Split (1)

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[Question] [ I want an empire that is simultaneously enlightened and barbaric. So the idea is to split the territory in two: [the meritocracy in my previous question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/181683/can-you-have-a-multicultural-meritocracy), a mostly peaceful realm, has a vast periphery that is basically an eternal warzone. So how does that work? Well, the country in the core functions much like pre-modern China: government is bureaucratic and more or less merit-based, and while social mobility is not perfect there's also no structured class system. This is the middle ages (whatever that may mean for the countries I'm using as a reference), no need for the guys on top to concern themselves with human rights and all that. But even the best countries have tensions, and this empire has an ingenious solution: the outer reaches function less like China and more like the Aztec empire. The little governance there is tribute-based rather than administrative: really it's a myriad of pseudo-independent little states and tribes, which are frequently raided: for wealth, and for captives to sacrifice to the Rain God back in the capital. The frontier also serves as an outlet for tensions. Young men who want to prove themselves in battle have a fine opportunity to do so. And internal strife can be alleviated with these wars too: just let them sort it out over there. Make a competition out of bringing back as many captives as possible, or just let troublemakers lead undersized legions to a certain doom, as a honourable way of disposing of them. I think that so far this is quasi realistic: I'm basically smacking together two existing countries from history. But here's the kicker: this country must have been doing this for far longer than the Aztecs ever lived. Say, five hundred years. That takes it out of real history and straight into Orwellian territory: is it even possible to have such a long war, without: * People moving out of the war territory, or just going extinct * Everything being permanently conquered So the issue is mostly the eternal war. It does not need to be a total war that is going on everywhere along the border at all times, but the capital always needs human sacrifices (say twenty thousand a year), and the generals need to have wars, battle and skirmishes. The frontier does expand over time, as bordering states turn from tributary states into incorporated provinces, but this cannot happen too rapidly or the empire will become too big to manage. So, reality check this for me. My goals are: * A relatively stable inner empire, about the size and population of core China * Frequent wars along the borders to bring back captives for sacrifices * For this to last up to five hundred years * There's not a single equally large nation along their borders - I have to rule out this answer because the empire must not have met their equal (it's part of the story when they do) Can I make this work; how does one make such a vastly unequal war last forever? --- Appendix: the empire's borders are roughly 5000 km long. An important factor is the possible depth of the raids; assuming they can maintain a military presence for up to 200 km into enemy territory, then we've got about a million square kilometres of raidable lands; or about twice the size of France. If raids happen every ten years, then 100000 km² of area is available for a given year, and with a population density of 0.4 person/km² (about that of pre-Columbian agricultural tribes), to take twenty thousand captives a year, we need to take about half the population every ten years. That's probably not going to cut it. The twenty thousand could be supplemented with those given the death penalty in the core empire, and perhaps halved. Still, losing a quarter of your populace every ten years does not seem sustainable - so some more data on the possible reasonable depth of the raiding territory would be helpful. Even then, it must be light enough not to reasonably cause tribes to want to move out - and I must prevent the large-scale establishment of stable tributary relationships and alliances where they peacefully give up their people; there must be wars, after all. [Answer] > > how does one make such a vastly unequal war last forever? > > > You are pretty much describing the frontier along the Rhine and Danube for the Roman Empire. Restless neighbors were on the other side and they wanted a share of the wealth they knew was within their reach. On the other side the Empire never set on a long term strategy of conquering the trans limes lands and occupy them indefinitely. The cost outweighed the benefits. Some thrusts were indeed done actually beyond the rivers but always in a limited way and never with the prospect of an ever growing expansion. In this context the [Battle of Teutoburg Forest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest) was supposed to quench a rebellion which had been fabricated by Arminius, not to conquer new lands. In your context it's completely believable war could go on for centuries in an area. It will have its lulls and hot moments, of course. Populations may also change as migrations occur. The result of prolonged war is not necessarily utter destruction. Undoubtedly your Empire would assign only limited forces to these wars; they're not perceived to be profitable. Just like the Romans, your Empire - usually in response to a raid - would strike the tribes thought to be the culprits. The enemy will scatter. Some prisoners are going to be taken. Some villages are going to be burnt. And then they will retreat because there is no reason to permanently occupy the land by setting up a colony. To raise what? Mosquitoes? And so life will go on as usual. Notice that when the Romans had reasons to stay they did conquer the land and kept it after a hard fought campaign. See [Dacia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan%27s_Dacian_Wars) for instance. [Answer] The regions out there should not be "pseudo-independent" but independent. Furthermore, they should be tribes, not states. This hinterland needs to be hard to conquer in the sense of hold. Therefore, like the lands on the border of China, it needs to be bad land to farm. The tribes should be nomadic hunters or herdsmen. This land is hard to maintain fortresses on, and the fortresses do little good because the inhabitants can always go around them. Their tribal structure makes treaties hard because the next tribe that comes along will not be bound by what you agreed to with the last guys. Furthermore, their occupations have the side-effect of making them good at raiding. Also, it gives them a motive to raid. Besides the pride based effects, they will need to either raid or trade in order to obtain goods made by civilization or products of agriculture. To keep the borderlands settled on the empire's side would require pressure that makes leaving the shelter of safety reasonable. Population pressure might do it in itself; the prospect of your own farm has led to a lot of spreading. Also, people might be sentenced to settlement as punishment. [Answer] In the modern USA, some politicians have declared a metaphorical war on crime. The US federal and state governments have far more military power than all the criminals in the USA put together, let alone any one criminal organization. It is certainly possible for governments to adopt policies which will greatly reduce the crime rate in the future. But any "war on crime", or any other approach to reducing crime rates, is doomed to gone on forever without total success. Because the root cause of crime in the "evil that lurks in the hearts of men" (and in the hearts of women and children too). Government policies can greatly reduce the evil impulses lurking in the hearts of humans, and/or the rate at which humans follow those evil impulses, but it seems very improbable that any policies can totally eliminate crime. So a metaphorical war on crime can drag on forever, despite victory after victory after victory over individual criminals and criminal groups, since the only two ways to end a metaphorical war on crime are: One) to give up, abolish all laws, and make all actions, no matter how evil, legal, or else Two) to lie and declare victory over crime, despite crimes still happening and criminals still being punished for those crimes. In your case the wars are not exactly metaphorical wars on crime, but more like real wars or like civil wars, since I am not certain about the exact political relationship between the central government and the local governments in the outer regions. Are the outer states more like largely autonomous provinces or tributary states or vassal kingdoms, or are the outer states more like foreign countries, or are they somewhere in between? Somewhere in between being a dependent state and an independent state was a very common political condition for most of recorded history. Anyway, it seems like the conflicts in the outer regions are a bit too large to be a metaphorical war on crime in the other regions, and more like foreign wars or civil wars. However, the public justifications, though not necessarily the reasons, for various attacks on various outer regions could be various crimes and sins committed by their rulers. One of the functions of the central government could be to guarantee moral and ethical behavior standards by the rulers of states in the outer regions. So whenever the central imperial government, or an ambitious governor of a province, wants to attack one of the outer states, they can use the list of misdeeds of the ruler of that state which have not yet been punished as justification for the attack. So the conflicts in the outer regions seem a lot more like wars than like crime. But wars vary a lot in severity. On one extreme there is World War Two and the long feared but as yet not happened World War Three, causing horror and suffering, death and destruction, on a vast and unimaginable scale. And on the other extreme of the scale is endemic low intensity warfare where each small tribe or band of people is in a perpetual state of war with all their neighbors, but acts of war are few and tiny in scope. For example, before Europeans arrived there was no central government in the vast area of the trans Mississippi west in the USA. There were hundreds of independent nations, tribes, bands, and other groups of people, each with the ability to make war on other groups. Some of those groups had warlike cultures where young men were expected to make their reputations and gain wealth by killing and stealing from members of other groups. So each of those warlike groups was in a constant state of war with all their neighbors, except for any groups which might be allied to them. So if you assume that the average total population in the trans Mississippi west was between 100,000 and 500,000 and assume that the average fatality rate in that low level endemic warfare was between a tenth of a percent and one percent, about 100 to 5,000 men, women, and children would die in that warfare in the average year. The USA kept at least a few troops stationed in various forts in the trans Mississippi west to maintain peace with various Indian groups there for over a century. And there were occasional conflicts with various Indian groups there over most of that period. But the period of really intense warfare with various hostile groups there only lasted about 50 years from 1850 to 1900, or only 30 years from 1850 to 1880, or only 20 years from about 1857 to 1877, or various other relatively short lengths of time depending on when it was defined as beginning and ending. It only took about a generation to pacify the most hostile groups in the west, so that is not a good example of warfare lasting a long time. But the USA did have various Indian wars with various groups in the eastern USA on and off from the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 to the end of the Third Seminole War in 1858, somewhat overlapping with the western Indian Wars. And the USA fought various major wars with foreign powers such as the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, etc. And the USA has had many other small conflicts such as Barbary Pirates Wars, the Mormon War, the Korean Expedition in 1871, intervention in various Latin American countries, etc., so it has become a great and successful nation despite, and sometimes because, of being in an almost constant state of at least low intensity War. Similarly the United Kingdom flourished in the 19th century despite fighting such major wars as the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, The Indian Rebellion, and the Boer War, as well as being constantly involved in at least one small scale colonial war somewhere in the world. So if you imagine that the central power in your story resembles in someways the 19th century USA or the 19th century UK, the wars in the outer region should not drain its power or weaken it and it could go on fighting wars at that level of intensity forever. But what about the outer groups that the central power keeps fighting? How long can they keep on fighting occasional wars against it before they are destroyed or pacified? In the US west it was very hard to find an Indian tribe that would fight repeated wars against the USA over a long period of time. The Chiricahua Apaches were mostly at peace with Americans from the Mexican War in 1846-48 to 1861, then at war until 1872, then at peace until about 1876, then alternately at war and peace on and off until 1886. So basically the Chiricahuas were at war on and off over a period about 25 years. The First Sioux War was in 1854-56 and the Ghost Dance Troubles were in 1890-91, so various plains Sioux were only hostile on and off for 37 years. As a rule Indian tribes didn't keep repeating the mistake of fighting the USA over and over again. The United Kingdom mostly defeated its colonial enemies in its wars and added them to the British Empire. The longest lasting colonial enemy of Britain might have been Afghanistan, which fought the first, Second, and Third Anglo-Afghan Wars in 1839-42, 1878-80, and 1919, and remained an independent country at the end of them, after a period of 80 years. On the other hand, the Spanish government claimed to rule what is now the Southwestern USA for about 200 years, and during that period there were repeated conflicts, on and off, with various groups of Navajos, Apaches, and Comanches, as well as other conflicts with other Indian groups. There were times when the Spanish settlers were suffering greatly from hostile raids, and other times when the Spanish authorities succeeded in achieving almost total peace with almost all groups. As far as I can tell the pattern of repeated on and off warfare could have gone on forever without destroying or permanently pacifying the Indians. In ancient and medieval history there are examples of conditions of endemic low intensity on and off warfare seeming to go on for decades and centuries without any resolution. For centuries there were dozens of small city states in ancient Greece, for example, which sometimes went to war with other city states. At any moment someone could face an invasion from a neighboring city state which might be only a single day's march away. But even in such uncertain conditions many of the Greek city states were prosperous for 500 or 1,000 years. In medieval western Europe for centuries the feudal system enabled even the lowest ranking lords to fight private wars against other low ranking lords. But even under those conditions western Europe gradually became more prosperous, more populated, and more civilized. So it seems that a society can exist in a state of endemic on and off warfare, when that warfare is not severe enough or frequent enough to reach a level of causing it to decline. The more severe the conflicts, the rarer they must be for the society to survive without major damage. The more frequent the conflicts, the less severe they must be for the society not to be fatally damaged by them. [Answer] Protect your roads. [![Silk Road](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fXSfK.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fXSfK.jpg) <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Silk-Road-trade-route> Your state does not have a borderland of 200 km to raid. It has trade routes of many thousands of kilometers to protect. Your Empire guarantees the safety of merchants conducting commerce along these roads. If a merchant party is attacked or lost, or not accounted for, or any other excuse, your army will track down where they were last accounted for and search them out. Persons who live along the road benefit greatly from the trade and the protection by your army. They are unlikely to attack merchants on the route. Persons based at some distance from the route will be those most likely to try something. Really though, such attacks are a plausible excuse to conduct the desired raids into far flung areas outside your immediate control adjacent to your road. Having the road(s) to protect greatly expands your catchment area and so avoids exhausting your borderlands. Sometimes fortified cities situated on the road but well outside your domain might provide some excuse for you to besiege and plunder them. You might then run afoul of other distant powers who are actually in a position to oppose you. If your needs of the moment run more towards the actual war and conquest and less towards the rounding up of hapless slaves, this would be the approach. [Answer] By not calling it war: it's tribute. Or faithfulness. But really, it's slavery. Bureaucracy is not so much about raids and plunder as it is at making things run efficiently. I think your neighbors have a lot to gain by being your neighbors, but you have an insatiable need for blood & death. So demand your neighbors provide the offerings. You could even assign them parts of the calendar they need to cover. They can raid their other neighbors, raise slaves, or thin their population of the poor & undesirable. That's up to them. But you let them know that the royal families of their lands will be the first under the knife if your empire actually needs to cover the offerings on their own. This can operate like the slave system in Africa did. Whites didn't do much slaving, instead it was Africans who often captured others. States that breed slaves have an easier time than in the old South - you don't need a well-nourished healthy slave, only a living one. Children frequently make better offerings to gods anyway, so they don't even need to be mature. Males can be offered up en masse, and females kept behind as breeding stock. You can demand as much or as little as you want. The neighbors are bled dry (pun intended) and you can demand more if they start getting too strong. I'd maintain a body of slaves in your empire for the occasional shortfall, but mostly the whole thing should be kept as effortless as possible. Burning and looting isn't going to be the most efficient way of getting offerings. Slavery and tribute are. [Answer] That is why the Empire has the Imperial Intelligence Corps. The IIC's primary function is to foment local wars over succession and religious matters, civil unrest and rebellion against the local rulers, banditry/border raiding and any other mayhem among the neighbors they can come up with. That gives the Empire plenty of plausible reasons to intervene: Back our ally (never mind the IIC funded his opponent). Restore peace (both warring factions are in fact created/funded/trained by the IIC). To protect the people we will take over and dispose the evil tyrant (who we put on the throne in the first place). And the list goes on. If things get too quiet along the borders the IIC will stir something up. Officially the IIC doesn't even exist. (Which gives the Empire plausible deniability.) They masquerade as an obscure sub-department within the Department of Foreign Affairs. As the Empire is thoroughly corrupt with a lot of nepotism going around every Department has a couple of these obscure sub-departments were the Heads of Department park their various family members and friends that are on the payroll but don't (can't) do any real work. It is the perfect hiding spot for the IIC. The Corps is very small, which helps to keep it secret. They work behind the scenes. Usually employing mercenaries, assassins and merchants as proxies that have no idea who they are really working for. Many of the IIC operations are in the form of distributing (mis-)information and money (bribes and military funding) in order to influence various parties. The IIC is a very powerful organization. Rumor has it they don't only control whats going on at the borders, but that they control the Empire itself as well. Of course, discussing that isn't a good idea. People that are too curious about the IIC have a tendency to suffer nasty accidents... [Answer] ## Become the World Police Don't fight your own wars. Fight the wars of others. Whenever there is a conflict in the world, decide whose victory would further your geopolitical and economic interest more, and then send your troops to intervene on their behalf. When there aren't any suitable conflicts going on right now, use diplomacy and spycraft to create them. It might be a bit more expensive than fighting your close neighbors. But the plus side is that it's a lot safer because you never risk fighting on your own territory and you can withdraw at any time and let the original belligerents continue. And when you do it right, you make more friends than you make enemies. The United States follows this policy, and it kept them in perpetual ~~war~~ armed conflict for the past 80 years. [Answer] Ancient Sparta had yearly "wars" against the Messenes, according to some sources, see <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypteia>: "Every autumn, according to Plutarch (Life of Lycurgus, 28, 3–7), the Spartan ephors would pro forma declare war on the helot population so that any Spartan citizen could kill a helot without fear of punishment. At night, the chosen kryptai (κρύπται, members of the Krypteia) were sent out into the countryside armed with knives with the instructions to kill any helot they encountered and to take any food they needed. They were specifically told to kill the strongest and best of the helots. This practice was instigated to prevent the threat of a rebellion by the helots and to keep their population in check." [Answer] War is good for the economy. Whether true or not, many complained that USA deliberately used poor tactics to prolong the Vietnam conflict. Your empire might be doing something similar. ]
