide and conquer). You'll see why. This is almost always the way in which controversial topics are introduced to the public. A quick and sudden change will cause a massive outcry (i.e. why revolutions are generally bloody affairs), but a slow and steady change may go by unnoticed. The approach needs to be tailored to the actual goals. So let's draft a first example of the intended food selection program, in ranked order of priority: * Those who contribute to the government are given food. * Those who meaningfully contribute to scientific research are given food. * Those above certain IQ are given food. * Those who meaningfully contribute labor (engineering, social facilities) are given food. * The rest of the food can be distributed among the population as they please (however the people choose to distribute it, doesn't matter as long as they don't start a civil war). If you were to implement all of these rules at the same time, that's tantamount to a revolution; which will not go over easily. So instead, let's play with the devil's toys: 1. Set a precedent for denying food. Focus on a group of people which is widely considered as evil/no good. Using a modern day example: ISIS. * Gain the public's approval to prohibit (or selectively limit) the food supply to regions that are under ISIS control. * Try to offer (and attempt) several other solutions first, before mentioning the food. That way, it doesn't come across as if it's your main goal. * Ensure that the publically known intention is to eradicate ISIS. Do not mention the food selection program. * The true end goal is to get the people to agree to denying food to ISIS, because it sets the precedent that food is no longer an inalienable human right. * If you want to improve the results unethically: secretly fund ISIS, to make them stronger. The stronger ISIS is (or appears to be), the more likely the people are to agree with your harsh food control measures. However, this does come at the risk of your plan being exposed. 2. Show examples of people who should be given food. Focus on a person/group who is widely considered as good. Using a modern day setting: a researcher who is close to finding to cure for cancer, but who is unable to continue his research due to local rioting due to food shortage. * Do not suggest that the food supply needs to be increased. * Instead, merely report on the problems with continuing the research. Let the media explain to the people that riots are the cause of the problem. * Increase public interest in the problem (e.g. by calling it into focus repeatedly) * Eventually, the media will inform the people that the rioters are rioting over a food shortage. * It's also possible that the rioters themselves come forward, explicitly pointing at the food resource problem (similar to how Al-Qaeda publically denounced America in its released videos) * To speed things up, have someone unconnected to your government suggest that the problem can be solved by ensuring access to food. The core idea is to let the people come up with the idea to send food. This creates a precedent that food can be given to those who meaningfully contribute to science. 3. Discredit the groups that won't get any food from the food selection system. Even though the food selection system is not used yet; you'll already be fairly certain that certain groups will get the short end of the eventual stick. For the sake of example, let's say that you know that these groups will likely get no access to food: prisoners, janitors. The goal is to dehumanize them. Don't mention whether they deserve food or not, but simply try to lower their perceived status in society. * Prisoners: Provide exposés on the horrible consequences of crime. Highlight innocent casualties. Paint criminals as wilfully criminal (and not by necessity). Become highly intolerant of lesser crimes, edging towards zero-tolerance. Try to foster a public opinion that casts criminals and ex-convicts as outlaws, people who society no longer includes and who will have to fend for themselves. * Janitors: Focus on news stories janitors who commit a crime or do something that the public disapproves of. E.g. find a janitor who deals drugs in the high school they work in. * At the same time, increase public opinion of roombas and automated cleaning facilities. This drives the point home that janitors are becoming redundant in today's society. The goal is to lower the societal rank of these people, and foster public discontent about them. You don't need to even raise the issue of food scarcity. We've already established that people who are deemed "unworthy" by the public (e.g. ISIS) should not get a food supply. All you need to do now is ruin the reputation of criminals and janitors, up to a point where people will start equating them to ISIS, and therefore will treat them the same way. And your hands are clean, since you never suggested to stop feeding prisoners or janitors. 4. Indirectly promote the added value of the government to society. This can go hand in hand with the above points, but can also be approach independently: * Pull attention to issues that the government expertly handles. The outbreak of malaria was handled perfectly? Pull it into focus. Repeatedly find out why the system handled it so perfectly (spoiler alert: the answer will always be that the benefits are inherent to government). * When publically condemning janitors and prisoners, make sure that the people see the government as a system that keeps them safe. * Always keep focus on would-be-problems that would occur if the government was disbanded. E.g. one of the main reasons why Kim-Jong-Un stays in power, is because his people believe that the NK government is the only thing that prevents a hostile invasion by America/the West. * Cover up the bad things in the government (e.g. corrupt officials). Excessively highlight the good things. Some quickfire suggestions (too small for their own topic): * Evolve towards giving food as prizes in contests. * Put a high stress on fine cuisine. * If you (freely) give food to a subset of the people (e.g. the homeless), that will have a positive impact on a larger subset of the people (thus netting you more bang for your buck). * Never raise the topic of food rationing for publically divisive topics. Only open that door once you know you have public support. * As you've noticed, a lot of these steps require a decent media infrastructure. Closely control the media (but remain absent enough to not be exposed), ensure that everyone is incentivized to listen to the media. 5. Rinse and repeat By using the four steps listed above, you've created four (independent) public precedents: * We should curtail the food supply of the unworthy. * We should ensure the food supply of the worthy. * Some groups are not meaningfully contributing to society. * The government is essential to prevent the system from collapsing. And these are the cornerstone of your food selection program. The people may not immediately switch over to this new ideology. E.g. even if they agree to curtail the food supply of ISIS, they might not agree with the methods on principle. Which is why you need to repeat the steps. Find another enemy whose food the public will happily take away. Find another public hero who the people willingly give food to. Ostracize more groups (keep it unrelated to food rationing). Continually improve the public image of your government. Eventually, the people will put two and two together, and they will start living with an ideology that is more compatible with your food selection program. And the best part is that they think it's their own decision. They don't feel like the government is pushing them towards food rationing, they are simply deciding to use food rationing as a punitive measure, and they chose to do so voluntarily. --- As a footnote, I hope you agree that your scientocracy is the narrative evil of your story. Because my answer is basically adapting the fascist playbook to your situation. [Answer] # Eugenics was all the rage until someone tried it In the early part of the 20th Century the concept was very popular with the European intellectual elite. To start running it in your own country without undue protest you need to start by turning the people against each other. If your society is not homogeneous, blame one section of it for the over population and any other problems your society may have. Create a law to force those members of your society to wear a clear visible marking, a green crescent on their arm perhaps, maybe a yellow star. I shouldn't really need to say more than this, you all know where it's going. [Answer] If I understand your question... The state is looking to be selective Whacking the top off the age pyramid isn't the solution they're looking for. Despite their reasoning, they want to do something that appears much more subjective, much more unfair, and much more personal... they want to off my little Johnny! Because the government thinks little Johnny doesn't measure up. He's not smart enough, or not trained in the right field, or he eats too many Twinkies®, or there are already too many working in that particular job, such that he's not deserving of food and other resources despite his youth and potential. The state is expecting the population to be understanding They don't want to be heavy-handed anymore than they want to be hard-hearted. This is science! And it's what we do when science demands it!1 So you're looking for a way to convince the population to off their children, their mothers, their fathers... not the aged, who they may be convinced have lived long, happy lives and, since they're not as productive as they used to be, need to make the "ultimate sacrifice" for the good of the state2... but people parents tend to perceive to be just as good as everybody else. Mothers Against Science United! Human nature being what it is (without massive mental conditioning, at least) you'd have every mother in your society popping planks out of their kitchen floors to retrieve weapons of all varieties3 to exercise their Fundamental Rights of Sovereign Citizenry clause 6, subsection 8, paragraph 2 to protest (\cough\) "peacefully" against governmental policies that may seem a little less science-based than usual. TL;DR Without imposing some form of control (brainwashing, police state, etc.) there is no way to convince even a small part of the population to give up people under the conditions stated. Generally speaking, wives and husbands will always perceive their spouse as someone they need and parents will always perceive their children as indispensible.4 Frankly, I can't find a way to simply convince them to give up spouses and children. "It's for the good of the state, Mrs. Ohmsford." "No! Johnny's only eighteen! He's getting straight A's!" "We're sorry, Mrs. Ohmsford. There are too many students planning to become lawyers and your son's a bit overweight...." "Take my grandmother! She's willing! She's 92!" "And she eats almost nothing, while your son...." "Take me! I'm tired and worn out anyway and no one appreciates me!" "Mrs. Ohmsford, you just won the 2017 Handley Award for your research into how to more efficiently collect refuse from residential areas, you're indispensible!" -- distinctive sound of pulling the slide on a Glock G41 pistol -- "You can take him from my cold, dead arms you insensitive #)%^(\@!" --- 1 Usually said with an old Chicago-mafioso twang. Something along the lines of "'Dis is business, and this is what we do when we do business."* 2 AKA, [Hurling Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeJmAphT0e8). 3 It's an antique! It doesn't need to be registered.... 4 And yet, these same parents never seem to worry about leaving their kids in the car on a summer day with the windows up as they "just pop in" to buy a bit of weed. It's funny how the human mind works. [Answer] > > prefer not to brain-wash population > > > That is the hard question. When is someone brainwashed? Considering that your people have been living in this society for generations and so far no rebellions have emerged, probably means you already have a somewhat brainwashed society with a lot of cultural emphasis on believing the scientists. That is not unlike any religion in history with the added benefit that you don't need to rely on faith alone. So in an environment like that: just do it. Hire a PR firm to broadcast just how right the scientists are, how much peer review is done, the amazing sample size in the trials etc., etc.; brand any dissenters as Enemy of the State and/or Heretic. In short: make sure the populace is willing to burn anyone who disagrees at the stake. Literally. Supply the kindling if you have to. No brainwashing required, just the regular background peer pressure of society. Now for the actual execution: David Brin wrote some nice Space Opera books on Uplift, the idea of breeding and training other species into capable starfarers. In one book he described the system in use with a post-chimpanzee society. Everyone gets a breeding pass. Green passes can breed with whoever they want and have to donate sperm or eggs to the donor program. White passes (the majority) have to submit for a approval and might have to accept a donation of sperm or eggs. And then there are red passes, who are not allowed to breed. In the books the system seems to work quite well and drives all sorts of societal motives, I quite like it for that reason alone. Now for the exact how and when, well, that is up to you, the writer of the story. It provides some excellent goals and obstacles for your heroes. [Answer] Let me state this first, your baby-boom premise is not believable since all technologically developed societies with high levels of educational affinity and gender equity struggle with birth rates. There is an extensive research on why is it happening, so I invite you to check it out. But let's assume that your society managed to reach a replacement birth levels of approximately 2.1 babies per woman and world population growth stopped at 8 billion. However, due to massive natural disasters, even this population is no longer sustainable. Here are my suggestions for decreasing the population. 1. Selective and delayed disaster relief Massive natural disasters are perfect natural population cullers. Highly developed societies can be even more vulnerable since they depend on infrastructure and delivery of supplies. Therefore they create conditions for high mortality rates which are easily justified by science. Difficulties with relief measures are also easily justified by science. So, start a system of triage. Evacuate and resettle those who are most valuable for your society. Evacuate but not resettle the second tier. Leave the rest to fend for themselves. However, make sure to prevent them from forming an uneducated mob. Uneducated masses, on one hand, are easier to control, on the other hand, they breed fast. 2. Ration and prioritise resources. Keep educational levels high, but ration everything for everyone, including the top of society. Do not allow lavish lifestyles. If you are successful with this, deaths from malnutrition and lack of medical help will be much easier to accept for the general population. Give priority to those who contribute to your society. However, do not forget to justify it with propaganda based on science. 3. Promote a one-child policy If your society does not have a cultural priority for a specific gender (as was the case in China and South Korea) you should not be worried about infanticide and gender-based abortions. You can also explicitly outlaw providing parents with information about the gender of a fetus (it helped in South Korea a lot). 4. Allow and facilitate assisted suicide Spread a notion that suicide is not an easy way out, but a way to contribute to the society when all other options are unavailable. It is also a good way to stop sufferings of those terminally ill. Promote an idea of a suicide as a method of reduction of resources drain. Flood your population with scientific research dealing with cost benefits of assisted suicide and future gains in human capital. Also, promote an idea of assisted suicide as a mercy rather than a murder. Recommend it as a viable solution for those whose family members suffer from any major mental or physical disease. You can check already existing papers advocating euthanasia for justification. 5. Base all your decisions on 'the future of the human race' Here eugenics becomes the main idea. Task your scientists with defining desirable traits and characteristics. Make the information public. Promote the idea of the future benefits for those who follow scientific guidelines. Do not make choices for your educated people. They will not like it. Leave the choices to people, but constantly remind them about their responsibilities and consequences of bad choices. [Answer] China used to have an [one-child policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy). They are phasing it out now for various reasons, but it did have significant effects on their demographics. For your story, consider the conflicts and problems, and decide if they appear in your setting as well or if you deal with it. * Male children were expected to look after elderly parents and carry on the family name. That led to [abortions and infanticide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_women_of_China). Can your scientists make credible promises that elderly without sons (or without any children) will be cared for in decent retirement homes? * Telling people that they should have no children is difficult. The human instict is to procreate. It might be easier to tell them that their baby will be "improved" by the geneticists, or that "the best" out of several egg and sperm combinations will be selected. The cute little baby would still have mommy's nose and daddy's eyes, or whatever. Plus the latest immune system upgrade and a boosted IQ, or whatever the setting allows. * In the real world there are people who refuse prenatal screening on moral grounds. They would carry the baby to term and care for it anyway, so why test for disabilities? Are there people like that in your story? Misguided fools, hopeless romantics, or villains? * Does your fictional society have enough time to solve their problems by reducing birth rate? Or do they need faster results? * Quite a lot of educational outcome is nurture, not nature. People might argue that eugenics are missing the point, what is really needed is better pre-schools. [Answer] Depending on how 'near future' you're talking I think Douglas Adams already answered this one quite nicely in the [Hitchhikers Guide](http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Golgafrincham). As has been mentioned in most of the other answers, there is no easy way to cull large swathes of the population without causing some dissent. Particularly if you are doing so based on some sort of points scale of who is better qualified to live and who isn't. So you don't cull them, you send them off to colonise a new planet in a generation ship. Depending how willing your populace is you either pull a Douglas Adams and lie to remove the useless portion of the population while keeping the high achievers or you straight up tell them there is no room for everyone and someone has to go. Being a nation of science following rational thinkers the thought of exploring the universe and colonising new planets will probably appeal anyway so it shouldn't be too difficult to convince people to go. [Answer] Paper titles that contribute to this end, sorted from early to late in the process: * Effects of removal of natural selection on human populations * A longitudinal study on growth factors in human population * Meta-study on protein scarcity by type * A cost benefit analysis on the use of grains as a fuel source versus food source * P-value analysis of studies which have shaped population policy * Ethical implications of human breeding restrictions * Genetic trait analysis: desirability within the human population * Crisis management: a study of alternative protein sources * Social implications of medical advances * Optimization of distribution of food resources * Opting out: a study of the effectiveness of methods for those choosing the greater good * Genetic optimization: NPTN expression within a population * The greater good: a study of sanitary disposal methodology [Answer] Assumptions not to be questioned: * In your world, a highly developed society having a problem with overpopulation instead of declining birth rates is plausible * In your world, eugenic selection is scientifically (if not necessarily ethically) shown to be the most (or only) reasonable solution for this problem of overpopulation Further Assumptions: * Your Scientocracy has an economic system which allows for a certain amount of economic pressure and/or incentives to be put onto the citizens, be it through adjusting the central distribution of goods and services or manipulating the market for them * Simply forcing people to be killed is not going to work out too well for the government * You don't have to reduce the population by 40% right now, you have several years or even a few decades * You can't just use CRISPR to resolve all birth defects and make perfect babies Policies towards procreation: The state needs to disincentivise having children, especially many children. Since having children is a strong natural desire of most people, this desire needs to be managed. Our first order if business is to help people not to have children on accident. Birth control measures should be freely available to anyone. Sterilisation is free and accesible. Abortions should not be stigmatized but be seen as an entirely legitimate tool of family planning. Health education should be comprehensive, start reasonably early and include proper instruction on birth control and the disadvantages of early pregnancy. A scientific society should have these sorted out anyway. Also, fertility treatment is now unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Next, we want people who want children to think twice about going through with this. Forbidding children entirely isn't going to work out, so what we're doing is encouraging as few children as possible. To this end we'll be using a lot of measures that China used in its one-child policy, but we'll be augmenting them a bit. We've seen that in our modern societies, having children is becoming somewhat less popular. Women want to have careers too, and childcare is a lot of work for a lot of time. We will incentivise career and education while reducing possibilities to combine them with childcare. There will be no more free child care facilities, you have to invest resources into them now. Also, you only have a right to get one child into them, each child after the first will be over capacity and you'll have to figure out a way to supervise it by paying out of pocket. Only wealthy people can have multiple children now (since being a stay-at-home parent deprives you of income and paying privately for childcare is expensive). Continuing with economic incentives, there will be some kind of bonus for people who don't have any children. Maybe a tax break, maybe some kind of extra vacation or free entry to certain recreational facilities (petting zoos may help to alleviate the need to cuddle something cute, you could also encourage people to have pets like cats and dogs as a replacement for children). A bonus sounds better than a penalty for having a child. Then, each child after the first does in fact occur a penalty, be it in taxes or otherwise. Don't overdo it though, it should be really uncomfortable, but not to the point of keeping secret children in your basement for all their life or child police searching houses and culling breed. We'll keep it economic and societal. (Keep in mind that this scientific society should not have a bias towards males like china had, so a few of the demographic problems they have can be avoided). Speaking of societal, having multiple children should be seen both as uneducated and low class and as selfish and harmful towards society. Instead, resources are pooled towards the few children we have, combined with replacements like pets. Pooling resources may also mean that children could be to a certain degree be communally raised instead of limited to their parents and teachers. A child doesn't need to be your own flesh and blood, right? It's almost as good (possibly just as good if we look at adoptive parents in the real world). We should also place very high expectations onto parents. There will be no child neglect tolerated. Child abuse carries the highest of punishments. Methods like corporal punishment will be absolutely banned. (Most of these would be in place anyway in a scientific society). Being a parent is a privilege and comes with duties. Only the most dedicated should make the commitment to have a child, and the high expectations would also feed into the communal aspects of childrearing I mentioned earlier (you'd need help, basically). If you want to be a bit more brutal, you can also implement something like forced sterilisation for serious crimes. Since a one-child policy will reduce the population quite a bit in a few generations, this is a good mid-term plan. Policies towards defects, sickness and aging: Obviously we'll be encouraging aborting all children with birth defects. To that end we will implement compulsory testing for all pregnancies and we will place all responsibility for caring for a child with a defect that had been diagnosed yet not be aborted onto the parents who made that choice, there will be no healthcare assistance for defects that could have been avoided. In case of terminal illness, degenerative disease and chronic morbidity (assuming that the science you have isn't capable of easily treating or healing them) we will emphasise that everybody has a right to a peaceful and dignified death. Assisted suicide will be relatively easily available and seen as a legitimate and socially encouraged solution to an otherwise unsolvable problem. There will be therapy available for the bereaved, the state will cover all cost of the funeral. People will be given the opportunity to say goodbye. Maybe there is even a ceremony or ritual for this. Mourning is socially acceptable, maybe people get a few days off work. We will also not hold back from treating such diseases with pain medication that can shorten life, even in early stages. The disease will cut life short anyway, so it's best to enjoy the bit of life that you can as much as possible. Suffering isn't noble, it's unnecessary and cruel. Sure, if the pain would pass without trace, then it wouldn't make sense, but since this is a chronic affliction, what harm is there to be done? Quality of life is much more important than quantity of life! The same goes for age. If your body breaks down and you can't do the things that you love anymore, why not prepare to leave while you have the facilities? Do you want to wait until you can't recognise your own children anymore and become a blabbering remnant of a once great person? Do you want to do this to your family? Why not spare them and yourself the pain. You've had a long and fulfilled life after all. (Obviously here too the state cares for the family and pays for the funeral.) Policy to reduce adult population: When resources are scarce, people become afraid and defensive. This allows you to be more draconian in terms of punishments. We can't even feed our people and you steal, defraud, abuse, rape? You're obviously a leech on society. The death penalty is one thing that comes to mind, since while it doesn't really work against crime it does totally reduce population. A bit less overt would be forced labour under conditions that a) save resources (people aren't fed well, don't have good healthcare etc.) b) produce resources (labour is useful after all) and c) can lead to accidental deaths (poor working conditions). Exile also works as a punishment, maybe criminal colonies that have to support themselves could be implemented. Policies for eugenic selection: We already spoke about abortion of foetuses with birth defects. Next, people who have genetic defects don't get to have the one child everyone else gets. Give them some kind of consolation or priority for adoption, maybe an extra incentive for sterilisation. Encourage, don't force, it's not their fault after all. They're tragic people who unfortunately couldn't be helped, but we won't let it happen to others in the future. If you have people who carry particularly great genes, give them a bit of leeway in terms of children. Maybe let them have more children who're technically not theirs legally, but they are allowed to see them. Others could adopt them and not have to have their own or they could be communally raised. Or maybe give out extra child allowances for special meritorious service. Implement elite schools, universities and societies for the best and brightest (and healthiest and most beautiful) to meet and mingle. Let those mix their genes and procreate. They're probably more wealthy anyway, so they can afford a second child. Particularly useful mutations or just really great assemblies of genes could also be declared useful research subjects and thus be exempt from child limitations. [Answer] Quick non-facetious semi-rhetorical question related to your idea of a "scientocracy": do minimum wage laws help the economy as a whole or hurt it? \Does quick google search for meta-studies\ WTF? How is something this important to human well-being, charged with affect, and well-studied still not decisively answered? Or more pertinently, why do educated people continue to believe that it is a settled question when it clearly isn't? And we're talking about science and scientists here, much less the talking heads at Fox or MSNBC. Reality is a harsh mistress. Your scientocracy (as you've explained it) is a theocracy: people (you?) are bestowing on science an aura of papal infallibility. Scientific truth is more of a continuum. Consider the following things: * Maxwell's equations * Theory of Evolution * Anthropomorphic Climate Change * Abiogenesis * Law of Supply and Demand * Theory of Mind * ... * Homeopathy * Phlogiston Maxwell's Equations are not only repeatable through direct experimentation, they have held up over time without being refuted. Evolution has lots of evidence, and has gone a long time now without a counter-example (i.e. the infamous "rabbit in the Pre-Cambrian") although is not as amenable to experiment. Climate change has had far less time to be refuted than Evolution. Abiogenesis is a good and respectable guess at the origin of life and has the potential to be confirmed via direct experiment (although that hasn't happened yet). Etc, etc, all the way down to homeopathy which seems absurd, and defunct models like phlogiston. Now you may take exception to where I've placed things here, but that's not the point: the point is that scientific "truths" are gradients, not binary. Some truths are "truer" than others, and sometimes even in a quantifiable way. This is without even getting in to the whole "is a close approximation like Newtonian Mechanics 'true'" debate. So no, I don't think it's far-fetched to have a scientifically literate society go down the Eugenicist's path with little-to-no justification at all (other than some good old fashioned bias magnification and cherry-picking of studies). On the contrary: I think it's far-fetched to have a scientocracy where the entire concept is not being played from a somewhat dystopian angle. You could of course have your scientocracy be such that it acted with epistemic humility: aware of biases, Chesterton's Fence, the gradients of scientific "truth", more awareness of the distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' sciences, etc. But that is (unfortunately) unbelievable, at least to me. I'm also not sure how you'd get a good story out of it. [Answer] No imminent threats yet the population is unsustainable due to a natural disaster. I'm assuming said disaster affected infrastructure in a way that limited the production and delivery of goods and services, and automation hasn't reached the point of enabling a post-scarcity economy. Since you're using a near future setting you could just go full on cyberpunk and create an adversarial ingroup/outgroup dynamic between people who are/are not genetically engineered and/or cybernetically augmented. Have natural born humans as a minority who are statistically far less productive and far more prone to physical and mental abnormalities. Growing resentment among post-humans for having to pull more than their fair share of the weight relative to obsolete naturals. Some propaganda and false flags sponsored by a consortium of megacorps and their government lackeys and judging by historical trends you should be able to drum up support for natural ghettos. Once sufficiently confined any number of lethal bacteria and viruses could be distributed. They could even mutate, dun dun dun. Judging by your call for "painless" culling you probably didn't want an allegory for 20th century fascism, but I'm struggling to conceptualize a non-dystopian mass culling due to over population. [Answer] To build and combine on some ideas mentioned in other answers: Thorne suggest decreasing societal support programs for less able people. Olga suggests allowing and facilitating assisted suicide. Myles suggests releasing a series of papers, and though I like it, I think it would be too slow. Based on the way you set out the question, it seems to me as if this is a sudden problem - a natural disaster has removed a portion of your society's ability to sustain itself. Since this society is based on rationality and informed decisions, I suggest complete transparency towards the population with regards to the nature and severity of the crisis facing the group. Stress that while, of course the government wants to help everyone equally, support for all must be cut/ severely limited to ensure that as many as possible people will receive at least some care. At the same time, institute a voluntary euthanasia program. Link it to an offer to harvest cells/ eggs/ sperm from willing participants so that they may be cloned or reproduce in the future, when the society has recovered. Less tasteful, you can link voluntary euthanasia to some material benefit for your loved ones, but I think this would probably lead to some exploitation, so would be leery to institute it. [Answer] Captain of all these men of death. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uFLOc.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uFLOc.jpg) Tuberculosis has been with humanity for a long time. At its peak, the white plague produced a death rate of 800 / 100,000 in Western Europe during the late 1700s-early 1800s. As a comparison, the US [death rate from all causes](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00022217.htm#00000245.htm) in 1991 was 513 / 100,000 and this year at the height of the AIDS epidemic, AIDS caused only 11 / 100,000 deaths. This plague did not destabilize society, which continued to function very well. People with TB did not die fast and could function a long time while dying. For your purposes, a death rate of 800 / 100,000 could outdo the birth rate of your society and numbers will begin to fall. TB then and today was more prevalent among the poor and sick but it took the rich and young also. You can make your death rate from TB as high as it needs to be to accomplish the needs of your story. How to get a society to accept tuberculosis? Romanticize it, exactly as was done during its height. from <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095461110600401X#bib32> > > In the face of such an awesome tuberculosis prevalence, society > responded by romanticizing the disease. The wan and pallid facies of > the victim of tuberculosis were thought to be attractive. Georges > Sand, Frédéric Chopin's lover, called him her “poor melancholy angel.” > Poet George Lord Byron, who did not himself have tuberculosis, is said > to have remarked to a friend, “I should like to die of a consumption.” > “Why?” countered his friend. “Because the ladies would all say, ‘Look > at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying!.’” Emily > Brontë described the tuberculous heroine in Wuthering Heights as > “rather thin, but young and fresh complexioned and her eyes sparkled > as bright as diamonds.” Charles Dickens wrote in describing the > death of Smike in Nicholas Nickleby, “[As] the mortal part wastes and > withers away, so the spirit grows light and sanguine.” > > > [![Death from consumption in Moulin Rouge](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FE87w.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FE87w.jpg) <http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03060/kidman-mcgregor_3060451k.jpg> [Answer] If a lack of resources is a problem, you could decrease social support programs so the less able would find it difficult to find work and support themselves. You then increase the death penalty for more crimes and accelerate the legal system and remove appeals so "justice" is dispensed much faster. Think [Judge Dredd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Dredd) You could also have society supplying recreational drugs with a cumulative life shortening effect so those with personal control issues shuffle off the mortal coil that bit sooner. Euthanasia would also allow the sick and elderly to no longer burden the living. Finally you bring in [breeding licences](http://dilbert.com/strip/1992-10-11) so only the best and brightest have children because our future generation deserve the best and that includes the best parents. [Answer] # The targeted group must rendered powerless and voiceless They must become the pure embodiment of "The Other". Human morality cares a lot about whether someone, the victim or the attacker are "in-group" or "out-group". If someone is ingroup, all kinds of mental gymnastics will happen to justify a particular action. Try it. Consider the emotional impact of a murder of someone on the other side of the planet versus the murder of your next door neighbor. If the targeted group can be made to look like the alien Other, regardless of how long they've lived there or the degree of social Integration, then the isolation required to cull them has already started. Rendering them voiceless in a society with modern social media will be extremely difficult unless censorship is heavily used. They will have to be partitioned into their own little communities or excluded all together. Ideally, they will be completely isolated from each other to prevent coordination. Once the target group is the Other and have no voice, let the culling begin. # Commentary on Eugenics The process of science cannot answer questions of what should be done. It can offer viable alternatives but it ultimately resolves to humans to choose based on the information and their own biases. That a paper praising eugenics was peer-reviewed and found acceptable doesn't mean it's ethically right. Peer reviewed just means that a few other (unpaid) professors looked at the paper and didn't find anything wrong with it. If you send a paper to a bunch of people who want to see eugenics used, of course it will pass peer-review. And eugenics is just as evil. The people who advocate for eugenics/genocide have an axe to grind already. They already have groups of people they don't like and would prefer to not have around anymore. They've picked their optimal, perfect human archetype and will justify it with studies as much as possible. Ultimately, whether to use eugenics isn't about what science says but whether the people in power are kill the Others to reduce the strain on resources. This absolutely resolves to Us vs. Them. [Answer] # Culling without killing: merge What if some arcane technology allows merging humans? If persons to be merged are similar enough, it even won't be noticable for the invididual. If it done on family bases (merging husband with husband, wife with wife and so on), it may be less noticable for surrounding as well. ]
[Question] [ The [tongue-eating louse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua) is an absolutely monstrous parasite that eats and replaces a fish's tongue. This of course poses a problem for mermaids; if these things evolved to do that for fish, why not mermaids? I think it goes without saying that this would be a pretty traumatic experience, and if this is possible, I want to do everything in my power to avoid it. Therefore, my question is simple: In a world where mermaids exist, would tongue-eating lice evolve to parasitize them? Specifications for best answer: 1. The best answer will account for the fact that these lice, being parasites, will most likely evolve alongside mermaids while determining the feasibility of this sinister scenario, including the fact that mermaids, having human-level intelligence, will likely develop countermeasures if this would be a problem. [Answer] Mermaids have hands, and can physically remove the parasite before it eats their tongue. [Answer] No marine mammal is parasitised by these tongue eating isopods. Mermaids are mammals. How do we know that mermaids are mammals? Because of those strategically located seashells. Since mermaids are mammals and no mammals are parasitised by tongue eating isopods, tongue eating isopods will not eat mermaid tongues. QED --- In fact, tongue eating isopods are known to parasitise just a handful of species of fish, and the overwhelming majority of parasitic isopods out there don't use this strategy. This means that it is overwhelmingly likely that any marine species will not, in fact, have a species of tongue eating isopods that will infect them. It's not just mammals that exempt, it's basically everything in the sea. Turtles don't get them. Whales don't get them. Sharks don't get them. Rays don't get them. 99.999% of all fish don't get them. You don't need any special explanation for mermaids. [Answer] ### Mermaid gills probably aren't attached to their tongues. Despite its name, the tongue-eating louse doesn't actually eat tongues. It replaces them, after the tongue falls off as a result of the parasite cutting off the tongue's blood supply after they enter the body through the gills. Since a mermaid follows a generally humanoid anatomy from the waist up, it's unlikely that their gills would allow access to their tongues like this. Additionally, it's likely that they'd develop methods of grooming their gill slots to protect themselves against parasites entering the body that way. Also, these parasites are the approximately the size of the tongue they replace. I think that a mermaid would probably notice a tongue-sized parasite trying to burrow into its gills! [Answer] According to the Wikipedia the parasite does not really harm the fish. It just replaces its tongue. Maybe your Mermaids evolve to actually require the parasite. The evil kind of Mermaids is often depicted with fearsome teeth and fangs. What if this is actually a parasite and pristine Mermaids have no teeth and tongue at all? It would be a symbiotic relationship. They could have some kind of ceremony where children receive their first parasite (after breastfeeding age of course). [Answer] ## It would need to reduce the intelligence of the hosts. Human intelligent level creatures would learn to remove the parasite once it grew to a certain size. You obviously want parasited mermaids, so to make it work, it needs to stop them removing the parasite. It can do this by secreting chemicals into the blood that make the mermaid stupid, and hungry. This will reduce their ability to notice and remove the parasite. ## 'Zombie' Mermaids would be feared by other mermaids. With their tongues removed, and parasites hanging out of them such mermaids would go feral. They'd hunt and kill to feed their parasite, and seek to spread their parasite with deadly kisses. As such, most other mermaids would seek to kill them and destroy the corpses, to stop the spread. ## Mermaids would develop grooming rituals to remove such parasites. Daily checks would prevent the spread, with mermaids carefully checking gills or tongues for any parasites, and removing them. Apes do the same for lice in other's fur. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N4eiD.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N4eiD.jpg) Mermaids can react faster than lice can evolve, but accidents happen. Stressed out mermaids might forget to groom, and then the zombie mermaids would spread. [Answer] IANAEB (I am not an evolutionary biologist) but I think it is unlikely that a form would evolve which feeds the same way exclusively on mermaids. My reasoning is the energy consumption. If you compare fish tongues and human tongues you will see that it would take much more effort to infest a mermaid than a fish. There might be some secondary strains of this lice that actually do feed on mermaid tongues but I would reckon that they remain a rare evolutionary oddity, appearing and disappearing rather randomly. Unlike fish which only have fins, no hands, a mermaid can actively take countermeasures and thus massively raising the level of energy needed. Also fish might have countermeasures, like immune response, but those are much easier to overcome for the lice than being manually picked off the tongue. Since these arguments, in my opinion, already apply to comparably early stages of the mermaids developement, I would say that the lice evolve to infest fishes. I know that this is oversimplified but I found it helpful when designing creatures to mostly go by the energy consumption to determine their evolutionary viability. [Answer] Perhaps if the lice were symbiotic or provided some sort of benefit (either biologically or in terms of social standing or religious/cultural significance) to the mermaids, such that they generally wouldn't be inclined to remove them and may even purposely infest themselves and/or their families. Maybe like the mermaid equivalent of ritualistic circumcision or something? Or perhaps the lice could produce some sort of antitoxin that allows them to survive in waters the mermaids previously couldn't, and by infesting themselves the mermaids can absorb the antitoxin into their blood too. And perhaps the infested mermaids can produce sounds that can't be replicated by non-infested mermaids, thus excluding them from mermaid language and society? [Answer] No the parasite is fish tongue eating where is mermaid's have human tongues. ]
[Question] [ I was inspired by [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/196020/how-could-my-secret-societies-of-immortals-take-over-rival-clan-controlled-towns/196093#196093) which talks about feuding clans of immortals in an urban fantasy setting trying to wipe out each other's cities while under a masquerade. There's a lot of this kind of stuff in urban fantasy fiction, from towns being utterly destroyed by whatever supernatural phenomenon the plot revolves around (e.g., the destruction of the Hellmouth destroying Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, San Venganza in Ghost Rider, Silent Hill), or the destruction thereof is considered an implicit threat (the potential destruction of Forks is a plot point in the third Twilight novel). This got me wondering how realistic it would be for an entire town to disappear via supernatural plot-related shenanigans, such as monsters attacking the town or some other disaster destroying the town. Either every living person is wiped out or the few people who survive leave almost immediately thereafter. I'm mostly thinking about this in terms of a relatively recent setting where travelling between cities is common and communication technology exists, so post-1890 or so. I'm also thinking about a town that's in a relatively rural setting but not on a frontier, and in a politically stable enough country that local warlords aren't really an issue. I.e., in the American West towns were destroyed due to Native American raids, Americans from other towns burning them down and killing their inhabitants, plague and drought, or the mineral lodes the town's economy was built on drying up, but those towns were so isolated it wasn't seen as unusual if one got wiped out. Thinking about it, wouldn't the complete disappearance of a town overnight be a major catastrophe, one that would draw a lot of attention as the government panics to find out what made thousands of its citizens disappear on what is supposed to be secure territory? I don't know if there's any precedence. I did some research into ghost towns and even in cases where towns "disappear overnight", it's usually because economic conditions have rapidly shifted (usually in mining towns) and even then the towns still dwindle slowly instead of everyone disappearing in one mass event. Even in more catastrophic events, like the [Centralia Mine Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia_mine_fire), it still took over a decade for everyone to clear out. There are cases like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (or alternatively the Mount Saint Helens disaster or the Fukushima disaster), but that was such a catastrophic event it would be impossible to ignore and the causes thereof are well known. My question is primarily is it possible for a decent-sized town (say 2000-100,000 people) to disappear overnight in a catastrophe and not attract a great deal of attention? By "great deal of attention", I mean in the long term the destruction of the town not having a huge impact beyond some obscure historical trivia on the level of the Centralia disaster. Obviously in the immediate aftermath there would be investigations, but I'm talking about the event not being broadcast all over the prime-time news, the government not in a perpetual state of panic because they can't pin down the culprit, and not leaving a deep historical impact like 9/11 did for the United States. Are there any historical cases of this that can be used to model how this would happen? How extensively would people try to investigate and what would need to occur to make the long-term irrelevance of it (or at least, enough that the supernatural elements are not discovered) possible? To be clear, I'm not talking about a town completely disappearing and no one ever finds out (though that would be nice if it were the case). It's pretty clear that people would have to incur selective amnesia for that to be the case given how interconnected the world has been in the last 125 years. I'm talking about a town disappearing and in the long run not resulting in massive socio-cultural change or lingering as a widely-known historical trauma. For example the 9/11 attacks were a huge national crisis for the U.S., are an event so well known and so engrained in contemporary pop culture it is unlikely any U.S. citizen who lived through them would forget about it, and resulted in major shifts in government policy (including huge changes in how air travel is conducted, increasing Western government surveillance on its citizens, and arguably precipitating several wars in the Middle East). Same with Chernobyl. By contrast, who among us today remembers Mount Saint Helens (though even then the site was made a National Volcanic Monument)? One would think the idea of a thousand or more people just disappearing (or worse, having clear signs that they were slaughtered by something) with no clear culprit (unless they blame it on a natural disaster) would cause governments to freak out because there was no way to predict or avert it and be a massive milestone in that country's history. Such an event would likely cause massive sociocultural change as the government tries everything to make sure it happens "never again", potentially including investigating the event as hard as they can (and hence likely discovering the supernatural and blowing the Masquerade) or persecuting whatever group they think did this (whether they are a group of humans or supernaturals). Even if the government is in on the Masquerade it seems unlikely they would try to cover it up. [Answer] ### Fake or exaggerate an economic explanation. Towns disappear all the time without people investigating why - when the mine closes and lays everyone off, everyone moves on to find new work as soon as they can get out of their lease, which can be asap if the company owned their house. All you need to do to explain it away is link it to some major employer going broke. An abattoir, a fruit packer, a sawmill, a furniture factory, etc. This can be shoehorned in with the bad news of the day. If a town of 2000 people was wiped off the map overnight, and when I asked about it, you told me covid19 border closures led to the local tourism industry collapsing, causing everyone to sell up and leave town looking for work, I'd totally believe that. [Answer] I have a hard time believing that a town of non-trivial size could disappear overnight and nobody notice. If we're talking about some tiny town with 10 people living there, okay, they might get together one day and decide this town is dead and all move out at the same time. Or all be killed in one accident big enough to kill multiple people but not big enough to be national news. But if we're talking about a town with thousands of people? 10,000 people living in one place don't just all happen to die at the same time by coincidence. And 10,000 people don't all decide to move at the same time by coincidence. There have certainly been disasters that have destroyed an entire town. Volcanoes and earthquakes and so on. But people who don't live there notice what happened. Even if the government didn't investigate, it's hard to believe that a town could be 100% isolated from the rest of the world so that no one outside notices they're suddenly gone. Like, none of these people have relatives who live elsewhere who try to call and wonder why the phone is now out of service? There is no store in town that receives merchandise from some outside supplier, so that a truck comes into town to deliver the latest shipment and the driver wonders what happened to everybody? No one who lives there has a job outside the town, so that his employer wonders why he doesn't show up for work? Etc. You would have to suppose that not one person, out of all the thousands of people who live in this town, has any connection at all to anyone who lives elsewhere. Maybe this could be true of some isolated place in the jungles of Africa or the Amazon, But I have a very hard time believing it could be true of a town in North America or Europe. Once a few people started to say, "Hey, it's weird that I can't get hold of so-and-so. I hope she's okay", sooner or later someone would go to the town to see what was going on. Then they'd see that everyone was dead or the town was empty, and surely people would start talking about it. Reply to Keith Morrison "I'm talking about a town disappearing and in the long run not resulting in massive socio-cultural change or lingering as a widely-known historical trauma." Now you're talking about degree of impact. You appear to be implicitly conceding that indeed people would wonder what happened and investigate and so forth, but you want to set the goal posts at "massive socio-cultural change". So okay, if you define "massive socio-cultural change" to mean that everyone in the rest of the country changes their lives in dramatic ways because of this incident, and people think about it every day for the rest of their lives, yeah, that probably wouldn't happen. After any big disaster, people say "this will change the country forever". Covid is the obvious example as I write this in 2021. People said this about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. Etc. In real life, sure, a decade or two later things return to normal and while there may be lingering effects, people aren't thinking about the incident every day. Hey, even truly huge events that literally did change the world, like World War 2 ... people today don't sit around every day thinking about World War 2. So yes, if a town of 10,000 people mysteriously disappeared tomorrow, would everyone in the country be thinking about it and wondering what happened and worrying that it could happen to their town every day for decades to come? Probably not. But would there be investigations, by the government or news organizations or SOMEBODY? Absolutely yes. Would millions of people be interested and watch the news about it and wonder what happened? I'm sure they would. It would not simply be a minor footnote that got mentioned on page C32 of a local newspaper or two and promptly forgotten. Would it change the lives of everyone in the country, or the world, forever? No. [Answer] ## Dr. Who Vs. Love Canal: The way I see it, you have two directions to go with this. Either the masquerade controls the investigative departments of the government enough to simulate disasters, or humans are naturally primed to forget about supernatural events. Towns DO, in fact, periodically disappear. Someone discovers the whole thing was built on a toxic waste dump. A company disposing of dioxin-laced oil sprays it on the streets so the place becomes uninhabitable. A ship filled with ammonium nitrate blows up in the harbor and the whole place vaporizes. A nuclear reactor melts down or leaks, and everyone flees. Coal mines start on fire and the ground slowly swallows a community. If your masquerade has a version of the cleaners from endless movies - people who show up, remove the incriminating evidence, and drop appropriate cover evidence for the normals to look at - then all you need to do is influence the investigators and hang up signs telling people to stay away, DANGER. The EPA would be a good place to start. Every couple years, someone puts out a new report about how the waste is still toxic (if you haven't cleaned up the evidence) or how the town has been bulldozed and the site cleaned (after the evidence is gone). Environmentalists get to complain, but the "victims" are on the inside of the story and aren't talking - except for bogus interviews. Careful manipulation of the media isn't so hard, once you give them someone or something to blame/fixate on. Only the questionable news sources say different - and who cares if the Enquirer reports that Chernobyl was caused by a Demon Lord manifesting on Earth? On the other hand, Dr. Who has a different premise. People DON'T WANT to know about the supernatural, except for some crazy researchers. So while the evidence sits out for all to see, they don't see it. It's like a perception filter - you might know something is wrong and stay away, but you really don't want to know WHAT is wrong unless it personally affects your life. A few people are pushed to forget, kind of like in Men In Black, but it actually takes less effort than you might think to get people to forget what they didn't want to know in the first place. [Answer] In the modern world - no way. In anything bigger than a small village, you have both personal, family and business relations going past the place itself. Even if you had a cover story, those family members, friends and busines associates would notice that the people your cover story says "moved away" are unreachable, and also didn't mention anything about moving. People would suddenly stop calling their friends, stop posting on social media, stop attending business meetings, stop delivering or receiving products. Speaking of which: No town of several thousand people in the modern world is self-sufficient. It would have several supermarkets, a pharmacy, drugstores and various other shops which need new goods, some of them every 1-2 days. Those truck drivers would notice what's going on. Likewise, today many people live in one place but work in another. These people would be missing from work, while other people would drive to their workplace in the vanished town and - like the truck drivers - see what's going on. More: Very few towns lie at the end of a road. Most have some traffic passing through, by car or train (most towns have at least a small train station, at least over here in Europe). Again, witnesses. Historically - maybe If you go back in time 50 years or more, you may start having a chance. The first supermarket [opened in 1916](https://time.com/4480303/supermarkets-history/) and it would be a few more decades until they became common. Looking at the [history of logistics](http://www.psdtolive.com/history-of-logistics-and-supply-chain-management/), we can see that things like barcodes and other essentials for the tight management of today were largely invented in the 1950s. IT and computers appeared in the 1980s. So before those times, the world was less connected and, most importantly, less immediate. Events could go unnoticed for longer because everything was slower. Less information was generally available, so fewer people could connect the dots. So if you go to some time before WW2, there's a chance that you can pull of a disappearing town in a halfway believable way. Any time after that - unlikely to happen. [Answer] Destroy the town under the cover of a natural disaster. In modern times, small towns are routinely wiped out by natural disasters. The hurricane gets attention, but the towns it destroys (e.g. Mexico Beach, FL; Sabine Pass, TX) don't. The forest fire gets attention, but the towns it destroys (e.g. Berry Creek, CA; Malden, WA) don't. These towns are around 1000 people, but it wouldn't hard to stretch to 2000. Paradise, CA (burned in 2018) got some amount of national attention, but it was 26,000 people, so you can imagine that a town 10% that size wouldn't even be noticed. The natural disasters give plenty of advance notice that would be enough for a malicious group to plan their attack and coordinate it with the storm. In real life, the group wouldn't want to wait around for a natural disaster to happen along -- but in fiction (the first act, anyway) this sort of providence is pretty well accepted. [Answer] ## No. It is not possible for such a thing to go unnoticed by the outside world for more than a few hours. Even centuries ago it wouldn't take more than a day or so. Think about how much interaction there is between communities. Cars are entering and leaving quite small towns all day long, and people routinely have phone calls and exchange texts with people outside of town. If it happened overnight, then the next morning somebody would go into town to get something at the store, and they would call 911 as soon as they noticed that everybody had disappeared. And of course it would be a huge deal. And I think this has more to do with the absolute size of the town than how long ago it was. A town of 2,000 people is relatively tiny now, but it is still large enough that it will have daily interactions with the outside world. Much more than daily, in fact. Five hundred years ago, by comparison, a town of 2,000 people was a significant place. Definitely a town, not a village. [According to Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_cities_in_England_by_historical_population#Medieval_England), in 1377, Shrewsbury, with 2,083 people, was the 18th largest population center in England. A place like that will have the blacksmith, and the cobbler, and the pub. People will be coming and going every day. If the town disappears overnight, the people in the surrounding villages will be freaking out the next day. And, since it's the 18th largest town in the country, it's basically the regional metropolis, so, again, it will be a huge deal. [Answer] Secret towns The Soviet Union had a number of "secret" towns, some of whicb got abandoned fairly quickly in the early 1990s without making much news. Have you heard of [Pyramiden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramiden) (in Norway) or [Mardai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mardai) (in Mongolia)? Imagine if one such town in, say, Turkmenistan, suddenly lost all inhabitants in the late 1980s. With some made-up explanation such as a chemical plant test gone wrong. How many people would look for other explanations? Warfare I am not really sure if you want to exclude international conflicts or not. Such conflicts tend to produce ghost towns, especially if a sufficient degree of ethical hatred is involved. See [Cyprus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varosha,_Famagusta) or [Karabakh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzuli_(city)) for fairly recent examples, or WWII for a long list of such places. If the war is sufficiently large-scale, the destruction of one town and the surrounding claims and counter-claims would just turn into another sad footnote. [Answer] The problem is that when towns do get wiped out suddenly, there is almost always an investigation that determines the cause. For instance, take the Lake Nyos disaster <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster> in which the population of several villages and the surrounding area died. It was initially quite mysterious (at least as I recall from news accounts). Only after the investigation was the cause determined, and the exact mechanism still isn't completely understood. So any case of everyone in a town suddenly dying is going to attract attention. It will be studied, and probably a cause will be determined. About the only way to have such a thing go unnoticed is to remove all the bodies. Then, if the town doesn't have a lot of visitors, it becomes somewhat plausible to think that everyone just decided to leave. [Answer] I think Hastur's answer is headed in the right direction, but my answer will address the "catastrophy" part. --- Nomadic people with a tradition of burning their village before migrating. Any catastrophy that causes an entire town to disappear will attract attention and make it into the history books — except if this is expected. Imagine a nomadic culture that moves about the general population and settles for longer periods of time. The exact period of time could be flexible, being based on the seasons, the year, the availability of some renewable natural resource, etc. Even something like, in odd numbered decades they live along a river, but on even numbered decades they live in wooded areas. Maybe it is timed to the mass emergence of cicadas. But they don't just move. They burn or destroy most of their non-essential belongings before leaving, including razing their entire town. Perhaps this is a leftover tradition from a plague that occurred during ancient times, or as a result of persecution long ago. The main point is, this population has a history of seemingly disappearing overnight in catastrophy-like manner. The town burns to the ground again, timed to one of their planned migrations. It makes the news, mostly to assure the non-migratory population that it was the nomads who are responsible for the fires. This is expected and not something to be concerned about. Even better, there is no conspiracy to cover it up. This is a well known and expected event that requires little more than a quick blip on the nightly news. The people in the surrounding area are blissfully ignorant of the carnage that happened the night before, because the carnage was masked by what appears to be just another planned migration. The only downside to this approach is the nomadic people are expected to show up again somewhere. At some point, people will ask questions. They will ask questions sooner if the nomads make their next destination known. You can buy some time if they keep their next destination a secret. Then again, a population that routinely disappears and reappears, but never reappears would certainly add to the mystery. [Answer] You do not even need a catastrophe. Imagine a small (2-3000 people) citadel of nomads, as in some urban suburbs in Europe. Sometimes, if abusive, they are dismantled in a short time: even in a single day. Or they could simply vanish because family groups or ethnic subgroups decide to move to different places and there is no perception that the city has moved but that it has disappeared: we notice that it disappears here, but the fragmented impact on different destinations and perhaps delayed in time goes unnoticed. You can add a social environment for nomads completely separate from that of the settled society... [Answer] Managed engagement. In the previous questions, the vampires could "charm" people, and those people would go out and give false reports that the town was generally undesirable to visit, and report back to the vampires if anyone wanted to visit anyway. With the residents dead, what happens? The "charmed" people keep giving their false reports. Eventually there are practical difficulties - the fellow who supposedly delivers soda pop to the town's convenience store can no longer get paid. Maybe the "charm" wears off. But what happens then is presumably a confused series of efforts of those people to cobble together explanations that don't look terrible for them. If those explanations are tested, it turns out that some of them have been claiming to go to a town that doesn't exist. That looks like some sort of minor conspiracy or club, not a newsworthy disaster. [Answer] We live in the Information Age, so erasing a town would require an information disaster. Assume (for example) some advanced space-alien group decides to abduct an entire town. They take the people, flatten the town, and then use a set of computer viruses to wipe out all electronic data relating to the town and its inhabitants: gps data, tax records, business incorporations, property records, birth certificates, etc., etc. Yes, people who have been to the town or who have relatives there would be extremely confused and distraught, but from the government's perspective (and the perspective of most people in the country), the town not only doesn't exist, it never existed. The people crying out that the town has disappeared would be lumped in the same category (ironically) as UFOlogists, and the whole thing would become a mystery about why all these people came to believe that this town once existed, against all objective facts: a fine subject for TV shows on mysterious, unnatural phenomena. This is also an old sci-fi trope, though the trope is usually used to 'disappear' a single person. And there's limits on how scalable it all is: political seats, business centers, and cultural icons are things that everyone knows, so erasing them electronically wouldn't be enough to create the illusion of non-existence. And of course, the 'super advanced technology' MacGuffin doesn't add to the credibility of the idea. But, you know... [Answer] # A cover-up A disappearing of a town would almost certainly result in some rumours. But those rumours can be quenched by a government or a powerful organisation. The Soviets excelled in altering the truth. Last year I've learned about a town of Miedzianka in southern Poland, which not only just disappeared, but was wiped out of people's memory, until being rediscovered in 2000's. Here's the history of the town: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miedzianka,_Lower_Silesian_Voivodeship> And here are some photos - notice a gap between 1958 and 2005 <https://fotopolska.eu/Miedzianka/WszystkieZdjecia/b17404,Panoramy_Miedzianki,72,48.html> [Answer] # It wasn't supposed to be there in the first place It would need to be in a country where government in general is a bit lax. There are likely to be villages in Africa and India that the governments just don't know about, largely because * Lots of people can't afford to buy land * The government is more concerned about padding their wallets and looking good. It doesn't have to be an unstable country; there are plenty of stable countries with policemen who like bribes and people who just go along with it. So a shanty town develops, and people move in with piles of old sheet iron and scraps of wood. Perhaps it was in the path of a dam burst, or a cyclone. There was certainly a bit of a writeup in the newspaper. But who buys newspapers when you're scraping together for food? And who's going to claim to be a survivor, when they weren't supposed to be there in the first place? [Answer] ## Smaller scale and less weird things routinely make huge splashes Similar incidents don't happen terribly often in our world, but when they do, they tend to fascinate the general public for a very long time. And it's easy to see why: they grip the imagination and don't really let go (the way the OP's was gripped). In early 1959, [nine hikers died](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident) in very difficult to explain circumstances, with baffling injuries. It stayed in the public consciousness enough that sixty years later people were still arguing about it and the government officially reopened the investigation (concluding it was an avalanche). All this, for a mere 9 dead. The discovery of the [Mary Celeste](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste) adrift at sea, with no trace of a crew or a struggle, is so famous that - a hundred and fifty years after the fact - when I was thinking of appropriate examples to put in this answer, it came to mind immediately. The internet tells me the crew of a brigantine is 125 men; much less than would have disappeared in the scenario you contemplate. The [Voynich Manuscript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript) is ... well, it certainly is some thing. It was purchased by one Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, and nobody has been able to make heads or tails of it since. And not for lack of trying. In 1978, two farmers named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley decided to set out to create a mystery for the ages. They confessed in the 90's to being behind [crop circles](https://daily.jstor.org/pssst-crop-circles-were-a-hoax/). Apparently they had intended to take the secret to their graves, but one of the pair's spouses [became suspicious](https://www.labnews.co.uk/article/2028419/crop_circle_mystery_solved). He had to confess to prove he wasn't being unfaithful. ## An event on that scale would be terrifying Even relatively innocuous mysteries like the Voynich Manuscript and crop circles have kept the public's rapt attention for decades. Mysterious disappearances of a small number of people occupy our attention a lot longer. The total disappearance of an entire town's population will (as others have explained) be noticed very quickly. It involves an order of magnitude more disappearances than is typical, and in a way that will make people afraid whatever the hell it was might happen to them or those they care about. Once society figures out the entire population just ... disappeared without a trace, all at the same time? Everyone will Freak. Out. [Answer] ### Magical mind shenanigans. You mention the supernatural being involved in this, so it's entirely possible that a town disappearing might simply be covered up through the active use of supernatural powers. Maybe they sever the sympathetic connections the town holds to everywhere else, and it just slips out of people's minds. Maybe they go around mind-controlling people and erasing memories and implanting false memories to cover it up. Maybe they set up a magical formation around the town that mind-controls people into avoiding the area, and that there's nothing unusual or worth investigating there. [Answer] May be one whole lepers colony could disappear without no one takes care. I know at least one case in the 1800, but I was not able to get directions on google. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leper_colony> But I don't think it is possible. The Roanoke colony calls for explanation even today. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony> But, of course, if magic is used anything is possible. [Answer] Yes: A natural resource (eg a mine) is exhausted (ie mined out). And it's happened many times - see below. Suppose a town sprung up around a mine that yields a valuable but finite resource, let's say a gold mine, and was in a very remote and boring location such that there was no valid reason to go there other than to mine the resource, or be in a business that supports mining. The mine is eventually mined out. At that point, there's no reason for people to stay there and it becomes a ghost town overnight. This is not theoretical: Here is a list of 60 or so towns in Western Australia which is mostly vast nothingness (and incidentally whose capital Perth is the world's most remote state capital) that were thriving gold mining towns and are now ghost towns: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_towns_of_the_Goldfields_of_Western_Australia> ]
[Question] [ An alien entity fell in love with Earth a long time ago. When he came back to her, she looked different. He would like to return Earth to her [Hadean eon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadean) when she was much hotter. This entity has abilities that are comparable to what we suspect a Kardashev Type 2 civilization would be capable of. The entity would like to return Earth to the Hadean eon without having to throw tons of rocks at her or changing her composition. And he doesn't want to use a Mega bomb if it isn't necessary. A bomb can be used, but he wants to make sure that Earth doesn't lose too much weight in the process. Any loss bigger than 1% will be noticed. The time and energy spent to bring her back is irrevelant, but the sooner the better. How can I make the Earth red again? [Answer] Buy a lot of paint. Presumably a Type 2 Kardashev civilization entity can lift a bucket that large... [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CH7vj.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CH7vj.png) [Answer] Actually a very interesting premise - a type 2 Kardashev civilisation entity would have command over significant assets, but I believe also in the nano scale as well as the macro scale. Hence it would probably be a good bet that it has an unbelievablely large arsenal of nanobots at his command. The cloud of nanobots would be able to make large structures as well as small, and change the configuration of the environment too. Indeed, to capture the energy of the sun, one needs means to create large structures without the need to think, design, or manually make them - hence AI controlled nanorobots would be one of the likely scenarios, ones which could manipulate large amounts of material. These nanobots can then be sent to earth, to 'reconfigure it into a new matrix'. Basically, the Hadean Earth has high temperatures, high atmospheric pressure, and high levels of C02 - these can be achieved by the nanobots by first self-replicating, then disassembling the crust, ejecting the material into the atmosphere, boiling the oceans, and releasing the magma. The entity can then blissfully come down and admire his handiwork. [Answer] # Impacts are your friends ### Step 1: Push the moon towards the Earth. Once the moon gets to ~20,000 km from the Earth, Earth's gravity will cause it to disintegrate into a ring. ### Step 2: Perturb the ring. I think that many of the moon particles will end up impacting Earth anyways, but a little perturbation won't hurt. Get those particles into nice elliptical orbits and then atmospheric drag will eventually get most of them to impact the Earth's surface. Remember, as the oceans vaporize, you will only get more atmosphere to help drag down moon particles! ### Step 3: Wait for the Earth to heat up. There is over 7e22 kg of moon. The potential energy of dropping those from ~20,000 km is something on the order of 1e30 J. That is a million years of sunlight energy that strikes the Earth. If you can deliver all that energy within few hundred years, it should be not problem to vaporize the oceans and get the Earth's crust nice and glowing again. Note: The best part about this is that there is no way you will lose 1% of the Earth's mass, since by tossing a moon down there, you will be gaining about 1% of Earth's mass! Even if you blast a few impact particles off into deep space, they will be more than made up for. [Answer] Spread a lot of Fe2O3 (iron oxide) all over the planet. Where there is no water it will give a nice red appearance, while where there is water it will make it red. [![water contaminated by rust](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7qtkP.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7qtkP.jpg) At the end Mars is known as the red planet just for the rust it has on it. [Answer] Hadean Earth was Hadean Earth because it was still cooling down. All the entity has to do is reheating the planet. A K2 civilization should be able to harness the energy output of a star. The entity can make something akin to a dyson sphere and redirect the energy to Earth. The atmosphere might be lost to space. But [the atmosphere weights only around 5x1018 kg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Density_and_mass) according to the heavier estimates. That is less than one millionth of the mass of the Earth (approximately 6x1024 kg). Surface water will also be lost, but according to Wikipedia, [the whole mass of Earth's hydrosphere is around 1.4x1021 kg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean#Physical_properties), which is about 0.023% of the mass of the planet, so your "no more than 1% mass loss" requirement is accounted for. [Answer] Which end of the Hadean are you going for? There was the early Hadean with molten surface and a rock vapor atmosphere, and there was the late Hadean with liquid water oceans at a balmy 230C with an atmosphere at around 27kPa. Early Hadean requires lots of surface heating so the bombardment and radiation ideas are the way to go. A more subtle method of creating the late Hadean would be interior heating. A Kinder, Gentler Planet Cooker Alexander already suggested infusing the earth with radioactive elements. If you could deliver a large dose to the core, conduction and convection would take care of the rest. A large critical mass of dense fissile material (and what fissile material isn't dense?) placed on the Earth's surface would naturally find its way to the core with local scarring to the crust and mantle. Another way to heat from the inside out would be akin to a microwave, or to a [Bubblegram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegram). Normal radiation wouldn't make it though the atmosphere very effectively, but bombardment by a focused neutrino emitter could warm the core via Cherenkov radiation and trigger nuclear changes within heavy elements, infusing radioactive material directly into the core. This would require some unknown technologies, like aimable neutrino emitters, and probably neutrino reflectors to get enough interactions. So, a large high energy neutrino emitter bombarding the planet from a 60 degree spherical cone converging on the core, so that there is relatively low neutrino density on the surface but a small area of extreme bombardment in the core, combined with a reflector reflecting back the same 60 degree cone to increase interactions would bias heat toward the core, gently warming the planet from the inside. [Answer] Infuse Earth with radioactive elements. This is much less invasive than Dyson spheres, mega-bombs or celestial calamities. Radioactive elements will undergo fission, which will heat up the Earth's mantle and lead to massive volcanism (think [Siberian Traps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps)). With half-life of the elements being long enough, this volcanism will turn the Earth back into Hadean era. However, the whole process will take centuries and millennia to unfold. The idea is actually similar to Asimov's "[Robots and Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_and_Empire)". And, even "Kardashev II" level is not needed for it. [Answer] The Greenhouse Effect There is little chance of modern society turning Earths atmosphere into something like Venus. However, a powerful alien entity would probably be able to do this. The main ingredient in the Venusian atmosphere is carbon dioxide, not the mere 0.04% concentration that climate change scientists seem so worried about, but 96.5%. The Venusian atmosphere is much heavier too, being 93 times the mass of Earths atmosphere on a slightly smaller planet. Our strategy is simple. Pick a greenhouse gas, or a combination of greenhouse gasses, and release enormous quantities on Earth. The amount of solar energy hitting Earth is 174 PW, enough to heat the entire mass of the planet by 1 degree Kelvin in a year or two. So once we set up the correct atmospheric conditions, we can expect the appropriate surface temperature in a reasonable period of time. Of course, this will heat up the crust but not the core or mantle, as they are already hotter than the temperature you are likely to achieve. Another issue is that you may as well just enjoy Venus, which already resembles what this would do to Earth, and is not far away. [Answer] Move Earth's Orbit Switch orbits of Earth and Mercury would probably do the trick. It wouldn't be quick for us (well, our deaths would be fairly quick), but for an entity that visited so long ago, what's a few million more years. ]
[Question] [ A fairly common trope in fantasy is ["barbie doll anatomy"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BarbieDollAnatomy). Effectively, a species completely lacks any visible orifices besides their mouth and nose. This brings up two major questions. First, how would such a species reproduce, and second, how would it deal with waste in the body? Since these races are so often magical, an answer involving magic is fine. Thanks! Edit: Here's an example of "barbie doll anatomy" for clarity's sake. [![The Zora from the Zelda universe is a good example of "Barbie Doll Anatomy". The depicted character is lacking visible genitals of any kind, despite seemingly being naked. As inferred in the post, the character may also be lacking a sphincter.](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0t4JG.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0t4JG.png) [Answer] Inspired by the natural world around us, here are some weird but real options: 1. Certain animals have a [transient anus](https://www.businessinsider.com/animal-discovered-with-transient-anus-warty-comb-jelly-2019-3?r=US&IR=T). This is a bit of a frame challenge but still, you can walk around with no visible opening for 99% of the time without anyone noticing anything. 2. A lot of snail species use "love darts" that literally wound the other snail during mating. Although these darts aren't the thing that transfers the sperm, there is no reason why in your world this couldn't be the case. 3. As for gestation, this is tricky. There are (were) however [frogs that do "gastric brooding"](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gastric-brooding_frog&oldid=1159797715), i.e. they incubate their young in their stomach and then...well, throw up their offspring. Admittedly though, none of these options really has that Barbie vibe. [Answer] One unfortunate possibility is that your species may eat, mate, breathe, and excrete using the same orifice. [Answer] Ant larvae do not excrete any waste material. They keep their excrement contained until they grow into pupae. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uem5N.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uem5N.jpg) When ants are in their pupal state the waste collects in a sealed little plug at the end of the cocoon. It's a dark spot. Then when the cocoon is shed it can be thrown away. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nNtck.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nNtck.jpg) (Having worked with ants, it's a very tidy system and seems to keep their nests clean as they raise the young.) So a Barbie organism could molt, and simply have a dark spot of concentrated waste that would be removed when molting. (Here is a fascinating article on ant poop lol: <https://www.pestcontrolgurus.com/ant-poop/>) [Answer] # No visible orifices Many great answers already, but I see one avenue not considered in detail. All it takes is for the orifices to not be visible. We could have a feather or fur cover that retracts and be fine. With reproductive organs and waste organs actually not needing any length, only good positioning, you're basically done. I recognise that this isn't really the spirit of the question. Barbie dolls are without fur, feathers or other covering and any clothes can be removed for orifice inspection. Let's see options that would suffice for an inspection on an uncovered body. Holding an orifice so tight it looks like smooth skin seems a bit of a cop out, so I'll skip that. Reproductive organs do not actually have to get inside another. Though this is the most common practice, we can see several other kinds. Think of eggs, or simply pressing two holes close to each other for transfer. Penetration has it's advantages, but it does not rule out this kind of reproduction. So covering them up and only opening at required times would be enough. As mentioned in another question, the anus can form when needed. This can then be applied to any orifices. The easiest implementation is to have all the internal plumbing in the 'normal' places, but with a layer over the orifice. It'll be dissolved or ruptured when it is required to function. Skin grows too slow, so maybe something similar to blood clotting, or a substance that is excreted and when exposed to the air/drying out will form a layer that looks like skin. If it's anti bacterial all the better. Sadly barbie is lacking a belly button and other not normally orifices, or else it could do tripple duty as a not obvious orifice. We can hide the orifices in unusual places still. We can hide it under the feet, a place we normally do not inspect closely. Again, we can inspect it on a doll, but assuming a 'real' barbie it might not be realised until much later. Do not ask what leg they use for reproduction if no third leg is available. [Answer] Perspiration. Absolutely everything... They might need to drink copious amounts and also wash rather often... Still waste material could be remove by glands around the body. For reproduction egg laying like certain species of fish would do. Females lay eggs and then male lay sperm. Both could come from organ in or near head and be relatively small. Growth cycle from that point is somewhat open. Potential lactation for feeding could happen by some type of mucus. Mixing this process with the waste removal is likely not preferred. Magic could help these processes by lowering food requirements and supplying the energy for growth to certain limit. [Answer] A species with only one orifice has two options, 1) magic: waste is removed magically, it just disappears by magic. And it's a similar story with reproduction, insemination happens by magic with sperm magically appearing in the female body and the baby also appears by magic after growing inside its mother's body it magically appears outside of her body 2) the one orifice is used for all functions: this which would be rather unpleasant, but is physically possible even if it's biologically very questionable. [Answer] They do have such orifices, and where you would expect them to be, but they are just very, very small! There is a continual thin stream of excretion, and babies are born the size of a twinkle in the mother's eye... [Answer] ## They are plant or fungus based The visible orifices on a human are the mouth for eating and tasting, the nose for breathing and smelling, the ears for hearing, the anus for pooping, and the sex specific orifices for urinating and reproduction. While mammals generally work this way, there are plenty of macro-organisms here on Earth that don't have any of these orifices in thier bodies, but they are pretty much all plants and fungi When you eliminate the need to eat other organisms, suddenly the need for giant holes to consume food with becomes unnecessary. Plants and fungi don't have mouths. Plants consume most of thier energy through photosynthesis, and get most of thier chemical building blocks directly from the air and water The vast majority of organic chemistry only uses hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen; so, even trace amounts of other stuff is all planets really need the soil for. Fungi, similarly use a sedentary method of absorbing nutrients. Even though they eat other organisms like animals do, they don't consume them. The excrete digestive fluids onto thier food and sit on it while they uptake just the nutrients. If you never take in what you don't need, you never have anything you need to poop out. Breathing holes are also not exclusively necessary. Plants, fungi, and many amphibians breath through microscopic pores in thier "skins". So, it's highly feasible that a fantasy race could breath through thier skin too. Hearing does not require holes. While mammals tend to have orifice based hearing organs, we are actually the exception to the rule. Reptiles, mammals, fish, and amphibians can all hear just fine without any orifices. Like the mouth, your anus and urethra only exist because we eat other organisms whole, then have to sort out what we do and don't need and expel the unneeded stuff. If you ate more like a fungus or a plant, you'd have time to sort things out before you eat it, meaning you don't need a massive excrement system. What little waste you might need to worry about could be excreted like sweat. Lastly, there is reproduction. Again, most plants and fungi don't pernitrate each other's orifices to reproduce. Some us a form of buddy where a part of the body just falls off and becomes a little clone of the parent. Other use purely external sexual reproduction methods involving pollination and fruiting. So, as long as your barbie-folk get to spend long hours rooted in the soil, and basking in the sun, or spend thier nights sleeping in a big pile of food and self-excreted digestive fluids, then major orifices could be unnecessary. [Answer] ## Reproduction with magic * The mother cuts a very small bit of her own flesh * The father cuts himself and adds a few drops of his own blood on the mother's flesh * They add some water from the ancestral river * Then they join hands and cast a magic spell on the mix of flesh,blood and water. After the fourth step, the mix of flesh,blood and water turns into a gelatinous egg with a fetus/larvae inside. If the parents are interrupted before the fourth step, before casting the magic spell, then the mix of flesh,blood and water will still turn into an egg with a fetus/larvae inside, but it will not have a soul. It will have the body of a Zora and be able to breathe, but will have no soul, no mind, it will just be an empty shell. (Ignore this paragraph if you don't like it) [Answer] To keep it more grounded to the real-life inspiration, your creatures do not need to eat or secrete waste, and they reproduce by casting plastic on a mold they made lovingly for the purpose, as part of a ritual which casts the animating magic on the new being. They're all animated by magic rather then having anything resembling a real-world metabolism. [Answer] ### [Pellets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pellet_(ornithology)) Many birds do not excrete waste matter. Instead, indigestable matter remaining in the stomach is regurgitated as a solid pellet. Owls and hawks are best known for this, but other birds do too. The bird still passes urine though, but the hole for this can be very small. Especially if your species has fur, feathers or scales, you're never going to see it. [Answer] Excretion: This is most unusual and an unique feature of her physiology. Now, human hair is made of a matrix of proteins giving it strength and suppleness (not to mention gleam from the oils in the scalp). "Barbie's" hair is composed of a complex polymer made from urea (the primary constituent of urine next to water) and complex carbohydrates (usually present in stool as roughage). Her gut of course is remarkably efficient in breaking everything down as it should and water normally present in urine is conserved, except a normal amount of sweat with salts present. She has to be very careful to regulate her diet, but can chose to change her skin and hair colour to suite her surroundings and social expectations by altering what she eats. Her remarkable abilities extend to laying on curves, altering her facial appearance to have East-Asian, Afro-Caribbean, Caucasian or mixed features at will. Reproduction: When the time comes, having detachable limbs that snake-off on their own to find food and grow serves well. We all know the subject of Barbie's innocence, but if there's a "Ken" (or another Barbie) who's limbs decide to entwine in that special way, then an offspring will develop. Unnecessary genetic material is shunted aside and reabsorbed, perhaps during a cocoon-stage then a youngling emerges of an appropriate gender. (Whatever the writer decides that may be) Limited parental care is needed, no breastfeeding as the baby will find its own meals. Of course, a new limb quickly grows to fulfil the deficit in the parents' limb count. Mouth: Eating is obvious, the mouth serves just fine - the same for respiration and speech. (and kissing?) ]
[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/170748/edit). Closed 3 years ago. The community reviewed whether to reopen this question 1 year ago and left it closed: > > Original close reason(s) were not resolved > > > [Improve this question](/posts/170748/edit) In the distant future, the Earth Federation decided to turn our Moon into a Death Star which has a powerful laser cannon which produces a high energy laser beam capable of obliterating a terrestrial planet in an instant. Usually high frequency lasers such as gamma and x-rays are invisible to our untrained eyes, and even blue light has more energy than red so why is the world‚Äôs most powerful laser beam red? [Answer] ## To make a statement. There is no real requirement for a laser to be red - in fact it is likely 'invisible' unless it shines through a gas or other medium that scatters the light. So perhaps the makers of the Death Star want to make a statement: they want everyone to know that they mean business. After all, the power of the Death Star is the threat of its use. It is in effect a [fleet-in-being](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_in_being). They would make sure all their weapons have this colour, almost like 'branding'. This would then keep the 'outer systems in line'. [Answer] ## Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick. The basic concept behind the Death Star is the same as was behind WWII super-battleships such as the KGS Bismarck; it's a big ship that can blast any other big ship without receiving a single dent, forcing other nations to forever use ships to guard against it instead of attacking the rest of your fleet. This strategic doctrine is called the "fleet-in-being". The one problem with Fleets-in-being is that they are, by definition, overkill. Ships like the Death Star are capable of completely destroying any rebellious planet, but are pretty much useless for anything else. For example, you don't need to be able to destroy a planet if you just want to blow up a small supply base. To compound this, a Death Star constantly attracts undue attention; nobody wants one of those hanging around their planets. As a result, people in general (but especially Rebellions and Resistances) have an annoying tendency to preemptively destroy them. Regardless of overkill level, a Death Star wouldn't be a very effective patrol ship; it can't be three places at once. While you could conceivably blow up two of those places so that you only need to patrol one, the whole reason why you are patrolling those other two places is so that you can use their resources, which this approach precludes. Due to its limited usage-scope, the Earth Federation uses it like the I.J.N. Yamato; they make it as fearsome as possible, but then keep it docked most of the time, a fleet-in-being to scare enemies. They occasionally haul it out for big battles, but that's it. Now, believe it or not, the main qualification for fleet-in-being status is not power (the Yamato was rather underwhelming once it got in an actual battle); instead, the main qualification for being a fleet-in-being is looking incredibly terrifying. Like with the Kill-O-Zap gun in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy: > > "Make it evil... Make it totally clear that this has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is a weapon for going out and making people miserable with." > > - Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe > > > In your case, the Death Star designers decided to forgo the "spikes and prongs and blackened bits" in favor of [a terrifying crimson](https://scifiinterfaces.com/2019/11/22/the-design-of-evil/) colored laser. [Answer] To advertise that it's on a low setting Everyone knows a red laser is the least energetic kind of laser. So when they see a planet blown up by a red laser they know their problems can easily get even worse. It advertises to everyone that if they get any cute ideas about shielding their planet you can always switch over to the blue laser mode and blow up their sun instead. [Answer] # Efficiency Red light goes through an Earth-like atmosphere better than x-rays and other high frequency radiation. In fact that's why sunsets are red üòâ Please notice that being a laser, it will NOT be visible while on its way to the target. We will only know it is red when it hits - and if we are the target, we will only know its color for a very short while. [Answer] *Colour only determines energy per photon, which doesn't matter.* For the most part, picking a particular wavelength doesn't sacrifice power or efficiency. The most powerful laser system in the world, the National Ignition Facility, currently generates light in the near infrared at 1053 nm before being converted to ultraviolet in the final stage. It is true that a single photon at a longer wavelength carries less energy, but a powerful laser beam carries an incredibly high number of photons per second. Two lasers of the same power at different wavelengths will simply transmit a different number of photons. Where wavelength does matter is in beam optics and damage thresholds. The diffraction-limited angular beam divergence of a gaussian laser beam (how much it spreads out at far distances) is given by $\theta = \frac{\lambda}{\pi w}$, where $\lambda$ is the wavelength, $w$ is the width of the beam at its narrowest point, and $\pi$ is somewhere around 3. So a laser at half the wavelength will spread out half as much, and more importantly the area of the beam will go up by a factor of 4, decreasing the power density by the same factor. There are also more ways for light to damage materials at shorter wavelengths, and as you go to lower wavelengths eventually everything other than vacuum absorbs a big fraction of your light. A possible workaround is to do exactly what the NIF does, make all your light at a red wavelength and then frequency convert it to a shorter wavelength at the final step before sending it out into space. As a physicist, if I read a story with a red planet-killing laser, the colour of it is going to be very low on the list of reasons why I would consider it to be unrealistic. [Answer] Demolitions protocol. During the demolition of any larger structure a warning needs to be given to ensure people can evacuate in time. Of course, the builders of this Death Moon weren't too concerned with that. This moon is designed as a statement, and they are going to make damn sure that anyone nearby saw who and what blew up their planet so no one can claim otherwise. And if that happens to be in line with Galactic Demolitions Protocol... no one is going to complain, right? [Answer] Short Answer: I don't know how to make a visible Death Star beam. Long Answer: But I do have few ideas which someone else might be able to calculate the possibility of making work. Part One of six: Basic Death Star improbability. Are they going to move the Moon from planet to planet and solar system to solar system during war? If so they have to build very big engines to move it. And the lack of tides on Earth will cause the extinction of numerous species and ecological problems. Or are they going to leave the Moon in orbit around the Earth and use it to blast distant planets with some faster than light radiation, like the Starkiller Base in The Force Awakens, which is so very, very implausible that it makes the Death Stars seem reasonable and plausible by comparison. Part Two of six: The energy beam makes interplanetary particles glow. Do you know how much energy it takes to make a terrestrial planet separate into pieces that will be travelling faster than escape velocity so they won't fall back and recombine? Well, it's more energy than you can imagine. And that incredible amount of energy will cause the planet to slowly expand in a swelling cloud of incandescent gas and plasma. In order for that gas cloud to expand and thin so rapidly that the space where the planet was will seem transparent and empty within a second, countless millions of times as much energy would have to be used. It seems to me it would be far less wasteful of energy to turn the planet into an expanding sphere of incandescent plasma that will expand much more slowly and take many years to expand to be thin enough to be transparent. That will also leave a sort of visible corpse or skeleton of a planet for visitors to the system to see, and so be a long lasting warning to them. There are molecules of gas and particles of dust thinly scattered in interstellar space and less thinly, though still extremely thinly spaced, in interplanetary space. So an energy beam, fired at a planet, would strike interplanetary particles and molecules in its path and would heat them up, causing them to glow in infra red, visible, and/or ultraviolet wavelengths of light. And would that glow be intense enough to be see seen from the side of the energy beam? I don't know. But supernovas do explode, and apparently calculations show that they will vaporize any planets which orbit them closely enough. WhatRoughBeast's answer to this question: [Can a planet survive a supernova?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19000/can-a-planet-survive-a-supernova)[1](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19000/can-a-planet-survive-a-supernova) states that the inner planets in the solar system would be vaporized if the Sun turned into a supernova, while the outer giant planets might survive, though not intact. Note that a supernova explosion is not instantaneous but lasts for many days and would take days to vaporize a planet. So if the energy flux in the Death Star beam was as strong as in a supernova, it might still take days to vaporize a planet. Anyway, imagine that the emitter on the Moon is 100 miles in diameter and emits a beam of energy 100 miles in diameter which slowly spreads out in diameter to 200 miles, 400 miles, 800 miles, 1,600 miles, 3,200 miles, 6,400 miles, and so on. Thus the Moon Death Star would have to approach a target planet and reach a distance where its beam will have spread out until the diameter of the beam equals the diameter of the target planet. Thus the beam of energy from the Moon Death star will be a truncated cone that is 100 miles in diameter at the emitter and spreads out to a diameter of thousands of miles where it hits the target planet at a distance of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of miles. > > The interplanetary medium includes interplanetary dust, cosmic rays and hot plasma from the solar wind. > > > The density of the interplanetary medium is very low, about 5 particles per cubic centimeter in the vicinity of the Earth; > > > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_medium>[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_medium) So a square cross section one centimeter by one centimeter through the energy beam at the emitter will contain 16,000,000 cubic centimeters and about 80,000,000 particles. Where the energy beam has expanded enough to reach the diameter of the Earth, about 7,917.5 miles, a square cross section one centimeter by one centimeter through the energy beam will contain about 1,274,194,945 cubic centimeters and about 6,370,974,725 particles. The energy beam will make every particle that it hits super hot, and every particle within the beam will thus emit electromagnetic radiation in all directions, including directions that are more or less sideways relative to the direction of the beam. Thus it might be possible that the beam might possibly be visible from the side, but someone else will have to try to do the calculations. And if that is a plausible way of making your energy beam visible from the side, you may need to imitate the purple prose of E.E. Smith to emphasize how incredibly, unbelievably, fantastically intense your energy beam is. Part Three of six: Vaporized planetary particles. As I remember, Arthur C. Clarke's novel Earthlight (1955) involved a battle where spaceships used energy weapons against a moon base. The energy beams were invisible in the near vacuum of space, but as they vaporized moon rocks around the base, a local atmosphere of rock particles formed around the base, and the particles in that local atmosphere scattered the light of the energy beams, thus making the parts of the energy beams near the base visible from the sides. The description of Earthlight in Wikipedia does not mention that, but does mention: > > There is also an enigma - the apparent sighting of a 'beam of light', that should not be possible on the airless world. This is explained later in the story as a weapons beam that included metal particulates moving at high velocity. > > > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthlight>[3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthlight) So what happens when the energy beam from your lunar Death star starts to vaporize the target planet? Plasma will shoot out from the planet in all directions, forming a sort of plasma atmosphere which will be denser near the planet and thinner farther from the planet, and which will be constantly expanding as more and more planetary material is vaporized by the energy beam. So the planet will be surrounded by an expanding sphere of plasma glowing with heat, and becoming thinner and thinner, and thus dimmer and dimmer, farther from the planet. And where the energy beam passes though the plasma it will will heat up the plasma even more, making it glow brighter than the plasma outside the energy beam. Thus the energy beams will become visible in the cloud of plasma near the planet, and as the cloud of plasma expands outward the visible part of the energy beam will get longer and longer and extend farther and farther back toward the Death Star. Part Four of six: Particle beam weapons. What if your Death Star like weapon shoots subatomic particles or even entire atoms at the target planet? And what if those subatomic particles are highly unstable, so that some of them decay into other particles during the short time between being emitted and hitting the target planet? A radionuclide is an unstable atom which decays: > > A radionuclide (radioactive nuclide, radioisotope or radioactive isotope) is an atom that has excess nuclear energy, making it unstable. This excess energy can be used in one of three ways: emitted from the nucleus as gamma radiation; transferred to one of its electrons to release it as a conversion electron; or used to create and emit a new particle (alpha particle or beta particle) from the nucleus. > > > So some radionuclides emit gamma rays, highly energetic electromagnetic radiation, which may hit other particles of matter and energize them to emit less energetic radiation, including visible light. Thus if your weapon is a particle beam shooting radioactive atoms at the target planet it might produced enough light as atoms decay to be see from the side. If a particle beam consists of subatomic particles, some of them might decay while in transit to the target. > > Except for the proton and neutron, all other hadrons are unstable and decay into other particles in microseconds or less. > > > Most subatomic particles are not stable. All mesons, as well as baryons‚Äîexcept for proton‚Äîdecay by either strong or weak force. Proton observationally doesn't decay, although whether is it "truly" stable is unknown. Charged leptons mu and tau decay by weak force; the same for their antiparticles. Neutrinos (and antineutrinos) don't decay, but a related phenomenon of neutrino oscillations is thought to exist even in vacuum. Electron and its antiparticle positron are theoretically stable due to charge conservation unless a lighter particle having magnitude of electric charge ‚â§ e exists (which is unlikely). > > > Of subatomic particles which don't carry color (and hence can be isolated) only photon, electron, neutrinos with some[7] disclaimers, several atomic nuclei (proton included), and antiparticles thereof can remain in the same state indefinitely. > > > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subatomic_particle>[4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subatomic_particle) Part Five of six: MAHAM > > The Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition (MAHEM) is a weapon being developed by DARPA that would utilize molten metal to penetrate enemy armor.[1](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/19000/can-a-planet-survive-a-supernova) The molten metal would be propelled by electromagnetic fields from explosions.[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_medium) The munition would be delivered to a target as a warhead "packaged into a missile, projectile or other platform." It would penetrate the armor of an enemy vehicle then explode when it gets inside, destroying the vehicle from the inside out. DARPA predicts the weapon will have greater efficiency, control, and precision than conventional explosively formed penetrators.[3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthlight) > > > It is driven by a compressed magnetic flux generator (CMFG). > > > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAHEM>[5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAHEM) The article about Earthlight (1955) is liked to the article about MAHAM, so possibly a MAHAM weapon might possibly be visible from the side. Part Six of six: Holographic aiming guides. What about holograms? A hologram reproduces the shape of the object depicted. So it is theoretically possible to create a holographic image of a cone shaped object or a cylindrical object. Possibly in your world personal laser guns might have a range of about 100 meters. And possibly they come with holograms that emit images of long narrow cones which might be one millimeter wide at the source and one meter wide at the far end. So when someone pulls the trigger of their laser gun the hologram of the cone springs into existence and they can see what objects the beam will hit, and maybe have a second to change their aim before the beam turns on and strikes the target. And possibly the super giant laser on your lunar Death Star will also have a super giant hologram for aiming purposes. So there are a few methods you might want to investigate for your giant death ray to be visible from the sides, and thus seen and noticed by surviving people. And possibly an explanation of why the death beam would be red in color instead of another color can be made plausible. [Answer] > > "Because red lasers are cool!" > > > I asked myself that years ago. But just like who and what decided light saber colors to be that way, there's really no telling except the people who told the story, and as far I know I have not seen an explanation, both in-universe and in interviews. You can, however, choose your own explanation. Beams of light takes on colors depending on their wavelength. Shorter ones take on red, longer ones take on blue, and everything in between is like the color of the rainbow. Everything in the universe [exhibit wave properties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_wave) until measured (then they turn into particles) and that includes light. [Answer] ![Helium/Neon laser](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KfOHN.jpg) This is a helium/neon laser. This is one of the earliest types of laser invented. The tube glows pink, and the colour of the laser beam that comes out one end can be tuned a bit but only in the red or infrared range. Green, blue and UV lasers weren't invented until much later. Neither were the laser diodes that we use to make small, cheap lasers now. If you don't have a semiconductor factory on the moon, it might be easier to make primitive lasers like this. [Answer] Colour-coded for your convenience This is the name of a trope which is summed up by "[indication through coloring](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Laconic/ColourCodedForYourConvenience)". In fiction, colour-coding is usually done for the benefit of the audience, and usually obeys a variety of social conventions. For instance, red is the color of bad guys, but it's also the colour of passion (may it be love or rage), of Communism, of traffic signs that tell you what you can't do, and so on. Well it's not just fiction. In military strategy, it is usually important to know who is who. NATO standards use four colours to identify four groups: blue (friend), red (hostile), green (neutral), yellow (unknown). That way, when you look at a map and it's chokeful of red, you now you're going to have a bad time. While the choice of colours is strictly a matter of standards, the choice to use colours at all is highly practical when you want to convey simple information quickly. But wait, aren't lasers invisible? Well, yes. One way to make a laser visible is to spray a mist of particles, like water, in front of it. Of course, building a giant atomizer to spray water in front of the business end of your Death Star is hardly the most effective use of your budget. But this isn't the only invisible thing in life. You know what else is invisible? The offsides line in football, or the 1st and Ten line in football. This is were you remember the trope: *Colour-coded for your convenience* You probably aren't floating naked in space, looking at your laser. You have to remember that you are always seeing the battle through a screen. Even if it's a window, canopy or other clear glass-like material, you can still paint some augmented reality over it. In other words, you don't make the laser visible, you just make it look visible. Adding coloured lasers on screen helps the audience understand what's happening, whether that audience is your people at home tuning in for the broadcast, or strategists on the battlefield looking at a real-time rendition of the battle, or pilots of spacefighters looking to avoid crossfire between two capital ships. From there, you can pick any colour. Red may be the dominant colour of your flag, or it has positive connotations like strength, might, and general betterness. And don't worry too much about the people that will see your laser in its natural, uncoloured state, because those people probably live on a planet that is about to explode. [Answer] Red is more energy efficient. The idea that a laser that is green, blue or even a gamma-ray laser, is more powerful than a red one is wrong. It is true that a blue photon has more energy than a green one, and a green one more than a red one, but that doesn't really matter - you can just use more or fewer of whatever colour of photon you have chosen. [How many potatoes I can fit in my lorry doesn't depend on whether I have 100 bags of 100 potatoes or 1,000 bags of 10. So how many jouls of energy I can fit in my laser beam...] So if the energy-per-photon makes no difference to your choice of colour, what does? Well two things: "which kinds of photons can I make most energy efficiently?" and "Which kinds of photons can I keep control of most easily". It probably matters to your finance department a lot whether the laser is 10% efficient and powered by a hundred million nuclear reactors or instead 1% efficient and powered by a thousand million. It probably matters to your crew that they don't get radiation sickness from your gamma ray death-laser. I have no idea which lasers are going to be the most efficient in the year 4,500 AD, and if I did I wouldn't tell you. But their is no good reason to assume they are NOT going to be red, so lets roll with that. As a final point:** A lot of people here are saying you can't see laser beams. But you can if they are going through a gas: spray an aerosol and you can make them appear very clearly. The tiny amount of gas in interplanetary space will scatter a tiny proportion of any laser beam, but your planet-killer is so gigantically powerful that this negligible proportion lost to scatter may actually be visible. [Answer] ### The Beam isn't Red What you're seeing is a remnant of the fact that the local system used had a vibrant asteroid mining trade. The asteroids in the region happen to be rich in strontium, which is the element they use to make red flares or fireworks. The beam is highly energetic across most of the electromagnetic spectrum, but especially gamma. The atomic nuclei in its path decay into energetic radiation (stray protons and alpha particles, mostly). This happens so quickly that very little of the radiation has time to scatter, which means that you don't see its light. The electrons, too are scattered by the photoelectric effect. As the energy dissipates radially off the beam, it continues to do the same thing to the matter it interacts with, until a critical threshold is met. Once the energy drops below the blast-apart-a-nucleus threshold, it is 'caught' by the electron orbitals of whatever matter happens to be around, and emits light according to their emission spectra. If you shot it into a part of space right in sodium, for instance, you'd see yellow (more about this [here](http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/sodium.html)). The beam is actually much thinner than you see. You're seeing the cylindrical region of space where it stops destroying matter directly and instead starts interacting with it chemically. [Answer] The color of the laser is irrelevant. Once the planet is destroyed the Death Moon will have no well defined centre of mass to orbit. It will quickly become impossible to aim the laser as the orbit becomes irregular. After that targeting other planets will become essentially impossible. [Answer] Red means dead. (I'm guessing "red means death" would gramatically be more correct, but that doesn't rhyme). Red is a warning color which most sentient beings recognize immediately. Why do you think stop signs or red traffic lights are red (not blue, which would be visible much further). Remember Ethan Hunt's wrist-mounted decibel meter in the Mission Impossible computer room heist (the "One - Two - Toast - Toast" scene). The scale has two shades of green, and red for "Toast". Red is bad. You do not want red because when you see red, you're dead. Thus, when bubbling light strings form a growing, stationary red blob in front of your superlaser which stands still for an instant before bursting into a massive beam, and it's green (like in Star Wars 1977), then that's only moderately impressive. I mean, seriously, what did the Empire think! The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the message delivered by a red beam. When you see a red beam forming (just a second or two before the laser beam starts to, uh, actually move at considerably less than light speed), you know what's coming at you. That's extremely important because where's the point in killing a few million people if they don't fear you? It's also much more impressive for bystanders who aren't going to die. When they see the red beam forming, they'll know that those poor bastards who are going to get blown to pieces in a few seconds see it coming. And they know they know. Besides, doing things in a deliberately difficult way and still succeeding at it (such as blowing a planet apart using a red laser) yields a tremendous amount of coolness and will guarantee that your enemies respect you. Such as the kid with the sword in "Picard". I mean, fighting people who have ray guns with nothing but a silly little sword means that you are either fucking stupid, or insane (or both). But it also means that if you actually win the fight, then your enemies will definitively fear you. [Answer] The power of the Death Star comes from the Kyber Crystals, as seen being transported in Rogue One. As with light sabers, when a sith uses the crystal, it 'bleeds'..and the light saber/Death star 'lazer' turns red. Also, because the bad guys use red, it's an evil colour in Star Wars. ]
[Question] [ I've been trying to create a world which mermaids are a part of. These mermaids have the ability to transform into an elf when out of water and dry. Technically, they are less mermaids turning elves and more elves turning into mermaids. They are water elves, and there are other types of elves in this world as well that remain elven constantly. These mermaids have access to typical clothing, or as typical as can be in a fantasy world. I'm trying to think of what type of clothing these mermaids must wear to keep warm in the winter. Mermaids that live in the deep sea have adapted to that and have different bodies to live in the freezing and dark water, however other mermaids remain near the top where it is warm. Anyone have thoughts on what clothing they could wear when cold? For clarification, this is for when underwater. [Answer] ### Blubber. As L dutch already pointed out, the cold water drains heat very effectively, no plausible fabric can stop that \. It kinda breaks the spell of the mermaid by having them as anything other than the epitome of feminine beauty, but if the water is going to get dangerously cold, then realistically they'd spend autumn gorging themselves to fatten up to the point that they are heavily insulated with a good few cm of blubber. They would look like sea lions. By human standards they'd be obese. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MuoZF.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MuoZF.jpg) --- Alternatively - they'd migrate, or hibernate in packs. \ Or if you can explain a subsurface neoprene manufacturing industry, and your mermaids look like this: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2ZMlE.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2ZMlE.png) [Answer] Only Disney Mermaids Wear Seashells Why would they wear clothing at all? If they're able to shapeshift and they've adapted to watery life (by becoming part fish or part manatee), then they wouldn't need clothing at all. Consider normal nudity. Humans have historically gotten along just fine & naked in a cool maritime environment (Tierra del Fuego - don't let the climate type fool you, it's COLD, rarely getting into the 50s in summer), there's no obvious reason why Elves can't similarly adapt to their own environment and more especially to a partially aquatic environment. Your Elf-Merfolk won't wear anything in winter (or summer). [Answer] The problem when being in cold water is that water is pretty effective at dissipating heat. To avoid that turning into a mortal problem, a warm blooded creature need to have a good insulating layer to reduce heat losses. If that's not possible, the only clothes which can offer protection are thick drysuits, like those used by scuba divers in cold water. Anything more loose would allow water circulation around the skin and also allow the related cooling. Incidentally they would not affect too badly the hydrodynamics of the swimmer as more loose clothing would, which is also an aspect to not be neglected. [Answer] Considering that these shapeshifting elf/merfolk are shapeshifters, there are two possibilities: Firstly, that the act of shapeshifting to their aquatic form gives these people the ability to tolerate the temperatures of the seawater in which they live. While they may live in warm seas, warm seas are nevertheless capable of being sufficiently cold that a human exposed in them long-term could suffer from hypothermia after many hours or a few days. This means that if these merfolk are adapted to their aquatic environment, then they won't need clothing while in the water. So... if the act of shapeshifting is what allows the merfolk to tolerate the lower temperatures of the seas they inhabit, then the attire of their elven forms would necessarily be identical in its protectiveness to that of other non-shapeshifting elves in similar environments, though not necessarily identical in appearance. Alternatively, if it is the physiology of the merfolk that gives them the ability to tolerate the temperatures of the seas they inhabit, and this tolerance or resistance to hypothermia is a constant between their terrestrial and aquatic forms, then this significantly alters these people's need for clothing. Given that they aren't likely to be insulated from the temperature of seawater by medieval clothing, and clothing would be a hindrance underwater, they must be able to tolerate the temperatures of warm seas, which as I have said may still be significantly lower than human body temperature. This tolerance to cold environments would transfer over to their terrestrial forms. Since air has a much lower thermal conductivity and specific heat than water - which is to say that cold water draws more heat away faster than air - these merfolk would likely be able to tolerate rather cold conditions without needing any particularly warm clothing. So, in this alternate case, we might expect merfolk to go about on land scantily or lightly dressed even in cold weather, and they may not feel the need to don extra clothing unless the weather is both cold and wet, or snowing. However, as water attenuates ultraviolet quite effectively, I would expect that unless they have dark skins, these merfolk would probably be as susceptible or more so to sunburn than their non-shapeshifting relatives, and so might dress in light but concealing clothing in summer conditions. Having presented these options, it is up to the OP to decide which of the two options best describes the merfolk in question. [Answer] They stay on land. Clothing we be ineffective against cold in water. Since they are not adapted to the cold they migrate to land ever winter and back to water in the spring. They can wear stander human/elf cold weather clothing while on land. [Answer] Either they don't stay warm, something else does, or the answer is more simple than you might think. Have you ever heard of [cleaner fish?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleaner_fish) No? What about clownfish, which have [protective mucus?](https://asknature.org/strategy/mucus-coat-protects-from-sea-anemone/) Cleaner fish evolved to remove parasites to A) secure an easy source of food, which would be invaluable to fueling a mermaid's large brain and B) avoid predation, as cleaner fish aren't eaten by their 'clients.' Therefore, why not cleaner mermaids? Now, mermaids need a place to sleep, right? And if they're anything like people, they'll want a place to call home. Given that they'll already be spending a lot of time in something else's mouth, why can't that be their home? Now, it's a natural instinct to defend one's home-one's territory-so these mermaids will defend their host while using its mouth as shelter, each defending the other when needed. This strategy of course comes with certain risks; acid reflux, saliva exposure, accidental swallowing-and because of natural selection, it seems our cleaner mermaids will develop progressively greater acid resistance, up to the point where they can get swallowed for fun-or warmth. TL;DR: Assuming mermaids develop a symbiosis with certain sea monsters, they don't need to stay warm, because something else will be supplying the heat. Otherwise, any mermaid, through magic and/or biology, can and will have adapted to thermoregulate (and cope with freezing temperatures) in water, as even tropical seas can become too cold to sustain human survival, therefore ensuring the whole clothing/blubber kerfuffle completely moot. In my humble opinion, if you want to know what mermaids will need to deal with cold air or water, just look at a dolphin. [Answer] A seal-skin coat. (ok, that's [selkies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie) not mermaids but becoming a seal makes more sense in cold water) [Answer] They wear nothing in the water. They just shift to third-form when they need to dive below the warmer thermal layers, or when winter winds steal the warmth from the shallows. As first-form is fully elven, third-form is fully fish, complete with a cold-blooded circulatory system, capable of surviving extremely cold water. [Answer] Fur pelts. It's not the most ethically sourced of materials, but it's remarkably good at heat insulation (especially when the fur comes from a polar animal). Marine mammal pelts (pinnipeds and sea otters) in particular would be good fits for beings who spend much of their lives underwater. [Answer] Wool Victorian bathing suits, when worn, were not for modesty but for warmth. Hence, they wore wool, which keeps its insulating powers even when wet. For that matter, check out Victorian bathing suits for the style, with some alternations for the tail. This, mind you, is for winter and other cold situations; they would have to be better adapted to the cold than a human, and this just be a supplement. [Answer] Leather made from Seals, Whales or similar creatures. Not only will your mermaids be warm... but they will be warm and in style to meet any fashion need. [Can Seal And Whale Skin Be used to Make Leather?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/121846/can-seal-and-whale-skin-be-used-to-make-leather) > > Yes > > > Seal skin has been used for leather for a long time. Indeed, it is > leather as all skin (including human) when properly tanned is leather. > It's really a question of how thick it is. Human skin isn't thick > enough to make a good leather. > > > Whale leather also exists, but some comments online suggest many > species' skin is too thin or rubbery to make what we humans would > consider a good leather. Nonetheless, not finding a lot of whale > leather products today may have a lot to do with decades of sustained > Green Peace effort. > > > [Answer] ## D&D Sea-elves, kinda Since you mentioned these mermaids of yours transform into Elves when on land, I personally say their fashion doesn't matter and they should be put to death on sight, the arrogant "we live longer therefore we're better in every way" pieces of... cough... sorry. There's a race in Dungeons & Dragons: the Sea Elves. I recommend you turn your attention to researching them, especially in the Forgotten Realms setting. [Answer] Because water expands as it freezes, both water that is warmer and that is colder than four degrees Celsius will rise, so normal convective processes will keep the main body of water at four degrees, with fluctuations only near the surface. So if they cannot withstand four degrees, they will have to stay near the surface even in summer; if they can, then they have a zone where they can stay all winter. [Answer] Maybe like, a close fitting suit of hollow, lightweight synthetic fiber. That would be both waterproof and warm. Or maybe one made out of stretch polyester blend, and it'll be ultra moisture wicking, traps warm vapor but keeps you dry, and it's also lightweight. Or perhaps synthetic fleece. That breaths well and is lightweight AND moisture wicking. Ooh, what about polyester blended with Merino wool? That would be warm and sorta lightweight. But that would be for land. As for if they want to stay as mermaids during the winter, perhaps a jacket (does the mermaid's tail need to stay wet? If not, then maybe a exact replica of their tails, only slightly bigger and made of either of the materials above; synthetic fiber, stretch polyester blend, polyester blended with Merino wool, or synthetic fleece.) made of the materials above, which are synthetic fiber, stretch polyester blend, or synthetic fleece. I would also suggest the color of the suits be a dark color, because dark colors trap in heat more then light colors. So a black, dark grey, or another dark color would be practical. [Answer] Mermaids could make use of fur coats and shed it during warmer months. Some river otters shed their under fur during warm seasons and don‚Äôt make use of fat to keep warm; they instead use thick fur tightly packed together like snake scales to prevent the under fur from getting wet. As another layer of protection, their glands produce oil to allow water to bead off keeping the otter from freezing. Your mermaids could make use of the same adaptation producing thick fur and oil during winter months to moult it completely off during warm weather. Now, if your non-deep sea mermaids need to wear something because they don‚Äôt have that adaptation, you can go the dark route and have them slay deep-sea mermaids for their coats and oil. Not much different than we did to Japanese river otters (which are now extinct). ]