[Question] [ In my alternative universe, Atlantis was a real city that existed, although it wasn’t called Atlantis or founded by humans. Atlantis or rather, Dosham was a city on an isolated landmass in the northeast Atlantic Ocean, which would later become the Rockall Plateau belonging to a dying race of aliens called the Duxiaris. The Duxiaris colonised Earth in 40,972 BCE and created a slave race called the Bassirid created from various species of hominin. At some point, the Bassirid would overthrow their masters and commit genocide against them, becoming the dominant species on Earth. But the Bassirid’s reign didn’t last long because they fought a dramatic civil war that reduced their numbers and would almost go extinct in 14,000 BCE after trying to summon a planet-killing abomination, which led to Dosham sinking. Yet several thousand Bassirid fled the sunk city and found refugee in prehistoric Eurasia without their technology. These surviving Bassirid would then adopt a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, wandering across the Eurasian landmass and diverge into two subcultures at an undetermined point. One made their way towards the Pontic-Caspian Steppes and the other migrated into the Levant. As these groups ventured further into the unknown, they interbred with humans to maintain genetic diversity at the cost of becoming more and more humanoid. Soon both subcultures would become assimilated into the Yamna and Natufian cultures, ending the Bassirid’s species. Yet, their legacies would live on through complex distorted oral traditions, which would influence Indo-European and Afroasiatic cultures. This phenomenon explains shared motifs like pantheons ruled by all-powerful sky gods that battle chaos serpents and cosmogenesis via sexual unity or corpse mutilation. The only problem is that going extinct, both the Bassirid and Duxiaris did extensive interbreeding. After these species vanished, archaeologists, anthropologists or geneticists would have found that every one of Indo-European and Afroasiatic descent has Duxiaris DNA in them after their ancestors mingled with Bassirid. Why hasn’t such a shocking discovery occurred? [Answer] There is nothing intrinsically alien about alien DNA. If you took a random string of alien DNA and compared it human DNA you would not be able to tell the difference. Therefore, since the alien DNA is so old, people just assume it is human DNA. Sure, there is a large shift, but there have been large genetic shifts throughout history, and if it really is so large that it must be noticed, then the two species would probably not be genetically compatible, so no interbreeding specimen would be viable. > > Professor: Ah yes, that bit of genetic code that only occurs in > indo-European and Afroasiatic peoples. My theory is that 16 millennia > ago a great warrior was able to conquer the world similar to Genghis > Khan, with similar genetic results. Because this was pre-history no > records exist, but the DNA tells the story. > > > Student: But professor, I think it was alien interbreeding. > > > Professor: But that is impossible, there were no cows to probe or crops > to make circles in. > > > The class laughs as the student sits down in shame. > > > [Answer] The Duxiaris modifications were made deliberately, with careful analysis of each genetic change's consequences weighed against the progress it would make towards a specific, now unknown goal. The Bassirid modifications were made in desperation, in pursuit of survival. The changes which they introduced to the humanoid gene line were more random and although still elevating the base humanoid to a higher potential, were no rival to the elevation provided to the humanoids under Duxiari care. Now, with all of the original humanoids extinct after forty millenia of competition with two distinct breeds of alien enhanced humanoids, the world belongs entirely to the hybrids. And that world is divided into two distinct castes of people. Those who know they are of the Duxiari, who hold all the key power positions and scientific roles; and us, the others, who do not know of our alien ancestry, nor that we are dominated by a cousin species which far exceed our intellectual potential. [Answer] ## Human/Alien hybrids were not viable without sufficiently advanced technology It is very much impossible for aliens and humans to interbreed naturally. They developed in completely separate ecosystems. Aliens might not even have DNA in the same way life on Earth has. It would be an amazing coincidence of convergent evolution if they would, and even more so if they happen to be compatible with humans. It's more likely for humans and jellyfish to interbreed. So how did the aliens make it work? Technology! Using their godlike biological knowledge, they found a way to create human/alien hybrids. But the alien technology is required to keep it working. It is not possible for the hybrids to procreate without it. When Dosham was abandoned, the survivors managed to save these gadgets and drugs in sufficient quantities. They then kept carrying that stuff with them. Over the generations they forgot how it actually worked or how to reproduce it. But it became part of their hunter-gatherer culture in form of culturally significant holy artifacts used in "fertility rites". But eventually the technology would malfunction or run out. Or they lost the knowledge how to perform these "fertility rites" correctly and most of the time they didn't work. The hybrids became infertile. Now that procreation of the alien genes was no longer possible, the hybrids died out and their genes were removed from the pool. [Answer] No point of reference. Plus genetic swapping takes place in nature it's called "Horizontal gene transfer" The point is... there's no way to determine an alien contribution to the human genome without an alien whose genetics we can analyze. If you're a biologist and you wanna name a new species you need a type specimen to analyze. Science demands proof and replicable experiments. [Answer] Answer: Mules. The offspring of the alien/human were sterile and unable to reproduce further. With such a small pool of specimens, none of them have become preserved like [Otzi the Iceman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi) and are not available for study in the modern age. Only the pure-bred Bassirid were capable of producing viable descendants. As the generations wore on, interbreeding became more common and fewer pure-bred Bassirid were born, leaving an ever-decreasing pool. Whether the cause of the sterility is obvious or not might depend on the needs of your plot. If it needs to be invisible, then perhaps the males simply have lower sperm count, or the females lower egg production. Maybe males have excess testosterone and are more combative, tending to die in youth or combat before reproducing. Or if it helps to be obvious, perhaps the males are born with no testes. [Answer] ## The genes were destroyed by a gene-coded bioweapon It was created either by the Duraxians as a means of controlling the Bassirids or by the Bassirids themselves during the civil war. But what it was is a pathogen which looks for alien DNA and destroys it. Fortunately it was never deployed successfully. But centuries later it eventually did get activated due to some unlikely coincidence and spread across the globe. Purebred humans weren't affected by the disease, but carried it. Any pure-bred aliens who got it died very quickly. People with just a bit of alien DNA got sick and had a chance to survive, but the disease would purge all alien DNA from their genome, so their offsprings would be pure humans. If you are looking for a real historic event which might represent that genetic cleansing, then the [Bubonic Plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death) might be a viable candidate. Although it might require some handwaving, because the Yersinia Pestis bacterium that caused it still exists, is still lethal to humans and is too well-researched for this story to be plausible to anyone who knows a bit about microbiology. ]
[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/144589/edit). Closed 4 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/144589/edit) It's a common pattern in nearly any imaginary world that "ancient items are powerful artifacts" and stuff. But for what plausible reason? I'm trying to come up with some realistic explanation on why stuff that was created 2-3 thousands years ago is "better" than what we have now. And so far, looking through real examples of what we find from the era of B.C. - speaking of quality it's just piece of shistory. We have way more advanced tech now - firearms, nuclear warheads etc. So - why? What could be the reason that such items are better ? (weapons would be the easiest to address) [Answer] Most "ancient artifact" stories come from the "atlantian" theory: a civilization that advanced much farther than we did, but at some point collapsed and dissapeared. Call them Atlants, Elves, Gods, but in general these artifacts tend to be made to much better tolerances and materials than current era artifacts. To put an example. Let's say our current society collapses and 2000 years later, humanity has been able to rebuild to middle-ages tech. Imagine some farmer, ploughing a new field, unearths a ceramic kitchen knife. The plastic hilt almost intact, and the edge so sharp it blunted the crude iron hoe he was wielding. For us, it was a disposable kitchen knife. For him, it netted a nice reward from the local lord, who in turn presented it to the local king, who probably decided the best use was to attach it to a pole and make the kitchenette polearm, a fearsome artifact from ages past. The other explanation is the "magical artifact". In a world where magic is real, most of the time magic artifacts grow more powerful over time. Like the magic capabilities of the artifact are not fully revealed until it is given time to mature... centuries and centuries. Answering the question put in the comments: As for artifacts that we can use... the industrial processes have made us forget a lot of oldTech, specially oldTech that is not mass scalable or simply we don't have an use right now. For example, I did some research on bronze-age china, and we don't know much about how they forged the swords. We know they covered with certain chemicals to make them more durable, and that it was not a random process, but the lack of books makes very difficult to ascertain HOW they did it, and while we can replicate some of the processes... we simply don't know how to do them without "cheating" For a real life example: The fabled [sword of goujian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Goujian) was found intact even though it was submerged in water for almost 2500 years. It is suspected that the airtight lacquer covering and the chemical composition of the surface layer of the sword preserved it. I can replicate this surface covering using modern techniques, like [vacuum sputtering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputter_deposition), but this is a modern method, quite expensive, and does not tell me how they did it. So if we wanted to make more durable bronzes, it would be interesting to investigate how they made it, but we don't, because we don't need durable bronzes: we have other materials that fill the gap and are readily available and cheap. For another real life example, hinted in the comments: It is known that [roman concrete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete) is superior to our common Portland concrete in several aspects, but specially: * It is allegedly cheaper to make, and more ecologic. * It has a very superior performance on marine underwater situations. We have uncovered 2000 year old underwater structures intact. Portland does not fare very well on those situations. For many centuries we ignored roman concrete, because most other concrete bindings use volcanic ash and britain (where portland was invented) had little. But the demand for concrete is so big that not only the ecologic impact is starting to be too important to ignore, the materials needed to make Portland are starting to become scarce. So there is a very renewed interest in reviving the techniques needed to make roman concrete, and finding suitable replacements for the materials that are not as easily available (such as volcanic pumice). [Answer] Knowledge For the latest things, sure, modern is better. But think of something old fashioned, like a chariot or some building techniques: if we no longer have the knowledge on how to do it, they are of course better. Just to give you an example, there is still lack of consensus on how did Brunelleschi managed to build the dome in Florence, yet we can build 800 meters tall skyscrapers. For most of the middle age anything that the Roman Empire built was simply too advanced to be replicated, so, if the level of knowledge falls down, older is better. "Ignorance" of the maker In the past, when the engineering knowledge was necessarily less advanced, any good engineer just supplied to it with a generous amount of safety factors in the design. Those larger safety factors made the product necessarily more sturdy. For example, I still have the garden scissors my grandfather used when he worked in his youth, 90 years ago. I never managed to find a modern garden scissor lasting even 1/9 of that. [Answer] We've only just, in literally the last couple of years, been able to replicate the steel used for the Vikings' Ulfberht swords. A rather eccentric farrier from the US by the name of Al Pendray finally cracked it not long before he died in 2017. That steel is superior to anything we can make today not because it has any one quality (hardness, durability, strength, flexibility) that's better than a steel we can make but because it has levels of all those qualities that we can't create in combination using modern mass production techniques. Making [Wootz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel) involves an expensive technique that, at this time, cannot be replicated on a large scale, it also involves a piece of very particular and quite peculiar chemistry involving Vanadium that's only been very recently understood. There's also the legendary [flexible glass of Rome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass) an invention that got it's maker killed and which has, probably, never been replicated. So sometimes the ancients understood a trick or two that we don't. As to why ancient artifacts in story and myth have such power, that is often based in one of two ideas, the first we'll call the "[Hyborian Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyborian_Age) thesis" and the second the "accumulation argument": The Hyborian Age thesis goes like this; once long ages ago there was a great and powerful civisation that knew all sorts of things we didn't, especially magic and/or technology that conforms to [Clarke's Third Law](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ClarkesThirdLaw) and crafted powerful tools and weapons that beggar modern belief and knowledge. There are many examples of this in fantasy, any of the ancient swords in the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings whether made by Men or Elves, [The Scar's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scar_(novel)) Probable Sword (a personal favourite), [Amber's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Amber) Spikards and any time anyone ever invokes the word Atlantis to explain something extraordinary. The Accumulation Argument is a little different here's several versions; * Version one goes something like this: objects are just objects but the older an object is the more it has done and the more notoriety, and therefore power, attaches to it. Such objects, be they weapons, tools or armour, are awesome because and only because they are ancient and have been around when stuff happened. The only example I can think of off the top of my head is the [Armour of Bronze](https://davidgemmell.fandom.com/wiki/Armour_of_Bronze) from [David Gemmell's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gemmell) [Drenai Cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drenai_Series) everyone thinks it is magical and it's been on battlefields where the apparently miraculous happened for generations so it is somewhat magical in it's effect on people who see it on the field of battle. A possible second example may come from [The Dresden Files'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dresden_Files) treatment of necromancy. * Version two deals with the concept of "sacredness" for lack of a better term. Basically the more an object is used for a given task in the name of a given cause, whether that cause is conventionally religious or otherwise, the more belief in the power of that object grows and the more real power it has to serve the cause. This can be couched in positive terms, i.e. believers in the power of the object and the cause give it power to do the otherwise impossible or more negatively, unbelievers fear of the weapon give it power over them, or both, often both. * Finally there is an actual accumulation of power, the object was not originally terribly powerful but it has the ability to accumulate power slowly over time, this can mean that a user or even successive users deliberately imbue it with more energy (as with Shilly's staff in Sean Williams' Cataclysm series) or it can be the passive uptake of some sort of ambient power. [Answer] Falls of civilisations and subsequent dark ages I have no real evidence for it, but I suspect the trope likely stems from the collective European memory of the collapse of Rome and the Dark Ages that followed. Cultures remembered (or read) how advanced the ancient world was compared to their current state. Thus 'old stuff is better than current stuff'. This lasted as a reality for a little while, but lingered as an impression for far longer. If you want a more low-fantasy take on this, your culture needs a pretty hefty Fall and subsequent Dark Age. Set your story within that dark age and you can plausibly have 'ancient powerful artefacts'. This works best over a period of a couple of hundred years though, not thousands. Artefacts degrade, new technology develops. It's not a stable state of affairs. Another realistic alternative is that people believe these ancient artefacts are more powerful, but the truth varies considerably. They have romanticised the past based on scant information, and paint a picture of their mighty forebears as unimaginably powerful when in reality they're not too dissimilar from how they are now. Some technologies have been lost, but others have been developed. Progress has resumed, but the impression remains. This would be more realistic over a period of a thousand+ years, judging by Western history. Edit @John pointed out an even better example with the [Bronze Age collapse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse), which resulted in/caused the destruction of early European advanced civilisation and the long-distance trade routes it maintained. One of the reasons this works better is that bronze artefacts survive far better than iron ones. Bury an iron sword in a bog for 100 years and it'll be junk when you pull it out. Bury a bronze sword in a bog for 100 years and it'll still be deadly. If you lose the ability to make bronze (either from loss of knowledge, or loss of the trade routes that shipped tin from Cornwall all the way to the Middle East), you could legitimately find superior weaponry buried in the ground. [Answer] There are many reasons why old stuff can be better than new stuff In addiction to the most popular answers, I can point some other interesting reasons why it could be impossible to build today something that is equal or superior to the old things: * Extinction: a tree, or an animal, from which a particular product was made, has gone extinct. For instance, some recipes of Roman cuisine are impossible to replicate because they required [an extinct plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium). So, if an effective medicine or a spell (in case of a magic world) would need an extinct plant, it is clear that the new products can't replicate the good old stuff. * Environmental changes: another interesting story is that [all steel manufactured after the 40s is slightly radioactive because of nuclear tests in the atmosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel). In other words, for some purposes, like very sensitive measures of radioactivity, whatever steel is built today would just introduce too much noise to allow for the construction of a precise radiation detector. You can replicate something similar in your world: think of a powerful world enchantment that makes all iron alloy impossible to heat, so that it is physically impossible to forge new swords and shields, and the old ones become increasingly more valuable and prized. * Economy: it is impossible to replicate the reasons (social, religious, economical) behind some of the biggest masterpieces of past history. An artist could no more be able to dedicate all of his life to painting or writing a single piece, or you could no more find hundreds of people (and the necessary funds) necessary to build a pyramid. Clearly, machines would allow to reduce the needed resources, but you would lose the "hand-made" feeling behind the equivalent works of the past. [Answer] ### Selection bias Something 10,000 years old, has lasted 10,000 years. Most things we have today wouldn't last nearly that long, and certainly wouldn't in the original condition. Of the millions of swords made in a particular era - just one of them turned out perfect. It didn't tarnish, didn't degrade, and was an elegant and excellent enough weapon that it stayed an important status symbol, handed on to significant individuals through history. That goes double in a setting where 'mystical technique' or 'magic' applies. This one sword was the magnum opus of 40 years of being a master swordmaker. Intended as a gift for a warrior prince, who would truly appreciate a sword of exceptional quality. It took 666 days of unceasing labour, and repeated folding and reforging. It took the last grains of metal from a fallen meteor, and quenching in the blood of dragons. Or if not fantasy, maybe just the last of a batch of particularly good composite steel, with 'just right' mix of carbon and iron - that was proven over years, and set aside for a special occasion. It's not that craftsmen were better 'back then' - it's just that you've a much larger pool, and a way of 'filtering out' the worse quality items, because they just didn't last. [Answer] Firstly, it's not correct to just dump everything old into a "shistory" category. There are plenty of ancient things that are amazing and cannot be reproduced today. Artifacts that have survived so long usually do so due to their high quality, either physically (pyramids) or intricate enough to be carefully preserved (crowns and other jewelry). Maybe not stone-age artifacts, but musical instruments can be several hundred years old, and cost an absolute fortune. The same with paintings. For some cases it's the particular craftsman, painter, sculptor who has never been equaled since. Mostly its that the market for quality goods is no longer viable for individual artists. If you look at modern mass-production methods, it's all about reducing item production cost to maximize profit. A good product can be initially launched to a reasonable price, as novelty sells, but as time goes by, the production gets optimized, replacing expensive parts with cheaper ones, skimping on quality control tests, and using cheaper methods of assembly. The actual quality gets shaved off, and the saved cash goes in the company pocket. Companies also make more if the product needs to be replaced, too, so there's little in it for them to build solid, lasting, high quality products. This is known as designed obsolescence. Work done by individuals, or boutique companies cannot compete on price, availability, time-to-market, or just marketing and advertising in general, so we see a massive change in how goods are actually produced. Industrial production in capitalistic society is a recent invention, and has caused a massive decline in handcrafted work. Prior to a hundred years ago, goods were always hand crafted, and the better quality artisans would spend their life perfecting their craft, and charge more money for their superior quality goods. The absolute cream of the crop would work for kings and noblemen, supported by royal budgets or arts patronages. Quality and prestige were part of the product the customers paid for. Today, its mostly just cheap Chinese imports that fall apart after a short while, forcing you to buy another. And in today's economic climate, that is the method which works best. The drawback is everything is plastic and shitty, and little of it will be around in 10 years, never mind 1000. I can think of some other ancient artifacts which have not been equaled, or cannot be produced today. Look at the Book of Kells (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells>) and ask yourself if a team of people could today dedicate their entire lives to hand-coloring a single book (one copy only). It just can't happen today. There are many other examples of religious artifacts surviving over 1000 years, many of which would be difficult to produce today, and impossible to produce in the same way using the same techniques. What about the cathedrals (Notre Dame being in the news recently)... you can't build one of those anymore, it's simply not economically and politically justifiable. Restore it, sure, but build a new one? No way. Some artifacts are non-physical, and still preserved for thousands of years. There's the story of Christ, or the entire Bible, and whether you believe or not, it should be recognized as one of the more well-known and preserved stories of the last few thousand years. And its in large part due to it being a very good story, and not much has come along to top it. (Romeo and Juliet, 400 years old, many other examples like Little Red Riding Hood, etc) Other things have also stood the test of time, like Chess and Go, military tactics, discoveries and inventions in mathematics, etc. I wouldn't exactly call them artifacts but they survive because they haven't been bettered. Finally, the real reason old stuff is good, is that all the old stuff which wasn't good, was not worth saving. History and time have eaten up all the crap, leaving only the shining awesome masterpieces. [Answer] There are 2 typical reasons why ancient artifacts are so valuable: ## Everything was better in the past, especially magic It's also a common pattern in nearly any imaginary world that "in ancient times magic was much more powerful than today". In many fictional stories people lost the ability to utilize magic powers as well as their ancestors could or the knowledge about how to create powerful artifacts was lost over generations. The only way to obtain a seemingly otherwordly power is to obtain an item from a time when such powers weren't as otherwordly. Different stories have different reasons for this decline in magic: * Humans spread over the world and displaced the "old races" like elves and dwarves, who were much more adept in the arts of magic * Humans lose their faith in the gods and they, in turn, lose the power to grant magic * The world was filled with magic but now it's simply used up or the source of magic has become tainted ## It's too expensive to create a copy To keep some balance in a magical world, the creation of powerful artifacts requires very powerful beings and often some kind of valuable sacrifice (like a soul, a heart of a dragon, feather of phoenix or some obscure material no one knows exactly what it is). These resources might simply not exist (anymore?) or someone might not be ready to sacrifice their own live to create some magic wand they couldn't use anyway (since they're dead...). Searching for existing items is often the only solution. [Answer] Fundamentally it is about numbers. Artefacts and relics are rare. This means that there is a low chance of someone or some event creating them. There is a low chance of someone or some event being capable of creating them as well. These probabilities then go up with time, resources and number of people. This should be fairly self evident. If there is a certain chance that an event will create a relic, such events are more likely to happen over the past thousand years than in the next five seconds. If there is a certain chance to have a smith capable of making an artefact level magical sword a large empire with thousands of smiths has better odds than a village with one. If artefact requires expensive materials or processes, it is more likely to be created when the times are good. There are also threshold effects. The canonical example are the European Middle-Ages where people simply did not have the resources to do things like the Romans before or the renaissance after them. Some things might require a level sophistication that requires specialization made only possible when the volumes are great enough. That one village smith is not going to be specialized making magical artefact swords, he is too busy making and fixing things people need to survive. If making the artefact requires a process taking a century it is unlikely to happen in a kingdom that only exists for one or two generations. So how does this map to common fantasy? Fantasy settings generally have histories spanning tens of thousands of years. Past empires often lasted for millennia. Especially if they were established by long lived races such as elves. It should be fair to expect that your past Elven Empire that lasted ten millennia created more artefacts during that time than your current human kingdom that has existed for two centuries. Similarly those histories are often filled with those powerful empires collapsing catastrophically. This is obviously based on the Roman Empire. And just as with Rome, those collapses were followed by reduced population densities and resource availability. Those past empires had much better odds and ability to create artefacts. They would have more people with the skills needed, those people would have more specialized skills and education, and they would have worked with better resources. This is incidentally where our modern sensibilities fail us. Our populations and economies have grown at insane rates during the last few centuries. Our experiences and the experiences of several preceding generations would have been the exact opposite of those in most fantasy settings and not really related to the resource and population constraints that are the historical norm. We do not have better things than in the past because we live later. We have better things because we have more people and resources than ever before. And it should be noted that because of those threshold effects these things almost work exponentially. Internet for example multiplies the ability of people to communicate and produce information but it or the technologies it needs are not going to be created unless people already produce enough information to need them. Economies of scale do work for effects of population and resources (and even time) on artefact creation. [Answer] I think the most simple answer is just "magic", and ignorance: For one, during the last few centuries "magic" that was previously widely accepted to exist "disappeared" as science somewhat took its place. The coffee machine you use every morning would have been clearly "magic" just a few hundred years ago. But is it magic to you? - So, whatever advanced we encounter daily in our time was definitely magic in ancient times. From there, it's only a small step to saying that there used to be magic in ancient times which is now gone. And here comes ignorance into play. Through historical records, pictures, paintings, films,... we (believe to) have a pretty clear picture of what the world, and life, was like a hundred years ago. Or two hundred years ago. But the world of, say, 3000 years before our time is much less documented and thus by itself quite mysterious. So we have a world about which we don't know much, where the existence of magic was wide-spread common sense, from which we may find a rare artifact. Or, seen more pragmatically, if, as a world builder, we want something magic, where do we take it from in the most plausible (or easiest) way? How about a mysterious world which we have no access to, where magic is a common thing and from which artifacts can reach us without too much hassle (compared to, e.g., extra-terrestrial devices or things from the future)? One could have some character craft something akin to magical in our time, but that is harder to make plausible because people have a grasp of what technology today can do. So instead of trying to create a somewhat credible background about why or how man's current capabilities enable something magic-like without violating what people know you can just take an artifact from some place about which the common person, or everybody, knows little except that it definitely exists. (I deliberately used the present tense above to describe ancient times, because w.r.t. the (desired) effect the ancient world is a mystical world, perceived like a place you just can't go to.) ]
[Question] [ Let's say that Australia has been taken over by a hyper-aggressive fungus that grows on any biological life form larger than an ant. The stuff covers the entire continent, has subsumed every form of life on it, and is capable of a primitive form of photosynthesis in order to stay alive when other life runs out. However, it can't expand outside of Australia, even if someone carved a sample of the stuff out, shipped it to another continent, and let it loose. Why is this? What biological or chemical mechanism would stop a fungus from reproducing outside of that one landmass? It evolved to not grow on ants because of the square-cube law; ants don't have much usable mass (volume) relative to the amount of fungus required to kill an ant and utilize its mass (surface area). Something like a human or an elephant has a much greater ratio of volume to surface area, meaning that the fungus gets more "bang for its buck". [Answer] Because it is not a colony of independent microscopic fungi. It is a single massive lifeform that looks like terrestrial fungus. The lifeform has a centralized nervous system which controls and maintains the life functions of the entire organism. When any part of it is separated from the whole, that portion dies for lack of connection to the centralized brain. When a portion of the organism attaches itself to an ambulatory creature such as an elephant or human, it quickly infiltrates the pain and pleasure nerves, then uses intense sensations to train its host to periodically touch/connect with the main organism mass. This is done with a basic carrot and stick approach. Whenever the host is touching the main mass, it feels orgasmic bliss. Whenever it is not touching the main mass, utter agony. ...and it doesn't like salt water, so growing a tendril through the ocean to the adjacent land masses won't work. [Answer] By choosing all of Australia you've cut off a couple of options, those being too hot/cold/wet/dry as Australia as a whole has a vary varied environment. If you limit it to the regions where hot and dry is the primary environment, and slow it down in wetter places, that would do a great deal to limit spread into other environments and entirely prevent it crossing the sea unaided. This links into its ability to photosynthesise and its current large size, that being it has reached a point of having a critical minimum surface area. It's not that it can't expand outside Australia, it's just that the only place it could survive would be somewhere like the [Empty Quarter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rub%27_al_Khali) and you'd need to move several truckloads of it there. The little samples that scientists tend to take could never survive. You could potentially add to that the weakness in the ozone layer over the southern pole leads to higher than average UV levels in the area upon which it depends, meaning the dryer regions of Australia are the only place it could maintain its core, with tendrils into wetter areas dependent on its mycorrhizal network but with less dominance. [Answer] Could it be related to Australia's geology? Australia has the world's oldest rocks, and the fungus may be dependent on the particular zircon deposits found in the Kilbara: <https://www.britannica.com/place/Australia/Geologic-history> [Answer] The fungus evolved into such a potent form by consuming [Australium](https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Australium) from the soil: > > Australium is a mysterious metal element that can adapt and transform itself into different states and forms, with invigorating health effects, therefore making it extremely valuable and sought-after. (...) Prolonged exposure to Australium increases both intelligence and virility. > > > Now the fungus needs Australium to live, and there is none to be found outside Australia. [Answer] It is not that it cannot survive outside Australia, it is that humanity can easily kill any new colonies. It started in Australia and grew in a remote area for years before anybody discovered it. And even then it wasn't taken seriously at first. By the time it was, it was too late. Sure, people could kill it off in one area, but it simply grew more in other areas. And fighting it is a very risky job. Make one mistake and it is time for another mercy killing. In the end Australia was abandoned. Fortunately salt water seems to stop it... so far. Still, infected birds can land on nearby islands sometimes. They are met with EXTREME violence and never get a chance to establish themselves. Every surviving country in the world supports this with personnel, equipment and money. [Answer] There exists a soil microbe that parasitizes and kills the fungus, but it isn't present in Australia. It also parasitizes some other organism as part of its normal life cycle, and this other organism isn't present in Australia or can't survive now that the fungus has completely taken over, so the microbe can't reproduce in Australia. [Answer] what you are asking for is called endemic's, endemic plants, endemic animals. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endemism> idk, probably not the best wiki article I have seen but has some examples. endemism includes a variety of species with different degrees of selectivity of their environment, with maybe a lesser percentage of those are strictly dependant on specific conditions in the place they grow, which is hard to recreate elsewhere, maybe even nearly impossible atm. So can it be - yes, there are examples of such in reality, of selectivity to a place. But at the same time making it to be essentially a carnivore which can thrive on almost anything - maybe a bit tricky combination,imho - freedom of options on one side as a carnivore, but at the same time be constrained as a plant, but not to some small area of a specific ecosystem but to quite a big one like Australia which includes plenty of different stuff. But is it still possible - maybe, there are examples in nature when subtle changes, like water temperature can have a drastic difference in the success of reproductive cycles, for some Jellyfishes as an example. imho, a good chance to create such dependence is to constrain, pinch/constrain reproduction cycle in more than one stage and it would mean that there won't be a single magic factor X that explains everything, but rather a bunch of factors that create such behavior. maybe a good layman explanation can be a specific combination of specific microbiological strains of bacterias and alike which can be inhibitors or a vital part of the procreation process. But that is just an option. if there are solutions (in math sense of the word) then it is probably more than one solution. [Answer] Since fungus evolved not on Earth in environment with much lower salt level in water, it's cells have very low concentration of salt. So, this fungus cannot survive in salted water because [osmisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmosis). Fungus cells has weak membranes, since it can dissolve and consume nearly anything. When fungus cells enters salted water, they start consume too much salt from seawater, because salt concentration is much lower in them. And when salt concentration is high in fungus cells, it causes poisoning or methabolism issues, that kills fungus. [Answer] The fungus now (and perhaps has always) is dependent on heat and lots of ultraviolet light. (Did it come from a planet where more ultraviolet light reaches the surface?) While there are lots of places in the world that are plenty hot enough, all of them except Australia are protected by the ultraviolet-light-blocking ozone layer. While there is a huge area near the south pole where the Antarctic ozone hole (and a smaller area near the north pole under the smaller Arctic ozone hole) lets in enough ultraviolet light to keep the fungus alive, all of that land and sea area (except Australia) is too cold for the fungus to grow. ]
[Question] [ Yes, I'm back with another Class-related question. Don't worry; I looked through all 24 of my Classes and decided to focus on only the ones I can't come up with roles for. Recap-How Classes Work: In my book, a mysterious pulse of energy sent a young man named John into another world called Alendyias. This event resulted in John becoming Rorjon, a bluish ghost-like being (Kanyeri) that acts as a force of good, guiding, advising, and blessing the people of his new world (Alendyias). One of these blessings was based on John's love of RPGs like DnD, namely Classes. All Classes magically enhance one's potential (capacity), but only within the limits of their held Class. The level of this enhancement increases as the Class-holder grows and gains experience in their Class, and this increase is measured by Levels. This question is about the Ranger Class, which falls into the Speed and Combat categories. Like all Classes, this Class is almost invariably inherited or granted at birth, magically enhancing the holder's potential. However, this Class's enhancements mostly concern aim, perception, survival skills and adaptiveness. Rangers are known for their knowledge of nature and their natural gift for surviving. I can see Rangers acting as guides or archers, but in a medieval fantasy society, what other roles would Rangers have? Restated, my question is: What Role Would Rangers Have In a Medieval Fantasy Society? [Answer] Imperial Messengers and Scouts In the middle ages travel was dangerous, travel times uncertain, and it was easy to get lost. A Ranger (I'm imagining in my head someone like the Tolkien Rangers personified by Aragorn-as-Strider) overcomes all those obstacles. They're talented enough trackers/survivalists/archers that they can avoid traps by brigands or being eaten by wild animals. They're quick through rough terrain because they can live of the land and know how to find their way. In short, they're the perfect person to handle important documents, lightweight valuables (anything that could fit into a saddle-bag and be carried all day by a person on foot at need) or getting a high-value person quickly and secretly to a given location. I would imagine most Rangers in your setting would work for regional governments like Kings or free cities, perhaps even forming a Guild whose network connects the realms together. They might also be of some use as guides, but someone skilled at surviving alone can only help but so many people in a group. (Aragorn guiding 4 hobbits is a big help. He can feed them all and make sure they're doing the right thing. Aragorn guiding 100 hobbits with wagons and ponies is less good, as his skills are diluted.) As scouts they could range ahead of an army on the march. Sure they can spy out the enemy, but their main job would be to mark trails/roads/paths for movement of troops (it is WILD how many battles, even modern-day ones, occur/change/don't occur because troops take the wrong road) find suitable campsites (fortified positions near running water) and similar functions. But as wars are always a part-time gig for Medieval Kingdoms and paying for idle hands is a waste, I see this as more an additional task for the Royal Courier Service than a stand-alone full-time employment. They might also find work as wandering law-men. Their survival skills would help them chase down and bring back, say, a murderer who kills a guy and runs off into to woods. Their skills would also let them travel through the less densely populated parts of the Kingdom where anything more than 5 miles from villages is trackless wilderness. The problem there is that A: Contrary to popular belief, a random peasant in the woods is likely to die on his own without help. and B: when you don't do "jails" because you can't spare the manpower to feed an idle body, "bring back criminal to face justice" is less of a priority. But bounty hunter might also be a thing for similar reasons. [Answer] # They are a part of the military They are going to be involved as invisible sentries, border security agents, and tactical strike teams. Their responsibilities include: 1. Challenge entering foreigners (as long as they're not threatening). 2. Scout and report information about invasions, or ahead of an invading body. 3. Sabotage and harass encroaching enemies. 4. Light beacons in case of emergencies. 5. General law enforcement, dealing with highwaymen, etc. 6. Augmenting the archer corps in large actions 7. Augmenting the hunters when traveling with the army. Advantages: 1. They require little to no upkeep, as they live off the land. 2. Stealth, enemies can't fight what they can't see. 3. Speed, strike first and strike hard, then run away. 4. Information wins wars, not just battles. Good rangers = Good informaiton [Answer] Hunters seek to bring resources from nature back to civilization while rangers seek to bring resources from civilization out into nature. Yes, a hunter may know the land well, but fundamentally their purpose is to extract resources from the land. A hunter's ability to fulfill their role increases the more they stay in one place and the closer of a relationship they form with the land. They learn to manage animal populations, they learn where the animals move, and the learn how nurture their territory. A ranger, on the other hand, does not go into the wilderness to get something, they go there to reach a destination. A ranger might be a courier, delivering goods, or they might be a guide leading people to a destination. A ranger's ability increases the more new land they see. [Answer] Frame challenge: Consider you may be defining your classes and job too narrowly, a class may only tell you on average what a person is good at. There should be lots of overlap because in the real world, jobs have a lot of overlap. A blacksmith still has to be a decent woodworker, a fisherman can be very good at finding rare fish, really good at catching lots of fish, or really good at selling fish, a police officer can specialize in winning fight, preventing fights through negotiation, finding tax evasion, or crime scene investigation. to use your character, consider DnD, a fighter makes a damn good archer, but so does does a rogue or ranger. Creative use of class abilities makes for a better story, and more variety, it also gives your reader/player something to think about, you can create unique characters while giving your readers forshadowing. jobs to consider for wilderness survival: prospector, mushroom/herb finder, trapper, fisher, guides, military scouts, lumberjacks, explorers, monster tracker, human tracker (bounty hunter/cop), cattlemen, pioneer, fisherman, whaler, animal tamer, hunter, pearl diver, messenger, smuggler, smuggler hunter, poacher, game warden. to quote an old gamer. " I'm a thief." "but your huge and can't hide, pick locks, or pick pockets" "I'm not that kind of thief" "what kind are you?" *Whack* takes wallet from unconscious body. "that kind" [Answer] I suspect Rangers, as a class, would be fairly adaptable. They'd be able hunters, trackers, warriors, odd jobs men, kings in waiting, news bringers, mercenaries, and the like. As for roles they'd be particularly good at, I'd argue that scout & spy, explorer, guide & warden would all be good fits. [Answer] Ensure the King's wood isn't being poached. Only the owner of the land could hunt great prizes in our history. Some close allies would be invited, it was an event on its own. Your ranger could be part of that cohort, making sure Ladies and Lords, firstborn of high pedigree and useless.... would be safe while hunting Wild beats. Why, I can remember last year, when a Centaur dismounted some rude princeling who insisted on reigns. [Answer] The original D&D Ranger was one of the more focused classes as far as why they existed. The setting was lots of little villages in the big forest full of monsters -- England or Germany or the Eastern US. These hamlets begged adventurers to help with really bad stuff. But day-in and day-out a Ranger was out there killing stray orcs, or worse. They weren't assigned, and didn't expect any thanks, but someone has to do it. The rules even describe them as loners, always on the move; who must be "Good"; and who don't even care about possessions, only keeping what they can carry. As they become famous instead of attracting apprentices, they are followed by strange forest creatures, better to help them defeat the everyday encroachment of goblins and their ilk ([2nd Ed Ranger](https://advanced-dungeons-dragons-2nd-edition.fandom.com/wiki/Ranger)). By my thinking, they could be army scouts, but only because they show up saying "you're going to need my help getting through these hills". Or caravan guards only after some damned fool insists on going through hobgoblin country. On their own they go where needed. Pretty 1-dimentional, but a definite archetype. [Answer] Sherifs for rural area's, outlaws, bounty hunters, colonists/farmers to unhospitable lands, nomadic herdsmen, traders, protection detail for caravans, skirmishers and scouts for armies, messengers, guides, explorers, traveling entertainers (solo or group), prospectors far from civilization, mountaineers and probably more. Each requires some level of ranger skills, even a dancing one. [Answer] Fun fact: ‘Rangers’ are a thing IRL. Most larger modern militaries either have a dedicated commando unit that puts heavy emphasis on this particular set of skills (wilderness survival and tracking as well as high mobility and usually guerilla warfare tactics), or have a series of training courses that has the same focus. See for example the US Army Rangers, the JGSDF Ranger Courses, or various others (the name does not usually involve ‘rangers’, but almost all the big militaries have such a specialization). In many cases, these troops serve as advance forces, operating right at (or behind) enemy lines, providing scouting information to other units and/or focusing on eliminating priority targets that would otherwise severely hinder the ability of other units to advance and complete their own objectives. In terms of actual warfare, I strongly suspect that your Rangers will end up filling a similar role focused on advance scouting, priority target elimination, and covert operations behind enemy lines. Hunters will also end up on scouting duty to some extent, but would be more likely to be focused on scouting within territory that is already relatively secure (and would probably be tasked with scouting while hunting to replenish the army’s stocks of food). --- Outside of warfare it’s a bit more interesting. Because you specifically have a separate Hunter class, the most logical thing that Rangers would do during peace times is already covered by another class. Other roles I envision Rangers probably filling instead include: * Border patrol. The combination of precision, mobility, and combat skills makes Rangers uniquely suited to police border crossings when countries actually want to enforce things like entry and exit controls. They’re better suited than conventional fighter-types to apprehend individuals crossing illegally due to their mobility, and are also more likely to be able to capture them alive due to their focus on precision. * Professional frontier settlers. Again, Rangers are pretty uniquely suited to this. Villages did grow organically in many cases in Medieval times, but it was also not unusual for a wealthy individual to specifically start a new village. This was a risky endeavor for both the person supporting it and the people who traveled to live there, but a lot of the risk could be easily mitigated by having many of the initial wave of immigrants be people who are unusually good at just surviving. Rangers fit this perfectly, and I could easily envision one of the services offered by guilds of Rangers being to travel to an area and live there for a few years establishing farms and other critical aspects of village infrastructure to then hand them off to regular people once things have stabilized and a reasonable stock of spare supplies is laid in. * Courier services. I could easily see postal services being managed by guilds of Rangers in areas with lower population density. Their skills would mean they could eschew regular roads and take direct routes to their destinations, significantly shortening travel times in some cases. * Peacetime scouting and exploration services, including conducting geographical surveys of remote regions for cartographers. Their skill set is, yet again, uniquely suited to this type of thing, especially if there are ‘monsters’ in your world. * Wilderness escort services for expeditions and caravans. I actually would envision them being preferred for this over regular fighter types, as they would require less support from the rest of the expedition or caravan to stay in top fighting shape, and their mobility is going to be far more useful than raw combat prowess in many cases. * Bounty hunters. Probably in equal measure with Hunters. The thing is, while this may be a specialization option for Hunters, it’s arguably something Rangers are better at than normal Hunters due to their seemingly greater focus on combat. --- As an aside, I would encourage you to actually look at portrayals of rangers in tabletop RPGs. In most cases, they’re functionally highly skilled warriors who specialize in fighting in certain types of terrain against certain types of creatures. This means that ‘hunters’ are functionally a sub-class of rangers who specialize in fighting animals in whatever the local terrain is. In some cases though, there is a distinction. Revised Third Edition D&D for example includes a special ‘Scout’ class that actually more closely fits what you seem to be describing, being optimized for guerilla warfare (they get increased movement speed, do extra damage when they attack after moving, and are good at hiding) with a heavy dose of survival kills. Similarly, First Edition Pathfinder includes a dedicated Hunter class that is, in fact, a hybridization of a Ranger and a Druid (so they’re less combat focused than a ranger, more focused on animals and more in-tune with nature), but Rangers are still commonly engaged in actually hunting in most standard settings in that system. [Answer] Rangers are hoboes, tramps, scroungers and con-artists They travel from place to place boasting about their exploits in order to entertain the locals and get tips, drinks and a free meal. In fact they are good at surviving and living on their wits but their actual deeds are much exaggerated for dramatic effect. They are always talking about 'far off' places where there are dragon hoards they have sacked, beautiful princesses they have rescued or evil warriors they have defeated. Their favourite way of gaining attention from the locals is to sit in a corner of the common room with a hood shading their face and smoking a pipe. This creates a mysterious atmosphere and prepares the way for their stories of derring-do. They may also run a protection racket. They say, "I will protect your crops and animals from raiders if you pay me a certain amount of gold." If the money isn't paid, they vandalise people's property and sneak off in the night. The more enterprising among them may hint at noble birth and persuade gullible youngsters to go on a quest set by a wizard or some such. Once well away from their home village, the ranger will steal all their possessions while they sleep and make off in search of new victims. [Answer] Park rangers IRL park rangers concern themselves with monitoring nature for things like forest fires, poaching, monitoring animal populations, and rescue missions. The equivalent role in fantasy would do much the same thing, but with orcs, volcanoes, dryads, giant mushrooms, etc. When you get a quest to take down a hydra deep in the forest, it's because a ranger saw evidence of it, tracked it back to it's cave behind the waterfall, noted the location, determined it could be a risk to the nearby village, and informed the village's mayor. Not "in tune with nature" like a druid, but more like "patrolling nature". ]