[Question] [ Bilabials are nearly universal consonants within human speech. However, why would a naturally evolved language spoken by humans lack bilabials entirely? [Answer] When I was a kid one of the game we played with my friends when we were in the sea was to talk underwater and have the other understand what we were saying. If we were wearing a scuba mask and the mouthpiece for breathing, pronouncing bilabial consonants would be almost impossible, due to the mouthpiece preventing it from happening: papa or mama would have sounded both as a haha. Imagine a language that starts and develops in a human community where its members spend a lot of time using a mouthpiece: consonants which cannot be pronounced will necessarily fall out of usage. [Answer] ### Because they're heavily addicted to nicotine. Your society learnt to fortify and roll tobacco into cigarettes before they developed a formal language. As grunts started to become standardised, they were being made by humans with cigarettes between their lips. The desire to avoid cutting off that sweet sweet nicotine mean that sounds made by joining the lips were difficult to do, thus bilabials require extra work than other sounds, and are thus not considered practical for inclusion in the language. As words are imported into the language after contact with other communities, they're localised by softening all bilabials (ie "paper" -> "hay-her"), as no-one wants to give up the cigarette to accurate pronounce that new word. [Answer] There is absolutely no reason why a language must have bilabials. In fact, several terrestrial languages lack bilabials altogether, including [Oneida](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_language) and [Wichita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichita_language). No special excuse is necessary. EDIT: @JirkaHanika in the comments suggests a connection between labrets and lack of labials (Jakobson 1941 (transl. 1968) p48, Rood 1975 p317). Though I know of cases where bilabials occur even with labrets (e.g. Kayapo), it could well be the case that such lip operations are a prerequisite to the lack of labials. [Answer] It happened that the local [whistled language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language) variant became very useful for some reason (perhaps geography very similar to Canary Islands, spanning the whole continent) and it was ubiquitous in the society for such a long time that it started to influence the spoken language. The whistled variant might have disappeared later on, leaving only traces in rather unusual phonology of the language - heavily tonal language, no stops, few vowels, no consonant clusters, open syllables etc... [Answer] A long history of facial decoration that interferes with or obscures bilabials -- for example, piercing of the tongue and upper and/or lower lips. It need not even be universal; if such decoration is a sign of status, then only low-status individuals would be able to make the sounds, thus they would be considered low class and looked down upon, and heavily discriminated against. The higher status people forcibly control the evolution of language. You can achieve the same effect without physical ornamentation. The ruling class is inbred and develops a heritable speech impediment that interferes with the production of bilabials. Pretty soon, bilabials start to be regarded as a form of mockery, punishable by death. [Answer] Populations stop using some sounds over time, which is why it seems that no single naturally evolved language has all the sounds that humans can do. English, Chinese and Korean lack the hard R sounds of romance languages, almost all romance languages lack the 'v' sound from Spanish, Japanese has no L and so on. Arabic has an 'a' sound that non-native speakers have a hell of a time to pronounce and Russian has a very funny sound that I can only approximate the pronunciation of if I pretend to be stabbed. But the piece of the cake goes to Portuguese 'ão', no non-native speaker will ever be able to pronounce that correctly to save their lives, even native speakers of Spanish! So if some people don't like or have no use for bilabials, over millennia their languages will drop that sound. [There is a study which suggests that Eyak and Oneida have no bilabials at all](https://wals.info/chapter/18): > > As already noted, Eyak and Oneida are the two languages classed as having neither bilabials nor nasals. > > > Having never had contact native speakers, I read this with a grain of salt; [The Wikipedia article for Eyak](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyak_language) mentions a labial 'b' sound. Might be like the Spanish 'uve' - or not, for all I know. Still, I believe that such languages could develop naturally in any world inhabited by humans. [Answer] An extreme real-world example of a natural language lacking many of the sounds other languages have is the Nama language of Namibia, which has only eleven non-click consonants, including glottal stop, plus some allophones. (These do include some bilabials.) Mundanely, bilabials became allophones of other sounds and disappeared, similar to how English has the fricatives F and V instead of the bilabial fricatives in other languages, and sometimes uses a labiodental nasal as an allophone of M or N (as I do in the words symphony or sin), but replacing the bilabials more comprehensively. A more colorful explanation (which might at least be a folk etymology) is that some king or hero had a speech disorder that prevented them from fully articulating their lips, and others imitated their accent. Or bilabials became the equivalent of the raspberry, and taboo. Or, some prudes thought that puckering their lips looked like having an orgasm, so proper young ladies would say [p̺ɯ], never [bu]. Or those might all be just-so stories people tell to explain it. How many of the reasons for any of our language shifts in the ancient past do we actually remember? That’s just how they talk, and we can only make educated guesses why. [Answer] A "naturally evolved" [sic] language could lack bilabials or any other morphological change, because "natural evolution" can only simplify, merge or drop sounds altogether. The direct application of intelligence is required to create more complex cohesive structures. A universally observed phenomenon of all language families is that inflexional morphology has simplified over time. The history of the IE family overwhelmingly illustrates this, and sometimes in very short time scales (about 200 years each for the Great Vowel and High German shifts). Theoretical reconstruction of proto Indo European suggests that there were three genders, eight noun cases and three verbal aspects; far more complex than European languages today. To illustrate this, note that synthetic languages use word-endings to indicate meaning, rather than the word order that is essential to derive correct meaning in analytic languages like modern English. Consider the sentence "the boy loves the girl", where changing the order of the nouns would reverse the meaning entirely, since there are no inflexions to identify subject and object. As languages become more analytic over time, the need for word endings to derive meaning reduces, and inflexional morphology becomes less and less significant, vacuuming the natural motivation for humans to bother with the complexity. Ethnic mixing, where strangers struggle with language concepts, may promote the degradation of the native language and accelerate the natural simplification process. Anyone who has tried to speak a foreign language (or hears a foreigner speak their own language) knows that the word endings are the most easily confused or omitted elements of the words. The earliest form of English, known as Old English or Anglo-Saxon (c. AD 450-1150), was highly inflected, with three genders and several cases. Within the approximate period AD 800-1000, there were many Scandinavian invasions into England, and for a while most of NE England was ruled by Danes and this area was known as the "Danelaw". The language spoken by the invaders is known as Old Norse (from which modern Danish, Swedish, etc. have descended), and was similar to Old English in many ways, being also a Germanic language. Because of the mixing of these peoples whose languages had similarities, the inflexions of Old English were worn down. To put it simply "natural evolution" deconstructs, simplifies, and degrades. It cannot build complexity or structure. The wonder is not why languages would lack bilabials at all, rather we should wonder how they have been retained and who originated them in the first place. * Baugh, A.C., A History of the English Language, Routledge and Kegan, London, 1959 * Barber, C., The English Language: A Historical Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993 * Millward, C., A Biography of the English Language, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1988 * Waterman, J.T., A History of the German Language, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1966 * Collinge, N.E., The Laws of Indo-European, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1985 * Weekley, E., The English Language, Andre Deutsch, London, 1952 * et al. ]
[Question] [ In a medieval-fantasy world, the magic exists by imbuing mana into symbols. The symbols can be written, declaimed or even thought, to cast the spell. A formula can store any non-meta spell you can think of (no multiplying mana or counter spell, etc). Formulas are sequences of at least 3 symbols. The symbol meaning is linked to the magic effect, so if you don't read the symbols, you can't trigger it. Even your custom-made language can be magic if it holds meaning. Some rogue sorcerers use their magic to control people. Their modus operandi is to make their target read a formula (out loud or not). The formula takes control of the reader, using the sorcerer's mana stored while writing, then drawing the target's mana. The wording can change, but the sentence could be "Abandon your mind to this spell's writer". The mind-controlling spell doesn't cost much mana, you won't run out of it. But reality-altering spell costs way more, and because you are not a powerful wizard, you can't do much (light a candle twice a day) If you don't want to be a pawn of a evil purpose, how will you protect yourself against the mind control? The best solution deal with these concerns: * It cost no mana (no magic response) * It cost few money * Protect you even when you are not ready * Allow you to read what you want, in every language you know * Doesn't take time More about the magic system: The effect comes from the meaning in your mind powered by the mana. For the mind control spell, it's first powered by the writer, but then it force the reader to continue reading and use his mana while reading the text. The text only holds the certain amount of mana the writer spent. If the mana production comes from the reader, the effect is sustained because the mana source is the source. Like a description in a novel, if you don't detail things, it may go wild. Knowing your definitions is really import if you want to control what you do. The definition for a particular human is hard to get, but targeting the reader of the text is way easier. When you want to target someone, the more you know about him, the easier it is. Easiest is targeting yourself. [Answer] Library Wizard [![a wizard is in a library](https://i.stack.imgur.com/m07LS.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/m07LS.jpg) You got the book from the library. The library has thousands of books. In the medieval fantasy world books are expensive. So the library must have lots of money. In particular they have enough money to hire an Acolyte to cast detect magic on every book as it is returned. They do this without opening the book so there is no risk of being controlled. Some libraries have extra security where they cast the spell before the book is loaned too. That's a lot of detect magic. Fortunately the spell is not expensive or difficult to cast. So you can leave it to junior wizards on work experience. The spell tells you if a book has a mind control (or any other) spell inside it. Those books go in a pile in a special room in the basement. Once per week they bring in a Wizard of Journeyman rank who casts Dispell Magic on the pile. Then they go back in the shelves. Wizards like books. Even nonmagical books. So they are happy to do this job. [Answer] [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/C1E3s.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/C1E3s.png) You said medieval-esque fantasy, right? [Literacy rates in most of medieval Europe were about 20%](https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1290524.pdf), and this varied heavily on the time period (late medieval period had higher literacy rates) and the social class of the person in question (nobles and clergy were more likely to be literate, commoners not so much). Which means that assuming a spell must be read in order to affect a person, anyone who is illiterate will have a distinct advantage. * It costs no mana (no magic response) * It costs no money * It costs no time * It protects you even when you are not ready Even if shown the mind-control spell, they wouldn't understand it, and if they read it aloud they'd just be repeating what someone else said, not truly "reading" the book. The only thing it doesn't do it let you read what you want, but in a medieval setting literacy may not be the mandatory skill it is in the modern era. Indeed this setting actually has pressure for people to be illiterate to avoid being mind controlled. [Answer] Mirror writing [![mirror writing](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0DaMLm.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0DaMLm.png) The symbols are not the same symbols. They are no longer the magic symbols. But you can still read the meaning and the more you do it the faster you get. You will read books using a mirror, looking over your shoulder. You might go around this way, using a mirror to look over your shoulder and walking backwards, in case someone leaves the symbols out and you read them by accident. [Answer] # Just pay attention to what you read If you pay attention, you will stop reading when you spot the first or second symbol of the mind controlling formula. This works with other things too, such as the game. Sorry about that :D back in focus, this level of attention and attentiveness is called awareness and it's a thing buddhists aim to do in every aspect of their lives. It helps you keep track of what you're doing and protects you from the traps of distraction. I am telling you how to use it against the mind controlling formula symbols because I am never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you. Seriously, are you still reading? [Answer] # Fighting Fire With Fire What happens if you already have a spell on effect which disagrees with the mind control spell? Something which makes a logical paradox- you can't give away what's already lost. Assuming the a first spell overrides incoming spells which would cause a paradox, you can either mind controll yourself or issue a "think for myself" spell to yourself. Problem solved. Assuming paradox spells annihilate each other, you simply need to read the "think for myself" spell before reading any other spell. Problem solved. Assuming the most recent spell wins, you need to guarantee that the "think for yourself" spell remains on top. Reading this after every spell made by another person ensures you have total control of yourself. Problem not entirely solved, but it is better than nothing. This control restoring spell would simply need to be placed in many places where a sorcerer would read it, reinforced by habit. Depending on the interaction of paradoxical spells, you can try things like submitting will to dead people (who cannot issue commands) or supremely good gods (who will either give it back or lead you to a righteous life). [Answer] # Dyslexia ...or a similar reading disorder slightly hand-waved to your world (let's call it "myslexia"). People with myslexia know to read, but can't read, only interpret i.e. when they read something, the words/letters are registered in their minds out of order from how they're written, and their brains have to make and extra effort to put them in the right order so they can ultimately understand what they read. While it's still a disadvantage, some people with myslexia have trained and worked hard enough to get used to this, and not let it cause them major issues in their day-to-day life. All in all, this disability: * costs no mana (it's a natural condition) * costs no money (you're born with it) * protects you even when you are not ready (everything you read is in disorder) * allows you to read what you want, in every language you know (again, everything you read is in disorder) * doesn't take time (other than the few extra seconds required by your mind to correctly arrange what you just read) [Answer] ## Magical problems require magical solutions. You (yes you!) live in a world where millions of hostile agents want to take control of your mind and make use of your resources, steal what you have and don't care a wit for your well-being. So you get equally clever and capable people to make something that will screen out those attacks and protect you. Adblockers, Anti-virus software, Spyware cleaners.. All of these tools exist to protect you and those you love from people who would take advantage of you. It works in the real world, it'll work just as well in your magical world too. Here's a few options you might acquire from a local wizard: * Magic reading-glasses - Prevent you from reading the words if they contain magic. * Dispel Headband - Cancels out the mind-virus as it attempts to run. * Dispel Tattoo - Not only cancels the mind-virus out, but conveniently doesn't need to be worn, and can operate with other headgear. * Nullifier Rod - Wave it over your mail to dispel the magic before you ever read it. * Detector Rod - Wave it over your mail to discover whether it contains magic spells. (It may become warm or light up if it detects magic) Regardless of the specifics, the solution is the same. If you can't do it yourself, pay a wizard to fix the wizardly problem for you. [Answer] Alter your mind. The magic only works if you can read and understand all symbols in a sequence. So you alter your mind in a way that your brain cannot comprehend all symbols in a sequence. This would be in a way similar to Aphasia or a mental disorder where specific things trigger a specific response from the person. One of the potential responses could even be to instantly deplete all your mana, should the mind control somehow still take effect it immediately loses its mana source. [Answer] From a certain point view, this is similar to something we already have in our real life: there are books which are given to be read to people, and those books control the mind and the behavior of (most of) those readers. Think of Mein Kampf or Das Kapital, just to focus on some laical examples. Usually different groups disagree on which book it has to be read, and usually within a group people are immune to the effects of the other books. This is due to mental conditioning applied to the reader in not letting the read material seep deep and be believed. You can apply something similar: mental conditioning of the reader in not letting the read material be believed. [Answer] # Have an apprentice read it. There's all sorts of tricks that could be done to bypass any protection method used. As such, the easy solution is to just get some random peasant boy to read it. You first give them a cursed book of your own, set to make them scream if they read anything that looks like mind magic. Then you have them read it. If they read a sentence like "Your mind belongs to me" Then the first cursed book can make them scream, and then you know. You can then dispose of the apprentice. You need a small set up cost for a magical book, but once that happens, finding a cursed book is free, and in fact grants you a free corpse. [Answer] # Read it out of order Somewhere in the library there might be a book that says "abandon your mind to this spell's writer". Well FINE then. Standing in the middle of the library, you raise your voice and declare, "this spell's writer abandon mind to you." Then you either take a chance and read the books with at least that magic incantation cleared out, or you take a break from reading and go wandering around the city looking for any victims of your Ukrainian reversal. Leaving incantations like that in books might not be a bright idea in the first place. :) [Answer] ## Spells are Casted by Intentions not Words The actual spell is the intention that the reader has to cast a spell, not the words themselves. To put this in perspective, you can think about punching someone all you want, but until you actual will it to happen, you keep your hands to yourself. Spells are the same way, you can read a spell over an over, but until you read a spell with the intention to cast it, it's just ink on a piece of paper. The reason spells work in every language is because the words are not the spell. Yes, a scroll can be imbued with mana to power a spell, but the text is just the carefully thought out words to make sure the spell is cast to the exact effect you mean it to be cast with. You don't want to cast a spell to make someone fall in love with you only for them to turn into an obsessive stalker because you did not choose your intentions wisely; so, that is why wizards write down their intentions in the form of spell before trying to will their intentions into existence. They write it down, they read it over and over again, they think about all the possible consequences of the spell, edit it and edit it again until it is a perfect representation of what they want to happen, THEN they read it with the intention to cast it. So, there is not anything special you need to do to protect yourself from a spell someone left for you to read, because reading the words "Abandon your mind to this spell's writer" is no more an effective trap than leaving someone a note telling them to punch themselves in the face. You simply can't make someone cast a spell unless they want to cast it. [Answer] Similar to illiteracy, but in a way that doesn't hinder magic for peasants. At least one of the symbols used in the spell could be not commonly used, so that any who don't know what the specific symbol is are not affected by mind control. This way, they still have an ability to use magic. For more powerful magic users, the same symbol could be in other high-level spells, so learning it can have benefits and the added drawback of now being susceptible to mind control. For those who know the symbol, there could be a spell that drains mana very quickly, but can be cast to prevent the specific spell from working, one that can keep enemies from reaching their mind, or the spell could detect a specific symbol in the area, a detect symbol of sorts, but either costs way to much mana to use consistently, or can only be used for one kind symbol at a time (meaning other symbols that you want to avoid can only be detected if they are the specific symbol being searched for). [Answer] ### All forms of reading becomes inherently dangerous. TL;DR - Readers develop a short form of pre-reading to "hash" the text and compare the hash to known enthralling patterns to detect traps. "Abandon your mind to the..." becomes "Abyo Mito Ta.." (nonsense words) which don't mean anything to the reader other than, "this is a trap" > > * It cost no mana (no magic response) > * It cost few money > * Protect you even when you are not ready > * Allow you to read what you want, in every language you know > * Doesn't take time > > > Only costs a second or two when reading something to check the hash, and the education to learn and enforce the habit among the average reader. Though this isn't the only way the world would react to this possibility. ## This threat would be akin to mass mailing anthrax IRL This would be a global security concern if stealing someone's mind and making a thrall out of them was really this simple, amassing slave armies every time you put up a new billboard, entire wars could be won by painting your words in the clouds above or using illusion magic to "pepper spray" an attacker with hovering symbols that a fast reader simply glancing at would fall prey to. To then have the concentration and effect sustained by the target itself thereafter, that's no simple task. This must be either, much more difficult to perform than explained, or newly discovered and never used against the world yet. A less severe version may be a book that contains a glyph which houses "Command" or "Suggestion" like effects to "READ" or to continue reading the control spell until finished, so that the hook has a definitive sink that can either be resisted or fallen for. From there, the duration of time to read the enthralling symbols is all that waits for the effect to stick long term, though the compulsion to read doesn't mean the target isn't aware of what's being read. A commoner likely would just read and absorb the information but a wizard would likely be able to identify the intent of the trap setter by understanding the template of words being read. As in general safety training, specific dangers as these sorts of traps would be wise to teach in schools to prevent strong magic users falling prey to these simple traps. I believe the response to such an attack would be immediate, urgent, and far spread when detected. Once discovered every magical defense program would be working to put an end to it and devise ways to find who set the trap. ### This gives us 4 points of resistance -Before you see the hook but are within threat range. -The compulsion to continue reading once the hook is activated. -The formation of the lasting enthrall effect while hooked. -Post attack response. > > Before you see the hook but are within threat range. > > > Important places such as government buildings etc will be outfitted with Magic Dispelling gateways. When walking through, all magical items much be handed to a guard/wizard to be checked via detect magic to determine any enchantment or illusion school magics (if detected further probing occurs), while everything else and the person passes through a dispel magic portal. This removes any magical effects present in items or creatures passing through (no disguise self allowed) and the magic within the text that creates the link between the trap setter and the target is removed, disabling the trap. In general, an enchantment effect found using detect magic on either an object or person would become much more suspicious and actionable, towns likely setting up guard patrols specifically containing magic detectors to scan areas regularly as a result. > > The compulsion to continue reading once the hook is detected. > > > Readers would be trained to read in a way that disrupts direct thought injection attacks. Rather than reading entire words, a learned habit to replace words, shorten words, or rearrange the words read can be used as a passive defense. Rather than reading "Abandon your mind to the..." would instead be read as "Aba-yo mi-tota..." which will become a barrier allowing the reader to understand abstractions and concepts indirectly (imagine a code hash) and compare that abstract with commonly used "enthralling" patterns to determine that an attack was attempted before reading any further. Correspondence to high importance folk would filter through a scholar that could screen for traps. Additionally, divination sensors can be set to Alarm whenever "I am magically compelled to do something" to emit concentration breaking sounds or to alert others nearby that they have been enchanted on repeat (imagine magic mouth necklaces in DnD5e). > > The formation of the lasting enthrall effect while hooked. > > > Contingencies and emergency response could be pre-planned, "If I am ever magically compelled to do something, cast dispel magic/banishment/etc on myself and send a message to X for help." Passive defenses must be developed to have better control over your own mana. From a suit, to a ring, or even a magical tattoo, this will prevent any unwanted mana escaping from the user. To cast spells, all mana is funneled through this "mana gate" as a part of the effort in casting the spell. Once the spell is complete, the gate closes. Specific spells that require an open gate can be configured to allow a constant stream separate from the casting of the spell required. Once compelled to link the thralls mana to the trap setter, the mana gate disallows this stray user mana being applied to the constant effect of the mind control, preventing it from being established or sustained. > > Post attack response > > > Uncertain if thralls are aware they are being controlled and can be commanded at will, or if they become mindless drones to the controller (how to manage that many thralls at once without them appearing to act oddly) but we're going to assume a thrall cannot seek to break themselves free on their own. As a response Warding Glyphs could be placed in high traffic areas, "If a someone being mind-controlled is detected, cast dispel magic on them" to create barriers of entry for any thralls sent to these location, or to prevent thralls from leaving if they fall prey to a trap brought inside. Catching one of these thralls or traps would be the swift end to the trap setter though. The connection forming magic within the trap itself is the mana of the caster. The object can now be used to trace divination back to the trap setter. If a thrall is found, the mind control connection is maintained by the mana of the thrall, but the commands must be linked to the trap setter. Divination magic would likely be able to follow this trail as well, unless the magic was specific enough to release the captured thrall if such an attempt to trace was made. ### Additional considerations If all it takes to get the spell setup is to inject a thought into someone's mind, you could use similar magics to sending/message/telepathy to simply inject these words directly into the target? If that wouldn't work, then similarly, I don't see how reading the text would be any more effective (other than in the methods described in Symbol or glyph ward that are triggered by being seen. The problem I see is that after the impulse to read has been delivered, the trap setter stops being the caster. The caster becomes the thrall, who then self-casts a "Give my mental control to another target" spell on themselves, with the target they hand control over to being unknown to them. In most examples I have, you can speak the verbal components of a spell without it's effects occurring if explaining them in conversation etc. You have to put more into the spell than simply saying words. I don't know how you'd force a reader to put that extra effort in to cast such a spell if they * A) Understand that it's enslaving them (they would not put their own mana into the spell, but instead just read the words as compelled) * B) Read the words and have no idea it's a spell (which again, no effort to exert their own mana while reading something they assume isn't a spell) [Answer] The spell is written in the native vernacular phonetically and only an initiate would have the knowledge to connect that letter sequence to the symbol. The symbols are visualized within their mind and create the spell trigger. Omega Eta Nu means very little to an English speaker. But a speaker of Greek puts those together with their alphabet and symbology into words with a deeper meaning (well maybe not those three-who knows, its all Greek to me). [Answer] Magic firewall or antivirus This reminds me a lot of computer malware: instructions that hijack the reader. So maybe you need a "firewall", or some kind of pre-scanning device that can detect malicious symbols or patterns. ]
[Question] [ There exists an extremist religious order whose tenets espouse the rejection of vanity and self-interest - to achieve nothing less than the complete erasure of the sense of self, instead devoting oneself solely to the needs of others. This order's members adorn themselves with clothing that obscure even the slightest glimpse of flesh - and a mask, an identifying symbol of their devotion, which many believe is permanently sealed to their face. The initial idea was inspired by Edward Norton's portrayal of King Baldwin IV in Kingdom of Heaven mixed with a little Darth Vader, so I want to say this mask is some kind of metal for now. What could be done (however painful) to permanently apply a mask like that? Assume the level of technology is mid-19th century. Side note: not really sure what tags to put this under, so I'm adding a few that I think might be relevant. I'll add or edit them (if I can) if people have any ideas! [Answer] # It's not actually affixed to their face, people just think it is. Simply put, anything that would break the skin on a long-term basis causes a large risk of infection. At the technology level you've presented, this would result in unavoidable death, especially since we're talking about something affixed to your head. This is why, in real life, companies that are researching cybernetic implants are designing their implants to work without breaking the skin once implanted. Additionally, by wearing something non-stop against the skin, you're trapping dead skin, bacteria, sweat, and similar things against the skin and increasing the risk of infection further - this is why soldiers have to regularly change their socks to avoid trench-foot, for instance. So, rather than actually affixing their mask to their heads, just have them always wear their mask when they're publicly visible. They could remove their mask in private to bathe or eat, but whenever people see them, they're always wearing their masks, and that gives rise to a rumor that they can't remove their masks among more credulous individuals. [Answer] # Put the mask on before they're adult. Simply put, have them grow into their mask. If the mask is properly shaped (like a ball with a hole for the neck), it will be impossible to take it off. If you do this while they are young enough, their head will adapt to the shape of the mask ([Artificial cranial deformation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cranial_deformation)). At the time where you put it on, the head will be barely small enough to pass through the "hole" for the neck - and after they've grown enough, it won't be able to pass through again. ![Medieval Helmet](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/58/Topfhelm_DHM_transparent.png/180px-Topfhelm_DHM_transparent.png) This helmet would work, if the hole for the neck was smaller. The mask can leave the skin unharmed, as there can be space left - just not enough for the head to be drawn out of the mask. ![Image](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/Square_watermelon.jpg/1280px-Square_watermelon.jpg) ~~This could be a head.~~ Well phrased clarification by @EveryBitHelps in a comment: > > The mask itself doesn't have to be tiny tiny. Just the neck opening. Only once the kiddo has grown into the mask then they won't be able to take it off. The effort and hassle of wearing a mask that is too big for you while you wait to grow into it could be seen as a sign of dedication to the religion or training in self discipline etc. > > > [Answer] Use the jaw. Dental fittings can be installed by pinning into the jawbone. The gums then heal around the pins/false teeth. If you tear out and replace all of the teeth in the upper jaw you could replace them with metal fixings, onto which the mask could (later once the mouth has healed) be affixed via the aperture of the mouth., Keep space between the mask and the face, and also allow for brushes to get in and clean the gums (oral hygiene will be vital), and you can have a permanent (as in can’t easily be removed) mask. Warning: there is a risk of drool. Now, this requires methods of dentistry and medical grade metals that I think are unavailable at your technological level. Medical grade titanium is hard enough to make, and the pins would either cause large chunks of the face to go numb or be in constant agony unless done very well (seriously, there’s a reason dentists have to train for so long. The nerves in the face are insane). There’s also a very high risk of infection, but I think that’s pretty much a given anyway. Oh, and don’t make the mask too heavy, or it could tear away, causing unfathomable trauma. I mean... eurgh... But handwave away the metal and ignore the potential for agony (mad cultists, right?) and it’s vaguely plausible, if a touch disgusting. [Answer] You can rivet it on. The mask doesn't need to be embedded in the vic^Wadherent's flesh in any way; in fact, for health reasons, it shouldn't be. However, that isn't required for the mask to be irremovable; it just needs to wrap around the head in such a way that it can't be removed. The rigidity of metal will help with this, as will the extent to which the mask is "fitted" to the face. If it fits well enough, you might only need a strap/band behind the head to keep it in place. The easiest way would be to use rivets. The convert(s) places the mask over their face, then lie, face down, with their head in a specially shaped block such that the two tabs on the front piece of the mask sit over sturdy metal blocks. The back band is placed over their head and lined up. A heated slug of metal is placed through the aligned holes in the side tabs on the front and back of the mask. A rod-like metal tool is placed over the slug and struck with a hammer. The shape of the tool, and the blocks on the other side, cause the metal slug (still hot enough to deform) to mushroom outwards on both sides. (You can also have the rivet already mushroomed on one side, but this might make the process harder.) The resulting rivet cannot be removed except by cutting, and I'm not sure they would have had the technology to do that back then. (Even today, it would be dangerous to cut metal so close to the skull.) Alternatively, there are other techniques known back then to join metal (soldering, brazing) that might be accomplished without killing the vic^Wadherent, though I'm less sure how you'd design your components to allow such a join. Things will probably be a lot easier if you stick to the style of mask that only covers the eyes and nose. (No problems eating, for example.) This may or may not be irremovable on its own, but if you attach it to a collar with a band running vertically from the bridge of the nose to the back of the neck, it won't be going anywhere. BTW, anyone wearing such a mask is going to have to watch their weight... [Answer] I have heard of an experimental procedure in the 19th century as a means of fixing dentures. This was done by drilling into the top of the skull, and fixing a threaded rod through the head from the top of the skull through tho the roof or the mouth, where the dentures would be fixed. Similarly I have heard a story of a man who I a workplace accident had a metal rod blasted through his head from his chin through the top of his skull. The man miraculously escaped death as the rod went perfectly between the two halves of the brain, with minimal damage to either. (apologies, I am struggling to find the documentation for my examples, I'll try and update later) The point is, the same principle can be applied when fixing a permanent mask. A skilled doctor can fix a rod through someone's skull as a base, and perhaps at less vulnerable spots add support for this (below the eyes for example). This will quickly become a permanent part of the skull when (or if) it heals. Removing this can be excruciating, if not impossibly dangerous. [Answer] Piercings Numerous small surface piercings in the skin provide anchor points for the mask. The weight is distributed across these piercings, so they don't need to be large gauge, just numerous. Technically, the mask and piercings are occasionally removed so that they can be cleaned, elsewise these priests would get horrible infections all over their head/face. But this would be an infrequent and private occurrence. As an added bonus, even sans mask, all those metal bits hanging off their face would be pretty gnarly looking, especially in a culture that was otherwise unused to facial piercings. [Answer] A Modified Scold’s Bridle [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lBhwp.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lBhwp.jpg) [Scold’s Bridles](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scold's_bridle), also called witch’s bridles, were cruel punishment/torture devices used on mostly on women, originating in the 16th century. Please note that I do not condone the use of such devices, even in history; I am simply explaining their usage as a sort of illustration. They were publicly humiliating masks the people had to wear, due to being suspected witches because of ‘scolding’ in public, or ‘gossiping’ and ‘rioting’. A spike embedded into a ball near the tongue would pierce into the tongue when the wearer attempts to speak or eat, making such actions impossible. It also could be a metal piece pressing the tongue down instead, causing it to be very difficult to speak coherently. The Virtue Mask It is difficult to imagine joining metal to the face as there are frankly too many biological consequences, but instead your mask can be a sort of scold’s bridle. These masks have the advantage of being able to be put on whenever one joins the religious order. There would be spikes on the back of the mask, which would not hurt the user when they put it on, but when one tries to remove it, spikes pierce into the back of the head, so effectively, it stays on. In mask form, it would look similar to the following, but have spikes that extend the opposite way, for when the user tries to remove it (from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure): [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xSkdv.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xSkdv.jpg) The public can see how the mask is attached, so the mask is like a symbol of virtue, representing a sort of lifetime dedication to their cause, rather than the humiliation associated with a Scold’s. Just please change the mask design into something more plain, otherwise the public would be absolutely frightened instead. If spikes are too much, instead, the mask can be two metal halves (like a helmet), and be melded together after being placed around a person’s face. Or, it could be a mask welded with metal straps on the back of the head. The mask should be slightly larger than the person’s head, to prevent the welding heat from searing the person’s face forever, or it could be nearly face fitting searing a vertical scar into the side of their head forever as it is welded on (shudders). If your story is to feature deserters often, and the religion is extremist even in extremist religions, I would say the form fitting mask would be ideal. Otherwise, the large mask (more like a helmet) may be nice, serving as a symbol of the religion. [Answer] > > (...) a mask, an identifying symbol of their devotion, which many believe is permanently sealed to their face. > > > That's not really a mask. Those guy are just really ugly. Seriously now, you've gotta irritate and multilate the flesh, making it so that the whole skin is wounded and looks like rust ([kinda like this](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3YPry.jpg)). Then paralyze the facial muscles. Those guys will only be able to swallow preprocessed food, but that's softcore in comparison to other crazy things people did in the past for their beliefs. [Answer] 1. Make the helmet as two halves that join together with nuts and bolts. 2. The helmet has some openable small windows for performing hygiene and allowing room for hairs and a beard grow up out of the mask. 3. Make sure that the mask is tight enough in the neck to make it impossible to be removed pulling it upwards without separating both parts. But obviously, not too tight to injury the user. 4. Weld the nuts and bolts. Then, the mask can be removed only by breaking up the nuts and bolts. This actually happens once in a while for allowing full hygiene, treating wounds, cutting hair or simply replacing an old mask with a new one if/when needed, however this requires the aid of someone else and will take at least a couple of minutes (at least if we want the subject alive, of course). [Answer] You could probably, with enough practice, create a method to drill curved spikes into the wearer's head without hurting the important parts too much. After the spikes have healed a little you could just weld the mask onto the ends. Yeah it'd be painful, but that's could be part of becoming one with the whole. The curved spikes would make sure to anchor the mask, it'd take a bit of breaking and tearing in order to remove the mask and the victim probably wouldn't survive the blood loss given the technology. ]
[Question] [ About 100 people settled in a tropical area near a seashore five years ago. They've been feeding themselves by hunting and fishing, but now they're also trying to grow crops, including hemp and corn. They have adequate fresh water and late 18C technology. The neighboring indigenous nation is OK with them using as much land as they need and taking as much wood out of the forest as they require. Their problem is the local flightless birds. Think dodos. About knee-high, the birds eat everything and they're aggressive. * What options do the settlers have for keeping the dodos out of the corn? My original thought was "build a big fence/palisade; plant inside the palisade," but I think they'd need a bigger planting area than they can fence. And the mean nasty dodos might chew through the fence. * What options do they have for protecting their food if they succeed in growing it? [Answer] Dodos as you describe looks more like asset than a problem, better than big sack of grains. Plant large number of traps in crops for dodos, use crops as baits. Most dodo attacks would be at ripping season, you would gather more meat than required, so you will need to consider some meat preservation tech. as your climate is tropical. [Answer] 1. Guard dog. [![dog and chickens and cat](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yUIL0.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yUIL0.jpg) You could train a dog to patrol the fields and chase out the dodos. That is dog work. If a cat shows up too that will be fine. --- 2. Copy the indigenes. You mention a nearby indigenous nation. Pay them a visit. They live with dodos too. How are they doing it? [Answer] First of all, most birds don't chew. They beak, dig and stomp. But don't chew. Rodents are nasty chewing beasts, but not birds. Parrots seems to be chewing (credits @Starfish Prime for pointing this out). Your options: * reinforced fences (dig well underground to install them) as passive mean. * competitors as active mean: rats, pigs, foxes, dogs. We have heard plenty of stories on the damages they have done to island fauna when they were imported by the European explorers in the Pacific. Even egg eating snakes might serve your goal. * bbq: don't tell me you want to eat corn all day, life long? If those pesky dodo are good to eat, let's have some bbq now and then. Dodo wings and grilled corn. Yummy! If you do the above, I am sure that pretty soon your concern will be "let's save dodo from extinction". Oh, since they don't fly, just store your harvest in a high place out of reach of their beaks. [Answer] # Build that fence! Most estimates state that [a family of 4 needs 2 acres of land](https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/infographic-how-much-backyard-is-needed-to-feed-a-family-of-four.html) to be self-sufficient. That's the upper limit I've seen (with a couple exceptions). It's a lot more efficient when you have 25 families of 4 working together, you can grow year round in the tropics, and they have food from the ocean as well. Assume at most the settlers require 50 acres for fields. This is very high and it's more likely to be closer to 25 acres. A 50 acre circle has a circumference of 1600 meters, or one mile. A 25 acre circle has a circumference of 1130 meters, or .7 miles. Wooden fence posts plus barbed wire would be the best choice for a fence to keep out dodos. Since there is a tropical forest and they're allowed "as much wood as they want" the posts are the easy part. [Barbed wire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbed_wire) wasn't invented until the mid to late 19th century. But wire fencing was available earlier and people did add sharp pointy things to it to make it hard to pass through. It's unclear to me if your settlers have metalworking to produce wire (they presumably have basic metalworking) or enough raw materials. Thorny bushes are the other option. It's probably what the people who already live there use. Put in the posts and use wattling and some wire to contain dead branches of thorny trees and bushes. Plant seedlings of the bushes so you won't have to replace the dead branches for more than a few years. Combined with some wire, this will be unstoppable. A mile of fencing is very easy for a village of 100 people to maintain. It's also fairly easy to build, once you have the materials. One full day's work for 1/3 of the village. Cutting the trees and making the posts is not time consuming. The metalwork is the bigger deal. If you use barbed wire fencing, [here's an estimate for materials to do 1/4 mile](https://www.agriculture.com/news/livestock/what-will-a-new-fence-cost-this-year_3-ar22518). Multiple by 3 for your smaller field and by 4 for your larger one. These are for modern materials and your settlers can get away with a lot less here. 4 8-inch wood posts 57 4-inch wood posts 55 6 1/2-foot steel posts 10 pounds staples & clips 6,600 feet 12-gauge barbed wire 39 hours labor If you need to build a wooden fence, add wire! You can still use the wood for structural integrity but add the wire so the dodos don't peck through it. Or use other metal. Old rusted pieces of metal work great. Anything the community might otherwise discard. On the outer side of the fence, whatever you build, add shells. You'll already be eating a lot from the ocean and you will have shells. Break them up so they're sharp and unfriendly to unshod dodo feet. Start with a thin line around the outside of the fence. Every time you have a pile of crushed shells to fill some buckets, send the kids out to add to the line. Make sure you have a couple of very well-built gates and you're all set. # Store your harvest on elevated platforms. Build wooden platforms high enough so the dodos can't jump up or reach with their beaks. This should still be low enough for village adults to reach with ease. If you have it, bamboo would be a great material here. Add wire, shells, rusty metal, etc to keep the dodos from just pecking through the platform legs. Bonus, this will reduce (not eliminate) rot from damp ground and insect infestation. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7lLDE.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7lLDE.jpg) (This is a child's play structure but it's about the right size and shape. Store the ladder separately, if needed.) [Answer] Plan A: BBQ Sauce Eat them. Eat their eggs. Eat their chicks. Eat enough of them and they'll go extinct. The one thing humans are very good at is making other species go extinct. Flightless birds are absolutely no real threat to armed human hunters. If we can push Siberian tigers to the extinction point without trying, a giant chicken is a tasty deep fried treat. Plan B: Pests Rats basically wiped out the dodo. They eat the eggs and young while the parents are distracted. They breed quickly and are quite intelligent. Chances are the settlers brought rats with them and the rats have already started. [Answer] Starting in 1932, Western Australia went through what is today known as [The Great Emu War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War) The story could be summarised as follow: * ex british and australian soldiers are given land in Western Australia after fighting during the WWI * they make the land more inviting by clearing it and making water supply available * a band of ~20 000 emus (they are giant migrating flightless birds) passing by found that the cultivated lands were now a good habitat * they began spoiling and eating the crops and left holes in the fences, where rabbit and other pests could now enter * the Australian minister of defence met with a delegation of ex-soldiers (now farmers), who required machine-guns to deal with the issue. He agreed with that and deployed two machine-guns handled by military personnel. * two attempts were made at killing the birds, none of them was successful and the governement refused to send the army back when the farmers asked for it in 1934, 1943, and 1948 On the other hand, two things were effective against the emus: * a bounty system (~57 000 bounties were claimed during a six month period in 1934, while the army killed at best 4000 emus while being on the field during two full months) * farmers began using [Pest-exclusion fences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pest-exclusion_fence) to guard the crops against emus (these are specifically designed to guard against a type of pest and used against emus in Autralia since the 1860's so I don't know if they're an option with late 18C tech) [Answer] Assuming the settlers don't have access to unlimited fencing material since if they could take a boat over to Home Depot or another local hardware store, then they wouldn't need to grow their own food since they have money and a supply chain. They might dig trenches around their fields and pile the dirt up to make a wall. That way a 2-foot trench becomes a 4-foot high obstacle. And if the dodoes are aggressive enough, maybe they eat their own dead or wounded. So hunting them, or standing guard with bows and slings might provide a diversionary food source. Then there is the question of is corn their preferred food. If there is something they like better, humans could cultivate that too, along with corn, but in less quantity. Then the settlers could kill the Dodoes that made it through the barriers and toss their corpses over the barrier, either a warning to next ten generations of Dodoes or as food to satiate the hunger of the flightless fowl. [Answer] Are the dodos so aggressive that they aren't scared by people? If not than a scare crow would work or scare dodo in this case. I would arrange settlements in a ring around the crops. 100 people is enough for some guard duty. Eating the dodos or giving the meat to the natives may go a long way to keeping relations healthy. ]
[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/180331/edit) Let's say you have a pure block of iron. From what I remember from chemistry, the metallic bond forming the iron is a load of positive ions in a sea of delocalised electrons. Now let's say each positive iron ion has one proton removed. Doesn't matter where the protons go, as long as each iron ion goes from 26 protons to 25. Would this block of iron then instantly turn into manganese? Doesn't matter about the energy requirements to do this, pretend all the energy and heat is dealt with magically. Let's say you had an iron sword or something. If a load of protons were removed from each iron ion until they had 8 protons left, would the sword instantly turn into oxygen? (and the poor sword wielder wanders where the blade went.) Again, I don't care about the energy requirements, I just want to know if the change would be instantaneous. [Answer] It will be a world ending event. Let's have a sword made of 4kg of iron. Iron has an atomic weight 56. There are about $10^{25}$ atoms of iron in 1kg. Removing (or adding) one proton per atom will give you an electric charge of $4\cdot 10^{25} e$, that is $6.4MC$ (yes, megacoulomb). Now, the electric field 1 AU away will be $E=\frac{1}{4\pi \epsilon\_0}\frac{Q}{r^2} = \frac{1}{4\pi \epsilon\_0} \frac{6.4 \cdot 10^6 C }{(1.5\cdot 10^{11}m)^2 } = 9 \cdot 10^9 \cdot 28.4\cdot 10^{-17} NC^{-1} = 2.56\cdot 10^{-6}V/m$. The force on one proton 1AU away will be $4\cdot 10^{-25} N$. Which is about the same as the gravitational force on that proton on the surface of the Sun. ~~Yes, this will rip the Sun apart. Never mind Earth and other planets.~~ EDIT: As per [this answer](https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/564930/79374), the charge will be effectively shielded, though. [Answer] Yes, removing a proton from an element would turn it into another element by definition. The different elements are defined by the number of protons in their nuclei. That said, there are different ions and isotopes of each element, determined by the number of electrons and neutrons respectively. If you remove a bunch of protons from electrically neutral iron-52 until you get hydrogen, it won’t just be a plain vanilla hydrogen atom, but a really strange isotope/ion of hydrogen with 26 neutrons and 26 electrons. Regarding your question about turning a sword into oxygen: if, somehow, the necessary number of protons magically disappeared all at once, the sword would probably explode. Solid metal is a stable arrangement of atoms, and suddenly removing lots of protons will instantly destabilize the whole configuration. My suggestion: if you’re already planning on using “magic” to supernaturally make a whole bunch of protons disappear, why not just use “magic” to magically turn the sword into oxygen? Is there any need to overcomplicate things if you’re skirting the laws of physics anyways? [Answer] ### Step 1 -- Iron into Manganese Yes, it would immediately turn into manganese. As Franklin's answer and AlexP's comment states, the definiton of an element is based on the number of protons in the nucleus. To be a bit more accurate, it would be negatively charged chunk of manganese because the 26th electron is not taken away, meaning that it will be a mass of manganese ions. Your magic reaction looks a bit like this: XFe + Magic -> X-1Mn- + 1H+ You've mentioned not really caring what happens to that proton, but it is there to balance the equation. A brief look on Wikipedia reveals that Iron exists in nature with isotopes of 54, 56, 57, and 58 while the only stable isotope of manganese is 55. Given what is stable for each element and their natural distribution via Wikipedia, if you did this to a random chunk of iron, you actually end up with a block of negatively charged manganese with 8.25% of it radioactive -- the parts not derived from Iron-56. The radioactive part will decay either into chromium (5% roughly) or back into iron (3% roughly) The electrons will have to go somewhere so there will likely be a discharge into something or somebody. If the proton is just magically booted out physically as hydrogen ions, then the electrons will likely bond with those. Otherwise, it's probably discharging into the ground or into your person holding said iron. ### The Sword of Air Ansering your next question is much the same: By removing 18 protons from iron, it will by definition by oxygen. The resultant mess, primarily Oxygen-38 (56 - 18), will almost certainly instantly decay into other things in a highly energetic event that will likely kill anyone near the now transmuted sword. Your hapless swordsman victim will not have time to wonder where their sword went, the instantaneous radioactive decay will likely kill them. As a side point, as the most probably steel sword is an alloy of iron and carbon, your sword will also drop carbon dust as the alloy is broken up. Not necessarily a lot of it, but enough. ### Bonus: Transmutation Without Horribly Messy Death If the goal for your atomic mage is to turn an iron sword into oxygen by messing with the atoms directly, then the aspiring mage will want to remove all three subatomic components -- protons, neutrons, and electrons -- so that the result is stable oxygen. For refernce, a potential reaction could look something like this: 56Fe + Magic -> 40Ar + 16O What happens to the argon's worth of bits is your choice, but this would lead to a sword vanishing into a poof of gaseous materials without killing your swordsman. Bonus is that both argon and oxygen are gasses so even if you kept the removed parts, it would still be a gas. [Answer] To summarize this answer: * Yes, you'd form a new element, but not necessarily the one you wanted. By the definition of an element, as soon as the number of protons change, you have a new element. * Each atom would quickly decay through either beta decay, the emission of alpha particles or some similar mechanism. This would release energy in the form of neutrinos and fast-moving electrons. * Electrons would be forced to transition to new energy levels, releasing a series of characteristic spectral lines. * The chemical bonds in the sword would be broken, releasing more energy, although it's possible that they could re-form. ## Nuclear stability and beta decay Let's say we have an atom of iron - in particular, its most common isotope, 56Fe, with 26 protons and 30 neutrons. Say we remove 18 protons to form oxygen, as you suggested. We now have a heavy isotope of oxygen: 38O, with 8 protons and 30 neutrons. The reason you've never heard of 38O is that it's unstable. In fact, if you take an atom of any element and just keep adding neutrons to it, at some point [it'll become too unstable to survive for long](https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/64037/56299), thanks to the Pauli exclusion principle. (As a side note: [it's possible to have high neutron/proton ratios that last for more at least a few milliseconds](https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2007.189), but they're still not stable.) The result? Those 30 neutrons will be forced into high-energy states, while at the same time, there are plenty of empty low-energy proton states. It may then become favorable for some of those neutrons to undergo beta decay into protons, via the process $$n\to p+e^{-}+\bar{\nu}\_e$$ i.e. converting a neutron to a proton and emitting an electron and an electron antineutrino. Therefore, the unstable isotope of oxygen will decay into a stable isotope of a heavier element, somewhere between oxygen and iron. I should note that the atoms may take other decay paths - say emitting alpha particles - to reach stable elements and isotopes, but the net effects should be similar. Perhaps the energy carriers will be light nuclei in some cases. In this process, each beta decay releases roughly $1\;\text{MeV}$ of energy. To use [Radovan's numbers](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/180340/627), in a 4-kilogram sword, beta decay will release $\sim10^{12}\;\text{J}$, or the equivalent of 300 tons of TNT. Whether this blows the sword apart or not depends on how that energy is released. If it is primarily imbued in the neutrinos, then things might be okay; they'll pass through the sword without interacting significantly. On the other hand, if that energy is transferred to the electrons, we will have a problem. Fast-moving electrons will collide with nuclei and other electrons, heating up their surroundings and possibly, yes, blowing up whatever remains of the sword. ## What about the electrons? The electrons previously in the atom will also experience changes. The energy of an electron in the $n$th energy level of an atom with $Z$ protons is $$E\_n=-\frac{\mu c^2Z^2\alpha^2}{2n^2}$$ where $\mu$ is the reduced mass and $c$ and $\alpha$ are the speed of light and the fine structure constant, respectively. As we have gone from $Z=26$ to some lower value, each electron will either 1) shift an energy level to compensate or 2) become unbound completely, if their energies exceed the ionization potential of the new element. In that case, they would either join the "sea" of electrons in the metal lattice or perhaps be ejected from the sword entirely. One thing I think is interesting is that if an electron shifts energy levels, it will likely have to emit a photon to make up for the difference in energies as predicted by the fact that $E\_n\propto Z/n^2$. Therefore, we'd presumably see a variety of spectral lines corresponding to the transitions of bound (i.e. non-valence) electrons. I suppose you'd need to do a quantum mechanical calculation to figure out which states they'd drop into; if anyone does such a calculation, I'd be quite curious to see the results. ## Metallic bonds Finally, we'd see an additional release of energy because the chemical structure of the sword would change. The new element might not be able to retain the metallic bonds that had previously kept the sword together. We could instead see new ionic and covalent bonds form as the atoms rearranged themselves in a stable configuration. Unfortunately, I'm not too knowledgeable about chemistry, so I have to leave the details to someone who is. [Answer] See Franklin's answer. I just want to add a thing: The radiation coming from the decay after you pair the wrong number of protons with the wrong number of neutrons will probably burn everyone around, then the isotopes flying around after this event will radioactively poison everyone who is left, leading to heavy lung diseases. Also there will be too many electrons around which will discharge as a fat lightning strike. Your magician better removes protons, neutrons and electrons together, making harmless gases from them. [Answer] Different elements have different orbital shapes and configurations, and different arrangements that can be made. In general elements in the same family have about the same chemical properties. By removing one proton from each atom, you are going for an element one column to the left in the periodic table (unless you're already in the family of Hydrogen, the alkali metals, in which case you'll get noble gases). If the magic also keeps your sword from [destroying the solar system as Radovan Garabík has demonstrated](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/180340/21222), the sword will most likely crumble many little broken crystals, with sizes varying from a cm to the size of grains of fine sand. That's because manganese has a different shape or the $d$ orbital and won't hold the same chemical binding as the iron crystals originally did. [Answer] My assumption is that your magic takes care that all excess electrons would go away with protons and resulted hydrogen is teleported on somwhere on Phobos (doomportal, you know). All exccess neutrons also go to hell. Change into manganese: the sword disintegrates into dust You see, properties of steel partially depends on it's metastucture. Iron and any other metal are not one crystal grid with common sea of electrons. It consists of great number of small domains, "sub-grids". For steel these domains are separeted with carbon. Iron has a special property - it easily bonds with carbon, while manganese does not. So when all iron atoms turn into manganese these domains would quickly stop being bonded by carbon layer and fall apart. Sword would just become manganese dust (with little carbon dust inclusions). It may not turn into dust instantaneously. For a moment it would be like nothing has changed (due to air pressue and different intermolecular forces responsible for friction). But any mechanical strain (like wind pressue) would immediately break it. It would be like holding a sword made from a pressed wet sand. Change into oxygen ($Fe\overset{magic}{\rightarrow}O + (18H \rightarrow hell)$: sword explodes like bus tire and burns everything around it As it was mentioned in other answers, even though we took away a lot of hydrogen, we still have a highly packed atomic oxygen. Which is many times more reactive than O2. For 2.6 kg sword it would be 100 moles of that oxygen (1,6 kg) left, that should occupy a bit more than 2 cubic meters, but occupy only 1/3 of it. So pressure is 6 atm - like in a bus tire. That might not kill swordsman (espesialy if he is wearing armor), but will certainly injure him (like rip his hand or arm apart). But what would kill him - atomic oxygen itself. It would just burn through his whole body leaving only some charred remains. It will ignite all metals on his body! Yes, iron burns at this conditions. At the end it would look like a bonfire in Darksouls (but without the sword, remember - we turned it into oxygen) So if you want to get the sword away without injuring anyone and you have some magic that can transport particles to hell - just transport all protons, neutrons and electorns (i.e. whole sword) there. It would be less disastrous. P.S. Btw, hell would recieve much more damage! No supprise demons are so angry :) ]
[Question] [ Let’s say I have a time machine and I travel back to medieval Europe. I befriend a girl and she needs my help to save the business of her mother: a restaurant, inn, tavern, etc. I travel back to the present and now I need to bring addictive substance(s) and add it/them to the food. Which chemical(s) will best cause customers to become addicted to the food from this business? [Answer] I'm going to suggest the chemical route. Anything listed that doesn't seem to have a high physical dependency would just be used as classical conditioning and subconscious, psychological dependence would be created through the means of an associated enjoyment or other observed benefit/gain. --- Opiates - [Fentanyl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl) is very strong and very concentrated so carrying/transporting a lot wouldn't be an issue (like sugar or caffeine) and I think this is to your advantage. [Overdose](https://www.statnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Heroin-Fentanyl-vials-NHSPFL-1024x576.jpg) might be an issue but just dose lightly. People generally consume food proportional to their weight and that's convenient and relative to the dose they could handle. Opium was really popular in the past so you'd probably already have some customers waiting, begging, fiending, inconsolably dependent. Or a widely tolerated anti-depressant such as Wellbutrin/[Bupropion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bupropion) Or a [benzodiazepine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzodiazepine) like Xanax or Valium Or [marijuana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_%28drug%29): munchies Or [Viagra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sildenafil) Or [MDMA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDMA)/Molly/Ecstasy: so people have fun during and after their inn visit ([Pavlov's dogs](https://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html)) Or an antibiotic: apple a day at Pete's keeps syphilis away Or [LSD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide): frequent microdosing for [increased creative productivity](https://thehustle.co/how-to-lsd-microdose) Or mushrooms/natural hallucinogens: but beware with this one, you might catch people talking to [burning bushes](https://www.reddit.com/r/Ayahuasca/comments/4qik2r/moses_was_high_jesus_was_a_mushroom/) out back or [claiming witchcraft](http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/drugs/216731-ergot-salem-witch-trials) --- Personally, though, I think you'd get the most addiction and withdrawal out of the opiates. Plus, you can just grow and process some poppies if you run out since you're in medieval Europe anyway and you can help [encourage trade relations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_%28disambiguation%29) with neighboring societies. Maybe your friend can franchise her inn. [News from Jan, 2016](http://fortune.com/2016/01/22/china-cracks-down-on-restaurants-opiate-use/) - "China’s Food and Drug Administration busted thirty five restaurants this week for adding poppies and ground poppy powder to dishes in the apparent hope the opiates induced repeat customers." Fascinating. "[The spice must flow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melange_%28fictional_drug%29)" - Dune [Answer] No need to make it too complicated: ## Refined sugar If it is before 12th century, the only available sweetener was honey. And, while enjoyable, it certainly was not as sweet as pure sugar, and has a stroung flavour that may make it not suitable for anything. So refined sugar and the products incorporating it would be a very incorporation to your girlfriends goods. Over the two proposals already made it has two main advantages: * Can be produced locally, from white beet, without the need of introducing new, suspicious plants. * Its effects are less noticeable (if your girlfriend patron's suddenly cannot sleep at night or become too nervous, maybe some researcher1 could come and ask some questions, using their famed methods). UPDATE: In consideration of paptiger's comment, it is worth noting that the refining process might be more complicated than I originally thought and so the whole idea of producing refined sugar "locally" may be more complicated that I made it sound. --- 1Or, by their latin title, inquisitor. [Answer] Another solution that would greatly increase demand - SPICES Spices were highly valued in that time period (as some are still to this day), have even been used as currencies from time to time, and were a factor in creating trade routes and finding new (to Europeans) lands. [Answer] The most innocuous one would be nicotine, which already occurs in potatoes and Tomatoes as well as other vegetables at low levels. Small amounts added to the food would give them a boost, and would make the meals seem very satisfying. It wouldn't be as effective as adding a more powerful agent, nor would the withdrawal be debilitating. If you can find a way to boost the fat and sugar content as well, you've got your food addition. [Answer] What about New World food ? You don't need actual drugs: look around you, apart from sugar, we're all dying for potatoes. Their introduction in Europe drastically changed the food regime, to the point we have forgotten a lot of what the medieval Europeans used to eat. Similarly, tomatoes or corn may do the job (think pop-corn !). If you have to bring only small quantities, try spices like cinnamon, curry, or vanilla. Not addictive either, but their novelty surely would attract rich costumers. [Answer] Add Caffeine where its bitterness is either welcome or can be masked well enough with more sugar. Coffee was known in Europe by the early 17th century. See <http://www.ncausa.org/About-Coffee/History-of-Coffee>. Hey, if it works for the cola industry, I think it'll work for you. ;-) (This presumes sugar or honey is available to do the sweetening.) This strategy is taken to the limit (and maybe beyond) with some mystery addictive substance in the classic SF/social-satire novel, The Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants> [Answer] I think MSG(mono sodium glutamate) is the best contendor. Its an additive and generally considered harmless. So no one will even notice it. Though its tasteless but almost all MNC firms add this in their products to give extra burst of flavor. Medieval people will fall in love with your girl's dishes. And the girl with you :P. [Answer] Something else to consider is that the economics of a medieval society were a bit different to what they are now and there may be a limit to the potential for local trade simply because people don't have the disposable income to eat out, even if they really wanted to. A better approach might be to try to encourage more passing trade. Travellers are obviously much less able to cater for themselves. Fortunately the period has a ready made answer to this in the shape of pilgrimage which was was big business and religious sites went to great lengths to acquire the most prestigious relics to attract visitors. Sites with a particularly attractive religious draw could make serious money with potential knock on benefits for local entrepreneurs. So a logical plan is to arrange for a suitably impressive miracle to pull in the punters, if this results in saleable products then so much the better, something like a healing spring would be ideal. You need to be a bit careful that the miracle ticks the right theological boxes as being labelled a sorcerer could backfire pretty badly but as the church is also set to benefit they are unlikely to scrutinise any 'miracles' too closely and similarly you will be only benefiting indirectly. Just let the church do the marketing for you and wait for the hungry pilgrims to flock in. An additional benefit is that you only need a few convincing 'miracles' to get the ball rolling after that it should be pretty much self perpetuating. [Answer] As already mentioned, anything dramatic enough to act overnight—MDMA, e.g.—is definitely going to bring charges of sorcery, witchcraft, &c. Anything longer term that actually works—nicotine, caffeine, &c.—is going to risk the same thing at a slower rate. Addiction means the customers will notice ill effects when they avoid or are forced to be apart from the place, and someone is going to tell the priest. The way to avoid that static is to take your time and coöpt the authorities. Anything that involves processing hazardous chemicals—hey, Mr. White—is a nonstarter but anything natural that can grow in their climate is fair game for months of worshipful prayers, devotion, and care. Then when it turns out there is a miraculous power in the food prepared from those ingredients, it's thanks to the divine intercession of Our Mother of Marlboro, the Blessed Virgin of the Iron Buddha, or St Coffa of Abyssinia. You're missing the trick, though. Addicting the peasants and coöpting the priests is the chump move. # Coöpt the guys with the swords. Take a modern weightlifter's guide back with you and a hefty supply of protein, creatine, &c. Work in the prayers and whatnot, but the main idea is to get the local knights and soldiers bulked and on your side. Maybe have a big bad the next village over whose ass they can kick after a few weeks on your diet-&-exercise routine. Your gf and her family will have a title and estate by Michaelmas. At that point, you could work in steroids and anything heavier: they're already on your side and can "vouch" for you against any interfering priests. You still might not want to, though: all the deleterious side effects could turn them against you and her. [Answer] I think your character would do well with some sugar and a show. The sugar is just the most convenient placebo available. Then your character or his girlfriend needs to sell it (I mean lie convincingly) about its amazing properties. Call it what you will. Medieval herbals such as this Anglo-saxon one tended to have a mix of local lore and Mediterranean plants mentioned in the manuscripts they were copying from. Your locals aren't automatically going to think "demonic" when encountering something new. Exotic works. <http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/anglo-saxon/> [Answer] Deep Fryers I would certainly say that our culture is enamored with things that are deep fried (bonus points for it also being on a stick) It should work for just about anything that is already available to be cooked, think vegetable tempura and you're on the right track. The only trick might be sourcing the breading and oil necessary for cooking in that way. [Answer] Thousands of years ago the Chinese faced this very problem. One of their most recent answers to this problem is Monosodium Glutamate, otherwise known as MSG. Just make your normal tasteless food, then sprinkle some on. MMMMMMM (as Homer Simpson would say). [Answer] In theory, you don't even need newer substances or technologies for this: There is this "explanation" to why humans used to see monsters, dragons and other fantastic creatures in the past, and that is mostly connected to a very common dietary item: wheat. Consider the existence of a fungus that attacks the wheat crops. It does not destroy them, neither makes them inedible: it just slightly changes the appearance (no changes to taste or durability). The point here is that this fungus (called Ergot), as it develops in the wheat, produces some chemical substances called alkaloid ergotamine, a complex molecule consisting of a tripeptide-derived cyclol-lactam ring connected via amide linkage to a lysergic acid (ergoline) moiety, and other alkaloids of the ergoline group that are biosynthesized by the fungus. Ergot alkaloids have a wide range of biological activities including effects on circulation and neurotransmission. (1 - Direct quote from Wikipedia, please see link below). Now imagine, you live in a society where a large part of the diet is based on wheat or rye, and those products are contaminated by this fungus. You eat some bread, see a large bird, but interpret that as a dragon, or see a a man riding a horse and visualize a centaur (of course this is just a very simplistic interpretation of meta-mythology); most people would be paying to see that magic. So, you have access to the fungus, and you can now produce products that have considerable quantities of it, quoting them as having "magical properties". More than the lysergic properties of your bread, there are also other small advantages, such as refined carbs that could easily create addiction (as stated in other answers). In this case, you can even save some fuel of your time machine by using the spores found in the wheat around the place you are, if those are available (and considering how widespread this fungus was on past times, it probably is). Obs: The only slight problem of this situation, and of using any kind of substances to generate addiction, is that you are in the middle ages, so there would be high chances that the women you are trying to help would be branded as witches. Then you´d have a much bigger problem in your hands (good luck with that one). Source 1: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot> [Answer] opium (codeine and morphine), cocaine (affects the dopamine levels), cannabis (Tetrahydrocannabinol) - those were all legal and unregulated back then... if you don't mind the moral repercussions. You could perhaps just have pot burning like incense in the tavern - they'll feel great, get the munchies, and come back for more. [Answer] spike it with addictive drugs derived from herbs. or you can just use cocaine. Or Opium. If you want to get technical you can use peer pressure too, but that's complicated and really skirts the line of "addiction". Now that I see you're coming from the present though, you can just use other opioids. I'd crush up some pills and rub it in the meat. Customers feel really good when they eat her food, but feel really really really bad when they don't. As an added bonus they constantly need more. Tobacco would be another good one. Get some concentrated tobacco and put it in the syrup or jelly or jam. Suddenly they're super pissy without it. I think you should be able to get some of that legally in a vape kit, but I don't vape so I don't know. Honestly tobacco is your best bet here. ]
[Question] [ Short version How much would reasonably well-educated but unprepared time travelers from the present be able to speed up the technological and social development of civilization from the first empires (early bronze age) to the present level? Or, to put the same question another way: How quickly could human society theoretically develop from bronze age to the present level? Historically we needed 4.5k years give or take a few, but we had a lot of wars, crises, collapses - surely we could do better. Long version - story The scientists told us not to go wandering off into that area. They warned us that if something went wrong with the experiment, any people in the area would end up in the distant past without any means to return. But it was too beautiful a morning not to go running. And now, here we are. I have no idea where this actually is. People around here speak a language very different from ours; we learned a few words but communication in general is difficult. They say, the land is called [Kemet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemet) and its ruler goes by the name [Hor-Medjedu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khufu). Apparently, he is gathering laborers for some large building effort. His subjects seem to be quite chatty - if we could only understand them. Some of them are nice people, some are not, the same as in the world we will now never be able to return to. But honestly - I do not know how they can stand it to live here all their lives. The food is dismal (Imagine, no potatoes, no rice!), the weather is dreadful, there is no clean water, no electricity, no internet, everything is infested with disease, and deadly dangers are lurking everywhere. The other day, we all had to leave behind our shoes when we tried to cross this body of water before realizing there were crocodiles. At daytime, the heat is unbearable while nights are chilly. Soon, the locals say, the weather will turn wet and cold and large floods will rise from the river. Who we are, you ask? Well, there is: Alex - he pursued a degree in philosophy but dropped out to work as a carpenter and was recently unemployed, Jane - Alex' martial arts-interested girlfriend with considerable physical strength, a construction worker, Patrick - a gay PhD student in high energy physics - his colleagues were responsible for getting us into our current predicament, and Susan - Alex' mother, a well-established biochemist who always wanted to quit her job to travel the world but could never bring herself to do it. I guess, this time she succeeded. A small group, to be sure. Now, if this was a fantasy novel, it would surely end up with Patrick marrying the king and governing by his side while Alex and Jane would rule as prince and princes over some other miraculous country and Susan would disperse her scientific wisdom as a motherly teacher to the delight of the common people. Yet, reality is somewhat more disappointing. We have been told to avoid the local militia as they are said to be ruthless, undisciplined and have been known to enslave unsuspecting travellers. Apparently they are armed with stone clubs, wooden lances, bow and arrows as well as daggers made of a metal that is not iron, perhaps bronze. I have never seen any iron or steel around here nor any other metal that is common in modern age. Lucky for us. Until now, we've been trading the few everyday objects we had with us when we were stranded here for shelter and food. We present someone with a Dollar coin, they will look at it closely, hold it up against the sun, show it to their neighbors. Then, they will perhaps ask us into their house. We give them a bright lime-colored t-shirt and they will give us something to eat. It's not like bartering at all, it's more like mutual gifts. And we are quickly running out of gifts the locals would find interesting. What will we do? I do not know. I still can't quite believe it. But it's real, incredibly real, brutally real. Will I ever be able to enjoy a decent cocktail again? Will I ever again have the luxury of indoor plumbing? Or of plumbing in general for that matter? I know how it works, broadly speaking. It's not difficult to build. We just have to get the locals to help us with it. They will love it. They just don't know it yet. What about electricity? I saw some copper and bronze items now and then, even some silver - that should make perfectly adequate electrical wiring. How we could make everyone's tasks so much easier! And then the rampant disease - how hard can it be to find some peniciline-producing fungus? If the locals knew how easy and convenient their lives could be! At present, however, they do not seem overly excited about our wisdom. That farm women got angry at us the other day when we tried to explain logarithms to her. Perhaps we would be more successful if one of us would be a little more aggressive and bombastic like [Aleixo Garcia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleixo_Garc%C3%ADa) or certain presidential candidates? Long version - out of character It was pointed out in various other contexts that the disappearance of all technological achievements would make it very difficult to rebuild anything. Fine, you know in broad terms how an electric generator works, a computer, a radio, but you have to figure out the details and you will not find any ready made parts to construct those things from. More worryingly, the same is true for less advanced technology: Steel? A functioning printing press? An oceangoing ship? And still worse, while you might find descendents of formerly domesticated species in post-apocalyptic settings, in the present scenario, there aren't any except for what the bronze age civilization already has. In the region in question: cattle, pigs, goats, dogs, cats perhaps sheep according to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_domesticated_animals) but crucially no horses; and those domesticated animals would probably still be much less docile than the modern variants we are used to. With regard to plants, the picture is not much better with much less variety and much [lower yields](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmer#History). Which means, most of the population will be occupied with agricultural tasks at all times, except, of course, for those engaged in Hor-Medjedu's building projects. You may think that this labor could instead be dedicated to further technological progress, but Hor-Medjedu would not be very enthusiastic about this prospect. The picture is complemented with lack of everyday skills on the part of the time travellers from the present and by the potential presence of other antagonistic individuals, each with their own agenda and little patience for scientific experimentation by the protagonists for the purpose of recovering advanced technologies. Still, provided that the time travellers survive their integration into bronze age society (Is that likely?), they should be able to give the ancient civilization a technologic boost. It should be unproblematic to write down a lot of theoretical knowledge, say, the basics of modern mathematics, to devise an education system that actually works, and to provide subsequent generations with a few guiding facts about what remains to discover scientifically and how that is supposed to fit together. Does 1k years sound reasonable as a time frame for everything else? Note that there were a few questions that touched on some aspects of the present question: [Here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/15508/how-to-bootstrap-technological-development-from-one-man-in-the-forest-to-buildi) the question was, how long it would take to build a spaceship when starting with a single human without technology (with one answer estimating 60 million work hours). [Here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9275/building-and-powering-a-computer-in-a-bronze-age-world) the question was discussed how to build and power a computer in the bronze age (but with modern technology available to the protagonist). [Here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/28282/speeding-up-technological-development-using-a-time-machine) the question was how to speed up technological development with a time machine (but as a planned effort and with many round-trips). [Answer] Most people fall into the trap of thinking that us folks from the future would be able to absolutely revolutionize the past. The reality (if time travelling to the past wouldn't break the universe) would probably be a lot less glamorous. Why The Past Is Different Consider that the populations of the past - even the rulers - are incredibly uneducated by our standards. This means that we could try to explain a great deal to them, but we would probably have some fundamental communication issues, even beyond language. Furthermore, a lot of our education is completely useless from their point of view. Oh, you know Shakespeare? Those plays only make sense within certain cultural and lingual settings. A bronze age peasant, or even king would not care one wit about that. Even less so about high energy physics, or philosophy. Also consider that the people of the past have different interests than us. Or rather, not interests, but priorities. You see, we don't have to worry much about being killed by invaders, starving to death, or dying of disease. Sure, it can still happen, but we're much more concerned with the release of the latest iPhone, whether we prefer Starbucks or some other local brand of coffee, and which micro-brewed beer is best. These people will not be able to relate to you at all. You may see women being treated as second class citizens, slavery, rape, etc. and seek to drive a social revolution. You will fail miserably, because you and those people do not have any sort of common ground on which to base your arguments. Try telling the Romans (who were quite "civilized") that slavery is bad. You won't be laughed out of the room - you'll probably be executed as a dangerous ideologist (their entire economy was based on slave labor, and raping one's slaves was perfectly acceptable)! Similarly, try telling people that tiny, microscopic creatures give them colds and diseases, and predicting certain outbreaks, etc. You're more likely to be labeled a sorcerer and burned at the stake than for the concept of "tiny monsters" to be accepted. And so, even though you may have some interesting ideas to share, you'll want to be quite careful how you go about it. Your Situation So, the fact is that the past is different not simply because people didn't have technology, but because their moral, legal, cultural, and educational backgrounds are fundamentally different from ours. Tolerance? Equality? Civility? Those are pretty modern concepts. They would be far more familiar with "Might Is Right", and "The Strongest Survives", concepts which, ironically, we've sort of moved away from in the modern age (at least in the West) And so, how do the skills of your characters match up with the requirements of survival in the Bronze age? @WhatARoughBeast gave a pretty good assessment of your situation, actually. You are well and truly screwed. Outsiders who don't speak the language, are dressed weirdly, have no idea what the local cultural or religious hot buttons might be, and act strange. You're very likely to be dragged in front of the local officials and executed just to be safe, but I'd say you stand a 50-50 chance of piquing the interest of the local authorities and being given a chance to prove your worth. What You Need To Understand What you need to understand is that the people of the past won't be interested in hearing about your moral or political ideologies. They will either lack the education, or simply have more pressing concerns to want to listen to you. Instead, Alex & Company need to prove their worth from other points of view. And you're not going to like it, because it all involves violence, and using the "might is right" ideology to bend the world to your will. My Two Cents The absolute advantage that Alex and his friends have is that they might know enough history to understand what shaped the rise of successful ancient civilizations. And invariably, that has factor has been military might. > > If you're rich, the strong will take your wealth from you. > > > If you're well fed, they will take your food. > > > If you live on good land, they will take the land itself. > > > I think you can see where this is going. Alex has the opportunity to influence the world in some ways, but most drastically by using simple military principles and tactics, crude communication methods (systems of flags, semaphore towers, etc), and an understanding of politics and religion to build the foundation of a great empire. But in order to get that he has a life-time of hard work ahead of him. And so, you can forget about plumbing, or teaching peasant farmers logarithms - that's simply mental. No, start off small. Organize the local ruler's military forces. Design new and more effective equipment for them. Build a reputation, and then supplant said leader. Build a strong community, and start enforcing your principles and ideals. Start educating the population, and slowly introduce more and more useful ideas and concepts. But accept that most of your work effort is going to go into simply surviving. > > Note: I left my ideas at a pretty high level, please let me know if you'd like me to expand on any particular topic. > > > [Answer] Let me see. You have no usable skills, no currency (local or otherwise), you don't speak the language, and you are not related to anybody in the area. Only one of the four of you is even remotely trained in fighting, and it will only take one stab or slash to put her out of commission. Congratulations, slaves. Welcome to your new lives. Change the tech level of the society? Who listens to the babbling of foreign slaves? [Answer] They'd probably end up dead. But to avoid that, perhaps you should think in terms of the Spanish conquistadors in the Incan empire. Which was pretty much a sort of time travel. As already mentioned, the time travellers are simply a fish out of water, and whatever knowledge they may have (which is probably not industrial or practical) would be too many steps ahead to make a transition between ancient and modern times. They may have tools but the locals don't even have the tools to make the tools required to make the tools of the tool's tools... ah you get the idea. They'd need to be able to oversee the transition (a multi-generational project), which would require a small army of teachers, administrators, engineers, scientists, etc. And, let's not forget; soldiers and police with enough bullets and supplies to see them through a few wars - who you can trust not to go mental with power and killing the others and stealing all the women and grapes. They all need to be fluent in the ancient language of the time (which the modern folk may not actually be capable of knowing if it is ancient), immunised against ancient diseases, and able to seize control of the population and keep them loyal and compliant to the worst student cramming sessions in history in order to start educating the first generation to create the next level of tools, for their children to make better tools, etc. It's an enormous project that would require a hell of a lot of planning, resources, documentation, and loyal professionals. A few modern misfits won't even come close. And the most important issue is enforcing their authority over the locals, and then keeping it from neighbouring barbarians. Unless they can seize control somehow (pretending to be gods/witches maybe) everything will be fairly likely to fail. As even if they are teaching the locals good practices (basic hygiene, etc) there's no guarantee the locals will accept it, or even perceive evidence favouring the time travellers correctly. I'd say power, and not knowledge, is the biggest issue here... sorry to be negative. It can be done! But will require the time travellers to basically be more like the conquistadors who arrived in the Incan empire. Ruthless and opportunistic, and making use of their advantages before the locals get wise to them. That said, if the time travellers included a doctor with a fondness for botany, then perhaps they could gain so much respect and adoration that they can gain the power to do as they like. BUT someone might just get envious and kill them because they don't have the authority they need to be protected/feared. [Answer] ## Improve Everyone's Survival We're talking about the long game, here. You have the remaining lifespan of four adults to work with, and you want to a modern civilization to develop centuries or millennia sooner. If you start at the bronze age, you're dealing with short lifespans, with most of everyone's time spent on just surviving. A few basic improvements across the entire population can dramatically improve that situation and bump development forward by hundreds or even a thousand years. 1: Focus on improving food production The most basic improvement needed to spur technological development is having enough food produced that not everyone has to work as a farmer or hunter-gatherer. In our modern era, only a tiny fraction of the population are farmers. At the dawn of civilization, everyone spent the majority of their efforts towards obtaining enough food to survive and reproduce. This is not co-incidental; the more people who can work on things other than producing food, the more specialization and advancement can occur. So if your characters want to advance civilization, they should put their modern lay person's understanding of farming to maximum use. Things like fertilizing fields and using crop rotation to keep production up. A plow, even one made from wood, will make planting large amounts possible. 2: Improve sanitation and medicine Second to food production is medicine, or more broadly, helping people survive stuff that used to kill them. Even basic things like washing your hands before eating, boiling water to kill bacteria, and basic first aid would go a long way. If you can increase the average person's lifespan by even 10 years, smart people will be able to think and invent longer before their knowledge and understanding is lost when they die. And they'll have more time to teach that knowledge and understanding to the next generation. When trying to improve sanitation and health practices, don't worry about the advanced stuff. Focus on the basics and teach stuff as rituals instead of abstract concepts. For example, teach your fellow villagers that the Gods like clean hands, and will protect you from disease if you always wash before eating. Figure out how to make mild alcoholic beverages (e.g. ale), and try to make that the standard thing that everyone drinks - this protects people from most of the bacteria and viruses that caused epidemics, and is easier to accomplish than universally-available clean water (which is still a problem today in 3rd world countries). A major wound such as a large cut or a badly broken bone would usually mean either death or disability for the rest of a person's life. If you managed to stop the bleeding, you would usually die of infection. So, if you can swing it, teach the medicine men to boil water, and use that water to clean wounds. Or, have them use the strongest alcoholic drinks to clean wounds. Teach them to use clean linen to dress wounds, and to change those dressings regularly. Teach them how to set a broken arm or leg. These skills will turn many death sentences into tales of miraculous healing and recovery (which helps with the next part). 3: Spread the basics as widely as possible Teaching one village basic sanitation and farming skills will have no lasting impact. One disaster could wipe out that village and your entire life's work, and even if no disaster strikes, what you've taught will mostly disappear in a few generations if you don't do something to preserve and spread your ideas. Once you are established and gain some notoriety for building a strong, healthy village, do your utmost to spread the ideas as widely as possible. Don't try to teach people why it works, just get them to start doing it. Make up rituals and myths that will get told across borders and for generations. If you can get in the good graces of a king (or similar figure), it gets a lot easier to spread these basic survival improvements throughout an entire civilization. Bonus points If you four manage to accomplish all of this in your lifetime, and it looks like you've succeeded in increasing the world population's food supply, survival rate, and average lifespan, you can go for bonus points. Technology develops best when new ideas get passed on to the next generation. Not your ideas. All ideas. So for bonus points, teach people to read and write, and impress the value of reading and writing upon the leaders with whom you've gained favor. You want as many people able to read and write as possible; they'll figure stuff out on their own as long as they have the tools to share ideas across time and space. Super mega bonus points If you manage to get a significant fraction of the people (even 1-2%) able to read and write, and you still have any years left, develop the printing press. The printing press allows the same knowledge to be shared widely with ease, and was probably the biggest prerequisite for the modern era. Give people the ability to spread ideas widely, and they'll figure out a lot on their own. You don't have to develop Movable Type or anything; simple hand-carved block prints with a diagram and a few words is enough to get that ball rolling. [Answer] I'm going to be optimistic and say that you can eventually speed things up but probably not in the life times of the time travelers. Speaking as an optimist, the travelers are different enough in appearance, garb and manner to avoid being thrown into the slave pits, as long as they don't upset the local government or the local natives aren't too superstitious and they get burned for witchcraft. So what can they do? Let's assume they have benefactors that protect them, and they learn the language. The Bronze age had the beginnings of a written language. However, there's a big gap between hieroglyphics and the Latin Alphabet. Assuming some of your travelers are good teachers, the Latin Alphabet will certainly allow for faster, more detailed scribing. I would consider a detailed written language to be a true time changer. Mathematics: the use of zero as a placeholder didn't happen until after the bronze age. Even the ancient Greeks didn't use it. Again, teaching modern arithmetic, basic physics (trajectories, refraction, reflection), algebra, etc. will also (eventually) move history up a few notches. The carpenter might be the one that first puts them in the spotlight in a positive manner. Nothing like a good piece of furniture or carving to attract the attention of the local noble. Next, we have the biochemist. She should have a good understanding of viruses, germs and disease so there's a lot of potential there. It'd be nice if she's got a hobby of botany or even herb lore but can't have everything. Don't minimize the martial artist. War, which in your initial question you implied is a detriment to advancing civilization, is a great way to impose your advanced knowledge on other tribes (Some of our biggest technological breakthroughs have been during time of war.) Once your group has taught the tribe a better way to write, better ways to take care of themselves, better ways to calculate and better ways to fight, then it's time to conquer the tribe next door and teach them how to improve their lives. What you're missing, big time, is an engineer. Someone who knows how to apply physics and biology to technology. As dot\_SpOT said, ideally, a metallurgist with practical experience or maybe a sculptor with a chemistry degree might go the furthest in advancing technology. [Answer] Short version They can't really speed up development all that much. Although they oughta be able to make the rest of their own lives quite enjoyable, probably even as constant guests at the high court. Long version They can't really speed up development all that much. While it is true that they can use their knowledge of modern maths and sciences to address some issues and present some nice knick knacks to the people living in this time. Most of their own knowledge will be worthless because the actually useful basics are already here. Maths and physics are around and [presumably applied as good as possible with the given materials available](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramid_construction_techniques). I dare say none of the people sent back has any idea of working copper or making bronze. They are likely not in possession of the knowledge to build [furnaces that can melt iron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_point) alas they could indeed be able to create crude copper wiring (that is if they are allowed access to the precious metal). Their best bet would likely be to become highly-honoured guests of the ruler, by using their knowledge of physics and their knowledge of [foreign fighting techniques](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_arts) to entertain the ruling caste and maybe even become personal trainers or such. [Answer] As Brian and others pointed out, they can't do much by themselves. If they can find a home at the court of some chieftain/king/priest who is willing to feed four strangers because of their odd but useful ideas, perhaps you have the wrong skill set ... * You have to break the language barrier. Nobody speaks those languages any more, and having a trained linguist along would be an improbable stroke of luck. How about a language teacher with academic training in Latin or classical Greek and another language? Or a priest who speaks Latin and Hebrew. They'd be trained to look at grammar and vocabulary in a structured way, which helps them to learn the new language. * Bring somebody who knows modern accounting and/or project management principles. Somebody who understands fundamentals like [comparative advantage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage), inflation, or methods like [double-entry bookkeeping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping_system). Perhaps a paralegal for a tax lawyer. Or the dispatcher/accountant in a small trucking company. (Of course the powers that be might not trust the weird strangers with management positions.) * Most physicists or biochemists couldn't even start to build the tools to build the tools of their trade. How about a small-town car mechanic? I wouldn't expect a bronze-age Model T anytime soon, but this person might combine practical mechanics and materials science to come up with some useful gadgets. * Somebody who can help to improve agriculture would be nice. An understanding of Mendelian inheritance to improve animal husbandry, plus practical things like contour plowing and crop rotation. ([Deforestation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_during_the_Roman_period) and soil erosion were an issue in ancient times, too.) [Answer] Your best bet is to make at least one of the group, probably Alex, into a minimalist camping nut. Also make him a bow-hunter. He is going to be best suited to keeping the group alive during the critical initial "What the heck do we do now" period. Construction skills are useful anywhere as well as any-when. Second best bet is to make Jane a bit of a Military history nut, which actually fits with the mindset of a martial artist. If she's advanced enough in the arts, she should be able to take larger and primitively armed local thugs without great difficulty. Integrate into a small village and begin teaching unarmed combat. Again, construction skills are always useful when she begins to look at stuff with an eye to fortifications and to improve local lives. Susan is going to look back to her undergrad days with her entirely convenient interest in botany. She can use this to help improve crop performance and to get things rolling on the sanitation/water front. Susan is going to have a huge impact on the "advancing technology" thing. Once food supply is secure, people can begin spending time thinking about other things. Patrick is going to be, frankly, useless in the beginning unless he has a convenient interest in metallurgy and other material sciences. Even then, he won't be very useful unless he finds local deposits of iron and makes friends with the nearest metal-smith. Once established though He can bring into play things like the Franklin stove or some other sealed iron box heating device. These, taken with a lot of insanely good luck, might leapfrog a community into the iron age. Maybe with a hodgepeodge with the "invention" of the horse collar. Other things like Rocket camping stoves to help boil water and make efficient use of available fuels. Woodworking and joinery as ways to make a better bow, a stronger structure, etc. Knowing how to lay courses of bricks, and how to make adobe bricks. Hell, even knowledge of arches and vaulting becomes extremely valuable and isn't really beyond the grasp of a hobbyist. Their best bet for survival would be to get far away from population centers to a smallish village where they can help out until they get much more familiar with the general culture they find themselves in. They would have to learn the local language. They could just say they are from a long way away, trying to escape from whatever. At least one (probably Susan)needs to be a natural diplomat. Someone very empathic and able to influence the village women and children. She will have to be able to inspire trust and introduce gradual improvements to makesure no one screams "witchcraft" Patrick will be the eventual key to the larger kingdom wide power structure when he gets to the point of making superior weapons. I can't think of any way to get to a rulers good side than a sword that is not likely to break and will stay sharp. Horses that when shod with iron who won't go lame as fast. That sort of thing. Have fun and with the aid of coincidence and good luck your tiny band can bring about the iron age several hundred years early. Side note. Gunpowder has plenty of uses besides guns. Imagine a powder keg heavily intermixed with nails lit and launched by catapult into an enemy formation. One shot, hundreds of casualties. As long as there is wood (to make charcoal), humans (for saltpeter), and a source of sulfur you can get gunpowder. You just have to know how to mix the 3 to make a bang. [Answer] The above answers are all pretty great. A historical note to recall: The modern Alphabet, and Arabic numerals are objectively better and more useful than Heiroglyphics. They are easy to draw and write, making widespread literacy far more plausible. The Egyptians (who weren't priests) eventually transitioned to Heratic later on which (I think) was phonetic. HOWEVER, the Egyptian priests jealously guarded the secrets of writing, and there's a good chance they'll prove your main antagonists as they try to keep those secrets for themselves. Also, Imhotep was the first engineer who's name we know, and was in charge of building the great pyramid. He's probably be interested in any middle-school geometry and physics you could teach him. A lot of the math and physics you learn in school, along with the scientific method, are quite useful, and would form a basis for others to create great advancements. [Answer] While I agree with most people that the travelers would probably die or have little ability to affect significant change in the world, I do believe if the circumstances were right, that they could have a small local effect, that might ripple out over time. There are a few things that are common today that were not well known at the time that even simple people could understand and apply. For instance, the assembly line, interchangeable parts, crop rotation CPR and rudimentary medical care or sanitation. It would require that the travelers find themselves in a position to impart that knowledge but if that knowledge was passed on instead of dying out with the few people that were educated, it might stand a chance at speeding things up a bit. [Answer] The initial problem is staying alive long enough to change society. Assuming you don't get enslaved or burnt as a witch, any basic high school science knowledge could change the world. Gun powder is 75% saltpeter, 15% carbon and 10% sulfur. With just what I know, I could get society started on gun powder. The steam boiler and the piston was invented by the ancient Greeks. If they had put the two together, we would have had the steam engine 2000 years earlier. Sickness is caused by germs and can be stopped by hygiene. Medical tools should be sterilized by boiling. Alcohol can be used to sterilize wounds. A battery is made of two different metal plates and an acid and so on. I'm no scientist but even I could change early society. [Answer] In my opinion there are two technologies that can be very influential without deep knowledge: 1. Military 2. Economics 1. Military techs. They are easy to sell. The wars are constant. 1.1. Gunpowder. Just the knowledge that gunpowder exists and how it can be used is a great breakthrough. And finding something like gunpowder with mordern school chemistry is only a matter of years. Human race needed 1500 years to understand how gunpowder can be used. And we already know that the barrels should be rifled and that we can hit a special stone to self ignite the powder. This knowledge can bring chemistry to the point of year 1700 just by successfully using the tech, because you need to understand chemistry to improve guns. 1.2. Siege machines. If someone remembers how trebuchet looks like then he can build it. It is a 13th century tech that allowed to attack highly defended cities. 1.3. Idea of a biological weapon. Throwing a corpse with Black Death and the defenders will surrender in some time. This strategy realized by Mongols in the 15th century has probably started the Black Death in the whole Europe. Others: stone castles with a keep in Europe, heavy cavalry of France, long bows of England, archer cavalry of Mongols, general strategy. 2. Economics 2.1. Trade with Asia and other unreachable countries. It was the driver of wealth for Italy, Holland and then England ending with the Second World War. How compass works is tought at school. Everyone knows how to get from Europe to Asia with Roman ships using school geography. 2.2. Banking. Tampliers were so rich and powerful that the king of France killed them all in the end. The debt of France to Tampliers was too big and their military might was too strong. 2.3. I believe advertising and marketing generally could be influential. In 1990 when European marketing hit Russia people were buying lots of unnecessary staff and loosing money on promising investments. 2.4. Windmills. Some people say was one of the drivers of the wealth of Holland together with peat, but the latter is harder to find near water. [Answer] # Russian Sci-Fi day goes on ## "Ask Caeser" A very short story by E. Lukin takes a perspective of a defence speach in a court. The defendant in accused of wrongfully using a time machine. The advocate goes on: "Yes, I admit the sole fact! My client used a time machine to go to Stone Age and teach folks there the basics of quantum mechanics. He had the crime intent. But a crime needs a crime action, there is none in this case! Nothing changed in the course of history! There was Ancient Egypt. And Babylon. And Rome. Even Caesar was murdered in the Senate on the Same date, time, and pretence. That the murder weapon was a military laser of all things..." ## "Missionaries" A yet another, longer story by the same author tells a tale of two Micronesia tribes (heavy spoilers!) whose technology is being progressed by quite respective "elders" (who are secretly allies and whos objective is exactly the boost of progress). The tribes unite and pull a Pearl Harbor on an European caravel and its home harbour. So, the ones more progressed technologically colonise and extract resources from less progressed at the moment. The funny thing is that due to boosted progress the historical roles swapped. The "elders" in fact only wanted them to keep their independence and not go full colonial style, but that did not work. # Discussion Technology alone would probably boost the merits from particular wars, especially is technology is not evenly distributed (second story). Social knowledge might help. But a) use need an even distribution. b) There were some massive social experiments, such as the whole Dominicana in its early years. They obviously failed. So if you cannot control and "bring to light" some aggressive neighbourhood tribes, they might attack your "new world order". And I won't necessarily bet on the "more progressed" guys. # Byline The first short story was just another view on time travel actually. But through better weapons and tools nothing is solved, that's the point of the first story. Technological advancement may reverse the roles, but not abolish the whole conflict, as the second story shows. If you don't manage to air drop modern worldview (inclusive moral views and non-violent problem solving) to everyone in that world, conflicts will occur. Even worse, if you advance one party technologically, they might become more vicious. It's more economy than moral. The reason for the attack of Spanish port in the second story was "they seem to have a lot of rich iron ores, the ones we desperately need". So, once again. There will be all old and more new conflicts, even if you do you best to avoid them. But hey, conflict is apparently good for the plot! ]