[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. There is an enchanted thingy at the top of a mountain, and there is only one hero who can wield said thingy in order to save the world. The mountain is 5,000 meters in height and the [atmospheric pressure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_pressure#/media/File:Atmospheric_Pressure_vs._Altitude.png) is standard to earth. Our hero exists in the late medieval age and has no access to modern advancements (no modern air tanks to increase oxygen intake, or medicines), they are not [pre-acclimatized](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_sickness#Prevention) and has no time for [acclimatization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_sickness#Prevention). They must reach the top of the mountain as soon as possible or the world will perish. Assume warmth and hydration will not be issues. What can they do in order to avoid [altitude sickness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_sickness) to an extent that they can still function and succeed? Is this even possible? [Answer] 5000m is well below the "zone of death" where oxygen supplementation is required, and there were passes that high [used in ancient times](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Rock_of_Hunza), so it's certainly feasible for people to operate at that altitude without special equipment. In the [acclimatization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_sickness#Altitude_acclimatization) section that you linked to, it talks about only increasing where one sleeps by 300m a day, above 2400m: > > The rule of thumb is to ascend no more than 300 m (1,000 ft) per day to sleep. That is, one can climb from 3,000 m (9,800 ft) (70 kPa or 0.69 atm) to 4,500 m (15,000 ft) (58 kPa or 0.57 atm) in one day, but one should then descend back to 3,300 m (10,800 ft) (67.5 kPa or 0.666 atm) to sleep. > > > Basically, the key questions are: "how high can your hero climb in one day", and "how much time do they actually have to get up there"? Saying "as soon as possible" is one thing, but if you're thinking "hours" then they're just going to have to push to the top and chance it. But a 5000m climb is not really a one-day deal just from a "people can't climb mountains that fast" standpoint (the example above mentions acclimatized, modern climbers going up 1500m in one day before returning back down 1200m). If we assume they can take a few days, then they can probably get up there safely without much issue. Push up to ~2500m, spend the night, push higher up the mountain each day, retreat back down to somewhat higher basecamps each evening, and they'll hit the top at some point. If the magical doodad gives them the ability to spend the night up at the summit safely or some magic means of transportation, they could probably shave a day off their trip since they don't have to leave time to come back down to camp. [Answer] ### Coca leaves, the placebo effect, and motivation [These have been used historically](https://www.alpacaexpeditions.com/does-chewing-on-coca-leaves-or-drinking-coca-tea-help-with-altitude-sickness/) to help mitigate altitude sickness. Can be refined in various ways to increase potency and taste, including into caramels and other tasty things. (Refining it too much will make cocaine, so some middle ground might be ideal). There isn't any scientific evidence backing this up ([studies show no correlation](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3001837/) in blind trials), but the knowledge that it's been used for generations and locals swear by it can induce a placebo effect, which is beneficial. Behaviour at altitude is measured in ["Time of useful consciousness"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_useful_consciousness) which for your hero at 5000m will be about 30 minutes. This isn't 30 minutes until death, it's 30 minutes of making sensible decisions. If the top of the mountain is a gentle slope and not a cliff face, every last fibre of their being is motivated to get there, they're currently walking there and don't need to change the pattern of "left foot right foot", and they have to do nothing when there except be present (or flop on some "abort" button, that's not behind a door or anything tricky to open while hypoxic), and believes they've taken something to dramatically increase his chances of surviving. They might just get there. [Answer] You world is doomed Even for modern capabilites mountain of 9000м would be unreachable without pressure equipment of some sort. 1km height differnce with now-highest mountain is a lot. It makes the difference. A trained person can breath at 8000 (33kPa), at 9000 (30kPa) they can't. That 3kPa change puts the partial oxygen pressure (from 33 \* 0.22 = 7.2kPa to 30 \* 0.22 = 6,6kPa) to far bellow chemical limit (8kPa). 1kPa of pressure can be negated by special technic of breathing (shortly holding breath and increasing its pressure with you muscles on each sigh). But 1,5 would be unachivable by that. (Yes, lungs can create up to 10kPa of excess pressure, when, say, filling airbaloon, but you can't fill airboolons all around the clock). Besides this +1km is quite a large distance by it own - so human would need to stay in "death zone" far longer than they can survive it. So your medieval untrained person can't reach this height by any means in a hard-science world. I suggest you to lower height to [7000-7500 meters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismoil_Somoni_Peak) wich is reachable by highly trained climber with support team only, but still does not require any superhuman abilities. For that height other answers apply: willpower, luck (tons of it), trained body - your hero might be sailor (climbing skill) with long history of diving for pearls (breathing skill). [Answer] We have managed to reach Mt. Everest (8850m) without supplemental oxygen. However, this was done by superbly trained and ultimately fit experienced climbers. And it was done with a support staff of thousands. Remember its not only the final climber, its not only his 10-12 person climbing support team, or the other two equally large support teams. It is also the 200 or so that stock the base camp from the nearest village. Which village only exists because it is a supply line for Everest. Which village is totally populated by a culture that is not only pre-acclimatized but also descendants from generations of high-altitude dwellers. Which village is kept stocked by the proceeds of an industrial modern economy with all the vehicles and infrastructure that goes along with that. As the OP asks, for a single, untrained, late medieval age person who is not pre-acclimatized and has no time for acclimatization.. ab.so.lu.te.ly. no chance for 9000m 9000m requires both a skilled and acclimatized climbing team, and the infrastructure to make a supply chain for the climbers.( I know its been done 'solo' and without oxygen. Did that solo climber really lug all his gear, food etc. from sealevel, by himself?) For the 5000m in the original question... Yes. Not at all easily, but possible. It depends on the climate and technical difficulty of the mountain. Does your hero have access to a support staff that can build a supply chain for him? He is a hero, we can assume he is in superb physical fitness. What sort of protective clothing does he have access to? Is there a local tribe that is pre-acclimatized to living at altitude, and is willing to assist our hero? Refining the question down to just: Can a late medieval age person avoid or moderate altitude sickness, without taking the time for acclimatization? Not really: Late medieval is 1250 to 1500 AD. No knowledge of Oxygen, no means to make it without very heavy materials, no ways to store it. No knowledge whatsoever of actual medical treatment for altitude sickness.(which requires tailored steroids) Drugs that fortify the body/metabolism actually worsen your response to altitude sickness! So no opium or coke or junglefrog licking for you. [Answer] We need to advance chemistry a little to get oxygen but perhaps not implausibly so in your context. I looked for chemical ways of producing oxygen ideally accessible to alchemists, but definitely without electricity (common chemical oxygen generators use electrolysis in their manufacture). While most of what I've suggested happened too late, much of it could have happened earlier. Barium peroxide releases oxygen at low pressures (possibly requiring elevated temperatures, but possibly not). Wikipedia says medieval alchemists [knew about some barium compounds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barium#History), such as [baryte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryte). Barium oxide was isolated in the 1770s, and that can be made into the peroxide by heating. Further heating will release oxygen. This was used to obtain oxygen via the [Brin process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brin_process)but that was in the 19th century, though it could probably have been developed considerably earlier: The pressure pumps required for the more efficient process could have been [built by 1650](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pump), but heat would work. The downside is the BaO2 only gives you about 1/10 of its mass as oxygen - so you'd need to carry a lot if you carried the solid. Maybe it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to use that air pump directly and carry compressed air, or oxygen-rich air produced using barium peroxide. The [Magdeburg hemispheres](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdeburg_hemispheres) were a demonstration of vacuum in 1654. If metal could be worked to keep pressure out, it could keep it in. I suggest that the metalwork was possible earlier, and the concept was what prevented earlier demonstrations. If you could get to [sodium peroxide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_peroxide) you'd have something that reacts with CO2 to give O2 as used in rebreathers, but that may be a little too far. It is however much lighter than barium peroxide ("barium" is, after all, etymologically derived from the Greek for "heavy"). Potassium superoxide is another chemical oxygen generator, but potassium wasn't isolated until the 19th century and the intermediates are rather tricky to handle; hydrogen peroxide and various derivatives are similar too recent even if they could be made without electrolysis. [Answer] ### Why does the hero have to be the one doing the climbing? The classic mistake of too many heroes is assuming they have to do everything themselves. A hero who knows their limitations and can delegate effectively would be much more effective. Hire yourself a battalion of sherpas or the local equivalent. With enough money, you'll get people ready to risk their lives. Granted they'll know it could be a suicide mission, but for money and for the fame of saving the world you'll find people to do it. They'll all be fully acclimatised already and have years of training and expertise which the hero simply doesn't. So the climbers hit the mountain. A large proportion of them die in the attempt, but a handful reach the summit, grab the weapon and head back down again with it. The hero waits safely at base camp. The surviving sherpas finally reach the camp and give him the weapon. He saves the world. Job done. [Answer] The problem is a bit mixed up. As it currently is written with the object at 5,000m you don't have a big problem. Based on my previous experiences at high altitude (I'm a hiker who likes mountains, but not a mountaineer) I would expect to be able to make that climb without serious issues. It appears that at some point you changed this to the death zone and it's been reverted back. An unacclimated individual in the death zone doesn't suffer altitude sickness, they pass out and soon die. The time of useful consciousness at the bottom of the death zone is roughly 3 minutes, by the time you're up to that 9000m figure it's half that. ]
[Question] [ Many mythological humans vary in depictions. Let's use Trolls from Scandinavia as an example. Some are said to be giants compared to humans (I'd imagine twice the height), and some, like Danish Trolls, are said to be the same height or smaller than humans. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1lzDN.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1lzDN.png) Same for other big species such as Ogres, Cyclops, and Orcs. They can either be twice the height as humans, or the height of a child. Considering the necessities of animals being huge (bigger heart, higher blood pressure,thicker limbs,etc.) How could a species biologically evolve and exist with such varying heights without Darwinism being in the way? [Answer] If we look at the range of human sizes recorded today: We have Robert Wadlow ad 2.72 meters and Chandra Bahadur Dangi with 0.55 meters, So Humans are already appearing with a variation of 1:5 If we look a a species apparently more prone to genetic variations: Smallest dog I could find is the chihuahua starting at 0.15 m shoulder height to the Irish wolfhound of 0.9 m we get to a high variation of 1:6 So you´d really need to invent anything, just make the variation genes a little bit more unstable to get a more common spread of the extreme small and big specimens. [Answer] No need to go purely mythical for your reseach. Have you looked at any real hominid species for inspiration? [Homo florensis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis) is a, now extinct, hominid species. It is theorised that they had an average height of 1.1 m. It has a nickname of "the hobbit" and was actually almost named Homo Hobbitus. It is not in our direct ancestry but is rather a cousin, existing at the same time as some of our own taller ancestors. It was even initially thought to have existed at the same time as modern humans, but further date-testing pushed the date back. Some of our older ancestral cousins, Homo australopithicus were only around 1.4 m, but still occassionally used both hands and feet for walking. But that was quite awhile ago. Homo neanderthal was about the same height as modern humans, if not slightly shorter. Cro-magnan was also about the same height as humans. Both existed at similar times to our older Homo sapien ancestors. If you had provided the same healthy diet that we have now, it can be argued that they could be taller than modern humans. (I think it more logical to have them as the basis for your giants rather than tall and slender elves. I think I'm being a bit speciest). I found this helpful, not entirely accurate image, on [quora](https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-tallest-humanoid-species-to-ever-roam-the-earth) of Hominid height development. The second image from the [Natural History Museum](http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-origin-of-our-species.html) gives a better sense of when the different species overlapped. You can see immediately that several "species" (see main edit) of hominid existed around and at the same time. [![Hominid heights](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IWBFh.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IWBFh.jpg) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XdNUW.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XdNUW.jpg) MAIN EDIT: Our research into our hominid past is still incomplete. As such we often are basing entire new species on incomplete skeletons. We could quite possibly be measuring intra-species variation as entirely different species by accident/incomplete data. We can successfully interbreed with several of the other hominid branches, eg cro-magnum and Neanderthal etc. (many Homo sapiens have H.neaderthal DNA in them). Darwin did not know about genes and genetics. > > [Non-Darwinism](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Non-Darwinian_evolution#Definition) does not deny or dispute common descent or the fact of evolution. It is only concerned with denying or downplaying the "Darwinian" mechanisms of evolution, such as natural selection or sexual selection. > > > Because of this, you can still use theories of genetic drift and isolation to explain your geographically distinct Giant and Troll characteristics. So tall Giants in one area and short Giants elsewhere. These different Giant tribes could still interbreed and could technically be considered the same species. If you happen to provide a hearty mead and protein sources for some of your Giants and not for others, get some of your dwarves to live somewhere else besides those dank caves, and give some of your orcs some medical care, this could also explain some of the [smaller height discrepancies](http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1820836,00.html). [Answer] You specifically asked, > > How could a species biologically evolve and exist with such varying heights without Darwinism being in the way? > > > From this, I am assuming you mean a single species having variations in size, versus a range of related species being different sizes (but the similar sizes within each species). First, we can answer a broader question: Is it possible for a single species to produce individuals of varying size (on the order of 2x difference in size)? The answer to that is definitely yes. There are lots of examples: for instance, Canis familiaris domestic dogs. A single species with at least the same variation in size as the trolls you're asking about. In this case, the variation was basically due to human meddling by selecting genetic patterns to emphasize a specific desired trait. Of course, as you pointed out, the species needs to be able to support the size range (ie heart size, bone strength, etc). It's hard to answer this for a mythical species since we don't have an actual physiology to study. Further, it's hard to address the reasons why a mythical species would develop such different size ranges in sub-populations, but the good news is, you have a template to go on (the trolls you mentioned) and enough leeway to develop your own answers as part of your storyline. [Answer] If we do not hold tightly to genetics, (or simply have several gene combinations result in a wide variety of sizes), it is simple to have a species with that trait. The primary problems with such a variance come from the difficulty of interbreeding between the different sizes. For example, a Chihuahua and a Great Dane can interbreed, but the mechanics of the act itself may be difficult and awkward, and a female Chihuahua likely couldn't bring a Great Dane mix to term. Here are 3 ways to address the 2nd point (carrying to term). 1. The smaller female's system (hormones, etc) naturally prevents a fetus from growing too large during pregnancy. 2. Your trolls are, or are similar to, marsupials. The children are born very small, and continue to grow and develop externally. 3. Your trolls lay eggs. The size of the eggs is fairly uniform across the species, so may appear quite small when compared to the larger trolls. Here are 2 ways to address the 1st point (the act). 1. Your trolls make use of external fertilization, such as fish might use. They may build dams to create beaver-style ponds for this. 2. Your trolls make use of entirely non-biotic means of reproduction. Perhaps two trolls must gather and consume a large amount of clay that they regurgitate (or otherwise excrete). Then together they sculpt this into their child, adding stones, seeds, gems, etc, as well as a portion of life energy, as they craft it. The size, shape, and appearance of their child is entirely based on how much clay they gathered and what form they give it. [Answer] Sure. [![elephant family comparisons](https://i.stack.imgur.com/skSau.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/skSau.png) <https://homero13.deviantart.com/art/All-species-of-Mammuthus-446196499> [![bears smallest to largest](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oyu4v.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oyu4v.jpg) <https://serchio25.deviantart.com/art/bear-species-73640712> [![sauropod size comparisons](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PRMil.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PRMil.jpg) There are plenty of examples of animal lineages in which species show the size range you want and greater. Bears are the closest to actually exhibiting the size range of the trolls you ask about. Elephants show an even wider range and sauropods an immense range. As regards Galileo and square-cube law (and I could not find Galileo's exact words on the subject) - it is true. But just as one can demonstrate the possibility of a human lifting 600 pounds by locating a human and having him lift 600 pounds, so one can demonstrate the possibility of giant animals by locating giant animals. [Answer] Possibly the different types of trolls could be members of the same species at different stages of life. Trolls could change their appearance radically between each life stage, the way caterpillars turn into butterflies, as well as suddenly growing much larger each time. Note that a typical human will grow about four to six times taller during their lifetimes, and some have grown much more than that. A newly hatched crocodile might be only one foot long and grow to be 15 times as long and about 3,375 times as massive. Newly hatched sauropod dinosaurs would be curled up in their eggs before hatching, and still could not be more than a few feet long when hatching, judging from the largest known dinosaur eggs. But depending on their species, they might grow to be more than 15 times, longer. A four foot long baby that grew to be 80 feet long would grow 20 times longer and 8,000 times as massive. And some Sauropods grew much bigger than that. If the legendary and controversial Amphicoelias fragilimus and bruhathkayosaurus were as big as the largest estimates, adults could possibly have been forty or fifty times as long as newly hatched juveniles. So it is easy to believe that the different stages of the troll life cycle could be less different than tadpoles and frogs, and range in height by a factor of only four or five. Note that many human children can walk and run well by the time they are two feet tall, and the tallest human was almost 9 feet, or 4.5 times that tall. And there was allegedly a prehistoric man over 11 feet tall judging from his leg bone. The tallest living and prehistoric bears could rear up and walk on their hind legs for a time, at heights of 10 to 15 feet. The extinct ape Gigantopithecus blacki is sometimes believed to have been bipedal and 10 or 12 feet tall. A large elephant can rear up on their hind legs and tower about 20 feet tall. And a large circus elephant was taught to walk on his hind legs for hundreds of feet. Prehistoric giant ground sloths could stand up to a height of about 20 feet, partially supported by their powerful tails. Thus if the trolls change their shape a bit every time they morph into a larger stage of life, they can have a size range much larger than you probably need. [Answer] Isolate the populations, add in different cultural preferences for mate selection, wait a bunch of generations, vastly different sizes. Expanded; in group A women only allow the tallest men in their generation as mates. In group B the women only allow the shortest to mate. (Or the men selecting, there are cultures that do each, doesn't mater). Much time passes. The populations start adjusting to this preference and over time the heights change.The reasoning for the preferences are up to the author and can be either part of the plot or just along the lines of 'eh, they like 'em short in group B's culture. Sexual selection is a very strong component of Darwin's theory of evolution and it is completely realistic to have this be the engine by which your species evolved these differences. ]
[Question] [ Why would scout robots be used for recon only, not general combat? I have a situation in which scout robots akin to mars rovers are used for military applications by forces residing on a foreign planet (Mars) that operate out of colonies to keep civilians in line and exterminate raiders. these bots are equipped with imaging and video cameras, audio recorders, and a submachine gun-esque weapon chambered in 9mm. These autonomous (supervised) terrors would scutter around on six legs instead of wheels with solar panels for extended missions. After the situation is evaluated, the scouts would de-activate and wait for human support, in the form of massive 12 wheeled armored tank-esque troop transports to arrive, clean up enemies, recover stolen goods and bring the autonomous scouts back to a colony. Why would sending human soldiers be necessary to fight human raiders and outlaw bands, if the technological level is high enough to send combat-capable autonomous robots to fight instead? keep in mind that the question is not "why is it necessary to send humans", but "why is it necessary for the humans to fight?" [Answer] Some thoughts: * Weight The robot carry various scouting tools, mapping tools, surveillance tools etc. and these are all heavy. This means that it doesn't have the capacity to carry any extra dedicated targeting tools. Someone will probably point out that a surveillance optic and a targeting optic aren't entirely different - and to which I'd say - yes. However the surveillance optic whilst able to be used for targeting is a last-ditch effort option. * Range Not the range of the robot - 9mm out of a PCC is effective out to about 100-200 metres - one source said that they could land shots at 400 metres (but they didn't say how reliably they were able to hit). Bearing in mind - 400 metres represents the absolute max range. Most infantry would be armed with a Rifle in a Rifle calibre - if we take the venerable 5.56 - that is effective out to 400 metres and with the same tweaking that gets a 9mm to 400 metres, the 5.56 can be taken out to almost 1 km. * Armour See Weight - other posters have touched on this - but in order to make it practical in combat, would require more armour that would impede it's mobility. * Cost. Depending on your Militaries view, it might be better to send humans to die than Robots. In the West (and especially the US) - the Defense budget is such that sacrificing a multi-million dollar Remote-Controlled vehicle/Drone/UAV/Thing is almost always seen as preferable to letting a Human die. But... If you say have an excess of population, not too much money and not a whole lot of moral principals - send 10 penal combatants on a suicide mission, rather than risk an expensive and rare asset might be better. * Combat is dynamic One of the things Humans do exceptionally well is prediction and reaction. A Computer might be able to calculate all possible moves and may even have an algorithm to help rank-order them in terms of likelihood - but Humans still have an edge for this sort of thing. For example - when I was regularly motorcycling to work (and doing extensive lane-splitting) I would observe drivers doing the 'Lane change lean' - that is, in the middle of a multi-lane highway, someone that was thinking about changing lane would turn their head to look at the lane they wanted and they would, ever so slightly, drift towards that lane. Noticing this change in behavior more than once gave me an extra 1-2 seconds of reaction time. Additionally: * Combat algorithms are too complex A scout algorithm of go here, look there, if threat identified - send help and if attacked point gun in general direction and scoot is relatively simple. However, a combat algorithm of identify lanes of assault, rank order target priority, mission objectives etc. etc. before a first shot is fired and then having to constantly update all of those as things happen is too complex/taxing for the scouts CPU to handle. [Answer] [My comment](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/251822/why-are-scout-bots-only-used-for-reconnaissance/251831#comment774075_251822) was in jest, but actually contains an answer as well: these scout robots are not made for combat. And there is a huge range of reasons this might not be the case. A few broad examples: * Manoeuvrability has been favoured over armour and other defensive measures. These machines are fast and agile, but easily incapacitated. They are as light-weight as possible. * They carry mapping and scanning tools, rather than offensive weaponry. The one submachine gun can is used in the unlikely scenario the robot is being attacked and it can increase its survival chance by killing rather than avoiding its predator. (Naturally, knowing they carry guns will keep the unarmed in line.) From a completely different perspective, there could be good reasons humans have to do the actual fighting: * Robotic combat is universally considered an act of terrorism. It's already hard to develop robots solely for combat and offense without anyone knowing, but to actually deploy them is even more difficult and considered terrorism. The reasons behind this will allow for some intriguing socio-political storytelling (involving a singular historical event, perhaps). * Robots can't always distinguish between Friend Or Foe. We are familiar with this concept, but there is simply not always a way to tell opposing forces apart, especially when everyone is wearing civilian clothing (this especially holds true during insurgencies an other rebellions). You need clear human communication and a direct and dynamic conceptualization of the "battle field" to attack or defend against an opposition. * This is about oppression, and humans are the vilest and crudest of all. No details necessary. [Answer] > > combat-capable autonomous robots > > > does not necessarily imply "human-level intelligence capable of dealing with all of the situations that may arise once the shooting has stopped". Human environments and human interactions are complex, and fully understanding them would need AGI and if you have human-equivalent AI with guns then All Bets Are Off anyway, so lets discard that idea for the moment. High quality, low latency audio and video links over long distances are surprisingly awkward in the real world without having to operate in a war zone on a near-airless radiation-soaked rock where you can't necessarily rely on infrastructure to be there or functional, and in the absense of a troposphere or ionosphere and in the face of the possibility of cheap antisatellite rockets (low G! thin air! scifi space tech!) and ECM, radio links are always going to be unreliable and slow. Your scout bots may be supervised but the supervisors can't get a good handle on what is actually happening. Robots go in first, but humans are needed to mop up and secure the area and handle prisoners and the wounded and captured equipment and work out exactly what happened and who was involved, because the robot supervisors may have little if any idea. [Answer] ## Latency Bots get commands, decrypt them, and then move, make telemetry and image data, encrypt them, and send the parcel back. Data is decrypted, then a human decides what to do next. As a result, all data from the frontline is at least 5 to 30 seconds old. By the time the operator sees the tank coming, the drone might be dead already, would it engage in hostilities. So, why arm up a drone with equipment to lose if your latency will lead to its loss? Ordering an attack to a drone with that much latency is suicidal. So the autonomous drone is set up to dodge, hide, and evade on its own, and on a secondary level follow the location instructions by the human operators in the control bunker. Even if the imagery is still somewhat time-delayed, it is good enough to plan larger operations. ## Prevent Robot Uprising Arming up bots to the teeth does not just make them large and bulky, it makes people uneasy because they fear robot uprisings to murder humans. Teaching an AI to kill some humans and then expecting them to not kill some of them sounds terribly insecure to the general population. [Answer] The enemy can easily hack them and make them switch side. Losing a scout to an enemy is a rather little damage, compared with giving them a monster attack machine. Better send human soldiers, which in case of need can be "motivated" to commit suicide. [Answer] The governing Computer Council has put forth an edict that only humans will be sent into combat against human soldiers, so as to preserve the loss of robot life since human can heal and self-replicate, but robots cannot. Precious robot life cannot be so needlessly wasted. Humans should sort out problems caused by others of their own kind with their own hands. [Answer] The first point is that nobody likes having killing robots around. Civilians really hate the idea. A basic reason this society accepted robots was the concept that "A robot will never harm a human being". As such, creating a robot that kills people would cause an uproar. The military are more open to the idea of robots that kill people… as long as they are not their own people. That would be unacceptable. You can hardly look more dumb than making a killing robot that then proceeds to kill your own troops. Plus, nobody would like the remote possibility of being among those. However, no matter how you make the robots, there will be errors. You would need to teach them which people are ok to kill and which are not. And such robots would occasionally fail to notice the cues telling them that someone is a friend. (Not to mention that establishing the difference of friends vs foes will not be simple at all, since the enemy will logically try to look as an ally in front of the robot) Then, in addition to the inevitable "mistakes" by the robot soldiers, there is the risk of sabotage. You bring your killer robot back to the base after an operation, just to discover that it got reprogrammed to start a killing spree on arrival. How could you trust that piece of metal with guns? The second point is one of responsibility. If a soldier kills someone, you blame the soldier. If a robot kills someone they shouldn't… who takes the blame? The company manufacturing them will not. Nor will those programming it. The blame (and target of legal proceedings) would probably fell on those that decided it was ok to produce slaying robots, along those choosing to deploy them on an operation, which means nobody really wants to take such a decision. And it's bad as well when they work. If your troops protect a colony from raiders, they are heroes. If you just deployed some robots that did everything, the army gets much less prestige. So, even with no malfunctions, the army is interested in that attacks are only carried by people. It's such an important quest that it must be done by a man. [Answer] Scouts are specialized functions. You program the scout to do that and nothing else. This produces a robot that is very poorly suited to do anything else. So why not make a specialized battle bot? Or rather, dozens of kinds? Because a soldier in battle may do all sorts of things. One might be artillery, one infantry, one sniper. It is not feasible to program a bot to do all of these, but while a human can specialize, it is feasible for a soldier to have a smattering of skills from other specialties, and also to pick them up on the fly. (A sailor at Pearl Harbor manned one of the guns despite having training as a cook.) Consequently, an army of soldiers is much smaller than one of bots. Furthermore, soldiers have better judgment than bots. If a scout is destroyed through bad judgment, it's just a cheap bot. Soldier bots will lose you the battle. Not to mention the horrific incident where bots were programmed to distinguish civilians from soldiers by their uniform. When they were attacked by civilians, they not only killed the civilians attacking (who were, technically, war criminals) but many others who were wearing the same thing. No one will trust a bot to learn on the battlefield what a uniform is. BUT that means an opposing force can defeat them by disguising that they are the opposing force. Pattern matching makes it impossible for a bot to reliably distinguish. [Answer] If you make fighting robots which are 100% autonomous, getting offed by them will be a matter of time. Humans are needed because humans call the shots. The day humans stop calling the shots is the day humanity gets shot in the back. [Answer] Poor Replaceability The Scout-bots aren't exactly cheap, all those rare-earth metals in their leg-servos and sensors and other expensive parts mean that they're not disposable for a civilisation operating in frontier conditions on Mars. They're built using equipment imported from Earth, which is a hell of a supply-chain. So they're armed with a gun for self-defence, but their best defence is to never get into a fight in the first place. Instead, they park up and provide data for the much more replaceable soldiers and robust ground-vehicles used by the main military forces. You could feasibly build autonomous soldiers (perhaps they do back on earth!) but they'd be hard to replace if destroyed, and when it comes down to it, it's easier to show up with a dozen soldiers in a massive armoured tank. [Answer] Let's start by considering a spy-bot in the form of a quadcopter drone. Its job is to move a camera and transmitter around. Right now, you can do this with a reasonable amount of autonomous intelligence in a package about the size and weight of cell phone. 