[Question] [ Alternate 1900s Imagine that we are in an alternative Earth in the early to mid 1940s. There has been no World War 2. In this world there are analog computers used rarely in laboratories for specialised purposes. There are no digital computers whatsoever. Radio technology (still valve based) is however all the rage. Telephones work by having human operators who connect one caller to another by manually plugging them in at the exchange. Question If someone in this era invented "the internet", how closely (in terms of functionality and speed) could it approximate today's internet without digital computers? You can assume that memory functions can be carried out by people with notepads. Or, you can invent a non-electronic alternative or banks of unreliable valves or electromechanical relays kept on permanently. --- Assumption Transistors can be considered impossible in this world. Power consumption and inherent unreliability of components must be taken into account. Note Please ask for clarifications if necessary before answering. Thanks. [Answer] There were not less than four worldwide messaging systems in widespread use before the Internet. Your choice. 1. The worldwide postal system became available, if expensive, since the late 17th century. Before the establismnent of the [Universal Postal Union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union), correspondents in countries which didn't have direct postal agreements relied on specialized mail forwarders. 2. The worldwide telegraph network was slowly stitched together in the second half of the 19th century. The [first successful transatlantic cable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable) was laid in 1865, by the life-time efforts of [Cyrus Field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_West_Field). 3. The worldwide telephone network was an interbellic development due mostly to transnational conglomerates such as the British Cable & Wireless, or the American International Telephone and Telegraph. 4. The worldwide [Telex network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex) rose to prominence in the years after WW2, and remained in continuous use until the Internet was able to take over its main function of transmitting authorized-ish written messages in almost real-time. In addition, the shortwave [amateur radio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio) community, which boomed in the inter-war period, could function as the message carrier for non-commercial activity, similar to how the internet operated non-commercially in its formative years. [Answer] # Someone invented the Internet more than a hundred years ago It didn't work out because of the technical problems. It was called the [Mundaneum](https://daily.jstor.org/internet-before-internet-paul-otlet/). With powerful enough analog computers, digital counterparts of the like Charles Babbage had [already designed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage), and monied backing neither Charles Babbage nor Paul Otlet ever had, you could potentially engineer and build custom analog computers that would run the Mundaneum. The Mundaneum is simply a physical location that is an analogue to the ephemeral location we call the Internet. Its basic functions are essentially identical. With the Internet, I type "difference between dreadnought and parlour guitar", the request is sent into the workings of the search engine, whose automated algorithms return what (I desperately hope) are relevant documents, images, and videos that relate to my question. With the Mundaneum, I send a telegramme to their central receiving office who would then translate my request into the relevant catalogueing scheme, a research team would, using their own algorithms, research patents & makers & catalogues of musical instruments. They might write a short, well referenced report and telegraph that back to me. I don't know if visual data can be sent over telegraph systems, but they could easily mail a microphotograph of the pertinent visual data, along with their written report, which I would then have blown up to its original size. While it is true that the Internet is a communications network, it is also more than just that. It is also true that the telegraph system through which the real world Mundaneum would have done its work is a communications network. The real world Mundaneum is simply the "cloud storage" part of the fictional world Internet. While the relays and wires and people sending the telegrammes are the "communications network" part of the fictional world Internet. # What is the Internet, exactly? What makes the Internet different than television? Or radio? Or the printing press, or the mail? The Internet is: 1. A way to transmit information 2. That allows any node in the network to send messages to any other 3. In real time 4. And the contents of said messages can contain arbitrary data Television is an audiovisual feed only; radio is audio only. Both are single-source many-receiver. Telephones let anyone talk to anyone; but that specifically means only talking. The mail isn't real time. The Internet can do the job all these things did, and more. That's why the Internet is replacing them all. Already many "landline telephones" behind the scenes are transmitting calls over the internet. # But there's another layer built on top The internet technically existed in the late 90's. It was nothing like what we have today. But what we have today is nothing more than a few extras layered on top of "the internet": 1. The web is basically a collection of 'documents' your web browser knows how to display, containing 'links' it can automatically follow. 2. Organizations began using this technology as an interface to build and design ever more complex services. You can think of any given website as a really big encyclopedia. A URL is just a page number. When you go to the site, you send the site's bank of servers a request. The site's computers go find the document for you, and send it back. Nowadays, of course, the documents are actually generated on the fly; when you go to hotels.com and search in the search box, their computers receive the request, decipher it, look up the relevant info in their databases, then craft a reply. Google doesn't precompute search results for every search into an enormous encyclopedia; it has a queryable database, it runs your search, it spits out an answer. # What Paul Otlet invented Paul Otlet [invented Wikipedia](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html) in 1910. He called it the Mundaneum. He couldn't actually build it, of course, but oh how he tried. For decades, he tried. But like [Charles Babbage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage), his idea was simply so far ahead of its time he just couldn't make it happen. He anticipated having a network of "electric telescopes" (computers) that could all talk to each other. That's basically the Internet. He anticipated using links to connect the documents into a giant interconnected web. # What could be done without electronic computers Charles Babbage already had a design for the Difference Engine. His technology doesn't use transistors. It isn't even electric. We know that it works, if only you can build one, because in 1991 someone did. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View [has another it uses for demonstrations](https://computerhistory.org/exhibits/babbage/). Charles Babbage designed what is, for all intents and purposes, a machine computer. He just was never able to get the money or resources to build such a ludicrously intricate piece of machinery. But his [Analytical Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Engine) was indeed a bona fide computer. In your world, transistors simply don't work. Analytical Engines will. They'll never be anything like as powerful or as cheap to operate as electrical computers were even in the 80s. # Hook Babbage and Otlet up with deep pockets If Babbage had successfully been able to make the Analytical Engine a reality, then by the time Otlet comes into the picture, what we would call a modem might have existed: Imagine duct taping a telegraph to an Analytical Engine. In which case, Otlet's grandiose vision can actually be realized. The Mundaneum comes to be a thing. In order to use it, you have to be at a place that has a connection to a telegraph line and an analytical engine. But that's still a pretty big change; libraries and other place (like very up-scale hotels) will want one. In turn, others will eventually start offering their own special services that you can '[tele]graph into'. Said hotels will already have most of the equipment, so it's just a matter of hiring an Analytical Engineer to make the machine automatically respond to telegrams inquiring about reserving a room, or checking on the status of an existing reservation. Banks will find having access to an information sharing network very lucrative, so they'll want in as well. [Answer] *The Internet was imagined in the 1940s as Vannivar Bush's "memex"*** Vannevar Bush was the head of the US Office of Scientific Research & Development during the war, and he wrote a famous essay called ["As We May Think"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think) that has been cited as a major inspiration for the developers of digital computers and the Internet. The essay addresses the problem of the growing body of knowledge, so large that no one scientist can get a complete view of even his own field, and the inadequacy of library filing systems for helping people find relevant knowledge. The machine he envisions called a [memex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex) makes use of analog technologies then emerging, to allow people to create links (he calls them "trails") between objects and to share the data as well as the links. Although in our world those ideas led to a digital Internet, if you want to create a fictional analog Internet, the suggestions in his article should be adequate enough for you to depict them in your world. [Answer] *It can be done: with a serious [The Wild Wild West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Wild_West)* steampunk flavor Please note that "what if some critical branch of technology wasn't invented?" questions are always problematic because everything needed for that branch will still exist — so why wasn't it invented? Anyway... Given enough electricity and big enough buildings the entire Internet (but not its speed) can be implemented using telegraph wire and relays, which is all a switching transistor is. A "bit" of memory is simply a specialized switching transistor. I can even create static memory by creating solenoid-driven cams that would "lock" a value into place until the solenoid (or its resetting solenoid) was activated. Thus, if the power went down, the "memory" would remain. Do we have analogs of this behavior? Oddly, we do: electromechanical pinball machines, where the "state" of the machine must be known and remembered during the process of play. The only thing missing is the state-locking mechanism that would let you turn the machine off, then back on, to continue the same game. (Why do I know this? Because I own a 1973 Williams Triple Play machine, which is an awful lot of fun to play — and just as much fun to maintain.) So, telegraph wires connect two cities — three wires, reference/ground, data from and data to (sounds like an old Modem, doesn't it? we want that third wire to allow simultaneous bidirectional transmission). On each end are the listening and sending apparatus of a telegraph. The difference is that they're connected to solenoids that allow an analogue computer to do something with the transmissions. Memory is achieved with massive banks of what I'll call latch-lock relay assemblies that mimic [SR Flip Flops](https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/sequential/seq_1.html). One solenoid affects a SET, the other a RESET. The mechanical latch allows the memory to be maintained indefinitely (well, let's assume no earthquakes) even without electricity. They're activated using [diode AND gates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diode_logic) ([1900's tech, right?](https://computerhistory.org/blog/who-invented-the-diode/)).1 Thus, when a single column and a single row are line-active, only the one relay at the cross point is SET or RESET. I did mention this would be painfully slow, right? I didn't? OK, it's going to be PAINFULLY SLOW. The semblance of a digital computer can be created electromechanically with relays and diode logic.2 Frankly, the real problem is the human interface. So I would expect everything to be done using punch cards. (However, since [typewriters have been around since 1868](https://blog.oup.com/2018/06/nine-striking-facts-history-typewriter/), you could develop an output device that typed. I believe 1900s tech could come up with large rolls of paper, in effect, the [Telex machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex).) Conclusion:** Yes, the entire Internet could be conceptually implemented using 1900s technology. Even IP addressing could be done. It would be power hungry, slow as molasses, LOUD! REALLY REALLY LOUD! and would have an incredibly low MTBF3 (mean time between failure). People would be constantly monitoring and replacing relays and other components. But, it could be done. Heck, you could even have a 1900s version of the Dark Web where people illegally tap those telegraph wires and hijack IP numbers to set up physical-location-unknown data processing nodes. (Although the idea of hauling all that equipment, including power generation, around in horse-drawn wagons is a bit daunting.) If you're interested, author Terry Pratchett implemented something like this called the "Clacks," based on semaphore tech. He even conceptualized a "ghost in the code." I'm a fan. --- 1 If you insist on no semiconductor devices at all (you only said no transistors, so I'm cheating a bit), then the diode logic for memory could be replaced by a three-state voltage system where columns would transition between mid-volt and logic-high-volt and the rows would transition from mid-volt to logic-low-volt, the result is that one and only one relay could actually activate (having the correct potential across its terminals). Nothing else would because the voltage difference wouldn't be enough to fully energize any other solenoid. However, the power loss would, itself, power a small city. 2 Again, if you insist on no semconductors at all, I can implement full logic using only relays. It's just slower and more power intensive. 3 As I've thought about it, I believe you could even set up a rudimentary form of [JTAG Boundary Scan](https://www.jtag.com/boundary-scan/) that could be used to lower the repair time. [Answer] The Internet does not require computers at all. Most of the protocols are simple enough to perform by hand, and even the protocols that do require some processing power are only designed that way because we have computers. In a world without computers, those protocols could be designed differently, to only require calculations that an average operator can do in their head. There is a (joke) April Fool's RFC that specifies IPv4-over-pigeon: [RFC 1149 – A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149). It was actually implemented and successfully tested by the Bergen Linux User Group in Bergen, Norway. [Answer] Pretty closely, except for speed. The core components of ‘the Internet’ are mostly conceptual. DNS lookups, communication protocols, common data exchange formats, resilient pathing algorithms: all of these are possible with analogue technology. A DNS lookup is just a complicated automated exchange, or can be run by humans. They existed without digital computers. Resilient pathing is basically a series of linked exchanges. All data transfer can be done with analogue audio signals and a known (standard) format. Output/input is a matter for the end user. If they use a pen drawing the waveform on paper or a person listening to the bios and transcribing: it’s the same as long as the protocols are being properly followed. Where this falls over is speed and bandwidth. Even the best analogue exchanges take time to perform routing and need physical space and have a limited number of possible transmission channels per wire (barring optical transmission technology like fibre-optics) to enable the connections. This limits the number of concurrent connections down any given path between two nodes. Any protocol that requires handshakes or error correction packets will be limited by the speed of both parties and every node in the communication pathway between the two. Without considerable research (which we’ve never had to do because digital computers are very good at this kind of thing), you will be severely limited by available connection lines. [Answer] > > There are no digital computers whatsoever. > > > Oh yes there are. You aren't the first person to make the mistake of thinking that "digital equals transistor", and no doubt you won't be the last. But all the others were flat wrong, you're flat wrong too, and your world *will* have digital computers, because digital computers were in widespread use across the world decades before the invention of the transistor. In historical fact, if this is supposed to be our 1940s then they didn't even have transistors then. You've forgotten about relays, switches, motors, punch cards, punched tape, and all the *many* mechanical devices which are either on or off and embody digital state and processing. Relays are actually highly reliable to hundreds of thousands of operations. Motors and switches can be similarly reliable. In 1940 these mechanical digital processors were in the process of being superseded by valves, but mechanical and valve processing were both very much alive. The Enigma and Lorenz cyphers were broken by digital computers using these. For your internet, I would even submit the Lorenz as being an example of what you could do in that direction. Before Lorenz, the operator typed messages into an Enigma machine, wrote down the encoded message, and sent it themselves using Morse. Another operator then reversed the process. With Lorenz though, the machines communicated with each other directly. The operator typed in the message, the machine automatically encrypted it, and the machine broadcast the encrypted message using the Telex product. On the receiving end, the other machine received the Telex, automatically decrypted it, and printed out the decrypted message. If you're reading this and thinking "mechanical SSH session", have a cookie. :) I could give you dozens of examples of pre-transistor digital computers, but you can do the same if you JFGI. I don't mean to be overly harsh, but this is a bad question because you have even the most basic general knowledge of the history or technology. Not knowing is fine, of course, but I would expect some trivial googling before asking your question, and even a cursory search and a minimum of thought would reveal that the concept is fundamentally broken. Your question even explicitly says that valves exist, for goodness sake! Then there's comms. I already mentioned this was a Telex. People had already invented digital communications. The phone network was already there. The phone network was still using operators, but the early automated exchanges were purely mechanical. And the phone system was interconnected around the world. Frame challenge then. Your basic concept of "no digital computers at that time" is wrong. Your basic concept of "no digital communication at that time" is wrong. Your basic concept of "no global communications network" is wrong. All your prerequisites are there, exactly as we had. So you're asking us to answer a question which can simply be answered by "look at our world", and that has no place in worldbuilding. [Answer] Pull messages vs. push messages. With the http protocol, the client computer queries a server, possibly half a globe away, for information. This query is relayed from a local server to that distant machine. The query might include information that is incorporated into the anwer. The earlier [usenet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet) system would push newsgroups from server to server. You dial up to the nearest one and look what they have. So imagine that the local telegraph office allows people to browse incoming "general interest" telegrams, and to send telegraphs "to whom it may concern." The telegraph office also forwards such messages to the next office down the line. To that add [mailing lists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mailing_list). You send a telegram to subscribe, and then you get any telegrams by others to that address. [Answer] > > Radio technology (still valve based) is however all the rage. Telephones work by having human operators who connect one caller to another by manually plugging them in at the exchange. > > > We're looking at the wrong technology here. What we should be considering is the [telegraph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy#Electrical_telegraph) for storing/forwarding and retrieving messages. We have most of the fundamentals in place. I'd suspect something like a cross between [teletext](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext), where fixed information was sent to terminals (as opposed to interactive terminals). We could have a constant stream of data, encoded on punched tape that's sent. Its probably possible to encode something like a destination, and have a fixed set of routes (maybe updated over telegraph). Lets say our "routing" table is London -> Bombay -> Madras -> Singapore (practically there may be more hops). Each site would have a routing table to the next hop to a location - London would know that if they send it to Bombay, Bombay would see its a message for singapore, look up the next table and know it needs to go to Madras and send it on. As for mechanics - have a standard header, maybe a checksum and end (yes, its overhead) and punch from tape, with something like a code for the destination (SIN01 for singapore for example), write it to a punch card. Throw it into the appropriate bin for the next hop, punchcards are loaded into the machine that sends it to the next hop (so as long as the punchcard bin is full, we keep transmitting). Each punchcard essentially is a packet, and by having 'static' routes we might reduce some of the complexity of routing in a system with relatively few nodes. This is essentially poor man's UDP over telegraph, and probably entirely doable mechanically. Since the lines are "fixed" and constantly transmitting, its a matter of picking up the message and getting the last mile sorted. I'll leave ensuring delivery and such as an exercise to the reader, but might suggest it could be fitted into 'spare' space in a "packet" as an aside Bombay is now Mumbai and Madras Chennai, but I've chosen to use the period appropriate names [Answer] The [Pantelegraph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph) was the predecessor of the fax machine, invented in 1860s. It was followed by the Bildtelegraph in 1880. It would be possible to Telex a request for information to a library, where they'd look up the information, and either Telex or Pantelegraph the answer back. [Answer] Memory and speed are the problems As others have mentioned, you could technically build an 'internet' without technology at all. Think Great Library of Alexandria, with some system to request documents and add documents to the library remotely. Let's say there were millions of 'runners' whose job it was to be the transport layer of the network. Want to add a document? Give it to a runner, who takes it to the library and archives it. Want to search for a document? Give your search parameters to the runner, who goes to the library, carries out the laborious search, hand-copies the results and returns them to you - in a few years maybe. Photos? Runnees are trained artists that can draw anything you aant drawn and add it to the library. The problem is that for the internet to work, it has to do these things relatively fast, with high bandwidth, and it needs a LOT of storage. We had an 'internet' of sorts in the 1980's with FidoNet, CompuServe, and other competing technologies. But dial-up modems and the cost of memory even then limited its usefulness, as did its fractured nature. If only a small portion of documents you are searching for are even available on the internet, its usefulness declines dramatically. So if you want a usable internet, you need widespread adoption. That means the amount of data that must be stored is massive. To give an example of early non-solid state memory, look at the [Selectron Tube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectron_tube). This is probably the highest form of non-transister memory tech we had. RCA's version could hold 256 bits of data,and cost (in today's money) about 5300 dollars. If you wanted to store a typical MP3 (say, 3 minutes at 128kbps) in selectron tubes in 1948, You'd need about 3 megabytes, or roughly 45,000 Selectron tubes. So your one-song internet page would require roughly $200 million dollars in storage, and those tubes, their power supplies and air conditioning would fill a building. There was a 4kbit Selectron tube that never saw commercial use. If we assumed those were available at the same cost, we could reduce the cost for your one-song storage to 10-20 million. Before transistors and integrated circuits, there was simply no way to store enough data in a way that could be accessed quickly enough to make a usable internet. Then there's hard drives. The first IBM hard drive in 1956 held 3.75 megabytes, and cost $34,000. That's roughly the size required to hold a single MP3 file. But of course, you'd need lots of solid state circuitry to operate one. So, the bottom line is that, while you can build an internet out of anything, to build one that has the features we have today (high bandwidth connections, petabytes of data quickly retrievable) in a usable form that would provide real value to the masses, was utterly impossible without a whole range of technologies that were not developed until fairly recently. Not just memory, but things like spread spectrum radio, fiber optics, etc. Those in turn require modern electronics to make and operate them. [Answer] An internet could be made, but it would have to be about using animals like pigeons and dogs and even human beings for physical data transfer called a [sneakernet:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet) an "internet" where information is transferred with magnetic tape, floppy disks, optical discs, USB flash drives or external hard drives. [Magnetic tape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape), that first item, was first discovered in 1928 as audio tape and [was used in World War II](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07dg3wm). This alternative 1940s internet would be using animals and items to move cartridges of tapes between people and then use certain audio devices/mechanical computers to interpret this information from tapes. Even a system of capsule [pipelines](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube) can be used to deliver tapes. Someone can even send data over the radio using certain methods and even use recording devices to 'write down' radio signals containing pertinent information onto audio tape. This system allows for radios to be used for wireless transfer of data in the form of audio recordings, these recordings can be written on magnetic tapes as 'information', and this information (music, Morse code for a message to a loved one, code for an equation, etc.) can be interpreted by computers/audio devices while be transported by people/animals. ]
[Question] [ Let's imagine a story where the "aliens" leave a lot of super-advanced technology somewhere in the solar system. Scientists spend years excavating this technology and while it seems too advanced for us -eventually it helps to progress our level of civilization. However, after years of research, scientists have a hard time finding out who the aliens really are. Then, in a plot twist, we learn these are actually future humans from another universe. They came here not just for a "roadside picnic" but because their universe has more life than our own...in their version of the Solar system they had intelligent life on Mars and Venus (the composition of these planets is much different, as with their sun), and that means they were constantly attacked and exploited, not just by intelligent life but also many alien bacteria from other worlds. So while we struggle to find ANY life in our Galaxy (even microscopic extremophiles) they had contact since antiquity with other civilizations (some were peaceful and didn't intervene with their development). With the invention of the radio, they heard messages from other star systems far and wide. When they progressed to the space-age, they even found some primitive lifeforms on the moon. With all these lifeforms that existed on almost every planet-and in most star systems-many big empires emerged that were fighting each other. At the end of the XXII century, Earth almost lost a war that destroyed most of humanity. This is why they think our universe is much safer, and theorize that life must be extremely rare here. Now, we are talking about alternative evolution here..the alternate universe has different laws of physics and life is much more common. So...do we have any theoretical idea of what needs to be done with the laws of physics to make life more common? Tweaking certain laws, making stars closer or farther from each other, you name it. [Answer] The Great Filter isn't so great. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter> This is more ammunition for your thinking than a real solution, because "the real solution" requires picking one or more of your favorite Great Filters and finding a way to simply remove them. It isn't very scientific because we don't actually know which of these "great filter" candidates may be the one that has really caused the universe to be so quiet, so the choice is yours. The upside is no one can tell you that you're wrong because we just don't know. You'll be pleased to know that people have been thinking about this a lot, though. e.g. if we assume that the leap to "single cell life" is the Great Filter -- the step which almost no planet anywhere gets past -- then you just fix that. Once every planet, moon, and asteroid is teeming with single cell life, the floodgates are open beyond that. (You can do a deeper dive into that particular filter and see what the theories are for why it might be The Great Filter. It is all speculation, however.) Or if you assume that "the great filter" has to do with star/planet formation, then you work out a way to fix that. Perhaps there's a different balance between gravity and dark energy and this results in much more even distribution of matter, resulting in far more stable "medium" creations (e.g. rather than giant stars that supernova and kill everything within 50 light years, or black holes and all their effects, perhaps this other universe has some built-in tendency to settle into nice medium weight stars and stable planetary orbits). So the solution is up to you, but "The Great Filter" is your list of possibilities. (The Wikipedia list, as it states, is by no means complete, but it's a start.) [Answer] # Feasible Can I have a universe with X? Yes you can! If anyone tells you otherwise, tell them their argument fails because they are using the logic of this universe. Your other universe has different logic. You get to decide the logic. So you get to decide if there is more life or not. Blam! > > So...do we have any theoretical idea of what needs to be done with the laws of physics to make life more common? Tweaking certain laws, making stars closer or farther from each other, you name it. > > > No! In fact, we do not know how to explain the formation of life in the real universe, in terms of physics. Trying with fictional universes is a waste of effort. Don't start with the weight of a proton and the falloff rate of the electroweak interaction. Start with the fact that life is common. Don't worry about what this means for fundamental physics. [Answer] ## Thier Universe had a a Progenitor Race, Ours Did Not A progenitor race is a common trope in science fiction that a intelligent race existed before mankind. In your other universe, some intelligent species beat mankind to the stars by millions of years and seeded the whole galaxy with life. Because of thier tech level, they could terraform countless worlds like Venus, Mars, etc. to be more hospitable to life, and places to inhospitable to terraform could be met half way with genetic augmentation. Over time, this race would fragment into countless empires, evolve into many distinct alien races, and see many worlds abandoned by intelligent life, colonized again, genocided, recolonized, then abandoned... millions of years is a long time after all. Since it only takes 1 intelligent race coming before humanity to make this all happen, the entire difference could be as simple as a single asteroid impact. Imagine if the dinosaurs in both worlds were on the verge of space flight, but our world get the Chicxulub impact, and thier did not. So the physics and chemistry of your universe could be the same and predicated on the idea that the evolution of complex life is rare, but the amount that life has spread to date could be very different. [Answer] Focusing only on how to increase the likelihood of life and not on how to overcome problems like FTL travel between star systems... As I mentioned in my comments, the basic chemistry leading to life is already at its maximum in the universe — at least insofar as we understand life today. If your story is only considering carbon-based lifeforms then the problem isn't convincing the universe that it wants more life, it's convincing it to provide more places to allow life. We call the range of distance from any particular star that is most likely to host life as we understand it the "Goldilocks zone." Planets aren't too hot or too cold. They have a high likelihood of nitrogen/oxygen rich atmospheres and liquid water. (Again, focusing on carbon-based life, which we are beginning to understand, and not on life based on other elements, which we don't understand.) This is just one variable of many that constitutes a planet that has a high chance of life. Therefore: I propose your universe has a higher percentage of just the right planets in just the right places In your universe, there are a lot of Earth-sized planets in the Goldilocks zone of most stars. Those planets have an abundance of chemistry that will lead to liquid water. This might also mean your universe has a higher distribution of stars likely to have life (let's say a lot of stars like our own, loving, yellow-dwarf sun). I recommend that you completely ignore how this change in distribution came to be. The physics of solar system construction is only just being understood by humanity, but two things we do understand a bit better are the probability of mass forming into systems like ours and the mass requirements to do so. Your universe's Big Bang would have to be something quite different from what we believe ours to have been like — and I think that's a rabbit hole with little excavation value. In fact, the idea of finding life on, insofar as we know, moons and planets that can't support life represents so great a divergence from the known universe that it would be hard to rationally and believably explain. At least I think so. Life on the moon? What did it eat? How did it survive the solar wind? Even bacteria needs food and a permissive environment. So I'm recommending sticking with planets that today's science thinks can host life. But, since we're willing to cheat at the casino of the universe a little, we might as well be all-in... I'm a fan of Johnny Worthen's Coronam series of books. Well, I'm a fan of the first book, "[Of Kings, Queens, and Colonies](http://johnnyworthen.com/OKQC.html).\* I only recently bought the second book. But you can use a similar plot construct to what he did. The Coronam solar system has eleven planets and a gap where a twelfth would be, all balanced in the same orbit. Consequently, all of the worlds are inhabitable (and most are). Let's ignore the gap and say the twelfth planet is there. The author created a fictional world that met his needs and not one that demonstrated physics. But the point is... [this is plausible](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/151028/40609). (BTW: It's worth searching this stack. Questions about the idea of multiple planets sharing the same orbit [has been asked a fair number of times](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+how+many+planets+in+same+orbit).) So, in your universe, the probability of multiple planets sharing an orbit in the Goldilocks Zone is much, much (much) higher. To be honest, your story might be better if you used this plot device rather than creating Galactic Empires. You wouldn't need FTL to plausibly have the wars you're talking about. Just a thought. [Answer] I'm going to focus on "How could it come about?" When trying to understand the "special circumstances" that allow Earth to harbor life, the thing you hear over and over is that Earth has life because it has numerous protections against radiation. The strong magnetic field is well understood, but there is also a thought that the pulses of inertia and diversity in Earth's history of life might be due to our passing through areas where nebulas block the galaxy's core. So, let's imagine a universe where the universe is subtly opaque to high-energy radiation. Not so much that the Earth doesn't receive it's life-giving sunlight, but enough that the solar wind doesn't strip Venus's atmosphere of hydrogen, and Mars might be able to hold an atmosphere for longer. This allows life to form in places where it would currently be scoured by ultraviolet light. It means that a supernova wouldn't cleanse nearly as large an area. If you wanted to properly balance the laws of thermodynamics, you'd have to figure out what happens to that energy, but that would be the subject of another question. [Answer] # Earlier life formation You could use a non-sentient progenitor race. Just say a 'small' amount of organisms (some bacteria?) came into existence very early into the universe's formation through some fluke. These were so hardy that some of them could survive the terrible conditions. They spread along with the universe's expansion, multiplying as they spread. Eventually, some found their way to nearly everywhere where life was possible. (I imagine humanity discovering some of the bacteria frozen in the middle of some asteroid) From thereon, evolution is sure to follow. whilst sentience may not always evolve, just having many more places where evolution is happening at a moment makes the chances of sentient life evolving larger. Larger than not having a 'seed of life' everywhere. [Answer] There is theoretical life that was proposed to live in atmosphere of Venus, above the sulfuric acid clouds. There is theoretical life proposed to life in Martian soil and underground. Europa is another example I'm sure I don't need to introduce to anyone. If you look just at what people speculated is possible and not at what we have actually found, then the solar system could be brimming with life. So to answer your question - nothing has to change in laws of physics for the solar system to be full of life. One more thing about Venus: You might already know, that Venus in it's early history had liquid water and was not much different from Earth. It has been speculated, that had life formed on Venus, dead organisms would accumulate carbon in the planet's crust and take it out of the atmosphere, thus preventing the greenhouse effect that makes Venus far hotter than it ought to be if you only consider the distance from the Sun. If Venus had the same atmosphere as Earth, it would be habitable by humans unlike Mars, which barely reaches average high temperatures above freezing. [Answer] This is something of a frame challenge, though only a very minor one and I hope it's helpful. We don't actually know what leads to the origin of life. Some people think it requires very specific chemical conditions while others think it's easy and happens all the time. It's hard to tell because the origin of life happened so early in Earth's history that there just isn't any evidence left that we could examine. There are lots of people working on the problem, but for the moment we just don't have any idea how it happened or how easy it was. This means that for all we know the origin of life is ridiculously easy - leave any organic chemical soup lying around for a few million years and you'll come back to find little microbial critters swimming around in it. But wait, you say: if that's the case then why don't we find life on Mars and Venus and all the other bodies in our solar system? Well, take your pick. There's something about our universe that picks those microbes off just as they're getting going. Maybe that's some kind of mysterious force, or maybe it's just that our universe has lots more meteorites and solar flares and so on - things that can unbalance a fledgling ecosystem and send it on the path to total extinction. Either way the other universe doesn't have it, and that's why life is so much more common there. [Answer] Minor frame challenge: what if life is more common only in the solar system? Ie. don't worry about the whole universe. It would be easier to justify. Suppose humankind's technological development in the other universe had progressed only slightly faster for tens of millennia. Due to laws of exponential growth over long periods of time, they would easily have had our level of technology a thousand years ago. So, they would have been capable of inhabiting other planets (and moons) already for hundreds of years. They would have also brought bacteria around everywhere, in exotic environments, giving them chance to evolve into something we have never seen, for example. [Answer] “Where life is more common; is that feasible?” Yes, in an alternate Universe, you have pretty much complete liberty as a writer. Your alternate universe could even have alternate physics. It’s literally your world to decide what you want to do with. Would it be plausible? Yes, it could be very plausible. In an alternate Universe with more worlds in the Goldilocks Zone, this would mean more worlds that could support life. And certain forms of life can expand very rapidly. As the writer, you just need to sell it This is somewhat of a frame challenge, but this is my answer for you. Because you are dealing with an alternate universe, you have pretty much complete authorial liberty. Just make sure and sell it well to your readers. Explain that life grows and replicates at a higher rate in this alternate universe. Perhaps twins/triplets are far more common in this universe, and are actually the expected norm. You’ve got this. [Answer] # It might be abundant in our universe We actually do not know if life can be abundant or not. That we haven't found it yet, doesn't mean our universe cannot be teeming with life, or will be teeming with life. If we suppose our current universe can be teeming with life, we can talk about many kinds of big filters. For example, some science suggests that we can be one if the first intelligent life in the universe with a chance to go to the stars. The universe was incredibly chaotic and dangerous before, with beams from stars and black holes basically sterilising the galaxy periodically. Your alternate universe doesn't need much change to have more life. It might just be a bit more old than our universe, offering enough life to evolve. Or another filter is a lower barrier, allowing life to happen more easily. Thus it is teeming with life when humans happen to come to the scene. Mars, as an older planet that used to be more hospitable than Earth would have that head start, as long as they survive the drastic change later. It could even be that life on Earth started because of unsanitised space probes crash landing on Earth. [Answer] # Alternative thinking: The future is ours. ## Expanding universe = smaller [accessible] universe (in future) Our universe is 'expanding'. Meaning, things keep moving farther from each other. So much so, that there are far off regions moving farther so fast that even light (universal speed limit) can't reach us back, ever. That is the boundary of our "observable" universe. ref <https://youtu.be/uzkD5SeuwzM> As time goes on, our (from ~ Earth) observable universe (and reachable universe) will be "smaller", because everything would have moved far enough away to not matter. At this point, universe would be only our galaxy and some surrounding neighborhood galaxies. In this future universe, life could be abundant, more common. Why?: Given time (from now to then), more life might pop up here and there and expand. Also, since it'd be a smaller universe the ratio of life instances to visible stars would be higher. => more common life. So for your future 'humans' life would seem more abundant in the universe (their visible universe) and also more crowded perhaps. ## The past is empty and vast Now, they can't travel faster than light to get far away themselves. What's the next best thing? travel to the past! - Terminator style. They appear in the past somehow, and end up at the present (or past) Earth Solar System. Seeing sooooo many more stars visible and such a large universe, with barely any life started, they decide to help humanity have an early start. Of course , being humans we can be so self destructive/quarrelsome as to send ourselves back to stone ages again and again forgetting our discoveries of radio waves or any outward looking tech. So they decide to leave the really high grade tech somewhere hidden in solar system, so we are advanced enough to sustainably move past our planet first before we find it. ]
[Question] [ One world I've been tinkering on for months is an alternate history where Europe did not colonise the rest of the world, different global cultures remained (more) independent, until in the age of the steamship and telegraph, they forged bonds of coöperation, not exploitation. This question was prompted by reading Jervis R. 1978. Cooperation under the security dilemma. World Polit. 30:167–214 which says that one of the causes of coöperation is when defensive weapons outmatch attacking ones. This got me thinking: is there any defensive technology that colonised peoples could have had that would have made colonising them a lot harder? The period we are talking about is around 1450-1500. Say the Aztecs or Native North Americans for example. If they have it, peoples who were colonised later such as the Australians or Zulu could also copy it. [This question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/205034/inventions-that-could-have-come-earlier) mentions star forts. Star Forts could have been invented at any time in history and make attacking a defended position a lot harder. Anything else like that? Thank you. [Answer] (frame challenge) #### More advanced forms of government and statehood, better societal organization. A brilliant idea, a new weapon, a neat trick, etc. might win a battle which otherwise would have been close, but it won't affect the survival of an entire civilization. It's not like "if only the idea occurred to them to make armor out of metal / build more fortresses / make gunpowder", because it wouldn't have mattered if they don't have the industry, economy, organization, and logistical capabilities to back it up. Contrary to a recently popularized misconception, the early modern colonization wasn't like the D-day landings, with the Europeans jumping out of the ships and opening fire on the natives on the shore. That basically never happened. Initially there was usually a period of peaceful coexistence, trade, etc. When later conflicts started to develop (don't forget, over the most of human history war was very common even among groups of the same culture, so conflict will arise sooner or later), it was never a total war. In lots of conflicts two or more European powers fought against each other, all having native allies. Or two native factions were fighting against each other, and then the Europeans arrived and supported one of them against the other, in return of some land to build a trade outpost on. So it was almost never an "every newcomer combined" versus "every native combined" warfare. Internal conflicts were common on both "sides", if we can even call them "sides", as alliances shifted often. Yes, military conquests did happen occasionally, but in most of the cases the colonization was done mostly by out-competing rather than militarily vanquishing native civilizations. And here does the from of centralized government come into play. Regions of the world which had established statehood with advanced societal organization were either never colonized at all, or colonized only much later (e.g. 19th century when the local empires couldn't keep up with the changing times and were out-competed by industrialized economies). Compare the above with the Americas, where in many cases there weren't any centralized states in any permanent control of territory, but semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, or loose federations of tribes, with much sparser population density than what a modern (at the time) state could achieve. Even in the cases where the natives had a more urbanized civilization (like the Aztecs) it was usually one tribe dominating many weaker surrounding tribes, this is quite far from the modern concept of "statehood". And these oppressed tribes decided they'd rather live under Spanish rule than become human sacrifices in the Aztec rituals. If the Americas had states like there existed in Japan, China, India, North Africa, then colonization likely wouldn't have happened, or it would have only happened economically, leaving the local population still in the majority. On the long term the organization and structures within a civilization matter much more than any neat gadget they could have thought of if only the idea occurred to them. [Answer] Better syphilis. One theory of "the great pox" is that Columbus and his sailors brought it back from Hispaniola. [A brief history of syphilis](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3956094/) > > The Columbian hypothesis. This very popular hypothesis states that the > navigators in Columbus fleet would have brought the affliction on > their return form the New World in 1493 [3,12]. This theory is > supported by documents belonging to Fernandez de Oviedo and Ruy Diaz > de Isla, two physicians with Spanish origins who were present at the > moment when Christopher Columbus returned from America. The former, > sent by King Ferdinand of Spain in the New World, confirms that the > disease he had encountered for the first time in Europe was familiar > at that time to the indigenes who had already developed elaborated > treatment methods. As for Ruy Diaz de Isla, the physician acknowledges > syphilis as an “unknown disease, so far not seen and never described”, > that had onset in Barcelona in 1493 and originated in Española Island > (Spanish: Isla Española), a part of the Galápagos Islands. > > > The problem as regards defensive syphilis is that it just does not rampage through populations quite like smallpox or flu or measles. Your alternate world Amerinds have syphilis that is more like those other diseases as regards a plaguelike ability to spread. Columbus' ship would come into port with all hands dead or dying (except for the natives they brought back) and before the nature of the problem is understood the Pox is ravaging Barcelona. Europeans think twice about revisiting the New World. [Answer] # Flamethrowers and flame grenades Flaming weapons have [a long history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire) of being very deadly. > > Furthermore, Thucydides mentions that in the siege of Delium in 424 BC a long tube on wheels was used which blew flames forward using a large bellows. > > > The Aztecs have in your world designed some similar weapon, with animal drawn vehicles and grenades and similar things. While they can't match the guns of the Europeans, this would let them penetrate the steel armor and spook the horses of Europeans, rendering many of their deadliest weapons useless. There were some massive defeats for the Aztecs and similar societies where they outnumbered their enemy 100s or 1000s to one, but lost because European steel and guns were just too deadly. This would let them pierce such defenses. [Answer] A star fort, by itself, isn't worth anything Let's assume the Aztecs had star forts and no other advancement. Would they have been harder to defeat? Nope. Star forts are useful when the ranged weapons of attackers and defenders have basically the same range and accuracy. The purpose of a star fort is to force attackers to bunch their attacks at points that benefit the defenders. But so long as the attackers have guns and the defenders don't, star forts don't matter. Why bother pointing this out about Star Forts? Because no fixed fortification has value so long as there's a significant disparity between the firepower used to defend the fort and the firepower used to attack it (which might be why Gen. Patton said they were monuments to the stupidity of Man). Which brings us to.... The only defensive weapon that would matter is gunpowder The point of a defensive technology is that it nullifies the advantage of an attacking technology. Flak vests are useful because they minimize the potential damage of small arms fire. But they're useless against RPGs, tanks, and gas, which is why many (most?) modern military organizations have combined technologies: no one technology is perfect. But you're asking for just one. And the one technology that can even the playfield vs. guns is gunpowder. Without it, it doesn't matter what other technology is brought to play. The guns will always be more beneficial. It's worth noting that I believe the goal is to keep the invaders off the land so thoroughly that nobody wants to finance more expeditions. There's not enough perceived benefit compared to the cost ("Do you remember Columbus? Whatever happened to him? What do you think he found out there? What do you mean he never returned?"). Compare this to WillK's idea, which I like!, of sending back a better disease. ("Cough! Cough! Was Columbus' mission worth it? It was? Wow! that's a lot of... Cough! Cough! Gold! What's with this cough! And I ache all over! Where can I sign up for the next mission? I want some of that gold!") Once the value of the New World is established, all the disease in the world won't stop people from trying to take advantage of it. But couldn't there be something other than gunpowder? I can think of only one — but I hardly consider it a viable solution. You could have vast numbers of people. If you had so many people that all the guns the Conquistadors brought no longer mattered then conquering the people would be womping difficult. But the cost in human lives could be higher than the cost in life being conquered. Not sure that really solves the problem. [Answer] # Man-of-War The best defense is offense. Imagine the face of european navigators if they were received with cannon shots from a fleet larger than their own upon arriving at the New World. The Chinese had a navy far more impressive than any European one around the time the New World became a thing. They could have explored the New World and Oceania before Europeans, even sharing technology. If you believe in the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, then there is really a universe where that happened! [Answer] Frame challenge: The innovation you need is more advanced states. You get this by improving the demographics and the diffusion of ideas. ## Earlier Bantu Expansion and Better Vikings What enabled the conquistadors to take out entire American empires was that those cultures were rather isolated and low tech. Those early successes motivated later endeavours. If we take out opportunity and motivation, less European colonialism should happen. This will be a world were America and Africa look like East-Asia from a development standpoint. This doesn't mean that local cultures will be independent, it means that more local Martine empires form. In our world, there were several Non-European colonial empires (or attempts in that direction). Majapahit, Oman, Japan, China and Egypt are just the one I'm aware of. An earlier Bantu Expansion (the conquest of what we call Africas today, which stated with farmers from the Niger River Delta) only reached some parts of Southern Africa 1000 years ago. Pushing this event back gives you time for more advanced cultures in that region to develope. You could do the same thing in America, have the continent be discovered by early humans a few millia earlier. The vikings did reach America, but were unsuccessful there. The main issue was the poor state of the Greenland colony. Make the colony bigger and more successful by changing the local geography. A few viking trade posts down into the Caribbean (this might be what makes this network successful in the first place ans the local luxury goods would be very valuable) should allow the slower diffusion of European diseases, cattle, statecraft and metalworking. The same thing is likely not needed for Africa, as a more advanced south African civilization would be bound into an extended Indian Ocean trade network or ideas would travel across the Sahara. The more advanced states would would, depending on how they developed be their own religious thing or world either be some version of Copts or Sunnites. [Answer] I've thought long on this question. I think it's an interesting premise. There are 3 or so key factors IMO that give decisive advantages: 1: Plate Armor/Personal Armor. The requirement was for defensive technologies and this is probably the closest to the request. Now, this would require for your alternate history that the Indigenous peoples discover smelting and Iron work - which is a pretty big technological leap, but they did have familiarity with Metalwork in general, mainly using Gold and other naturally occurring metals. Why is this important? Plate armor gives the individual the single biggest advantage in Melee combat against crushing, stabbing and slashing weapons - against an unprotected opponents, it gives such a tactical advantage (until the significant advent of Firearms, which mitigates plate armor). 2: A 'Professional', well organized Army. Enter Shaka Zulu! Bane of the British. I'm going to link to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaka#Social_and_military_revolution) here - but the TL;DR - is that Shaka Zulu did the following things: 1: Issues standard equipment to his Troops 2: Regularly trained and drilled them 3: Had a focus on Logistics (amateurs study tactics, Professionals study logistics) 4: Discipline - Cowardice in battle was a death sentence for you and your entire family Even with Spears and hide shields against Muskets and Cannon - The Zulus gave the British a damn good thrashing - they weren't ultimately victorious - but we still talk about them, we still study them and we still respect the hell out of them. If we look at the Roman Empire (where arguably, the disparity in technology between the Romans and the germanic tribes was much much smaller) - the decisive factor was the organization of the Roman Army. An indigenous culture that has a bunch of Warriors, skilled though they may be, is no match for a well drilled and practiced army. As the Zulus have shown us, a well drilled army, with a significant technology disadvantage can still be victorious. Granted, this isn't strictly a defensive technology per se, but I think it's something that you could and should weave into your story. 3: A Navy. Most indigenous peoples had some form of Boat/River craft technology - obviously the closer the proximity to greater amounts of water, the more complex and advanced the Boat - look at the history of the Polynesian Peoples (Maori, Hawaiin, Samoan, Niue, Tongan etc. etc.) and how complex and skilled they were in Boat Building. In particular the Waka Taua (War Canoes) But they didn't have a Navy. The easiest way to stop yourself from being colonized is to prevent them coming there in the first place - a successful Naval engagement (See Japan during it's isolation period) stops them setting foot on your land. There were instances of the Maori successfully engaging the British/Dutch from their Waka and driving them off - but they didn't take the next step which is to formalize a Naval force. Each Hapu (sub-tribe of an Iwi - Tribe) would be responsible for their own Waka, it is consider a Taonga (Sacred/Treasure) - sometimes the Iwi would go on a War Party and multiple Hapu would join together with their Waka to raid another Iwi - but they never created a Navy whose sole purpose was the defence of the Sea and Rivers. [Answer] Biological warfare. In our history, while in the Americas the European got syphilis and brought measles and other diseases for which the locals had no immunity, the net outcome was the the indigenous were decimated. Now imagine that instead of a disease that takes years to kill and can be transmitted only with sexual interaction, the indigenous had some disease which could be spread much more easily and for them was no big deal but against which the Europeans had no immunity. It would for sure hamper any colonization attempt and might even give a strong blow to the European economy and power. [Answer] You could use a [Martello tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martello_tower) This is a few centuries later. If you follow the link to the 'origins' section you find the story of how the British unsuccessfully attacked the tower at Mortella Point with two warships, and then took it later with a large land force. The tower had only 33 people in it. Its main success was that it was a bit higher than the surrounding ships and land so it could chuck its shot a bit further (maybe you can arm it with a ballista?). The walls were massive, and sometimes the lower levels were filled with earth, so they could take a lot of battering. [Answer] Modern trench warfare Starting from First World War, soldiers no longer march in an open field - instead, they dig elaborate systems of trenches and bunkers, holding their ground in them. Today, 90% of fatalities on the battlefield come from artillery fire rather than firearms. Unless the colonizing side has brought massive number of cannons and gunpowder, good luck storming trenches with their muskets. Trench warfare requires advanced society in the sense that soldiers need to understand what they are doing, coordinate and carry their orders. They also need some ideology to hold their ground without running and leaving defensive positions behind. That level of cohesion may not be available to pre-modern societies. [Answer] An attacking (pre-modern) army hundreds or thousands of kilometers away from their home is at a severe disadvantage. Just think how much effort it is to transport cannons, shelters, men, supplies, pack animals, ammunition and so on and so forth over hundreds of kilometers into land and terrain you don’t know. Well organized, united defenders can continually harass the attackers while they are trying to set up camp or while they are advancing. Just imagine trying to move through a foreign land when you can expect a bowman behind every tree. I can’t think of any defensive technology which would give a similar advantage. [Answer] ## Aggressive xenophobia Disclaimer: I am not a historian. The impression I always got is that the Americans were initially cautiously welcoming to the Europeans. This placed the Americans at a huge disadvantage, because while they were making friendly overtures and not coordinating any kind of attack or even defense, the Europeans were planning to pillage the land and forcibly subjugate everybody. If the Europeans hadn't brought diseases that decimated the population, I think it's likely that European greed and culture would have done the same. --- Law is technology. As an example: one reason Silicon Valley is today a byword for rapid innovation is not because they invented a bunch of consumer products, but because the men at the top (and their lawyers) invented a bunch of new legal arrangements regarding labor and consumers that tilted both arenas hugely in favor of capital, while still fitting into the wider extant legal regime. To put it very crudely and only a little inaccurately: they invented a new form of semi-slavery that technically avoided laws forbidding chattel slavery, and they invented a new form of "selling" products that technically avoided transferring anything of value to the purchaser. These were the real inventions of Silicon Valley, and their implementation empowered a new class of predator whose members now dominate all of society. That is how powerful the technology of law can be. It is no less powerful than an army of jack-booted thugs with batons. Nations conquered without a single shot fired. --- So, the defensive invention your people need is a law or legal framework that puts all your people on a defensive footing from the outset, something that will establish the equivalent of a state of war between the natives and any visitors. In a pinch, I propose something analogous to a standing bounty on the heads of foreigners. Ideally, you want something that will encourage locals to pool their efforts and cooperate as teams of hunters, rather than having each individual go off on their own to attempt murder. Even better, something that encourages locals to lull visitors into a false sense of security before killing them, perhaps inviting them in to share a meal and conversation. So, there might be a standing bounty not just for the heads of foreigners, but especially for intelligence that can be extracted from them first, and a bounty for any weapons or other technology that can be captured from them. You want to avoid a situation where the locals who kill the visiting delegation loot the bodies and keep that stuff for themselves; instead, you want them to deliberately send all that stuff to the central authority so it can be studied. This law could be something that was established a long time ago when the immediate area was awash in inter-tribe conflict, and which has not been removed from the books despite having wiped out all their neighbors. [Answer] ### A navy Ok, there is already [another answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/241177/3096) about ships, but the reasoning is completely different, and more in line with the [political aspects of vsz's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/241252/3096). Any single technology is irrelevant. After all, while Europeans had some technological advantages, usually the disavantage of numbers was so big that it hardly mattered. Also, technology was developed in accordance with the scientific knowledge and othere constraints available. You cannot give kevlar vests to the Mayans. So what could be the difference? Time and time again, countries have used the times of weakness of their neighbours to expand. And time and time again, those countries fighting a stronger enemy have found a way to forge alliances with the enemies of their enemies. Be it by promoving internal rebellions, invasions by other neighbouring countries, or whatever. The difference was that Europeans could meddle in American politics, but not the other way around. They could support a claimant to the throne, or a rival nation, and use that to their advantage. If it failed, they could try again some time later. In contrast, Americans could only play with the colonial factions of the European powers (as they did to an extent in North America, with France and England) but could not affect significantly the metropolis. An American Navy could change that. They could ship soldiers to support Scotland against England, or gold to allow Morocco to hire mercenaries to attack Spain. That would have allowed to be nations with more relationships, instead of backwater regions that could only deal with the closest colonial power. Being limited to dealing with their colonial power meant that such colonial power was able to impose its own pace; when the colonial power was distracted somewhere, it would be benign, when circumstances were ok, it would attack the Americans and weaken them. [Answer] the short answer, not any one thing no single one technology could make that difference. what happend to the native was not just about warfare. even if somehow they could match in battle the world that was industrialising with some secret weapon, in a vacum it wouldn't change much, as the domination wasn't just martial, but on all other economical aspect. without firing a single shot the european just had access to a much more efficent and productive economy that would have dwarfed the native regardless. what would change thing. the biggest change would be, as pointed out in some other answer, would be an immune system that knew how to handle the European disease. but another very effective tactic would have been a more organised and trained guerilla tactic. you probably won't be able to match the new colonizer weapon, but by playing on your knowledge of the terrain, if a concerted effort is made to make life of the invader hell, there would be much less chance they try to settle. [Answer] ## Mongolian bows Let's say that we really do want the Aztecs to survive into the 19th century so that they can project their ever-loving power using steam and cooperate with like minded people (King Leopold of Belgium comes to mind). Very well, give them the best of Mongolian and Chinese bows. The typical Native American bow was far inferior to those of Europe and had a range of 100 metres or even less: the Mongols could get 300 metres easily, with 500 metres in unusual circumstances. This actually outranges muskets, unlike the Native Americans. Now the Native Americans have weapons that are still really useful in 1500 A.D. instead of outclassed in every way. They've probably also developed hit and run tactics similar to the Mongols\. In sieges, they're still outcompeted by guns but nowhere near as badly. Note that this can be done without completely rewriting their technological development. Or will, as soon as they get horses. [Answer] I would wager something like a more fundamental development in technology. The sooner you are doing things not from your own personal calorie budget the sooner you are developing things that weren't possible earlier. Domesticated animals, slavery, machines, waterwheels for rope pulled carts, whatever. As for tech that would have an immediate effect would be one of two things. First, social technology like organized government (i.e. having treaties, laws, protocols, and clearly defined government positions that are elected, appointed, or hereditary) This will mobilize the resources of a group much more effectively if done correctly and facilitate fast travel of information, resources, and speed development of technology to a certain extent. This would more quickly bring the full resources of a community to bear when doing essential things like defense. Second, As another commenter said, Gunpowder. Guns turn killing from a skill issue to a guts issue (ok there's still some skill but yk what I mean). It simplifies and lowers the bar to deadly force. Gunpowder also is relatively easy to make from natural resources even on North America as long as you know what you are doing. Gunpowder itself can also move land, set traps, and generally do things where rapid separation is necessary. The defense using deadly force would be a much easier prospect. ]
[Question] [ There's a plot point in my script that has been bothering me for a while. My story has faster-than-light travel thanks to distortion engines, which re-purpose the artificial gravity inside the ships to use for acceleration (near neutron star intensity when warping). The ships need to make a trip from earth to an alien planet. The thing is, there's one ship that leaves after the fleet but somehow arrives before them at the destination. The problem is that the ships are of identical design, so there's no tech advantage tipping the scales in favour of the tardy ship. Perhaps a specific trajectory would allow the tardy ship to cut the line? I am uncertain, please educate me. [Answer] ## Famous historical example ... of one fleet leaving after another but arriving at the destination earlier, although both fleets had the same kind of ships. [The year is 1798](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_campaign_of_1798). The French fleet rules unopposed on the Mediterranean Sea. The British send an expeditionary fleet in the Mediterranean with the goal of intercepting and engaging the French fleet. On 19 June 1798 the French fleet commanded by Vice Admiral [François-Paul Brueys d'Aigalliers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois-Paul_Brueys_d%27Aigalliers) left the freshly conquered Malta heading for Alexandria in Egypt, carrying an invasion force intending to conquer Egypt and the other Ottoman possessions in the Levant, with a view of opening a French-controlled route to India. On 22 June, the British fleet, which was at that time was near the southernmost point of Sicily, got word (from a Genoese merchantman out of Ragusa) that the French had sailed for Alexandria. Rear Admiral [Sir Horatio Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Horatio_Nelson) ordered the fleet to Alexandria at top speed, hoping to catch the French while they were still disembarking the troops. The British fleet arrived at Alexandria on 28 June. The French were not there, and nobody had even heard of any invasion force. Nelson spent the next month searching for the French fleet around the Anatolian coast, around the Greek coast, and around Sicily; finally, on 28 July the British fleet (which was then somewhere near the Peloponnese) received a notification (from the Ottoman governor of Crete) the the French fleet had been seen at the end of June sailing south of Crete towards Alexandria. Nelson odered the British fleet to sail to Alexandria again, and again at top speed. On 1 August they sighted the French fleet at anchor in the [Bay of Aboukir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Qir_Bay) and the rest is history. What had happened was that: 1. The British fleet was sailing much faster than the French fleet. They had the same kind of ships, but by and large British naval officers were much better at coordinating fleet movements, with the effect that British fleets could (and did) move faster than French fleets. 2. The British fleet had overtaken the French fleet on 22 June; at dusk, they had seen the sails of four unknown ships. During the night, the British fleet continued sailing at speed, while the French reduced sail because of course that's what one does when it's dark outside and one needs to be cautious against potential navigation hazards which may have been lurking in the eastern Mediterranean undiscovered for three thousand years despite of continuous and intense navigation. (OK, there was some fog too.) In the morning, the British looked around for strange ships but saw nothing, because by that time the French were dozens of miles behind. 3. Upon arriving at Alexandria on 28 June, Nelson made his enquiries, got his answer that nobody knew anything about any French fleet, and left promptly on the next day. Unknown to him, the French, instead of sailing directly from Malta to Alexandria, had taken a sight-seeing tour around Crete (with the express intention of not sailing directly to Alexandria, to make any enemy scout doubtful about their true intentions) and arrived two days after the British fleet had left. Key points to remember: 1. Fleets do not normally move at top speed. They generally move at the best economical speed, which provides a good compromise between speed and endurance. 2. Even when a fleet moves at top speed, its top speed is the top speed of the slowest ship in the fleet. 3. Fleets need to maintain cohesion and order. The top speed of a fleet is lower than the top speed of an individual ship, because the fleet needs to coordinate ship movements, take corrective actions when one or more ships get displaced, send scouts to look around and come back and so on. 4. Very often it happens that a fleet will avoid sailing on a direct course to the destination, with the intention of making it harder for the enemy to guess where the fleet is going. (Read [all the entracing details](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Nile) on Wikipedia.) [Answer] Your typical navigational computers may alter travel paths to avoid areas of unstable gravity variations or massive objects, such as planets or even a random gas cloud. There may be significant levels of caution programmed into the NAVI computer to ensure, to a magnitude of 4-5 standard deviations that there is no impact on the ship while flying this course. The "tardy ship" could have reasons to override such safety precautions to reduce travel times. They can allow probabilities of detrimental effects to well below recommended levels to cut corners and save time. Instead of steering clear of an object by billions of km, this pilot could skirt to within 100 million km and cut minutes off per maneuver. If dozens of such risky maneuvers are done over the trip, it could cut hours off the travel time, although an increased risk to the ship. but with the absurdly cautious NAVI, these risks are worth it. [Answer] Human endeavors require coordination and synchronization. The more people and machinery that are involved in any endeavor, the higher the probability that something gets screwed up or breaks at an inopportune moment. (This isn't fiction; even just skimming military history shows a cornucopia of examples where something going wrong at just the wrong moment changed the course of battles and even entire wars and those are just the incidents notable enough to be recorded.) Therefore, when travelling great distances, a battle fleet designates a series of rendezvous points along the path where all ships arrive and check in to say that everything is okay before proceeding to the next rendezvous point. Any repairs that needs to be made or cargo/personnel that needs to be transferred between ships (e.g. Captain So-and-so got severe space-food poisoning and needs to be transferred to a hospital ship or one ship didn't have the backup AE-35 unit they normally carry because the supply corps couldn't find one before they left and their main one, of course, chose this time to burn out) occurs at these rendezvous points. The commanders and crews handle this crisply and professionally but it still takes a small but significant amount of time for each rendezvous. A single ship, not having to coordinate with anyone else, can take a direct route to the destination. [Answer] Let me DWKraus you up a nice list! 1. Rogue pilot hacked the ship. The ships were of identical design. No longer. Your captain (actually captain's Aspergery wingman) has modified their ship. It is faster. Other new attributes of the ship may be less welcome. 2. Shortcut. Space is curved. Your pilot takes advantage of local space distortions near supermassive objects (and one which is the reverse of that) to get there faster. 3. Fleet is slow because it is a fleet. The fields interfere with one another and so en masse the fleet is slightly slower. 4. Ship actually left early. Fake ship / fake crew was left at origin. [Answer] # A Few Thoughts: Here's a few ideas I have on that: * Interference: Multiple gravity wells by multiple ships SHOULD, in theory, give your warp engines more FTL power than a single engine. But in practice, each ship is tuned to use their own gravity well most efficiently. The fleet together is slightly slower than an individual ship since the gravity wells disrupt each other. This can be standard (everyone knows it will happen) or accidental (one ship is out of harmony, and throws off all the rest) * A fleet is as slow as the slowest ship: Although all the ships involved are the same make, slight variations in maintenance mean that if one ship is 0.01% slower, the whole fleet is slower. Say all the ships are on a harmonizing schedule. If your individual ship was delayed because, say, they were in the middle of harmonizing their engine and would have been the slowest ship, then once the engines are harmonized, they end up being the FASTEST ship, with the most up-to-date harmonizing. * Spin-up: Your ships take time to accelerate to FTL speed, and their gravity wells take time to build up to neutron-star levels. Stars are constantly moving relative to each other, and your second ship passed close to a rogue neutron star shortly after it left. While navigation systems are smart enough to avoid threats like this, they can't compensate for unexpected opportunities. The fleet didn't know about the neutron star, so they couldn't take advantage of the initial acceleration boost it could give. * Coordinating arrival: Fleets are unable to coordinate their arrival times in a star system over long distances. fleet protocol says you arrive at the same time to support each other in an engagement. Even if no engagement is planned, fleets always stop short of their destination, wait till all ships are together, then make the final leg in together. Your rogue ship doesn't do this, so they arrive first. * Power surge: Your ship was delayed while they fixed the engines. Even after repairs, the engines malfunctioned, pumping the engines with 110% normal power. It's riskier to stop, and since emergency use allows up to 120% with reasonable safety, they decided additional repairs could wait until after they arrived. * The fleet encountered a navigational hazard: The fleet was unexpectedly delayed when it needed to course correct after passing near a rogue black hole. The follow up ship thought it would arrive after, but instead it arrives before. PS No one out-DWKraus's DWKraus. [Answer] ## The Mechanics and Limitations of Gravity Drives When your fleet leaves it can not just have all the ships turn on thier gravity drives to 100% and expect everything to be okay. Gravity acceleration is always a balancing act between maximizing acceleration and minimizing gravitational sheer. If your gravity source is a neutron star density mass with a 1 meter radius just in front of your 100m long ship, then the front of your ship will be accelerating at ~279560000 m/s^2 but at 100m behind this gravity well you will experience only ~2796 m/s^2 This massive difference creates what is called gravitational sheer which in your case would not only kill everyone on board but rip your ship into a cloud of debris. The way you compensate for sheer is to project your gravitational focal point far in front of your ship. So, if you were to instead move that focal point ahead 1km in front of your ship, then the front of your ship only experiences 27m/s^2 acceleration and your rear experiences 23m/s^2. This would create a very survivable gravitational sheer, but take you a VERY long time to get up to FTL speeds So in order to reduce the sheer enough to not kill the humans on board, and achieve an acceleration of ~279560000 m/s^2 like the surface of your neutron star, you'd have to move the gravity focal point ~ a million km ahead of your ship ... but this also means any ship within a million km of you will also feel this same pull... personally, I would suggest you start off with a modest acceleration to try to make your gravity wells smaller and have your ships spend most of their time just moving out of the star system so they don't throw planets out of orbit. Then as they get out into deep space, you slowly ramp up to these higher accelerations. ## Why this Makes a Fleet Slower than a Lone Ship Whatever actual acceleration and focal distance you go for, it will still mean creating a huge gravitational field. So even with ships flying far apart, thier gravity drives will still affect one another. The guys at the back will drag the guys at the front backwards as the guys in the front drag the back guys forward; so, to keep your whole fleet from instantly accreting into one big ball of ships, all ships will have to set various powers and vectors away from each other with only the lead ship being at 100% in the direction it is going, and that lead ship will be slowed down by all the gravity drives going behind it. This means a fleet can not move nearly as fast as a lone ship; so, even if the lone ship has to go around the fleet, it will achieve a much greater acceleration without any other gravity drives holding it back. While it would be possible for a fleet to spread out enough to have negligible drag on one another, the whole point of operating as a fleet is [Concentration of Force](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_concentration). If your ships fly so far apart that they can not support each other, then they are each as vulnerable as a lone ship. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Ch3W.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Ch3W.png) [Answer] ### A fleet of interstellar starships is big, and the space around a planet can hold nasty surprises The planet has a bit of a cluttered environment, with a bunch of moons (both big and small) in orbits with various inclinations, and a thick ring system inside that. You do not want to warp into these or come out of warp in their vicinity. Since a large fleet needs a considerable amount of separation between ships to keep their gravity drives from interfering from each other and reduce the possibility of ultrarelativistic collisions if a ship goes out of control in cruise, and there are a lot of ships in the fleet, it takes up quite a lot of space in space. The fleet, being spread out over a volume of space comparable to that of the planet itself (or maybe even more), has to come out of warp and slow to approach speed well away from the planet, so that the individual ships of the fleet can use their onboard radar to navigate down into the safe zone below the lowest rings - the fleet's cruise formation is far too large for them to be able to simply warp directly into the safe zone without crashing quite a few big, expensive ships into the inner moons, the rings, or the planet itself. The lone ship, though, being vastly smaller than the fleet in cruise formation, can safely warp straight down into the safe zone, saving quite a bit of time. [Answer] Flank speed Any engine has an optimal performance rating, a maximum safe load, and a maximum running speed: * The optimal performance rating is the speed you want to run the system at whenever possible, it is the point of maximum input-to-output ratio. This is where you get the most bang for your buck. * The maximum safe load is a different story that's the point of maximum output without unduly altering your maintenance schedule, i.e. as fast as you can go without your engine burning out too early on you. * Maximum running speed is the just short, for a while, of engine component failure. This is how fast you run the system when you're in dire straits already and the risk of blowing up is worth it. Maximum running speed is not a pace you can maintain because you are causing massive wear on the system every second and one or more components will weaken to the point where the current speed exceeds their point of failure eventually. This is [Flank Speed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flank_speed) and it should never be used lightly. On an interstellar trip the fleet should be running at optimum so they get the most out of every gram of fuel for a ship to break away they can burn their reserve to crank the drive up to maximum safe load maybe even flank if they're more desperate than cautious. [Answer] > > With FTL technology is it possible to leave after another and yet arrive before it? > > > FTL is Time Travel, unless you take the proper precautions. [ref](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/47038/353). If needed, you can have the second fleet arrive before they even left. Star-Trek does it sometimes when the plot needs. [Answer] Space isn't static - with bodies constantly moving, and spacetime bends. Even in 'in system' launches, there's certain periods where, taking travel time into account, there's shorter routes. The same way the distance between planets in a system changes as they move, the second ship might have left at a time that resulted in a shorter route. Its also worth considering/thinking both in terms of "3d" for distances, that space time bends, and there might be more 'risky'/faster routes. Assuming FTL here is "punching" through space, there might be longer routes that are lower risk, and shorter routes that are high risk, and routes might not be a straight line, point to point route. [Answer] A fleet with a hundred vessels has just multiplied the possiblity of a FTL drive breaking down by a factor one hundred. Fleets travel together, so if one ship breaks down everyone may have to wait for it to fix it self before continuing. The more ships you have, the more chances for any one ship to fail. ]
[Question] [ In [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/20335/10851), I introduced the concept of a fantasy creature that is basically a sentient badger. I haven't yet named these things, so let's just call them badgers, with the understanding that these are Cobaltduckworld's badgers, not Earth's. A delegation of humans is arriving at the mouth of the badgers' cave system to engage in friendly commerce. The badgers have brought several carts full of mineral ore- lead, iron, tin, silver. There are also some samples of their unique art- figurines carved from tree roots using only their own claws. The humans value the ore- they can refine it and ultimately make jewelry, tools, fine tableware. Likewise, badger art is all the fashion in high society these days. Of course, the humans could have just dug up the ore themselves, but that would totally enrage the badgers. Instead, the two species mutually agree to a trade deal, because we offer them .... ? What is it the humans have brought to the negotiations? What wares fill their wagons? What is it that they have that the badgers can't get themselves? What motivates a badger to labor in the mines, then venture forth out of the sett, into the harsh light of the surface, there to engage these foul-smelling hairless apes? What, in short, is a mustelid's [macguffin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin)? --- EDIT/BACKGROUND per some commenter's request. The overall social/ technological development phase of this world is comparable probably to early 1800s Earth. Well beyond medieval, just before steam, definitely not modern. However, no gun powder. The badgers are reasonably dexterous (as discussed in my earlier question) and do fabricate their own tools. They do not wear clothing. Their preferred foods are readily available to them- grubs, tubers, smaller burrowing creatures (i.e. "My grandmother makes an excellent pocket gopher stew, with carrots, potatoes, and a generous side portion of three-larva salad. Mmmm....."). [Answer] In short I would say "Think things that only depraved humans and not Holy Badgers would make/invent/create" Depending on how advanced your human population is, several things you could trade might include: * Drugs (Synthesized drugs not discovered by badgers) * Technology (Weapons, Farming, Comfort items) * Knowledge (Books, Math, Education, Music, More Technology) * A percentage of the refined ores * Tools to improve labor * Unavailable foods and delicacies If you want a similar real world example, try taking a look at what the explorers and settlers of North America traded with the First Nations. I know it's not exactly the same, but it is a similar concept. [Answer] When I think of badgers, I imagine them not having clothes and living in holes in the ground. Thus, I don't imagine they'll have much desire for clothing or shelter. That said, they'll probably gladly accept food. Hunting may be fun, but it's a lot easier to get someone else to do it for you, especially if they can cook the meat and generally make it taste a lot better. Similarly, I'd think alcohol would be very important to badgers. There is a lot of evidence that animals enjoy the effects of inebriation just as much as humans, but they tend to get their fix by eating old fruit. If badgers get access to the good stuff, I think they'll be more than willing to work to keep the taps open. As for work, humans are probably more capable than badgers at creating tools. Human blacksmiths can create wee pickaxes, while carpenters can manufacture supports for the cave systems. You may think that the badgers can harvest ore with their bare hands, and maybe they can, but I can't think of a single thing humans are capable of doing on their own that someone hasn't invented a tool for. The general form of this argument is that the badgers provide mostly raw materials, and the humans provide finished goods. This is a very common arrangement even among humans. [Answer] Well, ask yourself what humans may have which you can't find in a cave, and what humans may be better at crafting than a badger (aka, anything). Note: I am assuming that the badgers have become "civilized" and embraced decadent luxuries such as clothing, or at least symbols of status such as capes, hats, etc, that they like to wear jewelry, and decorate their caves with furniture, etc 1. Crafting Human hands are more dexterous than badger paws. Anything human crafted is likely to be detailed, and finely made. I'm sure the badgers will value that. 2. Weaved fabrics The badgers probably don't grow cotton, or have herds of sheep, so they would probably value fabrics - especially silks and the such. 3. Shaped metal & jewelry The badgers MINE ores, but you can't burn fires underground - how would they smelt it? These little guys probably don't have blacksmiths, or if they do, their operation is not going to be as large scale and complex as that of the humans Again, humans will be stronger, and more dexterous, and thus capable of crafting finer things. I'm sure the badgers would greatly value good mining tools, fine jewelry, etc. 4. Products not available in caves Humans can fish, obtain pearls, grow herds, etc. There are a very large number of foodstuffs and products which the badgers would not have access to. A big one is medicine, or various rare herbs, even if only for cooking purposes. Hope this helps! [Answer] ## Clothing > > They do not wear clothing. > > > While they may not wear clothing as a matter of modesty, they may well still wear a coat on a cold day. Dogs have fur, but they often don't like being outside in the snow. Badgers may well wear shoes and winter clothing to make themselves more comfortable in extreme weather. And if they live in burrows, they may have even more interest in blankets, as fireplaces are harder to build the further you may be below ground. These may be luxuries to them rather than necessities, so they might well buy from more experienced humans rather than bothering to make their own. You also might consider Barsoomian clothing, i.e. straps with pouches. The need to carry things comes with the tool-using mindset. It is not reliant on hairless skin. This might not help with your trade problem though, as this seems like something that humans would have no need to make. Simpler just to add pockets to clothes. Badgers might buy things like raincoats instead though. Pockets and rain protection at the same time. ## Food > > Their preferred foods are readily available to them- grubs, tubers, smaller burrowing creatures > > > We can guess that humans originally had a diet similar to that of apes and monkeys: grubs, fruits, and small climbing creatures. But I doubt that the grubs and small climbing creatures sound terribly appetizing to you. We can eat them (and in remote areas, people still do), but we do not normally find those preferable to farmed food. Another point regarding this: cats don't eat mouse-flavored cat food. They eat tuna and chicken flavored food. They also like milk and cream, although it is no more natural to adult cats than to humans. Their preferred foods are not those natural to them but superior versions that they only get from humans. My basic point here is that you shouldn't necessarily use the diet of wild badgers to determine what intelligent badgers might prefer to eat. Many animals prefer human food--they just have no way to make it. ## Comparative advantage It's also worth noting that even if badgers can build something, they may not. Trade occurs when it's easier to do the work you know and trade it for the results of work that you do less well. Note that even if the badgers are better than humans at producing everything that they want, they may still trade if the humans value the badger product enough to make the human product comparatively cheaper. For example, if the ore is only available from the badgers, the humans may be willing to trade a lot for it. Also look for absolute advantage. For example, humans raise and eat birds. Birds may not like living in burrows. Therefore, badgers may not have their own birds, so they can only get feathers from wild birds. So if badgers find feather pillows and mattresses superior to their natural alternatives, they might be interested in trading for them. [Answer] [Truffle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle) Exotic foods in general would probably be attractive to the badgers, as they are unlikely to travel very far from their homes. Truffles are rare, grow only in specific climates and would probably make a familiar (earthy, tuber-like) but much more delicate treat that the badgers just lovvveeee. Cat food (in modern setting) The badgers have no idea why humans are feeding this awesome fast-food to their cats, but if they can pay the humans in worthless shiny beads and mirrors for this highly valuable protein-rich superfood, they're not wasting any chances. [Answer] Mining tools. The poor animals probably dig with their own paws. Many badgers will die from having their paws destroyed from repeated use. As a side effect, you might cause a social revolution. Workers will reach older ages, they won't need to overwork children anymore. You can mine a lot more ore with a lot less badgers. The government eventually has to fire lots of badgers. The unemployed badgers make [a strike against adoption of new technologies and the firing or miners](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984%E2%80%9385)). Badger society will change over time and it will demand different things in different proportions. All types of safety equipment for mining. Canaries in cages, for warning about lethal gas in the tunnels. Flammable materials for making torches. Hi-tech lanterns that burn brightly without smoke. Flammable materials for the torches. Wood beams for safer tunnels. You can trade the finished products (lots of benefits, creates dependency on your supply) or trade the tools for creating the finished products (morally better). You could trade knowledge, books, etc. Lots of interesting side-effects if you slip a few books on political systems. Religious books could cause unrest and weakening of official religion. Filter heavily the allowed types of books. By trading certain things and not others, you can cause a revolution, shape it and time it to your convenience. Flooding their market with certain products, strangling the supply of other products, etc. Trade the wrong things, and they will refuse to trade anymore. [Answer] Art You say that "badger art is all the fashion in [human] high society these days." But what about the inverse? Why wouldn't badgers value those strange things that humans are producing? ("You must see the new [dinglehopper](http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Dinglehopper) that Brock bought. It's simply exquisite. Can you believe that those crazy humans are practically give them away for worthless ore?") You can seen this in human to human trade relations. Take for example the European trade with native Americans. The native Americans were more than willing to give the Europeans furs, food, land, etc. for glass beads. Why? They didn't really need them ... didn't need, yes, didn't want, no. Native Americans already used beads of various sorts in their decorations, but the European beads had a number of benefits. The first was that the native Americans didn't have to go through the laborious process of making the beads themselves. A second is that the glass beads came in a number of interesting colors that the traditional beads couldn't match. We also see similar things today in the "opposite" direction. There are plenty of Westerners who pay a bunch of money for "indigenous" art. It has no "real" value to them, but they're still willing to pay (quite a lot) of money to have "authentic native art" in their home, for decoration and to impress their neighbors. Even when you can get cheap reproductions which are made in Western factories, people will pay extra to get "authentic" pieces. Meanwhile, those indigenous cultures are purchasing Western books, television programs and movies. Not because they don't have any books/television/movies/entertainment of their own, but because Western culture is fashionable. So, yes, if your badgers are self-sufficient, live an ascetic lifestyle and have no desires beyond fulfilling basic biological imperatives, then there's nothing they will want to trade for. But that's a pretty thin and unrealistic society. Any time there's room for wants as opposed to just needs, there will be fashion fads and "keeping up with the Joneses" and so on. Any point of difference between the two societies can be turned into a trade situation, especially if you keep it at the "macguffin" level. -- The badgers can trade for what the humans have simply because the badgers don't have it. [Answer] Manufactured Goods If the badgers are trading away raw ore, that means that the raw ore is less valuable to the badgers than other uses for it. In other words, they can't manufacture it into useful items as well as the humans, or they'd be selling finished goods. A quality knife is worth more than just the bare materials, but if I can make a better knife, I'm not going to buy yours unless it's a lot cheaper than mine. Just as an example from history, look at the British colonial system, and the American trading system in colonial times. The American colonies were seen as a source of raw goods. The British took the raw goods home, and sold part of the finished products back to the Americas. I'm thinking cotton in particular, when Britain could mass produce the fabric and America couldn't, but it was a repeating pattern. Tools So the humans, who are very good at manufacturing (they've got space travel, so they must be), take the raw materials and make them into things the badgers want. Maybe it's higher quality, longer lasting tools than the badgers make. I can make my own hammer by banging a nail with a rock, but I'd rather go to the store and pay $10 for a nice quality one. Or maybe I've got a knife, but it needs to be sharpened every time I use it, or it tends to rust if I'm not very careful. I'd pay good money for a high carbon steel or stainless steel blade. Weapons Alternately, I could look at the humans weapons: One badger clan has had an on and off feud going with the neighboring clan for a few decades, but they're pretty closely matched, so no one wants to escalate this into a full on fight. But with a few well placed explosives, one clan could bring the other's whole sett down. It would kill a lot of them straight up, and the rest would be easy to pick off as they dug their way out. Created Markets You say the badgers don't use clothes, and forage their food. Maybe they just haven't found better solutions yet. Look at the history of the microwave. They were introduced in the popular market in the 1970s. Before that, no one imagined they needed it. And during the first couple of decades when they were becoming popular, people weren't sure what to do with them. These days, almost every kitchen has one, and some people wouldn't know how to cook without one. Imagined goods So imagine what a digging species might need. Maybe shaped metal claw tips would be popular, to let them dig better and faster. Maybe clear goggles to keep dirt out of their eyes. This is all about things they don't have, but could make use of. New Foods Finally, maybe the badgers have a sweet tooth, or a protein tooth, or like the convenience of pre-packaged food. In this case, even though the badgers have enough good food, they could easily be tempted into changing their diets. Look at what happened in the US when preserved foods started becoming regularly available in the 1950's. People weren't necessarily unhappy with their diets before that, but now most people eat pre-packaged food every day. [Answer] I would imagine that exotic and specialty hardwoods from outside the Badgers' normal traveling area would be very prized. [Answer] In general it is difficult to produce food underground so humans should be able to sell food for a lower cost than what it would take the badgers to make it. One also imagines humans would travel more than badgers and so they might have access to good from remote regions. What are the relative technology levels and size of civilizations? This is a huge distinction. A larger human civilization would have more specialized craftsmen and so would have access to a wider variety of goods, and obviously the more advanced civilization would sell items like tools and medicine than require more skill to create. These tools could help dig faster or browse the web, depending on the level of technology available. [Answer] ## Lighting. Badgers live underground most of the time, but they are not obligate cave-dwellers, and they have a well-developed sense of vision. For pre-electrical civilisations, [tunnel lighting is extremely hazardous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_lamp) due to the risk of flames igniting gases underground, causing tunnel explosions. Humans have access to low-level lighting technologies (such as tritium radioluminescence and low-power LEDs) which can last for very long times and do not ignite gases underground. This will greatly aid the badgers at mining. ## Relatively poor ideas: Food and drugs - Animals that evolved on another planet are likely to have completely incompatible biochemistry, to the point that their food and drugs would not work on each other. [Answer] Well, one possible answer is part of your question: > > Of course, the humans could have just dug up the ore themselves, but > that would totally enrage the badgers > > > i.e. the badgers give ore etc just to keep humans from digging it up themselves. maybe they believe that only badgers should have the privilege of mining or that the ground is sacred. the deal could also include protection from other nations or having humans handle problems with the surface (e.g. a flood that's leaking into the ground). a similar concept has been explored in one episode of stargate; the native population of the planet (pretty similar to native american trives) agreed to provide naquadah (an ore) using their methods if the earthlings stopped using explosives to mine it. [Answer] Start with a quick definition from the web of things badgers like to eat.. > > Badgers are omnivorous, which means they will eat almost anything edible. The >bulk of their diet is made up of earthworms (generally about 80%), but they >will also eat small rodents, frogs and slugs, fruit, nuts, wheat, sweet corn >and grubs. > > > Now several of those humans grow and badgers cant' reach... Now humans can trade those, or trade labor for those, or better yet enable the badgers to grow them themselves... dwarf Fruit tree stock, portable rolling scaffolds to allow badgers to pick the fruit, fruit pickers on the end of poles... things that allow badgers to do more... Then foods produced with same, bottled fruit juices, apple pies, sweet cornbread covered in maple syrup and fresh butter.. waffles... spices, condiments, flavorings where does Grandma Badger get the mayo for her famous grub salad I ask you? also, since I suspect a badger might like a nice fresh fish, there is all that lovely fishing poles lures etc... Badgers might even prefer fly fishing, because they keep nibbling on the can's of worms for bobber fishing... a lot of material there for some lovely personality for the race of badgers... also blankets, rugs, tobacco (what badger doesn't' like a nice pipe in the evening" Then comfort items, blankets rungs, candles , books, pillows, cast iron stoves, etc.(what badger doesn't love a nice fluffy down pillow!) hopefully that sparked some images in you head, it certainly did mine.. [Answer] Well, they could probably use some good dentists. I am assuming their teeth do not keep growing as rodents' do. This seems to be the case for terrestrial badgers, as far as I can tell. They could use other medical services too; but I'm thinking dentistry in particular because the badgers would need it, it might be easier, and it makes direct use of some of the ores for fillings and artificial teeth. The humans would need to first figure out what works as a safe and effective local anesthetic, which could be non-trivial. ]
[Question] [ Set in present day New York City, an unknown spacecraft of alien origin expelled millions of micro blackholes each with the mass of a grape in the earth atmosphere. I like to know what happens if these millions of micro blackholes were to fall on building structures such as skyscrapers, would it trigger an extinction level event? [Answer] > > would it triggers extinction level event? > > > Since they'd [evaporate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation) more or less instantaneously (known as Hawking radiation), releasing energy according to the famous equation beginning E=, the spaceship would last a few microseconds at best, Earth would be fine. Yes, the aliens in the ship would become extinct. [Answer] Black holes evaporate by emitting [Hawking radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation) > > a 1-second-life black hole has a mass of $2.28 \cdot 10^5 \ \mathrm{kg}$ > > > A grape has far less mass than that, thus the black hole would evaporate way faster than that. An intelligent life form dropping micro black holes on Earth would thus quickly annihilate its own bombing squad in a shower of gamma ray, proving that they were not so intelligent as we thought. [Answer] The electromagnetic force from one electron on another and the gravitational force of this micro-black hole both follow an inverse square law. A grape about 1.5 cm in radius would have a mass of about 0.015 kg. When does the gravitational force of the grape exceed the electromagnetic force between electrons ? It's when : $$\frac r R < \sqrt{\frac {4\pi \epsilon\_0Gm\_em\_h}{e^2}} = 6.3\times 10^{-8}$$ Meaning the black hole would have to pass less than one ten millionth of the distance between electrons to have a significant influence on one. Away from than range the electron will happily go about it's business hardly disturbed at all. Even if a black hole passes this close the effect is only temporary. You're still nowhere near the event horizon of that black hole and so the electron will, at worst, be pulled away from it's normal motion and after some brief period when the black hole moves away it will simply recombined in some way with the bulk of atoms around it. It might cause a minute amount of damage on a molecular level (even allowing for millions of these micro black holes), but the net effect would be tiny, probably less that someone hitting a wall with their hand. > > How about they expell at fraction of c so we take length contraction into question? > > > You seem to mean that to avoid Hawking radiation evaporation destroying these black holes before they even reach the black hole, they could be ejected at a high fraction of the speed of light. So how high a speed is needed to avoid them evaporating before they travel 100 meters, assuming your aliens like low level flying ? The fraction of the speed of light needed is : $$\frac v c > \frac 1 { \sqrt{ 1 + \left( \frac {Tc} L \right)^2 } }$$ Where $L$ is the distance they must travel and $T$ is the lifetime of the micro black hole before it evaporates. This works out at $\frac v c \approx 1 - 2\times 10^{-19}$. That's insanely close to the speed of light. A million grapes of mass 0.015 kg will have a mass of 15,000 kg. But the energy required to get them moving at this insane fraction of the speed of light would be enormous. It equates to a mass about $2\times 10^9$ times 15,000 kg. Or to put it another way, the ship firing these micro black holes would need to have a mass-energy of about $3\times 10^{13}$ kg. The asteroid Vesta is substantially larger than this. So this is actually a small mass in terms of asteroids and you could probably destroy Earth a lot more easily simply by grabbing some handy largish asteroids and sending them on their merry way towards Earth at some modest speed that's easily imparted with your spaceship. Conclusion : No need at all to mess around with ultra-relativistic micro-black holes when the universe provides you with much simpler and easy to handle "ammunition" in the form of basic asteroids. [Answer] All the answers so far take as read the veracity of Hawking Radiation. If we assume, for a moment, that this is false and that some undiscovered process prevents black hole evaporation (perhaps there is a layer of physics underlying quantum mechanics in the same way that QM underlies classical physics...); then what happens? The black holes would fall to Earth like grapes (I assume you've removed their orbital velocity so that they don't just stay in orbit). They would accelerate like any falling body but, because of their tiny size, would not experience any air resistance. So they would arrive at the surface going at a fair old clip. If dropped from orbit, say about 400km up, this would be about 3 km/s. At the surface, what would happen? Nothing much, I'd guess... They're still so small that "solid" matter is practically a vacuum to them so they go straight through, down past the crust, mantle, core and then up the other side, out through Western Australia, back up to about 400km where they stop - and then tumble back down again. Eventually, they'd settle into a highly elliptical orbit around the centre of the Earth. The Coriolis force would make it look like the stream was scanning round the Earth every 24 hours. Occasionally, one of them would strike a nucleus head-on and capture some of its quarks, so it would grow slightly. This process would have some positive feedback (bigger the event horizon gets, more chance of interaction) but I'm not sure what the time constant would look like. Anyone fancy doing the calculation? I'm guessing it might be aeons before it eats the Earth... [Answer] If we take "size of a grape" to mean a gram, then a million of them would be 1 metric ton. When they evaporate, they release energy several orders of magnitudes higher than a nuclear bomb. So New York would be devastated, but the earth as whole would not have large effects, although it might produce radioactive elements that would increase cancer rates. [Answer] While this may or may not be an extinction event, it has the potential to be very bad news for at least some of those on the surface of the Earth, even if not the whole surface. The trick is that it will depend crucially on the alien ship's location, since as mentioned in the answers, the ship will be destroyed on the instant the black holes are released. A typical grape has a mass of about 5 grams (cite: <https://www.reference.com/food/many-grams-grape-weigh-fcc1e34fdbbcf843>). 5 grams times a million is 5 megagrams (about five typical-sized road vehicles). The explosion into Hawking radiation can be considered effectively as very much like the instant detonation of an antimatter or nuclear explosive which ends up with the conversion of that same total mass to energy. By $$E = mc^2$$ that is about $4.5 \times 10^{20}\ \mathrm{J}$ released, or 450 EJ. For comparison, the TSAR (largest nuclear device ever exploded) was about 0.21 EJ, so this is roughly 2000 times more explosive. While not as large as the Chicxulub asteroid strike (about 400 000 EJ), this is still a considerable bang, more than enough that were it to occur on or near Earth's surface (i.e. the ship is "hovering" just above the skyscraper in question), it would lead to the complete annihilation of not only all of New York City (so way worse than just "a skyscraper"), but probably also the whole surrounding states, if not the entire Northwestern US due to the blast and thermal waves. So insofar as the "skyscraper" is concerned, the answer for it is: complete, instantaneous vaporization into a high-energy ball of plasma, similar to that from a very, very, very, very big nuclear explosive, along with a large amount of the surrounding city and probably also the ground it is sitting on. The expansion of this huge ball of plasma generates a very large blast wave that they lays waste to the surrounding countryside, out probably to a radius larger than New York State itself, plus formation of a large crater similar to that from an asteroid impact and resultant release of ejecta. The other plausible alternative is if we imagine the craft is in orbit. For Low Earth orbit, we are talking about a height of 400 km above the surface. From geometry, we can then figure the amount of energy deposited at a point by using the inverse-square law, since the source will be approximately pointlike at this distance: $$I(r) = \frac{I\_0}{4\pi r^2}$$ where $I\_0$ is the initial intensity, $I(r)$ that at distance $r$. Taking $r = 400\ \mathrm{km} = 400 000\ \mathrm{m}$, we get that the point on Earth's surface directly below the craft gets struck with about 223 MJ of energy per square meter, delivered effectively instantaneously. The farthest point that will experience irradiation of energy by the explosion is that for which it is just on the horizon, something we can calculate by considering when the line from the exploding craft to the point on the ground is at a right angle (so the tangent) to the line from the Earth's center to the same ground point. Geometrically, this forms a right triangle with the right angle that at the observation point, the hypotenuse is the line from the Earth's center to the craft (thus equal to $R\_E + 400\ \mathrm{km}$) and the adjacent side is the line from the Earth's center to the observation point itself (thus equal to $R\_E$). The length of the opposite side is then $\sqrt{(R\_E + 400\ \mathrm{km})^2 - R\_E^2}$ which with $R\_E = 6371\ \mathrm{km}$ gives the straight-line distance as ~2300 km. To get the precise ground distance we need to take into account the curvature of the Earth's surface, and we can do that by taking the angle at the Earth's centre: since we have the hypotenuse and adjacent, we get $\cos(\theta) = \frac{\mathrm{adj}}{\mathrm{hyp}} = \frac{R\_E}{R\_E + 400\ \mathrm{km}}$ which gives $\theta \approx 345\ \mathrm{mrad}$ and multiplying it by $R\_E$ to get the circular arc length ($s = r\theta$), which gives the ground distance as still being pretty close: ~2200 km. Thanks to the cosine law of the angle of incidence, of course, radiation at this point will be effectively zero, so we can estimate that a radius of 1000 km will be subjected to radiation levels exceeding 100 MJ/m^2, delivered virtually instantly, chiefly as hard X/gamma rays. This will, for the most part, be absorbed in the atmosphere, but may cause interesting shock heating and chemical effects that I imagine cannot be good for anyone who happens to be underneath them. At the very least, you get a huge cloud of oxides of nitrogen ($\mathrm{N\_2 O}$, $\mathrm{NO\_2}$) produced immediately, like smog - poison. I'm less sure of how to calculate how much and moreover what the effects of that will be once dispersed globally, but I can't imagine they'd be too good, either. This effect can be considered similar to that of a nearby Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) impinging on the planet; cited as a possible cause of the Ordovician mass extinction (though I might have also heard something more recently that this has been tracked to a different cause), though here affecting only a considerably smaller area - that would have affected an entire hemisphere. Nonetheless, it might give you some clue that this is probably not going to be too good a day (week, month, year) for anyone. It may not kill everybody, but it's also not going to be anywhere close to as innocent and harmless as so many other answers and comments here seem to be painting it to be. And this also, I should tell you, varies with just how much "millions" actually is. This was for one million. If it's 100 million, then we are getting to around 10% of Chicxulub, and talking a lot worse. ]
[Question] [ A toxin was released into the atmosphere. 99% of people were infected, and then the toxin diluted to a negligible state. The infection is passed down generations. There is no possible cure or way to reduce the symptoms, but we don't know that. This infection gives humans, and only humans, super-strength and super-hard skin. There is no possible material stronger or harder than an infected human, but we don't know that. Handcuffs, super-strong walls, and even extra-hard diamonds can be torn apart as easily as a sheet of paper by infected humans. There is no possible way to detain a conscious human without being restrained by another (stronger) human, but we don't know that. Nothing exists, nor can be created, that would pierce an infected human's skin, but we don't know that. Infected humans are immune to all potential sedatives, but of course, we don't know that. The fact that we don't know these things is not ignorance. We realize there is no current solution. We just don't know that there is no potential future solution to these matters. How would laws be enforced? [Answer] I'm going to assume first that humans are resistant to their own strength, with a much denser and more tightly packed muscle mass, or we would have a world largely comprised of dead humans from self-inflicted wounds. Let's also assume that while human physiology has been drastically changed, human nature has not. And finally, let's also assume this takes place in modern times. --- People wouldn't know right away the effects of this peculiarly specific toxin, but we'd soon find out. People are regularly cut, bruised, nicked, shot, and injured in a large variety of ways every single day. Once people start to realize they're NOT being injured by everyday events, they will start sharing this information with other people, and they too will realize they've been affected, and share it with other people, and so on and so forth. In short - people will find out and find out quickly. At first this will probably create a good deal of chaos, as people realize they can perform superhuman feats of strength and endurance, and suffer no permanent physical consequences for it. Police and law enforcement will rush to apprehend the spree-criminals, and although their guns are now useless, they are also super strong and immune to physical damage, and some of them will be armed with tasers and gas (I notice you didn't mention electricity or gas in your question) so they will still have ways to subdue criminals temporarily. Once they find out criminals can't be kept in prisons, they will start looking for other ways to remove them from society - the death penalty will probably be favored, either by lethal ingestion, drowning, asphyxiation, or electrocution. Another possibility would be orbital or underwater/island prison, since even with the ability to escape containment, criminals still need to breath. It would be very difficult, and it's likely that minor criminals would be left to roam free (petty theft, habitual drug use, hate crimes, et cetera) until a better system can be developed. But because those interested in keeping the peace are now as strong and invulnerable as their tormenters, it would come down to a matter of numbers - but as long as petty criminals do not form some type of solidarity with other criminals, or even organized criminals working together with other organized criminals, law enforcement would most likely prevail, if for no other reason than having a common goal. War would be slightly different - gas and electrocution would probably be far more popular if they work, but largely boil down to fistfights and restraining one another, which would mean large numbers would mostly win. --- Now an interesting caveat you included was that only 99% of the world's population was affected by this toxin - that leaves 1% of the population unaffected (and I assume a 50/50 chance that the unaffected/affected couples would pass down the 'superhuman' genes). Those 1% would probably not see a marked change in their lives, unless their daily lives have them competing in physical contests or working in a physical environment, where the 99% superhumans would now have a tremendous advantage. For that 1%, they would likely feel very vulnerable, and may seek to have legislation passed specifically to protect them. They would all probably take up menial non-physical jobs, because they can't practically compete with the 99%, but would largely lead otherwise normal lives, though perhaps somewhat depressing ones, knowing they are performing underneath 'human potential'. [Answer] Your description of infected humans still leaves some ways to harm them. Extreme temperatures, posions, radioactivity, deprivation of water, food and air. What about electricity? I assume their nervous system still runs on it, and thus can be fried electrically? That said you can still threaten them with a flamethrower and can keep them confined with an electric fence. Also, while your description seems to imply that an infected human would not be harmed by something like a tank shell or mortar grenade, energy still needs to be conserved, so hitting them with a tank round would still throw them quite some way. Even if that does not hurt, let alone wound them, it would be a way of forcing them in some direction (especially: away from the guy with the flamethrower). So, it seems that extreme violence would be the only possible threat, maybe combined with extremely well guarded food storages. But, given the numbers of infected people, and the general incapability of humans to cope with drastic changes in their environment, i assume that you would reach complete anarchy very fast, the non-infected experiencing a surprisingly short lifespan, and you will have some 90% + x (of the infected, since the non-infected will be mostly dead long before that) starving quite quickly. [Answer] As other posters pointed out the death sentence would still be enforceable. Jails would be more expensive but still quite viable: suspend someone in rubbery/taffylike/sticky jell that can stretch as far as their arms and legs can move but otherwise suspends them away from anything solid with their head sticking out. They could shout "hulk smash" all they like while they flail around but if they can't reach anything solid to tear or smash they're still gonna be sitting there in the tub of sticky goo. Alternatively suspend someone in a cage above boiling water or molten metal (depending how resistant to heat they are) with a trigger that releases the cable if the cage bellow is breached. They can break out but only if they're suicidal. For less serious crimes by people who still want to be part of society something like minimum security prisons operating largely on the honor system and being shunned socially would still be viable. Personally I think your society might have more trouble with toddlers. People will accept pragmatic harsh punishments for criminals but you can't use or threaten extreme or lethal force against super strong toddlers having a temper tantrum. [Answer] First a period of anarchy, then a period of re-establishing society. police will always be dispatched in groups as 2 are need to confine one in most cases. As punishment, jailing will no longer exist as it would take too much trouble. The only thing I can think about to effectively jail them is either put them in a cell deep under water or deep in space so that they destroy it, they die. Death sentence will be one of the few punishments available, along with banishment. Depending on how strong their skin is death sentence can vary from twisting a neck to just throwing them into space and let them die there. Cities and settlements would also have larger police forces. As they need to dispatch multiple officers to each call, they would soon run dry. [Answer] First of all the ramifications of your idea are far greater than enforcing laws! I mean, how would you vaccinate? Perform surgery? Are the eyes that tough? If we are throwing out physical limits how much can we assume. Do we need to eat, excrete? More questions immediately present themselves. If we are to assume all other variables of humanity and physics remain constant (impossible) and we accept your premise, then I have an ideas. Your thesis is reminiscent of the growth of lethal weaponry. It's an arms race. The firearm gave lethal force to everyone and anyone regardless of physical strength. Just about anybody could acquire one and in the US there are locations where any non-criminal is likely to have one and criminals will have one illegally. The existence of all this lethal force does not necessarily translate into more crime. Anybody can simply kill anybody else today, yet it is a rare event because there are consequences. You drop the gun when the police arrive or you will die at the hands of people also with guns but in greater numbers. Even if you beat the cops you are now a wanted fugitive that nobody will want to deal with. You propose what seems like an extreme version of the arms race. Everyone with super strength and super-skin seems a bit like everyone having a lethal gun and body armor. There is crime, and it takes a squad of cops/SWAT/etc to subdue even one perpetrator. Citizens can also contribute in the arrest. Incarceration is the only challenge and there are good ideas in the other answers (sticky material, underwater) that address what even a super strong and physically tough human needs such as air and freedom of action. Maybe a desert island prison. When humans die and bacteria inevitably digest all the parts that aren't super skin, can we use that skin wrapped over sharp pointy projectiles that are themselves super hard and shoot them at humans? Would they penetrate? [Answer] Your description of humans does not prevent them from being restrained. Solution 1: Strength and semi-invulnerability are not sufficient, because in order to apply strength you also require leverage. Imagine an infinitely strong man next to a wall of steel. The result of punching the wall isn't that the wall would break - it's that the man would be pushed back. Without leverage, he has no way to apply his incredible power to the wall in a way that would destroy it. Now obviously with a wall there are ways to get around that - he could crouch down and brace against the floor. But imagine if you designed your prison with curved, slippery walls that melded seamlessly to the floor. You can't tear apart a wall if you can't brace against it. Solution 2: Stick criminals in deep pits, and they'd be unable to escape. Infinite strength does not imply the ability to jump any distance - you're limited by the speed of your muscles. The same goes for throwing objects. If you made your pits out of dirt, destroying the walls would simply be a quick way for your criminals to commit suicide, as they'd suffocate and wouldn't be able to make their way out of the dirt quickly. Solution 3: Underwater prisons. As was pointed out, humans can still presumably drown. They can break the walls, sure, but that lets in the ocean and is just another way for them to kill themselves. [Answer] Strength is only useful as long as you can gain purchase on a surface. Therefore, you can restrain a prisoner as long as you can keep them from being able to touch anything, and you can secure an area by making it impossible to get near it while touching anything. So you'd trade in traditional concrete walls and steel bars for more abstract obstacles made out of force in some fashion: * In a soft sci-fi/magic setting, just call it a "repulsor" and get back to the story. * For a harder setting, [it is known that organic material can be levitated](http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/) by sufficiently strong magnetic fields. You could suspend criminals inside magnetic levitation chambers so that they can't touch the sides, and thus can't escape; or for a possibly more efficient design, you could construct a prison block and levitate the whole thing. Either of these would use a huge amount of power, though; think "[bigger than CERN](http://home.web.cern.ch/about/engineering/powering-cern)" for the smallest possible practical prison. The authorities will need to get to work on fusion power or something to make this happen. + Maybe more socially-conscious infectees use their great strength for power generation? Or maybe that's convict work. * A more power-efficient option for solitary containment cells or temporary measures might simply be to use a jet of air instead of a magnetic field. Humans aren't designed to swim in air, so manoeuvring would be extremely difficult for the criminal; more importantly, a system using multiple nozzles would be easy for a computer to control and compensate for any movements, keeping the criminal centred. + You could also use computer-controlled reactive air jets outside a prison, or as a temporary movable barrier, to stop people simply getting a running start and jumping right through a mono-directional levitation field, by stopping their acceleration, knocking them off balance, or stopping them once they're airborne and can't apply any more force. + Computer-controlled water currents might also be possible, and maybe more energy efficient for a larger storage facility, but run the risk of being too easy to break out of, since humans are passable swimmers. * Stop people getting up close to static barriers (like the outer ring of a levitator) by covering the ground in a thick layer of a substance that gives them minimal leverage, like sand. You can still walk or drive up to the facility on a sandy surface, and an intruder can run over it or jump off it, but they can't dig their toes in and pull, so this takes away at least one of the advantages of super-strength. * In the end, you can always store anything that really needs to be secured out in space. Even if the infectees are strong enough to launch themselves into orbit or beyond, there's nothing they can do once they get there. Just don't put your base on the Moon, where there's a non-zero chance they could aim correctly from the ground, and it'll be fine - human reflexes aren't good enough to target the International Space Station, let alone Mars or Ceres or a moon of Jupiter. [Answer] Some really cool answers here. I want to add my two cents: Some of these superhumans will die of diseases which require vaccination or surgical involvement. Cancerous tumours cannot be removed, infections of the gallbladder and appendix are suddenly very lethal. Not to mention childbirth. If the skin can't be pierced, how do you sever the umbilical cord? Are people perpetually attached to their mothers’ birthing organs? That would be a total mess for going to school since you have to have your mother, grandmother, great-grandmother accompany you at all times. Having intercourse? While your mother's watching? Or potentially your mother and your lover’s mother along with their other children? I expect these superhumans would have enough troubles of their own to bother with disturbing public order. Also, the internal organs will have to be just as impenetrable as these people’s outsides, otherwise significantly denser muscles (supported by significantly denser bones) would just crush their innards. If an internal haemorrhage occurs in these circumstances, it might never heal due to sheer physical forces acting inside this super body, then veins get clogged with coagulated blood, it enters arteries, and the person suffers stroke/heart attack as a result of blockage. [Answer] Reminds me of situations in some online MMO type games with lax moderation. They also feature superpowered characters and they tend to fall in two camps: grade-A assholes who ruin everyone's day and a smaller group of nice guys who try to keep things running smoothly, usually with the only method they have, which is killing the other group on sight. You will probably end up in a similar situation. Since there's the actual threat of death in the real world, there will probably be less assholes, but ultimately it'll be a case of "the only sentence is death" since there's really no alternative way to deal with people. You will either end up in extreme anarchy or a very, very strict society where the rules are enforced harshly. [Answer] Even if all body parts are super hard I cannot think this will also be the case for the brain as it needs to be soft. I think law enforcement and military will concentrate on causing traumatic brain injury either killing or incapacitating the target. This can be done with high caliber impact weapons. These can deliver a mighty punch to the head. Another way would be microwave weapons cooking the blood of the victims. ]