200 grams, including the batteries, motors, and electronics. Now consider a gun. Not even a huge gun. Let's consider a .22 caliber pistol. Just the pistol and a firing mechanism weighs in at almost half a kilo. The electronics won't add much to that, but you'll need that much again for motors and batteries. Let's call this a 1kg package that gets you half a dozen shots. This disparity only gets worse with higher tech levels. Consider loiter time. The ability to hang out and wait for something to happen is very important in the drone business. If you're keeping a gun aloft, then your loiter time drops significantly. You can have both with a much larger vehicle, but that only works if your drones have a huge field of view, as with Raptors. If they're anywhere near the ground, you lose that. Consider numbers. Don't ask yourself "is a spybot with a gun better than a spybot." Ask yourself "is a spybot with a gun better than a dozen spybots." Now that you're thinking in terms of numbers, think of how much effort it would take your opponent to take down a dozen spybots that are smaller and harder to see. You could take out a weaponized quadcopter with a shotgun. You could fire a shotgun into a cloud of spybots and you'd be lucky to get half of them. All of this changes when you shift to something with legs. Comparatively speaking, legs add a lot more weight, but also increase carrying capacity. At that point, you'd have to make something a hopper like a frog or a flea for it to be effective as a spybot. On the other hand, you could make a walking/hopping gun networked with a half dozen spybot sub-drones and have a versatile and cheap combat unit. So, to reiterate, don't think this or that, think this and that, in the proper proportions. [Answer] Scouting implements are expensive and fragile. When push comes to shove the robot can defend itself, but it's risky and looks pretty bad on cost-benefit analysis to use the scout robots as fighting robots. Not every situation can or should be solved by killing all opponents. Maybe they have hostages or fragile cargo, maybe they can be negotiated with, maybe there's some intel that can- or has to be recovered. Scout robot frame cannot handle the power draw for an AI capable of making these decisions, but humans are perfectly capable. [Answer] Two reasons immediately come to mind: First, as others have mentioned, there could be laws or mores in place to restrict this use. This is relatively simple to justify to a reader, but doesn't answer why they can't. Second, touched on by a few answers: combat is horribly complex, and they really can't conduct combat reliably. Drones which can traverse difficult terrain, pathfind, coordinate search patterns, and identify things which might be of interest to human oversight are quite feasible even with near-modern technology. Autonomous maid robots which are capable of "tidying up a room" are presently a pipe dream - even with plenty of time to think. Effective combat is more complex (facing an adaptive and intelligent adversary) and requires rapid decisions. So, just one of the simple problems in combat: vision. Vision must be interpreted and reacted on within split seconds - something humans are quite capable of. If you would like your scout drones to not fire on friendlies, they need to be able to operate at at least the human level. This is far beyond detecting things of potential interest. And of course, as another commentator mentioned, knowing when to stop hostilities... As another answer noted: cost and resources. You decide to solve the vision thing by adding some really beefy computer processors to your drone, mobility with very high rotation speed joints, etc... Might as well add a bit more ammo while you're at it, some armor plating to protect the resource expenditure... Maybe a bigger gun... You've recreated a tank (or a Bolo). It's great at fighting, but what you really wanted was a semi-expendable autonomous scout unit which could detect and report back potential issues. You already have tanks. And so, the design is purposefully limited such that you can send these out to identify where to send the tanks. Yes, you could probably use them to conduct minor sabotage via their point defense weapon, possibly at the risk of loss of both the scouting unit and the element of surprise, but that's not where their chief value lies. And in general combat they're a liability if they have even a relatively small chance of shooting friendlies, so they'd better lie down and not participate. You could possibly use the scout drone or a similar relative with more carrying/dragging capacity to deliver a bomb, though that'd probably be too slow in many situations compared to sending out the tanks and troops with mortars. TL;DR: Humans are extremely intelligent and adaptable relative to anything else we can find or build, and those qualities are essential in combat. Scout drones have their place, but general combat is not that place. [Answer] Scouts are using themselves up to propell themselves. Basically a scout is a camera on a fuel stack circling - and they need energy to transmit, to function and to move. For that they consume there whole body over time, which is basically just chemical energy compressed into a shape. And once that reaction is started it can not be stopped. Your scout will move through his whole life- even if its just vibrating in place -and that life will be short, fast and eventfull. As the whole body consists of volatiles- one small bump going wrong, even just a laser light strafe, will set it on fire, uncontrollably. It could be potentially used for assault, but on impact, it would just propell itself away again.. ]
[Question] [ I'm writing a speculative story about a planet in another Solar System. On this planet, there are five types of reproduction strategies amongst the sapient species. There are androgenic, gynogenics, autogenic, homogenics, and heterogenics. Homogenic species are species that sexually reproduce within their species; this is what the vast majority of real life species do. Androgenics are an all-female species that require males of another species to sexually reproduce. Gynogenics are an all-male species that require females of another species to sexually reproduce. Autogenics are genderless species that asexually reproduce (generally by parthenogenesis). And finally, heterogenics are a species that has two or more genders, but both genders generally reproduce with members of other species. There are already examples of homogenic and autogenic species in real life. But is it plausible for there to be a humanoid species of one sex that requires humanoids of another species to reproduce with? [Answer] There are species that require another species to reproduce. For example spider wasps. These depend on spiders. They paralyse the spider and plant eggs in its body. Then there are cuckoos, they depend on another species making a nest, then they lay eggs in that nest. Now I can imagine a "womb parasite". A species that appears to have a male organ, but actually injects motile eggs into the host, through her vagina. Those eggs then swim through the cervix and implant in the womb, just as a normal blastocyst does. The baby is then essentially a cuckoo, it is born and raised but has no genetic material from the host. Now, is this parasite a "male" or "female"? They appear male (they have what appears to be a penis etc) but they are actually laying eggs, not sperm, making them female. This gives a species that appears male, but depends on a female from another species. What about the other way around? Men don't provide much, just a little DNA. Now a possible female tactic is to deceive a male of another species into thinking that he has sired your children, whereas in fact they only have your genetics. He then helps raise the children (doing the usual father activities) A more subtle type of parasitism. Is this plausible? Probably not in the real world, but I think it can pass muster in a fantasy context. [Answer] Yes, in a limited sense it actually exists The Amazon Molly (Poecilia formosa) is an all female species of fish, but they must mate with a male with a male of a closely related fish in order to reproduce. However, none of the genetic material from this male is actually carried forth to the next generation. [This is called gynogenesis](https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/no-sex-for-all-female-fish-species/). However... This is a rare outcome, that appears to result from hybridisation and is likely not stable in the longer term. The reproduction here is a form of cloning, and has none of the benefits of sexual reproduction. And that's the underlying problem for all your unusual sexual mechanisms: either they aren't actually sexual reproduction or they aren't going to be species because they're blending their material with a different species. You could have forms which are parasitic in various ways, for example an "Gynogenic" (btw, I think you've named those the wrong way round) species would need to have sperm that invades the eggs of the host species, destroying their genetic material, and then growing parasitically in the womb. That could be stable, after all Cuckoos and various other species successfully get other species to raise their offspring. But actual sexual reproduction between species is just hybridisation. "Autogenics" exist, but sex appears far too useful There are, of course, many real species that use the various forms of asexual reproduction in the real world. However, all the examples of complex asexual species we know of appear to have evolved from the sexual species and aren't stable in evolutionary time. Sex is one of those things that has independently evolved multiple times, and thus can be expected to exist in all alien ecosystems. Also I'm not sure why you feel the need to coin a new word for this, why not just use existing terminology? [Answer] I'm going to say yes, but with a bit of a twist. ### Digesting your lover's gamete Everything on earth pretty much has two methods of interacting with the genetic material of other creatures. Either you eat them or you breed with them. We're extremely flexible with the first, being able to break down most proteins and carbohydrates to make our building blocks. In contrast, our genetics is super-picky about what you can do the second with. Our interbreeding mechanism is simplistic compared to our eating mechanism, requiring the two sets of genetics to match up like a zipper. Chemically speaking, though, it doesn't have to be an either/or proposition. A sophisticated gamete could cannibalize the genetics of another gamete, picking and choosing which parts it wants to make use of. It might not be as simple as breaking down the genetics in their entirety, possibly involving tens of thousands of viruses, each of which seeks out a chunk of the target genetics and delivers it to a mechanism that assembles it to spec. ### Artificial limitations For this to work, it would require that the target gamete have all of the required building blocks. This limits the options, and you have to ask why the creatures can't breed with their own species. The key to back-justifying this one is the essential nature of predation. I think it would be a safe to use vitamins as a source of comparison. Humans don't make our own vitamin C. We lost that gene somewhere along the way, because it's more efficient to get it from the things we eat. Similarly, your "predator genetics" might just not be able to reproduce itself without additional source material. So, overall, this is justifiable. Not likely, of course, but that would be arguing "irreducible complexity," which is always a losing bet against the anthropic principle. [Answer] For a given value of reproduce... Some fantasy games like Warcraft have "races" that are actually factions. And some fantasy RPG's define vampires and zombies as races rather than humanoids with a condition. Following this train of thought, zombies are a species that reproduces by infecting members of other species (regardless of gender). The aliens from the Aliens franchise also reproduce in this manner in a way... some might say that the people involved in the process are just hosts, and the aliens are parasites - but the resulting offspring has genes from the host, which is why aliens springing forth from predators are way stronger and more monstrous than those coming from humans. And then there is the Asari race in Mass Effect, a race designed to cater to a teenage male audience. The race only has females, and will reproduce with anyone and anything in the universe. The official explanation is that they psionically rearrange their genes using whomever they are mating with as a template. So... plenty of examples in sci-fi and fantasy. You need only look around a little bit and any idea anyone might have here has already been overelaborated in a book or game already ;) [Answer] Yes, for some meanings of "species" - because a lot of "species" definitions include co-reproductive abilities. Nature has, in fact, more imagination than most people. A real life example off my head: > > Two "species" of birds - having different outlook, foraging practices, nesting periods, etc... share a common male population. > > > I could imagine a genetic setup and an evolution path leading to this. But only after the fact. --- In short, whatever means of reproduction you think about, chances are that it is not only possible, but actually an established practice somewhere on Earth. [Answer] A salamander in the Great Lakes region of North America fits the description of Androgenics. They are usually called unisexual salamanders, as they only ever have female offspring. <https://www.popsci.com/female-salamander-kleptogenesis/> > > Many members of the salamander genus Ambystoma are sexual creatures—by which we mean males drop sperm packets to fertilize female eggs, producing offspring with a set of genetic instructions from each of their two parents. But unisexual Ambystoma lizards do it better. These females pick up those packets, but they can gather more than one with which to fertilize their eggs. And once they do, it seems to be up to them to decide which parts of the genome—if any—they use from each of their mates. > > > > > The female salamanders seem to be able to dole out genes to their daughters in all sorts of configurations. Individuals are basically salamander hybrids made up of the DNA of a variety of species, unified by common mitochondrial DNA (which a mother passes directly to her children, with no male input) from an ancient ancestor. Some carry five unique genomes around in the nuclei of their cells. They appear to always carry at least one copy of the A. laterale genome (the blue-spotted salamander), even though this species doesn’t seem to be the one from which they all descend. Scientists still don’t know how a salamander “chooses” what genes to give her daughter, but they know that mom can basically make whatever kind of Franken-mander she desires. > > > [Answer] Bees and flowers. Bees carry gametes from one flower to the other. No reason that the analogues to both couldn't be humanoid. What's in it for the bee? Here on Earth, there's free food. On your planet it could be that, or something else. [Answer] The obvious case is the literal virus, it's shed much of it's metabolism in favour of numerous cheap copies made with hijacked apparatus. Viruses that infect other viruses also exist. [Answer] If by humanoid you mean humanoid intelligence then no I don't consider it plausible, at least not as a result of natural evolution. While all kinds of parasitical and unusual mating systems have evolved the fact is a human level intellect would counter such parasites too effectively for them to spread and prosper. Let me set a few presumptions, and explain why I make them, before getting to the main problem. 1. If the host species has human level intellect the parasite must as well. One can hardly use mimicry to prey on your host is you are not intellgent, females are gong to notice a man trying to have sex with them that's incapable of basic language or social interaction. Likewise forced copulation (aka rape) isn't going to be viable, intellect, weapons, and organized group based tactics gives too much of an advantage to have a stupid parasite realistically able to exist and overpower females. Even more simply humans have a huge number of physical limitations counteracted only by our intellect. A humanoid bodytype only really makes sense in presence of intellect and tools. A non intelligent humanoid would struggle to compete and survive in the wild. 2. This species must have had it's intellect prior to becoming parasitic. Again a non intelligent parasite would not succeed against intelligent humans capable of identifying and actively erradicating a species targeting them. Furthermore one can't really survive with a humanoid body without human intellect. Thus your parasites would have to be offshots of human, or other homo-x, species 3. Clonal parasites would lose due to lack of adaptability I see parasites coming in two forms. One being a species that basically clones itself and ignores the other species DNA, much like many of the species your listed. This would have the advantage of bein hard to detect, allowing one to use mimickry to hide your clonal nature and spread your DNA. However sex is super important, clonal species would lack the ability to adapt to their environment. To give one example pre-modern humans suffered significantly from diseases once they moved into larger cities. this clonal species would basically end up being eradicated by disease as soon as they tried to create or move towards a city. For that matter once a disease was known to erradicate them it's likely humans would intentionally spread a disease that was annoying but not life threatening to them - like chickenpox - just to eradicate the parasitic species.\* This lack of adaptability would also mean all of their species would look the same, which eventually would result in humans recognizing other humanoids with this species physical characteristics and shunning them, driving them out so they can't parasite them.\* \* note in both of these cases I'm not necessarily saying it's a well thought out complex plan. Society has time and time again evolved counter to regular threats humans faced even without humans fully understanding the importance or even why they were doing the things they were doing. Most people wouldn't know why people with these facial traits were bad or why catching the flu was considered a good thing, and yet despite this cultural adaptations like this can work. In a sense it's a form of cultural evolution, cultures that had the appropriate mechanism to shun or drive out parasites thrived and so passed on their culture creating a unique type of evolutionary adaptation. 4. Non-clonal humanoids would be easy to notice as engaging in parasitic behaviors. Now lets say these parasites engage in sex, and then parasite another species afterwards. This gains them the advantage of sexual adaptation, but it hurts them in terms of mimickry. They would be having sex twice, once to share gamits, and once to parasite another. This makes it easier to detect them since their sexual behaviors are different. In this case the humans can combat them even easier, notice the ones engaging in whatever mechnisms are necessary to copulate and then parasite someone else, and shun or attack them. This will be done so quickly that the species will be erradicated before it could really establish itself as a species. Plus this sort of sexual parasitism is far less likely to evolve for other reasons... 5. boring trump card: parasites don't have time to evolve anyways. While reproductive parasites have evolved plenty of times they are uncommon relative to other species because the odds of mutations lining up to allow parasitism of this sort are rare, and I'd argue their significantly rarer with mammals since it's harder to parasite a womb then it is an egg. By comparison the length of time between when the first assorted homo-x species started to develop enough intellect to manage things like speech and tool use and today is no real time at all. Our technology evolved so rapidly that it was barely a blink of an eye from an evolutionary stand point. And that means there frankly isn't enough time for such an unlikely combination of mutations to develop to allow such parasitism to occur before you reach modern day humans. But wait, there is still an option All this assumes natural evolution. Guided or manipulated evolution is different. If you throw in genetic engineering, or even some sort of magically driven mutation or adaptation, things are different. You could make a parasitic species in sufficient numbers and with enough culture and intellect to have a chance of parasiting off of humans even if they couldn't evolve naturally. In this case the species would likely be clonal and lack any kind of genetic diversity (that's far more likely to evolve then a non-clonal species). In the long term this species likely would risk being wiped out by humans due to lack of genetic diversity. But if they only popped up a few hundred or thousand of years ago, well their lack of genetic diversity is unlikely to do them in that rapidly. So in short, magic made your goblins that prey on women and sure their die out eventually, but that doesn't make them less of a problem to you today! ]