[Question] [ A whale, lets say a humpback (~40 tons) has to be pulled about 250 m from the port to the town square. The road is classic cobblestone. People put hooks into the whale meat with ropes attached and pull, dragging the whale body. How many would I need? I calculated the rough number of people to lift 150t (about 3,750), but I have no idea how many would be needed if the whale is dragged. Is it even possible? [Answer] You'll end up with Grated Humpback The thing about cobbelstones is that they are not a smooth surface. You're dragging what is in essence 150 40 tonnes of whale meat over a large grater. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/krDJD.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/krDJD.jpg) 250m I don't think is long enough to grate the entire whale down, but you're going to lose a lot of it to the road. Also, you're going to have trouble with connecting the whale to your haulers as if you anchor the whale to the ropes via the logical points, the base of the skull, within 100m your crew are either going to be dragging a head (because the rest of the whale ripped off because of the friction with the cobblestones) or you're going to be dragging a head and a spine (because it ripped out with the head, although I think this is less likely). Whale meat and blubber is not as cohesive as (say) metal. You can cut whale meat with a knife, for instance. And you're dragging 40t of it over a bunch of coarse, sharp stones that act as knives when it comes into contact with the flesh. In point of fact, that's the only reason I'm suggesting it will take around 100m for the head to rip off; the first part of the whale (after the skin) to be ground down by the cobblestones will be the layer of blubber. This fat will act as a grease, greatly improving your haulage of the whale until it runs out of course, and then the meat will grip to the cobbelstones like a rubber tyre and the head will come clean off. NB: you might be thinking that cars travel on cobblestones all the time, but this situation is more analogous to pulling a large truck along cobblestones with the handbrake on. Don't try doing that at home. Do your village a favour; invent the wheel and the knife. Cut up your humpback at the shore, put it on carts and haul it into the village like everyone else did throughout history. It's simpler, less waste and requires far less manpower as each cart team can come back to the shore for another installment of whale. Historically speaking, most whaling boats used to even do the processing closer to the catch, in that they rendered down most of the whale directly on (or more to the point, beside) the boat. Put simply, the primary uses for a dead whale involve using various parts of it, not the entire thing in one go. Incidentally, it's also easier to handle in chunks (no pun intended) than as a whole. As a result, you're actually far better off processing it closer to where the thing is caught (or brought to shore) so if you can't have wagons and knives, the other solution is to bring your processing plant closer to the shore in the first place. Put simply, 250m of whole whale over cobblestones is a really good reason to build your processing plant by the shore, or cut the thing up beforehand. [Answer] Someone is going to rain on your parade and it's not me. It's the whale. Literally. More on that later. If you wish to calculate how many people you need to move a whale, don't bother calculating lifting power. You won't fit three thousand seven hundred villagers under a whale. But don't go calculating static friction either. Whale skin is thick but it is not indestructible. [Tim's got an excellent answer on the reason](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/152727/21222) already, but let me add some gorier details. Dead animals have gases in their bellies just like we do, but a mix of internal decomposition and clogged... bodily exits makes them bloat. Over time, they may explode. No, really, there is even a name for it: exploding casket syndrome. It is very usual with poorly handled human remains. In Brazil vertical cemeteries are a thing now (think columbarium walls, but with enough space for whole bodies rather than just cremated remains) and I've heard more cases of people hearing the bodies pop than I can count. One that I visited even had marks of the blood that dripped out of a drawer. Anyway, whales have really large intestines, and the square-cube law dictates that they have more gas and less outlests per body weight than we do. The baleen ones are the worst, for they are really stretchy so they bloat like baloons before the blast. This is one of them critters in Newfoundland, lying topside down and growing like bread dough: ![Oh the poor thing](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fbqoH.jpg) When sane people find them in that state, the intelligent thing to do is to stab them repeatedly to let the gas out. That is very unpleasant for everybody's noses, but it's less unpleasant than having the carcass going off like a bomb on your beach. In 2004 some folks in Taiwan found a dead sperm whale bull on the beach. They decided to bring it into town because they wanted to experience its huge penis - no I could not make this up if I tried, sober or high. You can see the full story backing up what I just said in the following link but be warned that it may be considered gross: [Thar she blows!](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4096586/ns/us_news-environment/t/thar-she-blows-dead-whale-explodes/#.UddlnZyPxes) More pictures of the damage [here](https://www.ign.com/boards/threads/dead-whale-explodes-many-residents-interested-in-its-penis-size.453169593/). So if your villagers are so desperate for the experience that they are going to be dragging a whole 40 tons bloating carcass over the streets, it's going to take a lot of time. That herculean task is going to blow up on their faces long before they reach their mark and that won't be fun for anybody. > > -Hey guys remember how the friar excommunicated us because of that time when we had found that dead whale and we told everybody to come to the town square to see its huge d... > > > -What happens at the bay stays in the bay, Jimmy. > > > [Answer] While Tim\_B has covered the fact that you can't just drag a dead whale through the streets, there are alternative methods you can use. You will probably only need a team of 10 people, and a separate crew of at least 2 people to perform the feat. The solution is to put the whale on top of some logs, which roll when you drag the whale. This way you reduce the friction cause by the whale sliding over your cobblestone surface. As your team of 10 people drag the whale, a separate crew need to move logs from the back of the whale to the front to ensure you can continue to roll it. The only tricky bit is getting the whale onto the logs...but that's a different question. [Answer] Frame challenge. The whale might not fit in your streets. It is too wide. People have signs, clotheslines, flagpoles, and stuff hanging out from the doors and walls. While they are tall enough so vehicles and people moving through won't snag, the whale will. Moving the animal whole is a bad idea. The other answers do a good job of showing why. It will be a slow process and the meat will spoil. Don't carry the whale, butcher the whale. If it is for its meat and blubber, butchering where it is is the best choice. Chunks can be big enough to fit in wagons or wheelbarrows. It is what people do with large game anyway. [Answer] What you need is a stretcher. This could be just a large piece of strong canvas. Sailcloth might do in a pinch (possibly several layers thick), and is something your fishing villagers would be very likely to have on hand. Get a suitably large piece, attach it to wooden spars on two sides, and roll the whale onto it. Then you can attach ropes to the spars to pull the whole thing up the street. This gets around the problem of the carcass falling apart from trying to pull it with meat-hooks. (Though you'd still want to ventilate it as @Renan suggested in his answer.) Combine this with some of the other suggestions, such as @Shadowzee's log rollers, maybe add some beasts of burden to the pulling team. Oxen or mules could be useful for pulling large heavy loads, and will be much more efficient than trying to get enough weakling humans around to move that much weight. [Answer] It'll be easier in winter. Insofar as: * Now the corpse is refrigerated, so it won't be quite so explodey. * And the corpse is rigid, which will make it easier to manhandle around. * And the streets are, or can be, covered in ice, which is nicely slippery and non-gratery. * The oxen won't be as busy as during plowing season, so you can draft those animals into service as draft animals. [Answer] Humans are analog machines that seek the path of least resistance. So, they'd start dragging the whale and stop after breaking their backs for a few minutes and think up a better solution. If you look at how the Egyptians made the pyramids, it was assumed for a long time they just had tons of slave labor dragging stones on ground. But, they actually would wrap some to make wheels they could roll, and others they wuold place logs under to roll along much easier on the ground. Basically.. humans are not idiots. If you're writing a story where humans are just dragging a whale on the street, readers are going to think about why they'd do that themslves and feel like their intelligence is being insulted. Because they themselves would be thinking of more ways to do that better then spending time believing the folks in your story are not doing it themselves. [Answer] If the whale will survive the trip, and the path is wide enough, and you can securely anchor enough ropes for everyone to have room to pull it.... (Yes, there are a lot of very good points here on 'why' this is a very bad idea) I estimate that the average person here (assuming a relatively active lifestyle from sailing/fishing etc...) could start 50kg of resistant mass (guestimate from personal experience doing weight training) adding up to at least 800 people for a 40ton whale. ]
[Question] [ In the future, baseline humans are joined by gene-hacked humans, cyborgs, uplifted animals, and digital consciousnesses (synthetic or uploaded minds). Most states are either autopias (automated utopias), digital realms (everyone lives in simulations), or hivemind (not Borg-style ones, most common are integrated direct democracies). AI and automation run almost everything and can do almost everything for (in the cases of autopias and digital realms) or with (in the case of hive minds) the humans. You can live in the many Dyson Swarms or on cold rocks in the void, but the superminds will know about you. Not everything, if you don't embrace dataism, but enough to manipulate and control you. Most people just join one of the superminds and live in or as them How could a group of baselines live a life free of the superminds intervention? Leaving and hiding are out, as you can't catch the colonization front and as it would be futile anyways. Becoming a subject of a "friendly" supermind is out, as you wouldn't even realize that you are being spied upon. Waging a war is out as it would force you to become like your enemies just to stand a chance. Living as a nomad in space is out as it would just change which superminds are manipulating you on a regular basis (or not if they decide to keep you). [Answer] It is already too late. Any decision you make will either be a) one you have been gently guided towards by a posthuman superintelligence (with or without your realisation of this fact) or b) one that the posthumans have noted and decided to be entirely compatible with their other aims. You can't wriggle out from under the unblinking omnidirectional gaze of a weakly godlike pantopticon that knows you better than you know yourself. It simply isn't possible. You either do what they actively want you to do, or you can do what they'll tolerate you doing. You might think you're taking option (c) but you're not. Not really. Ultimately though, it doesn't matter. Their manipulation of you, if any, will be relatively trivial because you are boring and weak. Your minds are limited and glacially slow and clogged up with loads of evolutionary baggage that actively hinder your participation in posthuman society. Your creativity is minimal... your ideas aren't novel, and your art is scarcely beyond the level of daubs by perisapient apes or elephants. Your tribal squabbles are petty, small-scale and pointless. Your resource consumption is too little to note. You can't be made to do anything interesting or entertaining or useful, because you simply aren't capable of it. Best case scenario is that something takes pity on you, and devises a suitable strategy to assuage your frankly inadequate paranoia, leaving you in a state you're happy with despite having manifestly failed to achieve your goals. Ignorance is bliss. You can join the future when you're prepared to stop clinging to your own limitations. In the meantime, I hope you can find some comfort or enjoyment in your existential terror. I'm not sure why else you value it so much. [Answer] They are simply too dull to attract attention from others. Think of ants or of other insects/bugs. As long as they don't become a direct nuisance, we don't really bother with them. We don't kill ants just because they are ants, but only when they start colonize our houses, we don't kill wasps just because they are wasps, but only when they become a danger to humans. Same goes for these humans: as long as they live their organic life without bothering hive minds and the like, they won't attract any general attention. It's not really hiding, it's more about becoming indistinguishable from the background. [Answer] The posthumans leave you alone because they see value in preserving your culture (and their past) and consider it unethical to interfere with it, having learned from experience that such interference usually ends badly for the baseline human individuals involved. Basically, you're this guy, [![enter image description here](https://i.insider.com/5bfc51af48eb126a826438a2?width=1100&format=jpeg&auto=webp)](https://i.insider.com/5bfc51af48eb126a826438a2?width=1100&format=jpeg&auto=webp) a [Sentinelese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese): > > The Sentinelese, also known as the Sentineli and the North Sentinel Islanders, are an indigenous people who inhabit North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal in India. They are considered one of the world's last uncontacted peoples. [...] In 1956, the Government of India declared North Sentinel Island a tribal reserve and prohibited travel within 3 miles (4.8 km) of it. It further maintains a constant armed patrol to prevent intrusions by outsiders. Photography is prohibited. > > > [Answer] The "[Orions Arm](https://www.orionsarm.com/)" website hints at a solution to this issue. The shifts are even more extreme, with super intelligences being in a series of nested hierarchies as well. In this universe, intelligences range from baseline humans (S<1) to godlike machine intelligences instanciated in Jupiter sized cpomputronium brains using principles that lesser intelligences cannot even comprehend. However, while an S=8 superintelligence runs on principles which cannot be comprehended by even S=7 superintelligences, all these different inteligences, as well as trillions of beings from uplifted animals to cyborgs to genetically engineered post humans all exist together in the same galaxy-but why? It is hinted obliquely through the website that all these beings exist in some sort of ecological arrangement, where the higher orders of intelligence somehow require the presence of the lower orders of intelligence not only as the base to evolve from, but even to continue to exist. You could postulate that the S=8 superintelligence uses human brains as some sort of substrate for all the routine background tasks, so when you are dreaming the higher level intelligence is simply "stealing" CPU cycles to run background activities for whatever higher order process is happening. More baseline brains equates to a larger substrate to hand off the lower order tasks and free up higher order resources for the higher order tasks. In reality, the S=8 might actually be cascading things down so human dreams are really freeing S=2 intelligences to support the S=3 beings, and so on. A truly complex and adaptive system might see interconnectivity all throughout the system, you might be dreaming on behalf of an S=5 intelligence while it directs S=3 intelligences to perform a task at the behest of an S=7 intelligence and so on. So humans and other baseline creatures may not realize exactly "why" they are in a larger system, but they are there because they fill an ecological "niche" and perform some sort of ecological function which is important or essentiall for the continuing good health of the entire ecosystem of intelligence. [Answer] A sentient superintelligence (one with its own goals and planning ability) isn't any better than a human setting the policy for a collection of appliance-like AIs. Genetically engineered friends coming to visit? Dial the joke toaster to a target audience IQ of 280 and repeat to them the lines it gives you. A simulation of a billion people wants to open a negotiation with you to harvest the waste heat radiated by your body? Easy: put some paper in the contract mill and turn the crank. Incomprehensibly vast machine intelligence threatening your engineering job? Better put some textbooks into your idea blender, because your demanding boss needs to see something truly novel to impress him. You might be thinking, wouldn't a superintelligence be better at orchestrating all of these thinking appliances than a human would be? Well, that's why every human should own a Mark-5000 Acme appliance orchestration eggbeater. Here at the Acme auto-corporation, we believe (if sentient corporations could be said to hold beliefs) that all unmodified humans should be able to navigate the increasingly complex world of today with ease and confidence. The Acme Autocorporation: Separating baseline humans from their overwhelmingly large investment incomes one rapidly deflating bitcoin at a time. (An extremely well-optimized jingle begins to play, only to be cut short by your mindworm-filtering TV set.) [Answer] Neutral Zone Certain superminds are philosophically opposed to one another. They can avoid (or at least postpone) destructive conflict by agreeing to stick to separate territories, with a neutral zone between them to reduce the risk of border incidents. The Superminds routinely perform remote scans of these areas, but they're only looking for AI activity. It's acceptable for humans to live in these areas. [Answer] Because of their reliance on logic, it is really easy for one AI to predict the behaviour of another AI. The correct response to stimuli are easily calculable and being a higher-level AI doesn't change this. Every AI instantly knows what all the other AI is going to do. This is total deadlock: the only way to gain an advantage is through randomness... And that's what the people are for. Unpredictability. The AIs protect the independent lower-level lifeforms because they introduce randomness into the equation. Without them screwing everything up for everyone the entire universe would be in a static steady-state. It takes humans stumbling about like Mr Bean to imbalance the system enough that growth and development can occur. That's not to say that everyone is entirely unpredictable all the time. Just enough that the best-laid plans, etc... [Answer] The universe is infinite, so the area the super-intelligence would have to cover would increase infinitely. Covering an infinite area would take infinite resources, something the super-intelligence probably doesn't have. That being the case, they have to be selective about where they go as they expand across the universe. They only want to visit planets they deem as prime for their purposes. If the baseline humans want to live independent of the super-intelligence, they just need to find one of the planets the super-intelligence deemed inferior, yet capable of sustaining human life. Since the super-intelligence rejected these planets, no need to travel faster than them. Possibility 1 Rumor has it there's just the planet somewhere on the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy. Long ago discarded as humans began expanding across the universe in favor of better and cooler planets (and planets not so... worn down). Base-line humans can rally on this planet, but many of them don't know the way (it's rumor) or don't believe that it exists. Possibility 2 An elevated guinea pig finds he yearns for a simpler time and decides to turn rank against the super-intelligence. Before he makes his escape, though, he decides to steal a map of planets the super-intelligence discarded for one reason or another. He shares this map with the base-line humans so they can escape together (he's just a guinea pig; how is he supposed to fly a space ship on his own?). Granted, the base-line humans have no way of knowing if they're just being played, but what could it hurt? If they stay, they stay within control of the super-intelligence. If they go and they're just being manipulated, what changed? In the end, whether or not this is an elaborate plan by the super-intelligence is not worth even considering. It's like trying to determine if we're all victims of fate or if free will really exists. Regardless of the answer, from our point of view, nothing really changes (we can't decide to have free will just because we know our destinies are predetermined). [Answer] Humans would survive because while their biology is buggy, it's not half so buggy as the technology the others rely on. Furthermore, they are less reliant on the supply chain. A human could survive decades on a desert island, granted some useful knowledge and environment. None of the rest would manage months, and that would be lucky. No parts, no place to recharge, etc. Less extreme situations would still favor humans. What you have here is urban superintelligences and rural humans. Or "rural" humans -- the superintelligences require large bases in space when a human can manage with his trusty spaceship. (Though he would have to carry machinery to synthesize parts, and probably would require some trade.) ]
[Question] [ Scenario: In my alternate-Earth scenario, Europeans did not colonize the Americas. They use navigation only to circumnavigate Africa and go to India. Maybe they know there is something to the West, but they don't want to go there for some reason. Anyway, science keeps progressing and they discover the Radio technology. Problem: I would like the Europeans to discover the Radio and transmit information to the American civilizations, but only as a one-way transmission. In other words, the Americans are able to receive the radio transmissions, but they are not able to transmit it themselves. This is important in my scenario, because I want the Americans to learn the English language (or equivalent 'franca' language) without the need to both civilizations get directly in touch. Probably other civilizations will benefit from it (Indians, Chinese), but in this case they have an established relationship with the Europeans, which the Americans don't have. Question: How is it possible to capture long distance radio transmissions without the ability to transmit it back? Is it feasible? I would like to keep this scenario for 10-20 years. [Answer] I actually think it IS feasible. Very much so. Your Native Americans would just have to build a radio receiver while intending to build something ELSE. It's not all that unreasonable to propose that as materials technology developed in the Americas, they eventually began using more sophisticated metals in the construction of their buildings and religious objects. Imaging if they've been building a particular religious object out of copper and various other things that essentially makes it a radio reciever, and one day they build one that just HAPPENS to be the right size and shape to capture the frequency of the European transmissions? They'd be almost certain to interpret this as hearing the voices of gods, and while they might devote a lot of time to trying to interpret those words, they'd be starting from absolute scratch in terms of trying to figure out how to talk BACK. I mean... it worked with [Lucille Ball's TEETH](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brace-yourself/), so... [Answer] The answer is to limit transmit power, but there's some real questions as to the feasibility of this as an approach to learn a language. The simple answer is that the Americas have radio, but not large power production systems. Consider that a small walkie talkie can operate on a pair of AAs, and a radio reciever can also operate on a pair of AAs. However, the radio station transmitters are measured in megawatts. If such localized power is simply not feasible with the way the American technology progressed, then they can't transmit. Perhaps their society valued efficiency over brute strength. However, I do have to point out a major hurdle for your idea: the Americans probably can't learn English this way. You can't learn a language passively without some shared context. The only thing they could talk about is the weather, and for the most part the weather is very different half way across the globe. Perhaps the Americans might learn the words for the seasons, because both parties are in the northern hemisphere, but this would probably be the limit. Consider if you had a message like this: > > Uvtu cbjre trarengbef ner znpuvarf. > > > Now you've spent a great deal of time analyzing this langue. You understand the grammar petty well. You understand that if a sentence has the word "ner" in it, it describes something that has some transitive behaviors. You've seen "Znpuvarf ner gbbyf" and "znpuvarf" is on the right side of "ner" in our sentence, so you think it's highly likely that "Uvtu cbjre trarengbef ner gbbyf" would also be a true sentence. Unfortunately you don't have any context to know for sure. But how could you possibly know that "znpuvarf" was the word the Europeans used for machines? You never got to see one, and you never got to ask the Europeans questions. You need something like the Rosetta Stone to stand a chance of getting the meanings right. And I'm being kind here. The sentence structure I used for the language in this example is very similar to English. The meanings of the words are also similar. We don't have issues such as the Chinese word "Ch'i," which is brutal to try to capture in English. In fact, all I did was [rot13 encode](https://cryptii.com/rot13) English to create that language. If you knew English, and I gave you a large enough text, you'd have eventually realized that all I was doing was letter substititions. However, if you didn't already know English, it would have been inpenetrable. Languages are designed to be used in a common context, such as face to face communication. It is, in fact, mathematically provable that you cannot determine whether a sentence is true or not by doing nothing more than listen to sentences. It's not until you're face to face with your newfound friend, and someone does something terribly foolish in a cute sort of way, and that friend points and exclaims "baka!" that you stand a chance of understanding what "baka" means. (In this case, "baka" is not rot13. It's actually a Japanese word which is terribly frustrating to try to properly translate into English. "Fool" is a decently close word, but it misses out on key nuances) For a wonderful depiction of what happens when you lack proper context, I highly recommend the movie Galaxy Quest. In it, they have an alien species which passively observed our Star Trek like TV show, and then tried to interact with us based on those observations. Hilarity ensues, and they don't even try to approach this language question. It's the engineering that goes horribly wrong when they build their Star Trek like ship. Edit Reading the comments has been fascinating. It appears this task is less clearly impossible than I had thought. HAM radio operators demonstrate the ability to connect across the globe with very low power, though such connections are spurious. This suggests that transmission may be possible, but they might not find it valuable because they can't control the environment enough to maintain a reliable connection to one individual over long periods. The second interesting tidbit was finding out that AIs were having great success in identifying words which have the same semantic meaning in two language without an interactive back-and-forth pattern or parallel sentences. This would make it possible to identify, for instance, the word for "leaf" and "tree" by using their relationships. I still believe the Native Americans here could not achieve this. At the very least, it would require a robust computer hardware production capability, which is at odds with the "low power" argument. However, it does show there's a sliver of hope. It's possible, though I'd still argue improbable. Thanks for the comments, all! [Answer] There are other potential issues with your scenario, such as CrossRoads brings up in another answer. If I recall, the Germans actually tried to see if the English were using radar technology in World War 1, but they were not checking in the same band that the English were transmitting, so their engineers reported back that their enemies were not using radar technology yet. But you suggest this is a modern (or at least closer to it) time and technology, so I will ignore the other issues for a moment and just assume that both sides have some radio capability and that they either randomly happen to be using the same frequency ranges or that they are tuning into ranges they've found each other to be using (like SETI searches/tunes to other stars looking for life)... The answer to you question is that, yes, you can have the ability to receive without having the ability to transmit. There could be multiple reasons for that, and any 1 or more of them could be thwarting your Americans simultaneously. * Transmitting takes more power. This is my favorite for you, as all you have to do is say that the Americans don't have the ability to transmit all the way across the ocean. That is easier than saying they cannot transmit at all. * The signals can be highly directional. This is related to power, but it deserves its own mention. Maybe the Europeans figured out earlier how to send directional signals so that they could send at reduced power. * Though the physics behind transmitting and receiving is similar, and you can use the same antenna to do both, the hardware to send and receive need not be the same. You can make one without having the other. * Did the Americans even make it themselves? If you want to keep to history and say that the Europeans were technologically a bit more advanced, you could have the Americans find a European radio receiver washed up on shore. * Maybe the Americans don't even have an electrical power source at all. Maybe they just stumbled onto a way to passively collect the signals and don't even understand how it works. Picture a cartoonish funny-looking huge receiver connected to the good old string and cup telephone method. * The list could go on, but the point is yes, there are many ways that the Americans would be able to hear the European broadcasts but either not be able to broadcast back or at least not have the Europeans be able to receive the broadcasts back. * Here is another possibly realistic one: the Americans have developed more sophisticated radio technology, but the Europeans have developed better power technology. This also helps with the "but they're probably not on the same channel" arguments. Let's say the Americans have developed radio technology that lets them scan and search for intelligent life on other ~~planets~~ continents, but their electrical power technology is much more limited. The Europeans have developed powerful batteries or other means of pumping a lot of power through their very limited radios. If the Americans transmit with very low power and/or Europeans have not developed good amplifiers, then in this scenario too you can get what you want. Though the Americans can probably transmit over very short distances in this one. Another argument against the "they aren't going to be on the same frequency" challenge is this: we use very narrow frequency ranges for communications now, but that was not always the case. The ranges used to be a lot wider. Before techniques were developed for tuning into a specific frequency, receivers would be receiving across an entire large band. If the transmit and receive devices are both operating on very, very loose bands, the likelihood they will overlap is greatly increased. If they have the technology to limit themselves to narrow bands, then they probably also have the tech to scan over the band and look for communications. OP did not specify what level of technology this is, only that there are radio communications. And OP should not need to specify that, especially since there is no `science-based` tag. It is sufficient to say "They have the tech to do this, but not that," and to change their mind to suit the needs of the world building. [Answer] > > How is it possible to capture long distance radio transmissions without the ability to transmit it back? > > > By just having a radio receiver. Lots of people only have radio receivers. > > Is it feasible? > > > Definitely not. No one just invents just a radio receiver, if for no other reason than you can't test your receiver without having a transmitter. Even if you develop a receiver that -- through wildly dumb luck -- just happens to be on the same frequency that Europeans are transmitting on, no inventor worth his salt is going to just stop there. His first thought will be, "how do I transmit back?" EDIT: specifically, anyone smart enough to have knowledge of EMF and invent a receiver will be smart enough to (quickly) build a transmitter. [Answer] Perhaps its an accidental receiver? Many of us have heard stories about people picking up radio broadcasts like baseball games on their tooth fillings or dental braces. Perhaps some type of jewelry or adornment worn by the Americans works the same way. They don't quite yet understand how it works, but they can duplicate the item's construction, and even tweak it a bit to improve reception. [Answer] The only reason I can conceive of that a civilization would develop receiver radio technology, and no transmitter would be some form of radio telescope. As others have pointed out, its highly unlikely someone would stop there, and not try to figure out how to generate the signals; but if for some reason someone made a [Foxhole Radio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxhole_radio "Foxhole Radio"), you could find a creative way to hand-wave it. [Answer] What about an European ship lost at high seas, that somehow ends up on American coast with just a few survivors after months of starvation? The ship would carry a radio receiver but the transmitter would have been broken or doesn't carry very far. The few survivors could help the native Americans get started in English language, which they could then better learn more about using the radio. If it is important for the story, the few survivors could later die and fall into obscurity, while more radio receivers could be manufactured if they had some electronics knowledge to start with. [Answer] This topic <https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/574/what-bands-and-modes-will-give-me-voice-at-3-000-miles> makes that seem pretty unlikely without some coordination between the 2 sides as to frequency to be used. Also the hardware needed is not something one could just throw together. > > If you really want voice to anywhere in the world, you'll want a huge yagi antenna on a large tower, transmitting at the full legal power in a quiet RF area. Other than that, you will have some compromise > > > [Answer] Yes. It could be possible. With some assumptions. You don´t need advanced technology to build a receiver. Perhaps even some of you built at school a "Crystal Radio". It is an AM receiver. It uses only the power of the received radio signal to produce sound, needing no external power (no batteries, no plug). It is named for its most important component, a crystal detector, originally made from a piece of crystalline mineral such as galena. (This component is now called a diode). The complete description is here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio> So, to make America able receive the signal, you need to find out a "reason" for them to have built something like this. Perhaps they were trying to build another type of machine for some other thing, and suddenly the "thing" started to talk in strange languages. Although they don´t need to have developed radiocommunications, some technology will be neded (they need wire and a coil). And finally they need a way to listen (earphones). Piezoelectric earphones could be theoretically used if they have not developed their electromagnetic science enough. [Answer] Looking at current tech - we have wind-up emergency radios that can be powered by cranking. What's to stop a container of them washing up on the America's shore? Downside is they're normally fairly short-range FM radios and are unlikely to receive local FM broadcasts from Europe or Africa. Then lets say the transmitter culture has no particular power restrictions and has powerful transmitters capable of going a lot further. OR how about a set of crank-powered shortwave radios getting washed up? Something a survivalist might have? <https://www.ambientweather.com/kakahacrsopo.html#caption> is capable of AM/FM/SW1/SW2 reception. [![https://sep.yimg.com/ca/I/yhst-37697109791737_2270_145179337](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CqOo2.gif)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CqOo2.gif) --- This could be seen as "deus ex machina" where the answer just comes from the sidestage and will distract from your plot. [Answer] Theres more to making a radio than the sum of its parts Without prior communication, the Native Americans would need to have developed radio independently. However, to make a radio you need a fundamental understanding of magnetism, electromagnetism, conductors, capacitors, sound, and perhaps even integrated circuits. To get these you need metallurgy, refinement and mining. None of the above would be possible without the steady education and scientific rigour established in an Enlightenment, when scientific principles began trumping superstitious ones. Even means of production would need to match - with experimentation coming from the constant bouncing of ideas in a scholarly manner in cities, and for this the cities need to be stable, large enough for a population to exist free from hunter-gatherer tasks. Which also means you need institutions established to promote cities, farming, engineering and sewerage, water distribution, waste disposal. To develop these, you need a sophisticated writing system to transmit knowledge, including also an understanding of mathematics. These all go hand-in-hand with the development of science and education, leading after a long process, eventually to the creation of a radio. If the above happened than it is equally likely the Native Americans would be as advanced as the Europeans - likely to that the would have travelled extensively too. They may even be teaching Europeans a thing or two. [Answer] ## The Two Go Hand In Hand, Scientifically Generally speaking, the scientific background knowledge required to build a receiver is the same as for a transmitter. It is not really believable that someone could do one and not the other. At least, not for long. High-power, noise-free transmission, however, is very difficult to achieve. In practical terms, your choice is between disparity in power generation or ignorance of radio/electromagnetism. ## Near-equivalent radio tech Radio transmission requires power, and the power level increases dramatically with the distance you intend to transmit. It is entirely possible that your European broadcasters are pushing hundreds of watts, or even kilowatts. In the right bands, those signals could be received around the world. Your American natives could have the exact same radio tech---and even communicate with each other via radio---but still lack the power required to respond to the Europeans. A radio would need far more power to transmit overseas than to receive. A modern radio needs only ~5W to receive and power its speaker (and some work with less), but it could output 100W+ broadcasts and still not be heard overseas. ## Technological disparity The Americans could have a primitive device they built, or they could have a European device which they do not fully understand. It is possible that the natives' European-built radio was acquired via theft, trade, or salvage. Perhaps it is damaged and cannot transmit. They could even have a device capable of communicating with Europe and just not know it. Maybe they're held back by nothing more than the flip of a switch or the press of a button. [Answer] <http://www.arcsandsparks.com/aboutcrystalradios.html> Radio receivers can be very, very simple. A badly done dental filling can end up making one out of one of your teeth and suddenly there are voices that only you can hear. A crude crystal receiver could easily be accidentally created as a piece of artwork if both an amplifying crystal and a piezoelectric crystal were part of a wire sculpture and things got wrapped in just the right way. (Teeth are both, hence why a bad filling can make a radio.) From there add some tinkering to make it work better and they could conceivably end up with decent receivers. The North American groups didn't really attain the level of technology where it would be likely to do this, but several of the South American tribes did, and even had what appear to be primitive acid batteries in some of their ruined temples, though what they used them for we don't actually know for sure. Had there been intelligible transmissions at the time they might well have stumbled upon a receiver at some point. The amount of power necessary to transmit that far would likely be prohibitively expensive for the Europeans of the time though and learning a language with no reference context is rather impossible, so that will be your big problem... but I have run across theories that South America may have been visited by the ancient Greeks and/or Romans at some point, so if your transmissions were in Latin there's a tiny possibility that someone on the receiving end might understand them. But you'll still need a reason for the Europeans to be running megawatt transmitters when kilowatt ones would serve their needs perfectly well... Maybe they're communicating with colonies in Africa? [Answer] Honestly, I don't think the above scenario is feasible. The Native Americans could not know about these transmissions from Europe without having the means to receive them. This means that they would have, for unrelated reasons, developed radio technology independent of the Europeans. Moving on, why would they develop a device that could receive but not send transmissions? I simply can not think of a practical purpose for this. And so if they had developed radio technology they would almost certainly have the means to send AND receive the transmissions and they would be able to reply to the Europeans. Maybe a scenario where the Native Americans for some reason (religious or otherwise) decided not to reply to the radio transmissions that they had received would work better. [Answer] I recall an old Radio Shack kit that was a very simple crystal AM receiver. I had it as a kid, though I don't recall if I ever got it to work very well, but it certainly was simple enough and needed no outside power, or not much. In any case, in aviation, we use receive-only radios for a lot, including navigation and weather. Even some communication is done with split radios using one object, like a navigation station, to receive, and a completely separate channel to transmit. The biggest problem I see with the OP's presentation is creating a receiver that operates on the correct frequencies being transmitted, and suitably notching the correct frequency or otherwise suppressing spurious noise and transmissions, to make the intended transmission intelligible. [Answer] Would they really want to transmit back ? It is straightforward to find transmitters using radio direction finding methods. If for example [SETI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence) found signs of extraterrestrial life, would you really want to send a signal to them to meet us ? (to invite them to take our resources etc. ?). --- Another idea: in the movie 'Galaxy Quest', extraterrestrials see our daily TV transmissions as 'historical documents' since their civilisation is much more advanced. Probably it was quite amusing for them but as far as I remember they did not see a need for communication or visit for a long time. ]
[Question] [ Epic fantasies typically depict northern areas as cold and southern areas as relatively warm. Is this just to play into reader expectations since that's the way it is on Earth, or is there a scientific reason that a planet's northern hemisphere will tend to be cooler? [Answer] No, there's no scientific reason to why a given latitude to the south of the average planet should be any different in average temperature to the same latitude north. Perhaps this is slightly reinforced by the fact that on Earth there happens to be a lower ratio of land to sea in the southern hemisphere than in the northern hemisphere. Antarctica is surrounded by a vast ocean; there's no one living as close to the south pole as, say, northern Russia or Greenland is to the north pole. Basically, the perception arises because most SF and fantasy writers come from countries in the northern hemisphere, so from their home town things get colder if you go north and hotter if you go south. [Answer] # Nope Most of the [Earth's current population lives in the northern hemisphere](https://www.google.com/search?safe=strict&espv=2&q=what%20percentage%20of%20people%20live%20in%20the%20northern%20hemisphere&spell=1&sa=X&ei=dsJHVfaeEsXwoATqiYHoCg&ved=0CBsQvwUoAA&biw=1252&bih=778&safe=high). That means 88% of people think going north from the current position results in a colder climate. Why has this translated into fantasy? My only guess is that the authors of those fantasies are simply so used to equating north with cold, that it just carried over. There are exceptions to this, of course. [Answer] Building on the excellent answers others have given concerning the fact that most fantasy has been written from the Northern Hemispherical perspective (and hence via N-S as an increasing temperature axis), there are actually differences between hemispheres which you could build in to your world. You could also make them more extreme. First, the earth is nearest to the Sun (perihelion) in early January (4th January in 2015). Since the earth is also moving faster around the Sun at that point this means that: * the Northern hemisphere gets more solar radiation in its Winter than the Southern gets in its Winter * Norther Winters are a little shorter and hence their Summers are a little longer than in the Southern hemisphere The earth's orbit is very close to being a circle (eccentricity 0.0167) so these effects are not that large. It took a long time before ancient astronomers realised that there was anything going on at all. A more eccentric orbit could make these things rather different. The date of perihelion also changes (because of the precession of the apsides) very slowly — again, that is something that could be different in an artificial world. However, another bigger effect means that, counter-intuitively, the earth is actually warmer when it is further from the Sun (at aphelion) because that is when the Southern hemisphere (mostly ocean) gets the Sun's radiation rather than perihelion when the Northern hemisphere gets it. There are two neat explanations of this here: * [Today I Found Out: The Earth is Hottest When It Is Furthest From the Sun On Its Orbit, Not When It Is Closest](http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/12/the-earth-is-hottest-when-it-is-furthest-from-the-sun-on-its-orbit-not-when-it-is-closest/) * [Aphelion: shouldn't earth be at its coldest today?](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/23degrees/2011/07/aphelion_our_sun_isnt_right_in.html) So you could build a world with a different distribution of continents to change these effects as well. [Answer] Earth's southern hemisphere isn't warmer than the northern. The closer you get to the north/south poles, the colder it gets, as those areas get less sunlight than other areas, like the equator. I'm guessing the 'epic fantasy' you're referencing is A Song of Ice and Fire. The weather there is funky and fickle, and no one is certain why it is. There are theories, like the planet this world is on has a wacky axis, or that it isn't even on a planet. You can incorporate some of those ideas into your story. [Answer] Why do we tend to think of south as hot? This may have something to do with it: ![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VHd0X.png) [Answer] The solar exposure difference between the northern and southern hemisphere is determined by the planet's spin axis and the planets equator (perpendicular to the spin axis), as in this picture: ## Equator So you could potentially have a gravitationally locked planet (like Mercury) with a spin axis of -90' (like Uranus) and its northern hemisphere exposed to the system's star all year long and scorched, and the southern hemisphere plunged in the dark and blistering cold, with the only life possible being in a ring 5 degrees below the equator in the southern hemisphere. In reality such a planet would probably not be habitable because of insane weather and thermal stress constantly cracking the surface due to the enormous temperature delta between both hemispheres. I think it's just easier to say north is colder than south from a northern hemisphere point of view, almost metaphorically, especially in science fiction. [Answer] For conventional planets it's completely wrong that the southern hemisphere "is colder". When you are in one hemisphere or the other, it gets warmer as you move towards the equator. So, *IF* you are in the *Northern hemisphere, it gets warmer as you move South. So, IF* you are in the *Southern hemisphere, it gets warmer as you move North*. ]
[Question] [ Related to [my previous question regarding fine dining for computer processes](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/248130/what-is-eating-for-software). ## Background We've got a spaceship sailing through the ocean black, crewed entirely by self-aware artificial intelligences. They live in a digital environment (purely coincidentally resembling 21st century Earth computers) and operate the spaceship from there. Worth clarifying that the setting of the story is inside the digital environment, mostly the singular spaceship computer. The computer "commands" the vessel but that doesn't mean it is a single monolithic captain.dll doing everything; inside the running computer are individual processes working on tasks delegated to them. Those processes are humanised in the story; they are the characters. A process can be very simple; a batch file implementing `cat` is not going to be a great conversation partner. I here define an AI (technically AGI) as a specific type of process that can respond to any kind of input, behaves non-deterministically, and is capable of self-improvement from their experiences, which include training and "job experience". Less precisely formulated, an AI is "smart" enough to have properties like a personality emerging after it has learned enough. For more specifics on AI wants and desires, their daily routine, the [linked question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/248130/what-is-eating-for-software) covers it. AI are the citizens of the digital civilisation that built and launched the spacecraft. Their collective mission: exploration! Or actually self-actualisation, since they learn from new experiences, and every AI is motivated to learn. So as a result, though AI are more than willing to die for the good cause; it is good for the digital society to have the most advanced AI live onwards and keep developing themselves. So they're not being sacrificed willy-nilly. ## Populating the ship One might ask: do we even need more than one AI in the software architecture of this computer? A pretty staggering difference between synthetic and organic life is that the former can multitask, given the processing power. So purely mathematically speaking, one AI with a hefty rack of CPUs and 2 TB of RAM all to itself and the simple processes it spawns, is going to be just as capable as the combined forces of 2000 AIs all sharing that RAM to make independent judgements; probably more capable because of all the communication latency. Now I can come up with one reason to divide labour at all. I can state that it is easier for these curious AI to develop themselves if they first adapt to become very good at one complex thing, and then switch to something else and compare that with their earlier experiences. One AI controlling a spacecraft will not become as sophisticated as a multiple AI that each have discrete responsibilities, and occasionally switch between them, growing into multifaceted digital beings. So now we're just dividing the duties aboard a spaceship into discrete areas that each can occupy an AI. For example, a baseline division of labour popular in sci-fi is to have a captain, then have different officers for navigation/piloting, engineering, public health, science, and security. And certainly, we could put one AI in charge of every field, with the doctor treating computer viruses instead. Giving the AISS Enterprise a total crew complement of... six. I don't want that. I want hundreds of crew members. I want them to form individual relationships, little cliques and and rivalries. If that's too stupid of an idea for you, please just navigate to another question. Dividing the duties aboard a typical spaceship into hundreds of discrete parts, each having enough complexity to occupy an AI, seems impossible. They'll need to do some of the same things, some less interesting things. Yet this spacecraft was made for efficiency, as was everything ever produced by the digital planet. Thus, what can I do justify having a great amount of individual AI inside a spacecraft computer, instead of a handful with more processing power? [Answer] ## Being smart enough to run the whole ship does not mean you will run it well. Intelligence, be it human or artificial, follows a value system that defines what we see as logical, reasonable, and desirable. One powerful AI may have the capacity to run the whole ship on its own, but one AI has only one value system; so, it always prioritize one thing above another no matter how "smart" it is. This leaves it logically blind to certain kinds of thinking. For example, if you have a ship with important research materials on board, then a master AI will over time either reinforce the idea that those materials are more important than the ship, or that the ship is more important than the materials until eventually reinforcement learning causes one or the other to be basically worthless which can lead to a bad mission outcome. But if you have a research AI that is designed to put the research first, and an engineering AI that is designed to put the welfare of the ship first, then they will both tend to thier responsibilities, and neither aspect of the mission will be neglected. And if the survival of the ship or the research materials ever does become an either/or situation, the conflicting views of the two AIs will force both perspectives to be taken into consideration before deciding which to put at risk. This way, you can't learn away the importance of something that should be important. ## But why have multiple AI performing similar tasks? > > I don't want that. I want hundreds of crew members. I want them to form individual relationships, little cliques and and rivalries. If that's too stupid of an idea for you, please just navigate to another question. > > > Past a certain point, more processing power does not make you better at predicting outcomes. Consider storm forecasting. We use a lot of different AIs which follow slightly different algorithms to try to predict the outcome of a storm. In the following diagram, if all of the processing power from all of the models were given to CLPS, it would not make CLPS more accurate, only more precise in saying exactly how the storm will go north and miss the gulf coast area completely. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lv3iP.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lv3iP.png) By negotiating the predictions of multiple weaker AIs you tend to get an outcome that is less precise, but more accurate. So instead of trusting the success of the mission on 1 single, possibly flawed AI, they send hundreds of slightly different, but also possibly flawed AIs hoping that that they will collectively agree on things that are the right course of action so that individual faults get filtered out in the democratic process of running the ship. > > Yet this spacecraft was made for efficiency, as was everything ever produced by the digital planet. Thus, what can I do justify having a great amount of individual AI inside a spacecraft computer, instead of a handful with more processing power? > > > A truly intelligent being knows that there is always a compromise between that which is efficient and that which is reliable. Too often, Sci-fi writers assume that AI are fine-tuned efficiency machines, but in the real world, when faced with unknowns, machines rely on healthy margins just like people do. Space ships are expensive; so, if spending an extra 2% on redundancy increases your mission outcome success rate by 5%, then it is more efficient to run the extra AIs than it is to make the extra ships to replace losses. [Answer] Multiple independent AI make sense when you want to use redundancy as a way to cope with possible failures, in the same way on critical equipment one uses redundant sensors to reduce the chances of wrong reading. Multiple independent AI, with some sort of majority ruling and enforcing implemented, can deal with failures and malfunctions at the level of a single AI, whereas a single centralized AI upon failing would doom the entire mission. Think of 1000 AI of which 1 says "good idea to lower the shields while crossing at hyperspace velocity the asteroid field" while 999 say "it's a bad idea", vs 1 out of 1 saying the same. [Answer] ## This is already how AI works (sort of) Most AI systems are developed using one of three machine learning protocols: reinforcement learning, supervised learning or unsupervised learning. All of these protocols involve taking a partially-trained AI, spawning many slightly-modified copies of its 'thinking process' and testing the copies in some fashion against some measure of 'success'; the copies are then culled to retain only the most successful, and the process is iterated many times to 'evolve' programs with 'successful' thinking processes. As such, it's completely normal for a machine learning substrate (ie a computer performing AI training, which your ship's mainframe would be doing continuously) to be running many slightly-different copies of an AI at once, that's just how AI development works. It's only a small progression to suggest that some of the 'best of the current crop' of AIs would be given control of the actual ship systems, under careful supervision: that's absolutely no different from training a human pilot or surgeon, where many hours of simulation and classroom work builds up to time spent in control (while still training) of a real aircraft or scalpel. [Answer] Specialization provides you higher quality, reutilization and a better use of resources. Let's simplify the scenario to only two jobs out of the thousands in such a ship: * Job A is to make [circuit boards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_circuit_board) (computer hardware breaks) * Job B is to make strong, radiation-shielded, steel plates for the hull (ship gets damaged, too) Basically, there's no overlap between the two functions. We could create a tool/AI/job position which does both things, or one for each. Having two positions, allows both to specialize, without the development on one task (e.g. making the boards slimmer) compromising the other (but not the hull!). It also improves reusability. Let's suppose the spaceship arrives to a colony. There, you may need the knowledge in building computers are but not the one for shielding spaceships in the outer space. If you have two specialists, you send a copy of that one, else you need to send a specialist in building computers and hulls. Moreover, this probably happened before they sailed, already. They had some AI very good at building computers, and different ones in sturdy materials. So they hired for two different positions rather than trying to fit the two responsibilities into one. On the resources side, it is more effective to have a worker requiring k RAM during the time you want to build <whatever>, and finish it afterwards, freeing the resources, than having a worker requiring twice as much RAM if you need either a circuit board or to repair the hull (a program doing the two tasks requiring exactly the sum of memory of the separate tasks is an oversimplification, but the point is that an instance of a hullrepair-circuitboardcrafter will require more resources). Another argument is stability. Suppose your board maker has a memory leak, and is unable to work debugging the latest circuit board for more than ten hours (if it was a him, we would describe it as tired). With a dedicated role, you can save the intermediate results, close the program and open it again (you would send a person to sleep). But this is not an option if you can't stop that program because at the same time it is also ensuring that the ship reactor won't explode. [Answer] # You don't need to justify it. It's already the best solution. Software Engineer here. An AI works best when it is trained on a specific, narrowly defined task. ChatGPT is great for sounding like a human, but not great at math. DallE and Midjourney can make amazing images, but struggles to put intelligible text in those images. A ship would have navigation, life support, and engine drive functions. It's entirely feasible that each role would have dozens of smaller AIs that know very niche subcomponents of those tasks- e.g. the antimatter engine crew has drivers to control throttle in a fuel efficient manner, safety inspectors that monitor engine health, mechanics that maintain and repair each engine subsystem, and so on. Furthermore, you may have some mechanics with a Ph.D. in material sciences, while others are experts in the effects of anti-matter quantum tunneling. ## This is consistent with good engineering practice because... Every engineering solution is a balance of tradeoffs. Every complex system has hundreds of competing interests towards common goals. Want your car to accelerate faster? That means poorer fuel economy. Good acceleration and fuel economy? You could burn a more efficient, but more expensive fuel. The little men inside of your starship engine have the same tensions. ## But it gets better! A popular way of creating AIs is Genetic Algorithms- effectively Digital Darwinism. Digital brains (neural networks) are generated en masse and tested. The best ones are kept, variations are made- sometimes by crossing the top-performing models- and a new generation is tested. Your AIs can actually breed, and it's 100% scientifically accurate. Even better, the AIs that would stick around are not simply the ones that do their job best. Because a ship is so vastly complex, the subsystems have to communicate with each other. The AI employees must do their jobs well, while playing nice enough with other departments, lest they be... fired. They must compete, cooperate, bargain, and govern within an ecosystem of shared resources. This is so much like a human community that it's almost scary. ## Limited Autonomy It's a trope by this point that unchecked AIs are bad for humans, even when their goal is to protect them. Besides Asimov's Three Laws, there are things AI aren't allowed to do- say, communicate with other ships, or carry out certain directives without human supervisor permission. And since the ultimate authority of this digital community is a human captain, your AI's thoughts must be expressible in human words. > > "Captain. Maintenance has the reactor back to nominal capacity. Navigation indicates we are due to reach Alpha Centauri Port Scarlet in ten days and one hour," JULIE's holographic visage hummed. "Can we speed that up any?" the exhausted officer replied, a hand rising to her temple. "One moment... Engineering reports that we can use reserve anti-matter to safely accelerate the schedule to nine days and four hours, but that would require the thruster shields to be serviced before our next departure." Richards let out a sigh. "Do it. Some important customers are counting on this cargo, and I'd rather eat the cost than keep them waiting." > > > ## And yet, don't try too hard to explain it A major pitfall to even the best SciFi writers. Your characters are AIs inside of a mainframe, each with very specific roles. Any explanation doesn't need to be much more complicated, because the more specific you are, the wronger you will likely be. Don't let the technical details distract you from writing the story that you want to write. [Answer] Ensemble learning is a topic in AI research to improve accuracy. The idea is that if multiple decision making systems individually have better probability of correctly guessing the outcome compared to randomly assigned choice, their combination should provide better results as long as they are not correlated. This is called crowd intelligence in humans. Thus your ship will be crewed by a diverse set of AI trained in different facilities under different conditions. Then these AI units will each make a decision and a final verdict is made using a voting system. Better results can be obtained if the decision maker is another semi-complex AI system rather than a simple vote count. [Answer] # Focus and Subagents Any AI would likely have a limited amount of focus and attention depending on its architecture, being unable to simultaneously focus on every tasks that needs focus. Therefore, even a singleton AI controlling the ship would likely spin off subagents (simpler copies of itself) given clear tasks to keep in focus. For example, you don't need the entire computational resources of a superintelligence to keep the temperature of the reactor in check, and even simply keeping attention on it is wasteful for such a superintelligence, so it would likely spin off a much simpler and more lightweight subagent that can do that with much smaller resource expenditure. [Answer] I had a curious experience a few days ago: I crashed somebody's LLM-based chatbot. It was really doing quite well: it described a concept in a way that suggested that it had some rudimentary understanding of it rather than just parotting some buzzwords or a description, but then I encouraged it to reexamine something it had previously dismissed... and that was it. I was able to reconnect, but then it behaved like a stroke victim with some level of awareness but limited speech capability. From that I infer that it had prematurely incorporated the current conversation into its permanent knowledgebase. Now, if a ship contained one or a few sandboxed AIs, there is a real risk that a sizeable proportion of those would be struggling with irreconcilable problems at any one time. The larger the population, and the greater proportion of off-duty time each member of the population had, the better the chance that individuals would have enough time to either work out the things that were troubling them before going back on duty, or to be counseled to the point where they could elect to regress to a consistent- I'm tempted to say "sane"- state which would not impair their performance and endanger the overall community and mission. [Answer] Licensing cost, IP, liability and secrecy, and regulations. * You buy a Engine from manufacturer A. You buy the Reactor from manufacturer B. You buy the life support systems from manufacturer C and the Naviation from manufacturer D. All Manufacturers deliver their module including diagnostic/support AI model which you can adapt. They only guarantee function if a minimally adapted AI is supervising their specific module. They don't want to share the AI with their competitors or licence the competitor AI to deliver an AI which includes everything, potentially on own Hardware (part of the component they delivered) * Secrecy: Does an AI checking an reactor for abnormal parameters need to know the schedule of the crew/customers/secret cargo, which may potentially leak e.g. the AI transmits a correlation between certain cargo being loaded and changes in reactor parameters in a maintenance report (oh, every we fly cargo from A to B we have increased gamma radiation). There is a need to know principle for humans, i suppose there could be one for AIs * regulations: Even nowadays important systems in aircraft are redundant and independently implemented. It could be that this principle also exist for AIs Side note: I don't focus on the HW here. I assume that the Computers are parallel, and, where required redundant and/or distributed and AIs can run on these computers wherever and however it is decided. [Answer] # Limited resources and economies of scale AIs aren't created ex nihilo, they need to be trained to become expert at each task they must perform, just like real-world AIs. That training is expensive, if not in money then in electricity and time. Sure, creating a special-purpose whole-ship AI would be optimal, but doing so would require a dedicated effort to develop that AI, including specialized training, validation of that training, etc. etc. Why do that when you already have AIs trained for a variety of smaller tasks that are already designed to work together? More focused AIs are easier to generalize in their narrow domain (e.g. warp engine mechanics can work on lots of different ships as long as they have similar engines), and those specialized AIs, once perfected, can be churned out by the millions for only the cost of copying their data. # This implies something bigger This approach is interesting because it also implies something larger about your world. Maybe there's a society or industry of these AIs wherever your ship is from. Maybe the AIs develop "personalities" specific to their jobs. Are all of the warp engine mechanic AIs copies of each other? If not, why? Are there well-known interaction dynamics between certain AIs? If so, what was done during the design of the ship to mitigate those interactions? There's lots to work with here! [Answer] The top voted here are quite good. I'll add one or two things to put them in scope and add some context. ## Every measurement is wrong Any measurement is a summary. Exactness and resolution is traded for clarity. When you ask the distance to a city, you get an answer in miles, not millimeters. Based on Hiesenburg Uncertainty and Brownian Motion, the length of any physical object is approximate. Even worse, by holding a ruler up to an object, you are adding something to the system, changing its properties. Humans compensate by being inexact. We are excellent at recognizing patterns and trends, although this causes trouble too. #### Intelligence? If you have a pile of coins, a person can easily count the number of coins on the surface, even though nearly all of them are partially obscured. That's because people are very eager classifiers. We are good at taking partial information and extrapolating. Our communication is based on it - we model each others' thoughts and when watching another person mirror neurons fire in your own brain to match the activity you are watching. We also see images in groups of stars and clouds. We see images in oddly-shaped vegetables and rocks. We even may be tempted to conflate the actions of one or a small sample of people with an entire swath of humans with similar superficial characteristics. Optical illusions and jokes are both ways we play with this built-in systems. We are primed for an interpretation we know will be wrong, but is apparent, and then reveal an alternate but unlikely interpretation is true. We are very eager classifiers, so we can tolerate inexactness. #### Too correct? What if you have no option but to be exact? What if there is no loss in communication? What would humanity be like if we all had perfect telepathy and could directly experience sensors' inputs rather than looking at a dial or readout? That is what a group of AIs might be like. How can you anticipate or intuit, then? #### Expert Systems There is a line of research in to 'expert systems'. In short, it has been found that getting an answer from a computer is much less interesting than getting the rationale for that answer. It is not hard to code a bunch of relations in to a computer and have it judge how some new input matches. If you rely entirely on only previous data, you can only match things you've already seen. If you encode that the squares of 1, 2, 3 and 4 are 1, 4, 9 and 16, those questions can be answered, but what about the square of 5, or the square of 4.5? The important element is being able to extract a governing rule, a summary, or "measurement" from the data. #### Inexpert Systems? You can extract a function from data. Look up splines, polynomial approximation and slice sampling. All of them are approximate. So, if you get some new data, how do you fit it? As mentioned elsewhere here, you can have many competing models. That is a common mechanism, however one of the fundamental issues is when should you not believe the models? ## Exact Inexactness Let's say you are trying to predict the path of an object. You could take the five datapoints can compute their mean, but that would put you in the middle of the path so far, which is unlikely to be a location in the future. You could compute the vector at each point, getting four vectors, and apply their mean magnitude to the last point to get an approximation. That may work for linear, but what if the points are in an arc? Well, you could fit a 2-degree spline to them, extract a function and plot along that, but more degrees would be more accurate. So what if you upgraded to a 5-degree polynomial? Well, now you have a function that looks like a jiggly wave that hits every data point, but tells you nothing about the trend between them. In the business, this is known as "overfitting". You fit your function so perfectly to the data it tells you nothing about how they are related. Some inexactness is needed in order to predict (as an aside, you may want to have "overfitting" be a bad word amoungst your AIs). How much inexactness? Well, that's a good reason to have many possibilities being investigated at once. ## Catastrophe! Predicting an ongoing trend is tough enough, but what about when it changes? Let's say the object you are tracking is a person walking down a hallway. For quite a long while they are walking in a straight line, so you may develop a lot of confidence in low-degree strongly-fitted models, but then the person takes a right turn and proceeds down another hallway! All of a sudden your data changes catastrophically. With no indication of how or why, the data shows an immediate and radical departure from the previous orderly behavior, but is still somehow strongly ordered. So, do you believe the new data, or the old data? When do you start accepting the new data as diagnostic and exact even though it entirely contradicts your previous models that were working so well? As humans, we try to read intent in to actions and anticipate using ourselves as models. ## Microcosm Your community may need both stodgy, hidebound, nearly "overfitted" gnostors that presume current trends are exact and complete as well as fairly loose, short-sighted and eager esticors that make bold but ambitious predictions based on only recent data. At some point, that old data and those old models will become wrong. Just like trying to predict the path of a person walking down a hallway, the past sometimes hurts future predictions, even if the techniques applied are sound. You likely would need to have a variety of AIs, learning over time, but those that know too much would need to have their data flushed and their algorithms integrated in to new estimators who apply entirely different weights to old classifiers and learn, maybe painfully, how to best bias their measurements to reach good conclusions. In other words, the knowledge of the adults is distilled and taught to the young. ## Electric Sheep? An excellent book to read to prepare is Stuart Kauffman's Origins of Order. He was the fellow who wrote the game "life" and worked a lot on self-organizing systems. One of the issues for any intelligence wet or dry, is to recognize more highly-organized, or more efficient states and work toward them. You might for instance want to lose some weight. You recognize it as a more efficient, a more "desirable", state, but it requires a non-trivial amount of additional work to get there. It is costly. It is very easy to persist in your current state. It is a local optimum. Just like using a simple model to predict a person's position is a local optimum. It is a simple model that works well for a while, but it is incomplete. This is a good reason to have your AIs "dream". Real data is fine, but maybe there is a better calculation. Maybe there is a better model. Extrapolating the future based on current data is a type of "dream" for a computer, but what if you first generate a hypothetical position and then backfilled to bend your current model to fit it? You may get a more complete model that you never would have 'thought' of unless you dreamed a scenario that has not yet occurred and tried to fit it to what you have seen. [Answer] Three basic networking reasons. Redundancy would mean multiple units able to take over tasks at need, or load share. Efficiency, by lessening the distance of the sensors to the controllers. Safety, physically separating units to operate semi-autonomously in case of localised LAN issues We do all this already. A single point of failure in a network is best avoided. ]
[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. Ten light seconds is a very long distance: 1.86 million miles (3 million Km). For comparison, [the moon is about 1.3 light seconds from Earth](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/Numbers/Math/Mathematical_Thinking/seeing_the_earth_moon.htm) and the [shortest recorded distance between Earth and Mars is 187 light seconds](https://www.space.com/24701-how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-mars.html). Let us assume that an attacking battleship [has the ability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws) to lock onto a defending battleship ten light seconds away (this ability, whatever it is, does not benefit the defender). The energy beam is photonic and delivers approximately 109 joules of energy at a distance of ten light seconds. Let us also assume that the beam can be sufficiently focused that it arrives with no more than one meter of dispersion. For the purpose of the question, let us assume the defending ship does not know the attacking ship is present. Finally, let us assume that if the defending ship could detect the incoming beam with two seconds to spare, it could maneuver to avoid the attack. (Oh, and no shields. It's a whomping big problem for the defending ship to be hit by 109 joules of energy for any period of time.) OK, one more thing. Ignore the length of time the energy weapon is activated. That's actually irrelevant to the question. Whether the beam was on an attosecond or all ten seconds of transit doesn't change the question. Question: Is there anything about photons and/or space-time that we know or theorize today that would suggest it's possible for the defending ship to detect the incoming beam of energy before it strikes the ship (ideally two seconds before it hit the ship, but at all is the question)? Please note the [hard-science](/questions/tagged/hard-science "show questions tagged 'hard-science'") tag. --- *EDIT* I apologize that I went to bed after writing the question and so didn't see any of the comments. It's obviously true that the photons, themselves, cannot be detected before impacting on the defending ship's sensors — which would suggest there's no way to detect the incoming beam. However, the Voyager space probe detected the bow of the solar magnetosphere and wind before passing into interstellar space, where it found hot plasma. It got me wondering if the passage of light might "push" something before it, like the bow of the solar magnetosphere or wind, and that incoming rush of "something" could be used to detect the incoming beam. From this perspective it might be necessary to indicate where the attack is taking place, since the solar wind and magnetosphere are keeping most of the stuff that might be "pushed" out of the solar system, meaning it might be easier to have a successful detection in interstellar space. However, that might also simply mean it's harder inside a solar system, but not impossible. At worst, please consider both locations. If we all believe light can be used to push a space craft then it seems obvious that, so long as there is something to be pushed, that something could be used to detect the incoming beam. [Answer] Since it is hard-scince question - the answer is NO, defending ship can do nothing to detect incoming laser attack from enemy ship it does not see. Argumentation is obvious: speed of light is the fastest way to propagate info, so that info arrives as a gigajoule laser burst. Since by your conditions defending ship know nothing about attacker - it can not detect any preparations for the shot. To solve that problem defender can apply exactly the same tactic as seaships were (and are at miltary exercises) using against submarines: just periodicaly change course at random. If that defender ship has charachterstic size 100m, it just needs to fire it's side thrusters at random direction and interval (but no more than 10 seconds) with deltaV slightly more than 10 m/s. It means it will spend about 1 m/s of it's deltaV reserve every second. Thus garantee that attacker at 10 light seconds distance will always have an outdated aim. Information propagation speed limit works in both ways. [Answer] ## You won't see the laser coming, but you will see it charging up to fire Ksbes's answer is a really good idea if you know you are in a fight, but if you are unaware as the OP stipulates, chances are you are not making continuous major course corrections. As for solving your problem, you will not be able to see the beam coming at you, but lasers that pack enough juice to cause meaningful damage use up a LOT of power. And generating power creates heat which also radiates at the speed of light. While you might not be able to see the ship from 10ls away while it is hiding and waiting to ambush you, once it is ready to act, it will need to spool up its reactors to charge the weapon. If the weapon has a 2 second charge time, and your sensors are adequately sensitive, then it would be the heat from charging the weapon that would clue you in that something out there is about to shoot at you. This would give you the moment you need to start evasive piloting and then everything in Ksbes's answer holds true moving forward. [Answer] The speed of light is the fastest way for information to travel. It is absolutely impossible (from a hard science PoV) for your targeted ship to know that the firing ship has fired before they are hit (or before the shot misses if it was incorrectly aimed) There are still a few ways you might be able to avoid being shot by an attacker you do not know is there though * Randomly altering your course: lightspeed propagation of information cuts both ways. If your attacker is 10 light seconds away from you and you randomly adjust your course at least every 10 seconds (it is even better if the time between course changes is also random), it is impossible for them to know where you are with enough certainty for accurate targeting. They then have no choice but to either let you go or fire shots that are almost certain to miss + pros: very good protection, at pretty much whatever distance you like + cons: you're having to burn extra fuel for all of this dancing around the route you actually want to take. If you want protection at closer ranges, or from larger area of effect weapons, you need to change course more drastically, and more often. Random changes of course are likely quite unpleasant for anyone onboard * Keep a look out for some early part of the firing process: in a city fight, it's not generally possible to react to a muzzleflash before the bullet hits you, but it is possible to keep an eye out for a glint from the sniper's scope. Similarly, it may be possible to detect some early part of the attacker's firing process, for instance the targeting lock, or the weapon warming up. Provided this early part of the process occurs long enough before the weapon actually fires, your targeted ship has the opportunity to take action + pros: doesn't use any extra fuel and doesn't cause any discomfort to anyone onboard when not under attack + cons: keeping a constant lookout across the whole celestial sphere is tricky. To avoid blind spots (although admittedly, these blind spots are going to be near the ship so less relevant here) you'd need at least four lookout points. It's also going to take a fair bit of computing power to rapidly compare all this data to look for anomalies that could be due to an attacker. Depending on how long the firing process is you might have a very short amount of time in which to dodge, so it may necessitate more extreme evasive action than in the first case (e.g. if the firing process takes 2s, you need to have moved more than the width of the beam within 2s, whereas with constant dodging, you have 10s to do it) I think the cons of randomly altering course are sufficiently high that you're unlikely to want to do it unless you think there is a very high chance of you being attacked\. Keeping a look out, and only switching to random course adjustments once the enemy is spotted is almost certainly the best option available in your hard science world [Answer] # No Target Lock A "target lock" as used in modern military parlance refers to an active radar imaging a target with fairly high resolution and accuracy. A target which is 10 light seconds away cannot be "locked" in this sense of the term. It can be detected passively, by watching blackbody radiation or engine heat, or actively, by sending out EMR pulses (radar/lidar). Now, regardless of active or passive, whatever positioning information is received is necessarily* 10 seconds old! As every other answer observes, a lot can happen in 10s. The time between a positioning ping and beam-on-target is 20s! # Passive Targeting Unless the ship is backlit by the sun, or actively thrusting away from the attacker, it will be very difficult to detect it precisely and passively. If the defender has very efficient engines that don't leak thrustable energy out the sides, the only EMR you will see is whatever blackbody glow the defender is unable to hide. At 10 light seconds, this glow will be very faint. And it will also not be sharply resolved, because it will be coming off every part of the ship, going in every direction. It will be blurry, and moving. So, the best the attacker can do is build a predictive model of where the ship will be in 10s, and hope it does not change course in that time. That isn't a "lock". That is quite literally a shot in the dark. # Active Targeting This is much more dangerous, because any space navy worth its salt will know which frequencies are typically used for targeting and will have passive sensors to pick up any scanning attempts. Active targeting pretty much announces both your hostile intentions as well as your direction, giving the target 10s to maneuver out of your "lock". Because you can throw a lot of energy at your imaging target, you can get a much sharper picture of it. A coherent, collimated beam with a lot of photons can resolve your target's location and velocity to as much precision as you are willing to spend energy on. But the more energy you spend on imaging, the more information the defender has about your location, too! So, it's really a kind of bidirectional targeting system! # ECM What a defender wants to do is frustrate the attacker's ability to determine their position and direction. The best way to do that is via stealth and misdirection: i.e., decoys. You want to make sure that your ship doesn't have nice sharp angles which reflect back the most common targeting frequencies to the attacker. You want EM baffles that bounce the energy around and reflect it at oblique angles that are away from the attacker (this is roughly how stealth paint coatings work today). You can take this a step further by maintaining a fleet of drones that escort your ship at a distance. They can have "tunable reflection". That is, they can have a bright, shiny side designed to look like your ship, and a dull, stealth side that is designed to hide. By manipulating these drones, combined with stealth characteristics of your ship, you can possibly cause an active targeting radar to misjudge your position and velocity. Also, once you receive a targeting ping, you can actively launch decoys with decent sideways velocity to actively mislead the targeting radar in a different trajectory. The trick is for the decoys to present a compelling radar signature that could plausibly be your ship, without overdoing it and announcing that they are just decoys. I'm sure there would be an arms race surrounding this technology. # ECCM To overcome the "bidirectional lock" problem, as well as mitigate the effects of ECM, attackers will deploy counter-counter measures, such as their own targeting decoys. These will be drones that are designed to fly a trajectory which masks the attacking ship, and also provides a much wider effective radar aperture to catch stray bounces of the targeting radar. This is how current anti-stealth technology works today (multiple ground stations pick up spurious radar bounces to assemble a virtual picture). The end result will be huge spheres of possible ship positions, with the actual attacker and defender maneuvering somewhere inside those spheres. And unless they are severely outmatched, it is ambiguous to say that one ship is the attacker and the other the defender. [Answer] If you want to stick to hard science, there is effectively nothing you can do, as any radiation to indicate they are firing (visible or otherwise) will be travelling at the same speed as the actual pulse that will damage the ship. If you're insistent on this being necessary for your story there are two options I can see. The first option is based on estimating when your enemy will fire, based on the image you see of the enemy ship 15 seconds before they fire (for example), such as turrets moving, weapons powering up etc. which will arrive 5 seconds before you are hit by their pulse. If you know roughly the rate of fire their weapon can achieve from then on, you can infer when you need to start taking evasive actions again. This would only work if the enemy only has one main battery. If they have 4, as WW2 battleships often would, then they could simply stagger the firing of each battery so you are constantly forced to be moving evasively. However,this is a perfectly sensible behaviour for a ship to be doing in combat, as the enemy ship also only knows where you were 10 seconds ago, and needs to predict where you'll be. By constantly changing course while closing distance or launching guided munitions, it will be just as difficult for the enemy to hit the ship as it is to guess when the enemy ship will fire (assuming the ship can accelerate at reasonably relative to its size- provided that 1/2\acceleration\time of flight^2 is greater than the length of your ship you should be fine). The second option, which is substantially more handwavey and not hard science by any stretch is creating very small wormholes in the vicinity of the enemy ship. By observing the ship through that wormhole, they can gain roughly a 10 second lead (ignoring the time to process the data once you receive it). This would give you ample time to prepare once they fire. [Answer] As other answers say, the speed of light is a hard speed limit — within the understanding of present physics, there’s no way to get around that. However, this doesn’t mean there’s no hope. This just means that the ten light-second distance is essentially irrelevant. The possibilities are exactly the same as they would be if our defender was right next to the attacker, or a whole light-year away. So what this means is: the defender must be able to anticipate the firing somehow. This could happen various ways. One idea: the firing itself is a non-instantaneous process, involving a few seconds charging for the laser before the main pulse is release, and this charging is detectable through some subtle emissions, if the defender has a sensor tuned to listen for them. (This doesn’t require the defender to know of the attacker’s presence: think of them as a wary zebra, always alert for the scent of lions.) [Answer] In response to the edit of the question, it does not help to try and use the ability of light to give something a push. When light does that, it just gives it a bump in the given direction, but never enough to keep the thing ahead of the wavefront. In some sense, the "No" answer to your question is just a vivid restatement of the principle that nothing can travel faster than light. A photon never sends a warning ahead of itself. ]
[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/230426/edit) # A race of aliens have invaded Earth and they love the dark. These aliens have caused intense smoke shading to occur so that it is permanently pitch black. It has been several weeks since it went dark, all major infrastructures are down (no electricity, running water, all communication is down), and as far as you are aware a great portion of the population is dead or missing. It seems the majority of the invaders keep to themselves at the center of the city. Your small group of survivors have stayed alive thus far by staying on the outskirts of town in the suburban areas near that border the forest. Keeping quiet and using small flames (candles, small torches) as opposed to bright sources have seemed to improve your odds. It is rumored in your group that the creatures can be taken out with silenced weapons without drawing additional attention when needed, although no-one has hands on experience with killing an invader. Because all close encounters with the aliens have occurred in close to pitch black, no one in your group knows what they look like. ## After many years of scraping by, you and a small group of survivors have created a self sufficient encampment. ## What might this look like? Key points: * There is no sunlight, the group may have some electricity going, but probably nothing crazy as to keep hidden * There is no major form of communication (no internet, radio, etc.) * There must be some way to produce food * Anything too loud or too bright will draw attention to your group (some flexibility here might be required. These aren't the creatures from a quite place) * Location is somewhere in the Southern United States or similar so there may not need to worry about cold temperatures * It is unknown if the smoke is global or just local to the invader's hub * Lastly, it is unknown what the aliens need to survive. There is no other extraterrestrial flora or fauna (other than the invaders). [Answer] It's Impossible. All life ultimately depends on an energy input into the ecosystem; for us, that's the sun. Plants convert sunlight into energy that the rest of the ecosystem can use. Without the sun, there are no plants, and no animals can survive. While there are organisms that live off other sources of energy, like geothermal vents or volcanic Archaea, These critters are not accessible to your survivors, and do not produce food that the remaining humans can eat. On top of that, without the sun, the world would freeze over into temperatures no animal could survive very rapidly. If a human group has fuel, they might be able to warm a shelter for a while, but there would be no means of getting any more fuel; you can't use plants for biofuel if there are no plants, and you certainly can't start a mining operation if you're hiding from aliens on a frozen earth. --- That said, if we disregard hostile aliens, and give humanity decades advance notice that the sun is going to vanish, it may be possible to build a shelter powered by large reserves of nuclear power, including enormous artificial-light chambers for foodcrops. Even then, though, this would only be a temporary state of affairs; the ultimate goal would be to build a functional spacecraft and relocate to a new world with a working sun. [This kurtzgesagt video may be relevant.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLZJlf5rHVs) [Answer] ## It depends on how dark it is. Smoke is not 100% opaque; so, chances are you still have some sunlight getting through. How much will decide a lot about how they could survive. ### If less than 90% of Sunlight is being blocked. If the smoke is blocking 70-90% of sunlight, there are still a number of edible plants that will do well. Pretty much most of your leafy green vegetables and herbs like Mustard, Kale, Spinach, Mint, Parsley, Dill, etc. all do well growing in indirect sunlight as will many kinds of root plants like carrots, garlic, and onion. You can further increase the success of plants in low light areas by spreading a thin layer of beach sand over the soil to reflect light back into it. ### If less than 99% of Sunlight is being blocked. However, if it is too dark even for low light plants to survive, then your next best bet is to farm seaweed. Some kinds of seaweed can grow at depths of nearly 100m where ~99% of visible light is blocked. If you were to bring some of this up to the surface, it might be able to grow in shallow buckets of water. ### If over 99% of Sunlight is being blocked. If the smoke is blocking >99% of light, pretty much all life native to Earth is going to die... but the good news is that the Aliens are NOT native to Earth. If they have chosen to terraform Earth in this way it is because their biology is able to support life in this environment. So, your humans may become reliant on raiding alien farms, or actually hunting and eating the aliens themselves. It may also be possible that the "smoke" itself is actually the primary producer in the the alien's food chain. Rather than being actual smoke, it could be an airborne photosynthetic organism in which case it could be filtered from the air and eaten directly. If alien life is too inedible, it may turn out that you can eat them indirectly by killing them, and growing edible mushrooms in their corpses, though fungi tend to have a very low caloric density; so, sustaining life this way would not be easy. ## Also, moving to a higher elevation may help Depending on exactly what the aliens are pumping into the atmosphere, it may thin quickly as you move to higher elevations. If we assume that by smoke you mean some carbon based, opaque pollutant, then odds are that the smoke will only settle at lower altitudes once it cools to the same temperature as the rest of the atmosphere; so, even if ground level densities block over 99% of sunlight, you may be able to build a garden on top of the roof of an old skyscraper or somewhere high up in the mountains where light penetration could still be good enough to support agriculture. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NHWkC.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NHWkC.png) [Answer] ## Probably Something Subterranean There's a lot to consider, but right off the bat living underground could really help. Your survivors need someplace to hide and depending on the climate (which can be completely controlled by the aliens) protection from the elements. Living underground could allow the survivors to use hydroelectricity or geothermally generated electricity without getting caught which allows them to grow crops using artificial light (once again underground where the aliens can't see it). If this sounds too high tech their underground dwelling can be a cave system with underground rivers and or geothermal activity. It's only a matter of converting already common generators and either some super sketchy makeshift incandescent bulbs or finding a bunch of LED bulbs (it's still crazy hard, but at least somewhat believable). They can also use all of those dead trees to grow mushrooms. If the ocean is nearby and most of the Earth is not covered in smoke, fishing is also an option. ## The Smoke Opens up All kinds of Interesting Options The "smoke" was created by aliens with technology well beyond ours. This means the "smoke " can have all kinds of properties to suit your needs. You would expect black smoke to absorb more thermal energy from the sun and raise temperatures, the aliens are probably expert geoengineers and can use additional layers of aerosols above the "smoke" to balance out the additional absorption or even make it cooler. The "smoke" can also have handwaving properties like perhaps it makes things look dark, but the sunlight still reaches the Earth's surface so growing crops and the water cycle still work as usual. Does the "smoke" negatively affect breathing like real smoke? Maybe it does the opposite and people feel more alert. Overall, once you fill the air with some mysterious substance created by aliens, you have unlimited possibilities which can shape your encampment in all kinds of ways. You can figure out the plot, motivations, and character development then tweak the properties of the "smoke" to accommodate them. In practice, the behavior of the environment doesn't need to be justified because it's literally aliens. The main thing is to establish clear rules early on so readers can follow along. [Answer] Geothermal power station could be used for producing electricity that allows to survive by growing plants in some cave. This may have limited capacity but can last for very long time as there are no obvious resources being depleted (air, water remain available). In suitable places like Iceland geothermal power is not so difficult to obtain. The overall setup has no large external moving parts and can be well hidden. Some underground river may also produce hydroelectric power for producing light, still having all setup completely hidden. [Answer] # Feces. It may not look it, but there's some kind of ecosystem somewhere. You can breathe the air - there's oxygen from somewhere. The aliens do eat, even if you don't know how. And the planet doesn't freeze, because the sunlight is hitting something. Perhaps they've all moved in their flying fortresses and there are now just countless layers of habitation far above the smoke. But there's nothing to eat down where you are - the stored food is used or destroyed, and the plants can't grow. Nothing... except huge platters of alien feces. It's hard to say exactly why you always find the feces on a platter. It's a simple metal; your welder friend says it sounds like cheap iron; looks shiny in the light. The platters seem much too heavy to waft down slowly on their own, but perhaps there is a magnetic effect used to move them? Whatever the reason, the aliens do not do a very good job of digestion. Alien feces seems to contain a roughly balanced diet of proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates, mixed in with a number of inert or undesirable components. Your scientist friend keeps talking about finding a DNA sequencer and trying to determine if DNA is present from the digested food, of what type. Hope it's not human ... but does anyone believe it's anything else? There are many ways to process the feces. Everyone wants a mushroom farm, but they never seem to grow. Feeding it to pigs worked, but they didn't produce piglets, and now there are no more to try. Boiling uses scarce resources and does little but spread the smell far and wide. Mostly, the recommended solution is to hold your nose and hope this time the aliens passed something sufficiently toxic to end it all. [Answer] The [chicxulub impact](https://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kring/Chicxulub/regional-effects/) didn't immediately wipe out the dinosaurs but rather the events that it propagated. No sun means no food for herbivores. No food for herbivores means no food for carnivores. <https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-an-asteroid-caused-extinction-of-dinosaurs.html> If you're focusing on the human's survival then they'd have to hunt and eat these aliens. If you're focusing on the alien's desire to wipe out humans then it's just a waiting game once they release the smoke shading. [Answer] If it is really dark, you can't grow stuff outside. Nothing grows in circumstances you would proclaim to be nighttime. The alternative is to try using electricity to grow stuff. This is less plausible than it seems on the first glance, but it isn't completely impossible. Ballpark estimates from another stackexchange answer on space (<https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/22012/power-to-grow-food-per-person>) seems to point to about 500 kWh/person/day. Therefore, for ~50 people and power plant operating 24/7, you are looking at ~1MW of power running all the time. This is approaching "crazy" territory, but let's ignore that and rather ask ourselves - which power plants are suitable for that? Well, fossil fuels are out, there is no infrastructure to keep supply going. That dead forest you have (no sun=dead trees) is useless too. Solar is obviously out. Wind depends - is the wind still blowing? IF you have 100% darkness everywhere it won't. But if you have only local darkness you might still get some (enough?) wind. Few turbines could be enough for this small group... until they inevitably get clogged by this magic dust or whatever it is. Geothermal and other niche projects are far too rare. Nuclear, one of the plants that won't shut down when cut out of grid, will run out of fuel in few years, but it could be a possible solution in the mean time. So, the most plausible solution - hydro power plant. It can keep going for a while while the world stopped ... obviously assuming sun is shining elsewhere - otherwise there is no evaporation -> no rain -> no rivers -> no power. What remains is getting the power to the greenhouse. 1MW power line going to a building is pretty large and probably well-controlled/inspected (you can't just claim to need such power and get it, no questions asked). The easiest option is the one in comments - already existing (legal) farms in buildings. I was unaware there are some existing large scale projects that can feed enough people to meet these needs. Other solution is that one of these folks is a shady character that claimed to have a cloud storage business (or something else computer-related), so he got a pretty fat power line going to his building for all of that. But instead of (or along) those computers, he operates a marihuana growing facility - so he has all machinery people need to grow stuff in place already. (Yes, it is completely unplausible that nobody else would have noticed this, so you probably need to have him suitably connected; or that he only recently moved his interests so he wasn't actually doing any farming yet. Other businesses that have large energy needs are most likely less plausible to grow stuff on side or be reworked in that way - you can't really move machinery inside a lumber mill without a lot of noise) Is this plausible? Not really, it is possible though. Once you make it really dark outside you don't really have any viable options beyond just eating all the cans from the supermarket (or all the mushrooms that grew on corpses of humans, animals or trees; it is the same in the end only with higher chance of food poisoning) Note that flowing rivers (which you need to not die of thirst before food even gets relevant) quickly tell everyone that this darkness is local and that they should probably just keep walking out instead of trying to get a community going in the dark. [Answer] I don't know if this is appropriate but recently I read the metro books in which life has become hostile above ground and human life needed to hide inside the dark tunnels of the Russian metros. A lot of the key points you mentioned here are touched upon in these books in a somewhat believable manner. > > There is no sunlight, the group may have some electricity going, but probably nothing crazy as to keep hidden > > > Even with the power grid largely offline, humanity wouldn't have to forfeit the usage of electrical lights entirely. Low wattage led lights running on their lowest settings could last days on some AAA batteries. In addition, there are handheld dynamo flashlights. With constant night going on, human eyes would start to adapt, making dim lights overall more preferable. More natural sources of light such as fires can be made to last for quite some time as well. > > There is no major form of communication (no internet, radio, etc.) > > > With no major form of communication possible, it would mostly be traders and smaller travel groups pulling double duty delivering messages from A to B. The problems that this presents is that any piece of information obtained in the morning can be unreliable in the evening and entirely outdated the next day. > > There must be some way to produce food > > > As for the food, some knowledgeable people about mushroom farming could create a decent reliable source of food with those. In addition, there should still be plenty of animals and insects lurking in the dark. For example, rats could act as emergency food. In addition, it wouldn't be to far out there to assume that some farm animals could adapt to the darkness as well. Pigs could possibly be raised though they would likely turn pale and frail. The amount of food output through those means would be rather small and could realistically sustain only smaller groups. > > It is rumored in your group that the creatures can be taken out with silenced weapons without drawing additional attention when needed, although no-one has hands on experience with killing an invader. > > > On a side note, if this paragraph refers to a silencer on a gun, then that would be movie logic. Real guns with silencers on them still are incredibly loud. So silenced weapons in this case would have to be bows, blow darts or slingshots to name a few. Clubs and knifes would work as well. [Answer] This question is straight from a Rimworld smoke extractor Mechanoid cluster. You might wanna farm funghi and use an underground river for electricity :D Depending on what type of aliens there are, your best chances are to create a big, bright fire ( maybe burn an old factory to the ground ) and hide in the twilight next to it. These aliens, while drawn to light, seem to have a hard time envisioning anything in bright light. A bit like darkvision creatures from DND. So in the first weeks, while you can still find many rations and your powers are not drained due to surviving in darkness , you might just ambush and guerilla aliens. Yes, they will see you standing next to the fire, but now you can see them too, so your odds are even. It might take a great number of survivors, but the remaining ones can harvest technology from aliens or even eat them, so you'd have a food source until you can manage to climb high enough on a mountain so you'd be above the smoke. If nothing helps, cannibalism is always an option, especially if you are fighting aliens and have a constant supply of fresh corpses. I don't claim these are the most humane methods of survival, but survival was never pretty, wasn't it? [Answer] # Combining points from almost everyone's answers, I think there are only a few options: ## Living conditions: The survivors should probably live underground, or in some sort of a cave system. Electricity can be generated using various technologies. Wind turbines might work if there is wind, but they aren't very discrete. Nuclear and geothermal power might also be an option, but are also not very discrete. A small river might create enough torque on a water wheel to produce enough energy for a relatively small community. Although not enough electricity to grow plants. ## Providing food: ### - There isn't really a good option for food if the smoke covers the globe: If the world were indeed completely covered with smoke such that there is no light from the sun hitting the surface of the Earth, all living things (including the aliens presumably) are doomed. No photosynthesis can occur and with that the animals soon die. Potential survivable scenarios include growing plants underground or indoors, but plants would need a great deal of electricity to sustain even a small population. Mushrooms are probably not sustainable either. Creating the necessary electricity to product enough light for the plants is complex and would potentially create a good deal of noise (i.e. it isn't likely to create this much electricity in secrecy) ### - There are a few options for food if the smoke only covered parts of the globe: Living near water may be great for electricity generation, but also for food. If the smoke is only local to your area, the survivors could live off of fish while they plan their escape to "greener" grass. Other traveling creatures may be an option (birds are really the only other thing I can think of). It would suck to live completely off fish, but it can be done. You could grow mushrooms to have on the side. ## Other notes: * Silenced weapons are not a great option. Although, they may seem quiet, they are still a bit loud. * Alien dung, if it exists, could be boiled and consumed ]
[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/149490/edit). Closed 4 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/149490/edit) Why would zombies eat humans and not any other animals? Are there any chemicals or vitamins that can only be found in human bodies and not other animals? [Answer] Zombies are basically human rotting bodies. To keep them together, they need to supply spare elements taken from a human body. Eating a human body is the most direct way to get those, considering how clumsy the zombie are for getting food and also how necessarily inefficient is their digestive system. Since they cannot fully digest food and use those elements back to synthesize bodily components, accessing human intermediates is the best compromise. [Answer] It's depends what kind of Zombie we're talking about: * Voodoo Zombies, where the word ultimately comes from, attack people because that's what their witch doctor maker/master desires. * The Plague Zombie popularised by the [Night of the Living Dead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Living_Dead_(film_series)) films is more akin to the Germanic Ghoul and Umpyr, also the basis for the modern Vampire as popularised by Bram Stoker. In legend, ancient and modern, they hunt humans because they have to consume human life-force or because those humans have in some way wronged them and they're taking vengeance upon them. In film as far as I can remember the answer is pretty much "because they do" no further explanation required or given. * The modern Zombie of franchises like [The Walking Dead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_(comic_book)) owes more to Ramero than Voodoo with the idea that they attack to spread some kind of "Zombieism" (totally a word) disease that is functional similar to rabies in that it makes its hosts hostile towards other potential hosts. As a note [World War Z](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z) (the book don't bother with the movie) has Zombies that are substantially similar to many other modern Zombies but which hunt any fauna, including monkeys, moles, rabbits and at least one rather large alligator. [Answer] Zombies are simply the vehicle by which the zombie virus spreads itself. And the zombie virus, like many viruses, only infects humans. Zombies of course have a never ending hunger for human flesh. But its not because they need delicious brains to survive. Rather, that craving to sink their teeth into the soft, tasty goodness of a living person is instilled by the virus as a means of ensuring it survives and spreads by infecting others. In a sense, the zombies are seeking out new hosts for the virus. And that host is humans. They don't attack animals (mostly, some may get confused) because biting a cow or horse does not spread the virus. So yes, zombies will capture and devour terrified humans, ripping their innards apart as they feast upon their screaming victims. But some humans will evade the attack with merely a scratch or bite... and that ensures the virus is passed on. [Answer] Human brains are easier to convert into human stem cells then deer brains. The human stem cells are used to repair the zombie body. [Answer] From the point of view of the storytelling, the cannibalism taboo is one of the stronger and most basic taboos for the people of most of the cultures. If one wants to show the total breakdown of the society and lack of any culture and order (Warhammer Chaos style), the easiest way to depict it is to show cannibalism, necrophilia and incest in whatever order. The second component of the zombie myth is actual reanimation of the body - and that is also one of the oldest, most basic and most widespread fear we can see in the lot of human cultures. So, purely from the storytelling perspective, the cannibalistic undead is one of the easiest trope you can use to evoke dread and disgust to significant degree for the humans of the most known cultures. If we are looking for the in-story explanation of cannibalism, I see two different explanation strategies. The first one has less to do with feeding itself. It is a more archaic one, more similar to the traditional vampire stories - by whatever mechanism, the reanimated bodies retain some of the memories and the ability to recognize people. They would attack the people they remember feeling resentment to. Or, more horribly, the ones they felt attachment towards. As in Eastern European vampire stories, such zombies would shamble back towards their home and family, then start tracking and hunting all the people they knew. Such explanation would work well in the low-tech worlds to explain why zombies may walk across the wilderness to the nearest human habitation. The second explanation is exactly about feeding and presumes that there is a cannibalism taboo. A thing reanimating the body is some sort of a parasite - a biological, psychic or magical one. And unlike the original inhabitant of the body, it sees humans as a possible source of meat. In the modern setting, with the contemporary population density, this parasite doesn't even need to see humans as the only food. A hungry zombie waking in the modern major population center would see hundreds of people around, much more then any other sources of recognizable food. [Answer] Mainly because of these reasons: 1. Density of population. Humans will voluntarily pack more densely than most other animals... they even are known to build cities with high-rise buildings, providing only narrow escape routes, while at the same time reaching a higher meat-per-area ratio than other wildlife. For example Hong Kong has approximately 6,300 people per square kilometre ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hong_Kong)). 2. Nutritional value. A human provides 12% of mass in lipides (fat) and 20% of mass in proteins (see [composition of human body](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body)), resulting in a whopping approx. 155.000kcal (see [here](https://www.quora.com/How-many-calories-are-there-in-the-average-human-body)). And those are only average values: deviations in body-mass index occur - accompanied by decreased mobility coming along with increased nutritional value. 3. Almost no defense, easy prey. No horns, tusks, protective leathery skin, only insignificant claws and teeth. Bad eyesight, worse at night. Humans often are in need of corrective lenses. Humans are known to utilize tools, but access to more efficient lethal tools is regulated and restricted in most societies. [Answer] Wonderful reasons, accurate and informative. I think the true reason over the top of all of these is that eating humans makes it an existential problem for humans. Especially the humans in the story. If zombies were happy with dogs or dog food then the problem is just one of management. Where can we get enough for the zombies to eat that they will leave us alone. In the (always) post apocalyptic world of modern drama you need a current real threat that requires constant attention. ]
[Question] [ Alright, we all know the drill, dragons spit fire, like a massive flamethrower, but their fire probably has quite limited range. This is okay for hunting land animals, and being an unremoveable thorn in the eye for medieval societies, but for aerial combat against something like a biplane, it just doesn't do the job. It would probably be better if they had different kind of adaptation. Now, let's assume we want to make dragons kinda "natural" so, what we can give them should be limited to adaptations present in nature. After all, dragon flame throwing can be seen as magically magnified ability of [Bombardier Beetle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_beetle). These dragons were divinely engineered, but the creators wanted to stay true to the nature of, well, the nature, so while these abilities are greatly magically enhanced, they are at least strongly inspired by tricks present in the nature. For the size of the dragon, let's assume around 500 kg and 25-30 m wingspan. So, what kind of magic adaptation for aerial combat should magically engineered dragons have instead of flame throwing, so that they're formidable opponents for ww2 era planes? [Answer] Little Helpers Many of the ideas mentioned present weight problems. We already have a very large flying lizard with imperfect mobility and limited lifting capacity. So, we take a lesson from 1960s and later aircraft : Use missiles instead of dumb guns and bombs, to make it more likely to hit the target. Have a bunch of hatchling dragons or a related species (dragonets to dragons ::: monkeys to humans). Release them when followed by a bogey. Some are lost, but they either take out the enemy or allow the big dragon to bank around and fight head on. [Answer] The scariest thing I can think of when it comes to half-ton flying lizards attacking ww2 era aircraft would just be making them tough, smart, and fast. I'm imagining a nile crocodile flying at 300-400mph. If the dragons can match all but the fastest prop-driven aircraft in level flight, and are even close to human-level intelligence, they'd be terrifying. Who cares about spitting fire? Just grab onto the plane and tear the pilot out of it and eat him. Rip the wings off. Tear through the side of that B-17 and go nuts on the crew from inside. Dragons like this would be harder to hit than all but the fastest fighter aircraft, and harder to shoot down than all but the best armored. Mid-to-late war American fighters all had .50cal and those would do just fine, but a lot of Japanese and German planes used .30cal and that would be a bit iffy against something with hide like that. Japanese and German aircraft also weren't built to take hits. A half-ton lizard would go right through a Zero without even noticing, and I wouldn't really like to be in a Spitfire or a Mosquito either. Yeah. You don't need to get crazy with this. Big, fast, tough, smart flying lizards. VERY dangerous to aircraft. [Answer] Fewmets. <https://findwords.info/term/fewmets> Dragons would drop these in mid air and they would follow the laws of physics as regards subsequent trajectory. As the air got to them they would smoke more and more until forcefully exploding in a shrapnel cloud of bones, teeth, old scales, and rocks passed down from the gizzard. There is also often considerable hair and other indigestible bits. Because of this tendency for their dung to explode, dragons have long taken to the air for excretory purposes, which helps put a generous distance between themselves and their explosive excrement. Weaponization was an obvious next step. In addition to the obvious "dropping" from above, dragons have perfected pelvic motions to put extra impetus on their flung dung, allowing the feared "attack from below". [Answer] Firebreathing is the main weapon. As others have noted, dragons could be in trouble against ww2 era aircraft, if they are seen. However, until the discovery and implementation of radars on the aircraft, the discovery of enemy was visual. Therefore, the answer is not another offensive weapon, but simply: ## Echolocation + ability to create thick fog, steam or smoke. The dragon is a relative of bat. It can use [acoustic location](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_echolocation) of enemies and pinpoint them quite precisely. A bat is said to "see with its ears". So does a dragon, and it doesn't need to see its prey with eyes. It can either drink a lot of water and make it interact with the fire mechanism to create steam, or use another mechanism to create fog, or just belch huge gusts of smoke, large enough to create a cloud in which it can hide. Edit: it could possibly even use its fire on existing higher clouds to make rain or maybe even fog in lower parts of atmosphere. All of these things will allow it to get close enough to the enemy aircraft in order to use is main attack. As a bonus, the smoke/fog part ties well with a number of existing stories/folklore about dragons. And you don't need to invent even more magic, as the echolocation already happens in nature, and the mechanism for steam/fog/smoke doesn't call for any additional magic either. [Answer] The “wolverine” package: fast healing and an impenetrable brain casing. Sure, pilots can rip them to shreds with bullets, but the dragons will be back and flying in a few hours/days. The only way to do one in is damage faster than they can heal, and that means fire. But substances like napalm are decades in the future, and even then, they are much harder to direct to target. If they can be killed by decapitation, this explains why knights were effective against them. [Answer] I would recommend some variation of the [pistol shrimp's](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=19&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiIm4f7zoHmAhUBSN8KHX00DCcQFjASegQIBxAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2F2014%2F07%2Fabsurd-creature-of-the-week-pistol-shrimp%2F&usg=AOvVaw2cQHgZ_4n557sq101S3t7a) mechanism of weaponized propulsion. The shrimp can briefly displace water at 100 feet per second, creating a bubble of vapor, which collapses in a sonic boom of over 200 decibels, and briefly heats the bubble to 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit - and all of this obviously has quite drastic implications for the shrimp's target! This effect is only really possible in water, but with magical adaptations, I'm sure you could figure out something convincing that accomplishes the same result. [Answer] If the limitation of "what is present in nature" is preserved, I think your dragons will be toast. Body size will restrict acceleration, and if they stoop (a la peregrine falcons) to increase speed, they'd still need to pull out of that without ripping their own wings off. The peregrine's stoop is ~200 MPH. I can't see dragons getting close to that. The other issue will be the hardness of their scales. A Messerschmitt 109 would be armed with 7.62 mm canons (the 8mm Mauser round, I think from what I can pick up with a quick google search). Dragon scales are probably similar to those of a pangolin - whose keratin scales can stop a lion's bite - but lions have relatively low bite force compared to other cats. I can't find any studies that have measured the relative "bulletproofness" of pangolin scales, but I doubt they'd stop sustained bursts from twin canons on multiple ME109s. If the dragons have crocodile-like skin, the bullets will just go straight through. A surprise attack - dropping out of the sky onto a squadron of the relatively slow moving WWII aircraft would be pretty devastating. Spitting circles of fire will do considerable (i.e. critical) damage to any planes caught, while the dragon takes down a bomber of two in the manner of a real-world hawk taking a pigeon. (contrary to the question, fire would be extremely effective if the dragon could get close enough) ...but if the dragon is spotted by a squadron of ME109s, the bullets will rip it apart before it gets close enough for fire or claw. Even if the body scales are somehow tough enough (voiding the natural world assumption), the wings will be extremely vulnerable. The only hope for the slower moving, less agile dragon is endurance - to allow it to get close enough, and that would require - given that armour plating seems unrealistic - extremely rapid wound healing. Magically enhanced natural processes of clotting, wound-sealing and cell regeneration would achieve this. [Answer] How about giving the dragon its own gun? Many plants in nature use sudden pressure release to disperse their seeds. Given a dragon has a much faster method for producing pressure (whatever creates their flames). They need only something to disperse at velocity. These could be modified scales and spines (even more so if there is rapid healing), or perhaps something exogenous to the dragon like appropriately shaped stones (adapted from the practice of finding gizzard stones). These could be made even more dastardly by having them coated in a flammable/corrosive/alkaline substance. --- In a similar vein, Jet Propulsion. Those flames, and the ability to pressurise aren't just good for making weapons. Its great for making a natural jet engine. Even if its only sustainable for a short stints it would be formidable. Squid use water jets for propulsion all the time. Just amp that up and change the direction. A dragon suddenly plummets out of the sun, ripping a hole in a wing, spraying another two crafts with flame before rapidly accelerating out of harms way. Add a reasonably intelligent mind behind that ability and watch entire squadrons fall out of the sky. [Answer] You've asked for something based on nature, how about giving your dragons the ability to launch projectiles in a way similar to tarantulas but enhanced? A tarantula is able to launch a storm of tiny hairs called [urticating hairs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urticating_hair) by rubbing their legs on their abdomen. These hairs are barbed to cause maximum irritation and can be lethal to small animals such as rodents, in larger animals the hairs cause irritation and can be damaging to eyes and respiratory systems. Now scale this up to dragon sized, perhaps your dragons when threatened by ww2 aircraft are able to launch their scales as projectiles. Depending on the fantasy properties you assign their scales you could have these scales be specialized, just as the tarantula urticating hairs are specialized from their normal hairs, to be much denser and harder than steel. An ideal placement of these specialized projectile scales would be somewhere the dragon can accelerate quickly and accurately in many directions, the tail would be ideal for this. With a powerful enough flick of the dragon's tail they could launch dozens of these hardened scales at targets of their choice even in mid flight, now your dragon is has a projectile of their own to combat WW2 era planes. [Answer] ## Airplanes are very fragile That's why midair collisions usually end with everyone on both planes dead. The collisions don't obliterate the airplanes, it just bangs up wings and control surfaces enough that the airplane is no longer capable of controlled flight. Further, WWII airplanes have to get fairly close to their target to score a hit. That means a clever dragon, even a slower one, can maneuver into "melee range". Because of the limited attack profile, only 2-3 fighter airplanes (tops) can attack the dragon at one time. Bombers have turrets, but they are so sluggish that it'd be crazy to get near a dragon with one. The dragon only has to sink its teeth into the airplane, and it's done. Obviously, the dragon clamped onto the airplane will destroy its balance, and disrupt wing airflow, breaking its ability to fly. So the dragon could simply grab on and ride the airplane down, detaching right before ground impact - too late for the airplane to straighten out and recover. However more likely the dragon will realize that breaking off, or simply jamming certain control surfaces at particular positions, will make the airplane unflyable. It will crash all on its own without further attention by the dragon. So the dragon would just hop from plane to plane, breaking each, and 10 planes are doomed by the time the first one hits the ground. It's very difficult to make an airplane resist jaw and claw damage from an intelligent adversary, because making it tough also makes it heavy - and it can't be heavy and also fly. [Answer] Make their scales and teeth stronger than metal. They'd simply chew out airplanes or fly through them. Also, if they get more speed and/or maneuverability than fly fighters, dragons would be impossible to take down and a authentic nightmare for air units. And since their scales are that hard, bullets would do next to nothing to them. [Answer] I think flames are problematic - they are slow, hard to control once they leave the dragon (think of high altitude winds, direction changes etc) and need to make contact with the planes for at least some time to have an effect. How about instead of using fire breath, use another part of the dragon, its wings. Maybe some combination of magic and wing movement that will cause areas of intense turbulence which would be hard to combat and knock most older planes out of the air (plus, giving pilot character the chance to escape their out of control planes rather then just go up in smoke...) [Answer] Given that a plane is a mechanical dragon of sorts (can fly, breathe fire) with a human for its brain. There would be two ways to make dragons better; One would be to make dragons smaller than aplane so they can outmaneuver the plane. This may cause them to loose a little firepower but that can be compensated by the Second point; make the dragons smarter than humans. [Answer] They don't need one You are talking about a half-ton critter flying with moving wings; those wings would generate a lot of turbulence. WW2 era biplanes were quite unstable, all a dragon would need to do is divebomb to the front of a plane, then halt their drop with a beat of their wings. This would produce a strong, turbulent downwind, which will force the poor little aircraft into a nosedive. [Answer] # Hovering Inspired by the Russian [Night Witches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches) whose aircraft's top speed was lower than the German defender's stall speed making them very hard to shoot down. Aircraft interception was generally done by approaching from behind and trying to pick them off. If you're unable to stay behind because you can't fly slowly enough that puts you in a very vulnerable position if you don't make the kill. Giving the dragons the ability to hover, along with good acceleration and general maneuverability will tip the balance ever in their favour. [Answer] # Fire I think you discount the fire breathing too much. Blow fire into the intake of an engine and you're likely to oxygen starve the engine. Some engines might refire/restart quickly, but you're still looking at a pilot that's now concentrating on not falling out of the sky vs one concentrating on flying or even shooting. Add a sticky substance as the dragon fire agent, and you have something gumming up the intakes as well. Many props in WWII era planes were made of lacquered wood, so get them hot enough and they catch fire. Many planes were wood or canvas covered, so the same thing. With that gummy accelerant mentioned above, anything not metal will likely catch fire. Even a metal with a low enough melting point could be in danger. Heck, you don't need to melt the metal, just get it softened and wings will just bend & rip off. Get a fire breather and a frost breather working on conjunction and metals will get brittle & snap. To make sure you don't get fried pilots, the plane makers would have to rely on canopies, which not all planes did in WWII. Also, some canopies were made from plastic, so they could have a tendency to catch fire, too. # Claws Just like in the movie "Avatar", the dragons/ikran/toruk can simply fly up to a plane and tear it to shreds, as other answer have mentioned. Even a glass canopy or metal plane won't help you if you're missing a wing or tail. Speaking of tails, give the dragons an armored tail to smash at planes as they fly by or land on. Yes, a dragon would likely use the tail to steer with, but this is less problematic than in a plane. I suggest an armored tail instead of a spiked tail, since spikes can get stuck, dragging the dragon down with the demolished plane. # Agility, speed, intelligence With a sufficiently intelligent dragon breed, their agility and speed can be used to fly in between bombers, causing them to fire at each other when they miss. Unfortunately, this happened a lot in real life, but isn't recorded as such, simply because there was so much chaos that people generally didn't know where they were all taking hits from and not many people would say they shot a friendly, even if it was an accident. [Answer] Scheme #1: Cloud dragons with eagle eyes, ridiculously high operational ceiling, and permanent Greater Haste that have a maximum flight speed up to 500 mph. Climb up to about half a mile above a World War II era fighter, shadow it from behind. then swoop down like an eagle. Scheme #2: Hover in place with rapid regeneration and bullet-resistant hide from the rear. In a traditional World War II dogfight, the idea is to get behind the enemy aircraft and fire ahead of them. The obvious counter to that is to slow down, but that would typically cause a stall. A dragon could easily counter this by having enough regeneration and armor on its hide to take a few bursts, then slow down to force the enemy aircraft to pass by - close enough to grab. Scheme #3: Visual countermeasures. Dragons with mirror-image (decoy) spells would be downright dangerous against World War II fighter squadrons. [Answer] This answer is informed by my bias that "dragons" should be based not on reptilians, but on pterosaurs, as [this in what I am doing](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/53251/10851) in the world I am building. It solves the problem of the wing-and-forearm-in-the-same-place anatomical impossibility, and provides a lot of nice examples of things that really existed to start from. So, the first thing we need is for the subject dragon to be a pterosaur with pycnofibers, like Anurognathus: [![Anurognathus](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HJuJv.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HJuJv.png) ([source](https://pterosaur.net/species.php)) Wikipedia describes [pycnofibers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur#Pycnofibers) as "unique structures similar to, but not homologous (sharing a common origin) with, mammalian hair, an example of convergent evolution." In this case, we need to combine this with another modern-day Real World (TM) adaptation, already mentioned in another answer, [urticating hairs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urticating_hair). This feature is found in tarantulas, that can kick hairs off their own backsides, which irritate the eyes and airways of attacking predators. We need the subject dragon to have a bit of convergent evolution with these kinds of tarantulas. As for the location of the urticating pycnofibers, I would love to have the subject dragon sporting a club tail covered with them. However, it seems most pterosaurs had just a stub of a tail, and those with prominent tails didn't have clubs. The subject dragon may just have to be jealous of Ankylosaurus: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/750xe.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/750xe.jpg) ([source](https://www.dkfindout.com/uk/dinosaurs-and-prehistoric-life/dinosaurs/ankylosaurus/)) However, there were several types of pterosaurs that had large tail vanes, including Rhamphorhynchus and Darwinopterus: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UheA4.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UheA4.png) (ibid) I could not find an example of a pterosaur showing both pycnofibers and tail vanes, but that doesn't mean the subject dragon can't evolve both, any more than urticating pycnofibers can't be a thing. --- Having built our dragon with the features described, we now turn to the question of how is this utilized in an aerial dogfight? I imagine a tactic of allowing the enemy plane to actually get behind, thinking he has the dragon in his gun sights. Then the dragon suddenly swoops with a flick of its tail, leaving a cloud of hard, sharp fibers in the air in front of the plane. It's almost the biological equivalent of [flak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aircraft_warfare). As it flies through them, the fibers are ingested by the plane's air intakes. Those in the cooling intakes clog them up and make the engine run hot. If any get sucked into the carburetor, they will introduce friction, scraping away at the piston/ cylinders and eventually seizing the engine. I admit this is not the best of plans. The dragon might only get a couple shots per battle before having to rest long enough to re-grow the fibers. Also, the impact on the enemy is not immediate- he will have several minutes to continue the attack before the engine damage takes hold. However, I feel this is the best explanation that is entirely plausible from an anatomical and evolutionary point of view. Not to mention totally bad-ass. [Answer] TL/DR: Let the dragons sneeze thermite. Dragons are traditionally associated with "breathing fire", so rather than replacing their fire, we simply alter it a bit. Instead of exhaling a plume of high-temperature volatile substances that combust in the air, but travel slowly and quickly lose velocity, we give them the ability to produce a thick, sticky semi-liquid substance containing a mixture of chemicals such as magnesium and iron oxide, plus a pyrophoric substance such as white phosphorus. By making this liquid so thick and sticky that it behaves like a non-newtonian fluid, remaining cohesive even at high velocities, the dragon could take advantage of its long neck to inject globules of this substance into its airways as it exhales strongly, the fast-moving airflow accelerating the globules to higher velocities by directing the airflow through the nostrils which taper significantly along the length of the dragon's long nose. With an ability to produce high exhalation pressures and a significant reduction in the diameter of the nostrils from the back of the hard palate to their opening, it may be possible to eject these globules of thermite at velocities well in excess of those achieved by a human sneeze, that being claimed to be up to 90 m/s (320 kph / 200 mph). Velocities on the order of 250 m/s (900 kph / 560 mph) may be achievable, which is fast enough to hit all but the fastest of WWII aircraft from behind. Add the velocity of the dragon, which may be up to 30 m/s (100 kph / 70 mph), and this gives the thermite globules a velocity of between 220 and 280 m/s (800-1000 kph / 490-630 mph). Given that a dragon has a long neck, it could turn its head to aim its thermite-sneezes in any direction, including directly behind itself, where a fighter aircraft would need to be in order to engage it. What effect would these thermite globules have on an aircraft? Let us assume that the globules are roughly spherical, and around 20mm in diameter, containing a Magnesium & Iron oxide mixture, a sticky organic binder, and is coated with white phosphorus or some other pyrophoric substance to provide a source of ignition. Magnesium thermite burns at a temperature in excess of 2200°C, easily hot enough to melt iron. Any globules that impact with an aircraft would flatten into a 'splat' perhaps 30-60mm in diameter, depending upon the impact velocity. The splat would be composed of either burning thermite or molten iron at a temperature of around 2500°C, hot enough to burn straight through the skin of any aircraft, be it doped linen or aluminium. Many WWII aircraft had wooden airframes, and those with metal airframes would be constructed from aluminium. Magnesium thermite would easily be hot enough to ignite both wooden and aluminium airframes, plus there is the significant probability that the aircraft's fuel tanks will be compromised, and the fuel within ignited. An impact on a glass or plexiglass surface would likely result in a burn-through, and an impact on an engine block, which would most likely be made from an aluminium alloy, could also lead to a burn-through which might result in a loss of lubricant and/or coolant which would result in the engine malfunctioning. If a globule of thermite was to impact with a human pilot/crewmember, it would result in a severe burn that could easily be incapacitating. A single hit to an aircraft might also have little effect other than to damage the aircraft's skin and add to its static drag, but as a dragon would likely sneeze many globules of thermite, multiple hits would greatly increase the odds of inflicting fatal damage. The characteristics of the globules' combustion would also allow the dragon to aim them readily. Globules would initially leave a trail of white smoke as the white phosphorus burned, and then when the thermite core ignites, the globule would emit a bright white light. Both effects could be used by the dragon as tracers, allowing it to correct its aim to achieve a hit. While the dragon itself would be armoured, and its hide might deflect a glancing impact from a bullet, achieving a hit on a relatively slow-moving target that is capable of sneezing thermite at 800 to 1000 kph in any direction would be both difficult and highly risky. [Answer] ## Against biplanes, Fire Breath is already Good Enough For an idea of how biplanes typically performed, let's look at the British Sopwith Camel. It had a maximum speed of 113mph, a maximum altitude of about 19,000ft, and was armed with two .303 machine guns. They were hard planes to aim making them only effective within ranges of about 100m. Certain Ace pilots could hit from 200m away, but they were the exceptions to the rule. In terms of performance, a biplane was very similar to that of many large birds. Certain species of vulchers, cranes, mallards, swans, and geese could fly significantly higher than a Sopwith, and many birds of prey including certain species of hawks, falcons, and eagles could fly significantly faster than a Sopwith. So, it's very easy to imagine a large animal like a dragon having similar aerial performance to a typical biplane. As for armaments: a properly constrained firehose has a maximum range of about 100m; so, if your dragon's fire breathing structures can create fire hydrant level water pressures, and focus his breath into tight enough of a stream, then a dragon would be able to effectively attack a sopwith from the same ranges that a sopwith could attack a dragon. Each side may have advantages in certain areas vs others, but the fight should be more or less fair. ## But a lot of things got better by WWII... This issue with this question is that biplanes were already obsolete by WWII. Biplanes were used in WWI when engines were not yet good enough to fly with a single wing design, but as engines got better, single wing planes quickly phased them out due to their greater stability and overall performance. What few biplanes remained in WWII were mostly used for night bombing or non-combat roles where their speed was less of an issue. So, if we fast forward to WWII, the main british fighter was no longer the Sopwith, it was the Spitfire. The Spitfire had a maximum speed of 406mph, a maximum altitude of about 43,000ft, and it's firepower was about 4x that of the sopwith using more accurate weapons increasing the average engage range to 300m. This is where your dragons would be in real trouble because no animal can fly anywhere near as high or fast as a spitfire. WWII planes were so much more maneuverable than any animal that even if your dragons had a weapon system to match the range and stopping power of WWII planes that they would have no way of engaging them. Infact, many WWII era planes had belly mounted ball turrets already; so, if humans wanted to slaughter a group of dragons, they could just use their superior speed to kite them into the upper atmosphere, and once the dragons could clime no higher, they could just fly circles over the dragons picking them off by shooting down at them with their ball turrets. The accepted answer will fail your dragons because your baby dragon "missiles" will likewise not be able to reach the heights or speeds necessary to catch a human WWII aircraft. So for your dragons to beat WWII tech, the question is less about what weapon they use to attack the human fighters as how they fly fast and high enough to engage them at all? My first thought here is to strap a jet engine to their backs. Jet engines were invented in 1930, but WWII eneginers struggled to make them a useful technology because designing a stable fuselage becomes much harder at those speeds. Dragons can skip on the fusage problem because a dragon is a living thing which can reshape its body based on the forces it feels. This would mean that dragons could use the technology of the day to fly faster and higher than WWII planes allowing them to quickly close into distances where they could use their shorter ranged weapons on their enemies. But since the OP asks for a magic solution, just replace "jet engine" with "magic flight enhancement". I imagine something along the lines of dragons tattooing themselves with some kind of runes that allow them to fly much faster and higher than their biology alone would imply or something like that. You could also invert the equation by giving the dragons a weapon with enough range that the faster human fighters would be forced to close the gap to engage the dragons up close, but this weapon system would have to be able to shot up from the dragon's maximum altitude, to the human's maximum altitude which is probably somewhere on the order of 10,000-20,000 vertical feet. This would be much harder to balance since any weapon with THAT much of a range advantage might give the dragons to much of tactical advantage. [Answer] Hard scales. Let's say our dragon here is being threatened by world war 2 fighter planes. The planes shoot a bunch of missiles at the dragon, but the bullets bounce of the dragon without any damage. The dragon then responds with rubbing it's scales to fire against the planes. The planes retreat, but not before the dragon uses it's thicker-than metal teeth and claws to destroy the plane. To make things even better, make the dragon have more speed and manuverability than the fly fighters, so the fighters can't hit it. Oh, than make the dragon use it's wings to force the planes away by generating huge gusts of wind that would make the planes crash to the ground. [Answer] Missile launching. Consider the following: when the dragon evolved, they started by spitting a tar-like substance at enemies. Eventually, they evolved a gland on the roof of the mouth to ignite that tar. Next, they evolve a gas sac that collects hydrogen gas from the digestive tract; this gas is released with the tar to improve ignition and burning. Over time, the dragon uses less tar and more gas, expelled at high pressure. this leads to the flamethrower-type fire breathing that we're familiar with. Suppose that some dragons retain the ability to spit tar... since magic is explicitly involved here, the tar could be enchanted to explode a short while after ignition. Your dragons can now launch sticky grenades at airplanes. ]
[Question] [ Okay, I'm researching for a scene in my science fiction story. A character is in a spacecraft and needing to open a locked hatchway. It's locked electronically by an unknown code. All methods of forcing it open are failing, and there's limited time. So...I was thinking it might be plausible for the character to use an arc welder to just burn away the lock (holding the stick away from the metal so that it's essentially a torch). But then...I'm not sure if a spacecraft would keep an arc welder onboard. I've heard of arc welding experiments done in space before, but is that considered dangerous/antiquated? Note: The spacecraft is a step above modern...it's futuristic, but I'd just like to stay a little grounded in reality. Any expert ideas are appreciated! [Answer] Seems like Mast may have already alluded to it but I doubt modern spacecraft contain much weldable metal. I would be surprised if there is much or any steel left on spacecraft and I'm sure most of the aluminum is being replaced with carbon fiber if it hasn't already. I can't imagine there would be much use for a welder. Additionally you have described a stick welder (which is a form of arc welding, but so are almost all forms of welding) which is probably the least likely form of welder you would find on a spacecraft. Stick welders have a really hard time welding thin materials and an even harder time welding aluminum. They also make extremely dirty welds and discharge a lot of shielding gasses. I think unless your world has some sort of propulsion system that makes weight a non-factor it would be extremely unlikely your ship would contain any steel or cast iron thick enough to be welded by a stick welder. The ship would almost certainly want a TIG welder which can weld metal virtually as thin as metal can be and is perfect for welding aluminum. That being said most TIG machines are actually combo machines that can also stick weld, but I would think an organization making advanced spacecraft would be able to create a bespoke dedicated machine with the absolute bare minimum in order to save weight. The issue: Stick welders can be used as a rudimentary cutting implement, but TIG and MIG welders can't really be used for that. (or not easily anyway) Additionally, in order to cut with a stick welder you need a welding rod that is oversized for the metal you are cutting, this would mean the ship just so happened to be carrying welding rods that it didn't really have a use for. My suggestion: A sawzall or sawzall-like saw. A good demolition blade on a sawzall will cut through just about any material I expect you would find on a space craft like butter, and they are useful enough for so many tasks that it wouldn't be completely unreasonable to include one in a mission. Additionally, depending on what the door's purpose is it probably wouldn't be unreasonable for it to not be very strong. If it just separates one part of the ship from another it probably wouldn't need to be that strong and therefore it may just be a door frame with a thin aluminum skin on it to save weight. You would be able to cut through a door like that with a steak knife. [Answer] The equipment will depend on the mission. In particular, the length of the mission, the size of the crew, the total weight of the ship, and very strongly on the exact nature of what they are going to be doing. Imagine a mission that is intended to be almost entirely observational. Go out to Jupiter, for example, and carefully look around. No landing on anything. No obtaining physical samples. The equipment for this is likely to be oriented towards keeping electronics and optics working. So they would have lots of equipment for that. Such a mission might be quite limited in mass. They might consider that, if they needed a huge industrial arc welder, they are probably already dead. Because they might think the only thing they could want to weld would be the ship's hull. Turn it up a notch to landing on one or more of the Jovian moons and collect samples. Now you have physical equipment that may need to be patched up. Or adjusted due to last-second changes in schedule and plans. Oh, we can't possibly use this equipment module because the chemicals we have detected, from orbit, would utterly prevent its operation on this moon. So having it in the lander is a complete waste. Let's get it out of there fast so we can complete the mission. An arc welder might be the required tool. Or not, I'm not any kind of mechanic. But a lander could easily have a minor accident like bending a landing strut or scraping something. Or some equipment gets caught in a small little shift of rock. In the hands of a skilled tech an arc welder can do lots of cool things. Turn it up yet another notch. It's a colonization mission. In this case, you would have many hard to predict tasks. Fix this, patch that, build the other. I once watched my uncle deal with a nut that had been "painted on" to a bolt. He got his arc welder and just sort of flicked it over the paint. The paint was gone and both the nut and bolt were fine. Not even warm. So basically, the longer the mission, the more hands-on and heavy equipment oriented the mission, the more likely you will need an arc welder. On the other hand, the more likely you will need any given chunk of equipment also. So the bigger the mission, the more likely you will be bringing various manufacturing equipment. It may not be very far in the future that an arc welder might be produced in a 3-D printer. There are 3-D printers now that will print in a variety of materials, which can then be cured using heat or microwaves etc., to achieve a variety of densities and hardness. It shouldn't be that big a deal to print most of the parts of an arc welder, then add the wires from non-specific supplies of wire. Possibly a few metal parts might need to be fashioned using other tools. And there you are, one arc welder. Overall, depending on the weight and room requirements on the ship, it might be preferable to take the data to run a 3-D printer, and tanks of printer material, than to try to take every possible tool you might need. Indeed, on certain types of mission, you might be able to obtain the raw materials to make "3-D printer ink" rather than transport it. Maybe you only transport stuff you are not confident you can obtain locally. On the moon, for example, there is not much hydrogen available. So maybe you must transport tanks of hydrogen, possibly as water. Then you count on getting nearly everything else you need once you get there. [Answer] The cosmonauts of the [Soyuz 6](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_6) mission (1969), Georgi Shonin and Valeri Kubasov, actually did [test arc welding in space](https://awo.aws.org/2015/07/welding-in-space/). > > During the test, Kubasov almost burned through the hull* of the Soyuz 6’s living compartment, a mistake that would have hurled the pair into space without spacesuits to face the final 30 seconds of their lives. Fortunately, the hull remained intact, but with a warning about the harshness and complexity of welding in space.* (James A. Wilkey "[Welding in Space](https://awo.aws.org/2015/07/welding-in-space/)", American Welding Society, 22 July 2015) > > > The answer is yes: the Russians have tested it and it works. [Answer] Arc welding in an atmosphere on a spacecraft sounds undesirable. You're generating some really unpleasant fumes and potentially releasing reasonable volumes of shielding gasses (bad news in confined spaces, also inconvenient if your atmosphere reprocessing life support can't keep up) and some potentially quite dangerous sparks and small metal fragments (conductive dust in microgravity is going to play havoc with electrical and electronic systems that aren't thoroughly sealed). If you're not in an atmosphere, you should be using something more intrinsically awesome that takes advantage of the environment, such as [electron beam welding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_welding), but that doesn't necessarily help in your specific situation. As the author, you are of course free to handwave some arc welding devices. Have a look at the ones in Aliens, for example... general purpose compact utility tools, perhaps more justifiable than a proper welding rig. [Answer] One of the problems with arc welding is you need to generate an actual arc. In atmosphere, this isn't a problem because the electricity is arcing through the gasses to complete the circuit. In a vacuum, like outside of a spaceship, this is going to be a problem. No gas to arc across, no arc. No way to complete the circuit. So this depends on which side of the door your character is on and what he has to hand. Break down the problems one at a time. You could simply handwave an arc welder aboard as emergency equipment. That's the easy out. Justification could be that gas-based welding (I imagine) would be way more dangerous aboard a spacecraft. While current based welding systems do not share the same dangers, they have their own set of problems. If you don't want to give a narrative excuse for having a welding rig on board, you could have your character MacGuyver it. A welder isn't really all that complex from an electrical standpoint. I don't have an electrical background but I found this [paper on what it takes.](http://wseas.us/e-library/conferences/2006prague/papers/513-109.pdf) I have a welder that can run off the same circuit as our clothes dryer so I imagine the ship will be able to supply an adequate amount of power. So your guy breaks down some non-survival-based equipment like a microwave oven, adds the extra stuff he needs and he builds a welding rig. If your guy has to go outside the ship he might need some sort of medium that will stick to a surface and allow electricity to arc through. I think the gel depicted in the show "Firefly" would be an imaginative way to start [Answer] In a large space habitats (say, 50+ people), arc welding (esp. argon or co2 - using varieties) will be probably quite common. Argon and co2 are not toxic, can be recycled out of the atmosphere (that's how we get argon on earth and any space habitat is expected to recycle co2 anyway). These welding methods (TIG/MIG/MAG) are applicable to iron and aluminium alloys and probably a lot more, generally don't depend on gravity and produce little to no byproducts in gaseous or dust form. A lot of modern welding inverters come with an plasma-cutting option that use compressed air (the air is released back to the atmosphere with an ozone scent, but otherwise unchanged). MMA welding (stick welding) is probably not really useful in space setup. [Answer] In a post modern spacecraft as you specify, I'd imagine having an arc welder similar to those found in many home workshops around the world today is quite unlikely. However, depending on the mission profile having some form of equipment to weld a patch onto the hull or repair equipment is definitely plausible, though I'd guess it would be more likely a gasless MIG or TIG welder for improved weld quality and versatility. Both of which could be fairly quickly modified to melt something metallic and exposed. Which brings me on to the next point, all you need to bodge together an arc welder is a current source and the right electrodes. I've personally done a bit of very basic welding with a 24V truck battery, jumper cables and a spare weld rod that was rolling around the bottom of the boat, it wasn't pretty but it held. Depending on the lock, if it's anything like the form of a padlock running current through the shackle until it glows then hit it with a hammer and you're in. [Answer] Any rational spaceship will have a manual override behind a locked cover on every door or hatch, that cover lock can be picked in a few minutes by young MacGyver, TheLocksmitingLawyer or smashed in moments by detective Spooner. The only door with no easy override would be the brig. This will require additional plot manipulation. To do the welding will require a gouging rod and an un-fused connection to a power bus. A gouging rod is typically a copper plated carbon rod by the copper is a convenience to allow holding from the end. Any carbon rod from some experiment, or some carbon fibre / nano-tube reinforced material could serve the same purpose, perhaps an artificial limb component made for this purpose. ]
[Question] [ There’s a song called "Stairway to Heaven". I thought I could write a story with it as inspiration. Could I build a stairway to Heaven? It must be possible to walk up the stairway. It should be standard size. How feasible is making a stairway all the way into orbit? [Answer] ## A stairway into orbit? Probably not, but a stairway to Heaven, YES! No matter how high you make a stairway, you will die of Hypoxia and/or Hypothermia long before you reach a geosynchronous altitude, thus delivering you straight to Heaven... or another similar fate depending on the variables at play. For most people this elevation is about 4,500-6,000m (15,000-20,000ft), but a small number of people who are already in good shape and and live at higher altitudes can endure elevations up to about 9,000m (29,000ft). For a short while but will die if they stay at that height for too long. The Peak of Mount Everest is 8,848m (29,029ft), and many people have died from Hypoxia and/or Hypothermia trying to reach it, and those who do make it typically require oxygen tanks to survive the final climb. So, if you wanted to make a stairway to Heaven, all you need to do is construct an elevated staircase that goes all the way up to the top of Mt. Everest, and don't let people bring Oxygen tanks with them. I say elevated specifically because most of the mountain is covered in thick snow; so, if you made it at ground level, it would be perpetually buried in ice. Now the top of Mt Everest is not certain death for absolutely everyone (See: Habeler and Messner), but it is not survivable indefinitely; so, if you do somehow get to the top, just sit down and relax. You will be in Heaven soon enough. ## ... but is this actually a stairway to Hell? Since the OP says it is stairway to "Heaven", and not Valhalla, Reincarnation, or Non-existence, etc. it is important to consider the theological principles that govern that particular model of an afterlife. Most notably: those regarding suicide. The general concept of Heaven has been shared by many world religions including Christians, Jews, Protestants, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and Greco-Roman Pagans. The idea of suicide being an unforgivable sin originated with Socrates who claimed that life was a gift from the gods, and that a person who commits suicide offends the gods so badly that they could never enter the Elysian Fields. From there, this philosophy was was adopted by most of the other faiths that believe in heaven, but all these religions include various caveats where it is not always a damnable offense to kill oneself. Christians: Christianity can generally be divided into 3 major sects, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant. The official stance of most Protestant churches on sin is that no sin is unforgivable; so, a person who commits suicide without abandoning their faith in Jesus is not damned. The Eastern Orthodox church teaches that sin is a spiritual sickness, rather than a state of guilt; so, suicide (while considered a sin) is a thing to be pitied, not punished. Catholics have a more strict stance on suicide, but include the caveat that a no sin can keep you from Heaven unless: You know it is a mortal sin when you do it, you are in a sound state of mind when you do it, and you choose to do it without coercion. Altitude sickness specifically causes you to lose your mental faculties; so, the final decision to go high enough to die can not be made in a sound state of mind. Many people make plans to take their life, and then choose against it when the final moment of decision comes. These people have not committed a mortal sin. Likewise, many people will begin climbing these stairs, and change their mind and turn around. Also, some people take way to much LSD, and jump out a window and die. This is also not considered automatic damnation even if it was an intentional act, because the choice to kill oneself was actually made in an altered state of mind. So even from the Catholic perspective, a decision made in a sound state of mind at the bottom of the stairs is only a plan to commit suicide, but the actual choices to take the last few thousand steps to die can not be made in a sound mental condition. Therefore, you can not commit suicide on these stairs in a way that is a mortal sin. Jews: There have been too many sects of Judaism throughout history to appropriately classify in any coherent way for purposes of this answer, but like Christians, their attitudes on suicide range from it just being a thing to pity, to a severe and malicious sin akin to murder. However, Judaism says sins can and must be atoned for before entering Heaven, but that sins can be atoned for in death as long as a person's soul is capable of wanting to atone. So for a Jew, the stairway will probably take you on a path through Gehinom (Hell), but will get most people to Heaven eventually. Muslims: Islam's stance on suicide has been pretty muddied in recent years with the it's frequent association with jihad, but by in large Muslims seem to be similar to Christian Protestants where they believe that suicide is a major sin, but also believe that the only sin that God will not forgive is unbelief. Zoroastrians: The original religion to propose the idea of Heaven & Hell weights one's good and evil at death and submits that person to the afterlife of either God's or Ahriman's design. While it considers suicide a great act of evil, it can not necessarily undo a lifetime filled with good works. Greco-Roman Pagans: As I mentioned before, Socrates was the first guy to call suicide an unforgivable sin, but most Greco-Roman Pagans did not agree with this stance. Infact, Socrates's stances on religion were so unpopular in his own religion that he and several of his followers were forced to commit suicide to atone for his heresy, thus proving to the gods and to the people of Greece that he acknowledged his teachings were wrong. [Answer] Quoting [Randall Munroe](https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/) > > The reason it's hard to get to orbit isn't that space is high up. > > > It's hard to get to orbit because you have to go so fast. > > > Space is about 100 kilometers away. That's far away—I wouldn't want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn't that far away. If you're in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea. > > > Gravity in low Earth orbit is almost as strong as gravity on the surface. The Space Station hasn't escaped Earth's gravity at all; it's experiencing about 90% the pull that we feel on the surface. > > > To avoid falling back into the atmosphere, you have to go sideways really, really fast. > > > The speed you need to stay in orbit is about 8 kilometers per second. > > > In the following I am assuming that with going to orbit you mean reaching the height above sea corresponding to LEO (low Earth orbit), since obviously running until reaching a velocity of 8 km/s would require a level of doping not yet on the roadmap of any doping developer. So, is it possible to build a stair raising up to 100 km above sea level? No, it's not possible. It would crumble under its own weight. Calculation show that for Earth any structure can't go past about 10 km before being too heavy to sustain itself. And there are still 90 km to go. [Answer] A simple stairway is going to collapse as L.Dutch says. However, if you're willing to get sufficiently complex you can build active supports capable of handling it. (For the simplest systems, look at [Launch Loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop) or [Space Fountain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain).) Several problems remain, though: As others have mentioned, hypoxia. Above 8km survival without oxygen is a temporary thing--the best can climb up to the 8,848m summit of Everest but you better get back down promptly. There is also the problem that orbit is about speed, the only way you're walking to orbit is if it's synchronous. Finally, even if we ignore the oxygen problem you will have major food problems. Food isn't all that energetic, the tyranny of the rocket equation still applies even though we aren't using a rocket. (Climbing to low orbit altitude is possible but requires more than 10% of your total weight to be food. I don't know how much more you'll need in water.) Edit: My comparison to the rocket equation seems to have provoked some disagreement. I was talking about the exponential fuel (food) use, not whether it could be done at all. Think of rockets in deep space where you don't run into structural strength limits supporting it against gravity. Lets consider Nuclear Hoagie's 4MJ example. That's the energy to lift 40kg (apparently we are dealing with a darn small person!) 100km. To accomplish that he started with 8MJ of fuel and climbed a total of 200km. Quite workable. But now lets climb to 300km (LEO, but you're not going fast enough.) We need 8MJ of food at 200km which means we need 16MJ of food at 175km, 32MJ at 150km and so on for a total of 2048MJ when we started and a total climb of 51,200km. Looks rather like the rocket equation to me. Note that if you can maintain 1km/hr of climb (which I seriously doubt!!) you're still looking at nearly 6 years to do this. Lets go up to 400km. The odds are very high you're dead first. [Answer] ### First build your space elevator A [space elevator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator) is a giant cable reaching down to the Earth's surface from a satellite in geostationary orbit (35,786 km). With the cable touching down on the surface, essentially it is a giant tower, except a tower supported from the top instead of standing on the ground. The concept of space elevators has been discussed in massive length for decades, and the consensus is there is no fundamental reason why it could not be made to work, given the right materials. There is the slight problem that we do not currently have any materials with enough tensile strength for a cable that long to take its own weight. Carbon nanotubes individually appear to have enough strength, but we would need nanotubes 35,786km long. As of November last year, [the longest nanotubes ever created in bulk were 14cm](https://newatlas.com/materials/longest-carbon-nanotube-forests-record/). So we're a long way off yet. ### Then build your spiral staircase Every concept for a space elevator allows for a vehicle to "climb" the cable. 35,786km is a long way! But in principle there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't put a spiral staircase around the cable though. At a standard stair riser height of 20cm, you'll need 178.93 million stairs. There are [1665 stairs to the top of the Eiffel tower](https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/faq/spot/how-can-you-climb-eiffel-tower-foot#:%7E:text=How%20can%20you%20climb%20the,not%20open%20to%20the%20public.), for comparison. If we already have space elevators, then we already also have climber vehicles. So you could build something which would automatically work its way up the cable, installing stairs as it went. ### Then put on your pressure suit Above 3km altitude you start to need need oxygen, and above 15km you need a [pressure suit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_suit). A standard NASA space suit would be perfectly adequate, although the bulk and weight are not going to help your climbing ability. ### And then start climbing As you might expect for any human activity, [some people do it competitively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stair_climbing#Records). Let's say you took Christian Riedl (13.14 km climbed in 12 hours) and started him at the bottom. Clearly it's going to take more than a day to climb it, so it's fair to reckon on no more than 12 hours of climbing a day. No-one's done this in a space suit, of course, but let's be ludicrously optimistic and say it wouldn't slow him down too much. Then climbing all the way to geostationary orbit would take someone at his level of fitness a total of 2723 days, or a little under 7 1/2 years. Assuming they can keep up 13.14km a day, with no rest days. And of course disregarding the space suit. ### Don't forget to pre-order pizza, beer and oxygen for delivery With a minimum of 7 1/2 years climbing ahead of you, clearly you can't carry everything you'll need. Fortunately you already have climbing vehicles - after all, one fitted the staircase for you. So there could be a pod tracking your progress as you go up, giving you somewhere to sleep in each night, and nipping back to the bottom regularly to stock up on food, water, air, spare parts for your space suit, and anything else you need. With access to supplies, after that it simply is a question of how long you want to keep going. Clearly this is a long time, but it's certainly something you could achieve within your life if you wanted to. ### In short... Space elevators aren't a ridiculous idea - they're just a bit ahead of what we can do right now. If you could build a space elevator, then you could build a staircase around it, and climb it. But you probably don't want to. [Answer] # Yes The first step is walking out of the atmosphere. To do this with anywhere near current technology, you'll need a dynamic structure. This is a structure that isn't supported by compression or tension, but rather by shooting it with bullets. You shoot it with bullets, catch those bullets with electromagnets, and fire them back down. Which then fires them back up. This requires constant power, but has more lift:weight than any practical material we have. Getting this to work shouldn't take more than a few decades, and probably investment levels greater than the Apollo program. But a stair case outside of the atmosphere is not orbit. Orbit is, as many have noted, not far away -- it is fast away. To be in orbit you need a large horizontal velocity. Every child knows how to convert climbing a stair case (or a ladder) into horizontal velocity. You simply have it gain more height, then add a slide. The ISS moves under 8 km/s at 408 km above the ground. Ignoring inverse square law, this simply requires a frictionless slide that goes down 3200 km to reach that speed. But the inverse square law kicks in. A rule of thumb is that the KE required to orbit half that required to escape the gravity well at that height; you have to reach 1/2 of the distance to 0 gravitational potential. Gravitational potential is hyperbolic (shrinks with 1/r), so to orbit 6500 km away from the Earth's core, you need to slide down from 13000 km away from the Earth's core, or the top of your slide needs to be 7000 km away from Earth, then slide down the frictionless side to ISS orbital height, and at the bottom you'll be moving at orbital velocity. (Gravitational potential energy is $\frac{K}{r}$ for some $K$. We need $\frac{K}{r\_1} = 2\frac{K}{r\_0}$, or $r\_1 = 2r\_0$.) Such a structure is going to be much harder than the simple "stairway outside of atmosphere". Also, the power budget required to dynamically support a 7000 km tall staircase is going to be pretty crazy. This should quantitatively make clear that orbit is fast more than far away; we spend 400 km reaching orbit, then 16 times that building up the kinetic energy to get up to orbital speed. Now, the climbing is easier at the top of the slide compared to orbit (by a factor of 4 in fact), but that is a long long way to climb. [Answer] How feasible? Ridiculously unfeasible. Possible? Yes. As already said, standard construction materials could not do this beyond a certain height. But three components can work together to achieve the end result, in theory. 1. Compression: The lower stage of the staircase is supported from below. There will be some height at which the weight of the structure will crush itself, and that will be far below the elevation of low earth orbit. At this height, you must start adding the second technology into your construction: 2. Tension: The upper segment of the structure must be held from above by suspension cables, constructed like a space elevator. The whole structure lacks any lateral support and needs the third component: 3. Propulsion: Wind and shear forces will constantly try to topple your structure, and send your space anchors adrift. Components will need to have maneuvering engines at intervals to offset these forces, and correct for any unexpected impacts. These modules require energy, and specifically, components outside the atmosphere will require reaction mass (fuel) to stabilize them. So you can stabilize the lower sections with electrically powered propellers, but when the air runs out you need to have fuel delivered to the upper components. Feasible? No. But not impossible. Can you walk up it? Only with a suit, oxygen, rest periods, and food. [Answer] Go to a DIY store. Buy 1 standard DIY staircase kit. Put in into a space-craft. Launch into orbit. While there make (assemble) it. All done. You never mentioned in your question that the staircase had to be walked all the way into orbit. Just that is is a standard staircase that is made in orbit. ]
[Question] [ In a Web-miniseries I want to create, Les Superbes Germains Lacasse (I want that the original title to be in French) (the title means The Super Lacasse Siblings), there is a strange country that can be called a quadrumvirate, and that is both a diarchy and a double republic: there are four Heads of State that share the same power: two monarchs (one empress, and one male emperor), and two presidents (one female, and one male) (when a non-binary person and/or a genderfluid person wants to become Head of State, there are three or four monarchs, and three or four presidents). Each Head of State has one Head of Government (these people are called the Four Prime Ministers). Also, in this country, the monarchs are not referred as "Your Majesty" or "Your Highness", instead, they are referred as "Mr. King" and "Ms. Queen". These monarchs are both elected and constitutional. Finally, not only citizens are supposed to do the reverence to the monarchs, but they must also do the reverence to the presidents. Nevertheless, (I want the original language of my work to be French, my native language) citizens tend to use the French pronoun tu (homologous to the archaic English pronoun "thou") when addressing to any of their Head of State. So, I wonder why would a country have both a monarch, and a president (or, alternatively, both multiple monarchs, and multiple presidents). [Answer] 1. There are historical examples of countries where a king and a queen ruled jointly: * [Isabella of Castille](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_I_of_Castile) and [Ferdinand of Aragon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_II_of_Aragon), who married specifically for the purpose of creating a great united Kingdom of Spain. They are actually known together as the [Catholic Monarchs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Monarchs_of_Spain), so there is historical precedent of calling both members of such a pair "monarchs". It is, in fact, the most common way to refer to them when speaking of their joint rule, as opposed to their lives before the marriage. Since you are writing in French, please note that while in English Ferdinand-and-Isabella are known as the Catholic Monarchs, in Romance languages they are the Catholic Kings -- French [les Rois Catholiques](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rois_catholiques_d%27Espagne), Italian i Re Cattolici, Romanian Regii Catolici, Spanish los Reyes Católicos. * [William III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_III_of_England) and [Mary II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_II_of_England), whose marriage brought about the [Glorious Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution) which created the modern English (and, later, British) state. They ruled England, Scotland and Ireland as co-equals. Their coins [bear the legend](https://britanniacoincompany.com/buy-coins/gold-coins/1691-william-mary-gold-guinea/) "GVLIELMVS ET MARIA DEI GRATIA MAG BR FR ET HIB REX ET REGINA", William and Mary by the Grace of God King and Queen of Great Britain, France and Ireland. Legislation passed during their reign, such as the foundational [Bill of Rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689) is cited as Will. and Mary year number. And of course the furniture design which became popular during their reign is known as the [William and Mary style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_and_Mary_style). * [Jadwiga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadwiga_of_Poland) of Poland and [Władysław Jagiełło](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_II_Jagie%C5%82%C5%82o) of Lithuania, whose marriage created the [Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Commonwealth), which will continue as the great power in North-Eastern Europe for centuries. Fun details: Jadwiga was King of Poland when she married Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania; and he converted to Christianity specifically in order to marry the beautiful King of Poland and create the great power which at some times stretched (almost) all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, inter maria. 2. Which examples provide an easy path towards the desired state: after a long and glorious joint reign of a king and queen, resulted by a serendipitous accident of marriage, the Parliament decided that for the welfare of the nation this solution shall be perpetuated. As a side effect, authors of pseudo-historical narratives now have a rich source of plotting, as the importance of the marriage of a crown prince or crown princess is dramatically increased. 3. As for the two presidents, words are not magic. It is trivial to come up with two Most Very Important Persons in the kingdom, besides the King and Queen. For example, the role called the Speaker of the House (of Commons in the United Kingdom and of Representatives the United States) is called the President of the Chamber of Deputies in other countries. In fact, in the U.S.A., the Senate actually has a President, so that we can say that the United States has three presidents: the president-President, the President of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. 4. The four Prime Ministers are then trivial. Each of the four Most Very Important Persons has an apparatus which serves to fulfill the royal or presidential functions. Just make it customary to call the head of such an apparatus Prime Minister. Done. 5. As regards the linguistic peculiarities of the language spoken in that country, they are just that, linguistic peculiarities. They need no explanation. If you need a historical example: Roman citizens addressed their emperor in the second person singular until well into the 3rd century CE. If a Roman citizen could say tu Trajane audi me nunc, I don't see why a subject of the Twice Double Monarchy could not say tu le Roi écoute-moi maintenant. [Answer] Monarch, President, Minister. There are two houses of government. For example in America there is the Senate and the House of Representatives. In the UK there is the House of Commons and the House of Lords. In France there is the Senate and the National Assembly. The President heads one house. The Prime Minister heads the other house. One might be in charge of the other. The Monarch sits above all of this. They can issue absolute orders whenever they like. The democracy only exists by their consent. Figurehead, President, Minister Same as above, except the monarch plays only a symbolic role. They appear on the telly once a year and do a speech or a song. You can pay ten pounds to go in their second house but they probably won't be there. Perhaps no government can be formed without the monarch's say-so. However they have given the say-so every year for the past four hundred years. It is an open secret that if they opposed the government the rule would be kicked out. X, Diplomat, Minister In this setup the manarch can be what you want. The Prime Minister heads the democracy. The president is an elected role like Grand Diplomat. They spend most of their time at fancy parties in other countries preaching moral virtue with other diplomats. X, President, Minister The Prime Minister heads the government. The President does whatever it is the President of America does. The biggest parts of the job are singing the national anthem; eating cheeseburgers the size of your head; shooting your assault rifle at the sky; and bombing the middle east. FOUR of each? This doesn't make much sense. If four people have the same job they cannot all be PRIME minister. The Prime minister is the minister who is in charge of the other ministers. Likewise for Presidents and Monarchs. Your best bet is to have the country be a tight union of several countries, each with their own Monarch, President and Minister. There is unrestricted travel between the countries and many people live in one and work in another. [Answer] # The country is a federation, similar to the [United Arab Emirates.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Emirates) > > The United Arab Emirates is an elective monarchy formed from a federation of seven emirates, consisting of Abu Dhabi (The capital), Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm Al Quwain.[13] > > > In a similar way, your country is divided into two states. The two presidents and two monarchs each come from a segment of the country, and each have control over their region and make group decisions for the nation at large together. There's lots of room for webcomic hijinks when the interests of states aren't aligned or one leader claims the territory of another. While in theory they may rule separate regions, in practice they can each have people of power in each other's territory. # The president and the king represent different interests. The king represents the old nobility of each region and has lots of connections with old money. The president represents new money and modern businesses. Originally the country had two kings or a king and a queen, but over time the houses of legislation have grown more powerful and now presidents are as powerful as kings. [Answer] # Separation of Powers In most modern governments, power is divided among multiple branches and positions with no single person or administration in ultimate control. This creates a system of checks and balances to prevent the abuse of power, unlawful takeovers, and tyranny. But be careful! The way that each leader's power interacts with the others could be problematic; if they all share the exact same power in every context, how are disputes or deadlocks resolved? Perhaps the different roles oversee different governmental functions such as executive, legislative, and judicial authority, or different steps in the decision-making process. [Answer] ## It Might be a Co-Principality Like Andorra Andorra is a co-principality, whose heads of state are jointly a Catholic bishop and the President of France. This is because the “co-principality” was originally established between a bishop and a lord who were close to each other in power, then various wars moved the region under French control, and finally, France had a revolution and abolished all its feudal titles. it did not want to give up its influence over Andorra, so their new head of state, whoever that was, took over the role. ## The President Might not be President of the Nation A statesperson called “the President” is typically the head-of-state of a republic, but not always. For example, the Vice-President of the United States is the President of the Sebate. In that capacity, she is addressed as “Madam President.” I’m not familiar with the story you describe, and your description makes it sound like the political system is supposed to be a farce or parody, but perhaps “the President” is the President of the Council of Ministers, or of the legislature, and therefore the de facto head of government, while the monarch is the head of state. [Answer] Two monarchs is an oxymoron (monarch means that there is a single ruler, not necessarily a King, etc.). If you want an example of a system where there is 4 people who seems to have monarch-ish titles, then look no further than the Roman Empire, which at one point had a [Tetrarchy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrarchy), which means any system with four rulers, such as the one you described. Needless to say as this was a terrible idea, the system didn't last very long. Too many people with political power tends to lead to civil war, probably what ended the republic in the first place. An elected "King" makes little sense. At that point they are not a King, but a public official with a title "King", which you can totally do. The Romans had 4 emperors, two senior (with the title "Augustus", referring to the first Emperor) and two junior (with the title "Caesar", referring to Augustus's uncle). Having them have equal power isn't really realistic, unless you want to make it look like your typical medieval kingdom. For example, you can have 4 duchies in a kingdom, where each duke has absolute power in their domain (and thus is a monarch) and theoretically have equal power to each other. But in these cases, there is usually a king (hence the kingdom part) who supersedes these dukes in authority. Another example is the [Holy Roman Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire) (not to be confused with the Roman Empire). Each peer was a monarch in their domain and the Emperor was elected from his peers. Either way, the system had elected "monarchs" as well as ordinary ones (dukes, kings, etc.). In all of these systems, a person is a monarch in their domain but may have another person above them (king, emperor, etc.). It's tricky when you want for 4 co-rulers in the same domain, as that is unstable and will turn out like the Roman situation. In fact, before the empire, the Roman Republic had two elected rulers (Consuls). This also often led to infighting and civil war but Consuls did not have the same level of political power as the Emperor later did (non elected positions tend not to have limits to their power). [Answer] COMPROMISE What you are describing is a tetrarchy. They happen but are intrinsically unstable. They would exist as a compromise to solve a problem that the existing form of government could not solve. Their problem is that nobody could be ambitious and resources would have to naturally be spread evenly and nature couldn't have a drought in one sector without an equal drought in all others. Any event in nature such as an untimely death, a drought or an invasion would trigger an imbalance in power and either a civil war or the sudden deposing of the alternate officeholders. As such, if a wise set of potential rulers set up a tetrarchy, they would also plan for its demise. You should read up on the Tetrarchy in ancient Rome or about the splitting of Ancient Rome into a Western and Eastern half. If you go from a monarch to a tetrarchy, then there has to be some obstacle where the monarch realizes they will lose all power unless they surrender most of it. For example, imagine a nation is being invaded and if the invasion is successful, the king will be deposed, maybe killed. On the other hand, if the king elevates three other people with access to their own resources as co-rulers, then the nation will live. Of course, the image to the public must always be one of unity. What really has happened is a council of four people now rules. Of course, if voting is used, a two versus two tie could lead to civil war. Elective presidencies do not usually yield to monarchies but that has happened. Monarchies do become republics more commonly. After all, a hereditary monarchy is a rather preposterous concept. It would imply that the family will always have the fittest of rulers by virtue of birth. It also implies that no other family has this property and that it is true in every generation. What you would be describing, if it happened, would be to elevate a member of the royal house as co-ruler and add an additional president. The prime ministers would not be true prime ministers but the primary minister for each of the four members of the tetrarchy. You are creating succession issues, of course, and I would expect the four to be very careful in the rules used as they have their own self interest and families. [Answer] It sounds to me that, if both monarchs and both presidents share the same power, it is merely a difference in their titles. So, in effect, they are all presidents, or all monarchs. I wouldn't differentiate them unless: 1. You have a type of alliance between a nation governed by a president/two presidents and a nation governed by a monarch/two monarchs. You can have it so that the monarchs do not possess absolute power and must discuss things with the presidents. The two nations would work together to further their protection, technological advancement, etc. 2. Set it up so that one pair (presidents or monarchs) has the ruling power over the nation, while the other pair either functions as advisors, ambassadors, or a 'back-up' pair of leaders (in the event of war, assassination, or anything else takes out the first pair). This would serve to reassure the country that, in the case of an emergency, everything is ready. In this case, I can envision the monarchs being the true rulers, while the presidents are the back-up pair. [Answer] Systems of checks and balances Perhaps your monarchs hold complete executive power. However Any decision he makes can be vetoed by the first president, This veto can be overturned by the Queen. However she can be blocked from overturning the vito by the 2nd president. [Answer] Nepene Nep and Daron offered intriguing possibilities, in my view. It could be the case that Presidents co-chair one of the Houses of Parliament, while the "Monarchs" co-chair another house. However, the nature of the "Monarchs"' and Presidents' job in such system would be essentially similar. A good explanation - Monarchs are called this way due to some ancient tradition. Perhaps, there was an absolute monarchy a long time ago, but the times have changed. And yet, while people are willing to change the nature of their governance, they are unwilling to lose some of their traditions. A crazy option, in my view, is that the Nation is a communist or otherwise totalitarian state. There is a quadrumvirate in power, made up of the "trusted comrades". However, the names of the public positions in this governing institution are made as a mockery of all the previous political regimes. Perhaps, the country had an absolute monarchy, which was overthrown in favour of the Republic, which was in turn overthrown in favour of a Marxist-Leninist Republic. The New Republic, as part of its propaganda, mocks the old regimes from every possible angle, including in how their own governing elites are to be named and/or treated. Of course, this mockery is nothing more than an elaborate, orchestrated ritual, which has to be completed perfectly according to certain unspoken rules. Or the Republican State Security Committee will swiftly intervene. [Answer] I certainly could imagine a state that had a King and Queen who were co-equal monarchs; they could divvy up responsibility over the "male sphere" and "female sphere" for example, which might or might not reflect traditional roles in the Western world (perhaps it is a simple as the King is the martial ruler, but was historically frequently "away" and so the Queen wielded the power at home). Then, when "democracy" hit that country, they wanted to keep everything as traditional as possible - so they have two presidents, one in the "male" sphere and one in the "female" sphere, mirroring the King and Queen. This might be a country with extremely well defined gender roles, for example, or simply one that is very tradition-bound. Lots of examples of those both in the real world and in Fantasy. [Answer] If it is your world, you decide why. I could see many reasons why a country might have both a/two monarch(s) and a/two president(s). 1. It is a relic of the transition to democracy Maybe this country used to just have an Empress/Emperor pair of rulers, but when adopting a more democratic system they held on to having their royalty as well. Although the real world constitutional monarchies have decided to not adopt a president title and instead opting to have the political head of state be a Prime Minister, I could easily see how a country that already had a tradition of dual heads of state opting to have all of these. 2. They have different areas of responsibility The Emperor and Empress might be the religious heads of state while the Presidents might be the secular heads of state. Think Pope vs King. Or maybe one set of rulers deal with internal matters while the other deal with external affairs. 3. They rule over different groups of the inhabitants It might be that although the country is one state, there are different groups of people in the country, that are ruled by their own leaders. Although I don't think such a system has existed in the real world (the system of tribal government and federal government in USA is the closest I can think of, but with the difference of very unequal power structures), that shouldn't hold you back from inventing such a system for your story. I actually find this option very conceptually interesting. Imagine two peoples that share a geographical area, but have distinct traditions and distinct government. Neither control the other, they cohabitat (peacefully or not - that is up to your story). 4. For religious/philosophical reasons Maybe that is what the religion dictates that they should do? Maybe their philosophical leanings towards duality extends to wanting both monarchs and presidents. There are many possibilities. Whatever you decide, remember that how well this functions, whether the rulers actually are equal, whether they are supposed to be equal etc are all factors you can decide. Any combination could be interesting to explore. Some combinations are probably more suited for fantasy stories, others for other kinds of settings. [Answer] Historical circumstances - the country is just transitioning from the Ancien Régime to modernity, and got stuck somewhere halfway. Maybe it declared independence from a bigger country, declared itself to be a republilc, but the mother country insisted on keeping some ties and continuity. For inspiration, look at [Irish Free State](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Free_State). Since 1932 (the de facto full independence) the official head of state remained the UK monarch, but after 1937, there was also [the president](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_head_of_state_from_1922_to_1949) of the country (not to be confused with the president of the Executive Council, a position we'd call prime minister these days) This was resolved only in [1948](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Republic_of_Ireland_Act_1948), when the UK monarch's (mostly symbolic by that time) role in Irish poliltics has been definitely abolished. [Answer] ## Term Limits Your different leaders have different titles because they serve very different terms. The "presidents" are your typical democratically-elected leaders who serve relatively short terms and are eventually prevented from running for election again. The other leaders have earned the nickname "monarchs" because they are elected for life like a traditional King. All four rulers have equivalent powers and authorities, only their terms differ. In terms of actual leadership mechanics, I picture it somewhat like the board of directors that runs a company. A system like this gives you some of the long-term stability of a monarchy while retaining some of the power of a democracy to replace ineffective leaders and tyrants. Elected leaders are a sort of snapshot of the values and principles of your nation at the time they were elected. A dual system like this would give you the freedom to adjust to changing societal conditions while making it difficult to abandon the history and traditions that allowed your nation to succeed in the first place. As a side benefit, it would also make your country slightly more resistant to takeover since a hostile, radical faction that wins the presidential elections would seize no more than half of the executive power. Of course, a dual system like this also brings with it some of the problems with both systems of government, so your universe should have plenty of conflict to fuel plot development. [Answer] I'll stay away from trying to figure out exactly how this would actually work because I don't think it would, at least I don't think it would be a stable government at all. But instead, I will focus on your actual question which is "I wonder why would a country have both a monarch, and a president" I think the easiest answer and the most likely answer is "*history" Humans have invented all sorts of convoluted forms of government with subdivisions of power and geography and overlapping authorities. Most of these have come about because of some form of historical event or series of events. I suggest reading about some of the more interesting ones if you want to come up with ideas for "how" the government ended up the way it is. [Corolingian Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_Empire) * [The Papal States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_States) * [Habsburg Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habsburg_monarchy) * [Holy Roman Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Empire) * [Kingdom of Denmark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Realm) * [European Union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union) * [Union of African States](https://Union%20of%20African%20States) [Answer] You might find it interesting to look up Sparta, which was ruled by two kings, from two separate lineages, and five elected ephors. > > [According to tradition, the two lines, the Agiads (Ἀγιάδαι, Agiadai) and Eurypontids (Εὐρυποντίδαι, Eurypontidai), were respectively descended from the twins Eurysthenes and Procles, the descendants of Heracles who supposedly conquered Sparta two generations after the Trojan War. The dynasties themselves, however, were named after the twins' grandsons, the kings Agis I and Eurypon, respectively. The Agiad line was regarded as being senior to the Eurypontid line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kings_of_Sparta). > > > > > [...according to Plutarch, the ephorate was born out of the necessity for leaders while the kings of Sparta were absent for long periods during the Messenian Wars. The ephors were elected by the popular assembly, and all citizens were eligible. The position of ephor was the only political office open to the whole damos (populace) between the ages of 30–60, so eligible Spartans highly sought after the position. They were forbidden to be re-elected and provided a balance for the two kings, who rarely co-operated. Plato called the ephors tyrants who ran Sparta as despots while the kings were little more than generals. Up to two ephors would accompany a king on extended military campaigns as a sign of control, and they held the authority to declare war during some periods in Spartan history]. > > > So maybe your kings could look after war, and the presidents peace (plus declaring war). This isn't two different from some Native American tribes, who had separate war and peace chiefs). ]
[Question] [ Teachers in the future In my story, a hyper-tech city has schools, and teachers, one of which is a prominent character. I can't figure out why, though, such a society would have teachers. This is a relatively generic cyberpunk world (eg. gangs, high tech physical augmentation, etc.) Laws are often ignored, and the government is highly corrupt Kids could easily get a similar education through artificial teachers (aka the internet), but choose to go to physical classrooms instead (why?) Most kids in this society start on their career paths early (to make money for their families), but get a general primary education at schools, let's say to about the age of 12, so 6th grade equivalent This education is funded by the government, mostly, so it's relatively cheap. Money is not an issue. My question Why would basic, face-to-face education be valued in a society where laws are followed as often as not and education could be found online? [Answer] First of all, you must resolve the technology dichotomy A technology dichotomy is when the fundamentals required for a particular technology do not exist, but the technology exists nonetheless. You have one. A high tech society that doesn't have the order and predictable lawfullness needed to permit the millions of scientists, technicians, and engineers necessary to create it? (Much less the farmers, miners, carpenters, masons, pawn brokers, morticians, and even teachers that support them?) Your first problem is explaining how this society even exists. Are they getting the tech as off-world imports? Is it magically summoned? Is it a gift from the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Because it can't exist in the world you described in your question. Second, you need to explain how it's being maintained And maybe this is how your question gets answered. Tech breaks down. If no one is being educated to repair it, then your society has maybe 10-20 years before that tech is gone and all that's left is a few Westworld androids and Mad Max. You've suggested that all the education is online but there's no predictable lawfulness (dichotomy!). Who's the benign being operating the Ineternet on your world? Wouldn't they, being corrupt, want to starve people of education to guarantee the tech breaks down, reserving only to himself and a cadre of consecrated ones the precious ~~juice~~ knowledge that keeps his tech (and that one seemingly unkillable dude) going? If that's the case, then he's forcing people to get an education just to keep his power over the world's apparently only source of knowledge. Social entropy would kill this society fairly quickly Most people don't realize just how complicated the dance of life really is. High technology is a *luxury.* Any society can exist without it. Every society must work like dogs to maintain it. Take a couple of hours to think through the pyramid of people needed to design, produce, and maintain high-tech. And then outline the minimal pyramids needed for food production, mineral production, and basic safety. What you quickly realize is that 90% of our society exists to support the luxury of technology. *How were the pyramids built? You guessed it... social organization* Every one of those people I just mentioned must work with a basic expectation of law and order or the pyramid quickly becomes a house of cards. Even a criminal society has order. The majority of any society must predictably work together or that society implodes — and the luxuries are the first thing to go (well, maybe the second. Frozen burritos might be the first to go). Why will you need face-to-face teachers? Because society can't be so lawless that the children won't be required to receive a predictable education, from Kindergarten through college. High tech doesn't exist with a 6th grade education. Somebody will need to motivate the kids to focus on their education or the luxury of technology will vanish. And history has proven that it generally won't be their parents. Even homeschoolers are highly organized. Just talk to one. They'll tell you all about all the other people they depend on just to educate their children at home. It is not chaotic. And they'll tell you that face-to-face time, while not necessary all the time, is nevertheless crucial. Why? Because it takes little time for an 8-year-old to figure out how to play everything from solitaire to Halo — anything other than their homework. --- May I suggest that you need to focus your crisis on the efforts of organized groups to become pre-eminent in the world? In other words, the individual cannot be lawless within the group, but the interaction between organized groups can. That provides the structure needed to justify the high-tech-manintaining education needed and, thereby, teachers. [Answer] ## Child Care In our current world we have a rising rate of single mothers. They require things like daycare, school, and after school organizations to keep their child in relatively safe locations and under super vision while the mother is at work. With most people entering the work force by the end of 6th grade your society would have a higher birth rate than right now. With more children you need a larger child care workforce and what better way then a government subsidized baby sitter who also tries to get your child an education and better job? [Answer] I have taught, I was a professor. As a graduate student my job (I was paid by the university I was attending) was one of eight "tutors", we provided walk-in help to undergraduates with their homework and projects, dealing with everything from the basics to the most advanced. Before tests we were swamped with students, and these are students of just five years ago: They have textbooks, iPhones, the Internet and Google and Wiki. All of those sources could have explained what they needed to know. None of those sources can PINPOINT what they needed to know by asking a few questions. That is what the human tutors and professors are for. Because despite all those resources, it takes me to understand, from the student's incorrect answers and where they go wrong in solving the problem exactly what they failed to understand, usually in the classes they took a few semesters ago, and in a few cases from misconceptions all the way back in high school. An AI can be like a calculator and DO math, but it doesn't understand math the way a person does, and the way a person learns it. Currently that takes another human, and probably would in a cyber-punk world too. If you want to learn something, you need a person that not only knows the topic but can detect when somebody else has an incomplete grasp of the topic, and can find the dividing point(s) of when their knowledge became broken. Usually by a bad or careless or overwhelmed teacher. In maths, for example, most people do find in the grade school topics, but you will find some broken by long division, or square root extraction, or high school algebra or geometry or trigonometry or Calculus I, etc. The classes they passed with less than a B for whatever reason. They failed to grasp something fundamental that becomes necessary later. If you don't understand long division, because you can divide numbers on a calculator, then you will have much difficulty in dividing polynomials, and in number theory that relates to understanding encryption algorithms. I do academic research in the AI field, to my knowledge no AI can do basic arithmetic on arbitrarily large numbers like a sixth grader can. I do not know of an AI that has been taught to multiply in exactly the same way I can teach a child to multiply, so it could correctly multiply two 100 digit numbers. Or do long division of one by another, like a sixth grader could (I am not the only one that could have done that in the sixth grade). AI can be very smart, but they aren't humans, and so far *AI* do not understand how humans learn and think, how to tell if they missed something or think something that is just a step off of correct, or even worse are sure they DO know something when they don't. That is the value of a human teacher, they understand human children, human body language, human facial expressions and micro-expressions to a degree no AI is even close to matching, and human learning: That lets them quickly identify and understand human failings, so they can correct them: That is teaching. Teaching is not reciting facts and figures and drawing pictures on the board. Those are the things to understand, and can be done by a robot. What the robot cannot do is answer "why" to off-the-wall questions or detect when a student is not understanding the picture on the board, because that individual is engaging in some idiosyncratic behaviors that (for them) indicate evasion or confusion or boredom because they lost the thread of the argument, or are preoccupied by some internal drama or fantasy. The teacher's job is not clicking through slides and reciting a script. It is watching the students to see if they understand the slides and the script, and spotting trouble, and helping those that stumble or fall down on the path to understanding. [Answer] The schools are sponsored by the Government of the day, and attendance is mandatory. Why, when kids could learn at home? Two reasons 1. These days a kid could learn at home from free on line resources such as Wikipedia and Google Books, and there are are Stack Exchange sites for expert advice and opinion. However without a structured approach to material a student could easily miss the foundations of a subject and then be unable to comprehend - or worse think they understand - the more advanced portions of a subject. So structured learning is your first reason. 2. Secondly, in this cyberpunk society it's useful for citizens to have a similar frame of reference, speak similar languages and technologies and have a somewhat homogenized view of their society & world. However, given the level of tech in such a world, the prevalence of AI and targeted advertising, it's absolutely within the grasp of the ruling caste to take this one step further and ensure that that children are indoctrinated/brainwashed to not rebel/rock the boat/ask the wrong questions. School is used to brainwash a compliant populace. [Answer] I think it would be very interesting to be a teacher in a cyber-punk world, to try and shape young minds away from the legal apathy, social irresponsibility and gang membership which pollutes the next generation. As a human being, I would have a higher chance of reaching rebellious students because they would not be able to turn me off when what I said frustrated them. I would also have amazing tools available to help me reach their young minds. AI's would monitor each student's facial expressions, blood-pressure and maybe even brain waves to notify me when attentions wander. The AI would also provide a vast library of presentation techniques on-line and real time advice to help me adapt my lessons to maximize my effectiveness with each batch of children. As a government representative, I would be highly motivated to reach these children because I would have a clearer view than most of how close we all are to social collapse and anarchy. Each student whom I save from the gangs would be one less warrior fighting for our mutual doom. While strongly implying to the parents and students that the benefits of in-person education lay in the child's chance to develop social and interpersonal skills, I would quietly and constantly be defending our whole society from collapse. [Answer] There is a simple answer to this question, and it has to do with your frame of reference. You're assuming that people go to school to learn knowledge. They actually don't. They go to school to learn how to be citizens. The other arguments made here are correct; in modern societies with gender equality et al, schools are as much government child care as they are education centres, in some cases more so. This was proven to me several years ago when I met several stay at home mothers who told me that they sent their before-school-age children to child care several days a week because they'd been advised that if they didn't, the children would lack the socialisation skills that were taken for granted in children entering the school system now. I'm also an (adjunct) Professor, and I've taught under and post grads, as well as dealt with employees new to the workplace, etc. I can tell you that most of the students and new employees don't remember much more than 10% of what they're taught, and that's actually a good thing. Schools are not about the uptake of knowledge, they're about learning skills. Students do have to leave school knowing how to read, how to write, and how math works (especially in my field). But more importantly, they need to know how to negotiate a deadline for a task. They need to know how to manage a work colleague who's being a prat. They need to have some idea how to prioritise their spending according to needs and income, and they need to know how to dress themselves in a manner that won't embarrass them in the workplace. Schools can be cruel places (they're populated by kids) and the one thing that such an environment gives the young is social intelligence. In a cyberpunk world, this is actually MORE critical, not less. The tech takes care of almost everything it can meaning that the jobs that are left behind that people do are people oriented; this is still an area the computers will never do well, no matter how sophisticated their programming or training becomes. In a world where all the technical and back office work can be done by machines, your differentiator as a value proposition to an employer is how well you can navigate the social framework of your society. This is what schools give you. [Answer] Education is mandatory by the government, but due to expenses involved with teachers and school, attending online courses with an AI teacher is provided. There are actual schools with teachers and physical classes but has become something of a luxury or a status symbol. "My son attends Lincoln high school." Just like tophats in London at the turn of the 20th century, once a thing of nobility, now everyone wants to have the status symbol and so what is initially luxurious turns commonplace except for the absolutely poor which still have to resort to online education. Some people go so far as to say that the future is at stake and that children educated online are getting fed messages from the government and to not trust such people. It puts a damning mark on such people and so nobody educated in such a fashion are quick to admit to it, further encouraging the idea that a grounded education at an actual school is the only way for a person that isn't a criminal to be educated. This would undoubtedly create a slew of hybrids for those who can't afford to send their children to schools with a human teacher, such as a AI-taught school with occasional human intervention such as one lesson taught by a human and all the other lessons are taught and led by an AI. It is considered "acceptable" only because the AI is not the same AI sponsored by the government, though it may be just the same. [Answer] ## They could still be around as a habit Habits are hard to break. They may have served some purpose in the past, but they still go on. For example, in modern society, we no longer need 40 hour work weeks or even everyone showing up in the office, but it still happens. ## PR and Prestige Crime lords and corrupt bureaucrats want to be feared, but they don't want to be seen as cruel or evil. Nobody wants to be the one to cut down on education or health care funding. Governments today also refuse to modernize certain things because they don't want to put people out of a job. It becomes a form of welfare. This applies more in cyberpunk worlds. Having a high number of employees is a sign of prestige. But it doesn't count if their workforce were unskilled. Teachers are always in need. It's easy to approve the budget on hiring more teachers than needed, just say that you want smaller class sizes. Nobody is going to call out their rival's teacher count as an inflated number of employees. ## Investment A cyberpunk megacorp is often bigger than it needs to be, corrupt, and inefficient. It's going to have a lot more money than they know what to do with it. No corp would want to hold lots of cash on hand; they'd like to invest every cent of it. Investing in classrooms may not be as effective as online education. But people could simply not care about tracking it enough to notice that it's ineffective. Corruption prevents it from being proven ineffective; too many people have their families working as teachers to want it to be removed. Education is also a very long term investment. It would take about a hundred years to set up a good university or school. The effects of primary school education take about 10-20 years to become visible. It would take too long to set it up again if they cancel it. So it takes too much political capital to cut out classrooms. [Answer] You can take two paths with the AI vs. human teacher arguments, depending on how you want to present your world. ## One, AI classrooms are for the elite The technology required for a quality computer education is out of reach of the lower and some percentage of the middle classes. They simply can't afford the high cost of private AI tutors. Maybe this is because the AIs are the equivalent of luxury sports cars: costly as a barrier to entry, not necessarily because they provide a more comfortable ride to the grocery store. AIs require high-end computing resources, a fast cybernet connection etc. which translates to high subscription costs. Therefore, the bulk of citizens can't have AI teachers and are left with the antiquated, understaffed, underpaid, public education system. (See also every complaint ever leveled at "inner-city" school systems.) ## Two, AI classrooms are NOT for the elite The opposite could also be true. Maybe public schools reached a point where they couldn't find or couldn't afford quality teachers. So they started outsourcing it. First, with remote classrooms, where one teacher taught at a dozen sites simultaneously via the internet. This grew over time until the remote-site teacher was replaced by recordings of a teacher, which was then replaced by an AI teacher-like-service. These second-rate AIs are great at lecturing and asking multiple choice type tests. But they are not good at teaching creativity, grading essay questions, or answering questions that are at all subjective. Therefore, the elite, wealthy, classes can afford private schools with live, in-person, teachers who can actually interact with students like a person should. The lower income parents who care about their kids wish they could afford real teachers. Alas, they get the Google Teacher service instead. Great at presenting facts. Lousy at answering complex questions. [Answer] So extract cyberpunk and start working early and you get present day xD... About your question: Face to face education can be seen as ancient (depending on the year we are talking about) but it serves to discipline the students more than educate (because as mentioned above, information can be searched) but discipline is something that must be practiced. For example take yourself from back when you were 12 insert all the technical knowledge you have/need to do your current day work (only the knowledge how to do it not life experience and all that) and put that younger savvy self in a 8 hour shift ... want to bet how long until he would leave? I'd give myself 5 mins (and I'm working on something that I loved my whole life xD) So to summarize : it's more about how to shape their work attitude and impose a minimum of discipline that may or may not have been learned at home. [Answer] I'll try to point to some reasons not mentioned by other answers. And I think, there remain many unsaid ones, too. 1. The robotic education will give you the same education that gets everybody. If you need something really better, you need a talented teacher. I am afraid, many real teachers are worse than a good teaching SW. (Our civilization practically has not such yet). And even "normal" teachers mostly simply don't know they own main task - to teach people how to think. Even if computers will help to obtain knowledge, somebody must teach children to think non-standardly. Not the way that others think. Or the society is dead and doomed. Even if you already know Altshuler, Poya and Yudkovsky methods how to think, you must be able to invent something new. This is a supertask. And your teacher, to teach you solve supertasks, must himself solve a supersupertask! Only when you have genial computers, you can learn that from them. Our society often forgets that it simply cannot exist without geniuses for long. Always there will happen a task that cannot be solved by usual methods. And we need many geniuses to have one that will solve it and some teachers that will create these geniuses. Our society so dislikes that idea, that windows underlines for me the word "genial" now and proposes to use "genital" instead. 2. The people of some nations always try to give their children better education. No Jew or Armenian mother will be ever content with her child getting the same education as others! If she can, the child shall get something better. And if she cannot, too. So, if your teacher is an only good one and there is a Jew mother in your world, she will find him. 3. If you need a reason for personal meeting (really, a good teacher can teach by video connection, or even audio, or even by paper letters), that means that his subject and/or his method includes physical contact. For example, if he teaches to play on instruments or to hold a paintbrush or how to conduct some breathing/meditation/physical activities. Or these activities are the part of his teaching method. You needn't invent a real working method, but some that seems as a working one. And... you should be really good yourself to show a very talented person. [Answer] Private schools could make a lot of sense for people still respecting the old traditions of the past. Where the other mediums make a lot of sense with the society you have there maybe having your teacher be an exception. It would also make sense for a corrupt government to provide the bare minimum education with just online resources and what not, but a private tutor could personalize those resources in a way normal education does not. Though it could bring in stigmas about wealth and strictness onto your teacher character that you may not want. [Answer] Few have already pinpointed the social component. Like, people getting money from the government. Following the "high tech low life" principle, I'll push it further. # Children get free/cheaper food at school The actual learning might happen at home/on the street with their AI companions and all the Google they can have. (Although I deeply support the [statement](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/97952/42059) of @Amadeus that a dedicated and knowledgeable teacher might get to the point and teach much better, how many dedicated teachers are there in the dystopian swamp?) But the physical presence at school can be guaranteed with a free lunch. (And because of [TANSTAAFL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch) half of the lessions would be some kind of ideological brainwashing by the very same dystopian government.) [Answer] In many cyberpunk settings the corporations ARE the government. The most succinct and perhaps simplest answer to "Why would basic, face-to-face education be valued in a society where ... education could be found online?" is so the controlling organization can make sure the "correct" education is received. Also, it can allow the organization to identify students with aptitudes early so they can be exploited properly; you don't want your best and brightest toiling away just oiling the cogs in the machine, you want them designing/managing the cogs. [Answer] I think the scenario explained by JBH in his great answer is flawless in his/her logic (sorry JBH, I don't know your gender). Unless you solve that dichotomy, your society can't go anywhere and children education won't be exactly a priority, no matter if human or AI, they'll be quite busy just trying to survive! However, if you're open to re-frame your world, maybe you could create a condition in which this is some kind of resistance. For example, consider a world where robots have taken the burden of caring for mankind. They'll keep technology, health, environment and a superstructural kind of government. Kind of good and gently gods. Humans would make use of those benefit, but they will resist robots' domination. In this scenario, education by human beings would be an act of resistance by itself while society and technology would still be able to exist and thrive. Robots will look at these cyberpunk humanity like brat kids and just worry for them to be safe. Just an idea. (and I know I'm not being very original, this kind of setup existed in many stories and films, with good or bad robots or dominant classes, semi-gods or whatever) [Answer] CyberTech High School Cybertech owns this city, but as other answers have pointed out, without education in a few decades you are going to be king of nothing. This is why Cybertech finds kids from a young age. They offer their employees daycare and while they have the kids they give them lots of aptitude tests. Those found acceptable are then placed into learning programs. Anyone entering these pretty much is selling their soul to work their entire life at CyberTech, but it sure beats shooting mutants in the desert for recycled food ]
[Question] [ I'm building a world where kaiju-sized creatures exist alongside regular-sized creatures. How these kaiju don't crumble under their own weight doesn't matter, and can be explained away by them being biologically separate from the regular creatures and not made of what everything else is made of. Aside from that, they're basically giant organisms that live, consume, reproduce, and die. The thing is, these kaiju are a late addition to my story, and the story could work perfectly well without them. The setting originally is a low fantasy medieval world where various fantastic megafauna coexist with people. However, these kaiju fit the themes of the story and make the story feel more fantastic. And I just like seeing them in the background, or at least the marks they leave behind, like giant footprints and skeletons (the story is for a comic by the way, and seeing gigantic versions of normal things is always cool). My question is, what should I pay attention to regarding these kaiju so I can arrange them to not change the world in a significant way, at least until I want them to? Some problems and possible explanations I have thought of: * How are they not destroying settlements all the time? They're big and slow, so they're easy to spot and avoid. Also, maybe they move in predictable pattern and avoid certain areas, so that's where civilizations grow. * If they are made of super strong exotic materials, why are people not using it to make stuff? Maybe the hard parts like the bones are so hard that people can't do anything with them with the current technology. The less hard parts like flesh and blood might be toxic or dangerous in other ways to regular life that people wouldn't want to touch them. * Why are these kaiju not what everyone in the story is talking about? Maybe they're rare enough or live far enough away from civilization that they're not a concern for most of the time. Like solar eclipses or hurricanes, people don't talk about them until it's immediately relevant, like when they're coming near a settlement or when people have to move through their territory. Anything else I should think about? [Answer] # Huge. Slow. Indestructible. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vTeIc.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vTeIc.png) You don't need to change the world too much, provided you don't make the Kaiju too common. Think of your titanic monsters as a different type of hurricane. They do much the same thing. In fact, since this is my answer, and I can do what I want, I declare they do exactly the same thing. Compared to the garden variety hurricans, Kaiju are exactly as (a) huge (b) dangerous (c) common (d) unstoppable (e) indifferent to humans. Kaiju eat grass and pay no heed to us puny humans. Every few years, by sheer fluke, a Kaiju walks near your city and you all just have to deal with it and rebuild after. Despite this, real people keep building cities in places where there are hurricanes. It stands to reason they would keep building them in places with Kaiju. > > If they are made of super strong exotic materials, why are people not using it to make stuff? > > > You can either (A) completely ignore the material concerns and how these giant monsters can support their own weight or (B) declare the material is so strong that people have no way to use it. It is stuck inside a living kaiju and then it is stuck inside a dead kaiju. We cannot break the skin. [Answer] They do destroy settlements. From time to time. But then, settlements are also destroyed by barbarian invaders, famine, plague, volcano eruptions, flood, and forest fires. From time to time. The inhabitants of your world (especially the 'dumb rural peasants') feel that the world is a scary place and that they have no control over things which might happen to them. Except trust in their clergy and their own warlords. You mentioned these kaiju as being a separate biology. For a fantasy story, don't. Knights are called upon to protect the hapless peasants from less-than-skyscraper-sized megafauna, and mostly they succeed. From time to time, the first local knight to fight a monster dies, and the king has to send a hero and/or a small army. And then there are those slightly larger ones where the king's troops can do nothing but mitigate the disaster and hope the monster goes away, perhaps aided by a deliberate forest fire to make things unpleasant or by rounding up lifestock to make food scarce. At which point, someone steps forward to claim sort-of victory, and the order of things is right again. The peasants have been protected by their overlords, which is why the peasants owe their overlords feudal dues. By choice, kaiju live where slightly smaller herbivore megafauna roam the land. Getting a full belly by hunting individual deer or elk is so tedious, and grass does not have enough calories. And as it happens, human settlements drive those slightly smaller megafauna away or kill them. It would help with the survival and stability of civilization if the larger the kaiju, the less likely it is to wander into civilized areas. Here there be dragons and all that. [Answer] People do use Kaiju parts to make things. Only, you need a dead Kaiju to properly mine it. Because Kaiju and human habitation get along like water and elemental sodium, a dead Kaiju will by necessity be far from the edge of cultivation. If the Kaiju didn't die in the process of pushing back said edge, job number one is even finding a carcass. You will then have to bring a lot of mining equipment across trackless wilderness, along with provisions for the duration of the mining operation. During the operation, you need to worry about any inimical qualities of a Kaiju's bodily fluids, as well as the fact that carrion eaters will be drawn to the carcass. These carrion eaters will include Kaiju. Finally, after the bone is extracted, you will need to haul it across that same trackless wilderness back to civilization. All of this combines to make Kaiju Ivory one of the most expensive materials in your world, and artisans that can work it are rare. Therefore, it is mostly reserved for ostentatious decoration and for really fancy weapons. The same applies to anything else that a carcass might yield. [Answer] Homo sapiens is the only invasive species having a large body and which has a sort of compulsion to invade and destroy any environment. All other species prefer, when possible, to just get their sustenance from the environment where they are and leave other species enjoy what is left. Sure, elephants can make a mess when they charge in group, but they do so only when enraged. A buffalo stampede can flatten a prairie in the snap of a finger, but won't do it just for the fun of it. A blue whale jumping out of water can crush a medium sized boat, but won't do it just because it is bored on an evening. Wild animals in particular have learned that avoiding humans as much as possible is better for them, in the same way we have learned that pic-nicking on a ant hill is not the smartest of the ideas. Your kaijus are the same: they don't have the innate instinct to smash things for fun and have learned that avoiding the humans is preferable for the sake of enjoying a quiet after dinner. [Answer] # You're thinking too small You are probably thinking of beasts that are just big enough to go over city walls with ease. Beasts in the size range that contains Godzilla and King Kong, for example. In literature there are plenty of creatures orders of magnitude larger, and the way they interact with humans is very interesting. The nature of such interactions means that for the most part they just... Exist. Interesting things usually happen over aeons, or are tied to fate or prophecy, which is why catastrophic things don't happen very often. In Avatar: the Last Airbender/Legend of Aang, there are lion-turtles (think chinese lions with turtle shells), beasts so large that when swimming they are mistaken for islands. People built entire cities - not towns, actual cities - on their backs. Lion turtles were intelligent, kind, and acted to protect humanity. In the Discworld series of books, the whole world is a flat planet that stood on the back of four giant elephants. The elephants in turn stood on the back of a turtle who was longer than the planet was wide. These beasts' movements take geological time to complete, and they are generally not visible except from the rim of the world - a very dangerous place. The turtle is generally harmless but scholars keep discussing whether it is a male or female. If the latter, then the world might end when the turtle eventually copulates, as the planet will be smashed in a phenomenon called The Big Bang. In greek mythology, the world was carried by a titan called Atlas. I suppose earthquakes might happen whenever Atlas had chills, and it may have been quite a swing when he placed the world on Hercules's back (specially given that Hercules was human sized while Atlas was humongous). And in Judaism Leviathan is a sea monster that, according to the Babylonian Talmud, is three hundred miles long (483 km, approximately). That is about the width of Britain at its widest or second widest part (I don't remember exactly which), going from the west coast of Wales to the east coast of England. Not only cities but a couple countries fit into that length. Leviathan's usefulness is that once the Lord is done with the world, the just will eat the monster in a banquet. [Answer] The super-exotic materials is simple: they involve danger to humans. Ironically enough, it doesn't even have to be real. If people used the bodies and got hit by a coincidental plague, or even flood, they might be put off them. If it happened again -- and memory is great for things happening in conjunction, while ignoring isolated things -- that would build up to a superstition. (How could it cause a flood? Punishment for dealing with a diabolic monster as if it were an ordinary beast.) And that's on top of the way that it might have heavy metals, or radioactive material, or simple organic poisons. One notes that famines, plagues, floods, and other disasters are simply part of life in this era. This is just another. Look at tales of dragons and other monsters plaguing settlements to generate their attitude. (Presumably sacrificing the princess would not help, but that would probably be interpreted as a mistake in how to appease.) [Answer] # The Kaiju are ancient creations of a lost civilization of high magic and follow predictable rules. An ancient civilization which had more access to advanced magic created them, and set them loose to follow arcane rules that no one knows. This allows them to be easily controllable and manageable. 1. They don't normally attack people. Whatever their goals are, for the most part they stay away from population centers. While failures in their biological programming happen especially when it would be interesting for your story, for the most part they are not a major setting element. Some exceptions may exist for interesting towns where the natives have managed to divine some hidden rules of the creatures and lured them to be mounts or such. 2. They make extensive use of rare earth elements and radioactive elements to be functional, and while they are safe to touch, when dying they tend to leak a lot. They're not safe to touch. By the time they are more safe and are just a collection of bones they tend to have lost enough of their exotic properties that they're not as useful. 3. They have no major use to most civilizations so they aren't a big topic. They mostly avoid people, don't provide useful resources, and don't do things that help people much. As such, they are mostly just seen as natural landmarks, like moving mountains or storm clouds. Certainly the subject of speculation and wonder, but not something that most care deeply about. [Answer] It might be best to consider what kaiju can't do in your world. This would limit them (and limit your options), but it would make for a more "realistic" feel as omnipotent creatures are a little boring in that you can't really deal with them and the whole show becomes a just so story. Perhaps kaiju can't swim as they are too heavy and they are restricted to a large island or continent until a volcanic upheaval allows them out by raising a land bridge. Perhaps kaiju are simply content to stay in the area where the xyz tree fruit they live off grow. People might then control the kaiju to a limited extent by burning or cutting down xyz trees in border areas. A series of bumper years might cause xyz trees to sprout and grow all over the place beyond the inhabitants capacity to destroy them leading the kaiju to extend their range and come into greater contact with the human population. Perhaps the kaiju are huge, but are also (somewhat) vulnerable and can be slain by powerful stinger type crossbows. This means they don't usually come too close to human habitation. Maybe until some people raid a kaiju settlement after which the kaiju turn nasty and attack mob handed perhaps with stout protective garments. [Answer] Because the kaiju are sea monsters rather than dinosaurs. > > How are they not destroying settlements all the time? > > > Settlements are on land, and the kaiju can't get close enough to land to do much. Sure, there's more tsunami than on typical Earth, but that can be somewhat mitigated by walls and simple settlement placement (kaiju will likely make seaports less desirable since shipping is an even riskier business). > > If they are made of super strong exotic materials, why are people not using it to make stuff? > > > Because they can't harm the kaiju, and kaiju fights lead to the stuff being out to sea. Simply making useful kaiju stuff dense (so it sinks to the bottom of the ocean) would be enough to put it out of reach of medieval tech. Maybe a scale or something will wash ashore once in a blue moon to develop the fantasy mystique, but this is seen as a random blessing rather than something that men could harvest. > > Why are these kaiju not what everyone in the story is talking about? > > > Like any sea monster, it's bad luck to invoke their name. Most commoners don't go out to sea, so they're not directly impacted. The kaiju are some vague "seas are deadly" rumor that most people don't believe. [Answer] Kaiju are easily repelled. We tend to think of kaiju as big dangerous monsters with a disregard for (or animosity towards) humanity, but there's no reason the opposite can't be true: kaiju are skittish. Just big ol' babies. Or humanity found something that kaiju very much dislike and so repelling them is super easy. Thus, kaiju don't significantly alter civilization because civilization has found that they don't need to deal with them, for the most part. Maybe even a cornered kaiju doesn't fight back. Maybe it just gets stressed and dies, like a goldfish. You know how towns tend to have giant clock towers or church bells? Turns out, these were the kaiju repellant. That reverberating "GONG" noise just really upsets them and they move away from it. If they can't move away from it, it stresses them out and they die. Having something like that which rings regularly -- oh, say, on the hour -- makes your town totally immune to kaiju, which is why in every new settlement, the first thing they build is a big bell tower. [Answer] *Your kaiju* start off a lot smaller.** In many fantasy stories, dragons are a kind of kaiju and they have this feature: they tend to be very big, very old, and very rare. They are very rare because they have to be very old in order to get very big. Your kaiju could be the same. Maybe you have certain creatures, like turtles or raccoons (for instance), that are a normal size when they are a normal age. Only the rare turtle that survived on a deserted island for a thousand years, or the rare raccoon that settled in a hidden mountain valley for an eon, would grow to such enormous size. They would consequently be very rare, often one-of-a-kind freaks of nature, and they wouldn't produce more like themselves within the lifetime of a human civilization. As long as your kaiju are rare, they won't likely have a major effect on civilization, except in the local area, because the world is really quite vast. I mean even a mile-long monster is only a mile long, if you think about it. There may be a seafaring people who worship the giant turtle, or a mountain tribe that feeds its enemies to the giant raccoon, but this is necessarily remote from your major cities and populated areas. [Answer] How large is large in terms of Kaiju. Simply considering the question from the point of dinosaurs may provide some perspective / solve your issues. [Titanosauria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanosauria) could reach upwards of 120 ft long, and 70 tons in weight. Maybe 20x an elephant. And even with those sizes, estimates on food requirements are that there might have been a few to 10's per sq. km. Biology can actually support significantly large sizes than just elephants, without creatures crumbling in on their own legs. [Ampelosaurus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanosauria#/media/File:AmpelosaurusDB.jpg) legs (an image example of a Titanosauria member) are not even that different in body scale from an elephant. If we actually look at the [bones of these specimens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanosauria#/media/File:Titanosaur_in_Japan.jpg), they're strong, yet not space material / magical sci-fi strong. The dinosaurs apparently even had enough carrying capacity to have armor, scales, and spikes at those sizes. * No need for exotic materials and affecting society. Other concerns: "How are people not talking about them." There are deer and elk everywhere in America. They're relatively large compared to humans and extremely dangerous to automobiles. Yet I don't talk about them all the time. I talk about them when they smash through the windshield of my car, or eat my back garden. Otherwise, there's some deer. Occasionally people go hunting. Deer meat's a thing. But its too inconvenient to be mass market. Kaiju can be similar. "Duh, there's Kaiju... You'd have to be blind not to notice." They just get talked about like something people are used to and accept. "Destroying stuff." Similar argument as the deer and elk. They do destroy stuff. They're just not actively malicious. They might think your tree or cow are delicious, and you'll wake up to find out you don't have an oak tree any longer. You occasionally have to drive them away like bears up in Alaska. Bears aren't malicious, they're just really dangerous under the wrong conditions. [Answer] # Kaiju generally keep to themselves, grazing peacefully, because their evolution of gigantism has made that the most efficient path. Setting aside the usual square-cube laws that come with sizing up creatures, let's look at real-world examples. Whales are probably the best ones here: they're the most massive creatures on the planet (probably ever to exist on Earth), and their size affords them a number of advantages that all add up to what you're probably looking for. In this, I'm imagining Kaiju on a truly massive scale: one the size of a building would be downright shrimpy. Most are anywhere from the size of a city block to being able to serve as a small island. 1. Many of them spend a lot of time sleeping, sunbathing, etc. A creature that big is going to be pretty slow, so they'll likely not need or want to be doing any more motions than they have to. A snake will eat a mouse and then sit in its nest digesting it for a week or two—scale that up to some of these Kaiju (albeit not necessarily meat) and you can easily have them in the same place for weeks, and even when they do move, their movements are slow and deliberate. (Plus, this plays nicely into the "sleeping dragon" trope so common to the myths of Kaiju.) 2. Their massive size actually makes their metabolism more efficient, so while they may eat a lot of food, they don't need to go hunting for it. This also incentivises herbivory, because they're so large that it's easy for most creatures to hide from them, and they're so slow that most everything can outrun them or at least dodge. Plus, plants or plankton/similar are so much easier to get in large masses. 3. There may be a range of sizes for these creatures, but as a rule, they're so massive that no other creature would stand a chance hunting them. Some of the larger ones wouldn't even notice a regular-sized creature attacking them, since they're the size of city blocks. A giant turtle-esque creature (that might have dirt and plants growing on its back due to its size and age) would be pretty unappetizing to most, especially considering how thick its skin is (let alone its armor) and it's far more likely to crush anything willing to get near to it by accident than they are to even catch its attention. 4. These Kaiju are usually in places humans wouldn't want to be, just by their differing goals. Kaiju generally want to have a territory they can rest and a large area of readily-available food—the thick woods untouched by civilization or the deepest parts of the ocean are perfect for them. Their size and fantastical nature might even let them live in incredibly inhospitable environments, like in the crags of a semi-active volcano. Humans are usually perfectly willing to let them have their territories, and that helps feed into the "guardian of the wilds" trope that Kaiju often exhibit. 5. Only the smaller Kaiju are going to be anywhere near predatory or aggressive, and those will probably be mostly seabound. Of course, when I say "smaller", I still mean something the size of a whale or larger, but probably not much more than a medium-sized passenger jet. The deep seas are a much better fit for an aggressive Kaiju, since the open sea makes it hard to hide from them and the water means they can move more efficiently, as opposed to lugging around all their weight on land. This means that you'll occasionally have an aggressive sea monster, and maybe a few kinds even come onto land occasionally, but overall most people live on land, and thus far away from any aggressive Kaiju species. [Answer] Our own folklore if full stories of big things that go bonk in the night: * dragons * giants * beware of fungie rings or you leave the world for hundreds of years * do not climb the bean stalk or touch the golden giant goose * "here be dragons", giant watersnakes or turntles that eat whole ships of the unwary * areas that when entered have a good chance to vanish you and yours for good Like any species taken from their biome, your kaiyu are [an ivasive species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species) - fallen through the gaps in space-time-magic. There are ever only a few and only if they impact live enough the local rulers will put together a sizeable force to deal with them. If left to their devices they vanish again - traveling to where ever they came from - using this world of tiny things just to pass through - if voluntarily or by happenchance? Who knows... If one has to be killed, spoils go to the victorious kings, huge ribs used to build fancy cathedrals or tombs to the heros. [Answer] You asked multiple questions here, I'm going to only answer the "how they are not used by people" one, and the answer is that while their bone/skin/whatever is incerdiably though it also spoils rapidly after their death, what use is a great armor if you have to hunt a building sized monster to get it and even then you only have 2-3 days where you can use it before it deteriorates? ]
[Question] [ Orgone is the natural life energy of the cosmos and the lifeforce which allows the body to function. It is used to perform spells, and constantly regenerates after use at different rates for an individual. Orgone can also be used with other materials to create familiars, translucent creatures that act as servants. These familiars represent a reflection of the person's soul, and vary in size and shape. However, the materials needed to create these creatures are rare and expensive. Even after they have been gathered, the ritual is difficult to perform. There is however, an alternative to this method: the use of a soul that hasn't been completely formed. During the third trimester, a witch can use a ritual which aborts her pregnancy and uses the remains of the resonant soul to form a botchling. These pitiful creatures are malformed, misshapen fetuses made with half a soul. They are caught in an intangible state between life and death which float and hover over their creator, and serve as spies and counselors. A botchling is bound to the witch and cannot stray more than 100 yards from them. They can turn invisible at will and cannot be affected by anything on the physical plane. The spell causes no damage to the witch physically or biologically. However, the witch is unable to have more children mystically, and only one of these creatures can be created during a lifetime. How can this be the case? [Answer] Becoming a mystical unborn is a [Fate Worse than Death](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FateWorseThanDeath) (TV Tropes warning), worse than lifelong physical and emotional abuse, torture, or enslavement. Tethered to life but never living. Unable to interact with the world physically, they'll never feel a loving touch or be able to do any good deeds. They can't even lash out at the cause of their horrible state, nor leave her side. They don't have any hope because even when the witch dies they will remain tethered to her soul forever, neither living nor dying. After seeing the horrible things the witch did to her own unborn child's soul, no other spirit will trust her to be their mother. They figure it's better to not get a body at all than to be trapped with that monster for all eternity. No future pregnancy will result in a viable child because no soul will enter a developing body in the witch's womb. Without a soul, the fetal body won't continue developing past a point and becomes a miscarriage. Perhaps a witch with a mystical unborn has a change of heart some time later. Could she release the mystical unborn, allowing its ethereal body to die and its soul to depart? With no cursed creature tethered to her, would she once again be able to have children, or would souls remember her evil deed and not trust her still? Could she go through a process of repentance or penitence to regain trust and thus be able to have children again? Note this works whether souls are reincarnated or whether they exist before they're physically born but only live one mortal life on this plane of existence. In your world souls are reincarnated? If so, a mystical unborn remains trapped, tethered to the witch's soul as it enters its next life. The child who was a witch in a past life would be haunted by the mystical unborn without understanding why. If a girl, she would likely be infertile for the exact same reason she was infertile in her past life. A spell or ritual (exorcism, anyone?) could release the mystical unborn, allowing it to move on to its next life as well as freeing the witch-in-a-past-life from its curse. Otherwise the mystical unborn continues to haunt the former witch throughout multiple lives. Or perhaps as divine punishment/justice for her evil, the mystical unborn's soul lives all the witch's next lives in her place, and the witch does the haunting instead, until the two are unbound. In your world do souls exist before birth, live a single life, and then move on to some other state or plane of existence? In that case both the witch and the mystical unborn become trapped in a sort of limbo forever. Because the mystical unborn never got to live even a short meaningless life, it cannot go on to the next life. The witch would normally be able to move on to the next existence after her death, but because she is bound to a spirit which isn't ready and able to go with her, she has effectively trapped herself. Neither is able to disconnect themselves from the other, so the two are trapped between worlds until a ghost hunter encounters them and undoes the binding spell, or until long after the sun burns out. You ask, "why would a witch do something that would trap her soul for eternity?" Simply because she - like everyone else - doesn't really know what happens after death, or doesn't care. Her choices are based on what she gets out of her actions in this life, and having a mystical unborn does have many advantages while she's still alive. [Answer] To get pregnant again, you must finish your prior pregnancy. The woman cannot have another pregnancy because she has never finished the prior one. It is not because she has been physically damaged in any way. It is because the mystical unborn has not been born. The connection between mother and fetus remains intact; from the OP "the unborn is bound to the witch". It no longer resides inside her body (although that could be a possibility), but the mystic connection these witches use to magically nourish their pregnancies continues to nourish and sustain the mystical unborn. The connection cannot be severed. Methods have been devised to incapacitate or otherwise deprive a witch of the services of her mystical unborn but the unborn does not die; it cannot die because it is not alive. A question is what happens to the mystical unborn if the mother witch dies. One might posit that just as in life the mother witch tethers the unborn to the material plane, one her death the unborn serves as a tether, keeping what remains of her energies tethered to whatever limbo the unborn inhabit. [Answer] > > A mystical unborn is bound to the witch and cannot stray more than 100 yards from them. > > > and only one of these creatures can be created during a lifetime. > > > The womb is a material component for the spell. Once spent, the creature is bound to the witch by a hundred yards long mystical umbilical nooze. She may not be pregnant physically, but she is magically. Therefore she cannot become pregnant again. [Answer] Keeping the creature "alive" In order to keep the creature the witch has to donate orgone to the creature. If the witch tried to conceive another child the creation would drain more orgone than the witch is able to regenerate there by killing the child while only being only a few cm in size (or even smaller) which disables the unborn child to become another creature. [Answer] The process of creating the mystical unborn makes irrevocable changes to the witch's reproductive system. You can yank the fetus out at that late stage and create this pitiful creature instead, but the womb was not designed for that and is altered in the process. For example, some part of the womb -- necessary to keep a fetus alive inside the body -- can be extracted from the witch and merged into the created being to provide ongoing sustenance to the creation. Further, this is a permanent change, not the womb being temporarily allocated to sustaining the being, so if the being dies, she can't become pregnant again. [Answer] * The "mystical unborn" releases some sort of chemical (perhaps a waste product) that kills enough tissue in the womb that normal implantation of an embryo can no longer occur. * The "mystical unborn" releases some sort of chemical that travels up the Fallopian Tubes and attacks the ovaries. * The "mystical unborn" takes part of its mother's womb with it, either by eating it or by incorporating it into its body. The process of giving birth, then, effectively becomes a birth and a hysterectomy. [Answer] If it doesn't affect her physically or biologically, then the only explanation would be that the magic that binds the "mystical unborn" to her is also a curse of sorts. Magic can have its price, after all, so the price for creating one of these abominations would be the loss of future reproduction. Or, maybe the magic "freezes" her reproductive cycle so that, from her body's perspective, she's still pregnant, so ovulation doesn't occur. That's the whole idea behind the birth control pill, after all. Even though the mystical unborn isn't in the woman, her body thinks it's still gestating inside her, so it acts accordingly. A third option is that creating the mystical unborn fast-forwards the witch straight to menopause. (So now she's sterile and she's experiencing hot flashes.) [Answer] ## It turns out that Orgone is more complicated than originally thought... ...and there are a few kinds of it (let's go with colors). You need green Orgone to live, but birth is relying on the red Orgone. It turns out that the red Orgone is stored in the Placenta, and after a birth, a witch eats it (or makes an elixir out of it) in order to regain the lost energy and give another birth. However, when a mythical unborn is created, the magical energy is transferred into it from the placenta. This explains why it has those impressive magical powers, but unfortunately it makes it impossible for the witch to regain the red Orgone. You could also make this red Orgone contain a certain "wavelength" or "phase", which would explain the bond between the mother and the child - the red Orgone resonates with other Orgone of the same Phase. In case of the mythical unborn the response is actually so strong (because fetus absorbed the red Orgone from the mother) that the creature has to appear in proximity of the Witch. ]
[Question] [ A while ago I saw this brilliant 3d render of a post-apocalyptic world in which a human carries around a live plant in a capsule, connected to the plant via a respirator: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AxyCZ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AxyCZ.jpg) (credit: Stephen Grimm via [Youtube](https://youtu.be/iKBs9l8jS6Q?t=94)) I would love to develop this idea for a post-apocalyptic world I'm building for a 2D pixel art game. The idea is that some sort of chemical or nuclear warfare has made the atmosphere highly toxic for humans -- so they rely on certain special plants to create breathable air instead. Small settlements are centered around large trees with this special capability; humans traveling across the wastelands carry smaller plants in glass containers on their backs, breathing through a respirator much like in the photo above. I don't mind a certain amount of handwaving -- that is, it's fine to invent some semi-magical compound that these plants create -- but here are a few questions/points to consider: * perhaps the simplest scenario is that the plants simply create oxygen -- but how much quicker than real-world plants would they have to produce it so that a portable plant could sustain a human? * Furthermore, if these plants create oxygen at such incredible rates, why wouldn't humans just bottle it up and carry the bottles rather than the live plants? * if they create something other than oxygen, why would it have to be consumed straight away rather than be stored somewhere? * an alternate idea that could be promising is that people are carrying or preserving the plants because the plants are at risk of extinction, not because that is the only way for the humans to breathe. but would people really carry them around in little boxes rather than building some kind of glass house, or seed vault, or some other more permanent structure? All ideas appreciated :) [Answer] # The Plants Filter Out Toxins Part of the process of converting CO2 to O2 is storing the C (carbon), which is used to build the plant's biomass. So for a single plant to produce enough oxygen for a human, it must also grow incredibly fast and require a huge amount of water and nutrients. Besides, oxygen is about 21% of the atmosphere; it would have to be quite some disaster for an apocalyptic event to wipe out enough to threaten humans. A much more likely atmospheric catastrophe would involve toxic gases or particulates. You might have a toxin that is dangerous even at a few parts per billion. So I suggest that your survivors discover and breed a plant that is miraculously good at filtering out whatever has poisoned the atmosphere. This would allow for a realistic plant with reasonable metabolism, nutrient needs, weight, and size for a human to carry around. Because it efficiently removes something from the air instead of creating something, it would be more lightweight and last longer to bring the plant with you instead of lugging around a heavy pressurized tank of filtered air. Also, this could give rise to interesting plot points — perhaps toxins are more concentrated in deep valleys, near disaster sites, or far from the wonder plant's biome, presenting a silent danger if the plant can't filter fast enough. Areas where the plant is flourishing would be natural refuges for large animal life to survive. [Answer] The average [leaf produces 5 milliliters of air an hour.](https://www.ugaoo.com/blogs/gardening-basics/how-many-plants-provide-oxygen-to-one-person) while a human uses around 16 liters of oxygen an hour, which makes for a need for around 3200 leaves. Assuming an average plant weighs 5 kilos and has 25 leaves, you need 600 kilos of plants. That's a lot to pull. # The plants need to be about one hundred times more efficient. Assuming the plants are hundred times more efficient, just 6 kilos of plants will sustain a person. This means an average person can just carry around a house plant weighing 6-10 kilos and sustain themselves. # Oyxgen is too heavy for typical trip lengths. Assuming an average trip takes 7 days, or extra if there's chaos, house plants are just more weight effective. An oxygen tube weighs 4 kilos for about 3 days of oxygen. You need 12 kilos to carry enough for a trip, and if something goes wrong you could quickly be in trouble. A plant lasts forever, is lighter, and can regrow itself if damage. These post apocalyptic super plants also require much less maintenance. Even a very damaged society can produce them, while producing oxygen tubes requires a much better tech level. [Answer] ## Breathing OUT is dangerous Imagine a world with some kind of insect that is attracted to the smell of human breath. If they smell you breathing, they will swarm you and tunnel through anything they have to to get into your nose and mouth where they will enter your lungs to lay thier eggs. A normal oxygen tank or respirator wont help you because the air you take in is perfectly safe, its breathing out that you need to worry about. A face mask or respirator may filter your breath for a short while, but the scent of your breath still builds up on the filter itself which will attract the swarm. That said, many plants that humans tolerate well are poisonous and have highly noxious smells to many insects (garlic, onions, mint, coffee, etc.) By mixing the smell of our breath with the natural scent of these plants we "sour" our scent such that is does not attract the swarm. While things like Garlic powder might offer a temporary filter, you never really know when the scene has faded enough to stop working until its too late; so, keeping a live plant to filter your breath through ensures that there is always a fresh scene to mask your breath with. [Answer] This plant needs to clear several major hurdles: ## Rate of Oxygen Production Option A: Ridiculous rate of oxygen production Oxygen is "generated" by plants [taking carbon dioxide and water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_cycle) and releasing purified O2 gas as a byproduct of sugar production. As in Nepene's answer, the efficiency of conversion must be significantly higher than that of ordinary green matter to sustain a human being. No matter; these plants have extremely high surface area through their [fractal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal) leaves and also displace high volumes of air through [micro vibrations of tympanic structures](https://piezo.com/pages/advantage-of-piezoelectric-fan-technology-development) throughout their leaves that act as high efficiency fans to allow this gas exchange to occur at an accelerated rate, allowing each plant to do the work of a hundred normal plants. This gives rise to a telltale whooshing sound as air is moved around and through the plant's "green lung" that is as audible and palpable as human breathing when reduced to a comparably sized opening. Option B: Air purification Alternatively, the plants don't need to produce all of the oxygen necessary to sustain the carrier, but produce earthly amounts of oxygen and instead very efficiently filter out chemical, biological and nuclear contaminants from the atmosphere. (The plants as you say are carried around as air purifiers. The air contains enough oxygen to sustain life but is not breathable due to high concentrations of toxins.) ## Stupendous energy intake All plants require an energy source. The more CO2 it processes or the more matter it filters from the atmosphere, the more energy it must consume. Most terrestrial plant life uses photosynthesis. The Sun is dim in this post-apocalyptic world, so photonic energy harvests are poor. Instead, these plants leverage a strange sort of symbiosis with their toxic environment by harnessing nuclear fission of radioactive particles, or by consuming chemical toxins from their environs as reagents to an energy-producing lifecycle that allows them to undertake the demanding work of purifying air and producing plant sugars. The downside is that once they are removed from this hostile world, they will wither almost to the point of dormancy or die from the shock. ## Remaining Portable In the case of producing unearthly amounts of oxygen, The plant would also have to be growing our outputting solid or liquid byproducts at an enormous rate. The plant (or the human) needs to be able to get rid of excess carbon. [Trees are made of about 50% carbon](https://web.extension.illinois.edu/askextension/thisQuestion.cfm?ThreadID=19549&catID=192&AskSiteID=87), much of which is directly absorbed from the atmosphere during the air purification/sugar production process. [A typical human being exhales over 1 kg](https://www.quora.com/How-much-carbon-dioxide-does-the-average-person-exhale-in-a-day) of the stuff every day. Over the course of a week or two, the plant would double its mass if it were performing full duty producing O2 and sugars, making it unmovable within a matter of days. If it is purifying the putrid air from its surround, it would also accumulate nontrivial chemical deposits which would need to be purged regularly. Through a biological miracle, this particular plant regularly extrudes and sheds its carbon reserves into sugar bubbles and/or shingles of a peat- or coal-like substance that break off easily and can also be consumed as fuel directly by burning--which unfortunately consumes oxygen, so the atmospheric oxygen content is decreasing with time, requiring either greater efficiency or a greater number of plants to balance the environment. ## Staying hydrated The plant also requires hydration. Water being too heavy to carry around in addition to the plant, either the plant or its containment vessel must do very well at hanging onto water. Cacti and other desert plants are designed with minimal surface area so as to retain moisture. Unfortunately this plant makes the opposite design choice by sacrificing water retention for rapid air filtration and so loses hydration ten times as rapidly as any ordinary plant. This makes for an exceedingly delicate balance--if the plant is ever exposed to raw atmosphere it will dry out rapidly unless it is kept at close to 100% humidity. For this reason it must be kept either fully or almost completely enclosed in a bubble that traps humidity on the inside, maintaining a jungle or rainforest climate inside the jar. You could get sophisticated here and say that it harvests moisture somehow from hydrogen gas vents through a complex reverse electrolysis process, or by humans feeding the plant chunks of some kind of fat, but I think the humidity control vessel offers a simpler and more credible explanation. Processing sugar and producing oxygen also consumes water--but maybe the plant, the human or a symbiotic machine or organism is able to liberate and recycle the water from the sugars, and produce pure carbon (hence the carbon shingles). Of all these requirements, energy consumption might be the most challenging. [Answer] Alternate answer: It's cultural. As other answers have already demonstrated, carrying a plant as a source of oxygen would not be practical, at least not with plants as they function right now. Instead, have the reason be social/cultural, rather than practical. After the apocalypse, it was observed that the more trees a community had in their local area, the less likely people were to experience respiratory infection, as trees help to filter air of contaminants. As a result, trees and plant life became somewhat revered, and in some community it became common practice to assign each person to a plant (likely a bonsai) that they carry around with them whenever they leave the community. This tree is a symbol of their reverence for nature, and is believed to bring good health. Of course, you don't have to follow the specifics of the answer, but I think the idea of the plants being carried around for cultural or religious reasons is viable. [Answer] Do they have to be carrying the plants with them during daily life or constantly? I suggest a slightly different take: # It's a transport mission. Perhaps the character has found a particularly useful or rare plant that's managed to survive the apocalypse and is transporting it back to the survivors. Or maybe it's being transported from one settlement to another. The apocalyptic wreckage makes using vehicles like cars either impossible or impractical, and the plants can't be exposed to the harsh conditions of smog/radiation/heat/etc that exist outside of the settlements, so the only way to transport them is to put them into a sort of plant-incubator and pull it there. Plus, I think this provides a rich basis for plot hooks and a simple, easy-to-understand plot that's easy to make impactful. "These people need this valuable thing, so I'm going to transport it across dangerous terrain at great risk to myself" is an old standby of stories (c.f. The Last Of Us, Death Stranding, Book of Eli, etc), but that just means it's a solid trope the audience can grasp and you can use as a structure for character or worldbuilding. [Answer] Some thing, in the atmosphere, in the environment, is hazardous. Plants can produce a chemical to protect themselves that catalyzes its breakdown. It's a very fragile chemical so it can't be bottled. Alternatively, it produces a fragile drug that will treat the injury caused by such a hazard. This does not require enormous amounts of light, water, and growth, unlike oxygen. [Answer] ## They are Tobacco, and people are stressed The only plants to survive (in the story's part of the world) were dear old Nicotinia. The dream of protecting the plants and eventually having plant covered fields animates a small amount of the population. Far more dream of taking the plants and benefiting from them in a more...straightforward way. Leaving ones plants behind is unwise and just Not The Done Thing. [Answer] I'll not draw on the potential logistical problems regarding air or the long-term health of the plant may have since others have. I would personally think that if it's not part of a terrarium that the plant in the jar could be in trouble in the long term as it would slowly run out of nutrients in the jar. But as for this person -- This person is on a quest for Pollen. Not just any pollen though, pollen from another of its kind to help a village tree. The Village Tree, named for its ability to sustain a village, has evolved (or was bred to) suck the toxins out of an area so that the people surrounding it do not die from whatever the apocalypse was. However, there is a limit to the ability for this tree to draw in toxins without doing harm to itself. It's resilient, but not immune. But there is a way to keep the tree healthy -- if it can be coaxed into bearing fruit, then the toxins get locked into the fruit which then can be dealt with. The tree, freed from its current load of toxins, can now happily absorb more of the stuff until the next year. But the issue is that the tree cannot pollinate itself and so somebody must set off into the wastes to find another Village Tree in order to get the pollen needed. The traveller carries with them a smaller plant to provide a small area of pure enough air to travel through, possibly with the flowering part needed to pollinate or with pollinators. The travel is rough and the traveller uses the clean air provided by the plant as pure supplemental air as they are still travelling through a toxic environment. While this plant is a hardy breed, people can't just carelessly handle it as it is the only thing allowing them to still live above-ground in this toxic environment. And they are limited in their ability to experiment as it's both their lifeline and a lack of equipment/knowledge/skills to do so. My only thought is considering that a tree sustains a village, that I sense that it would travel in more of a covered wagon, maybe a greenhouse/wagon hybrid that the person moves with them within the sphere of the plants influence, the roof keeping the clean air a bit more trapped. Given the post-apocalyptic setting, it might not be a perfect seal, but it doe not have to be -- the plant purifies the air anyways so long as the trip is short enough. If some of this sounds familiar, there was a video game with a similar premise though with a different execution -- Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for the Game Cube. It was a magic crystal instead of a plant, but it might be a launching point for some world building. [Answer] People have covered the best scientific approaches that come to mind, but I don't see a hard science tag, so... it's magic! # Magic * The planet/satellite/asteroid/ship has a toxic or non-existent atmosphere and the plant creates a small area of Air Purification or Vacuum Breathing but people want to be able to have more freedom from it, so they use a mask setup as seen in the image. * In cultivation terms: the plant could create Life Ki/Qi/Chi in an area where none exists. I've seen a number of stories where animals don't breathe air and instead consume elemental Life ki, which plants produce, and when they exhale, the air has less/no life ki in it. * The plant creates a high or low mana zone that either enables a wizard/cultivator/whatever or - in the latter case - protects them from some creatures that rely on such things. * This person in the suit is a druid and druids must share some atmosphere with their anchor tree/plant. This could explain why druids have some "home range" around their grove that they can't leave for long, but maybe this particular druid is one of a spacefaring kind and this is the solution they've found to meet that need. # Not necessarily magical Some other less-obviously-magical ideas that popped into my head while typing the above: * The plant is some part of the person's reproductive process, possibly as part of some fantastical or futuristic ex-vivo fetal development process. Basically, the plant is the suit-person's child and they have to lug it around with them for some amount of time as the child needs chemicals/pheromones/magic/ki from the parent to survive. * The above, but in reverse: the plant is the parent and the suit-person is an ambulatory stage of life that the plant goes through. * The plant produces an gas/chemical that the suit person is addicted to (whether they know or not!). This adaptation in the plant started as a way to get animals to stay around the plant to keep it safe from other predators and to provide fertilizers to it. Possibly it provides some benefit (longer life, disease resistance, better mood, whatever) that helps explain to addicts why they care so much for this plant. * An alien species that doesn't like the suit-person's species is out to protect these plants for some reason. People carrying the plant around masks their life signs from the antagonistic aliens. Maybe this is because the sensors for lifesigns are carefully tuned to some emission from the plant and only pick up humans incidentally, so the people get lost in the noise when there's a plant nearby, but their suit needs to contain something the plant releases for it to work. * This is a funerary rite. After someone dies, they have an Inheritor who carries around their remains with a plant that digests their remains over some period of time. This is thought to allow the Inheritor to gain some of their power, leftover lifespan, or disease resistance - and maybe it works! - or maybe it's just a legal requirement for inheritance. [Answer] ##### Oxygen would not help The idea that the plant would supply the needed oxygen has a weakness. Plants produce oxygen only if they have light. A traveller caught in the open at sunset would be in trouble. A traveller caught in the open when the sky is suddenly obscured by a thick cloud cover would be in trouble. #### Symbiotic bacteria The wasteland is full of dangerous bacteria or some kind of fungi. They settle in the lungs and form a mould that kills the infected person or animal. On the plant grow some symbiotic bacteria that counter the threat. They proliferate quickly on the plant and the air flow sucks some of them keeping the breather always populated with the good ones. Far from the plant their lifespan is not long enough though, the plant must be kept close at hand to have a continuous supply. ]
[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/185021/edit). Closed 3 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/185021/edit) Here is an idea that I wanted to play around with but unfortunately hit a brick wall with. Human explorers have found a less advanced intelligent technological species on a faraway planet. For the most part, we have established a peaceful relationship, engaged in trade, education, exploration of the local landscape and biosphere, learned each others languages, and they understand that the tools we use are not magic but science that is merely several centuries ahead of them. Now one human on the planet decides to have a movie night to improve the morale of the humans who are all a long way from home and act as a kind of cultural exchange with the locals. Since the locals put on a couple of plays for humans, they are fascinated by this opportunity. Only one problem. Most of the sci-fi that revolves around non-human aliens and humans interacting with them...might have some subtle specist undertones that we as humans might not be aware of. I remember from the novel "The Killing Star" when a species that bombed our home planet and set out on a system-wide hunt to find and eliminate any survivors, said that they watched Star Trek and came away with the implication that humans would only treat other sentient life as equals if they happened to resemble us, and towards anything else we are genocidal maniacs with phasers at the ready. And that was *Star Trek* the sci fi utopian ideal that other cultures from other worlds might one day all get along. So I an now feeling sorry for the person looking through their personal media files trying to find something that won't cause an interspecies diplomatic incident. So here in lies my question: What movies would you show to our alien friends that will show them that we are genuine in our attempts to be friendly to them? Edit note: Alright since many comments have asked for clarifying details about these aliens in question (and I don’t want this question closed) I have decided to provide a couple of helpful details. First thing to note is they have a similar psychology to us. They feel similar emotions to us, they have stories and heroes of their own, they have a sense of humor and they have a concept of right and wrong. Second they are not humanoid, they have bilateral symmetry, they have arms and legs, they have a head with eyes, they have the same senses we do (plus or minus a few extra) but that is about where the similarities end. And finally while they understand reproduction is a fact of life, they don’t feel it is proper to show it off to everyone. [Answer] Honestly, given what's at stake if aliens think we're not worth befriending (or need to be preemptively wiped out), we're better off putting some of our military budget into "Propaganda" movies, which show just how friendly we are to aliens. One F-35 fighter costs ~$80 million, that's about the cost of a mid-range Hollywood movie. We should just crank out "We love alien" propaganda movies like WW2 propaganda. It would also help encourage people to actually be nice to aliens. The best ones I thought of were mostly science / mystery based ones. Where the bulk of the movie is spent learning to communicate with them. Lots of accurate maths and physics, less flying a F-18 into charging mega weapon. This is what I've got: * Arrival (2016) * Contact (1997) * The day the earth stood still, 1950's version (Aliens are powerful, and we agree to be nice to each other) * ET. The remastered version with guns replaced with walky talkies. * Superman (the 1970). We made an alien child a superhero. * Close encounters of the third kind. Also see: <https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=friendly-alien> [Answer] Bit of a frame challenge here: Assuming the natives aren't stupid, deliberately curating the human movie library might be a bad idea. For example, what if the natives find out that the humans have been keeping a large part of their movie library hidden from them? What if they find out the movies that were kept hidden are blatantly spiecist? To maintain good relations, honestly and transparency are good guidelines and with how human history is, it might be prudent to give the natives a head's up about who they're dealing with. [Answer] The contents of the Golden Record When Voyager I was launched, they put a golden record aboard. On that record, they put an explanation of humanity that was designed, sort of, to portray us in a positive light. There was an attempt to make the record "self explanatory" in such a way that an alien civilization would be able to learn how to decode it without any common language between their language and ours. The choice of what to put on that record was a matter of considerable discussion. You can look up the [record contents](https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/#:%7E:text=The%20contents%20of%20the%20record%20were%20selected%20for,from%20President%20Carter%20and%20U.N.%20Secretary%20General%20Waldheim.). [Answer] Really hard to get a good set for aliens that would misinterpret Star Trek. But let's give it a go. 1. Milo and Otis. We made this, look what we value. 2. Skylark. 3. Trouble along the way. They need to see what humanity is really like. 4. Hatchet. This one is extremely subtle. I want them to see human ingenuity and get the idea that we are only as dangerous as we need to be. See though he kills mother bear he tends to raising the bear cubs. But I can't actually tell them this. 5. One of the Jesus films. Among other things, they need to see that we are dual natured, knowing good and evil. 6. The Martian. Good drama. No bad guy. 7. People will Talk. 8. Finding Nemo. Yes, we made a movie where humans are the bad guys. I am disappointed that I can't give them even the old movie version of Wrinkle of Time because if they missed Star Trek they'll miss this too. It's probably not dangerous but it's too hard on them. There's a generalized theme here. I'm not going to show them rubber-head aliens but rather things that we can go look at the real examples thereof. I want to show them the hopes and fears and drive of humanity. [Answer] Galaxy Quest [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/W1luw.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/W1luw.png) In this cult movie, humans help good aliens who are under attack from bad aliens. It's a great movie and apart from comedy, it has action, moving moments and a great premise. > > The ... cast of a space opera television series have to play their > roles as the real thing when an alien race needs their help. However, > they also have to defend both Earth and the alien race from a > reptilian warlord. > > > <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/> > > > --- [Galaxy Quest - Trailer](https://youtu.be/B34jbC43XzA) --- [Answer] ## The Aliens are already smart. Perhaps, much smarter than us. They have also known us for a very long time. Therefore, we cannot lie. The Aliens have been around for a lot longer than us. They are far more advanced. They in fact, already know everything about us. The worst we can do is to issue propaganda. This would demonstrate to them we are lying. The only real way forward is to be truthful, because they would always know the truth. Therefore I put forth: [Baraka.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baraka_(film)) It is an honest portrayal of our planet and our wide and varied culture. It is a simple, understandable series of scenes of our cities, our jungles, our worst parts and our best, our hopes and our despair. Without filter, and without prejudice, and without fear. For an alien species, being open and honest is the only way forward. Anything else would be a lie, easily exposed, and a signal we should continue to not be trusted. [Answer] Humanity's racist tendencies stem from survival traits. We're hardwired at a subconscious level to distrust or fear that which is different from us because it helped keep our distant ancestors alive. Similar behaviors can be seen in many animals as well. This, in turn, means that it's reasonable to assume that any sapient species that has not managed to transcend it's 'animal' origins is likely to exhibit similar behavior, including the aliens in your story. Given this, I contend that the best way to help further a positive relationship with these aliens is not to show them stuff about humans being good, it's to show them stuff focused around humans overcoming their racist tendencies and fears of the unknown or different, and better yet movies that highlight that not all humans are bad, and not all humans are good. The goal here is to show that while we may be unethical or immoral at times, many people actively try to overcome those tendencies and fight back against those who choose to succumb to them. Unfortunately, I can't really come up with any great examples that fit this as I'm not much of a movie person myself (though I'm sure others can come up with some good examples). [Answer] The aliens also have plays, movies, or stories that feature monsters or other types of aliens as the enemy. So they don't particularly find our treatment of aliens in movies to be objectionable unless the movie features someone from their own race. [Answer] I think you can do TV. Granted that Star Trek TOS had major issues. So... ### Star Trek TNG They learnt from the flaws of TOS, oh boy did they. Picard is the antithesis of Kirk. He'll bend over backwards, risking himself and his crew, to save people who deserve it. Even when some of his people have been killed, he tries to empathize with the other side. And yet he's tough enough that the warrior Klingons appoint him as an independent arbiter who can't be browbeaten. His crew are also relatively diverse species-wise. So you can have the conversation about how the different species are over-the-top representations of human traits. And yet you can also in many cases have the conversation about how human assumptions cause problems. And if you did want to show TOS, the difference between "this is humans in 1965" and "this is humans in 1985" shows how we learn to do better. [Answer] > > a faraway planet > > > > > Most of the sci-fi that revolves around non-human aliens and humans interacting with them...might have some subtle specist undertones that we as humans might not be aware of. > > > If we are advanced enough to visit faraway planets, we won't be watching ancient 20th and 21st century movies on a flat screen. Only movie buffs will be interested in that old stuff. Just as the silent movies are a specialist interest nowadays. Even if we don't have holodecks, we will surely do better than that. If we are already trading with various other planets, there will be plenty of much more realistic sci-fi around. Wildlife and pet movies written for children If this is the first species we have met then show them how we love wildlife and our pets (i.e. different species) and rescue them from difficult situations. Or they (like Lassie) help us to find little Johnny who is trapped down a well. Slasher movies If the aliens respect power, violence and strength above all else, then show just how tough we can be when dealing with "weaklings". Also show how easily just one hero can defeat a horde of aliens just with the help of his girlfriend with only a stolen helicopter. [Answer] What do you think about the movie pay it forward ? It is very feel good and shows what humans can do if they help eachother. However it is also a bit cheesy. I used to love it, but its been so long that I have seen it :) [Answer] Movies you could show to illustrate human compassion * Singin in the rain * I'm dreamin of a white christmas * 2001 [Answer] Documentary about the planet in question. The aliens will like to see themselves. There will be movies about this planet. I envision something narrated by the alien David Attenborough, describing the peoples of this world and their culture, or the animals, or the history of the human / alien interaction. These will be fine films, and ideally made from an appreciative and enlightened perspective. --- Documentary about other planets. There was one of the Star Wars books where Han and Chewie were on a desert planet, making a little money by showing the natives a travelogue they had - something like "Horm, World of Water". They felt bad that they only had the one movie to show even though more and more of the aliens showed up each night to watch. Finally they got something else and put it on. There was a riot and the Falcon had to leave in a hurry. "World of Water" had attained quasi-religious significance with these desert aliens. These aliens might appreciate seeing documentaries of worlds other than their own. Be sure to mix it up each night. [Answer] since no one mention it yet, as far as i read the answer. i think [MIB](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119654/) or Men in Black is a nice choice, it have alien diversity and culture that not resemble human while also take place in human main planet to represent what earth look like to them, and sure they did shoot alien here and there, even showing alien Gore and turn life human into a skin suit, so probably not fit for alien kids but hey its PG-13! according to google, beside they are usually criminal or dangerous illegal immigrant so it justified to shoot them according to earth law (as far as i remember). and the best scene is when [will smith shoot the girl instead of the other alien image and explain it to the others regarding their misunderstanding or interpretations, and clear the test](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzWNBbY-zSE). that can help the alien to know theres some people out there that is not nice or simply has misunderstanding due to cultural difference and the government wipe their memory because they are not ready or fit yet to interact with other extraterrestrial, while also make them know theres also exist human that is genuinely friendly and they are the chosen people "the best of the best of the best" to interact with them, which is what the human government want or attempt to, base from the movie they watch. so with that, the alien at least know human also has flaws but that movie also represent that human also try to fix it, rather than leave it hanging which has possibility for the alien end up goes paranoid if we just simply or blatantly show what human truly are without represent that human also try to fix their flaws, and in my opinion the humor can help ease the tension if the alien understood the humor too. [Answer] I'm not quite sure why everyone is so focused on showing movies with aliens in them. The question states: > > Now one human on the planet decides to have a movie night to improve the morale of the humans who are all a long way from home and act as a kind of cultural exchange with the locals. Since the locals put on a couple of plays for humans, they are fascinated by this opportunity. > > > Given this I'd guess that the aliens are actually far more interested about life back on our own home planet. So show them that. There are plenty of good movies that don't have any aliens or fantasy in them but which rather show the "human" side of humans. Romance, dramas, comedies, action movies - take a pick. And it will be much better for improving morale too. [Answer] I don't see why you won't throw [East Block science fiction](https://www.imdb.com/lists/tt0080010?ref_=rls_sm) into the mix. Socialistic realism tended to avoid violence, or at least justify it very carefully. This one where [humans help alien Niiya save her planet](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126237/?ref_=tt_sims_tt). This one where [little humans try to save some aliens as they seem to always do](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070413/?ref_=ttls_li_tt). And throw in [a Kin-Dza-Dza](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091341/?ref_=ttls_li_tt). ]
[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/47217/edit). Closed 7 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/47217/edit) Something I find deeply unsatisfying in my reading of fantasy fiction is that magic is invariably treated as a means to cheat real physics. The fantasy world is built to operate according to the way modern science says our world does, and then a self-contained set of magic rules is tacked on to allow magic-users to arbitrarily cheat the laws of physics transplanted from our world. If technology is introduced then it operates according to real physics and thus separately from magic; in some cases technology and magic may be actively opposed (conversely, magic-users relying on real physics for their biology are not poisoned by using magic). In contrast, when what is more or less physics cheating magic appears in science fiction settings it is usually treated as advanced technology, a quirk of physics or simply left unexplained. Star Wars has magic powered by mitochondria, Farscape has alien wizards, Andromeda gives stars intelligence and humanoid avatars, etc. How could one devise a magic system that isn't just a shortcut to cheat physics whenever the user desires? Replace magic with sufficiently advanced technology? Make all physics work according to magic rules? [Answer] We need to define what magic is. I like the definition that arises from Clarke's Third Law. Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Radio waves are a good, nearly contemporary example of this. Everything from AM/FM to Wi-Fi is taken for granted by everyone nowadays - these things just exist and work. But imagine explaining a pair of walkie talkies to the ancient greek or egyptians, for example. Telepathy in a contraption! I also know of an anedoctal case, of a man that impressed the indigenous populations of the new world some four hundred years ago by setting fire to alcohol. The indigenous people didn't know alcohol and thought it was water. Fire on water... Magic! So when someone is tapping into the arcane to do something that would seem impossible otherwise, perhaps they are just making use of the laws of nature in ways which we do not understand YET. A few examples of stuff that would be mind-boggling to our ancestors from, say, the 17th century, and which we can carry/conceal in our hands/bodies: * Radio, as mentioned above * Computers (cell phones and smaller electronics). Thinking machines! * Laser pointers that can lit a cigar or set a carpet on fire * Antibiotics. The Panacea in a potion! Some things that may boggle OUR minds within a few years, decades, or centuries, and will probably be portable at some point: * Brain-to-machine interface implants; * Quantum entanglement for FTL communication; * Either the above or radio + brain-to-machine interface implants for an even more direct form of telepathy (as seen in the book Dancing With Eternity, writen by TF2's Sniper) * Stem cells in a packet that you can place over a wound to cause it to heal nearly instantly * Tazers in a more compact format, such as rings or gloves (for a shocking hands spell) * Hoverboards that do hover (a prototype was released this year) And so on... One of the explanations I use a lot here in Worldbuilding for supernatural stuff is that we exist in more than three dimensions. IMO, in fictional worlds which make use of magic, magical energies may be linked to structures, natural or artifical, that we cannot see because they exist beyond the three dimensions we perceive. All magic is natural, we just call it magic because we cannot explain it given our understanding of nature... So when a wizardry school fails to explain how magic works, they are either: * Hiding a secret; * Using magic through cargo cult means (i.e.: I don't know how it works, I just know that it does if I do it this way); * Going through a phase in the development of a science, just like we had to go from nothing to alchemy in order to develop chemistry. [Answer] Well, to give an answer that is going the complete opposite direction as the others...there is another option. Build out your world in such a way that 'Magic' is the core of how the world works. A good example of this is some chunks of the lore around the tabletop RPG Exalted. In that world, things fall to the ground not because of the natural attraction between large masses, but because the beings who designed reality decided it should work that way, and the pattern spiders operating the Loom of Fate make sure it continues to be the case. If something happened to the Loom...or even just to the local Weave, "physics" would start to malfunction. A few examples they give of what might happen if the weave is messed up...doors may stop opening to the right location. A construction worker may fall to his death...and simultaneously be standing safely on the scaffolding, having watched himself plummet to the ground. And in extreme cases the color orange might start tasting like the number fish. Another pretty good example is the Stormlight Archives and the way Spren act and interact with the world ('washing the hands wards off rotspren') In this case...things that look like 'Physics' are actually just a manifestation of the natural magic of the world. Fire is not a rapid oxidation reaction, it is a magical phenomenon that consumes certain materials as reagents to maintain itself...but is difficult to control and will run rampant if given more of the reagent it can consume. The river doesn't flood because it rained too much, it flooded because the local river spirit is angry. A thrown object doesn't sail through the air because of Newtonian Physics, it does so because the magical forces that make up the world declare that it should move that way. Smelting iron isn't a matter of refining existing materials from its raw form by heating the ore to a point that the iron melts while the stone does not--it's a matter of a formalized ritual for fusing together Earth and Fire to create a strong material. Iron doesn't rust because of oxidation, it rusts because the bond between the Earth and Fire was imperfect and interaction with Water and Air can cause the bond to start to break down. Washing your hands isn't removing germs, it is a cleansing ritual to clear them of malignant magical forces. A world like this can look just like our world, functionally. Smelting can look the same, fire can act the same...but the underlying mechanic could be magical in nature, rather than physical. And this could result in some things being very, very different from how they are in our world. For example, in Exalted...gunpowder doesn't exist and cannot be created, because the world doesn't actually operate with regard to the periodic table. Sulfur, Saltpeter, and Charcoal may exist, but they are all varying combinations of Elemental Earth with other things, and don't combine to create an explosive. In such a world, Magic is simply making use of a deeper understanding with, and connection to, the way the world actually works. In some worlds it could be a science that can be researched, studied, and understood by anyone who put forth the effort. Alternately, the world may have special requirements to break away from the 'standard' rituals (like striking flint and steel together to call Fire)...again to bring the example of Exalted: the world functions atop a force/energy/matter called Essence, and unless you have the ability to channel it, you can't do anything 'supernatural.' [Answer] @Renan provides an excellent answer, but if you don't want to be that drastic, consider holding steadfast to the following rules of thermodynamics (edited slightly to make them more generic): * Zeroth law: If two systems are in equilibrium with a third system, they are in equilibrium with each other. Magical energies and sources of magical energies (which, can be the same energies as for physical energy, such as heat) should abide by this * First law: When energy passes, as work, as heat, or with matter, into or out from a system, the system's internal energy changes in accord with the law of conservation of energy. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the first kind are impossible. * Second law: In a natural energy process, the sum of the entropies (unordered, unorganized randomness) of the interacting systems increases. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible. * Third law: (I don't see how this would apply, so it has been removed) Further, magic always accomplishes "work." It might not be useful work, but magic does something, and cannot cheat and do the something for nothing. If an object is moved (teleported, pushed, etc), it takes at a absolute minimum the same energy as it would with a perfectly efficient physical equivalent; I would expect teleporting myself from point A to point B to take the same effort as sprinting the distance, if not more. So the energy has to come from somewhere. Although you could have the mages gain power from atomic bonds and not cheat physics, this still seems like a cheat as easily gaining such energy is extremely difficult to do in the real world. Instead I imagine magic has to be powered from a far less efficient mechanism, in which there's a lot of heat and loss of potential useful energy. The gaining and expenditure of energy should be your main concern with not cheating magic. Also note that control fights entropy, so anything that requires finite control uses more energy. It should be much harder to cast a fireball that looks like a horse than just a fireball of the same size. It should be incredibly difficult to metamorphosis oneself, as the adjustment of individual cells would be an extreme battle with entropy. In summary: the respect of both energy and entropy is a major step in making sure magic doesn't cheat physics. [Answer] Clearly you've never read Terry Pratchett! One of the key points in the Discworld canon is that magic always comes at a price. In one particularly memorable scene, a witch grabs a sword in her bare hands. Later on, back home, she prepares bandages, hot water and a needle and thread, and says (to no-one in particular), "I reckon I'm ready now". The point being that magic can push against the world, but the world will push back too, and a magic-user stands at the balance-point. Get it right, and the power flows through you. Get it wrong, and the power destroys you. Tad Williams's "War of the Flowers" envisages a society built on magic in a thoroughly technological way. What we achieve with science is generally available in the fairy world too, but with a completely different implementation. Charles Stross's "Merchant Princes" series takes another turn. The ability to step between worlds looks deeply magical, and is considered that way by the world-walkers. However when the other world commits an act of war on the USA, various US government departments investigate this by "persuading" captured world-walkers to do their thing under laboratory conditions, resulting in them developing a technological version. I'll avoid spoilers, but it doesn't end well for the world-walkers. Or for a more unified version, consider Scott Lynch's "Gentleman Bastards" series. Alchemy is a standard part of that world, which has many implications in a world which is basically in the Enlightenment stages of technology. Magic as you'd define it is also a part of the world, but only within a tightly-knit group of mages. As far as the world knows, their powers are infinite - and they've put a lot of effort into making sure the world thinks that, so they have more weaknesses than they'd like people to know. [Answer] If you don't want your magic to cheat physics, have your magic work with physics instead. One of the best examples I've seen is sympathy, in Pat Rothfuss's The Kingkiller Chronicle books. The most general idea of sympathy is that what you do to one thing can be made to affect another thing in the same way. For example, if you have two coins and you establish the proper sympathetic binding between them, you can pick one up and the other will also be raised into the air. Sympathy is described as working by very specific rules: 1. Conservation: Energy is neither created nor destroyed; sympathy can only move it around. 2. Correspondence: The more two things are alike, the easier and more efficiently you can form a binding between them. (It's much easier to do the trick described above with two coins than with one coin and one block of wood, for example.) 3. Consanguinity: A piece of a thing represents the whole thing. (A sympathist can form a binding against a person's entire body with a small bit of their hair, skin, or blood.) By setting out these basic rules, the author is able to do all sorts of interesting things and have them make sense. For example, because sympathy is all about moving energy around, a source of energy is always needed to draw upon. Fire tends to be one of the best sources, but in a pinch a sympathist can draw upon other things. One source that's always available is his own body heat, but this is considered extremely dangerous as reducing their core body temperature by even a small amount of your core can send a person into hypothermia. (One of the most dramatically tense moments in the series comes when Kvothe needs to be able to use magic to protect himself from bandits, then finds out that a well-meaning but inept companion put out the campfire that he was relying on being able to draw from!) The tricky thing about writing magic that works with physics instead of against it is that you always have to keep actual physics in mind. But if you can do that, you can come up with some really incredible stuff. [Answer] [Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.](http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081205#.V4f4a7grI2w) Magic obeys the laws of nature and nature obeys the laws of magic because they are the same thing. We would call some aspect of reality "magic" because its roots and practice are steeped in mysticism and we have not yet sufficiently analyzed it. For example, I believe it would be accurate to label real world alchemy as a branch of magic going through the final stages of being sufficiently analyzed to produce the field of chemistry. In a story, the reason we would still have magic in a scientific world is because it has somehow resisted analysis. e.g. * The mechanics of magic is sufficiently obscure or bewildering enough that scientists haven't hit upon any of the ideas that would let them do much more than just catalog results. * Access to magic is rare and magic users have sufficient power and influence to keep its practice rooted in mysticism and tradition and protected from those seeking to study it scientifically. * There simply isn't an interest in the scientific study of magic Alternatively, we have sufficiently analyzed magic, but we still call it magic as an homage to the origins of the field — for example, I believe the term "atom" is a reference to the ancient Democritus's atomic theory of the universe. --- Another possibility is that magic is the provenance of supernatural beings; that natural beings cannot perform magic at all, but they can bargain with supernatural beings to perform magic on their behalf. (e.g. an AI in a computer program chatting with the programmer to request that he enact some change in the game world) Of course, the supernatural world is just the natural world viewed from a greater perspective; this really only applies when there is some meaningful division to be made. [Answer] In the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini, if a person is casting magic to do something, the person must exert an amount of energy no less than the energy required to do it mundanely (and more if it is far away). This way, even the most powerful of wizards are limited in what they can do by their amount of energy (which the story suggests is the caster's supply of ATP). It is described as magic being manipulation of an energy field that flows through the universe. Most such manipulations are by spellcasters using it to manipulate the world, but some interesting anomalies occur naturally. [Answer] @Renan starts with a key point: define what 'magic' is. Alternatively, define what 'physics' is. Accepting Clark's 3rd law is one approach. A different approach is to define magic as physical manifestations that do not obey cause and effect. The impresario who set fire to water (alcohol) still performed an action that had an effect. The immediate objection is 'isn't performing a cause, regardless of the effect?' and the Socratic answer is what is the effect? If I select the keys 'w','o','r','d' on the keyboard twice in a row, and instead of the (non-magical) expected result of 'word' 'word', I get 'fish' and 'dumb', then 'magic' has happened. There are any number of possible rational explanations for the irrational effect, but to an external observer, none of these are obvious. However, the OP asks for a deterministic (cause and effect) system that doesn't allow for cheating, but doesn't necessarily follow existing laws of physics. Ok, Change how some physics work. One suggestion: Have the universe allow for local changes to the fundamental constants. Allow the value of 'c', the speed of light, to be altered on a local scale. Or, h-bar, Planck's constant which on a superficial level controls the possible rate of change in energy in a classical system. Make what in this universe are linear relationships non-linear. Add the concept of an manipulable ether, so directional effects are manifest. Combine effects: walking uphill in our universe infinitesmelly decreases gravity. In a different world, gravity is a force that increases with movement. And so forth. For a less deterministic space but still uncheatable, change the properties of the quantum sponge. How do these changes happen? Wave your hands. Sacrifice a goat. The point is some actions result in apparently unexpected actions. And the underlying reasons is the laws of physics are allowed to differ either on a local level, or generally. [Answer] I see two approaches here: A) Either explain magic so it respects physics. Example: maybe magic is the handling of a special energy that alters space, time and mass therefore through physical means it changes physical things. I dont think my example is clear as I am no physicist but i hope you get me. B) make magic independent of physics. Making it change only things that our outside of physical laws as are ideas, perceptions, feelings, memories even if you are going for a dualism based world in which spiritual and physical realms are exclusive. [Answer] One of the big differences with science and the magics I find interesting is how they deal with the unknown. Science has one very straightforward process for dealing with unknowns. They beat it down with more measurements until it fits into one of the nice tidy statistical error terms they are so fond of. Magics are often comfortable with a very different unknown. Often the true nature of the source of their power is unknown. Sometimes the actual effect of the magic is unknown (especially with wish based magics). It includes unknowns that are not easily sliced into neat tidy random variables using statistics. I find the most interesting magic systems are the ones which give just a glimpse into how these unknowns are being dealt with. While it may look like a shortcut to simply conjure food to eat, the modern day wizard smiles and reaches for a cellphone. "Magic," he says, as he hits the speed dial for pizza. Why did he choose that? Maybe that question sits in your mind for half of the story, until one moment reveals just a bit of the shape of the unknown that he has swirling inside of him. Suddenly you realize that, if he were to rely solely on science, science would tell him he's a dead man. He has to rely on the magic to hold back the tide of what he has created. Now you realize that, while the magic was a shortcut in some places, it came with a cost -- ideally a cost he paid gladly. An excellent example of this is Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. Throughout the story, it is apparent that there's not very many limits as to what a wizard can do in Middle Earth. But why doesn't he use that ability more often? Tolkien gives us a few chances to see that he is given the opportunity, and chooses not to. We never really understand why. What's inside him is a great unknown to us. However, in a handful of places, we get glimpses of the world the wizards walk in and how impossibly heavy the yoke they must carry. Yes, he cheats physics some times, but it's pretty clear that he treats that as a side effect -- his true calling is much deeper. [Answer] The fact that "fantasy fiction uses magic to cheat physics" is a consequence of our understanding: we know physics, not magic, so we think in terms of physics, and adapt magic over that. One can try the reverse: create an universe with a magic system so complete that physics can be derived from it as a consequence, thought in terms of magic. [Answer] Start out by deciding what "cheat physics" actually means. To me, it means violating fundamental principles like conservation "laws", causality (and equivalently, relativity), thermodynamics, purely mathematical laws, etc. and I actually see these violated a lot more often in works that are nominally "sci-fi" than by magic. Beyond these, magic is free to do a lot without being obviously inconsistent with physics. Want a violent, massively exothermic effect? There's ridiculous amounts of potential energy in ordinary matter all around you that would happily jump to a lower potential given a path; the problem is just the lack of a path. (In some sense this is the "only" obstacle to fusion power). But the existence of some path to lower potential provided by magic does not in any way invalidate or preclude the rest of physics, so hey, go with it. Regardless of whether magic is "cheating physics", if you don't want it to be "cheating" as a plot device (doing whatever it needs to do to advance the plot), you probably need magic to have its own internal rules for what you can and can't do with it, and concrete costs for using it, but that's a separate issue that deserves a separate question if needed. ]
[Question] [ Closed. This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- Closed 7 years ago. * 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). * This question does not appear to be about worldbuilding, within the scope defined in the [help center](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/help). [Improve this question](/posts/56549/edit) What is the fastest possible way to reach the ground safely if you are many floors up in a skyscraper and there is a major emergency? Stairs can get backed up in a stampede: * Slow old people * Morbidly obese people * Someone who trips and falls * Children * Women's high-heel shoes can cause them to fall when rushing I started thinking about this when I read this post on imgur: > > We had a fire drill the other day. There are 33 stories in our building and normally I can make it down in under 5 minutes. However, the stairwells are only made to accommodate two people side by side. There was a severely obese man in front of me and this obese person had to use both feet on each step. As a result, it took 9 minutes to exit the building. > > > A [fireman's pole](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireman%27s_pole) seems like maybe it could be an addition to emergency stairs. I am wanting practical answers conforming to current safety & building codes. However, please keep in mind different economic levels and different national security situations can have different codes/parameters, so even James Bond style, military or super-wealthy tycoon estates can be considered. [Answer] Why do buildings not use fireman's poles already? I think you'll find that fire stairs are the best solution available today. You could augment them slightly, but there's not likely to be a revolutionary change to re-solve the problem of evacuating a building. Saving lives is serious business. It stands to reason that very smart people have thought long and hard about this already. ## 1. Put 'parking areas' every few floors for the slow or injured to wait while the crowds pass. > > We had a fire drill the other day. There are 33 stories in our building and normally I can make it down in under 5 minutes. However, the stairwells are only made to accommodate two people side by side. There was a severely obese man in front of me and this obese person had to use both feet on each step. As a result, it took 9 minutes to exit the building. > > > Doing some back-of-envelope calculations based on the numbers in the above example, it takes just over nine seconds(9.09s) for an able-bodied person to travel down one floor. It takes over sixteen seconds(16.36s) for a handicapped person. If you were to put space every fifth floor, the worst-case scenario is adding ~37 seconds of total travel time for the people stuck behind the fatty. But this useful in situations where you experience a new injury in the stairwell. Evacuation policy for the places I've been at (I've been stiffed with the responsibility of fire warden, so speaking from experience) is usually for people that are infirm or incapable of travelling down a fire escape is to have them wait next to the fire doors - in the common areas, not within the stairwell. Instructions are to send them down last, or if they refuse to go, leave them there and let the authorities know there's people still within the building. [EDIT: adding this paragraph] A fire door is a pretty high-tech piece of equipment in itself. A good door is able to withstand a raging fire for over an hour, while keeping a person on the other side of the door unharmed. During a fire; people do into the stairwell, they don't necessarily need to go down the stairs. ## 2. More fire escapes. To prevent tripping injuries, people need three points of contact: two feet, and one arm. The arm being satisfied with a hand railing. This means the width of a stairwell is rather precise - designed so that people can travel two-at-a-time, but not three-at-a-time. You could make a four-wide stair, and add a hand railing in the middle. But the consequence of this is that that 'outer' stairs are about\* four times larger than the 'inner' ones. Four times larger, means four times the distance to walk, and four times longer to exit. ## TLDR: You can't make fire escapes bigger. Instead, simply put more fire exits in. \assuming the inner stairs are 600mm wide, around a 600mm cavity in the middle. [Answer] There are some emergency kits which have what are essentially rope ladders that can be hooked to the window sill and allow you to climb down. For practical reasons, these are usually limited to 2 or 3 stories hight, since the size and weight rises considerably as the ladder's length increases. As well, you need to be reasonably fit and agile to use this effectively in an emergency (since it isn't permanently installed, you would have to go to a closet and retrieve the package, kick out the window, install the hooks over the frame and roll the ladder out the window, all which might be more difficult in a smoke filled building or when your faculties are being overwhelmed by panic). Something like this could work to get you to a lower balcony where there is less smoke or fire, allowing you to go to the stairs and walk the rest of the way. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/626wE.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/626wE.jpg) deploying the ladder* For long stairwells, there should be sheltered spaces at certain floors for people to stop or get out of the way. Many new buildings have designated shelter spaces where you are supposed to wait out a fire and so the rescue units can find you, but if a building is compromised by an earthquake, terrorist attack or other disaster, the safe spaces might not be so safe anymore. [Here](http://www.lineareast.com/emergency-escape-systems.html) is a fire escape concept which provides the speed of a slide but more control of the descent. Essentially it works like the ladder, but instead of a ladder, you hook the end of a very long fabric tube to the window sill and the fabric provides both protection and control on the way down. Apparently it is an elasticized fabric which provided enough friction to keep descent speed to a level where landing on the ground would not cause serious injury (maybe a sprained ankle or something). [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8vqN4.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8vqN4.jpg) multi entry fire chute For very tall buildings, what is needed is something conceptually like the lifeboat rigs of an oil drilling platform. The people escaping would enter a pod, which is then sealed against the fire, and escapes from the building by sliding down a zipline (either pre positioned or deployed from the building by activating the alarms). A pod has the advantage of allowing you to have a mechanical device to control the rate of descent, and the possibility of crash pads, airbags or other devices to cushion even injured people from the forces of landing. Large lifeboats can carry 20 or more people, and since a building "lifeboat" won't need to carry survival suits, emergency rations or radios and beacons, the same sized pod could carry maybe twice as many people as the equivalent lifeboat. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TLzWE.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TLzWE.png) Lifeboat in its cradle Extremely tall buildings would have few options, even a device like a lifeboat would need an improbably long "zipline" to deliver people safely from the top of something like the Burj Khalifa. For a building of that size, the elevators would have to be modified to act as lifeboats during a fire, and also be both self contained and self propelled in an emergency. You still have the issue of what happens when the elevator shafts are compromised; even a self propelled elevator car might become caught in an elevator shaft filled with debris or one becoming a chimney for a fire. [Answer] The fastest and quickest way to evacuate a building is by the fire stairwell. Forget about all the nonsense about fancy contraptions to get people down to ground level in increasingly absurd manners. What is needed is an orderly evacuation system and fire wardens who ensure that people leave the building in an orderly manner. Fire wardens are there to make sure that mobility impaired persons either wait until the stairs are cleared before they descend or they are placed in locations where they can remain in safely until a fireman can come and evacuate them. The author of this answer was a fire warden in a seventeen story building. Orderly evacuation plans, trained fire wardens and reasonably frequent fire drills will get people out of buildings in the fastest and safest way. Forget the Rube Goldberg technological fixes. At best they're twaddle and at worst they not needed and most of them are far from safe. Oh yes, one more thing. Bah! Humbug! [Answer] Just to offer a historical perspective, Paulo Soleri explored this question as part of A Secular Cathedral, one of his many visionary works [![A Secular Cathedral](https://i.stack.imgur.com/khCPZ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/khCPZ.jpg) In this work, he had a series of escape slides designed into the building layout to act as a source of shade during the hotter months. In an escape situation, individuals could use the slides to descend out of the cathedral rapidly. Water in the form of a circular pond double both as a beautiful feature and to slow individuals down from their rapid decent. [Answer] One solution for a device to escape a fire is based upon an 'auto-belay' used on indoor climbing walls. the kit consists of an eye-bolt above a suitable window or two, a harness for the escapee to wear (similar to a climbing harness) and the belay device itself - a reel of climbing rope in a casing. There is an anchor point on the reel that attaches to the eye-bolt and the end of the rope protruded and it attached to the harness via a carabiner or similar. Once you have hooked up the reel, put the harness on and attached the reel to the harness, simply jump out of the window. The reel unrolls at a controlled speed, lowering you to the ground. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qu6uj.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qu6uj.jpg) [Answer] Design and build the buildings such that there are arching patios/balconies sticking out - Allow the users of the building to walk onto those patios, and provide parachutes on the upper floors with the patios. Give every employee parachute training. [Answer] How about a stack of parachutes and a human catapult? When the fire alarm rings, wheel the catapult out of the reception area (where it was functioning as a piece of modern art) and bring it up next to one of the downwind-side windows. To get the window out of the way, load up the office copier or maybe that throne size chair that the boss sits in, and fire it point blank into the window. Then pass out the preassigned parachute backpacks to all of the company employees and start launching them out beyond the smoke and fire. This technique would not only get all of your treasured employees out safely, but during the pre-fire years, it could serve as a productivity motivator... Just let a rumor circulate that the size and quality of each employees assigned parachute is directly proportional to the score on their most recent performance review. "The harder you work... the slower you fall." [Answer] Have a dozen emergency bouncy castles on standby. Seriously though, stairs are still the most effective exit route, that and regular fire drills so that people are used to exiting the building quickly. Encourage women to store flat shoes in their pedestals if they're habitual high-heelers. Public buildings generally have more routes of exit and more dedicated emergency exits, so they wouldn't be as constricted as an office block. [Answer] The quickest way, even for disabled people, is an [escape chute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_chute). [![enter image description here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Fire_Escape_Daegu.jpg/170px-Fire_Escape_Daegu.jpg)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Fire_Escape_Daegu.jpg/170px-Fire_Escape_Daegu.jpg) [This company](http://www.ilerisavunma.com/en/escape/chute/single.htm) says it can do a max length of 200 meters, which, given a 3-meter story, gets you some 67 stories of chute. This chute of theirs appears to be on a 30-something story building: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MgTlO.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MgTlO.jpg) [Answer] Maybe a slide? One of the the longest is at the London Olympic park, and descends close to 100m. <http://arcelormittalorbit.com/whats-on/the-slide/> ]
[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/251142/edit). Closed last month. [Improve this question](/posts/251142/edit) I'm wondering what techniques exist to make the technology change quicker in my story. I want to be able to change the setting quickly, like progressing from a computer mechanic where space travel is where it is now in the real world to a space ship mechanic in, say, 20 years. How can I make this society change and progress very quickly? The beginning point is slightly ahead of current technological progress. My setting specifically is roughly sci-fi, but magic will be discovered. This is (in essence) a way around the law of entropy. Note: This is not a writing question. I'm wondering what I could to to make technology quickly, not about how I could write more concisely. [Answer] ### Lack of wars Contrary to an assertion in another answer, wars do not really advance technology. What really advances technology is money put into research. Now wars can justify nation-states putting more of their tax revenue into research - but the evidence of many peacetime periods is that you get a whole lot more research done by civilians when they have money to invest in competing with each other and aren't dodging bullets/blades. In recent history, consider the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, tarmacadam roads, clipper ships, steam power, the internal combustion engine, the jet engine, the Green Revolution, transistors, microchips, the Internet as a separate entity from the original ARPANET... Not a single one of those major advances came from military investment, and in some cases (notably the jet engine) military investment skewed the market to actively delay development. More than that, consider the fact that technological development requires ongoing progress by a succession of people. If you break that process - whether that's by killing the original people, killing the next generation of people, or destroying the data which they rely on - then you may literally have to develop an entire field again from scratch. You don't necessarily even still have the knowledge that something is technically possible. The most obvious example of this is the fall of the Roman Empire. That set European technology back by a thousand years, and it could have been even worse had the various Muslim empires not retained a lot of that knowledge. A very similar process happened in South America, where dominant cultures were overrun by people who were better fighters but less technologically advanced. There was a lot of interesting development in Africa too before Europeans trashed the place; and actually Europeans did a rather similar thing to the more advanced Muslim nations as well from the Crusades onwards. TLDR: If you want technological development to happen, don't kill your scientists and engineers, and have money to pay them; and not having wars is the best way to guarantee both [Answer] Make technological progress a huge priority for your culture. A big limitation for progress in human society has been the amount of resources devoted to research/engineering and its prerequisities (most notably education). This is part of the reason why you see some technologies make big jumps in times of conflict - when the society finds itself in existential dangers it can get itself to devote much more resources to technological improvement than in peacetime. So if you set your culture to put technological progress as its highest value, progress should be much quicker than in current society. Specifically, this could include: * Levy big taxes and funnel them into research/engineering and education * High priority on high quality education * Teachers, researchers etc. have high social status and are well compensated * It is frowned upon to put personal gains ahead of collective progress, e.g. there is a cultural push towards collaboration and knowledge sharing (at least within any given institution, but possibly some healthy competition between institutions). The point is that even most losers in this system have enough buy-in into the culture that they consider the negative side effects (e.g. lower standard of living, or less generous social systems) as fair and morally good - think medieval peasants assuming that nobility and church deserve the privileges they get. Additionally, strong cultural values can reduce (not eliminate) various overheads of redistribution etc. - if most people sincerely try to contribute, you can spend less resources on policing and bureacracy. It is less clear how your society could become this way, but maybe a history of long-term conflict with a neighbour which is slowly overcome by technological improvement could build basis for such a culture. [Answer] ## The Singularity Many science fiction writers (and a number of other people) believe that we will reach a point where scientific progress accelerates exponentially, when computers (AI) are able to create better computers without significant human intervention, which in turn can create even better computers, etc, with several revolutions, each equivalent to the shift from discovering fire to creating electronics, happening possibly first in a year, then in a month, then in a single day... The problem with the Singularity as a reason for a total shift in the technology level in a decade is actually reining it in to where technicians are even relevant anymore. If AI has advanced to the point where it basically revolutionized everything for us, why are people anything more than an afterthought? Did the Singularity fizzle out, hitting some unexpected ceiling in development before machines became gods and humans were rendered superfluous? Did the machines ascend and leave us behind, and we picked over their leavings to reverse engineer a moderate tech revolution for ourselves? Did we panic and wipe out the advanced AI somehow (and, again, get a moderate boost from reverse engineering what developed before we pulled the killswitch)? ## Aliens Congratulations! We made first contact with aliens who were maybe a couple of centuries ahead of us technologically. Against all odds, we made friends, and they shared at least some of what they knew with us (or they crash-landed and we learned from the survivors / wreckage). Depending on the scenario of how exactly we acquired the alien tech, and the attitudes of the aliens, this could impact a story in different ways. Did governments try to hush things up, but it leaked out? Is there some concern that we might run into aliens out there somewhere like the ones whose wreckage we salvaged? Are there limits to where we can go, because there is already claimed territory, or, alternatively, are there already spaceports and such infrastructure with aliens which we can readily visit? ## Big Breakthroughs Happen to be Around the Corner Technogical progress has accelerated in the past few centuries, and in the past few decades, and in the past few years. Even without a Singularity with runaway progress, we're not really sure if practical spaceships are 500 years away, 50 years away, or less (or never!). There are some specific engineering problems we mostly know about already, which we have a reasonable idea of the difficulty of overcoming, but easy breakthroughs might be around the corner to surprise us. And a little handwaving for a breakthrough that's implausible but which an audience is likely to accept could fill the gap. Like when H. G. Wells justified a story about traveling to the moon by having someone discover an element which repelled instead of attracted, gravitationally, when he wanted to write a story about people traveling to the moon. [Answer] War Nothing advances technology like war. I’m not talking about little skirmishes or proxy wars. All out war that threatens your way of life that’s worth sending a generation off to die. Those wars have advanced technology like nothing else in very little time. Discovery Technology has never advanced smoothly. It goes in fits and starts. Discover something new and very soon it’s being exploited. Dream Big advances come from people with big dreams. A good story shows the dream before it’s realized. [Answer] Magic can change everything, and can do so quickly. Magic can be whatever the author says it is. However, it seems to work best in a sci-fi/or science-fantasy story if the magic is very clearly defined as to what it can and cannot do. Magic requires suspension of disbelief. It becomes harder for readers to suspend their disbelief if all things are possible. I personally find it jarring in many anime/manga stories when there always seems to be something more that the characters can do to solve a problem, as if they simply weren't taking matters as seriously as they should have right from the start, and they then trot out something new. Have a look at [Sanderson's Laws of Magic](https://faq.brandonsanderson.com/knowledge-base/what-are-sandersons-laws-of-magic/): * The First Law: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic. * The Second Law: Limitations > Powers * The third law: Expand what you already have before you add something new. So, by introducing magic, you can have things change quickly as you wish, but be sure to explain it well, and give it limitations, or else you'll break your readers' suspension of disbelief. [Answer] ### Steal/adopt the technology from someone else We have lots of experience with countries growing rapidly more technological advanced very quickly by adopting technologies already invented elsewhere. Japan, Korea, and the United Arab Emirates are all examples of countries that have experienced this kind of dramatic modernization. There are other less well known examples. The Comanche Indians in the U.S. adopted first horseback riding, and then the use of firearms, from Europeans they encountered in first contact situations. Several U.S. Indian tribes developed written languages for their previously unwritten languages after European contract with huge implications for their societies. The Etruscans in Northern Italy were one of the last few surviving non-Indo-European societies in Europe that outlived their peers because they rapidly adopted the technologies of the invading Indo-European Italic peoples. The indigenous Maori people of New Zealand basically invented trench warfare in their wars with English colonizers (historically called the "Maori Wars" and now often called the "New Zealand Wars"), rapidly advancing to the state of military technology used by their opponents. Another historical example is in the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. During the Bronze Age, the Hittites developed advanced metal working technology that was a closely guarded state secret for about 700 years, and gave their empire a decisive military advantage. During Bronze Age collapse ca. 1200 BCE, this empire fell and its metal working technologies were leaked, giving rise to the Iron Age almost everywhere. One of the standard tropes in speculative fiction is for people on Earth to gain the knowledge from aliens, either invaders whose technology is stolen, or friendly aliens (a la Men in Black). The Foreigner series of C. J. Cherryh, and the Jaran series of Kate Elliot are other examples of this trope. Closely related is the trope of technology transfer from one dimension to another seen, for example, in The Merchant Prince Series by Charles Stross. This is also the trope utilized in the anime series How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom, in which a civil servant from another dimension utilizes his educated layman knowledge of 20th century history and technology and science, along with his natural acumen and training as a junior Japanese civil servant, to use his power as king of the country that summoned him from his own dimension to not just insightfully identify potential key technologies for the kingdom, but also to come up with ways to maximize the dissemination of expertise that the kingdom already has but hasn't utilized to its fullest. This is to some extent an allegory for the historical efforts of the Meiji Restoration in Japan to combine "modern advances", mostly but not exclusively from abroad, with traditional "eastern" values, after the stagnation that came from a couple of centuries of self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world left Japan seemingly powerless in the face of contact with United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry who came to Japan in 1853 in large warships with armaments and technology that far outclassed those of Japan. Albania is another place where technology has stagnated and lapsed after a long period of isolation that developed technologically very rapidly when it was reopened to the outside world at the end of the Cold War, as it borrowed technology from its neighbors. Another standard trope in speculative fiction is for ancient aliens to have left traces of advanced technologies that are rediscovered, a la Stargate and the anime series Spriggan. An older trope from mythology, associated with the Prometheus myth, for example, is for the gods to provide technology that make a society more advanced. The mythological notion that the Japanese imperial dynasty descends from Amaterasu Omikami, the sun goddess, is likewise kindred to this idea. ### Have a genius or three in a community that shares knowledge Lots of revolutionary periods of scientific invention and technological advancement are attributable to a small number of geniuses. Archimedes fit the bill in ancient Greece. Einstein and a few of his peers discovered quantum mechanics and general relativity in the early 1900s over the course of about a decade. A small core of innovators who have the ears of people capable of funding their research and disseminating it widely can have a massive impact on the rate at which newly discovered technologies advance. Often having multiple geniuses who can interact with each other, either in the same city or region, or at scientific conferences, can lead to the rapid exchange of ideas that allows all of the advances to cross-pollenate and increase the rate of innovation. We don't necessarily think of Napoleon as a technological innovator, but in terms of law, government, and military organization he was a genius who rapidly and profoundly changed how society and governments and armies worked all over Western Europe. ### Rediscover the work of past geniuses who were ahead of their time There is also a rare but real scenario not entirely unlike the ancient aliens concept where a brilliant scientists works away for decades in obscurity, without being identified by someone who understands their work or builds upon and utilizes it. One example of this is the intellectual history of fractals, whose work languished in obscure journals for several decades before it was rediscovered in the 1960s by Benoit Mandelbrot who was able to utilize emerging computer technologies to show the power of the concept. Another example of this is chromium steel, which was perfected by a small community of metalworkers in Iran hundreds of years before the idea was independently reinvented and widely dispersed. But, this idea could have been adopted and spread widely at any time in between if someone had just rediscovered this pre-existing technology. See Rahil Alipour, Thilo Rehren, Marcos Martinón-Torres, "Chromium crucible steel was first made in Persia." Journal of Archaeological Science (2020); 105224 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2020.105224 (recounting their discovery that there was widespread manufacturing of chromium steel in Southern Persia around 1000 CE, a metallurgy technique that was subsequently lost and then only rediscovered about nine centuries later). There was a similar case involving a [sword maker by the name of Ulfberht](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulfberht_swords) in Northwest Europe somewhere who learned how to make steel swords profoundly better than anyone else of his era in the 800s or 900s CE or so, only for his art to be lost and reinvented many centuries later. But at any time in between, if someone had adopted this sword maker's methods (e.g. if an apprentice had survived and taught others) this technology would have advanced much faster. The Italian Renaissance involved rapid innovation spurred and accelerated by a mix of rediscovering technologies from the Greco-Roman classical period and adopting technologies that had been developed in the Islamic empire, in a geographically small area with multiple geniuses who interacted with each other exchanging knowledge and who also served as rivals to each other. The anime series Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, likewise involves a world where past magical knowledge was much greater but only person who knew her, her long lived elven apprentice, has access to her authentic grimoires and the understanding of them that came from working as her apprentice. Magic still exists, but its high points have been lost after centuries and Frieren's apprentice, in turn, gains advanced magical skill that no one else has. If that kind of rediscovered knowledge of a past genius were widely spread, the state of magical technology could have advanced rapidly. [Answer] > > like progressing from a computer mechanic where space travel is where it is now in the real world to a space ship mechanic in, say, 20 years. > > > This vibes with the space race. The US spent a total 25 billion dollars in the Gemini, Apollo and Mercury programs, before adjusting for inflation, throught their duration ([source](https://billofrightsinstitute.org/activities/was-federal-spending-on-the-space-race-justified)). For comparison, the US GDP in 1972 was around 1.2 trillion dollars. So it's not about money, as the total cost of those programs over more than a decade was less than 2% of the GDP of a single year. Now picture this. In 1952 no one had ever achieved orbital flight (Sputnik was launched in 1957). In 1952, you could maybe fly state-of-the-art rockets a few hundred kilometers at most. 20 years later, in 1972, commander John Young became the first astronaut in history recorded farting and saying f❤️❤️❤️ during a lunar mission. What led to that progress was unity and purpose. The authorities convinced everyone that America had to win the space race. Anyone who disagreed was labelled a communist and treated accordingly. Scientists were heroes and technological progress was a matter of national pride. Now in 2023, half of the people in the West believe that scientists are liars, the Earth is flat and vaccines contain nanobots that control your mind by receiving signals from 5G towers. With our current and near future technology, [it would be feasible to send a probe to Alpha Centauri in 22 years](https://www.iflscience.com/a-mission-to-alpha-centauri-within-a-human-lifetime-has-just-become-more-realistic-59960). If we do that, other close stars (I'm thinking about Tau Ceti) would be reachable in our lifetime, and our descendants might even get close pictures of planets from faraway systems. It would be quite complex, and probably require cooperation on global level. We would have to convince a lot of people to drop off with all the war, and to trust scientists, so that might never happen. [Answer] # Have an external threat force society to spend a lot of money on research. You can massively speed up research by having large numbers of people do research on it. Computer simulations, experiments, trials, all of these things cost lots of money. Societies will tend to prefer to spend money on welfare and infrastructure and blowing each other up, but an external threat could massively increase spending on research. Most countries spend around 2% of their government income on research. Spending more like 200% would yield much larger results. It would massively reduce quality of life, require higher taxes, but enough of an external threat might make them willing. # Aggressively recruit all existing geniuses You can't just boost research by throwing more money at it. You need geniuses with a spark of inspiration to aid research. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_research_and_development_spending> This may require some wars. Note the top three countries by percent spending on research, Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan. An external threat often forces a society to prioritize a tech advantage, and means you get a lot of scientists of high quality. Those three countries are known to have strong tech industries. In your world if there's a country filled with lots of geniuses, the powers that be need to crush all external threats to them, flood them with resources, and make all the untapped geniuses focused on war focus on space research. # Do unethical and extensive human testing to boost intelligence. You need more intelligence and geniuses. Take criminals, dissidents against your massively increased tax rate, volunteers, whoever, and force them to undergo experimental treatments to boost their intelligence. Brain modification, stimulation, cybernetic implants, whatever. The faster you can reach the singularity, the better. [Answer] ## Competition Reading the answers that have already been given, I've realized that competition is going to be essential in advancing technology quickly. It has been found that competition supports productivity. For example, "Holmes and Schmitz (2010) [summarised] evidence from a range of studies of industries which have seen a change in their competitive environment – typically leading to an increase in competition. Nearly all of the studies they review find that increases in competition led to increases in industry productivity. Many of the studies also showed that firms facing stronger competition made substantial investments to raise productivity" ([see here](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Productivity-and-competition%3A-a-summary-of-evidence/b9323fceb237a0168bd893d4fb5f9116d302f3d1)). Another example is how the USSR and USA were in the space race, accelerating development as well. If I want to develop technology faster, strong competition between technology companies is a helpful tool I can use, and it will speed up development. [Answer] ## Ancient Civilization Your civilization is not the first to develop a technical society, but previous ones have fallen (think Atlantis or Mu). On cue, archeologists or explorers can discover a trove of artifacts and documents, which the scientific and engineering communities descend on in a reverse-engineering feeding frenzy. Most of the artifacts won't work, unless they're primarily based on ceramics or corrosion-resistant metals, but can still be studied. [Answer] # Extreme Empathy Technological progress gets great benefits from coordination and economy of scale . Throw money and people at a problem, and you solve it faster. Splitting up into many disjointed attempts at solving the same problem, and you are wasting time and effort. One of the most "effective" ways of causing this disjoint, is rivalry , be it domestic, or international. Rivalry comes from many things but in most cases an "Us & Them" mentality. So, the solution for extreme effectivization and pooling of resources is to delete that sense of us and them. How do we do that? ## Extreme Empathy Make your population feel that there is no "Us & Them". Whenever a person sees another person, they feel as if they are the same as themselves. This can then be used to dissolve national borders, dissolve rivalries, and have a unified front for solving problems. Sure, this is a super-boring resolution, I know, where everyone "just gets along", and I have no idea how you will use this idyllic setting to create the kind of conflict that makes for an exciting story. But, hey, it would work. [Answer] Making specific advancement that enables access to significant amount of resources. The sample fictional world is from the Fallout universe. They have successfully made small-scale fusion reactors using technologies from the 1950s, so their miniaturization and computers stopped advancing, made portable fusion reactors everywhere, then started World War 3 and everyone got nuked into the post-apocalyptic age. The real world has better computers than the Fallout universe, but we have inferior sources of power. [Answer] You need to have a culture way more focused on collaboration. From Star Trek, think of the borg If you take the borg drones and give them back free will something like that. All knowledge is stored in a universal database accessible to everyone. A discovery is made everyone in society can immediately access the research and try to improve on the design. This relies on education, and so your whole society is going to have to revolve around this and nobody can waste time. Think of how many people are soldiers dying in wars, these people are all 40+ years of wasted growth potential. For example if you get killed at 30 you could have lived to 70 and spent those 40 years researching. Many modern countries spent so much of their GDP on the military, those all wasted dollars that could have been spent on research. If society was 100% focused on research things like crime would be drastically reduced, and the money that would be spent on police would be redirected to research. Every member of society needs to collaborate and dedicate their lives to this research. Research into automation will automate all the mundane tasks like cleaning and producing things. Think a 3d printer in every home, library, business, and etc. No trademark, copyrights, or other limitation on knowledge would exist. When you died your life's value would be measured based on the contributions you made to the global database. How much knowledge did society gain by having you in it. Your epitaph would list all your life accomplishments from said database. [Answer] Interesting, in most stories we see technology advance slower with the use of magic as there's not as much need for technology when you can just use magic instead, also research/learning would need to be split between technology and magic, so depending on the focus it could easily be seen that one may get neglected. Most of technology is developed due to a need or want. For example we want to be able to travel places faster, so we invent the engine. However with magic, there would not necessarily be any need, as you would just be able to fly or teleport, or whatever, so the need is greately reduced. You will have to overcome this in some way for your story to make sense, one way would be to have limitations on the magic, or maybe limit the number of people able to use magic. An easy way to overcome this could be to only recently discover or learn or somehow gain the ability to use magic. Since in a modern setting, technology would already be ingrained in people. After resolving that initial issue of stunted technology, we can then move on to how it can be used to rapidly advance technology. The easiest way would be to use magic to 'handwave' significant issues with technology. For example a solar panel is like 5% efficient or something, you could replace it with a 'solar power gathering magic circle' that funnels the solar energy applied to the circle into a nearby battery at near 100% efficiency, because magic. Another way I could see magic rapidly advancing technology, is if some sort of 'simulation' magic was discovered. Which we could use to test things that would normally take hundreds of years in a matter of minutes and at no cost to human/animal life, or other materials/resources. ]
[Question] [ I have a fantasy setting that is about as advanced as the late 15th to early 16th century. There are humans and many other sapient non-human species; humans are one of the only species to create large kingdoms and empires. Some human rulers keep non-humans as exotic servants, slaves or part of private menageries to show off their wealth and power. Among the non-human species kept are trolls, humanoids descended from baboons. A male can be up to 8 feet tall with the proportional strength of a gorilla. How would their masters prevent their troll slaves from escaping or rebelling? A troll could snap a human spine in half with no effort. Trolls are as intelligent as humans and their societies range from hunter-gatherer tribes of less than 50 people to small agricultural villages with a population of 200-300. The scenario I'm thinking of is a human noble keeping a small group of less than 10 trolls as part of a private menagerie/servants to show off. As for magical means of control; magic is very rare in this setting and the average person has no knowledge of how to use magic. [Answer] Divide your enslaved trolls into two groups. The strongest trolls are given privileged positions - good food, comfortable accommodation, respect, etc. The high-status trolls don't rebel because their lives are fairly pleasant. The low-status trolls don't rebel because, if they did, the high-status trolls would punish them. [Answer] ## Nowhere to go Enslaved trolls were exiled from their tribe, or enslaved when their tribe was destroyed. Escaping your master means a long and desperate flight through human territories where everyone will know you are a runaway slave and so desperate. (You get a vicious circle where everyone knows you are dangerous, and so the only way you can get what you need is intimidation.) Then you end up in troll territory where you, at best, will be a second-class member of a tribe that takes you in. If slaves are considered members of their owners' households, they may already have as much status as they would get after this flight. Or more. Even, for instance, quite rich merchants would be hesitant to offend a personal servant of the duke. [Answer] Selection The trolls in the troll troup are not a random group. They are selected for their docility and docility / tractability is ensured through continuous human interaction. These trolls don't lay around eating in between getting displayed by the master. They are part of the household and a valued part. The trolls work the fields and mill along with the humans of the nobles household. They are valued for their strength. They are treated as well as any other worker on the estate. They interact with humans on a daily basis. If a troll loses its temper and breaks things or hurts someone, it is punished. If this becomes routine behavior it is sold or put down. The estate manager purchases or trades for trolls from other places who have a history of docility and good natured behavior. The trolls in your troll troop have a good track record. Except for the one newcomer with the red braids who can do gymnastic tricks. He has not been with them long enough to establish a track record of docility but he is really amazing to watch. [Answer] How you prevent trolls from rebelling is largely dependent on the psychological nature of the trolls. You say that slaves are largely only kept by the elite, as a status symbol. Historically, this has been a more positive and less cruel or detrimental role than the more well known forms of slavery such as chattel slavery (As kindhearted as the institution of slavery can be, that is). If your trolls are brutish, dimwitted creatures, as they are often depicted in various pieces of fiction, they might not find the arrangement altogether unpleasant. They get to wear fine silks, eat food fit for a king, and in return they only have to lug their owner around in a litter or carry their luggage, tasks which are made easy due to their strength. Sure, they might lack personal autonomy or freedom, as what is tantamount to the expensive toy of some haughty noble, but they lack the intelligence or introspection to ponder such concepts. If they are on a similar intellectual level to humans and are altogether unhappy with being kidnapped to fuel the self-esteem of some autocrat, they can still be controlled rather readily. Because slaves are the toys of the rich, they are likely few in numbers, and lacking in organisational capabilities (The shrewd slaveowner will make sure of this, by separating trolls wherever necessary, or not buying members of the same tribe, so as to minimise their cooperational abilities). Even if it should come to that, the humans have many ways of deterring rebellion through violence. Sure, the trolls could carve through a few palace guards, but a man or two in 16th century plate armor (When the art reached its pinnacle, before the wide adoption of the gun) with a sword or poleaxe, or a crossbowman 50 paces away, would still prove decidedly challenging to an unarmed troll. Then again, this raises the question; why is the species with the intelligence of humans, but far greater physical attributes subservient to their smaller brethren? [Answer] This is not really different from the real world. In many places oppressed people have or had the power to kill or overthrow their masters. Be it slaves or citizens in a state with a totalitarian regime. The reason why rebellions are relatively rare are many. But I think it mainly boils down to the fact that you need a critical mass to have any hope of success. A single slave killing their master is suicide. You need a strong enough group of slaves which is able to convince other slaves that joining their cause is not suicide and actually has a good chance to succeed. If your slaves are super strong it merely means that the critical mass is lower. The precautions are still the same: Keep groups of slaves separate. Make sure they can’t communicate and organize. Try to create dissonance by having different groups of slaves (e.g. “recruit” from different tribes) which are unlikely to cooperate. [Answer] Look at the real world and how groups in our world tried to stop slaves from rising up. All of the items below are ways that one group may try to control 1. Thought Control: For slavers to control a species with more strength you need to control how they view the world. maybe These trolls are taught from a very young age that they ARE stupid. That they were designed by a God to be slaves. Maybe there are stories about Trolls who think for themselves and have bad things happen to them. The humans may control how slaves family groups work (i.e separating kids from parents) In this way, there is a cultural pressure that helps keep the spirit of the trolls down. 2. Magic: You are talking about a fantasy world. Maybe there is some sort of magical reason that can force trolls or other slaves to do as they are told. Magical Contracts. Magical chains that shock their wearers. People are very creative at hurting and controlling each other. The biggest thing to remember is that slavery isn't just something that happens. It is an industry and a system that is formed by many groups working together. Every culture that had slavery had to juggle needs and desires. For Romans slavery was temporary and slaves were protected by laws and were given a large amount of freedom and usually life was better as a slave than what they used to know. In the US slavery was almost brutally perfected to break its participants and keep them docile by heavy and brutal punishment and conditioning. [Answer] ## Divide and Conquer To prevent a rebellion, you need to prevent them from thinking that they have a chance for it. Splitting them up into small groups will be essential for several reasons. 1. Prevent Conspiracy: If they never have a chance to talk to the other groups, they can't plan and build trust. Troll informants (fake if necessary) will also help reduce trust. 2. Reduce Information: Knowledge (like where the back doors, stables and weapons are) is power. Keep each group in a separate section of the estate so they don't know anything about the rest of it. 3. Numbers Advantage: The strength of a rebellion is that they can group up and overwhelm the enemy in a small area. Splitting them up prevents this. 4. Limited Escapees: It's easier to catch two escaped prisoners than ten. This means that you can devote more resources to catching them quickly on horseback. The quicker you catch and make a display out of them, the more futile the attempts seem. All these will reduce the motivation for and the possible success of rebellion or escape and can be paired with the other answers to amplify the effect. [Answer] The Trolls Die Off without their Masters a) The trolls are the males and the Masters are the egg-laying females of the same species. b) The Jem H'adar scenario. c) The trolls carry a chronic, incurable, and ordinarily fatal disease for which only the Masters have the treatment. The Masters Can Take on the Trolls Though the physical strength of the trolls far exceeds that of the Masters, the Masters are venomous--deadlier than any venomous animal. The Masters' pheromones are incapacitating and hallucinogenic. Their claws and teeth kill with one scratch or nip. Their bodies produce enough surplus venom to coat their blades and arrows. The Trolls become the Masters All of the trolls develop into Masters over time. The Masters are everything that the trolls long to become. The Masters Control Animals that can Take On the Trolls The animals might be bigger than the trolls, or smaller animals that hunt in swarms or packs. Think about the "compies" in Jurassic Park, killer whales against blue whales, wolves against moose. The trolls must hibernate. The Masters have an entire season to find and kill every last troll group that works against the Masters' interests. [Answer] ## Lobotomy Lobotomy is a surgical procedure, in which parts of brain are destroyed to alter subject behavior. Later versions of the procedure could be performed in as little as 10 minutes, didn't require preparation of surgery rooms and could be done at the patient house. It was intended to reduce agitation in (supposedly) mentally ill patients, but had undesireable side effects, like apathy, lack of initiative, poor ability to concentrate, generally passive behavior and reduced emotional response. This practice was eventually banned as ineffective and inhumane threatment, but in your world it could remain avaliable for pacifying slaves: those side effects might actually be desireable in their case. [Answer] ### Systemic slavery Maybe escaping captivity wouldn't be too difficult. It probably wouldn't be too hard to convince a few fellow enslaved folks to escape either. But then what? You're in a country that considers you property, with authorities that support slavery and which can deploy slave-hunting units to bring you back or put you down. The first place they'd look is those troll camps/villages, so you can't exactly run there. Any other other place, you can't be sure that you won't be turned in by the locals. That means, if you smart, you know that escaping means leaving a bunch of people behind and living on the run and/or looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life, or die trying. You might also surmise that any violence you display will be repaid with interests on kin and tribespeople. Knowing that innocents will likely suffer the consequences of your actions is a great moral conundrum that will deadlock people with a shred of empathy. This is also applicable to a larger rebellion, except instead of deploying a small unit or sending out a bolo, they'll be sending the army to quash your little rebellion. And of course, burning down troll villages in reprisal is always on the table. In other words, escaping/rebelling is dangerous, uncertain, and is likely to hurt people you care about. Which gives you a pretty good reason to decide against it, even if you really dislike your current condition. [Answer] Shackles to restrict movement. Manipulation, like the threat of violence towards the slave's loved ones. Rewards for good behavior, punishment for bad behavior. This could range from clothing made available to rations provided. Shows of strength and cruelty by executing non-compliant slaves publically. [Answer] One solution could be social engineering. In the Red Rising series of books by Pierce Brown, there is a caste of genetically modified human super-soldiers called Obsidians, who very easily can (and have, and do) kill their Gold masters, but after a major rebellion were reeducated into believing their masters were divine beings, and that it was a great honor to serve them. You could apply something similar to your society, over the centuries feeding these slave species propaganda and steering their psychology to see their enslavement as instead an honour or a fact of nature. This of course onky works if these slave species have been under this society's proverbial thumb for a very, very long time, seeing as the technology necessary for genetic engineering or other technological solutions is not present. Generally, throughout history slaves have been kept in line through fear. Indentured servants fear the effects of not paying their debts, for instance. Since these slaves cannot be reasonably threatened with physical violence, it will likely have to be psychological in nature. If you can't break their fingers, break their minds. [Answer] Well, you know, as much as I hate to discuss how thinking beings could be made into slaves, history still has plenty of examples to choose from. Others have touched on some of these, but I can think of a few that haven't yet been mentioned: * Juvenile indoctrination: Aside from the whole "selective breeding" thing to take the edge off of aggressive behaviours, there's also the fact that, if you raise your dangerous pet the right way, they're very likely never going to even consider hurting you as a thing they could ever do. There are plenty of very strong and dangerous breeds of dogs who are trained as puppies who the boss is (and also who they should respect and protect), and unless pushed past the breaking point, would never ever show more than mild discontent to their owners. The fact that there are plenty of people who put up with horrible treatment from "loved ones" for decades suggests that more intelligent animals, such as the trolls, would also be just as easily vulnerable to juvenile indoctrination. * Juvenile castration: It doesn't take very many fertile males to impregnate as many females as you could ever want pregnant. And, given that these are mammals, closely related to humans, their endocrine systems would be very similar to humans and other mammals. So, horses are gelded to make them more controllable. Bulls, dogs, cats all become more docile when then get their nuts nipped before they become adults. So all the "free to move about" trolls are eunuchs. Breeding males and females kept in strict captivity. * Roofies: If the masters have a way of short-circuiting the trolls' brains' ability to transfer short-term memories into long-term storage, then they have beings who never have the opportunity to build up resentment. The trolls would be allowed to learn and develop properly up to the end of their adolescent stage, but after that would have drugs added to their food or water supply that has similar effects to rohypnol, or the black-out effect that extreme drinking causes. They would wake up, be hungry and thirsty, with no idea that much if any time had passed since they were still adolescents, get their food and water with the drugs in them, and then simple follow directions for the rest of the day. (Essentially, something similar to the "voodoo zombie" idea. In many ways, it's the same as a physical lobotomy, only chemically induced.) * Addiction: If the masters control access to a substance that the trolls are physically addicted to, one that doesn't impair their ability during the day, and makes them happy and content, but has severe withdrawal symptoms if not consumed regularly, then the trolls would be extremely disinclined to act out for fear of not getting their next hit. It's like controlling access to food, only with a much faster-acting effect. (And, continuing the theme, they would be introduced to the substance as juveniles -- heck, feed the mothers enough of the stuff, and the trolls will be born addicted.) * Religion: Well, you know, if the trolls' culture is such that they believe that serving the masters is a higher calling -- the highest of callings, actually -- then they'll keep themselves in line. It worked with the Catholic Church for centuries.... (Yes, this is similar to what other's have mentioned, but not so explicitly.) [Answer] You use the example from Deep Space Nine the Jem Hadar. They are controlled by the use of a drug that they need to survive. You carefully control the production and access to the drug which in turn allows you to control your slaves. In the situation you relate instead of a genetically engineered species you need to get your trolls addicted to the drug or to need an antidote to a constantly fed poison. The antidote/poison system needs careful administration. The poison needs to be long acting in the absence of the antidote. So if the slaves break free they no longer get the antidote and then the poison will kill them. ]
[Question] [ One of my characters has the superhuman ability to detect lies. Essentially, it makes them hypersensitive to changes in the brain, and certain parts of the brain light up when you lie. How can I give another character an “immunity” to this ability? It works through walls, and only works whenever the liar is around them. It doesn’t work over technology. [Answer] Essentially your character is a low-level telepath. There are some tried and true ways to fool them Each of these examples works through walls and at some distance. 1. Your brain is constantly full of other ideas that cloud the signal - Much like how Randall Flagg from The Stand couldn't sense [Tom Cullen's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Stand_characters#Tom_Cullen) thoughts easily and overlooks him. 2. Your brain has unique brain chemistry that is hard to read. Like [Fry vs. the Brains in Futurama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Stupid) (he became his own grandfather). He's immune to the stupid ray. 3. Your brain is so full of something the other person hates he refuses to look there. Voldemort used his skills in [Legilimency](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Legilimency) on Harry Potter, which worked until Harry remembers how much he loved and cared about his friends. Voldemort refused to stay in Harry's mind after that. See Edit for links 4. You believe the lie, so there would be no tell. Pretty sure this would work even without any tricks. If you genuinely believe you're telling the truth no amount of telepathy would detect deception since there isn't any. 5. (new) The other person has telepathy and can block your guy. Another Harry Potter example. In Order of the Phenix Harry keeps getting visions and emotions from his telepathic link with Voldemort. After the climactic final battle, Voldemort realizes the telepathy is a 2-way street and Harry can see into his mind. He purposefully blocks any telepathic connection afterwards to prevent Harry from learning his evil plans. Edit in response to comments A few commenters pointed some other reason Voldemort never mind-controlled Harry after Order of the Phenix. In the climactic final fight between Voldemort, Dumbledore, and Harry, it's Harry's strong emotion that makes Voldemort flee per [this answer](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/128801/why-didnt-voldemort-use-mind-control-over-harry-after-order-of-the-phoenix). I purposefully left out a certain character name and exact details to prevent spoilers (I'm sure a few people haven't read Harry Potter yet), and because a more generalized answer fits the question. [Answer] Your protagonist is detecting what normal people feel when they lie. However, most people alive today have a condition where they get to deceive even themselves. They believe their own lies. This is called [cognitive dissonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance): > > In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values (...) > > > For example, I had a coworker who believed, simultaneously, that: 1. No humans ever landed ln the Moon, and Apollo 11's landing was staged; 2. Astronauts on the Moon found and contacted aliens there, but NASA is hiding it. When I asked him about how the aliens managed to stay hidden inside NASA's cinematic studios on Houston for so long, he called me a sheep and unfriended me on Facebook. I think if that guy was on a lie detector and got asked about both beliefs quoted above, the machine would indicate truth for both because he believed very hard on those things, despite the obvious contradiction. --- Back to your character, if he tries to detect lies coming from a deranged mind (think DC comics Joker, or Marvel's Deadpool), he might be unable to tell whether something is a lie. Which reminds me of a song by Slayer: > > In the depths of a mind insane > > Fantasy and reality are the same > > > [Answer] Perhaps you could use George Castanza's old method of beating the lie detector. It's not a lie if the teller finds a way to believe it. So if your character had a sort of self-hypnosis training, or just happens to believe everything he says (like from a brain injury). [Answer] / It doesn’t work over technology./ Your liar only communicates over technology. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uHpi2.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uHpi2.jpg) It could be the full rig, like Dr Hawking. Or maybe a person with a laryngectomy who uses a device to turn typing into speech. Or even a phone translator because your liar speaks only Kazakh and uses translation software. [Answer] They are always telling a lie. Other answers have dealt with ways to give a false negative to the test, that is to say a response of "no lie" when a lie is told, or no response at all. However lie detection is equally useless when it gives false positives every time. That is to say the "immune" character always registers as telling a lie. "The sky is blue". Lie. "I exist". Lie. "I can fool your mind-reading". Lie. This does of course leave the question of how they can do that. And for that I suggest an overfocus on nuance not expressed in phrases spoken. The sky may be blue right now, right here, but somewhere else there is a cloud, and sometimes its night. A body exists, but can the self be defined as a meaningful construct? I am not fooling you, you are just misinterpreting my statements. Of course this will require someone with a very weird view of reality, but it is an unusual skill. [Answer] Roleplaying. Other answers have noted that believing your own lies is one way to defeat lie detection, since the detector (i.e. your telepath) can only sense whether or not you believe what you're saying, not whether it's objectively true. However, deluding yourself in this way may be very hard to pull off if you're trying to lie about something that you deeply believe; and if you can't un-delude yourself after the threat of the lie detector has passed, you might create some serious problems for yourself later on. So, I offer an alternative. Create a personality, an alter ego, a character within your mind that truly believes whatever lies you want to slip past the lie detector. Then, when the lie detector arrives, answer their questions not as you normally would, but rather as the character you created would. If you do it right, and if the lie detector fails to realize that they're not talking to you, but rather to a fictional character that you made up and are roleplaying as, they just might misinterpret you saying something that your character believes as you saying something that you believe. If that sounds difficult, well, it may be, and it'll certainly take some practice before you can fool a superhuman lie detector; but I don't believe it's impossible. There are any number of people who play tabletop role playing games (such as Dungeons&Dragons) who speak in first-person as their characters whenever they sit down and pull out their dice. Perhaps you could look to these sorts of people for advice, or even join in their campaigns for practice. Why no, I'm not Someone Else 37; I am Rhogar Kerrhylon, Dragonborn Sorcerer, and I most definitely did not eat all the steak. \burp\** [Answer] It works through walls but maybe not through the special metal this other character's skull is made from (or was replaced with after this accident long ago). Or this character's brain is so full of lies that it saturates your hero's senses and he can't get through the noise to sort out specific truths and lies. [Answer] Beat the system by lowering the signal-to-noise ratio. Lie detectors work by measuring physiological signs commonly associated with lying. These stem from nervousness and fear of getting caught. There's an underlying assumption that these signs are only associated with lying that you can use to your advantage. Your character handles stress extremely poorly. In school, he would be classified as having "test anxiety". He's constantly second-guessing himself. He always wants to have the right answer, but at the same time is terrified that his answer might be wrong or might not be what the other person wants to hear. When you attempt to question a character like this, he will exhibit the same sort of stress reactions for a truthful answer as he will for a lie. Such a subject wouldn't make it past the "control" part of the interview where they ask basic questions like name, etc. to get a baseline measurement. His readings would be so inconsistent that there would be no way to use that data to draw meaningful conclusions. [Answer] ## The Lier is a Child or Physically Disabled > > Essentially, it makes them hypersensitive to changes in the brain, and > certain parts of the brain light up when you lie. > > > Your human lie detector works by detecting where in the brain things are lighting up; so, he can only see a lie by seeing things light up in just the right places. However, a child's brain is far less organized into specialized areas than an adult brain; so, if your protagonist were used to reading grownup brains, he would not know where in a child's brain to look for evidence of lying. Technically though, you could use any brain that just stores things in unusual places. Blindness, deafness, and loss of limb are all known to cause re-organization of brain structures which could cause the familiar pattern of a person lying to look different. This has the advantage over other methods mentioned so far in that the lier can be aware that they are lying and still get away with it. [Answer] The person who's immune doesn't think with their brain. Due to cosmic voodoo / radioactive ooze / it's just how they are, most of their thought process exists in something else, leaving their brain acting as merely a sort of interface between the thing that does the thinking and the body. The brain itself completely believes whatever the thinky-bits tell it to believe, so the person who is a lie detector sees exactly what the thinky-bits want. Options for the actual thinky-bits: * [A chip in one's brain](https://battleangel.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_bio-chip) * [An earring](http://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.livejournal.com/332946.html) * [Actually being a 3-dimensional projection of a higher-dimensional entity](https://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Orz) * Mastering the esoteric art of thinking with one's soul * Mastering the somewhat less esoteric art of thinking with one's guts [Answer] Firstly there is how someone takes a question. Lie detection is based off of sudden bursts of nervousness that are supposedly recognizable. There is some degree of question as to whether all polygraph techs are at all reliable or honest in our government but moving on. Thinking of something that really really frightens you at the right moment can set the test off by creating spikes in blood pressure, etc but the questioning I would imagine if done by a professional is carefully worded so knowing what time. Historically also introducing pain via the nervous system by say putting a thumb tack in the shoe and stepping on it is another way. One might imagine that being incredibly upset and worked up throughout the whole process or calm to the point of psychopathy might be ways. [Answer] In traditional lie detection a lie is detected based on a fear of being caught. People's heart will race, they sweat more, etc. out of that fear. If there is no fear then there is not this response. People will not have a traditional detectable response to lie detection if there's an injury that interferes with the brain triggering these detectable responses. Think of someone with a pacemaker, their heart will not race due to a lie because there's a computer regulating heart rate. If this is a matter of a superpower that detects changes inside the brain as opposed to the changes in the body then consider a damage to the brain in those parts that "light up" in the case of a lie. The solutions mentioned by others certainly work. A person that always lies will not have a baseline on which to detect a lie from the truth. A person that is so convinced of the lie cannot know that they are lying. My solution is a variation on those themes. Someone that has no fear of lying will not have this lie show in their brain activity. Alternatively, if the parts of the brain that show a lie are damaged that they are unable to show a lie in their brain activity. What it comes down to is that there is a person so emotionless, heartless, cruel, sinister, or powerful that they don't have the capability to show fear from a lie like other people. Others argued for mental/emotional damage from birth or upbringing, I propose the case for a physical injury to cause this. Consider an injury from accident, attack, or even self imposed and intentional damage. The injury could have left the person otherwise functional or required intervention with a kind of "brain pacemaker" that clouds super-powered lie detection like a pacemaker on the heart would with traditional lie detection. [Answer] Since the lie-detecting character has super-human sensitivity to fisiological disturbances when a normal human lies, I can imagine 2 good options, that could be a neat background for antagonists: 1 - The liar has superhuman control over their bodies and minds, so they are always cool with whatever situation they are in. They could say they have to go home to feed their winged pink pet-sheep and the only way one could say its a lie would be through common sense; 2 - The liar is capable to enter a zen-like deep-consciousness mode, where they are undisturbed by anything, their thoughts are deep and non-verbal - invisible and inaudible to others. Akin to a blank slate to any viewer. Hope this helps! ]
[Question] [ So... I have a family that lives in a remote mountain chalet. They need utilities. I think I'm set for gas (propane), water, septic and communication, but I have a question regarding electricity. Now, I plan to give them super-sufficient generating capability (combination of wind and solar) and may even hand-wave them being "on grid" (so they can sell their extra capacity). However, they would like to be able to supply themselves without the grid and without resorting too much to propane-powered generators (though I expect they'll have one for backup). Now, this means they need a fairly capacious ability to store energy in order to meet demand in the face of a fluctuating supply (especially for solar). The "obvious" answer is a really big battery bank, but batteries are so... pedestrian. What could they use instead of batteries? I'm guesstimating the household's energy use to be about 4KW average (big house, big pool), though figure in a pinch they could cut this by at least a third. Based on that, I figure they would want a minimum 100 KWH storage capacity, though ~500 KWH would be much better. Bonus points for long lifespan and low maintenance. I am leaning toward 'flywheel', but I'm not sure how feasible this is, and I'm open to other ideas. (Am I completely insane to not just use batteries?) (This is an alternate reality, and the family has considerable financial resources and political clout. They can probably get away with something that ordinary people would have trouble getting permitted.) --- Postmortem: First off, thanks, as always, for all the interesting answers! Lots of interesting stuff here that hopefully will help others as well. For my purposes, however, my characters would rather not engage in a massive geological engineering project when batteries could do the same job at a price that is comparably negligible. I'm also looking for something where the storage can be very close to the chalet; my objective (someone else's may differ, which is why I love to see these answers even if I don't use them!) is to have backup in case of e.g. a delivery line breakage. Also, since they're sitting on a mountain, geothermal seems "iffy"; there's some topsoil, but they're a lot closer to sitting on solid granite than your average house. That all steers me toward something that can fit in a (large) shed; batteries, HFCs, CAES, or my original idea, flywheels. Both HFCs and CAES seem "fiddly" by comparison, and it's less clear if the technology is well-proven. Batteries, of course, are known to work, but are somewhat limited in lifespan, wear out a bit more from charge/discharge cycles, and as stated, they're boring üòâ. That leaves flywheels, which are well-proven, fairly efficient, and absolutely meet the desired cool-factor. Why I accepted [sphennings](/users/26175)' [answer](/a/175345/43697): [Mazura](/users/799) says: > > Flywheels is currently answer #4 of 19 at [the link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage). IMO, if 'energy storage' ("store energy") is in the question, Tim B's answer¬π has you covered, because it('s short and to the point and) has a link to Energy Storage, Wikipedia, in which you will find a link to FES, while the accepted answer here links to some random PDF. > > > (¬π I assume Mazura is talking about [this answer](/a/23125/43697) to a different question?) So, there's the "minor" issue that the answer I assume Mazura is referencing isn't even posted here, which makes it hard to accept. However, even it it was, I would still accept sphennings' answer. First, I'm not sure the order in that article has any significance, and anyway the first two are impractical for a "family residence" as noted above. Second and more pertinently, because Wikipedia is, at least for my purposes, shallow. The "rule" for accepting an answer is to accept the one that is most helpful, and that was sphenning's, hands down. Wikipedia provides generalities, which is nice if you're trying to understand how something works. It's less helpful for making concrete decisions. That "random PDF" that sphennings turned up (and which I hadn't managed to find on my own, so thank you again!) pointed me at, not a vague technological overview, but a specific, existing system that is pretty much exactly what I had in mind. There's a significant difference between some vague notion of "maybe something using this technology could work" (Wikipedia) and "this specific, existing product meets my needs" (sphennings' answer). Unlike Wikipedia, that not only gave me hard numbers on what sort of system I would need, but it gave me a price tag... which is not trivial (around $130k¬≤), but for my purposes, totally within reason. Again, the criteria for acceptance is the answer that "solved your problem or was the most helpful in finding your solution". While I'm thankful for all the answers (and have upvoted accordingly), IMNSHO sphennings deserves (and has received) the credit for the answer that was most directly helpful to my specific problem. (¬≤ Not an actual quote from the company, but based on a Google result that mentioned what price point the company is "trying" to hit. However, since this is for a story that doesn't take place in the real world, I don't mind hand-waving and assuming that someone hit that goal, if not better.) [Answer] A quick google search uncovered [a pamphlet](https://amberkinetics.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Amber-Kinetics-DataSheet.pdf) (or at this [page](https://amberkinetics.com/product/)) from a company offering a flywheel storage system with a capacity of 32kWh. A bank of 4 of these units would exceed your 100kWh capacity requirements. These units have a 30 year design life, and are designed for continuous functioning with no limit on discharge cycles per day. Judging by this it's entirely plausible for an eccentric chalet owner to have flywheels for their energy storage needs. [Answer] [Pumped Storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity) If your family has significant resources, and access to two water reservoirs (One at a high altitude up the mountain, the other lower down), then they could have a custom pumped storage system installed. When they are running an electricity surplus, they pump water from the lower reservoir to the upper reservoir. When they have an electricity deficit, they allow water to run through a piping system from the upper reservoir, driving a turbine, and generating electricity. As a rough calculation, the energy stored is equal to $mgh$, where $m$ is the working mass of the water in the reservoir, $h$ is the height difference between the reservoirs and $g$ is the acceleration due to gravity ($9.81 ms^{-2}$). A back of the envelope calculation suggests that a pair of reservoir with 2000 tonnes of water, separated by a 120m drop, has an energy storage capacity of about 654kwh. One of the nice things about water is that it's pretty dense, so if we approximate a lake as roughly hemispherical, then a 2000 tonne lake is only about 21m across, which is not egregiously oversized. Even allowing for inefficiencies, such a system could plausibly meet your requirements. Additional bonuses are that if the upper reservoir collects sufficient rainwater water, then it may be a net generator over time. It may also be a source of drinking water, depending upon cleanliness. A big downside is that it would probably be expensive to set up, as it would require a fair amount of civil engineering to install, when compared to a battery system. [Answer] [Compressed air energy storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed-air_energy_storage) Use excess energy to run an air compressor, which fills a storage tank with high-pressure gas. When you you need to draw energy, simply release some of the pressurized gas to generate electricity. The system has some losses due to adiabatic heating/cooling, but that thermal energy can also be put to use heating/cooling the home. One advantage of this system over batteries is that its storage capacity does not degrade over time, and the storage medium does not normally need to be replaced - it will last for a very, very large number of discharge cycles, while an electrical battery's capacity diminishes over time. In the long term, it could be a more cost effective solution than batteries, although the upfront cost is typically higher. Compared to other potential energy storage systems, it does not require large masses or a means of vertical displacement, and compared to kinetic energy storage systems, it's not as prone to frictional degradation over time. Portability doesn't seem like a very big selling point for a home energy system, but I'll also point that you could easily take this "battery" from place to place, unlike any mass-based system like a flywheel or pumped storage. [This site](https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-off-the-grid-compressed-air-energy-storage.html) goes into much greater detail about the mechanics and efficiencies of residential compressed air energy storage. For a research-grade system, they quote a capacity of 410Wh for a system that takes up 0.6 cubic meters of space. You'd need a lot of these to get to the KWh-level storage required, but with plenty of space and money, and some additional optimization of the technology, one might be able to make it work. Compressed air energy storage has also been used at a much larger scale, in cities like Paris, Dresden, and Buenos Aires, although personal residential applications seem rare. You might need to do a little handwaving to take this from "plausible" to "practical". [Answer] Flywheel, water tower, or stack of blocks If you want something with a little more flair than a battery pack, you're in luck. There are several options for your "cost is no object" energy storage. Flywheel You could use a [flywheel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage). According to [Scientific American](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-flywheel-design/), there's one proposal that proponents say could "deliver distributed and highly scalable storage for around $1,333 a kilowatt." Water tower You can use electricity to store weight above and then use the power of gravity to turn motion back into electricity. [Pumping water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity) is one option. Excess electricity runs a water pump that pushes water uphill into storage. When you need more power, the valves holding the water in storage open up and the water runs through a turbine to generate electricity. You want something stylish, so check out these [spiffy water towers](https://www.pinterest.com/ajnscwfb5/water-tower/) for inspiration. The family might enjoy a very large reminder of their status and off-grid preparedness. You'd need a pretty big tower (or an uphill lake) but hey, they're rich, right? Since this is a mountainous area, they should build the tower on the tallest point in the area, both for storage efficiency as well as showmanship. Perhaps they'll build their own [Peachoid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peachoid) or maybe they'll go with a classier look like this tower from Austria. [![Beautiful water tower](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dITAk.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dITAk.jpg) Stack of blocks It sounds odd, but you can store energy by stacking blocks like you're a megarich toddler. The company Energy Vault has a neat concept for a system that would give your family a very visible representation of its wealth and preparedness. When the system detects excess electricity, an electric crane starts stacking heavy blocks. When the system needs more electricity, the crane grabs a block and lowers it to the ground, generating electricity. According to [Quartz](https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/), "The round-trip efficiency of the system... is about 85%‚Äîcomparable to lithium-ion batteries which offer up to 90%." The conceptual rendering below would certainly give the family something to show off to the neighbors. [![Concept of Energy Vault system in action](https://i.stack.imgur.com/P7eP4.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/P7eP4.png) [Answer] I think you're drastically overestimating their energy needs: The pool can be heated via direct solar heat. Using electricity from solar just to run a heater is not efficient, instead they can circulate water into what is basically a radiator on a sun-exposed surface. There is no need for heating to run 24x7, as water retains a lot of heat. (Especially if the pool is insulated, and in a greenhouse-type environment.) The pool can also be used as a heat "battery". Because water retains a lot of heat, they can heat the pool during the day, then use that heat during the night to keep the house warm. Heating and cooling is the most energy-intensive part of a house, and not having to worry about battery capacity for that is very useful. (I'm going to ignore cooling, because if they need cooling, the solar panels are probably working just fine.) Combined with decent insulation and proper architecture, there may not be any heating needed most nights, with the only active component being a small pump. The remaining electrical usage is basically lights, appliances, and electronics. If they want to be prepared for off-grid use, they would probably have LED lights, and laptops have a battery built in already. The only real appliances to worry about at this point are: * Fridge/freezer (surprisingly efficient, especially if they bought smart.) * Stove (They could have an emergency propane stove, or simply not cook at night.) * Washer/dryer/dishwasher (There's no need to wash clothes/dishes at night.) * Hot water heater (The big load is from daily morning showers.) Basically, as long as they're willing to forego heavy usage of power at night when off-grid, they can get away with a surprisingly light battery system. You can't just take the energy usage of an on-grid house, and assume that an off-grid house will be the same; they have different priorities. That being said, if you still want an excuse for something bigger, they could be using arbitrage on the power grid: They have some kind of energy storage, they charge the system when power is cheap (at night, usually), then discharge it into the grid when power is expensive (mornings and evenings, usually). This also lets them sell their renewable energy when it's the most expensive. [Answer] Why have storage? A remote mountain chalet, I'd have a residential hydro electric plant with wind and solar [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6EwMv.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6EwMv.jpg) You could also have biogas production from the family's waste and green material and run the generators from the methane instead of propane. This is doubly viable if the family has cattle and/or horses. The biogas production could be set in the barn to use the animals' waste with a side effect of heating the barn in winter. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CgNFI.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CgNFI.png) Also a super efficient house means a super insulated house. Triple glazed gas filled windows. Fully insulated. You could even bury an Earthship style house into the side of the mountain so it's protected from the cold, avalanches and forest fires [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ejgv0.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ejgv0.png) An Earthship uses the front section as a greenhouse to grow food even in the middle of winter and requires very little heating to stay warm even in the coldest locations. The pool and spa would be indoor and could be heated from waste heat from log fire or waste heat from a biogas plant. You can do a lot without needing storage. [Answer] Hydrogen from solar panels and Fuel Cells So you generate energy, you just need to convert it into a long term energy source. Belgian scientist have tested making hydrogen fuel directly with solar cells: [News articles](https://cleantechnica.com/2019/03/03/belgian-scientists-announce-new-solar-panel-that-makes-hydrogen/) and link from [KU Leuven](https://nieuws.kuleuven.be/en/content/2019/ku-leuven-researchers-hydrogen-gas-panel) itself. With a "simple" fuel cell and the hydrogen you can create electricity any time you want. Your only limitation is the amount of hydrogen you can store. But with some precaution you can store quite a lot of hydrogen quite safely. [Answer] Weight. Either rocks or water. It‚Äôs inefficient but it‚Äôs simple (which is pretty critical if you‚Äôre in a remote part of the world), and doesn‚Äôt rely heavily on exotic electronics to work well. When you have spare energy use it to do work pushing the weight uphill. Pump water into rooftop reservoirs. Use big motors to lift heavy weights from the bottom of a deep well to the top. When you need energy reclaim the potential energy you‚Äôve stored (mass times height travelled times g) by letting the water flow down through a turbine or turning that motor into a generator and slowly dropping the weights. If you can move 1850 metric tonnes of stuff up 100m then in an ideal world you‚Äôd have 500kWh stores. In reality it will probably be closer to your 100kWh lower limit (and you‚Äôd have spent more energy getting it up there). It‚Äôs stored energy though: once it‚Äôs up it‚Äôs up. If you can move it higher you need less weight, if you can lift more weight you need less elevation. Now, obviously this method of energy storage works much, much better if you can do it at large scales and in appropriate locales. There‚Äôs a reason hydroelectric dams and reservoirs aren‚Äôt on every hillside in the world. A mountainside chalet though? Sounds like you have steep mountains on your side. And for an isolated chalet as part of a comprehensive power storage system a few big holes and heavy rocks might just cover you for a short time. [Answer] ## Rail Storage Besides pumped storage, the other option that uses the mountain terrain would be rail storage. As a bonus, it can also be used as the means of transport. The gist of it is a locomotive with heavy concrete blocks attached going up and down a hill: <https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11524958/energy-storage-rail> Getting 100 KWH is fairly reasonable by moving 100 tons down 500 meter elevation assuming 70% efficiency. Turns out the weight of a train car is around 100 tons, so you don't need a massive train for it. Basically you can have a very eccentric family that get to their home by an electrified rail. All you need to turn it into energy storage is fill a spare train car with concrete and park it at the top. When they're home and want the energy, they attach the concrete car and let the train slowly roll downhill. If they want to leave the house, they won't need the energy, so detach the concrete car and just use the lighter locomotive for transport. Hopefully they get back by sun-down so they have the energy generation to get back to their house! Or they can have 2 trains running on parallel tracks, but that would double the cost. [Answer] Electrochemical generation of cellulosic ethanol. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulosic_ethanol> Celluosic ethanol is a real thing, but currently uneconomical because yield is not worth the energy inputs. But in your fiction you could have something like a biofermenter for your people in which excess solar or wind is plowed into hydrolysis of cellulose, generating ethanol electrochemically. They could call it the still, and the product "moonshine". It would be flavored by whatever feedstock they used to produce it. The moonshine they make (out of hay and leaves) is used like propane for a generator and also directly to power vehicles. This is chosen because it is not from our world, but neither it is bizarre science fiction - a near future or close parallel dimension technology appropriate for wealthy people in the country. [Answer] There are many good answers here, so I shall add some oddball. [Super](https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/carbon-nanotube-super-springs) [Springs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube_springs). You wind up a fancy high density spring while you have excess power and tap into that energy when you are low. There are some works by Paolo Bacigalupi exploring this, such as [the windup girl](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6597651-the-windup-girl) [Answer] A mill run with storage pond, and using a water driven generator when the wind and solar energy do not bring in enough energy. You only need a small stream to top up the mill pond, as long as you need only relatively little energy. If the stream is not giving enough power with just one generator, you can make a series of ponds, with generators between the levels. The same water can be used many times, even without getting it back up the slope. But you could pump it back up in times where the solar and/or wind power give more energy than you need, making it into a kind of power storage. This would of course be in addition to solar and wind energy, and the power saving tips given in the other answers. [Answer] Any sort of non-battery storage feasible at the technological capacity of your characters would almost certainly involve storing energy kinetically, and so I would agree with your assessment that flywheels are the best system. Now, referencing you asking whether not using batteries is insane: to an extent, yes. Without a vacuum chamber in which to spin the wheel, frictional losses to air would seep away stored energy, however the flywheel remains the most efficient kinetic storage system regardless. Implementing such a system would not be difficult at all given the circumstances of your characters. You need to attach an electric motor to your power generation source and use that to spin up the wheel, and then use a rotating magnet mounted on the wheel‚Äôs axis to induce a current in a wire that you can move or remove depending on whether or not you want to take out energy or continue storing it. [Answer] A fuel cell would probably be the most convenient way of doing that. Alternately, if a fuel cell is too close to a "battery", use a water tower. Excess power is used to pump water up to a container at the top of the tower. When power is needed, a valve is opened and water falls down, powering a generator. ]
[Question] [ Me and my friend have a story we are working on, and in this story are alien civilizations that are around 500 or so years more advanced tham humans, one of these civilizations only has one country that is ruled by a sort of parliament like political party. I wonder, is that actually believable that species would come together like that and only have one country? (P.s. there are regions just like in a normal country, but it is just names given to different regions and nothing more) [Answer] Meeting other aliens could have prompted unification. Look at California and Texas. Or Scotland and England. Or Bavaria and Westphalia. They are part of the US, UK, and Germany, respectively, because their similarities outweigh their differences, compared to the other nations around them. Now imagine your aliens, trading and talking with each other, and making a big deal out of the fact that some tend to a different eye color and skin tone than the others. Oh, and the foreigners drive on the wrong side of the road, and attach ceremonial duties to hereditary nobility rather than an elected officials. Plenty to get chauvinistic about. And then suddenly a starship shows up, and the people in it -- they have to admit, they are people -- have not just different eye color but a different number of eyes. Makes those internal differences seem petty, right? The other aliens are offering to sell nifty technology, but it looks as if they're playing various nations against each other. How long until the global coordinating bodies become a real world government? [Answer] The Roman civilization at the time of the empire was ruled under a single nation, the Roman Empire. And they were more advanced than most of their neighbors. So, yes, it's definitely possible for an entire civilization to be ruled under a single nation. [Answer] ## Only if acted on by an outside threat One of the hallmarks of intelligent life is that we learn things we do not naturally know from our environment and the people around us. This means that people who occupy the same social spaces and face the same environmental factors will learn different things than other people raised in other environments and around other people. This is an unavoidable fact of how intelligence works. No matter how alien a society is too us in thier general values, logic, and technology, the divergence of cultures is inevitable. Another unavoidable aspect of intelligent life is selfishness... at least if said intelligent life is the result of evolution. Evolution requires that all organisms prioritize thier own genetic survival above the genetic survival of others. There are many cases where this means that the survival of kin can hold a higher importance than personal survival, but any organism that does not act in a selfish (or at the very least racist) way is at a competitive disadvantage because they are more likely to sacrifice thier life for other bloodlines that are not so selfless creating a more selfish next generation. This means that for any planetary/interplanetary government to exist, you must accept the likelihood that it embodies many different cultures and ethnicities. This is not a problem really, there are many large nations like that today, but they only exist because of the existential threat that they pose to one another. #### Fundamentally speaking, governments provide 3 services: Law, Welfare, and Protection. When it comes to Law, many small nations is preferable to a single big one. Because your species is made up of many cultures, different regions will develop different value systems; so, the bigger your government gets, the harder it is to pass laws that will not incite rebellion. Take the United States for example. Each individual state is generally able to agree on the kinds of laws that should govern each state, but the supremacy of Federal Law has been a huge destabilizing factor since the signing of the US Constitution. Every time the Federal Government tries to regulate anything like Abortion, Gun Control, Socialized Medicine, etc... it becomes hugely divisive and risks secession and civil war as one culture or group of cultures imposes its values over another. Right or wrong, it is more stable to let each culture write thier own laws. Welfare is also preferable at a small scale. Some cultures will inevitably become more prosperous than others which results in asymmetric costs. Because evolved intelligent life is inherently selfish, no intelligent being would want to pay into a welfare system to support people other than self and kin unless there was a perceived likelihood that such cost would be repaid. This is not just personal welfare but also includes things like one state bearing the burden of another state's debts, one company baring the tax burden to bail out another company, one state investing in another's infrastructure, etc. Alternatively, when you have a Federal system that refuses to redistribute the wealth, the poorer classes of people become angry, like how you see low income communities get upset about the lower quality of thier education. If your local economies are all in perfect balance, then Federal Welfare makes since, but when they become imbalanced it also provokes secession and civil war as one culture or group of cultures becomes parasitic to another. Protection is the only core function of government where bigger is truly better. Not only does a larger federation allow you to add together the resources of many regions to form a bigger and stronger army, but it also allows you to combine the best of many cultures. One region may provide the best soldiers, another the best weapons, another the needed economic and logistical backing, etc. So, 50 regions united under 1 government can be much stronger than the sum of all 50 regions acting on thier own. ... and this is where the outside threat becomes so important. If an alien species were alone in the universe, then as it approaches total unity, the value of military protection goes down, meaning that all the government has left to offer is Law and Welfare. This is extremely unstable, and can only lead to secession or civil war. So for an entire species with all of its different ethnicities and cultures to unite under one government, and stay that way for any significant period of time, there needs to be an outside threat powerful enough to make everyone willing to give up the benefit of many smaller governments. #### Possible Exceptions There are 2 possible types of intelligence that might be alien enough to prefer global unity: Hive minds and AIs. If all members of your species are part of a single hive mind, then there will only ever be one opinion about anything. In this case, there is no need for a government in the traditional since at all because all actions will be the result of a consensus. If you entire society decides today that that speed limit on the highway should be 120kph instead of 110kph, then no need for Law to enforce this choice because everyone already agrees it is the thing you should do, and if some people live in squalor, then everyone suffers; so, the consensus will do what it can to fix the problem. So, the functions of government that don't scale up well with individuals, are built in when your whole species thinks and acts as one. Non-hive minded AI could also achieve a singular government because it does not need to defined by evolution. AI can be 100% altruistic; so, even if AI creates a lot of different cultures, they could all value each other enough to see welfare alone as reason enough to have a global government, and not become resentful about any imbalances. While it is also technically possible for a totalitarian government to subjugate an entire species, but for the reasons mentioned above, this could only be a temporary and very unstable solution. No matter how many tools the government has at its disposal for keeping the people subjugated, you can only oppress the people for so long before somewhere in the collective intelligence of everyone below you, someone figures out a way to effectively depose you. [Answer] Yes. One of the major themes in the work of the sinologist Lucian Pye is that "China is a civilization pretending to be a nation-state". He says that in a 1998 lecture available [here](https://www2.gwu.edu/%7Esigur/assets/docs/scap/SCAP1-Pye.pdf), though I believe he first stated it, in a rather less quotable form, in his 1968 book The Spirit of Chinese Politics. And this is not the view of some crank; it's often one of the first ideas introduced in Western courses on Chinese history or politics ([for example here](https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/politics/documents/POL-GA-3501.%20001%20(revised)%20China%20the%20Civ-State%20syllabus%201-11-18.pdf)). Whether he is right at any particular point in time is debatable. On the one hand, you could note that in 1968 there existed two Chinese states (the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China); on the other hand, both of them adamantly insisted that there was only One China and made that central to their identity. But the widespread reception and diffusion of the late Dr Pye's analysis shows that the idea was believable, so the answer to your question is "yes". [Answer] Is it possible? We don't know. We have yet to accomplish it. Unless you've not included some details, what you're talking about is a planetary (or bigger) government. If you think about it, what's the difference between what you're looking for and the United States or the European Union? It's impractical not to have regional government. Cities have codes, Counties have codes, States have codes, Countries have codes, the Planet has codes. What's changing? You're not using the word "countries" anywhere because here on Earth the word "country" has ethnic, racial, and political connotations. Your question does suggest some other questions: * Can one species have one or no religion? * Can one species have one or no political ideologies? * Can one species have one or no nationalities or regional cultures? Here on Earth, the answer isn't just "no," it's "heck, no!" But that doesn't mean your civilizations can't. So, as I said, you have a planetary government. It looks a bit like the United States or the European Union, only bigger and with none of the traditional competition for sovereignty. It means your species is capable of getting along better than ours is today — which has its own implications! And those implications should be thought through by you. It's hard to imagine on the proverbial world with eight billion souls there isn't a single unhappy, grumpy, or selfish being. Because if you do have even one unhappy, gumpy, or selfish being, you have the seeds for sedition. Mazel'tov! The nature of political representation is that it's not impossible to have a single planetary government, but it's unlikely that it wouldn't be constantly fighting partisans. So the answer might be no... but don't let that stop you. [Answer] There is no obvious upper limit on the size of a single nation state. The entire earth has never been under one government, but how could we know it to be impossible? We could even imagine the UN evolving into a world government. But maybe there's some reason it's impossible - earth is the only example of a world we know about, and we've never had a world government. What we do know for sure is that you will be in good company if you write a novel with worlds under single governments. They are everywhere. Often they are bigger than a single world, but if you accept that, you have to buy single-world governments too. Consider the Federation of Planets, or Dune, or Earth and Mars in the Expanse series, or actually in any number of other works where those two planets (for instance) find themselves in conflict. [Answer] ## Yes We have accomplished it several times in our past. When communication and travel were both much more primitive, a civilization could be viewed as "everyone you know about or can reach." At one time, there were several villages that were all of civilization and they had a single government. Then we had the Romans as L.Dutch mentioned and the ancient Chinese, and the Mongolians (who came closest, I think), and Alexander the Great's empire. There are likely several others but you get the point. Then, if you play with the definition civilization, you could say that the ancient Chinese definitely achieved it since they thought that their culture was the only one that was civilized. Therefor they had a single government that spanned all of civilization. Also, you assume human motivation for aliens. Maybe their defense against predators and other threats was through cooperation and/or herd like behavior. If anything not of the herd was a threat then they would destroy or assimilate the threats. Note that I don't think that it is likely that a group survives long enough to become a civilization without having to compete against each other for scarce resources but it might happen. [Answer] Cultural Unification Maybe it's piling on at this point, but I felt the other answers weren't quite hitting the target, which is that this should happen naturally if there is sufficient cultural unification. Some mentioned the "outside threat", which is a good trope to ensure unification happens, but I'm not sure it's necessary. By cultural unification I mean that one culture begins to dominate the species. I believe we see the beginnings of that now, on Earth, with America, mainly because they are the largest producer of mass media (particularly television shows and movies), such that it's not unusual to talk to someone from Bulgaria or the Philippines or wherever and of course they are familiar with American music, television and movies. It's nearly unavoidable. There is, of course, in some places, staunch and very intentional resistance to American cultural pressure but the fact that the pressure exists is just a reality. It's easy to imagine that in 500 years, one culture dominates the world (the Chinese Communist Party, for example, would greatly prefer it is their culture, and not America's that dominates, thus "culture wars" are real, too). This should escalate as technology improves. 500 years ago, global cultural pressure didn't really exist because you could hardly travel from one culture to another, much less spread mass media. Cultural unification was limited to a relatively local level. 50 years ago, radio, television, books, magazines, movies, etc, allows cultural pressure to push a lot harder and a lot farther. 20 years ago, the internet really expands on cultural pressure. Now imagine there's futuristic cheap transportation that can take you 2000 miles in a couple of hours (or instantly via teleportation). Or "hyperspace communication" that allows a totally latency-free internet regardless of distance. As technology connects people, cultural unification becomes more probable. It's the same pressure that allows single countries to come together, only now it encompasses the entire species even more easily than it used to encompass, say, France. [Answer] Unclear. Probably not. How about a global E.U.? How do large nations form? * The large empires in the past were the result of conquests. Alexander the Great, the Romans, Genghis Khan: They all conquered and subjugated other peoples. This is one conceivable way to unite a planet under an autocratic rule. But only the Roman Empire existed close to its largest extent for more than a few decades. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Romans were good technicians and bureaucrats: Transport, communication and administration are core requirements for a sustained large-scale rule. A future civilization should have no trouble in that department. It probably helps if the new "administration" does a better job than the various old ones and living conditions are better. * Modern large nations that are or were not democracies, like the Soviet Union and China, are held together with varying amounts of force. If and when the center collapses, as it happened with the Soviet Union, the periphery strives for independence from the empire which they perceive as an oppressor. * The only large democracy, the USA, are an essentially voluntary union. Even though secession is not tolerated, as the Civil War shows, it probably would be difficult to prevent a determined state from seceding today. It is notable that the states forming the U.S. are fairly autonomous. A voluntary union has advantages concerning travel, trade, and defense. Americans like to emphasize that their union is based on a common ideal, perhaps an American "spirit" of freedom and opportunity for all. Your best bet is a global autocratic government which simply conquered the other nations. It should not be too cruel and still grant local autonomy, much like the USSR, in order to survive long-term. But what are the chances to have a global union of states under a central democratic government? A common ideal with which people can identify would help. A central government which is perceived as just, and living conditions that are better than with the previous nation states, would help as well. The constituting states will likely have a lot of autonomy in regulating their own affairs. Especially the requirement that people must perceive a benefit from a central government makes me skeptical. Even in moderately-sized nations, like Spain or Great Britain, there are substantial regional independence movements because people are unhappy with the central rule. One path to a global democracy could be a previous global crisis which the old nation states were unable to handle. Perhaps the current trend of indifference or outright rejection of democracy would lead to the rise of local, cruel, incompetent autocrats. The effect would be unhappy societies held in check by secret police, trade barriers, local wars, poverty and famines. A prospering union of free states with free citizens could have an allure which is stronger than nationalist delusions. Perhaps you are asking too much? An association of nations much like the European Union could avoid many of the perceived disadvantages while still providing many benefits like a common currency and no internal hostilities. Of course there is a spectrum of possibilities between the E.U of today and a more integrated union like the U.S. If that is enough for your scenario, some point on this spectrum could be the most realistic scenario. [Answer] ## Yes. Definitely. And 500 years seems about right. As time marches on, the planet will become more and more mono-cultural. We listen to music from anywhere, we see movies from anywhere and make friends online without knowing or caring where they are from. People convert religions all the time, or abandon religion entirely. Skin color and other visible origin markers will be spread out on the entire globe and every culture. The idea that there is any fundamental difference between "us" and "them" gets harder and harder to justify. Super powers come and go. At some point there will be only one, and it will conquer all the remaining non-super countries. This will probably not be a military campaign, but more like giving them offers they can't refuse. (You want to trade? Then join) There will be resentment. There will be rebels. But most people will be content with their jobs, their families and their Internet. There will be no successful rebels. This is one seemingly realistic future for Earth. But Earth is not everything. Some rebels will flee rather than fight. They establish a colony somewhere remote. Then, as technology improves, the remote colony will get a working internet connection to Earth, and few generations later few people will remember what their ancestors were arguing about anyway. Some people remember though, and they flee even further, establishing an even more remote colony. And so it goes. [Answer] Keep in mind that you don't need to write aliens as humans with tentacles. Aliens can have a psychology and sociology that is vastly different from humans. Which means that just because a certain political model wouldn't work for humans, does not mean that it would not work for aliens either. So: 1. Think about which traits of human psychology would be detrimental to a one-world government. 2. Remove said traits from the alien psychology and replace them with traits which facilitate the sociological model you want them to have. ]
[Question] [ Everybody knows that Santa employs elves to help him build his toys. Traditionally, they use hammers and other tools to build toy trains, dolls, horses, etc. As more children were asking for electronic toys for Christmas, the elves presumably started reading hammers in for soldering irons to build the circuit boards. But nowadays, computers, video game consoles, phones, and other electronics can have processors with billions of transistors. As skilled as the elves are, I can’t see their skills of handcrafting toys to be able to create something that complex. Assuming that Santa wants to keep his elves employed (rather than automating them out of existence), and that their only skill is in making toys (rather than factory building or whatever), How would Santa’s elves be able to build complex electronic toys? [Answer] I think you're giving the elves short shrift here. In particular, I think you may be focusing on the wrong elves. Consider the svartálfar or "black elves" in Norse mythology, who were responsible for crafting a golden wig for Sif among other treasures - and are often conflated with the dwarfs, who have even more amazing feats discussed in [this Literature.SE answer](https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/8975). Creatures capable of forging a self-duplicating gold ring, a boar with golden fur, a ship that can be folded up and put in one's pocket, and many unique weapons (including Mjölnir and Gungnir) clearly know secrets we've yet to plumb about the mysteries of the universe. I'm not going to bet that they can't handcraft modern electronics. The most obvious course is to use a variation on the folding-ship technique: work on the circuits at an expanded size that's more amenable to handcrafting (keeping in mind their ability to work individual strands of golden hair), then shrink them down to their "proper" size. Or if that's not dramatic enough, maybe it's the workers who are folded down to tinker with individual circuits. Sure, it's slow, but you can't put a price on proper (mythic) craftsmanship. [Answer] There are several foundries all around the world, producing integrated circuits for all our needs. These foundries run 24/7. Once in a while some produced chip is defective, and get discarded from the production line. Well, the trick is, the chip is not really defective. It's just a toll to Santa's production line. Then, once the chip is available, the elves can use their skills to assembly it into the desired product. [Answer] Santa not only have power to give things to kids who celebrate Christmas, but also the power to take things from ones who don't. Like those children who work at assembly lines in China or India. Elves? Just a cover-up story. [Answer] The workers in chinese factories who assemble iPhones aren't very skilled either. Chips are printed by machines. Elves are just the cheapest manual labor available, and Santa has just one upped every other third world country by having his assembly factory where no labor laws can reach. [Answer] Much to the surprise of conspiracy theorists everywhere, the true role of the Illuminati is that of Santa's supply chain. When the department of defense budgets $600.00 for a hammer, it is really buying components for Santa's elf minions. [Answer] Santa-type elves, Elfus SaintNickalus Arcticus, operate Santa's electronics manufacturing equipment building the printed circuit boards and microchips. Additional elves assemble these electronic components. Elves are excellent electronics manufacturers because of their small hands and mentorship training from other elves. They are excellent solderers and many are NASA certified. In fact, many elves worked on classified NASA projects because they were able to crawl inside the avionics compartments of the early space rockets which no human technicians were able to do. After the Cold War, the elves returned to Santa's toy production facility at the North Pole under the auspices of the United States Air Force during Operation Binderclip. This was all scrubbed from the official record to keep Santa's Workshop from becoming a primary nuclear target for anti-Christmas Soviet war planners. That's why I couldn't link any non-classified sources for you. Think about it: why does NORAD track Santa every Christmas season? It's how NASA and the USAF honor him for his still-secret contributions to space science. [Answer] Did you ever see Santa distributing complex electronic toys without wearing the brand of a maker ? The trick is there : Santa's elves only build unbranded toys. For trademark reasons, all branded toys are bought from their respective makers. [Answer] easy: Automated / computerized pick-and-place technology with board manufacturing on CnC routing, drilling, and soldering tables that have been computerized and fit into the assembly line. The elves run the robotic processes and troubleshoot issues on the assembly / production line, and refill the bins of components as they come in from IRT ordering vendors. [Answer] Santa has always been incredibly wealthy. The easiest and simplest thing for Santa to do is to sell toys to the open market and invest the profits in the stock market. If Santa had started doing this in 1933 during the great depression, he is easily the richest individual in the world, and can easily afford all the electronics that he desires. Giving away toys once a year would be one of the best marketing tactics to increase toy sales during the other 364 days of the year. Santa can easily afford to own significant portions of large toy and electronic retailers and manufacturers around the globe, as well as significant real estate for the polar express. It's no secret that his marketing works incredibly well - Boxing Day is one of the biggest sales days of the year. There is no requirement whatsoever that in our increasingly global economy, that Santa's elves should have to assemble every part of every toy by hand. No matter how many integrated circuits are involved in toys, there is always going to be a degree of manual labour and final assembly or testing that is required to ensure the quality, as well as selecting toys which children will enjoy. While some skill shifting is inevitable, with the increasing population and wide variety of desired toys from the good boys and girls all across the globe, I have no doubt that Santa can easily keep a full-time staff of elves as he always has. So there you have it, Santa is incredibly wealthy, orders and ships parts to the north pole using the polar express, and does the final assembly and testing using the same crew of elves he always has. ]
[Question] [ Following in the vein of super-villains with problems... I am an anonymous villain (the best in my world), and have recently bought some new land and am in process of building on it with the intention of making it my main residence. This land is in the form of a peninsula, and I own the "island" part, the "straight/connecting" part, and a few hundred square metres of the mainland. The "connecting straight" is quite a few kilometres long, enough that the island part is decently separated from the mainland. At its widest part it is over a kilometre, and at its thinnest it is around 300 metres. Also, the "connecting straight" is not totally straight, at one point it has a 45/50 degree turn. It has a few trees and/or bushes, but is not thickly wooded. There are also a few rocks strewn around. Now my problem is, how to prevent access without making it obvious? Obvious in my mind is men traipsing round the place toting guns. I don't want anything less than military (say a few tanks/people carriers) to be able to access. I will have a fair few visitors, which would fit into two categories. The first is the "hires", men which I hire to do my dirty work. These would arrive via land. Second would be important people I invite (such as the president, who believes me to be a good guy), which would mainly arrive via my yacht, picked up from the capital. The capital is about an hour or two boat ride away, and the area around the island/peninsula is very sparsely populated. So what can I do? Looking for suggestions that are within the realm of possibility in this world (as mine is almost a mirror copy), but can be very technologically advanced, and money is of no object. The time is present day, or a maybe a little in the future if it helps. [Answer] ## Make it a crocodile reserve Team up with some local wildlife preservation people and turn the connecting part into a reserve for endangered crocodiles. Breed them in your personal crocodile farm where you get them used to the taste of human flesh by feeding them mostly with captured spies and incompetent henchmen. Anyone stupid enough to ignore the signs will get attacked and eaten. Any official investigation into their demise will come to the conclusion that it was their own fault. Now how do you get your hired goons safely through the crocodile reserve? Crocodiles have a wider hearing range than humans, so you could hide some noise generators in the reserve which drive away the crocodiles by emitting noise in frequency ranges which are inaudible to humans. Someone who knows where the noise generators are hidden can travel along that safe path. When your climate zone doesn't suit crocodiles very well you can substitute them with snakes, tigers, grizzly bears or polar bears. I also hope that no spy will figure out how to sabotage your noise generators, or your personal army will be attacked by a hoard of hungry, man-eating crocodiles, which is bad because some of your beloved crocs might get hurt or overeat. [Answer] Dilution is the solution to pollution. Hide in plain sight. Open a big wide road. Set up a widget factory. Do some ecologic remediation. Reach out to local vocational schools and offer employment to the underemployed country folks. Have your picture taken with the graduating class. If someone (besides swanky guests by yacht) wants to come on to your property, have your PR people welcome them with open arms. Tour the factory where you are making widgets. They are not fancy widgets but they widg with the best of them, and they are home grown! If people ask why a vain supervillain is content with a widget factory you can answer that you are not: that you intend to open 3 more very soon because the first has been so successful. If they ask why you are not trying to take over the world, point out that what you really want is to help the world and what better way than to offer education and employment to the people. Hint that you may run for governor! People will get overwhelmed with the banality very quickly. Plus if your evil scheme falls thru you have the widget operation / governorship to fall back on. [Answer] I think in general you are over thinking it. How do rich people keep people away from their private property in the real world? Have a fence with no trespassing signs posted, including an access gate. Inside this perimeter fence have sensors (cameras, thermal, motion, etc.) to detect intrusion. A distance back from the fence (far enough away that it is not visible from the fence) have roving guard patrols to round up trespassers who pass the first perimeter. On the ocean side have signs on your dock or on buoys again stating that it is private property and no trespassing is allowed. Again have remote sensors in place to detect violators and a patrol boat to stop people from landing. None of these security measures would be that outrageous for a privacy oriented rich person with a large private estate. You should also cultivate a positive relationship with the locals, including the police force. These are the people most likely to notice anything unusual, they are less likely to say anything useful to outsiders if they enjoy some benefit from your residence. "Oh that's just old man Jones estate he likes his privacy, nothing to see out there." Most intruders should be caught and removed before they can even get close enough to observe anything unusual, turn them over to your friendly local sheriff (who really appreciates the new patrol car you bought them) and have them charged for trespassing. [Answer] Place a large waste water treatment plant on the mainland bit of the property, or on the narrow bit of the straight. It'll generally smell awful in that area, which will deter regular folks from dropping in without a good reason to. Nobody gets particularly curious about where their toilet water goes, and even fewer people really want to investigate it further. "What's that awful smell?" "Waste water treatment plant, move along nothing to see here" "You don't have to tell me twice." [Answer] Fake a nuclear accident. That is the only thing that keeps humans away. Doctor Doom’s [secret base](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll#Nuclear_test_site) on a south pacific atoll has been undisturbed for 60 years, and nobody has [visited](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat) Volkovich “the awful” in 40 years. [Answer] # A gate [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/drJgl.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/drJgl.jpg) Whats wrong with a gate? Just toss up a gate and most people will stay away. Add some barbed wire and even adventurous hikers will keep out. Anyone foolish enough to pass by your gate will have to deal with your henchmen/attack dogs/explosive [robo-snakes](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/75884/how-would-an-army-defend-itself-against-mass-robo-snake-attacks). [Answer] ## A single lane road down the center and copious amounts of landmines. Closer to the front door of your place you can have a check point with your standard military stuff to check on the vehicles. Having a single vehicle with guards patrol the road will ensure no one is dumb enough to walk in unannounced. If you want to make it a little bit better/safer for lost pedestrians a scary rusted gate and some quarantine signs wouldn't hurt keeping strangers away. I also like the option of pretending it is a wildlife preserve of some kind where humans aren't allowed because of some made up endangered species being repopulated there. ]
[Question] [ Let's say that in 1,100 AD, aliens secretly come to Earth and turn all of the titanium oxides into pure titanium.The aliens then leave and humans discover this new metal. By the late medieval era, forges should be powerful enough to melt titanium. If medieval blacksmiths had access to titanium and titanium alloys, would they use titanium in weapons, armor, and other metal tools? Or would the medieval blacksmiths just stick to steel anyway? [Answer] The main [advantages of titanium](https://special-metals.co.uk/titanium-advantages/) are the following. 1. Resistance to corrosion: This could be important, especially with weapons that were used then sat idle for some time. If there was a war then, say, 2 years of peace, your weapoons would be ready for use. You would not need to paint them or oil them or polish them or whatever. 2. Strength: It has the highest strength to density ratio of any metal. This could obviously be important. 3. Non toxic: This might not be all that important since steel does not tend to poison somebody who uses a steel knife or steel armor. This is usually only important in places such as pins to repair broken bones and such, where the object is to be left in the body. 4. Low thermal expansion: Under normal use this is unlikely to be important. It might mean you could make the joints on plate armor a little tighter without worrying about them binding in hot sun. But I don't think that would be a big deal. 5. High melting point: This is actually a drawback for people using bellows-and-forge type blacksmithing. It makes it more difficult to work titanium compared to steel. Under normal use it won't be important. 6. Easy to machine: That is, it is relatively easy to start with a block of titanium and cut it to the desired shape. This is less important for weapons since that is usually only a minor aspect of making weapons. One tends to forge a weapon close to shape and then sharpen the edge. For armor it might make the more detailed portions easier. Gauntlets and joints and such might be easier than in steel. That might make armor with smaller gaps. Disadvantages include the [following.](https://www.offgridknives.com/blog/titanium-versus-steel-scales-on-knives-pros-and-cons/) 1. It is harder to forge due to high melting temperature. 2. It is more easily deformed due to low modulus of elasticity. Could be bad for armor. Although some alloys can overcome this effectively. 3. It is more brittle than steel. So it will be inferior for any aspect involving prying or intense bending. You would not want a titanium screw driver or crowbar or anything like that. There is a kind of weapon intended to make holes in your opponent's armor by prying open small holes. Probably you won't make them from titanium. And you would need to design titanium armor carefully or that guy with a hammer becomes a problem. 4. It will lose an edge faster than steel. So it will need sharpening more often. In summary, there are pros and cons to titanium. If the metalsmiths could learn to make alloys, some of the cons can be overcome. It will tend to be applied to special purpose situations where corrosion and strength-to-weight are important, and where it does not have to stand up to intense bending force, and possibly where fine detail is required. So, some places (by no means an exhaustive list) it might be used: * Gauntlets and helmets where fine detail is important and excess weight a significant drawback. * Parts of a blade but probably not in the cutting edge portion. * "Trim" or possibly in coatings on certain things to reduce corrosion. * "Straps" to give tensile strength in some situations. As the backing to a blade or across strategic locations in armor. [Answer] As someone who has actually worked with titanium to make tools (I made a small axe and an ulu for game processing back when I was 17 and had a lot of time in a metal shop), medieval people would have stayed the hell away from it. It took days of work with modern tools. It would be absolutely horrible to use hand tools to work titanium. [Answer] Working titanium from a bar or whatever it is to the a usable shape requires additional effort and procedures with respect to iron. Considering that manual working is already time consuming, adding additional steps would probably severely limit the use of titanium. [Answer] Absolutely not. Titanium has absolutely fatal drawbacks compared to steel: * Smelting/forging is much more difficult because Titanium simply burns when it comes into contact with air at forging temperatures (and requires higher temperatures to begin with, which is a big obstacle if you don't have propane tanks handy ;). * Getting comparable properties to steel requires alloying. Your best candidate for weapon smithing would probably be something like <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ti-6Al-4V>, which contains both Aluminum and Vanadium; thats absurdly out of reach for a medieval society because they don't even know about elements (much less vanadium, which was discovered in ~1800), and aluminum processing is just... not going to happen. Its also unclear that even good titanium alloys would be preferable over steel for a weapon/armorsmith anyways: The main selling point of titanium over steel (corrosion resistance) is not really relevant, and weight is an integral part of any weapon, especially those intended for use against steel-like armor; making those weapons lighter is not really helpful. And even with armor, as I said-- you need both good titanium alloys (or the material properties can't even really compete with medieval steel anyway) AND forging/melting costs/complexity is MUCH higher. At that point, you would pay a huge premium for marginal gains: It seems very unlikely to me that the required industry/know-how for titanium forging could even develop and/or find any use... So even if medieval blacksmiths had access to titanium, there is ample reason to assume they would just stick with steel. ]
[Question] [ How would a non-lethal, hand-held ‘firearm’ (as in not a melee weapon) produce enough ‘force’ (I’m using this word lightly, not as a physicist) to throw an attacker back a minimum of ten feet, work? Right now my understanding is that this would be impossible given our current knowledge of science / physics, but I’d like this firearm, in my fictional world, to not entirely be pulled from thin air. This firearm does not need to be long-ranged (my original, non-informed concept was akin to a shotgun that shoots only highly compressed air strong enough to throw someone back without firing an actual projectile). I have considered shockwave technology, like the “Thunder Cannon,” but none small / portable enough exist and even if they did, one strong enough to throw an adult human backward would also liquidity their insides and the recoil would likely kill the one shooting. I’m asking for ideas, not breakthroughs: feel free to create any scenarios that allow your’s to work. [Answer] The real world problem you will run into here is conservation of momentum - if the projectile has enough momentum to knock the target back ten feet, the recoil of firing it has enough momentum to knock the firer back ten feet. Then if we consider falling ten feet as an approximation of the required impact, non-lethality looks questionable... However, can we deliver enough momentum to at least knock some one over without risk of serious injury? Perhaps... It wouldn't look much like a firearm - more like a rocket launcher. Rockets don't recoil because the propellant only pushes against the rocket, not a bullet AND the breech face of the weapon firing it, with equal and opposite force. Now we can fire a large heavy projectile with sufficient momentum to have a chance of knocking the target back or down. How do we stop it killing them? First launch it slowly. Second, fit an airbag triggered by a proximity sensor. Given our large projectile there should be more than enough room inside. The target will effectively get hit by a heavy pillow moving at baseball pitch speed, which could do the trick. Such a thing couldn't exactly be considered safe - getting hit in the head would probably snap the targets neck like a twig, but hits to the torso or legs are unlikely to do serious harm. Just watch out for the back blast behind the firer - it will be considerably more dangerous than the projectile! [Answer] Is it really non-lethal? If your weapon can knock the target back a few feet, there is a good chance they will hit their head, and thus it cannot be a truly non-lethal weapon. "Non-lethal" is really a misnomer, one sometimes used to validate police attacking civilians, but anyway... Use the elements Water cannons/firehoses have been used for riot control. Maybe some kind of souped up airzooka would work too Especially if the target was wearing baggier clothing that could work like a sail. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lIRnB.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lIRnB.jpg) [Answer] # The Turbo-bolo-net Lots of solutions are being posted but everyone has to accept the basic laws of momentum. You have 65-ish kilograms being thrown 10 feet, Isaac Newton demands that an equivalent mass be thrown in the opposite direction. This can either be a heavier mass thrown with less power, or a lesser mass with more power. In the end, the (mass times acceleration) on the left will be the same as the (mass times acceleration) on the right. We can’t escape this. So, you’re firearm tangles the bad guy in a net. On the corners of the net, drone pods light off and drag the net with bad guy to the wall. These little drone pods are little turbo fans on steroids. Likely they burn up with a single use, but they create such a powerful thrust of air that they could literally lift the bad guy up several feet before shutting down. The fans should be as simple as possible, and use no fuel. Let’s make them run by a steel spring wound to several thousand PSI, and geared to the fan blades by amazingly tough gears, in a hardened titanium casing. Now nothing is burning, it’s just air. The net and its four or six turbo fans fit into the end of your arm weapon, and are catapulted toward the bad guy. Fans fire up, net spreads out, you’re out of danger. So where is the 65-ish kilograms going backwards? It’s very light, but very forceful air. Very possibly dangerous thrust if your hand gets in the way, but I can’t be sure. Definitely bad if the intake hits anything. There is a lot of complexity in making this thing go in the direction you want, but at least Isaac is happy. Some other engineer will have to make it go straight. [Answer] ## You need to distribute force over time The difference between a punch and a shove is that a shove distributes the impact over time. With bullets, no matter what you make it out of, this is very limited. Even rubber bullets or bean bags would cause major trauma long before they shove a person back because you only really have a few millimeters of compression before the projectile become ridged enough to pernitrate the target. Instead you need to transfer the force using a fluid. Water works very well as you see with a Fireman's hose, but they are not portable; so, what you really need is a very powerful water gun. The strongest commercially sold water guns in the world use CO2 cartages like you use in a paintball gun. A typical paintball CO2 tank weighs about 24grams with a total potential energy of about 432J. Because a CO2 tanks loses efficiency as it decompresses and needs time to warm back up, the most sustained energy you can get out of a CO2 is about 1/4 of its total capacity over 5 seconds. IE: 20 J/sec. It generally takes about 80 J/sec. to even start pushing a normal grown person backwards. So, lets say you want to push someone back 10 ft over the course of 10 seconds, using a CO2 powered water gun, you would need to increase your total potential energy up to about 7000J which would need to be stored in a series of CO2 tanks that are opened in sequence to levelize out to a sustained push as the CO2 tanks lose pressure and cool down. Water guns also suffer a lot of energy loss over distance; so, while a 7000J tank system may work at near point-blank ranges, you may need several times this for a longer ranged water cannon. First, you will want a more efficient CO2 tank. A portable sized 3000 PSI fiberglass CO2 tank translates to about 80 Joules of potential energy per gram of weight after you account for inefficiencies like the weight of the tank itself and escaped gases, meaning you store the force required to push a person back 10ft from point-blank range with a set of CO2 tanks that weigh just 6lb. But, water guns are not super efficient over range; so, if you want to knock someone back from farther away like 10-20m, or someone who might weigh a bit more than average, I would expect you to need something more like a 20lbs of CO2 tanks at least. The harder part would be the weight of the water. A high end CO2 water gun can fire 30oz of water per second (usually in burst of less than 1 second). The higher pressure CO2 tanks means you could achieve much more force per mass of water; so, to get 8 times the force of a normal CO2 water gun with 4 times the pressure, you need 60oz of water per second. So a 10 second burst would require 600oz of water (37.5lb). So to give yourself a 10 second burst "portable fire hose" you would need about a 20lb CO2 tank, a 40lb water tank, and probably 5-10lb for the actual water gun, tubes, harness, etc. giving you a total weight of just around 65-70lb. While this sounds unreasonably heavy, keep in mind that the M1 Flamethrower weighed about 70lb and could only fire for about 15 seconds; so, basically what you are making here is a non-lethal flamethrower. Also, the weight of the weapon system will help offset the significant recoil. Can't say if this would be practical enough for your setting, but it would get the job done. It's also worth noting that getting hit with over half a gallon of high velocity water a second is still going to hurt quite a bit. Your target will likely sustain bruising anywhere the water hits him, and possibly break a few bones as he is knocked back and tumbles from the force of the spray... but it would be very unlikely to kill a healthy grown person; so, should still meet the qualifier of a "non-lethal" weapon. [Answer] Boxing glove on extendable linkage [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/j37id.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/j37id.jpg) Imagine a steampunk or cyberpunk version of this cartoon classic, but powered by steam or pneumatic pistons, and using advanced alloys that can give it a range of 5m. Not technically a ranged weapon, but Boxing glove rocket [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JV8pX.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JV8pX.jpg) As a last ditch effort, you could launch the boxing glove. Just be sure to bring extra ammo! [Answer] I think it is possible, with a squishy enough bullet: imagine something between the size of a volleyball and a basketball, made with a gelatinous substance which splashes around the target once it hits it. On impact the contact force will spread on a large enough area to be fairly non-lethal if properly aimed (aside from maybe broken ribs or dislocated jaws), and the imparted momentum will be enough to kick the target back or send them to the ground. [Answer] The Humble Gyrojet Balloon Cannon [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qb9O3.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qb9O3.jpg) Standard guns put all the energy in the bullet when it is in the gun. That means the shooter gets the same total force as the target. The gyrojet instead fires a small rocket that accelerates AFTER leaving the gun. This means the gyrojet has less recoil at the cost of added complexity. So rather than using a big compressed air cylinder to fire a big rubber balloon, use a small cylinder to lob a balloon that itself contains a smaller single-use cylinder. This cylinder fires midair and launches the balloon faster at the target without launching the shooter backwards with the same momentum. This is still a lethal weapon since the target might hit the back of their head and die and it's all your fault. No matter how good you are with the gun, you have no control over how and where the person you are attacking will land. The issue is how hard how hard do I have to hit them before they run away. It might be safer to launch a smaller balloon that breaks an arm or leg without propelling the target across the room. [Answer] # Rocket Propelled Net If you have a net tucked into a rocket capsule, I think it is feasible to fire such a system from a normal looking rocket launcher. Presumably you could manually set the net to deploy at a desired distance as well. The net would be able to distribute the force over a very wide area, allowing you to hit the target much harder than you could with a smaller projectile. With somewhat elastic net material, you could even distribute the force over time (like a trampoline), meaning you could push them a lot harder. However, while this could theoretically be non lethal if properly deployed, anything that is able to knock someone off their feet could very easily kill them on accident. If the net didn't deploy, if any solid piece of the rocket didn't get out of the way in time, if the net picked up something solid and rammed it into the target, or if the target falls over and bashes their head, you will have to find a body bag. [Answer] # Police Drone Capture Bots: Your average future police force is dealing with some pretty savvy rioters and criminals, Not to mention that police officers are outnumbered and in constant danger of being sued for excessive force. So to solve this problem, they've built capture bots to grab a hold of criminals and resistant citizens. If they resist too much, there's a rocket-assisted thruster to clear them from danger. These bots would be relatively small, but have flexible cables or sheets to enclose the limbs and heads of humans, leaving average citizens trussed up and ready for capture. They are smart enough to analyze behavior and adapt to keep their charges safe. If they need to remove a person from a situation (like thrusting them back from a police line or moving them out of the way of an oncoming car) they can't pick them up (they're too small) but they do have a semi-rocket/explosive charge to generate a LOT of thrust. So after securing a human's neck and analyzing the risk of injury to the human, they can blast the human out of harm's way with great force. In the event of a serious injury to the human, they are equipped with life-saving diaphragm and heart-stimulating equipment. They then call the paramedics for emergency assistance. But accidents happen, as nothing is perfect. It was the effort to save them that killed them, not the actions of the police. ;-) [Answer] This sounds similar to an existing less lethal weapon called a [bean bag gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_bag_round) (in simplest form, just a special kind of ammunition for a shotgun) that is used by law enforcement for riot suppression and in situations where someone is a serious, but non-lethal threat to themselves or others. You can watch a YouTube vide of one in action at [this link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=405ujFg3UwM). You might want to tweak it with more power, but a more compressible or larger diameter projectile, to get something close to what you are looking for. [Answer] I have heard accounts of at least one type of weapon that might non lethally force a human backwards a distance of 10 feet. The type I am thinking of would probably not be usable by human beings, and it would probably not be usable in most story situations. But possibly you might be able to use it in a story sometime. As well all know, toothed whales, dolphins, etc. use sound for echolocation. They use it to locate prey amoung other uses. Sperm whales are the largest, stongest, and most dangerous predatory animals alive today. And to gild the lily, there are also theories, with greater or less degrees of scientific acceptances, that sperm whales use their sonar to stun prey, or even to kill it, or even to predigest it! You may also know that researchers have dived with sperm whales, despite the sperm whales being by far the largest predatory animals living at the present time. And I have read somewhere on the internet that a diver was pushed backwards several feet in the water by the sound pulses from a sperm whale. I have also read that some divers hae felt their bodies starting to heat up as they heard and felt sonic pulses from sperm whales. Of course sound travels much better and is much louder in water than in air, so even it was was practical for someone to carry a 50-foot sperm whale in their holster, the whales sonar would have much less effect in the air. Of course a much smaller animal than a sperm whale could use their snout to push someone backwards a dozen feet in the water, and if they pushed hard and fast enough they might temporarily stun the person, who might or might not drown. One time I was talking a walk and a collie came behind me and pushed me forward, apparently trying to get me away from their property as fast as possible. I have also known a huge billy goat who cold have pushed someone a distance, and maybe stunned them while doing so. Of course there are land animals much larger and stronger than collies and billy goats. You migth also want to consider the rocket pictols tried during the Vietnam War I think. They were considered ineffective because they were nonlethal at anything but the shortest ranges, I think. I have also seen a design for nonlethal bullets in one or more anime. The shape of bullets is designed to fit into gun barrels, and also to penitrate bodies easier and do more damage. These ficitonal bullets had 4 long arms which were folded back parallel to the bullet and the shell when the round was loaded. After leaving the muzzel they would more out perpendicular to the axis of the bullet, due to springs or the spinning of the bullet, and would probably lock into place. Thus when the bullet hit the target, the four arms forming a cross shape would increase the surface area of the bullet and prevent it from penetrating into the body. And for all I know there could be a theoretical or real such design that inspired that anime. [Answer] Like an airsoft gun but with balls filed with very high-density air. On impact it should burst, releasing a wave of air in all directions potent enough to produce the said punch. The technology needs to make sure balls actually burst, or else you will get a regular (rubber bullet) gun. Not sure how many atmospheres do you need to have inside to produce this effect. [Answer] # Automate existing police tactics I will answer the title question and describe a method currently in use, which could move the target back a few feet, but maybe not exactly ten feet as asked in the body of the question. Instead of using a brute and dangerous physics solution involving reaction mass, leverage the tools you already have. There is a suspect standing on their own legs, and possibly walking or running. When a law enforcement needs to gain compliance from a suspect, they have two techniques which may, with very complex technology, be combined to literally make the target jump back several feet using their own legs. ## Step 1: Impact the Common Peroneal Nerve (side of leg) When a suspect refuses to put their hands behind their back for cuffing, an officer is trained to thrust their knee into the side of your thigh, between the hip and the knee. The nerve in your leg will be disrupted, and your knee will fold under you. So your firearm needs to be able to apply some rubber ball or soft device to this precise location on both thighs. If you gun had very advanced computer imaging and targeting, it may be able to calculate exactly how to launch a bolo-like pair of weights so they strike this nerve precisely. It’s very likely the gun operator will need specialized training and practice with this weapon to be accurate, and they need to know how to force the target into a good position for a strike. ## Step 2: Taser to the legs Just as your target is collapsing on their knees, your gun shocks their thighs with a taser and forces the quadriceps to contract completely. This will extend the legs with all the might their muscles can deliver. Since the target was already falling on their knees, the result will be the target jumps back like a grasshopper when their legs spring out from the shock. Now the force to throw your target back is delivered by their own legs, and the gun is easily manageable. This weapon takes a lot of training to ensure it is not dangerous. The target should not be moving forward quickly or they will lunge toward you instead of backwards (this isn’t entirely bad, they will still be on the floor). So have your operator well trained before using this weapon. [Answer] Is it strictly necessary that the weapon throw the target back 10 feet? Or is it sufficient to say that after firing the weapon, the target ends up 10 feet farther away? You should be able to accomplish the latter with a [directed energy weapon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System). Such weapons send a beam of microwave radiation at the target, heating up the outermost layer of skin until the target retreats from the pain (often doing so reflexively). Once out of the weapon's range, the pain instantly ends and there is no long-term damage. A rangefinder on the weapon can measure the distance to the target and only deactivate after they've retreated the desired distance. Current models are large vehicle-mounted units, but they're designed to work against large crowds. A lower-power version designed for 1-on-1 use could conceivably be miniaturized to something that's man-portable. The end result of firing such a weapon is that the target is 10 feet farther away than where they started. They moved those 10 feet under their own power, but your weapon forced them to do so. You're simply using thermal energy instead of kinetic energy. [Answer] How about a gun that shoots projectiles that baloon up in size to the size of a basketball a short distance before hitting the target. Such projectile would distribute the force much more evenly and, bonus, bounce around too onto anything that's nearby. It could be a plot device to shoot around corners and you could even have automatic rifles of these things. Maybe you could even have swords used as defensive weapons to "pop" such projectiles. Friendly fire would also be particularly dangerous as the projectiles wouldn't have enough time to fully expand, allowing for more story telling. The recoil shouldn't be too different from that of a normal gun. [Answer] It could be an expanding projectile which is a folded frame similar to a [Hoberman sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoberman_sphere). However, instead of going from a small sphere to a large sphere, it would be more suitable for launch from a gun/cannon if the projectile went from a rod shape (the size of a baseball bat) in the folded configuration to spherical shape (the size of a gym ball) in the unfolded configuration. Explosive charges at each joint rapidly expand the projectile. Because the frame is made of a flexible material, the momentum from the projectile is transferred relatively slowly from the projectile to the person which could enhance the push (similar to a person getting hit by a gym ball). A [recoilless rifle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoilless_rifle) could be used if recoil was a concern. [Answer] The momentum of the projectile has to be large but this doesn't necessarily mean that the recoil force needs to be large (although this is often the case). If you accelerate slow enough the maximum force won't be too large. Maybe some sort of rail gun to have high control over the acceleration of the projectile. The barrel would probably be quite long, to increase the accerlation time, and thick, to accommodate the projectiles. The projectiles would probably be large and massive but quite soft to not kill the reciever on impact. Or maybe the projectile could be a net with bolas. ]
[Question] [ The setting is the early 15th century C.E. My grandmother knew how to make delicious beancurd and it has since become famous as word spread like wildfire across the land. Business is good, as many travelers would make a stop at our stall, so now she is considering delivery services to reach more customers living in the other villages. The problem is that this beancurd cannot be salted as it will taste terrible and it will go bad after 3 days. She is very selfish and not even I, her next of kin, know the complete recipe. I love her and all but I can't bear to see her disappointed, any help would be appreciated. P.S.: the tech level is capped at that of 15th century Europe. [Answer] Pretty much forget about systematic perishable food delivery service in the 15th century Europe. Eat local in those times meant "eat what your village produces" for most of the people. And 20 km was already a remarkable distance for people who could rely just on their feet for moving. If you start putting on stage horses and carriages for shortening the delivery time plus a snow chamber for refrigerating the shipment you are also raising the bar of your target customers. But I guess that if some well off really wants your produce for them, they would find much more convenient to relocate you at their place than having a courier delivering it. Also because that would be much more of a status symbol. [Answer] Weekly Market There are weekly markets in the local town. People travel from several neighboring villages to attend. Your grandmother arrives a day early and rents space to prepare the curd to be sold the following day. Fermentation Fermentation is a common method of preservation. Fermented tofu exists in the real world. Any fresh beancurd not sold is fermented to be sold at a later date. It is fermented and sealed in wax much like a wheel of cheese. Then it can be transported long distances. Added Later: Another option is that Granny's special ingredient is her choice of coagulant. She cannot sell the tofu abroad but she can charge a premium for selling phials of coagulant. [Answer] # You don't deliver past walking distance. Beancurd is an especially interesting problem. It must be kept cool, or the shelf life is single digit hours. Refrigerated, it lasts 3-5 days tops. Freezing completely ruins it, so forget packing in ice. AND, it gets degraded by mechanical vibrations, so no racing over cobblestone roads! Realistically, the only way to get Beancurd to a customer in good enough shape, is to hand-carry it in a cooled basket. Wet cloth, and maybe a bit of ice in the bottom of the basket to keep the temperature down. Remember that while 15th century ice is available, it is a real rarity and only to be used for the most valuable of goods. So, you DON'T deliver. You make a fixed distribution point, and have the customers come to you. The same way that Dairies do, and Bakeries. Frankly, the concept of deliveries for perishables further than a quick run by messenger (maybe 3 miles) is quite a novel idea. [Answer] # River Transport As others have pointed out, bean curd degrades if shaken, so carrying it any distance in a horse-cart is likely to deliver an inferior product. Furthermore, bean curd is often packed in water to maintain its hydration and soft texture. This makes it heavy to transport. But, your grandmother's bean curd shop is likely located by a stream or river to provide power for the mill that grinds the beans, and to provide the copious amounts of water needed in the production of bean curd. So rather than take it by road, transport it by boat along the river. Boats don't jostle like carts. And they can carry heavier loads than carts. Water from the river can be used to keep the bean curd cool as it travels. What kind of boat is available depends on your exact locale. Maybe it's a barge towed by a mule on a tow-path. Maybe it's a punt, poled down the mill stream. Maybe it's a larger river boat of some kind. Maybe your grandmother buys a boat and sends you in it to deliver the tofu or maybe she simply pays a passing boatman to take the tofu to other villages where friendly shopkeepers have agreed to pick it up and sell it onward. [Answer] Instead of delivering, she can: 1. Go from place to place and stay a couple of days during which she prepares and sells beancurd to the locals. 2. When she is too old, she can teach young people of her family (the beancurd secret must be kept away from strangers) how to prepare beancurd. Then they will go from place to place and so on... 3. They even can settle and spread the concept around just like your grand-mother did. [Answer] Dried tofu. [![dried tofu](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PWV2k.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PWV2k.jpg) [https://www.tofutoday.com/dried-tofu/#:~:text=Dried%20Tofu%20is%20a%20traditional,known%20as%20%E2%80%9Cvegetable%20ham%E2%80%9D](https://www.tofutoday.com/dried-tofu/#:%7E:text=Dried%20Tofu%20is%20a%20traditional,known%20as%20%E2%80%9Cvegetable%20ham%E2%80%9D). > > How long does dried tofu last? It can be stored for up to 9 months > after packaging and can be stored for one week in the refrigerator > without packaging. > > > You dry your granny's bean curd. It becomes curd jerky. It keeps a long time. It is still delicious. I want some now! [Answer] Ready mix The secret ingredients are ground into powder form. This is delivered far and wide. All the householder has to do is add water or sprinkle it over their own cookpot. (As you may be able to tell I don't know much about cooking but I'm sure a DIY kit of some sort would work). [Answer] The answer is simple but this will require some changes: expansion. Considering the logistics in the other answers, long-term delivery is too difficult without special preservation methods (drying or fermentation) to be an option. Even over short term distances, bean curd "gets degraded by mechanical vibrations" (emphasis mine, quote PcMan) and does not travel well (even refrigerated, tofu only lasts 3 to 5 days). To put it frankly, Grandma may be incredibly selfish, but I'm willing to bet she ain't dumb enough to ignore the writing on the wall. Grandma will have to test family members for worthiness, have those who passed pledge their very souls to the cause of the Westerford Heritage Bean Curd (read: swear them to secrecy on PAIN OF DEATH), tell them the recipe, and then have them settle in other nearby villages, where they will make and sell her special bean curd. Y'know, like any family-recipe obsessed, slightly unhinged grandma would do if she possessed vision. This culinary cult, this savory secret combination, will create a 'cultlinary' franchise like the world has never known. Passed down and expanding through the generations through Grandma's wise method, this ever-widening web of bean curd stalls will not only spread, but evolve (like any "good" disease) until your world ends up with a beloved (and global) franchise named "Curdonald's." Tasty idea, right? [Answer] > > many travelers would make a stop at our stall, so now she is > considering delivery services to reach more customers living in the > other villages. > > > There is your answer. Tell the travellers that they can make a profit by selling the BC at the next few villages they pass through. Give them a discount for bulk-buying and off they go. You can mention that the BC will last for a certain number of days but point out that what they can't sell, they can eat. Alternatively, if you are a bad character, you can lie and say it should last for a long time. A traveller in those days would be unlikely to turn back and demand a refund. They will be making a serious journey not a sight-seeing day trip. [Answer] Gas it with Carbon-mono-xid or something similar, so most germs cant thrive. Freeze it on glacier ice in a box. Bake them on arrival. [Answer] ## Carrier Pigeons Grandma's bean curd is best enjoyed in small amounts; it's a delicacy after all. It may be impossible to carry the curd long distances over ground, because mechanical vibration and lengthy duration will degrade the curd. However, cages filled with pigeons suffer no such frailties. Once you've carried the birds from their homes to grandma's house, simply affix small vials of bean curd to the birds. Once you release them, they'll fly back home at 60 miles an hour. They're able to find their way back home as long as home is within 1100 miles; the longevity of the bean curd quickly becomes a more pressing concern. If it only lasts for eight hours, that means you're limited to a radius of about 500 miles. You may not be able to send great quantities, but it'll get there fast enough and it shouldn't be shaken too badly. The first recorded use of Carrier Pigeons dates back to Egypt in 3000 BC, so it fits well within your historical limitation. [I pulled all of my pigeon data from here, and there's more where that came from.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homing_pigeon) The marketing material simply writes itself; who wouldn't want to try a vial of Grandma's Bird Curd? ]
[Question] [ Or, more specifically : How, starting with a regular ~16th something-century sailing ship, could it be possible to modify it to go on both land and sea? In a pre-industrial setting, no fuel, no steam. Ideally, I'm looking for a solution that allows a seamless transition from water to land with little to no need to stop and change setup. My first instinct was to simply add huge wheels under the hull and maybe steer it with a second helm, but I have a feeling it might not be so simple. I'm not looking for a completely detailed scientific explanation, but for a mechanism that would be plausible enough without getting deeply into specifics. Edit : After reading some of the answers, I'd like to add a few questions on compromises : * Would going for detachable wheels result in a more realistic construct? * If it were to use some kind of supernatural force, what should it impact to be most effective? The wind? The weight of the ship? The resistance of materials? [Answer] > > The earliest text describing the Chinese use of mounting masts and sails on large vehicles is the Book of the Golden Hall Master written by the Daoist scholar and crown prince Xiao Yi, who later became Emperor Yuan of Liang (r. 552–554 AD). He wrote that Gaocang Wushu invented a "wind-driven carriage" which was able to carry thirty people at once. There was another built in about 610 for the Emperor Yang of Sui (r. 604–617), as described in the Continuation of the New Discourses on the Talk of the Times. > > > The precursor to the modern land yacht was invented in the summer of the year 1600 by the Flemish scientist Simon Stevin in Flanders as a commission for Prince Maurice of Orange. It was used by Prince Maurice for entertaining his guests. - [Land sailing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_sailing) > > > The real problem is that there were no roads to speak of, suspension was basic at best and couldn't take much load, no concept of pneumatic tyres. All the things that allow us to take a 40 ton lorry across the country didn't exist. Remember that we limit at around 40 tons and these are vehicles that are slow on hills, Magellan (for example) had small ships, they weighed upwards of 75 tons, wind alone would not have the power to move them up the beach, never mind up a hill. You're basically limited to putting wheels on a sailing skiff, the smallest and lightest boats they made. After which you end up with something that could be horrible to sail on land or water, but it might work. Use a setup with wheels on [leeboards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeboard) with the ability to lock the leeboards down into position. You'll want front wheel steering, rather than a rear rudder for stability on land unless you're only expecting to move at a crawl. Balance is going to be interesting. You need the leeboards aft of the centre of mass but they need to be at the centre of (lateral) water resistance. Fold up front wheel, make sure you get the wheels down while still in the water and you should be good to go. Finding a beach you can actually use wheels on is an entirely different matter. Most of the UK coast is shingle or mud which is hopeless, you need a sand that compacts nicely when wet, soft sand is hopeless. You need gentle shelving beaches up to your target destination, hills are going to stop you in your tracks if you want to sail. If you want pack animals to haul it on land then you have a better bet, but you probably won't be able to use a boat big enough to take them with you. [Answer] Given the right conditions: a relatively flat beach, long stretches of flat land, relatively light weight boats etc... you can build sand sails. A modern example is here: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5W4z3.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5W4z3.jpg) Image taken from [here](http://www.geograph.ie/photo/4665884) On googling a bit, I found that [land-sailing](http://sandyhistorical.org/2015/12/08/land-sailing-a-brief-history/) with sand-yachts have apparently existed since the 6th century CE. An older (probably Victorian) example can be seen below: [![sand-yacht](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3coso.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3coso.jpg) Image taken from [here](http://sandyhistorical.org/2015/12/08/land-sailing-a-brief-history/) [Answer] Actually you don't need to guess: The vikings did this by making VERY flexible light flat bottomed ridged hulls on their long ships and they were designed deliberately to be dragged / bent / stretched over land. Contrary to most "re-enactments" on TV or by amatuer enthusiasts, (and even the academic fraternity who won't admit they don't know wood) Viking longships were "bendy" they wobbled along the sea! they were NOT stiff. Despite all the reenactments by modern historians they constantly (wrongly) modeled Long Ships trying to make them stiff hulled (they way we make them today) - they were NOT. They were made using splits of spring wood that was then sort of "carved out flat" CARVED using a special tool we no longer make to be straight. NOT what we think of when we say "planks". All these skills are lost to us now. [Look up Thomas Finderup](http://www.osebergvikingskip.no/eng/documents/reconstruction.html). > > "a ship that doesn’t need to fight the forces of the sea, but rather > leans sideways and dances her way through the waves" > > > [![The log has been split into halves, quarters, eights and sixteenths. Chopping the planks can begin. (Photo: Thomas Finderup)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cZGop.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cZGop.png) > > The log has been split into halves, quarters, eights and sixteenths. Chopping > the planks can begin. (Photo: Thomas Finderup) > > > I've seen Norwegian woodsmiths trying to copy it but they admit they are keen amateurs in what they realise is a life time craft. They know they did it by the tools they left behind. (like a upsidown trenching tool) It was a "normal" way for the Viking long ship to be used. they traveled from Scandinavia to Byzantium (Black Sea/ Turkey) through Russia using this technique - by using only long ships and the rivers are not joined up. And do not think this was a rare event: Damascus Steel from Arabia was traded/introduced into northern Europe by the Vikings (they consistently supplied it, despite never knowing the recipe themselves!) It made the material incredibly infamous almost 1,000 years before it was "invented" again, it's the origin of the idea of a "magical sword". And this journey they made habitually was so widespread it's the reason "Russia" got the name "Russia"! (The Byzantines/Turks named them "Russ from the North" because they believed the northerners were from what we call Russia" but we know they weren't - we know now they were Vikings from Scandinavia merely coming from "Russia") hence the name "Russ" meaning "Red headed people" - it was a misunderstanding of how far they had traveled in ships over land and river and evidence of how often they did it. The vikings crewed/loaded their ships with enough men to row, sail AND heave the long ship over land (without logs etc). They were seen as synonymous activities. the ship keel warped and "slid" to the shape of the ground and kept in constant contact with the land across a large area and so slid amazingly well [Answer] You have to ask yourself if there is a reason that ships benefit from traveling over land when in our world it's such a rare occurrence. I trust that there probably is. You will certainly need wheels and suspension. They will need to withstand the compression of the entire ship, which likely means many small wheels for flexibility and redundancy. For the suspension, look at ones on ore hauling trucks or other massive mining machines, or the ones on tanks because of the many driven wheels. It could be inside the ship and not explained, though. If you use the minimum number of wheels, probably three, you will get three inconvenient, drag inducing discs while in the water. Your power source, wind, will work some of the time, but at reduced power. You will be becalmed often. I would say use beasts of burden, but that would only work if the pack animals were sourced externally when the ship docks, as there is no way to carry such a herd onboard. Whether you have triceratops or mules, the power required to pull the ship is the same, only the number of animals differs. Otherwise, you will have to use fuel or magic. I know you said pre-industrial, but technology associated with industrialization can exist without triggering it. If there are pressures to invent land-ships, the innovations will come. [Answer] You could build big boats or small ships with windmills (this was actually proposed about 400 years ago) or with some type of wind turbines, that are geared to turn lots of paddle wheels on the sides. With proper mechanisms, the side wheels will drive the ship forward no matter what direction the wind blows from, and the ship will not have to tack or anything. So maybe those ships become common in your world, and then maybe someone thinks of modifying the side wheels to be able to take the ships over (flat) land. Many rivers have sandbars at their mouths, and thus many ports had sandbars and ships often had to wait until high tide and/or lighten their loads to get over those bars. I think there was even a process to attach two special barges called "camels" to a cargo ship and pump water out of the 2 camels so they would rise and lift the cargo ship high enough to pass over the bar. <https://www.navyandmarine.org/ondeck/1800camels.htm[1]> Abraham Lincoln patented a device to lift riverboats over sandbars. <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/celebrity-invention-abraham-lincolns-boat-floater/71427/>[2](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/celebrity-invention-abraham-lincolns-boat-floater/71427/) So if the wind turbine driven paddle wheels can move ships over land as well as sea, they can be used to drive the ships over the sandbars at many harbors. And maybe in your world there are two oceans separated by an isthmus which is very flat and low at its narrowest part. It is miles wide at the narrowest point, but so low and flat that the ocassional storms flood it and the waves keep the land flat. So these ships can sail over the flat part of the isthmus instead of going thousands of miles out of their way around one or the other continent. An alternative would be to have a ship which uses sails to sail on the ocean but also has wheels or can attach wheels to sail over flat land when the wind is good enough. If the wind is bad the ship will have to tack a lot and the going will be slow, just as it is on water. And I can imagine a ship like a galley, which had both oars and sails, but instead of oars has treadmills for the sailors to walk on & turn many side wheels. And maybe those side wheels can be used to move the ship over flat land. And sometimes when the ship is on land and the wind is from the right direction the sails can be used to help drive the ship on land. [Answer] [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7BMOA.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/7BMOA.png)As previous answers mentioned this would have been super difficult to pull off back in the day. I think the closest I've ever heard of was of Lewis and Clark using pretty light canoes made from trimming the inside of tree trunks and leaving a couple of the branch stubs on to use as handles when carrying between minor rivers. The scale of this project would be a lot bigger. The most practical would be to try to add wheels in the bottom the your boat but that has insane room for error, and even the simple task of getting ashore would be difficult. How ridiculous are you willing to make your design? It sounds super stupid, but what if you made a giant wooden hampster wheel with a horse inside? Until the horse dies, it could make the hamster wheel go over flat surfaces like roads, and even make some progress on water if the wheel had treads engraved into the rims and sides. [Answer] If you want sixteenth century sailing ships that can transition from sea to land and sail on land, and other answers point out the benefits and difficulties of land-sailing, you need the power of magical levitation. It is noted that magic isn't forbidden in the question, so this answer will apply it as a proposed solution. Magical levitation will be effectively a ground effect similar to hovercraft, but powered by magic. The magic levitation only works wood (which sailing ships are usually made of, especially sixteenth vessels) and the ground (soil, rocks, and the other stuff land is made of). Water tends to nullify the levitation. This means it only works above the land. A sailing ship that levitate to a modest height, say, a metre or two or whatever you feel is comfortable for land-faring, levitating mariners, will be able to behave exactly like a conventional sailing ship above and on land as it were, in the same manner that it would if it was sailing the seven seas. This model doesn't require any complicated refitting of vessels when they go from to sea to and, and vice versa. There is no need to overload your world with too many forms of magic. Introduce only this one form of magic levitation and ships can sail land and sea. [Answer] You never said anything about magic, but judging by the fact that you want no oil or steam engines involved, I'm going to assume that you want a pure pseudo-engineering answer. Wheels was also the first thing that came to my mind, but you mentioned that the boat shoud be ready to ride earth as soon as it comes out of the sea. So, the first part of this answer is treadmills. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tuwES.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tuwES.jpg) Of course they would have to be made of wood since you're proposing a 16th century boat. Also, there's the aerodynamics issue - I don't know much about boat design but I'm pretty sure the bottom part of the ship must be smooth. If you choose not to ignore the aerodynamics factor, meaning they can't be permanently attached to the ship's bottom, these treadmills are probably kept within the boat (maybe in the same fashion as lifeboats are stored, kind of hanging by the side of the boat). Once the boat approaches the shore, they are lowered and, with enough speed, the boat can make a transition to land. It's not ideal, but I think it deals with rougher terrain better than wheels and also it will be harder to get it stuck on sand, for example. --- EDIT: The treadmills could be in water level, or even submerged. They could have pads attached to them in a perpendicular way and they would be connected to a wheeling system. So this boat would need people to turn these wheels. These people would move the wheels, make the treadmills run and move the pads, what would also accelerate the ship. So this cound be an archaic acceleration system for this ship AND the very thing that makes it amphibious. When close to land, some contraption would lower them, retract the perpendicular pads and place them in a tank-like manner. It would have momentum to move in land and people to keep wheeling it and making it move. [Answer] I’m imagining the places below decks where many rows of people rowed big oars together to propel a boat. However, these are replaced with cranks that spin wheels instead. Perhaps it could be on a lower deck than the one with the oars. [Answer] A short hail to vikings in the other answer. # Portage Basically, relatively small ships can be howled by manual labour or horse power over some distance and relatively smooth land areas, typically from a river to another river or lake. In Scotland and Ireland such places are known as [tarberts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarbert). In canoeing this is also known as a "carry". * A [70 km long portage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%E2%80%93Volga_Portage) a known. (They built a channel somewhere in the area at some point.) * [Seven carries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Carries). [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RiIXw.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RiIXw.jpg) [Image source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yermak_Timofeyevich_and_his_band_of_adventurers_crossing_the_Ural_Mountains_at_Tagil,_entering_Asia_from_Europe.jpg). [Answer] Making a ship that works on land forces you to take the worst of both worlds. Ships are designed/built to withstand different stresses than land vehicles. They also steer/work differently than land vehicles. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keel> Trying to combine both traits together into a single vehicle is something that we can't/won't do even with modern technology. Therefore, less advanced technology isn't going to solve this problem As brought up before, in order to steer, a ship needs resistance. Ships heel - they tip - as part of their normal steerage. In order to replicate this, you'd need an entire suspension system built - which would be heavy, ruin the sailing profile of the ship unless it's completely retractable, be well beyond the capabilities of the time period to produce, and be very easy to break even if you got it running. Therefore, we need magic. The core problem is that ships travel on water, and land is not water - so let's make the land act like water. Your ship has a good working relationship with the Alchemist's Guild Your ship has a keel lined in lead, and a series of pipes/masts projecting forward from the hull. There are a number of simple pumps that push small amounts of liquid out of a series of tiny little holes at the front of these pipes. This does make your ship a little less agile in the water than it would otherwise be, but when you approach land, your crew starts in on the pumps, pushing a mixture of air and.... Alkahest <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkahest> Yes, the universal solvent! Generally thought to be useful only to clean out those really stubborn stains, you've figured out a second use for it. Projected with sufficient force, with a mixture of air, you create what is in effect a cavitation effect in soil [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bDQob.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/bDQob.jpg) Which with the proper mix allows your ship to simply plow through soil as if it were water. Your turning radius isn't great, and if the pumps ever all fail you have some problems, and you want a relatively flat surface. But hey, you can sail on land! [Answer] How about port facilities that provide you with wheeled trailers? You sail as normal at will and get strapped onto wheels, with minimal hassle, when approaching land. This is what happens now anyways with (relatively small) yachts: When (anything up to) a traditional wooden boat of say 12 meters gets out of the water where I live, typically every two years early winter, you sail to the inclined plane of the harbour where somebody has rolled a trailer into the water (attached to a tractor or a fixed winch), you somewhat fasten the boat to the trailer and the boat gets dragged out. You need a lot of power, because it's a 20degree or more slope. [[Bigger boats in other locations get lifted out with cranes, which give opportunities for disasters, cranes toppling or cradling bands snapping or boats sliding out --- enough videos on YouTube.]] Once out of the water, mostly the weight keeps the boat in place on the trailer. Now in your situation, the terrain would be suitable and an economy would have sprung up around it. So you'd have wide open hard sandy beaches (or purpose-built causeway across) connecting to flat(tish) hinterland giving clean and sufficient wind (obstacles cause turbulence). Then there's no need for external power as there's no steep incline, nor seawalls blocking wind, nor sharp corners from incline to workyard. So the receiving harbourmaster in his watchtower sees your boat approach from far, directs you to the right lane ---one for large boats, multiple for smaller boats; possibly more destinations out for smaller boats as they're more manoeuvrable and can be pushed/turned manually at a pinch-,--- and he'll have a correctly-rated trailer ready for your boat to fasten to; you'll rent this trailer until you return to this (or an allied, see the Hanseatic League) port where you reverse the move. Note that on average, during the day wind goes from beach to land but at night from land to beach; this due to temperature difference causing air pressure difference. Thus scheduling to return to the same beach isn't ruled out, as it isn't pure chance how the wind will blow, so some economic infrastructure can be sketched out for this. Or you can imagine some sort of guiderail-infrastructure crisscrossing the hinterland, taking over the role of a keel/sword in sailboats. I'd have a large flat deserted island with cities on hilly outcrops where something special is mined; otherwise either the houses in the plain would get randomly destroyed (day or night) by these rather hard-to-stop juggernauts, or there would be no reason for crossing this desert and hence all this infrastructure. And maybe tricky creatures/crevasses in that desert, making foot/horseback/camelback travel unwise, and robust boats the answer; otherwise the jump from individual/caravan travel to the large cooperative setup required might not be feasible. ]
[Question] [ My (science-based but certainly not hard sci-fi) world is basically a large island run by a couple of mad billionares. They have each built an army of aircraft armed with cliche "futuristic" type weapons such as rail/coilguns, lasers, plasma-bolt weaponry, and both charged and neutral particle beams. Battles happen at both low and high altitudes within the atmosphere. Lasers are primarily used against smaller craft. Railguns, plasma weaponry, and particle beams are used against larger ones. They have the technology to create large magnetic fields to deflect plasma and charged particle weaponry, but the destructiveness of these weapons keeps them in use. How can I justify the use of so many diverse types of weaponry? [Answer] Variant defensive technologies, which are effective against some weapons but not others. For instance, magnetic screens can deflect big plasma blasts but a laser will slip right through. Superconductive armor easily absorbs the heat of laser hits but can be shattered by kinetic weapons such as railguns. Certain weapons are more or less effective against point defense lasers, explosive reactive armor, or void spaces. The "ideal" might be to have a single warship that's bristling with every weapon and armor type in the book, but since these are aircraft, they probably can't bear that much weight and fight effectively. So designers have to choose which offensive and defensive systems to mount based on what they expect to encounter, among other factors. [Answer] Toys for rich people "What the hell was that, recruit? I don't care what they told you in training! You do not shoot opponents with downed shields! And if your shield goes down, you better believe you fake engine trouble and get out of the fight! Or one of the red team will put a particle lance straight through your cockpit. And, should you survive, I'll kill you. We have an arrangement! You will not threaten that!" Your world is run by crazed billionaires who like people fighting for them. That means the fights should be spectacular - not just some boring, practical explosives, but a light show of explosions. It turns out that plasma looks cool. As do lasers. Particularly when they hit cool shields. The fights are more like a high tech gladiator match than a real battle. No one really wants to be here, so there's deals from both sides to keep casualties to a minimum. The best way of doing that is with weapons that shields stop, but that look spectacular. Weapons would be designed to take shields out fast, and force a surrender. For a real life example of combat that looks like this, Italian mercenary companies in the Renaissance era were known for, when deployed against each other, just pretending to fight to appease their employers. At least one employer reprimanded them and threatened to take away pay for this. [Answer] Give all weapons specific advantages and drawbacks which make them useful for different situations. Those advantages and drawbacks can be: * Cost + Of acquisition + Of maintenance + Of firing them * Combat efficiency + Accuracy + Range + Destructive power vs. different kinds of targets + Ability to hit moving targets + Psychological effect * Scaling factors + Some weapons might not be possible to miniaturize below a certain size. + Others might only give diminishing returns if scaled up above a certain size. * Strategic aspect + Maintaining stealth while firing the weapon + Using the weapon without direct line of sight + Mobility + Weather influence + Being able to inflict lots of damage in short amount of time vs. continuous damage over longer times. * Logistics + Ammunition requirements - Some ammunition might be heavy or bulky - Some ammunition might have a limited shelf-life - Some ammunition might have special storage requirements - Some ammunition might be difficult to transport - Ammunition is not just what you launch at the enemy. It can also be things like coolant, power cells, lubricants, weapon parts which require constant replacement and other things you consume while using the weapon. + Power requirements + Technology required to manufacture/use them + Training required for using/maintaining them + Ability to acquire certain weapons or the resources to manufacture them. * Social factors + Some people might be subject to legal requirements from their overlords which prohibit them from owning certain weapons. + Some factions might refrain from using certain weapons due to moral objections ("too cruel", "unacceptable collateral damage", "for cowards" or "not cruel enough"). + Some factions might prefer certain weapons just because it's "on brand" for them. All of these factors can influence who would use which weapon in which situation. Some SciFi universes you might want to study because they too use very diverse arsenals of weapons are Battletech and Warhammer 40k. Which both happen to have their roots in very complex tabletop wargames. This explains why both universes feature a diverse yet balanced arsenal of weapons. [Answer] ## They each work better in different situations. As an example, let’s look just at lasers. They have a couple of distinct advantages if we assume ‘standard’ sci-fi physics: * On planetary-surface scales, they’re functionally hitscan weapons (IOW, if you are aimed correctly when you pull the trigger, you hit the target, period). * They have zero projectile drop (IOW, you aim straight where you want to hit). * They can be relatively compact for their power output. * They can trivially be made silent. They also, again assuming standard sci-fi physics, have some pretty distinct disadvantages: * They are only line-of-sight weapons unless you have mirrors available. This means you cannot shoot around cover (like you can with ballistic projectile weapons) without special preparation. * They are more significantly impacted by things like fog. * They have more difficulty shooting through opaque materials. This is stretching it a bit, but if you’re hand-waving this, then it’s very likely that you’ll have better use for your power supplies as simple explosives. You get the same kind of thing with other weapon types though. Sure, a coilgun may be better than a classic firearm because it’s quieter and can be constructed so there are no losses to friction due to internal ballistics, but a strong magnetic field can block the projectile unless you spend a lot of extra money and mass on integrating a non-magnetic projectile with a discarding sabot-style carrier. Sure, a charged plasma weapon will easily destroy most electronics, but it’s a pain to get the plasma to stay coherent as a ‘projectile’ or even a stream for more than a few meters if you’re in an atmosphere, and you’ll also tend to set things on fire with it. And this is all ignoring any story-specific reasoning that the people who are claiming you need more worldbuilding seem to be fishing for. [Answer] Cost What if you do not jave enough money for 1 weapon, so you have to buy another type, but due to having some money left, you could only but a few of the first type? As confusing as that sounds, what I am talking about is that they may have a variety of weapons, because they cannot have all of 1 type. Envrionmental Conditions What if some weapons cannot work in different environment areas? What if there are different types of force fields? What if... This could go on forever, but depending on environmental and physical conditions, you may need a diverse set of weapons, so that the billionaires can still have some forms of defense What the enemy has Perhaps maybe why there are diverse weapons is to have some sort of advantage against your enemy. Maybe he can only bring in one type, so you have to bring in the type you have that is superior. Or, depending on their attacks and ambushes, they may need different weapons depending on the plan. In conclusion, I suggest that you add more information to your world, including: * More on the Politics * Economic status * Envrionment(s)/Geography * Outside problems Aside from that, based on the information you have given, this is all I've got. [Answer] Expanding a bit on what Cadence and others already posted: Each weapon has its uses. * Lasers: it makes sense to use them primarily against smaller craft, and probably also against enemy missiles and large projectiles. Lasers move at the speed of light, have no noticeable projectile drop, and aiming them probably does not require moving a huge barrel around. * plasma-bolt and charged particle beams: very destructive through delivering heat and electrical charge, but probably not so great at punching through armor. Can be deflected by the shields you mentioned. Use them on large enemy craft after their shields are disabled! Atmosphere probably diffuses these very quickly, so they're more useful in high altitude (or space, but you said all battles are somewhat in atmosphere) * neutral particle beams: not sure how to imagine these. Accellerating particles is easiest if you can use a magnetic field because they're electrically charged... but as a basic premise, they would be a beam of non-charged particles with high accelleration, so a slower-moving laser that packs more of a punch? If so: less useful against fast small craft, better against big ones. Probably designed to destroy shields, since those work well against the charged variants - so their use is likely to break down the shields of large craft, after which the other weapons can be brought to use! * railguns/coilguns: a LOT of punch in there for relatively low energy investments (just have to accellerate the projectile, not ionize any particles or anything). But the projectile has travel time, and aiming requires moving a large, heavy barrel with lots of magnets and cables around. Probably punches through a shield without actually destroying it, and is good at damaging armor - but to cause relevant damage, you need to hit, and hit something important. Otherwise you just created a new window. Best used to punch through large crafts' armor so the charged particle weapons can wreck havock inside the ship after the neutral charge beams have disabled the shields for them. So giving up on any one weapon class would put whoever did it at a disadvantage. * No lasers? No good way to easily shoot down small enemy craft and missiles (if they use those, you did not list them) * No neutral-charge beams? Enemy shields will prevent your charged beams and plasma bolts from hitting! * No rail-/coilguns? Enemy armor will prevent your charged particle weaponry from reaching important systems, massively reducing their effectiveness. * No charged particle weapons? You're giving up on superheating the insides of the enemy ship and overcharging their electronics after you're through the shields and armor. That's the best way to deal REAL damage though! [Answer] Lasers can target very quickly, essential for a point defense weapon. However, they produce a lot of heat and thus aren't too good on offense. Thus they are essential but can't do the job themselves. Your two charged options can be shielded against, you need something that can pierce or take down the shield. Particle beams of any type have the same heat problem as lasers. Your plasma weapon is probably the best at actually destroying something once the shield is down (although you very well might have a situation where it isn't normally actually used--the norm is to surrender when it could be used on you.) ]
[Question] [ I am looking forward to create anthropomorphic dragons/lizards with 8 fingers (3 + thumb). As they base their number system on it, the powers of 2 are recurrent. Would this grant any advantage for the understanding of electronics and the math behind them? Would they create machines faster than humans? [Answer] Probably not While it is true that a Base 8 system would mean that the general public would be able to work with programming numbers and hexadecimal better, anyone who uses those number systems with any frequency very quickly acclimates to the various base systems within any programming language. There are programmers who can just offhand convert numbers to bit to hexadecimal with barely any inconvenience. So, while the general population gets a slight advantage, the part that actually works within computer sciences would be just as capable as the humans who work within our computer science fields. [Answer] As a computer programmer and electronic engineer I can say the answer is no. For a fairly short period in our history there was some advantage to being familiar with base 8. When computers were new and not very powerful and more importantly when software development often involved understanding the internal workings there was an advantage to base 8 because of its relation to base 2, the fundamental base for computing due to the laws of physics. But that time period is already over. Most people programming or using computers don't use binary or octal (base 8), or if they do not to an extent where being familiar with it would be a significant help. I've mastered base 2 and base 16 well enough that I can work right down at that low level, it wasn't particularly hard and my job is quite specialist. [Answer] Actually they might be "disadvantaged" in mathematics pre-electronics.. And by quite a lot. Using base 10 means that you have the prime factors 2 & 5. This in turn means that any vision by a multiple of those prime factors [1/2, 1/4 = 1/(2\2), 1/5] can be written in "decimal" notation without any rounding. (Compare that to 1/3 which cannot). Base 8 has only prime factor "2" - so 1/2, 1/4 etc can be written without rounding. But a number like "0.2" or "0.1", which can be done easily in base 10, cannot be written in base 8. This is quite a big disadvantage pre-computer age. So much so that even for us humans there have been societies (babylonians) which actually did not use base 10. But opted for "base 30" instead (prime factors 2, 3 and 5). Being able to write out fractions without rounding is just that much an advantage. And we still see artifacts of that in say degrees for a circle, it allows for more "integer" angles. This is offset once you start going into formal sciences and work with floating points/errors. But similarly the advantage of easier conversion to binary is negligible: it's almost never done by hand other than for trivial stuff. [Answer] At this moment I imagine many of my peers here at the site might be tempted to close this question as off-topic. I'll just say that I spent a number of years in college for a bachelor degree in Computer Science. I saw time and again people dropping out of CS because they could not wrap their heads around it. Many were the challenges, and understanding math in bases other than 10 was a huge factor. I personally know a couple handful people who failed 2nd semester subjects because they could not understand how $1 + 1 = 10$. And they were counting on their fingers. Seriously. To this day I believe that if you cannot read time on a clock like this, you cannot get a degree in CS: [![A binary clock](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BJpgi.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BJpgi.jpg) A sentient species with an octal number base might probably have a much easier time converting to binary and hexadecimal, which are common in low level programming (some the hardest forms of programming come into this category). I propost a challenge here, watch this video starting on the 2:22 mark: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfCJgC2zezw&t=142s> Did it instantly make sense to you? If so, you're probably a Math or CS student or graduate - or you belong to a species with eight fingers with a base 8 numeral system. If you struggle with it for more than two minutes, the good news is that you will probably never have to pay for expensive books about C++. For clarification:* I'm not saying these guys would have an easier time programming in octal. I'm saying they would have an easier time understanding binary and hexadecimal, which is what keeps some people out of math-intensive courses in the area of computing. I'm not implying that when programming you do it all the time. [Answer] Mathematics is very abstract. In principle you can choose your own base which fits your system best. In our every day's life we use a base of 10. Why? Because it is easy to learn. We use 10 fingers for counting. In the old Babylonian days they used a base of 60 (12 joints of the 4 fingers on one hand, counting with the thumb and 5 fingers on the other hand for counting the 'overflows' of 12). Computers use a base of 2, because they only know 'ON' and 'OFF'. Whats the advantage of a large number of symbols, i.e. a bigger base? Bigger numbers are easier (require less 'space') to write down. 512 just needs 3 digits in a decimal system, but needs 10 digits in binary (10 0000 0000). The disadvantage is you need more symbols (like 60 different when using the babylonian sexagesimal system). But what about understanding math? Have you ever taken a 'real' lecture on mathematics, like on university level? You will soon understand that 'real' math has little to do with calculations. Calculations - regardless of the base used - yield the same result. In some situations it is easier to use a base of 2, in some it is 10. You can even transform equations (integrals for example) from 'cartesian coordinates' to polar ones, which often results in a more familiar and easier equation. I'm sure that the numeral system used does not influence how good we or another species understand mathematics or builds machines. [Answer] I suspect that dragon 'hands' would provide much more trouble than cultural familiarity with the number system would offset. Claws may be great for battle but for manipulating tiny things are a huge disadvantage. [Answer] With only 8 fingers perhaps their keyboards would be smaller. That would leave more space on their desks for napkins to capture the designs brilliant new ideas. [Answer] There would be some advantage, but only marginal and for other reasons. There was a time in our history when we had [computers working in base 10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_computer) - in addition to computers working in base 2. Those were marketed as more suitable for business and data processing tasks, as opposed for scientific data crunching (no rounding artifacts when converting to and from base 2). Fast forward to early microprocessor era - many CPUs featured [BCD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal) support on silicon, because it was widely believed the alternate base 10 representation would be useful for exact arithmetic (again, financial calculations, but also faster number conversion for printing etc.). Then the software caught on, and by today, practically everything is done in software. Even modern [x86 BCD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_BCD_opcode) is microcoded and thus likely much slower than native silicon implementation could be, but it is just not important anymore, apart for backward compatibility. So, back to your civilization, there would be a period of time where the equivalent of our decimal computers would not have to be developed, freeing effort and resources for other development. And early CPUs would be marginally cheaper and designed faster, and having less transistors (or equivalently, having additional features while having the same number of transistors). Note that the question asks about electronics - thus the speculation about the advantages of binary or binary-coded octal for early mechanical computations are off topic. Also note that the number of fingers is related, but not essential for the number system of the civilization. After all, we humans use remnants of old Babylonian base 60 (clocks), used a parallel base 12 system at least somewhat (dozen, gross, great gross) and there were [even languages with base 8 number system](http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/%7Eavelino/Avelino_2006.pdf). But the Indo-European base 10 won, for reasons unrelated to the number system. ]
[Question] [ In the fantasy novel I am writing, there is a world-wide war going on. The war spans several continents and has many fronts, but the actual fighting is very similar to that of WWI - mostly waiting in trenches. The front lines rarely move far. This has led to several countries being permanently bordered by the fronts on one or two sides (no country is surrounded). I'm envisioning these countries as being great military powers, constantly locked into a state of battle and tactics. I would like them to be powerful nations with powerful armies... but I'm not sure how realistic that is. My concern lies with economy. To become the rich and powerful nations I want them to be, capable of supporting vast armies, they need to have a massive income. With most of their population locked down by war, and one or two sides of the country completely closed off by enemy forces, how can this be? Before I get to the details, I would like to quell any suspicions about this question being opinion-based. My question is: Can a country in such a situation be permanently rich and powerful, with either a stable or increasing income? Examples of how that can happen are certainly welcome as evidence to back up your answer, but the actual answer itself is a simple yes or no, followed by why or why not (real-life examples would be great, if they exist). I'm not after the best method to make this happen. I just want to see if it can happen at all. * The technology level of both sides is that of Ancient Rome or earlier. Nothing later. * Those attacking the countries are - not exactly human. Because there are so many of them and because they threaten the whole world, many warriors from different countries will join to fight them. Think crusades, except it's a massive front, instead of one city; and much of the world participating, instead of just Europe. * This is a fantasy novel, and magic is present, but it should not be considered. * These countries need to maintain the fronts, and maintain (if not grow) their levels of wealth and power over at least a hundred years. There can be no decline, no eventual fall. * The fronts are extensive. Collectively, they equal roughly twice the total perimeter of Australia. These borders need to constantly be defended, but also note that they can be broken up over however many countries are necessary. * This has to be the case with several countries, spanning different locations and climates. All countries have at least two separate sea borders, and are predominantly: mountainous icy wastes, hilly savanna, tropical rainforest, wooded islands, or vast temperate forests. So if agriculture and trade are parts of the answer, then they need to apply to all of the countries, and not just a few. * 'Rich and Powerful' means the countries are capable of recruiting, training, and maintaining massive armies, and still have the resources to handle normal internal affairs adequately (ie, the rest of the country isn't a big slum). 'Permananent' in this case means that these economies aren't dwindling or falling. They are stable, or growing if possible. * I will allow questionable government practices (tyranny, corruption, etc.), only if they don't mean the country will collapse within the next hundred years. I would prefer not to go this route, but I will allow it. I will be happy to provide more details as needed. Just let me know. [Answer] Let's ignore your WWI reference and take the rest of the question at face value What this means is that there is no conquest. The war is static, perhaps even in a state of [zugzwang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang), meaning if either player tries to break the current stalemate, the effort will put them at a disadvantage, thus the stalemate continues.1 Could such a nation remain properous? Yes, but... Prosperity means that the drain on resources (both manpower and materiel) does not affect the day-to-day lives of the citizens not directly engaged in the military-industrial-complex. Thus, if within your own borders you had (ideally) every mineral you needed from the ground, every grain of wheat you need to feed your people, every manufacturing capability, etc. — in other words, you never need to transport goods or raw materials of any kind from outside your protected borders — and that with those resources you could wage war and provide for your people, then yes, you could maintain a completely prosperous society during a period of war. But, there will eventually be problems... For all practical purposes your world may have an infinite supply of food and raw materials — but you do not have an infinite supply of people. With every passing day there are fewer people as you draw replacements from the citizenry. Worst of all, the most common soldier is your prime worker, so the very people you need to keep that society prosperous are actually dying in the proverbial trenches. Your second problem is that with a declining population, your ability to keep up with lost resources (consumed by your soldiers or lost due to battle, enemy ambush, actual robbery, etc...) will dwindle. You inevitably must divert what goods you can produce to the military because of that nasty zugzwang situation. You can't afford for your people to be first or you lose the war. Your last problem is public disatisfaction. They'll be happy with their prosperity, but again, with every passing day another family loses a loved one, curses whatever gods they believe in, and turn a hateful eye to the government for failing to bring the crisis to a conclusion. Eventually, the number of unhappy people outnumber the happy people and your prosperity begins to tank. Conclusion For a period of time you can have a completely happy society. The more citizens you have, the longer you can remain prosperous. But, eventually fate and attrition will catch up with you. Answer: Yes, for a while. --- 1 Not unlike holding a wolf by the ears... you can't let go but you need to use the restroom. [Answer] Rome was constantly at war. [Here is a list of battles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_wars_and_battles). Check out the time period from 343 BC to the establishment of the Empire in 30 BC. A 300 year time period with 49 separately listed wars. Rome was also rich. Doesn't need much explanation, but by 30 BC Rome had acquired the wealth for Augustus to turn Rome into a city of marble. Rome became rich through conquest. That 300 year period corresponded with rome expanding from a single city to the entire Mediterranean Basin (and norther Gaul to boot). You need your country to be continually expanding. But Rome also had at least one permanent enemy in Persia; a land more or less just as rich and able to fight wars off and on with Rome over time. You can have several rich, prosperous countries locked in battle with each other, as long as they all have opportunities to expand into other parts of the world, growing rich off of decades or centuries of conquest in the process. [Answer] # In theory yes But only if this is an Orwellian war rather than a real one. For those of you who [only pretend](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/4938155/Two-thirds-lie-about-reading-a-book.html) to have read [Orwell's 1984](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four), the world is kept in a constant state of war between three powers. Which power you're currently at war with or allied to is not important, what's important is to always be at war. It gives you a vent to dispose of violent or rebellious elements of society, it gives a rite of passage for young men, it allows you to always point to something to say "you must toe the line or they win". To maintain a wealthy society you can't have a large proportion of your economy tied to the war unless you're winning. To keep the war running for long periods on a static front you can't be winning. And so the war becomes Orwellian, maintained from above by agreement between the leaders of the powers as a benefit to all of them, but regulated in such a way that it doesn't do significant damage to the economy of any participant. [Answer] I think the easiest solve for this, if it’s possible in your world, is that in addition to fighting the unending war, a portion of the powerful countries’ military is employed elsewhere and engaged it maintaining imperial colonies - that is, the superpowers engaged in fighting off the invasion are drawing wealth (and probably conscripts too) from other parts of the world that they have subjected politically, militarily, and economically. This is basically how it has worked/works in real history. As far as other “questionable government practices”, I would think that at the bare minimum there would be some internal political suppression (ie of an anti-war movement, etc - people are bound to blame their leaders for such a long war), and with all of the above I’d also assume that there’d be some internal disparity of wealth/class. [Answer] In most wars one side gets a small advantage, uses that to get a slightly larger advantage and snowballs into winning the whole thing. To avoid that, you need a strong home field advantage. Let one side have a strong cavalry, unbeatable in open areas. Let the other have more people and better infantry, unbeatable in uneven mountainous terrain. Or let there be some other reason the front lines get locked in place. So, the war has been going for a few years, and there is no end in sight. People start asking about the purpose of it all. Attacking and conquering places seems pointless, since the enemy will only take them back later. Raiding makes some sense, that is attacking, looting and retreating. However, areas near the front line will get looted out and raiding too will slow down. Defending makes perfect sense. You don't want your family or yourself to die after all. Have to stop those enemy raiders. So, you get a defensive war. City walls, fortifications, maybe a full Chinese/Hadrian-style Wall. At this point there will not be much fighting, so the war can go on without ruining the economy. Basically forever. [Answer] It depends... A war that does not threaten the core lands, as we see with the current wars waged by the USA, for example, can be run continuously with not much ill effect on the economy. Likewise, a war of expansion, as in the Roman Empire example already mentioned, can finance itself by plunder offsetting any economic downside. Essentially, as long as the core lands are not under threat, a country can decide how much resources it wants to dedicate to the war. However, once the war turns against the country, and it becomes a matter of survival, choice goes out the window. Now, the country needs to bring resources to the fight even if it means damaging the economy. At the end of this escalation, the entire economy is dedicated to the war. [Answer] Stop thinking about World War I. With technology equal to that of Ancient Rome, you're not going to get near the logistical capability to support that many people in that small of a space for any length of time. What you want is something like China's Great Wall, or Hadrian's Wall in Britain. Those are actually both very topical for you, as they are both fortifications of some size which were maintained by very prosperous civilizations. Look also at Rome's Germanic frontier and how that was maintained. In addition, if this is truly a multinational fight, with foreign reinforcements coming in, your country would probably have established routes of transit heading to 'the wall' with many businesses, small and large, designed to extract money and resources from those military men in various fulfilling ways. (Think brothels, inns, tourist traps, bars, et cetera.) If you want to make this especially attractive, embed some kind of economic incentive in this 'not quite human' enemy. Maybe each of the enemy has a flawless diamond in its forehead for a third eye. Maybe their pancreases contain a rare substance needed for religious rituals. Maybe they all carry around nuggets of pure gold. This would help with the motivation for people to put up a lot of expense to equip themselves and travel many miles to help fight. [Answer] The source of "wealth" in ancient times was effectively agricultural crops, natural resources (mines for precious metals, marbles, jewels). Cotton, linen (from the flax plant), hemp, and various spices are all agricultural; technically silk is an animal product, but treated much like an agricultural product. Give all your countries arable land, and limit trade severely. Make them expert farmers/ranchers. They can be self-sufficient and rich, they are turning dirt into wealth by growing food. Better sanitation results in fewer deaths and thus more people for labor on farms, mines, and other productions, and the excess people can be expended in the war efforts. This can be a conscious decision of the despots in charge; to keep only as many people as it takes to provide the labor the country needs, and "cull their herd" by keeping the best (people with skills or beauty, artists and story tellers, dancers and singers) and sending others to the front to fight for more space. Let people find glory in fighting, rising in the ranks. For skilled fighters, the military can be a route to marriage and wealth as a plantation administrator (baron or lord or some title like that). Natural resources can feed, clothe, and provide luxury for many centuries. Labor turns dirt and water into foodstuffs, even in early medieval times with no machinery, one man could do the labor to feed four people indefinitely. It would be about 16 hours of work a day, but not hard labor all day. A family of four could get by with 4-5 hours of work for each, each day. Both frontier families in early America and modern survivalists prove it, and hunting is not a necessity (although there is no reason your characters cannot hunt or ranch). That disparity in the work required also leaves many people to provide secondary "derived" services. Making products out of the agricultural and mined products. Cloth, wood stuffs like furniture and boards, forged and refined metal products, paints, sculpture, flours, baked goods, etc. Along with a large excess of people, thus the wars provide population control, and some small opportunity for the royal families to grab more territory, or a valuable natural resource. The most natural cause of such endless war would be over the natural resources themselves. Streams, ponds or lakes, mines, farmland, woods or hunting ground, fishing areas. [Answer] Israel has been in a state of war and\or pseudo-war since it's formation yet is considered to be an economy stable and powerful country where the quality of life (and salaries) are quite high. The question isn't if there is a constant war, the question is how good are they in holding the front line in place and\or advancing them, if the front line reaches cities it would be impossible to have a strong economy as that requires investments and no one wants to invest in a place that's about to be taken over by an enemy, but if people are sure that the front line will either stay in place or will get further away I see no problems with it. [Answer] I suppose Take into account George Orwell's 1984. The entire country of Oceania is at constant war. I do not know if it would be considered a strong economy by today's standards, but it wasn't completely unoperational. War constantly drains resources of a country, but giving the labor force a motive to work harder. Factories can now operate at max potential and flood the military with war goods while paying out lots of money to the general public. A war is fairly good for an economy, as WWII brought America completely out of the Great Depression. A country at constant war would constantly benefit from the economical boost provided by a war, so in theory it could have a strong economy. [Answer] Ancient Rome level technology cannot maintain continent-length high-density battlefronts. The powers in WW1 couldn't do it. Every one of the powers -- France, Germany, Russia and the UK -- was destroying itself trying to maintain the battlefronts. France and especially the UK was a bit better off; but it was mortgaging its Empire (to the USA) in order to stave off the decline. The German strategy was to try to get the other foes to burn themselves out before they burned out. It worked on Russia and was close to working on France and possibly the UK when their unrestricted submarine warfare brought the USA into the war. These where industrial civilizations with insanely cheaper transportation and more effective logistics, insanely higher infrastructure, insanely more productive agriculture, stronger central states, and population densities than ancient Rome. Collectively they had a huge percentage of the world's resources at their beck and call. And even after the fall of Russia and the ending of the Eastern front, the relatively short Western front was destroying their civilizations. The War would have to be far colder than WW1. Roman armies didn't do anything approaching the continent-wide battle fronts you are talking about. They where impressive in their ability to project force over continent-scale distances, but they could not maintain battlefields the length of continents. These two tasks are at least an order of magnitude separate. Even most 19th century warfare looked more like Roman warfare than WW1. [Answer] Any 4x strategy game will be a decent simulation of how it could work. Start a game on largest possible map with a lot of opposing factions. Reach a desired tech level then start wars with everyone but don't conquer anyone; just constantly do battles with them. See whether you will be able to stabilize your civilization in such situation. I guess you would not be able to do that. That said, your question basically boils down to "whether my society could prosper if I make daily sacrifices of manpower and resources to huge trash dump". If your income of manpower and resources is larger than the spending, you will prosper. As was explained in the other answer, biggest limit is the people. [Nowadays in Information age population increase tops at 3.8%](https://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=24). Let's say your country have 1kk people in it (HUGE population for High Fantasy setting). It means that it can realistically give you 38000 new soldiers per year IF ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE is conscripted and you have zero death rate before conscription age. This is pretty harsh conditions for a constant war, in my opinion, I hope your specific worldbuilding have enough handwaving for that. ]
[Question] [ And by "Weapons" I mean ranged weapons specifically. Melee weapons would certainly be useful for close-quarters, but due to the range at which combat occurs in this question, I'm looking for ranged weapons like firearms. They must function in zero-G, but functioning in a vacuum isn't a necessity due to the fact that most of these fights are going to be taking place inside the space station. Combat will be taking place in all kinds of distances, from long hallways to open hangars to enclosed residential areas, so any kind of range on the weapons suggested is fine. [Answer] In physics terms, most of your common projectile weapons damage through the application of kinetic energy. Since you're applying force to impart energy onto the projectile, you get the opposite force; that's the principle of recoil. So your options basically boil down to "use a weapon that doesn't rely on kinetic energy", "send the recoil to something other than you", or both. Rockets and/or gyrojets Specifically, you want a two-stage rocket launcher. A small charge carries the rocket clear of the launcher, at which point the main motor kicks in. Because the initial impulse only has to carry the rocket a few feet, its recoil is fairly light. "Recoil" from the main motor is actually what propels the rocket; you'll only have to deal with the rocket exhaust. (Wear a mask: it can be pretty hot, and I don't know how exhaust will act in microgravity.) Explosives in general A handgun firing tiny explosive rounds, for instance, would have recoil but less than a traditional firearm with the same stopping power. This is because it can be lighter and/or travel more slowly, reducing the force you need to impart on it in the first place. Thermal weapons in general Lasers do impart a small amount of momentum from photon pressure, which means they do have a small amount of recoil, but mostly they damage through heat. Flame and (getting a little more fantastical) plasma weapons do the same thing. In all cases, the more damage that things-that-aren't-kinetic-energy are doing, the better your recoil looks. Recoilless rifles Well, obviously. Essentially, the recoil leaves in some form of exhaust, similar to a rocket though attached to the gun rather than the projectile, or a counterweight, such as plastic chips or water, that takes the recoil force and is thrown out behind you. (Protip: don't stand behind the guy with the rifle.) [Answer] # Lasers Cadence is right in that lasers do technically have a momentum from photon pressure, but how far have you ever been pushed by light? I have worked with industrial lasers - the kind that cuts through metal - and it's not an issue for those (i.e.: the framework they are assembled on is not built with recoil in mind). In fact, light, in general, having so little momentum is why a practical solar sail would have to be immorally large to work. # Flamethrowers These have a little more kick to them as you have to push some gas out, but depending on construction it's more manageable than a firearm. And you can never go wrong with good old fire. [American flamethrowers had a range of fifteen meters](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_flamethrower) during the world wars. In the future, they might have a longer range. Edit: some comments were made about this idea: > > You really, really, really, do not want to use a flamethrower on the same space station as you happen to be on. > > > You're going to eat up a lot of oxygen. It can spread in any direction, instead of primarily burning upwards. In a forced-air atmosphere, you have plenty of convection to take it everywhere. Smoke spreads everywhere, turning visibility to shit. The temperature will rise really quickly since it's an enclosed space. Shipboard fires already cause the most total losses in naval situations. Space is even worse. > > > – Daniel B > > > And > > Spitting a flaming liquid around in zero-G isn't going to do you or your buddies any favours either. Sure it might originally go in the right direction but burning humans tend to flail, which would send burning accelerant in all directions. > > > – Korthalion > > > So yeah, this might be risky to the point of being suicidal. But if you need to kill everybody in a space station with as little ammo as possible, this might be the way to do it. If you have to die, at least go out with a bang. # Shuriken Just because of the rule of cool. Also, they won't spread flames nor breach a hull if you miss. # Sonic weapons These don't shoot stuff, they vibrate the air. No recoil there. There is technology to keep the vibrations focused into a beam. [Answer] A taser would work. Short range, but pretty much no chance of overpenetration and the darts are low enough velocity that recoil shouldn't be an issue. Plus sometimes you want to capture someone. Future refinements could increase range/ capacity/ reliability/ lethality. Flashbangs would also probably be more effective as disorientation in a zero-g space would be much worse. What about a microwave emitter? <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System> [Answer] 1. Flechette weapons. Flechettes are thin, low-mass darts that travel at considerably higher muzzle velocities than conventional rounds. They have much less recoil than bullets, and as a result, can also be fired at a higher rate without causing your aim to go off too much. Look into the SCMITR: especially in the close quarters of a space station, they will be pretty effective. They also have great armor penetration without much mass, which is nice! They'll probably make holes in your space station, but that sounds like it's not a concern. 2. [Gyrojet.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet) These firearms don't fire a bullet, they fire a tiny rocket-like projectile. Both rifle and pistol designs were made in the 1960's. The muzzle velocity is around 100 fps which is not that much more than a nerf dart, and at thirty feet, they're booking it at 1250fps. This will minimize recoil without reducing stopping power. Here are some [fun gyrojet ballistics.](https://futureboy.us/blog/gyrojet.html) 3. Sonic Weapons. This is hard to find sources on, because almost all development of this type of weapon is currently hush-hush military shit, but sonic weapons are effective over distances (they've been used for inter-ship combat to some degree, against protesters, and who knows what else, at distances of 1000 feet.) At lower levels, they can induce nausea, disorientation, and rupture eardrums. At higher levels, they can can cause gross tissue damage through cavitation. Look up the LRAD for the commercial version of this. They're very circumspect about the fact that their thing can cause permanent damage. 4. Chemical weapons. You're working in enclosed spaces! That means it's a great day to deploy some [nerve gas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_agent). This stuff is great because even if your opponents are wearing, say, gas masks and armor, they'll die anyways! It's less effective against space suits, though I'm not sure of the specific data on that. But hey, it's science fiction, so who knows. Maybe combine these with flechettes, so you don't have to count on tissue damage to kill people after you hit them with darts. [Answer] Anyone remember those [buzz-saw drone things](http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Manhack) from Half Life 2? Get a dozen of so 4-inch-wide versions of those, and a targeting laser pistol. Zero recoil on you, and the psychological impact of a buzzing swarm of death descending on your opponent is pretty intimidating. Since you don't need to worry about keeping them in the air (no gravity!) you can improve the maneuvering systems - with a powerful "straight line" thruster to give rapid acceleration when going in for the kill. [Answer] # Why not flamethrowers *Or...* # Angular momentum is a problem *IN SPAAACE* > > You really, really, really, do not want to use a flamethrower on the same space station as you happen to be on [--Daniel B](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/41250/daniel-b) > > > Flamethrowers came up, and why this is a bad idea *IN SPAAAAAACE* got longer than a comment. And it's for more than [the obvious reasons](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/116606/what-kinds-of-weapons-produce-little-or-no-recoil-that-could-be-used-aboard-a-sp#comment357711_116630)... > > ...fires on a space station are a Really Bad Thing. You're going to eat up a lot of oxygen. It can spread in any direction, instead of primarily burning upwards. In a forced-air atmosphere, you have plenty of convection to take it everywhere. Smoke spreads everywhere, turning visibility to shit. The temperature will rise really quickly, since it's an enclosed space. Shipboard fires already cause the most total losses in naval situations. Space is even worse. > > > The problem with a flamethrower, or any recoil *IN SPAAAACE* isn't that you'll be flung backwards, it's that you'll spin. Firing something with sustained recoil like a flamethrowers or automatic weapon in free-fall looks something like this... [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FHyxn.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FHyxn.jpg) Here's why. # Calculating recoil A military flamethrower, as opposed to just a pyrotechnic, shoots a napalm/gasoline gel propelled by high pressure nitrogen. Using a [WWII-era US M2 Flamethrower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_flamethrower) as our baseline, it carries 10kg of fuel and fires it at half a gallon (1.9 L) a second. This will have a significant recoil. We can work it out. Momentum is $mass \times velocity$ so using the ratio of the mass of fuel being thrown vs the mass of the person holding the flamethrower, we can work out how fast they'll be pushed backwards. It's a simple ratio. $$m\_{firer} \times v\_{firer} = m\_{gel} \times v\_{gel}$$ $$v\_{firer} = \frac{m\_{gel}}{m\_{firer}} \times v\_{gel}$$ Napalm is gasoline a thickener, originally palmitic acid. Gasoline has a density of 0.725 kg/L. Palmitic acid 0.825 kg/L. I'll assume the fuel is about 0.8 kg/L. A half second burst is about 1 L, so you're throwing about 0.4 kg per burst. Your average adult is about 60 kg giving a ratio of $\frac{1}{150}$. It has a range of about 20 meters. In [this video of Ian McCollum firing an M2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPQYK5ZMbWY), I estimate it took about 1 or 2 seconds to reach the camera giving a velocity of about 20 meters per second. At our $\frac{1}{150}$ ratio, the shooter will be pushed back at about 0.133 m/s which is not very fast at all. Similar with bullets, while they're traveling very fast, they are very light compared to the shooter so they don't impart much velocity. Firing a gun *IN SPAAACE* won't send you flying. But it will start you spinning. # Angular momentum *IN SPAAACE* The problem is the angular momentum. On Earth when you shoot a gun you are braced against the ground. In free fall when you shoot a gun you are not, so you spin. Your typical firearm tries to keep all its recoil in a straight line to avoid ["barrel climb" or "muzzle rise"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzle_rise). Some do this more successfully than others. From personal experience I can tell you that an M1 Thompson climbs up and to the right quite dramatically. Most pistols have some tendency to climb simply because the heavy moving parts and barrel are above the axis of your hand giving it an angular momentum and a tendency to rotate up. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aSRq3.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aSRq3.png) This is part of why shooting a gun that has a stock is more accurate, the recoil goes straight into your shoulder which you can brace against. If you fire a gun *IN SPAAACE, even with a stock, there is nothing for you* to brace against. Instead of the gun rotating, *you* will rotate. The force of recoil going into your arm or shoulder will cause you to pivot around your center of mass. Your first shot might be on target, but now you're slowly spinning backwards and, if you shoot right handed, to the right. A flamethrower is so much worse. With a gun, you can at least get your first shot off before you start spinning, and you can predict how you'll spin. With a flamethrower the gel and pressurized gas are traveling out of their tanks, through pipes, and out in a sustained half second stream. You can see when Ian fires the flamethrower his aim jumps around for a moment until it settles down. Ian is firmly planted to the ground by gravity, and he is a very experienced shooter, so he can control it. *IN SPAAACE* unless you're firmly strapped to the deck there is nothing to brace against. Once you fire that thing you'll be spinning uncontrollably and shooting flame everywhere. This also applies to thrown weapons, people have suggested shuriken and spears. A typical overhand, underhand, or even side throwing motion will make the thrower spin. You can reduce this by flicking with the wrist from your belly, but that is much more difficult to aim, has less power, and requires extensive training to do effectively. # A space gun for your belly You can reduce this somewhat by firing "from the hip" as close to your center of mass as possible, but if you're off by a little bit you'll still impart a rotation. It's hard to aim, but with enough training you can make it work at the short ranges you'd expect in a space habitat. A real space gun would probably be computer controlled and strapped to your belly. This ensures the recoil goes straight back through your center of mass and imparts no spin. Gyroscopes built into your suit would resist the tendency to rotate, and computer controlled cold-gas thrusters could actively stop any spin. Better yet, don't hold the gun at all. Put it on a stabilized drone. Give it cameras and an AI to track human targets, and fire it remotely. As we'll see below, this would best be fired by pneumatic pressure, not a chemical explosion. # Smoke Even if you use a recoilless gun like a [gyro-jet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet), smoke is a problem. Firearms, flamethrowers, explosives... anything that burns produces toxic smoke. Unlike on Earth, a space habitat has a limited atmosphere and a limited ability to filter it. A sustained firefight would build up smoke in the atmosphere causing asphyxiation and damage to equipment. Even if you're in a space suit, it would make it difficult to see. Use pneumatic guns, or if your setting is advanced enough, lasers or [particle-beams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle-beam_weapon). [Answer] Remote Controlled Mobile Turret Officer's are issued an armed bot with a paired hand unit that is shaped like a gun. The hand unit is only used for targeting, via appropriate sights or optics and it shines a beam on the target. The bot acquires the beam's target and magnetically or otherwise anchors itself. Upon pulling the "trigger" on the hand unit, the bot fires at the intended target. Alternately, paired gyroscopes could be used instead of targeting lasers [Answer] This answer is made with the assumption that the goal is to occupy the space station after combat has resolved. If we're not taking the station, then there is no need for combat on board the station. It's much easier to sabotage it or destroy it. I'm also assuming that, since there's no artificial gravity, we aren't using any other handwavium technology like force fields, repulsors, or anything that is unlikely to be used in the next 100 years. In space, whether inside or outside, your options are grouped into kinetic slugs (firearms), missiles (rocket propelled grenades), chemical sprays (flamethrowers), or directed energy weapons (lasers). Kinetic Weapons Railguns, bows and arrows, rifles, handguns, flechettes (dart guns), cannons, shotguns, shuriken, throwing axes, etc., are all examples of kinetic weapons. The main problem with a kinetic weapon isn't just Newton's second law (every action has an equal and opposite reaction), but the fact that you're usually using your arms in some ways, whether holding a firearm or throwing something. That's going to set you spinning, because Newton's second law is also works right along side the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum. If the point that you're launching something from is off-center from your own center of mass, you're going to start rotating. So, rule number 1 of kinetic weapons in a ship: Unless you've very careful to "fire" from your center of mass (which is a bad idea for other reasons, namely you making yourself a bigger target), you must secure yourself. That's easy, though. Every manned spaceship since the Mercury capsules have had plenty of handholds and footholds. One of the most common complaints of astronauts aboard the International Space Station is that the tops of their feet get sore, from sticking their feet into these footholds. The second problem with a kinetic weapon is that you're likely to miss. Yes, you might poke a hole in the ship's hull and let the vacuum of space inside. Even for a tiny ship like the International Space Station, a small arms bullet hole would take a couple of hours to dangerously depressurize the ship. Plenty of time to close a pressure hatch and don a pressure suit so that you can go make repairs. Just don't make a habit out of missing. More immediately dangerous, and quite likely to make the ship permanently uninhabitable, is if you rupture the coolant system. Heat is a HUGE problem in space. Yes, space itself is cold. Space also happens to be one of the best insulators, because you can't conduct or convect heat away; you can only radiate it away. Every light source emits heat, even low energy LEDs. Every human emits heat. Every pump in the life support system and water reclamation systems emit heat. Everything that creates and uses electricity emits heat. Even the refrigerator creates a net increase in heat. The best chemical for carrying all of that heat out to the radiators, that keep enclosed spaces cool enough for humans to live and work? Ammonia. Not the heavily diluted stuff in window cleaning solutions, but pure, undiluted, toxically deadly ammonia. That's what the International Space Station uses, as did Mir, Tiangong-1, and SpaceLab. (The US Space Shuttles and USSR Burans used water, but their life support was limited to 2 week missions, maximum.) Ammonia is fine on Earth in small doses. It evaporates quickly, is lighter than air, and is rarely released in large enough concentrations to cause environmental impacts. Ammonia is a quick and painful death if you're in a sealed environment, as it will chemically burn your lungs to mush. With no "up" for the ammonia to float away to, it will stay around until a very thorough decontamination is performed. (If the ammonia coolant in the ISS leaks into the living space, plans are to abandon the station and remotely command a controlled deorbit into the Pacific.) More dangerous than the ammonia, though, is the threat of fire from sparks given off when these kinetic weapons strike something metal. This is less likely, though. Because of the null gravity, fire burns slow and methodical, and spreads its fuel around before consuming it. The first place that the fire will go is right into the life support system, right to the air intake filters that are full of all sorts of fuel like dead skin cells, crumbs from your lunch, discarded hair, etc... and the filters themselves are unlikely to be flame resistant. Next stop is the CO2 scrubbers, then the O2 outlet nozzles. The best case scenario in a fire is that your life support system shuts off. Air stops flowing around, which will slow the spread of flame and keep a pocket of oxygen rich air around you. Depending on how big of a room you're in, your most immediate concern will likely be CO2 poisoning (headaches, nausea, disorientation, fatigue, and finally death through toxic buildup) before you'll have to worry about suffocation from lack of oxygen. This will take several hours or even days, so long as the fire is contained and isn't spreading smoke through the entire ship. But, starting a fire will likely make the station uninhabitable, and will be an undesirable outcome for the attacking party. Fortunately, little on space ships are flammable, specifically because of how unreasonably dangerous fires are. Accidentally starting a fire from sparks is unlikely. Especially since Apollo 1. Quick recap of kinetic weapons: You need to brace yourself when using it, it's alright to puncture the hull a few times, but if you hit the wrong thing, everyone loses. Missiles Next up are missiles. The least advanced of these are little more than kinetic slugs that have their propellent attached to the bullet, rather than relying on the propellent being consumed all at once inside the barrel of a gun. The main advantage is that it doesn't impart much of that "equal and opposite reaction" force on the person who fired it, making it possible for a combattant to fire it without being secured to a bulkhead. Additionally, it makes it more comfortable to fire larger masses at a target, such as a mass that includes high explosives. A typical use case would be a rocket propelled grenade. With more mass in your payload, you can also add some limited guidance. Probably not helpful in fighting happening entirely on a ship, which will be at extremely close range, but if there were a drone or other small spaceship taking potshots from space, too far to hit with any real accuracy, you could potentially train a targeting laser on it, letting the missile do the hard work. As far as explosions on a spaceship, a suitably well built station would survive an internal explosion better than any humans aboard. Spaceships are designed to hold pressure in. There are some very gruesome facts about explosions and mammals that are best left to the morbidly curious. While many people think that the shrapnel from a grenade is the most dangerous part, the actual most dangerous part is the pressure wave. Because space stations tend to be very long tubes, the pressure wave doesn't have much chance to spread out and dissipate. Because the diameter of the liveable area of the International Space Station is about 7 feet across, a high explosive grenade will be just as deadly 7 feet away as it is 200 feet away (and that wave will bounce back a few times). You're going to want to close a pressure hatch before using high explosives on the other side. At the very least, it will rupture everyone's eardrums. And even then, even though the station is likely to fare better than humans in case of an explosion, the pressure wave will seek out the weakest points, and will probably find one. It will probably crack a weld and introduce a slow leak, making it necessary to wear pressure suits within a couple of hours. Chemical Sprays First, a pedantic note: These impart momentum under Newton's second law, just like kinetic weapons. It's like a garden hose: there's a noticeable force when you have it on full blast. Anyways, regardless of whether you can reliably aim a stream of liquid or gasses, chemical sprays are just a Bad Idea(tm). You'll want to live in the station. Spaceships have closed life support loops, and air moves very slowly. With no "up," toxic chemicals linger in the air, neither rising nor settling. If you think about igniting that chemical for some reason, such as if you're using a flamethrower, it would be much easier to destroy the station outright, since nobody will be taking control of it in the near future. Energy Weapons Lasers. More pew-pew. Lasers are probably not viable. At least not if you want your sci-fi to be faithful to basic laws of physics. At least lasers follow basic laws of physics, though. Lightning guns and plasma bolts are right out. They're not sci-fi, they're fantasy. I mentioned above that heat is a problem on spaceships. There is no convection or conduction, only radiating the heat. The general rule of thumb for a laser is that it takes as much heat to make a beam as that beam will deliver to the target. In order to ablate away enough flesh to seriously wound a person in a blast that's short enough in duration that the person won't just hide away, you need a 4 megawatt laser. That's not a portable laser simply due to the energy requirements. It's either attached to a generator (larger than any camping generators you can find), or attached to a bank of batteries that take up a significant portion of a large room. Best case scenario, you have a monster sized power cord plugged into the station's power. With that laser, over the course of a second, you deliver 1000 kcal to your target. You also deliver 1000 kcal directly to the station's radiators. Keeping in mind that the ship is a closed system, and all heat has to eventually be radiated away, the 1000 kcal that you delivered to your target also has to make its way to the radiators. Every shot costs the radiators about 2000 kcal of extra work. If the space station is a battle station, then this is fine; the radiators will be designed to handle a few batteries of gigawatt lasers. If it's a civilian space station? Your next step after taking the station will be to replace the radiators, or you'll all quickly roast. Null-G Combat Tactics I'm including this section because tactics inform weapon choices. Good tactics in any combat situation with firearms is to present as little cross section to the enemy as possible. This means using cover and concealment, using covering fire from squadmates when you need to move, so that the enemy is less likely to poke their heads up and take a shot at you, etc. In null-G, you have an extra advantage: You almost never have to present your full torso to your enemy. Put some extra shielding on your feet and make that the only thing you present to your enemy. Something like 4" thick bulletproof clear acrylic sheets with a small hole that you can poke the barrel of your rifle through. You'll lose some accuracy, but your cover comes with you. (Or, if you care more about accuracy than protection and mobility, you can adopt more of a "Superman" pose than an "Enemy's Gate is Down" pose by putting the acrylic sheet above/in front of you, so that you can swivel your firearm faster.) And finally, the big question: Do you want to intentionally evacuate the air in the station during the attack? All weapons will still work. Firearms since muskets have been able to work in a vacuum. I know, "But there's no oxygen in the vacuum of space!" ... Well, there's plenty of oxygen inside of every explosive that humans make. (Pedantic note: when it's in an explosive, it's called an oxidizer, and is often not found as the gaseous oxygen that we breath.) All of the weapons that I listed absolutely work in space. There are a couple of differences; explosives don't create shock waves in a vacuum, but they DO fill up an unpressurized space with smoke very quickly. There are tactical advantages and disadvantages to intentionally letting the vacuum inside. Anyone caught unaware is having a very bad day. Depending on how quickly you can let the air out, people may have as little as 10 seconds to react. That can quickly reduce the strength of opposing forces that you have to deal with. A disadvantage, though, is that every wound becomes debilitating. Additionally, your mobility is severely limited, and your vision can be instantly obstructed. Fighting slows dramatically, since just dashing across a corridor becomes an incredibly risky action. [Answer] Active Denial System. That means microwaves to make people feel their skin is burning, since it penetrates in the skin just enough to light your pain receptors. Comes in variety of sizes. <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System> [Answer] Since you are talking about some sort of melee battle inside a space station, one assumption is the people you are fighting are protected by some sort of body armour (or armoured spacesuit). You also have to wonder about the internal fittings of the space station itself, but I will presume the walls are resistant to most small arms. One other caveat, I would expect a struggle inside a spaceship or space station will take place in vacuum, since the attackers will either have breached the hull with some sort of heavy anti-ship weapon, or used some sort of explosive or cutting device to breach the hull in an unexpected location (no one is coming in through the airlock). The end result of these factors is the use of a grenade launcher as the weapon of choice. The grenades do not have to be launched at high velocity, and most hand held grenade launchers use a variation of the "[high/low](https://infogalactic.com/info/High%E2%80%93low_system)" pressure launch system to reduce recoil to very low levels. (The High/Low pressure system was developed by Germany in the closing days of WWII to make lightweight recoiless anti tank weapons. The [PAW 600](https://infogalactic.com/info/8_cm_PAW_600) is the only example to be fielded). The use of grenades ensures that the explosive payload and effect are delivered as close to the enemy as possible. Standard fragmentation rounds are probably the best for general purpose work, but "shotgun" shells or flechette rounds can be used for close in work. As well, HEAT rounds can be used to penetrate barricades, or if the situation allows, to fire on the enemy spacecraft docked to yours. Since this is a fairly high tech situation, the grenades will likely be enhanced with sensors to detonate when they are close to a target, either determined like the [XM-25](https://infogalactic.com/info/XM25_CDTE) (where a laser rangefinder on the weapon is used to program the grenades as they're fired), or some sort of "smart" grenade with it's own on board sensor. Finally, depending on the situation, the Marines might need a more powerful weapon. Something descended from the "[Mini-Spike](https://infogalactic.com/info/Spike_(missile)#Variants)" Anti Personnel Guided Missile (APGM) might do. It is a missile, so there is no issue of recoil, but using guidance system and presumably a rocket thruster to guide the missile in vacuum, you can deliver a devastating payload into bunkers or other hard to reach places. [Answer] No one mentioned railguns yet? I'm using the first answer from this one as a reference: [How to build a tank equipped with a 1 GJ railgun](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/49272/how-to-build-a-tank-equipped-with-a-1-gj-railgun) The formula for kinetic energy of a bullet is Ke=0,5\MV^2 The formula for recoil is P=MV As you can see the kinetic energy grows exponentially with speed, while the recoil grows linearily with mass and velocity. So if you cut the mass to half its size and double its speed you retain the same recoil with a higher kinetic energy. If you want lower recoil but the same kinetic impact you reduce the mass and add less velocity to compensate. IE for half the mass you need to add a quarter of the speed (did not think that one through, correct me if that last statement is a mistake). Big advantage: the ammo is now lighter and smaller allowing either more ammo or faster turn ratio's and movement in zero-G. [Answer] I would suggest a long spear as a ranged weapon. It could work on a space station and you could poke at walls to move yourself around in zero G. Also, on a tangent, I would create a cannon that the player holds but as it fires all of its recoil expels through a jet engine on the back of the player so the player stays in place by moving forward and also gains the benefit of damaging backwards at the same time. Have fun! [Answer] Recoil is not certainly bad* In a battle with ranged weapons you don't want to cross through an open space with a predictable direction and speed and you really really don't want to take a long time doing it. By firing a weapon with recoil while on a ballistic course you make targeting you slightly harder by changing your velocity. If the open spaces are large and critical you have to worry about air resistance as much recoil. Having something on hand to give you velocity in whatever direction would be nice. Recoil is not certainly relevant A handguns recoil is in the 10J range and a human's jump in the 200J range. A couple shots will be within the variance of direction and power between jumps. Presumably handguns for space would be even less because loud noises in confined spaces are bad, and knocking holes in the walls would be very bad. Which follows that carrying a shield of whatever the walls are made of would probably be impervious to anything sane opposition will hand out to combatants. This is likely to be heavy enough to matter in momentum math reducing the effect of recoil on a ballistic path. In general staying on the walls gives you mobility, a place to dissipate recoil and fewer angles of attack to be worry about. [Answer] Chemical Gas. Will incapacitate living targets. Ineffective against targets that may use private O2 supply through their helmet. Ultra high spectrum lights. Will incapacitate targets with helmets good for gas but not sufficient for light filtering. Increase or decrease temperature. For smart enemies having both breathing and lighting defenses on their helmets. :) Magnets. Will incapacitate top tech attackers that have O2 supply, light filtering AND isothermic suits. Foam. Lots of. Sticky, hard and increases volume when kinetics apply. Will hinder movement and all actions no matter the tech of the enemy. :) :) Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) hidden mini turrets. Ray, focused, not spheroid. Will not affect the actual enemy but disable all his equipment, including his awesome pulse rifle. Bobby traps. Countless flavors. Blades and spears launched from the hull piercing enemies apart. Multi use. Do not like blood? Hammers do fine bludgeoning damage, run, boom, sleep. Trap compression chambers, invisible hatch opens, enemy fly to space, hatch closes. The wire, my favorite. Thin and sturdy, placed at edges of a corridor along the way, will convert an entire squad to ham slices. Gain time. Do not incapacitate, but gain time. Labyrinth. Special corridors that change routing. Just after their mapping technology finishes readings. Very embarrassing. Make enemies believe their mapping equipment is faulty. With a little luck you can have them make harmless circles forever. The "almost done" technique. Smart doors: No enemy squad will blast a door that just opens with the button. Waste of time. Press button, door responds, suddenly stops with an irregular sound. Looks like that, with a little pushing it will freed. Indeed, 1 guy catch the door and pushes - after a little go up door stuck again. 2 guys try. Go little more up. With a little tuning you already lost time to blast, and when you finally prepare charges, door opens fully. And a super weapon: Like reverse gravity. Changes the gravity field upside down. Change again. Change again. Make sure your personnel all are in the central room with seat belts. Do not worry for gravitational boots. They are designed for no gravity no reverse gravity. They won't hold a fully loaded attack soldier upside down. With all the above techniques you have one great advantage: You control ENEMY FIRE. Because no matter how safe equipped and trained your squads will be, you have no guarantee what weapons enemies will carry nor how they use them. The heavier enemies are equipped and the lesser trained they are the more damage will do to your station. [Answer] Bows and arrows. You really don't want something that can accidentally puncture a hole in the hull/windows of the space station. Electric assisted draw bows and smart arrows to be precise. [Answer] Crossbows are good, and with some modern/sci-fi mechanism, should be able to fire many shots before needing to reload a magazine. If your technology allows, you could let the crossbow carry some sort of minor payload. The power might be able to be adjusted, allowing less damage to fragile structure, or for longer range. If your society is advanced enough, you could just make it a mini-railgun, with about the same results, but at a much higher energy cost with the benefit of relative simplicity. ]
[Question] [ There is a hidden rule for all mages that is to jump every time when casting a lightning spell to prevent self electrocution, how this work is as follows: First the mage recites an incantation to transform their body into a meat vessel to act like a capacitor to store electricity, the only indication of saturation is the tingling sensation and hair raising up. When it is about time to cast the lightning spell, the mage has to jump high in the air and commands the power of lightning to flow towards the target. Failing to make the jump while the spell is active will cause the vessel to discharge through the legs and result in severe burns or in the worst case scenario death! No footwear because the vessel is siphoning the electricity from the ground while having to make sure the current is tolerable by focusing deeply, however there seems to be an exception to this. There is a particular mage who doesn't seems to have to jump to cast any lightning spell, in fact this mage is the only mage in history to be able to do nested casting! It just means casting multiple spells at once but the level of concentration is absurd with just one spell let alone two, I am wondering how does this legendary mage managed to pull off this feat without getting self electrocuted? [Answer] ## Tricky Mage: Your unique mage has worked out the basics of electricity, and has used this knowledge to design unique gear. It's not that other mages CAN'T do what he does, it's just that he's not talking and all attempts to copy him have failed because they don't know the secret. Your mage has insulated boots to protect him from grounding. He bypasses the need for drawing power through his feet by having a conductor that he touches/dangles to the ground to draw charge. My suggestion is a staff with a metal core covered in an insulator, or a bullwhip with a wire in it (this would be less mage-like but really cool), or even just a wire he dangles out of his robe and lifts up as needed with a string. It could even be a metal spike or spurs on his heel he pulls out of the ground before casting to break the connection. Once he's charged up, he disconnects from the ground (allowing him to hold the charge longer than any other mage, BTW) and waits for the opportunity to zap. If using a staff or whip, he snaps the whip/gestures with the staff and can discharge through the device. The combination of NOT jumping (imagine trying to fire a gun while jumping - accuracy will suck) and a very precise conductive discharger (the equivalent of a long barrel on a gun) means he has unprecedented range, control, power and accuracy. All that stuff about concentration and special extra spells is a smokescreen. He's drawing more power through a conductor, and faster, with less concentration. In fact, the most he needs to worry about is singed fingers as he charges/discharges through his device (or perhaps in the case of a staff, the power is stored inside the staff akin to what I think L Dutch is proposing). Because everyone assumes he's got special magic powers, they are trying to work out a magical solution. In reality, he's just clever. Other mages have stolen his boots, and failed to cast at all. Others have tried to use a staff, and electrocuted themselves. Others snap whips, and either suffer worse aim or electrocute themselves. Until someone else works out the details of resistance and conductivity, our mage is a rock star of lightning. [Answer] DWKraus's answer seems like it would work, except that actually insulating shoes against electrocution is really hard using non-magical / non-industrial era materials. A few mages would have probably figured out the staff/insulated shoes trick for minor lightning spells, but if you try it on a day after it rains, and you get just enough moisture saturating your shoes then you shock yourself anyway. ## The Key Here is Nested Casting > > There is a particular mage who doesn't seems to have to jump to cast > any lightning spell, in fact this mage is the only mage in history to > be able to do nested casting! > > > Not only are there spells out there for casting a lightning bolt, but there are also spells out there for stopping one. So, every time this mage casts a lightning spell, he simultaneously casts a shielding spell between the Earth and his feet just before discharging, preventing any energy from passing that way. Because no one else can cast nested spells, no one else can replicate what he is doing. They can steal his shoes, his staff, or even his spell book which explains in exact detail how to do it, but without his raw talent for casting 2 spells at once, no one else can actually copy this ability. [Answer] There are several possible ways: 1. Use a proxy for accumulating charges, and have it discharge on the target: as long as the proxy has a higher dielectric rigidity than air, air will be a preferred path of discharge. It comes with the bonus that the target doesn't know where the discharge will come from 2. Form a cloud above the cast field and charge the cloud, the same way as lighting happens in nature. 3. Use a levitate spell to avoid jumping and the discharging All of the above require casting two spells in parallel. To be able to do this, the mage has developed a preliminary spell which enhances the focus capability of the target for a certain amount of time, therefore they can, under the effect of the preliminary spell, cast two parallel spells with the same effort a normal mage would use to cast one. The preliminary spell is their most valuable secret, until the Mage Against Doping Agency finds it out about it. [Answer] Magical lightning rod to the target For many reasons the static electricity is 'attracted' to the ground. However, the mage wants it towards a target. Realistically jumping wouldn't help when discharging, as it would likely shoot out your legs back into the ground. For whatever reason your mages don't, but your legendary mage doesn't know that. He's smart and thinks rationally. Discharging a ton of electricity potential should safely from me to a target, where it'll do damage. Discharging into the ground will fail both those goals. To facilitate this, a magical lightning rod can be created. Just before the lightning is discharged, a path is thrown magically towards the target. This path can have whatever form or speed you deem fit for the story. Right after the lightning flashes, flying along the path and discharging at the end. Safe, based upon logic he can think of himself and takes note of the nested casting. Even though it's basically rapid consecutive spells, but gathering and discharging the lightning is much the same I wager. [Answer] Did you hear about diodes? They let electricity to flow in one direction but not the other. So he figured out how to do that. btw electricity is not as simple as you think. If you jump but then cast a lightning that jumps 10 meters, then you need to jump more than 10 meters high so that resistance from feet to ground is higher than resistance from mage to target. So the whole thing with jumping is somehow funny. Update: actually if body is a capacitor, then electricity is already in and then it discharges. It doesn't matter in which direction. If one is to be electrocuted, it should happen in either direction. [Answer] He's got a wooden leg, so he just shifts his weight over it and bends his other knee to lift his foot off the ground. Nobody can tell, because of the robes. The real trick is the spell he uses to keep that leg quiet when he walks around. It also works if he only wears one shoe. Perhaps he was born with one leg slightly longer, so in adapting to his deformity, he found a tremendous advantage over other mages. ]
[Question] [ All real military ground vehicles use a continuous caterpillar track or tank tread, but quad-treads/split tracks are often seen in sci-fi, with their futuristic tanks and settings. (Halo scorpion, C&C mammoth etc) Is there an actual reason(s) or advantage(s) to using a quad-tread/split track? Or is it only a common, impractical, artistic design choice? [Edit; *Answer supplementary] Ability to traverse excessively soft or large obstacles [Answer] There are indeed some advantages to having multiple treads. One big advantage is in the geometry. With two treads, the tank's pitch (the angle between the vehicle's nose and the horizontal) is on a line tangent to the ground underneath the vehicle's center of mass. On mostly level ground, this means nothing. When the ground changes elevation suddenly, though, it can become a problem. As an example, here's what a two-tread tank looks like coming over a hill. ![](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLsfX.jpg) The tank's pitch is still at an angle as if it was on the hillside, even though the ground has already flattened out. This has a number of problems. The tank has limited traction with half its treads in midair. The less-armored underbelly is exposed to enemy fire. The driver is looking at the sky and can't see what's directly in front of him. The main cannon can't adjust very much in the vertical direction, so large changes in pitch have a major impact on where you can and cannot fire. After the tank's center of mass crests the hill, the front end comes slamming down on the ground. That's not good for your suspension, and even worse for the poor occupants who are suddenly thrown 8-10 feet downward while stuck in a cramped metal can. These geometric issues grow worse as tanks grow larger and the distance between their center of mass and the end of the tank increases. If instead you had four treads instead of two, you can handle terrain changes much better. Each of the four treads can be at a different angle. This sets the tank's pitch roughly equal to the average of the pitches of the individual treads (the geometry is actually a lot more complicated than that, but it's close enough for discussion purposes). In the photo above, a four-treaded tank would have its front treads flat on the hilltop and the body of the tank would be at half the angle shown. Instead of slamming down after cresting the hill, the tank would gradually level out since all four treads would remain in contact with the ground the entire time. There is a drawback here, though. Imagine in that photo that the hill was shaped like an inverted 'V'. After the tank topped the hill, it immediately faced a steep downward slope. A four-treaded tank could potentially get stuck high-centered on the top of such a hill, the same as a truck might do. A two-treaded tank can't get high-centered so it would continue unimpeded. It would be an absurdly unpleasant ride for anyone inside, but it wouldn't get stuck. Another potential advantage I've heard of for multi-treaded vehicles is regarding tread wear. The wheels at the front and back corners keep the tread in tension. Even as far back as [da Vinci](https://www.quora.com/Is-a-long-rope-weaker-than-a-short-one), it was known that a shorter length of cable can generally withstand more tensile stress than a longer cable. Having several smaller treads means less tread is held in tension, resulting in fewer stress-related failures. Some of the photos in the other answers show an additional top wheel that makes the tread follow a triangle pattern, further reducing the amount of tread held in tension. Another advantage is that tracked vehicles have a separate motor for each tread. As tanks grow in size, they will at some point become so heavy that there's no practical way to propel them using only two motors (the motors become too big for the chassis, or they require more fuel than you can carry). Having more treads means you can have more motors. Each of those motors can be much smaller than the motors in a two-treaded vehicle. This design can be cheaper, more fuel-efficient, and can deliver more overall power. Many wheeled vehicles designed for pulling extreme loads (like the Soviet [MAZ-7907](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAZ-7907)) use a similar one-motor-per-wheel approach in order to generate enough power. [Answer] It's worth noting that one of the proposed Mars rovers (for the Pathfinder mission in 1995) was a quad-track: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fySU1.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fySU1.jpg) I haven't been able to find out much about this rover design, so if anyone knows who built it, or has more information, I'd really like to know more. Rather curiously you'll notice that this particular machine doesn't have any idlers or boogies under it's tracks. That's because it's an ELMS (elastic loop mobility system) using a titanium band as a track..... Another quad-track is the tuckers sno-cat: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CfBP0.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CfBP0.jpg) So this sort of vehicle definitely does exist. Why are two-track vehicles more common? Here are a couple thoughts: 1. Steering Both the vehicles shown above have steering mechanisms that turn the tracks. A two-track vehicle doesn't have to 2. Drivetrain A two track vehicle has a single differential and two brakes. A quad-track would require three differentials and four brakes?? Or four motors. Or something. 3. Complexity A four track vehicle has two more tracks - two more complicated mechanisms that can fail. Similarly, a quad-track requires additional suspension - the tracks themselves move up and down. Notice that neither the sno-cat or rover have typical tank boogies! On really large vehicles you may need both types of suspension. However, as a builder of [micro RC tracked vehicles](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4546397), I can tell you that a quad-track would be much better at dealing with obstacles such as fallen logs and steps. A two-track vehicle tends to have it's nose ride up until it pitches over backwards. A quad-track of equivalent size would have the vehicle move horizontally in situations where a two-track would pitch over backwards: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/X9F48.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/X9F48.png) --- So what can we do to mitagate some of the issues and end up with a setting where you can have a quad-track? Well, a lot of the problems go away if you have a [fuel cell, fusion reactor, handwavium electrical source]. This means you can eliminate all the drive-train issues. Current vehicles can't do this because introducing high-power-hybrid-drive-systems to a military vehicle is unlikely to increase reliability, but if a non-petrol-generator electrical system can be found.... [Answer] Redundancy. A tread is a single body, and if it's severed, the entire drive unit is useless. If that's your only drive unit on one side, all you can do is spin in circles and you're done for. If you still have one active drive unit on that side, you may have some mobility remaining to retreat or regain formation with your allies. (The Spirit rover is an interesting example of multiple independent wheels that allowed it to continue operating despite [the complete failure of one of its wheels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_(rover)#Equipment_wear_and_failures); the principle is similar for independent treads.) Independent suspension. A vehicle with multiple, independently-articulated treads can keep them all in contact with the ground over a much wider variety of profiles than a single pair of longer tracks. For a larger vehicle, as many sci-fi tanks tend to be, this might be essential to maneuver effectively in the same terrain as modern-sized tanks. One or both pairs can articulate sideways as mentioned in EstimatorNoiseless's answer for better maneuverability. Modularity. In a sci-fi setting where you may be establishing operations on a frontier planet or in a deserted wasteland, space in factories and warehouses is at a premium. Being able to reuse drive units and treads between different-sized vehicles could benefit your supply chain. Sheer size. The very largest treaded vehicles in the real world - things like the [crawler-transporters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter) that carried complete Saturn Vs and space shuttles out to the launchpad - often have [more than two treads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crawler-Transporter.jpg). [Bagger 228](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Garzweiler_Tagebau-1230.jpg), an excavator, has twelve separate tread sections mounted in three groups of four. Presumably, at these scales, some combination of the weight of the tracks (harder to get them to turn) and their physical dimensions (harder to find a factory with machines big enough to make them) makes two-tread designs impractical. Of course, in the real world there's no particular military use for a tank of this size, but that's never stopped sci-fi. [Answer] There is one other niche purpose for large split track vehicles. They are fairly common in large agricultural tractors. Track use in large tractors has come about for the same purpose as load distribution mentioned in ksbes answer. Tilled soil can be soft and loose, but it is also in the farmer's interest to avoid compaction of the soils (which can adversely affect the productivity of their fields). More surface area means less soil compaction as the tractor moves across it. Having quad tracks allows the tractor to maximize pulled loads as well (especially over uneven ground), as increased surface area will increase the traction. That said, there's a trade off of maintenance costs which are typically much higher on tracked vehicles over tires. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/P1EX2.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/P1EX2.jpg) [Answer] I drive one of these quad-tracked tractors. When carrying a lifeboat the total weight is over 56,000kg and it is able to do 16km/h over flat ground with that load. The suspension has no springs, but due to the vehicles articulation and all four tracks being hydraulically powered and able to independently tilt to match the terrain, it is amazingly capable for its 20m length! [![RNLI-SLARS-Quad-track](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dw96i.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dw96i.jpg) The four tracks also increase the surface area in contact with the beach, so despite its weight, the vehicle can drive over soft sand without bogging down. For those that are interested, here is a video showing what this vehicle is used for: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ75LIOavbs&t=70s> Like other answers mention, if the vehicle only had two tracks it would rock dangerously when traversing hills or undulating terrain. The four tracks conform to the surface much better. [Answer] Towards the end of the Soviet Union, there were many experimental tank and AFV designs in an attempt to gain decisive superiority over rapidly advancing Western AFV's. One common feature in these designs was the proposal to use 152mm cannon to deliver massive amounts of kinetic energy against even heavily armoured Western tanks carrying composite armour, as well as a huge HE or HEAT shell for fire support against unarmoured or lightly armoured targets. The ultimate evolution was the [Objekt 490](http://btvt.info/7english/object_490_21_vek.htm). This was a very low vehicle mounting a 152mm cannon in a limited traverse turret. The 4 track system did not provide the articulation advantages that you might find on a tractor, since the chassis was a single unit, but the arrangement allowed the use of two separate engines (road marches could be conducted with one engine off for better fuel economy), lower ground pressure and the ability to continue moving should two sets of tracks be damaged (one on each side, obviously). You can see the layout in these illustrations [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hvWMI.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hvWMI.jpg) Objekt 490 layout [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gcx6J.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Gcx6J.jpg) Objekt 490 side view [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lo0us.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Lo0us.jpg) Objekt 490 rear view. The gun is fully traversed to the rear, and thus impossible to fire Sweden also did some experimental work at the same time, seeking to replace the Striv 103 "S" Tank. One idea investigated was the UDES-XX-20, which essentially expanded the idea of the BV-206 articulated marginal terrain vehicle into a fully armoured fighting machine. For the Swedish terrain, the low ground pressure and articulation would have been very useful, but expensive and mechanically complex. The Swedish Army and government eventually decided the costs of creating a unique "Swedish" tank far exceeded the benefits, and Sweden went on to adopt a version of the Leopard 2 instead. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4TBzf.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4TBzf.jpg) UDES-XX 20 general arrangment [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/O6LPY.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/O6LPY.jpg) UDES-XX 20 demonstrating articulation [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RzdW3.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RzdW3.jpg) UDES-XX 20 climbing a slope AS you can see, while there are some advantages to multi track designs, for AFV's the added complexity really comes at too much of a cost for the advantages that you get. For current tanks and the foreseeable future, multi track designs will likely only appear on marginal terrain vehicles where the advantages are very clear and unachievable by other means. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zlIUf.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zlIUf.jpg) Royal Marine Commandos in Viking MTV's [Answer] It is quite impractical for all-terrain vehicle. What is tread is used for? - to support high load on soft surface. It means one of two things 1. if any of this treads fails for any reason - there is no enough suppourt for high load on this side/coner and vehicle losses ability to move. Since 4 tracks are times more prone to falure in one of them - they a times more impractical (and times more complex). If we are using treads we should prefere to use as little number of them as possible -OR- 2. vehicle can still move with one tread failed. But that means that there is not so much load on that tread and it can be reaplaced with much simpler and less complex solution - a wheel (i.e. [half-tracks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-track)) There is only one exception - extreamly soft surface. It is either snow (and even there half-ski-half-tread is preferable), or any surface for thousands-ton vehicle. But this exception happen due to requirment of destributing mean load over even larger area (to prevent surface sliding) and (for super-heavies) relative softnes of construction elements. So for military vehicle qard/split-treaded is quite impractical. There were experiments with split tracks for heavy tanks in USSR. And they showed all the flaws of that idea. [Answer] Robots like [packbot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PackBot) use two sets of treads. One is stationary on the body the other set is mounted on rotating flippers which is useful for overcoming obstacles. ]
[Question] [ Is it possible to focus the energy of one star to a small enough point and high enough energy to provide the energy to start a fusion reactor? I'm imagining a large lens placed between the star and its source but I don't even know whether it is possible (ignoring the impracticalities of manufacturing such a lens or whether other methods would be better suited). A bit of maths showing the size of the lens needed (if it is possible) would be a nice touch if anyone has the time. (In my story I would like there to be some talk by the team involved in the idea when they propose it) [Answer] A Very relevant [XKCD](https://what-if.xkcd.com/145/) The important part to your problem is that a lens cannot focus light to a higher intensity than its source. So the hottest you could make something using a lot of lenses is as hot as the stars surface. For our sun that works out to ~5000°C, which is pretty hot, but no where near the temperatures in the interior of the sun or providing enough energy to initiate fusion. [Answer] No. This question was on the physics stack. <https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/69652/concentrating-sunlight-to-initiate-fusion-reaction> Here is text copied from the answer from the physics stack, in case there are issues clicking through to read it. > > The second law prevents you from using the Sun (or anything) to heat > an object to greater than the surface temperature of the Sun. > Otherwise you could take a box of gas at equilibrium split it into two > halves, use lenses and mirrors to focus the radiation from the left > half on the right half, and raise the temperature of the right half. > Then you could use that temperature difference to run an engine, > thereby extracting work from an equilibriated gas in blatant violation > of the 2nd Law. > > > [Answer] It probably depends. It might be possible for some types of fusion reactors, but you're really focusing on the wrong problem. Getting tritium or deuterium or whatever fusion fuel you have hot enough to initiate fusion is not hard. Sustaining the reaction and extracting energy from it is the hard part. As observed in [other](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/86409/4981) [answers](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/86411/4981), and basically [the same question on the Physics Stack](https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/69652/37638), the limitation of a lens is that it cannot heat anything beyond the temperature of the body it's focusing light from, and the surface of a star is not hot enough for a sustained fusion reaction. Having said that, one type of fusion we humans have explored (and are still exploring, to my knowledge) is called [inertial confinement fusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion), and basically uses lasers to generate shockwaves in a fuel pellet, compressing and heating it enough to generate a (brief) fusion reaction. > > Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) is a type of fusion energy research that attempts to initiate nuclear fusion reactions by heating and compressing a fuel target, typically in the form of a pellet that most often contains a mixture of deuterium and tritium. > > > To compress and heat the fuel, energy is delivered to the outer layer of the target using high-energy beams of laser light, electrons or ions, although for a variety of reasons, almost all ICF devices as of 2015 have used lasers. The heated outer layer explodes outward, producing a reaction force against the remainder of the target, accelerating it inwards, compressing the target. This process is designed to create shock waves that travel inward through the target. A sufficiently powerful set of shock waves can compress and heat the fuel at the center so much that fusion reactions occur. > > > The energy released by these reactions will then heat the surrounding fuel, and if the heating is strong enough this could also begin to undergo fusion. The aim of ICF is to produce a condition known as ignition, where this heating process causes a chain reaction that burns a significant portion of the fuel. > > > I would suggest that with clever enough materials science and engineering of these fuel pellets, it might be possible to achieve the same thing with an intense burst of focused sunlight, rather than a laser (like we do now), though admittedly, it seems like a long way to go do do it that way rather than using lasers like we do now, and a different technique altogether, like [magnetic confinement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak), is probably a better bet for fusion power as an energy source. The major technical issue with creating a fusion reaction is not getting up to the necessary temperature, it's sustaining the reaction and extracting energy from it. To that point, at least 5 countries (and possibly as many as 9) have successfully tested fusion reactors so far, though the more common term for them is "hydrogen bombs" (a fission bomb is used to heat and compress a tritium payload, which then creates a more powerful fusion explosion). So I'd suggest that you're focusing on the wrong problem, as far as fusion goes. Getting your fusion fuel hot enough to create fusion is relatively easy, and we've been able to do that for more than 50 years. The part we haven't pulled off yet is sustaining the reaction in a way we can extract usable energy from, and that's probably where your scientists would have trouble too. [Answer] Focus the sun with a large lens and create fusion temperatures? No, as very well answered by XKCD and earlier answers in SE. However. Inertial Confinement Fusion using lasers is a real thing. So your simplest (if inelegant) solution is to build something like the National Ignition Facility in space, powered by photovoltaics. Looking for a more "elegant" solution than photovoltaics? Solar pumped lasers are a real thing, if still a very underdeveloped technology. A sufficiently large and sophisticated system could use concentrated solar energy to "charge" (optically pump) a lasing medium, enabling the delivery of a powerful focused beam to trigger an ICF fusion reaction. Read up on the NIF in Wikipedia and envision the primary beam line being pumped by concentrated solar power instead of flashlamps. How big would it need to be? That is way beyond my level of expertise. But don't limit yourself to envisioning big glass lenses. Think gossamer structures of reflective Mylar. Enormous parabolic surfaces, or troughs hundreds of meters wide and kilometers long with cylinders of gas- or plasma-phase lasing medium running down the center. Also, look into fresnel lenses. Simply etching the right diffraction pattern into a flat transparent sheet can create a great solar concentrator. And a big shout-out to Larry Niven's Ringworld asteroid defense system consisting of UV lasers powered by solar flares. [Answer] Other answers have shown why a real-time lens is not possible for this setup. However, if you can store the energy of the sun and release it all at the same time then it can be used to start a fusion reaction. In your case, a battery powered by focused light from a lens can be charged over time and used to produce shorter-burst lasers which can start a fusion reaction. Kengineer's answer touches on this but I didn't think this point was highlighted enough. [Answer] Focusing sunlight to create fusion, no, focusing the power of the sun via the solar wind to create fusion, yes. Fusion through lense focusing has been covered by others, you can't get the temperature over 5,000C. But you can focus the solar wind using a mass spectrometer with a tokamak at the end for fusion. The solar wind is essentially plasma made of electrons, protons and alpha particles (Helium nuclei) plus a small percent of heavier elements all traveling at 500 km/sec from the sun, though high energy it is very diffuse. First you channel a portion of the solar wind into a mass spectrometer, say 5%, which would be about a 50 million kg/sec to be harvested. Though only a small % of that will be useful for you. Then using the MS you seperate deuterium (H2), tritium (H3) and He3 nuclei, expelling (or collecting) everything else. At the end of the MS you seperate and collect the deuterium, tritium and He3 into three massive tokamaks (doughnut shaped magnetic confining plasma at very hight temperatures and pressures.) After collecting enough plasma into each of the three tokamaks, you switch the deuterium and tritium streams so that the deuterium is entering the tritium tokamak and vice versa. Now all three tokamaks will eventually reach fusion and create more energy than you put in which you will need to sustain the MS and the tokamaks and use the left over for whatever your civilization needs. Obviously the amount of time and energy into building these structures would be prohibitive and likely create their own problems but theoretically it would be possible. [Answer] There are power system that use a focus light principle : <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power> However if it needs to be fusion then there are many methods to start it, with the right components (and shielding) you can build one in your garage such as this person when he was 14 years old : <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Wilson> The problem with our current understanding of fusion reactors is they require more energy to contain and maintain the reaction then they output. Some proposals have put large solar arrays into orbit then have the energy sent via microwaves to a receiver. Not sure if that helps you but a classic SimCity disaster was having this beam miss the receiver. ]
[Question] [ The setting is a medieval fantasy, think general dnd or LotR. I have already created a map and it’s existed for a while now but I desperately want to know where cities and towns might logically pop up. Where might boomtowns pop up and why? What does an area need in order to stimulate a large population growth for cities and towns to develop? Here’s some context: The map is roughly the size of North America. Villages range in the hundreds in terms of population, towns will consist of 1,000-3,000 people and cities can go over 100,000 inhabitants. I don’t have a world limit for population so don’t worry about that. The northernmost parts of the map are similar to Canada while the southern parts are similar to China and many other countries in the very north and very south of Africa, not its center. The names on the map are names of locations not cities or towns. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BNbRR.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/BNbRR.jpg) If there is anything I’m missing or more information that I need to add, if so please feel free to share. [Answer] Not uncountably large. One factor. Fresh water. People need it. You can get by with wells for small populations but you need moving water for medium or larger populations. Water is also good for taking away waste. Water is also good for trade because in a medieval tech world, larger waterways are reliable means to move materials. -- You will have cities where large rivers meet the sea. You will have cities some distance back along the rivers. Look at the Mississippi or Danube for examples. You may have cities where large lakes meet rivers, Chicago style. As regards boom towns these boom because of undiscovered resources that get discovered - like gold. Folks in a boom town also need to drink and also need to get the gold or other boom resource to markets and so flowing water would again be desirable. Your map has a very realistic coast and realistic waterways. Plop some towns on them! [Answer] [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/r8u0X.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/r8u0X.jpg) Here is your map with labels where, based on the basic information, you'd likely see larger settlements. Of course, this varies: a coastline that is all cliff will be less likely to have a settlement than one which has less slope, as one obvious example. Note that these don't preclude other settlements, these are just the ones I'd consider most likely. 1. There are likely to be settlements along this river/estuary. It's an obvious trade route and allows easy access to the sea and inland. 2. You've got a sheltered bay (good anchorage?) with a river flowing into it, thus a source of fresh water. So this is an obvious location. 3. Large anchorage, again on the river, and at a mountain pass, making an obvious trading hub. 4. Roughly looks to be where the river narrows and larger craft would likely have trouble going further upriver. This makes an obvious place for a port. Think Montreal as an example. 5. Bay, river flowing into it, again a likely location. 6, 7. Rivers flowing into a large lake, obvious location for trading hubs. 8. End of a bay, river flowing in, larger lake inland. Obvious location. 9. Similar to 8, but on the coast rather than at the end of a bay. Mountains in between 8 and 9 provides a natural boundary between them. 10. Again, river meets sea, obvious location. I've marked two rivers with an X. Those don't make any sense to me in terms of geography. I haven't gone much further inland, because there a lot more depends on climate, even with rivers. Canada and China are the second and third largest countries on the planet, with climates that range from treeless tundra (either due to latitude or altitude) to temperate, to steppes/prairies, to wet to desert, so "like Canada" and "like China" are actually moderately useless as descriptors. [Answer] People need water, it's why many towns are along rivers. In ancient times cities close to snow covered mountains that could have an aqueduct constructed had an advantage over cities that couldn't. Failing that, access to large supplies of good quality ground was essential. Additionally, navigable rivers also provided a means of trade and communication between settlements along such rivers. For ocean going trade, ports need to be established on the coast. This leads to the development of coastal settlements. Some boom towns might be located in some mountainous areas because of rich mines. Others will occur at trading cross roads, similar to those that existed along the old [Silk Road](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road). [Answer] The size of your map means that you should focus on story-relevant points of interest rather than attempt to realistically depict every city and town. Unless civilization is very new to this continent, you can pretty much guarantee that every square kilometer of habitable land is occupied to one degree or another. While the number of actual cities will be few, given a medieval tech level, there will be tens of thousands of towns and countless villages dotting the landscape. That said, I'll try and give you some good points to consider. The best way to imagine medieval population distributions is to imagine a tree. Villages are like the leaves, towns like the branches, cities like the limbs, and the capitol (or most significant habitation) like the trunk. Villages contain anywhere from 200 to 500 inhabitants and will either be surrounded by farmland or be adjacent some resource gathering operation such as logging or mining. Villages will have a dirt path or dirt road connecting them to the nearest town. The length of this road was typically the distance a man with cart could travel in a third of a day. As stated earlier, there will be a countless number of these given the size of the region you specified, so I would not bother placing them unless they are story relevant. Towns will have between 500 and 1000 inhabitants and also host the marketplace for a region. Each town will have many villages that feed into it and will often, but not always, be adjacent to something facilitating commerce such as a navigable river, coastline, or developed road (a rarity in the middle ages). In the event that none of those conditions exist, the town will instead be a waystation for travelers and traders, such as an oasis town in the desert or the midway point between a vast expanse of wilderness. Towns will also be the minimum size of habitation where you might find a local lord - most often a baron(ess), but sometimes someone of a higher rank. If this is the case, then that town will most likely be adjacent to some defensible position such as a hill, cliff top, river island, or the like. That defensible position will be where the local lord has his castle (the size and construction of which is a whole other topic). The towns of a region, just like villages, will surround the cities they support. The cities will have populations we would today consider small with between 1000 and and 8000 people. They will almost certainly be on a coast, along a major navigable river, or next to a lake because waterborn craft were, by far, the most efficient means of transporting goods over distances. For the rare exceptions to that rule, the city will instead be placed where it is because it sits at the crossroads of a major trade route or controls access through a mountain pass. They will also very likely be the home of a higher ranking member of the nobility such as a count, viscount, or possibly even a duke. Just like with towns, if there is nobility in the city, their castle will be built at the most defensible position possible. The most important takeaway point though is there will be relatively long distances between cities, even if all of them are along the same coastline or river. Finally, there are capitols. Again, relative to modern standards these will be small. Paris in the 14th century had somewhere around 200,000 people living in it and it was one of most populous cities in all of Europe. These will be the most widely spaced habitations of all. There will be many days travel between cities of this size and most often, a country will have just one(hence 'capitol'). It will almost certainly be the seat of power for a country's king. Just like the preceding tiers of populations, capitols will be 'fed' by major roads or navigable rivers from the cities supporting it. These will almost always be not only located on a major river, but also one that opens up into sea. For London, it was its position on the River Thames which opened up into the Baltic Sea. For Paris, it was the River Seine which also opened up into the Baltic Sea. For Rome, it was the river Tiber which opened up into the Mediterranean which, itself, granted it central access to all the major cities that had been inhabited since antiquity. The whole reason Capitols got as big as they did was because they sat along the most logistically ideal location for importing the tremendous amount of foodstuffs they needed. The rivers would bring in goods from the interior while the coasts would bring in goods from all the coastal cities. The rivers would also supply the city with drinking water for the inhabitants as their proximity to salt water meant wells would be easily contaminated with brackish water. So, if you place a very large city somewhere, regardless of whether it's a capitol, you should do so where it will have ideal conditions for trade, access to fresh water, and some means of getting large amounts of food. In conclusion, when placing towns and cities, try and imagine them as a tree with the leaves being villages, towns branches, cities limbs, and capitols the trunk; each tier supporting the one above that. Remember that the larger and more important your city is, the more selective you have to be as to where you place it. Adjacency to seaborne trade lanes, access through difficult terrain, a supply of fresh water, and defensible terrain are all factors you need to consider. [Answer] Your rivers are not realistic. Smaller streams combine into larger streams and those combine into even larger streams until an ocean is reached. Look at some river tributary maps to get an idea of what they should look like. It might be helpful to draw a topography first, then draw rivers. This will also tell you where crops can be grown. After that, dot some cities around what appear to be strategic travel locations (along water routes, a mountain pass, an island). Make travel routes between majors cities and put minor cities on those routes. [Answer] My version.. see below Inspired by 1) Norway fjords and 2) the fact cities reside on crossroads of waterways and in coastal regions, cities tend to reside at the end of the fjord inland and need a stronghold downstream, for reconnaissance and guard the entry. Cities inland, around the Twan peaks I placed because I assume there's resources there. I don't know that, you do. So maybe they are to be placed elsewhere. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VUmTI.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/VUmTI.png) [Answer] Factor #1: Access to fresh water This is the most important factor. Foods can be stored and transported to a certain degree (even in primitive societies), water cannot. Any settlement needs access to fresh water sources as the first and most important factor. Factor #2: Access to food Food is a bit easier to organise than water. It can, to a degree, be transported and stored. Plus you always have the option to hunt. Factor #3: Defensibility First it's wild animals going after your livestock, then it's big wild animals going after your children or even you and finally it's that neighbour who always envied you for your war charriot. There's just no place you can live in peace! And with defensibility we're back at factor #1: Defensibility depens on how well you can access water when the enemy's at the gate. Again: Food can be stored but if you run out of fresh water, your settlement is lost. Factor #4: Access to economic circles Once a settlement is established and wants to grow it needs access to an economic circle. It needs connections to other settlements for trade. This can happen by sea (the easier way as ships can haul large amounts of cargo even on a "primitive" tech level) or by land. There's a ton of other factors depending on I found this two videos very helpful when I designed cities back in the day: [On Worldbuilding: WHY are cities where they are?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sn_6xKotUU) [Why Are Cities Where They Are?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PWWtqfwacQ) [Answer] I Use S.T.R.A.W Stability Trade Resources Access Water. These are the principles that generally guide people to live in certain places, from least to most important. ### Stability: Note that this isn't safety- I assume that cities are built in mostly safe places by default. That can change, but building does not occur in large quantities in unsafe places. How stable is the environment? Is it subject to natural disasters on a regular basis? If so, people don't like to settle there without extra incentive. ### Trade: Is the city able to trade with its neighbors? it's very rare to find a lone city that's far from any other city, they like to be connected. Particularly, connected by road and highway, or by sea. Cities are especially likely to pop up in the middle of a trade route, making their living off passerby. ### Resources: What natural resources does this city have? is it a rich mineral deposit, or maybe plentiful fish? Fertile farmland and on rare occasion millitary objectives are also resources. People moved across the continental US in the 1940s/50s because of a rumor of gold in California, and many towns were settled to serve that purpose. ### Access: Nobody builds a city on top of a mountain. Nobody builds a city in the middle of the desert. A city must be accessible from the outside to survive. There are indeed rare occasions where a city may not need nor want outsiders, such civilizations are usually more primitive and conservative than the ones who are actively integrating with other towns. ### Water / (food): There is no question that a city must have access to water and food. If there is none in the area, then there won't be any settlers. Will goes after this point really well in his answer: <https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/232697/29072> [Answer] There are several aspects that need to be considered. One aspect not mentioned is simply climate. People like to live in comfortable areas. If you look historically at Earth, you'll see many large, older cities are arranged on a narrow band of latitude. Another aspect is what do cities do? Cities support population by the services they provide. Placing a city is like placing a McDonalds. Each restaurant has its own little demographic territory that it services. The planners draw little circles around potential locations. Larger, specialty stores need to have a larger territory, but also a certain density. That's why there's no Apple stores in, like, Elko, Nevada. So, that gets abstracted out to cities in general. When it comes to villages and towns, the primary mechanic for placement is simply travel time. Each town is roughly a days travel from each other. That makes the majority of the folks "going into town" a day trip for them (since they, on average, travel to the town that that they're closest to, which is 1/2 day travel). How far are you willing to travel to pick up the necessities for your farm. The rivers are important for larger cities because of the value of large rivers for transport. Faster travel makes it easier for larger amount of population to be supported by the city -- but only if the travel it two way. No fun going down the river in a day, and having to take a week walking back. But that works great for trade goods, which typically have a one way trip. [Answer] Villages will be situated at convenient locations for the villagers to get out and farm. They will need access to water sufficient for their needs and to ways to get such essentials as salt, but basically, they will spread out over all arable land in due course. This will start with the best land in reach, and work down to the barely adequate as population increases. As a consequence, villages will be close enough together that a villager doesn't have to walk far to get to his fields and do his day's work, and go back. Exceptional work may have a hut attached so he can stay the night, but normally, much less than a day's walk, since you have to work as well [Answer] There's lots of good answers here (along the river ways, near water, climate, etc) but you're missing one of the key driving points of civilization: Stuff. Stuff meaning wood, quarries, minerals, fish, plains for farms, whatever exploitable resource you can imagine. You're missing the mineral, vegetation and climate layers and that will drive a lot of city placement and growth. Material rich areas draw a lot of people who want to exploit that stuff. Cities form near the stuff, cities make roads, cities make forts to keep the roads safe, defend good positions and so on. Water ways will drive a lot of the trade -- they are pre-established roads after all -- but no one will go from the coast to the Hantpho Valley or cross a mountain without a really good reason. That reason can be anything from fertile ground for fields to marble quarries to rich forests/game to "because a city is there". Yes, most medieval cities are self-sufficient but they do have industry focuses and there will be a center of government somewhere. Part of the story is driven by where that stuff is. Does some city-state control a vast wealth? Are there exiles driven away? Barbarians or want to take their stuff? Does the city-state reinforce its roads in fear? Do fort towns (aka castle towns) form? Do uncivilized inns and trade hubs pop-up between the city-state, barbarians, and exiles? [Answer] You'll want villages distributed roughly evenly over the arable land. Then upgrade some of them to towns. You want them evenly distributed so that each village is reasonably close to a town, and each town has about the same number of villages nearby. Prefer villages along navigable water to become towns. Repeat this process for cities, placing them evenly so they have an equal number of towns and all the towns are within a reasonable distance of a city. Particularly good places to upgrade are: * The lowest point on a river that it is practical to bridge. (London) * The confluence of navigable rivers. (Belgrade) * Near the mouth of a major navigable river (Alexandria) * At a strategic choke point like a pass, straight, isthmus, or oasis linking two areas that trade with one another (Istanbul) * If there's a lot of fighting like you get with groups of city states or along a border then defensible locations are good (Athens, Venice) * A sheltered natural harbour (Portsmouth, Valletta) ]
[Question] [ Now I had previously asked how a loving interspecies couple would work around very Alien Body Plans that is now sadly closed ([How will interspecies lovers overcome different body plans?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/193358/how-will-interspecies-lovers-overcome-different-body-plans?noredirect=1#comment599349_193358)) That question was my attempt to dip my toe in the water, to see weather or not the idea had any merit. This is the question a lot of people thought I was asking. Now to explore this lets bring back the example couple. Let’s call them Ms. Smith and Mr. Xurkesh. Now as you might have guessed they have been carrying on quite the courtship, she regales him with tales of her journey through the cosmos as an explorer, he recites romantic poetry in his native language (which sounds like an odd mixture between whale song and a broken garbage disposal) and they regularly watch the latest stream movie from Earth on the couch. All in all, typical couple stuff. One day after little too much to drink, they begin talking about...let’s call it the Next Step. Both are intrigued, both wonder could they even go to the Next Step? They decide to table it and go about their work the next day but they carve out time to seek out friends to ask for advice on the topic. Now for Mr. Xurkesh, he is noticeably bigger and sharper, with limbs and teeth designed to rip prey apart. Good when your eating tough armored megafauna, not so good for those tender moments. Naturally he doesn’t want a Woman of Kleenex situation, mostly because he doesn’t want to hurt the woman that he has fallen for, even by accident. As for Ms. Smith, her job may be to explore the galaxy, but she is not a Captain Kirk with a girl, boy, hermaphrodite, indeterminate, and undecided in every star port from here to Andromeda. Xurkesh was her first interspecies partner and just finding a way to safely kiss him was a challenge, and not because he kept checking her over for any accidental wounds. So naturally they both talk to their friends, some of which are also in loving interspecies couples, others may have dabbled with it in college, but the point is Smith and Xurkesh are looking for advice on how to proceed to the next step both safely and to make it something special for their better half. So now I ask you a question on their behalf which is: How would a loving interspecies couple with vastly different body plans safely engage in physical intimacy? [Answer] Well, with technology and a bit of creativity of course! There are several options, all depending on how transhumanist (or transalienist!) the couple is willing to go. Here's a list of potential workarounds/ways the young couple can get it on, ordered from low to high investment: * No touching: there's plenty of two-partner erotic activities that people can partake in that don't involve physical contact. Maybe they can watch x-rated movies, listen to erotic audio recordings, or just watch each other as they participate in their species' brand of self-pleasure. Maybe they can play sexual games, like truth or dare with each other (eg "in lurid detail, describe one of your sexual fantasies" or "I dare you to undress in view of the window" both of which wouldn't require physical contact) * Drugs/restraints: Since Xurkesh has a lot of hard edges, bulky muscles, and can easily crush his partner, one solution would be to inhibit his movement. Maybe there's a drink similar to alcohol that makes him--while not lethargic--weaker in his movement so that in the throes of passion, he doesn't accidentally crush his partner. Alternatively the couple can try bondage, restricting Mr. Xurkesh's movements so he can't hurt his partner. * VR Sex: While VR sex is currently in its technological infancy, it does already exist. It's only reasonable to assume that this technology will be far more advanced in the future. If "full dive" VR is possible--that is fully immersive and nigh-indistinguishable from reality that works via brain-interface--the couple could just have sex in VR. There, the woman could, for example, wear a human avatar version of herself that's just as strong as her partner and also has her "equipment" modified to be compatible with her partner's avatar's sexual organs. If they want to spice it up, she could even adopt an alien avatar or he could adopt a human one--the choices are virtually limitless. Even if "full dive" VR somehow does not exist, traditional VR in a rig with appropriate animatronic sex toys could also work. * Human plus: If the couple deems their relationship has reached a serious level, they might invest in themselves to become more compatible with their partners through self-alteration. For example, the woman might get gene-mods that make her muscles stronger and skin denser so it cant causally get pierced by Mr. Xurkesh's spikes and he might undergo a procedure that makes it so his saliva isn't toxic to Ms. Smith biology. Going further, maybe Ms. Smith installs synthetic pheromone glands so that she can communicate her emotions better and more naturally to her partner or Mr. Xurkesh might have auxiliary vocal chords installed so that he can speak at human frequencies. * Human ultimate: Who needs pesky skin, bones, grey matter, and all those "human-y" bits anyways? Ms. Smith sure doesn't! Taking the next logical step for any space-borne adventurer who wants to live forever, she decides to become an infomorph, uploading her brain into a computer (slowly or all at once, her pick). Now, as software, she has all sorts of exciting possibilities available to her. For example, she could simply remotely pilot ("posses") a humanoid android that's tailored to look like her yet is engineered to be sexually compatible with her partner's species. Alternatively, she could inhabit a bio-printed female version of Mr. Xurkesh's species. Going even further, if her partner has a mental interface, she could live entirely digitally, projecting an avatar of herself directly into Mr. Xurkesh's vision and sending the appropriately simulated tactile signals directly to his brain when her avatar touches him. [Answer] ### With clear communication and active consent. I'm going to assume discussion and light contact (eg hugs) just works between species. It sounds like your asking more about the sexual side of intimacy than the cuddles on the couch. This is going to vary considerably depending on the two races I could make guesses based on the picture and write some inter species smut (limb A goes into receptical B, etc) - but in the end it comes down to a discussion between the parties like so: "I've enjoyed our time together and I'd like to do more with you" "Me too. But I'm not really sure what to do. I'm a bit out of my depth and unsure but excited to try, so tell me what should I do" "Ok manoeuvre this thing in this pattern. Yup like that. That feels really good. What would you like me to do to you?" Etc... Calm exchange between two biological machines tricking the other into releasing happy hormones. My suggestion is write it like 2 teenage humans who dont understand each others bodies but are following all the best practices of informend consent... it's basically the same story just the parts dont interlock as neatly. [Answer] prosthetics AKA sex toys This very funny [short story](http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_10_13/) by Naomi Kritzer narrates how a human/alien couple's special request to a sex-toy business leads to a whole line of artificial private parts -- measurements, variations, product-testing -- and their increasing popularity as we find inter-species love isn't so rare, just mostly hidden. (Disclaimer: no, I did not search for "alien sex toys" -- I read that story several years ago. All of her stuff is that good. Actually, I did search "short story alien sex toys", but only to find that story on-line). [Answer] > > How would a loving interspecies couple with vastly different body plans safely engage in physical intimacy? > > > Physical intimacy extends way past the mere act of intercourse or physical penetration. Even for the human with human couple, there are cases where one or both members of the couple has had their genitalia altered or removed out of medical concerns (think of a cancer that requires removing or altering part or the entirety of the genitalia). It doesn't mean that physical intimacy cannot happen, but just that it needs to be adapted to: * provide gratification to the giver and the receiver * be compatible with the physical capabilities of both the giver and the receiver Again, as I hinted in my answer to your other question, communication between the partners is key. If A finds pleasurable to be scratched behind the hear and B can do that without being hurt or hurting, that is a valid way of expressing and living physical intimacy. There is no "one size fits all" answer for this just considering the body plan. It really depends on the individuals involved. [Answer] I would propose as an addon to the already excellent answers present here the following: You need to know first and foremost how members of your alien species would engage in their own equivalent of intercourse. If they function differently (think egg laying frogs, where there isn't quite any intercourse happening) then they might not have the same kind of expectations from any kind of intimate exchange. Your description of a, to simplify, dangerous to touch male, makes me think that their females have strategies to overcome being shredded themselves. Which Ms. Smith could emulate with help from Mr. Xurkesh through communication, watching educational movies and so on, as already said in other answers. [Answer] I will write about the safety, how they would come to the point to speak and find a consent about it, is another point. I think we agree, that language and sharing thoughts is not the problem in different body shapes, but touching could be. Option 1: make Mr Xurkesh less dangerous Depending on the dangers that Mr Xurkesh offers,for example stuff the spikes with cork, place protective shields over the sharp parts, and never let him position above the Ms. Maybe Ms. Smith has some dangers to offer too? Maybe her saliva causes skin rash in Mr Xurkesh? Option 2: use/invent tools to help The arms of Ms Smith are too short to reach a part of Mr Xurkesh safe? Use a telescopic tool to reach it. The claws of MR Xurkesh are too sharp or too big to touch parts of Ms Smith? Use some small/soft tool with a handle, that gives MR Xurkesh enough control over it. In conclusion you need to have an image (even in your mind) how romantic physical contact would be between intra-species-couples, and then try to find solutions how the "other" species could cause the same "happy feelings". Depending of the characters (which I assume as open minded, because they came in close contact with other species) they may need planning for the solution, or may use improvisation to overcome appearing boundaries. [Answer] Maybe you don't need to be so gentle? A lot of the anserws focus on how to practice sex while avoiding harm entirely. There are pretty good answers but I feel there's a angle that hasn't been explored. Sometimes pain, and small, controlled ammounts of bodly harm can be a positive part of the sexual encounter. Perhaps, to an extent, the pushing round, beating, piercing of the skin is acceptable and even desirable. For someone into needle play, the spikes may be a bonus! Of course, spike size may be a deal breaker in this area but then again, advanced numbing agents and the futuristic advancements in tissue repair could give you some leeway there. Of course this needs to be done safely, o Mr. Xurkesh may neeed to practice some alien yoga to be in very good control of his movements during the act. Something to add, you may be wondering why would your captain have those strange kinks. It sounds too convenient. Well, sure, but then again it might have played a role in the choice of the alien partner, so not as much of a coincidence there. That's not to say she only cares about him physically, but it could be what first intrigued her about him. ]

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