[Question] [ If a medieval society had no access to gold, what other minerals or gems could take its place in the making of coins? In my research I found gold was used as coin because: * It is durable (does not corrode) * It is beautiful (desirable) * It is not too rare (not generating scarcity) * It is not too common (causing inflation) What other materials could replace gold coins? Jade coins? Quartz coins? Bonus points if they are easy to extract. [Answer] Iron. [Iron has been used as a medium of exchange in many cultures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_currency). Depicted: iron Chinese coin from 10th century. [![iron coin](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rfVQR.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rfVQR.jpg) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tieqian> It makes sense. Iron can be expensive to extract and refine in terms of labor and fuel. As opposed to gold or silver which have no immediate application for a farmer or laborer, iron has intrinsic value in that it can be made into tools and knives. Iron is durable. Iron has more propensity to corrosion than gold. Things can be done to reduce this risk like grease the coins. I propose in your story that the iron coins be called "Rusties". Or maybe "Greasies". You can have a character who has a rustie with one edge filed into a little blade; they keep it in the sole of their shoe. Other benefit of iron coin: not done to my knowledge in European medieval D&D Tolkieny Game of Thrones type fiction, so a little bit novel. [Answer] Far more coins were made from silver than from gold. Silver is: * Much more common in the Earth's crust. * Harder (more durable) than gold (when both are pure). * Sometimes found in native form (less commonly than gold, however). * Nearly as ductile and malleable as gold. * Very corrosion resistant (until the society starts burning significant amounts of coal, introducing sulfur into the atmosphere to cause tarnish). [Answer] In the past societies have used a variety of materials as coins, including sea shells and glass beads. You can likewise use any material you fancy. As long as it is recognized as precious and valuable, it can be used as coin. At the end a coin is just an abstraction from barter based exchange: "I get X from you and I give you Y in exchange, agreeing that the value of X and Y is the same". [Answer] Somewhat impractical, but the Island of Yap, in Micronesia, used have [Rai Stones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones). Some of the large money stones were 2.4 m (8 ft) in diameter. More conventionally however, [shell money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money) has been used throughout the world: Asia, Oceania and the Middle East. [Answer] I say stop thinking in terms of the value of the metal and start thinking in terms of how hard it is to counterfeit It's absolutely true that gold, due to its rarity and natural beauty, was considered precious and, therefore, valuable. That would make it easy to set a value (four chickens to the ounce!). The limited number of gold mines made it useful for controlling inflation (not just anybody could get to the raw material) and its usefulness for purposes *not* money (e.g., jewelry) gave it a feeling of presence. In other words, people wanted it. But the coinage of the day was crude and reasonably easy to counterfeit so long as you had the base metal. Worse, because the metal itself was valuable, people would chop of the coin to get more out of it. You've likely heard of these: * "Pieces of eight" is a term that comes from subdividing a coin into eight pie-shaped pieces. Thus, a shilling coin becomes eight one-eighth shilling coins. As a quick lookup example, the original Half Crown coin in England was equal to two shillings and sixpence or (ta-da!) one-eighth of a pound. You can thank the fact that people who wanted one instead of eight chickens came up with a quick solution to the problem. * "I got clipped!" is an old term for getting robbed. The phrase comes from the act of "clipping" bits of precious metal off the outer rim of the coin. Clip enough bits off and you eventually have enough for a new coin. Do it carefully and no one is the wiser. (Coins were also "shaved." Basically people filed or clipped the edges, which is why modern coins so often have that curious file-like texture... so people can see when they've been, um... modified.) The important point I'm making with those two bullets is that counterfeiting that old coinage wasn't too terribly hard. And that's the point: what's valuable is something difficult to counterfeit You could make coins out of wood if it was whomping hard to counterfeit. But let's not take it that far. Let me suggest... Steel The medieval period could work with steel. It's so common and durable that weapons and armor (to a degree) were available to the most elevated royal and to the most humble pauper. It has one drawback that gold doesn't have: it rusts... but how long must a coin last, really? (And from the perspective of the royal minting the coins, does he/she really care? Money wearing out isn't necessarily a bad thing....) What makes steel useful as coinage to you (and your suspension-of-disbelief) is that your royal has figured out how to stamp coins with remarkably precise and detailed designs. In other words, it's not the metal that's valuable, or even the coin, it's the technology that creates the coin that's valuable. It's something your average person (or even your average baron) wouldn't have available to them. And if you temper the steel (which you must do to make a good sword in the first place!) then it's very tough and difficult to modify (clip/cut). Having said that, let's mention a word about medieval economies Why was King John forced to sign the Magna Carta? There were many reasons, and among them were taxes. It's funny to think that a king would have to tax anybody. He could just mint all the coins he needed, right? Well... yes... and no. * It doesn't take long for a king to realize that minting too many coins results in inflation. (At least you'd think it wouldn't take long to realize that... humanity hasn't quite learned that lesson yet....) * It also doesn't take long for a king to realize that really wealthy nobility means very well funded competition — and we can't have that! So draining your nobles of just enough funds to keep them from buying an army and inviting you to retire to a small plot of land behind the local church is desirable. * Finally, a great many people learned a very long time ago that money (or, more specifically, the process of trade and exchange) is a convenient way to control people. That's a PhD treatise all by itself. So, as you think about taking your kingdom off its version of the gold standard, remember that your pocket full of change represents thousands of years of experience in economics and security that actually has nothing at all to do with metal. So, Steel. Any blacksmith can make the slug — but only you have the tech to make the coin. *P.S....* On the other hand, if what you're looking for is that certain geek factor, that bit of oooooh with just a touch of je nais se quois, then everything everybody's telling you is irrelevant because what you're looking for is a justified aesthetic and not an actual worlbuilding rule. In that case, your coins made out of gems idea is pretty good because gem cutting is a non-trivial technology. Although the "coins" would need to remain somewhat small (my gut tells me dime sized or smaller) because even diamond is brittle. [Answer] ## Paper Money In an era where paper is scarce and expensive, and skilled calligraphers and printers are too, it's not as silly as it sounds. The Chinese did it in medieval times. It's scarce, portable, acceptable/beautiful (potentially), recognisable, durable (sort of), stable in value (hopefully), and divisible (sort of). It has all the usual problems of paper money; it can be debased easily by printing larger denominations, but if some disciplined kings or priests keep it going for a generation or two, it'll become self perpetuating. ## Stainless Maybe if there's a local iron mine contaminated with nickel and chromium, your guys have discovered stainless steel, which could actually work nicely. Shiny! Non rusting! ## Otherwise What everyone else has said. Silver, copper, bronze, steel, glass. Semi precious stones like jade or lapis lazuli (pretty) can work but they can't be repaired or reissued. If there are small, high quality deposits all over the place, it makes it much more practical. [Answer] An excellent question. Keep in mind, money is defined as 'the easiest tradeable commodity in an economic system.' Six thousand years ago, there was no currency--people traded cattle and food for more cattle and food, or perhaps some tools. What's nice about using gold or silver as currency is because once you say that X ounces of gold is worth this much, it is fairly easy to check the weight. It also makes it more difficult to counterfeit it. Silver would probably be the next best thing after gold. You don't want it to be something like quartz because all you have to do is go dig around in your backyard and say, 'Oh look! This is a cow's-worth of quartz! I'm rich!" No--you want it more rare. Of course, you could substitute gold with a myriad of precious gems--whatever is relatively rare, tradeable, and valuable. [Answer] Q: If a medieval society had no access to gold, what other minerals or gems could take its place in the making of coins? What other materials could replace gold coins? Jade coins? Quartz coins? Bonus points if they are easy to extract. Short answer: ca 18x the weight in silver coins would do, to replace a gold coin When you wanted to pay the amount of [this coin](https://www.numiscorner.com/products/coin-belgium-brabant-philippe-le-beau-florin-saint-philippe-antwerpen) you go to the [coin trader](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0LOV5.png).. He weighs the coin using [his reference weights](https://www.google.com/search?q=coin+weights+medieval) to be 3.3 grams, the knows this coin is a Guilder of Philippe the Beautiful of Flanders, worth [20 silver stuivers](https://haffmansantiek.nl/namen-zilveren-stuiver-philips-de-schone-ca-1496.html) and weighing in about 3 grams each. So 3.3 grams of gold is worth 60 grams of silver, about 18x its weight. That ratio changed with colonization, where cheap South-American silver became available in Europe. Longer answer: difficult.. gold has a perfect value/weight ratio BUT.. suppose you'd need to buy a house in Amsterdam in 1500. The house would cost you e.g. 4600 gold-guilders, that is some 15 kg of gold, which can be carried. With the silver solution you would have to transport more than 270 kg of silver stuivers ! So gold was handy for large sums. Thing is, "gold" is a quite flexible substance touching a sweet spot with genus Homo. We love gold. It looks nice darkish shiny yellow, it weights in hand, so you know it is really gold.. and it feels warm.. a medieval coin trader could feel the difference without even looking at the coin. This one's "no good". Gold is the standard, everything below it was counted to yield one gold coin. Coins are coined: the new material needs to be stamped Suppose you'd replace gold and not use silver. Your new material will be distributed in standard weight and stamped: it should be reproduced in reasonable quantities (thousands) and it will show the king's portrait, or a heraldic symbol, a text referring to the issuer, and some connecting religious symbol, like a [holy text](https://www.google.com/search?q=dinar+gold&tbm=isch), or a [cross](https://www.google.com/search?q=thrymsa&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X). Don't underestimate the importance of a standard ! All German Goldguldens had the same weight and [looked the same](https://www.google.com/search?q=goldgulden&tbm=isch) you could spend it anywhere along the river. Jade, ivory and gemstone are about the only materials that were available in medieval times and could be engraved easily. These materials were costly imports.. maybe as expensive as gold.. but how to aquire enough of it, in large quantities, without handing over Europe to the Chinese, or the Malinese ? There's precious objects to replace gold, but will they last for long? Do they keep value? Funny 17th century example <https://www.sarahraven.com/articles/the-history-of-the-tulip> You could buy a house in Amsterdam in 1639 when you sold ONE precious tulip. Diamond A completely anonymous "coin" would be diamonds. Diamonds was the precursor of crypto-currency. You can always sell diamonds and get a price per weight unit. You'd get a very small diamond as replacement for a gold coin, I wonder if medieval coin scales were advanced enough to measure grains of diamond. "New material easy to extract" Glass would be a candidate.. or even paper ! No bonus for me. Yes, it would come in handy, when the new material would be less rare, or easy to obtain. That is what we do with modern, paper money. That is because we trust the banks. In medieval times, you had banks, but these were only for the rich and privileged elite, to finance their wars. In medieval times, people traveled around. You need [face value](https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/index/gold-and-silver/face-value/) money. The French introduced the first paper money, the [assignates](https://www.numisbids.com/n.php?p=sale&sid=4712&cid=145306) to finance the war, but in 1791, "medieval times" had long passed. [Answer] Why not look to history? Early medieval societies used to practice barter. For more monetary based solutions copper, bronze, iron and silver will do just fine. And coins made of gold were, contrary to popular believe, quite rare as gold is quite expensive and only the upper echelon of society had enough wealth to have any use of such currency. [Answer] Interestingly enough, while in medieval times, Aluminum would be more valuable than Gold. This is because the process to extract Aluminum was not invented, and thus it was actually rarer than Gold in its pure form. Thus, if you wanted to avoid common metals like Silver, Copper, Platinum, etc., Aluminum is an interesting choice for a unique but historically viable touch. It is said that before aluminum extraction from Bauxite was invented, the French king's most important guests ate on Aluminum plates, and lesser ones ate on Gold plates. ]
[Question] [ Set in the modern day, reports of dragon sightings came flooding in from all over the world. No one know where they came from or why are they here but these monstrous creatures seemed to be hostile to humankind and are extremely aggressive, they would attack any human on sight provoked or not. They can reproduce quickly which seems rivalling that of rabbit and they have a craving for mammals particularly human for unknown reason. Fast forward 5 years later, humanity finally won the war against the dragons, their population are dwindling and majority of them have retreated to mountainous region. Occasionally they would wreak havoc in population dense city to feast but usually they attacks the outskirts of the city area, but if left unchecked could spell disaster to the survival of our race. I have been thinking that since the dragons are introduced into the world overnight and are forced to coexist with us, they would perceived us as a great threat to their survival and on the other hand we human must protect our own kind which often result in extermination of the dragons. There seems to be no win-win situation so I wonder is it necessary to drive them into extinction for the sake of our species, given the technology today would we be able to coexist amicably with the dragons without casualty or deplete our resources? [Answer] It's all in how we perceive them, but regardless it is not a good idea to drive a species to extinction. Take Grizzly Bears. They are aggressive, can kill you if you get close, often exist close to urban areas. They have formed part of the national identity of both the U.S. and Canada - they are protected and endeared by many. Take Taipan snakes in Australia. They are the most venomous snakes in the world, with a single bite containing enough poison to kill 100 grown men. Death is assured in 30 minutes. There is no concerted effort to eradicate this snake. And although Australia has the most venomous spiders in the world, the Funnelweb spider lives in Sydney in urban areas and can cause death within 15 minutes of a bite, there is no eradication effort of these either. Generally it is better to find other solutions to ensure safety of people than to drive a species to extinction. Yes, humans can defend themselves, however in the end coexistence is often possible, with general acceptance that it is better to retain ecological diversity. The bigger danger to your dragons is probably habitat destruction caused by human development, which often has a 'soft', hidden and often unintended effect to kill a species. Although you mentioned your dragons could 'breed like rabbits' that is nothing compared to the inexorable inevitable and rapid expansion of humanity over the last century. The dragons food sources would likely be effected, with the resultant population loss logical unless concerted conservation efforts are made. So in short - better to create a dedicated reserve or 'habitat' for a species, manage and monitor their numbers, or mitigate damage from their natural behaviour, than to actively eradicate them, as is the case with many other natural dangerous animals we are currently living on the planet with. [Answer] It is an unwise act to destroy a potential advantage. If dragons appeared overnight they are very much an unknown quantity and therefore still a potential advantage (notwithstanding their inherent hazards). They clearly have drawbacks, but other than a recent war it doesn't seem as though your characters have explored sufficiently whether they may also have immense benefits. Here are some questions that need investigation by your protagonists before they can decide whether or not to eradicate dragons as an unredeemable menace: 1. Is their initial level of aggression and breeding typical, or just a response to their shock at being unexpectedly deposited into this new world (or possibly some scenario they escaped from which resulted in their sudden appearance)? 2. Are they capable of being trained? You say they have intelligence equivalent to dolphins, and we can clearly train dolphins to carry out tasks. 3. Are they capable of being tamed? Perhaps aggression and taste for human flesh are learned behaviours that young dragons copy from their parents: if young are hatched from eggs away from adult dragons it may be possible to train them to like humans (they may even impress on a human if it's the first creature they see after hatching) and to prefer more suitable meats. 4. If they are incapable of being trained or tamed, can their behaviour be modified by chemical means, for example introducing artificial hormones or doping agents into their food or water supplies? This approach might be capable of reducing aggression and / or breeding rate. 5. These creatures breed quickly but you did not state how quickly offspring themselves reach sexual maturity. If the generational cycle is short enough, is it possible to selectively breed the less aggressive / man-eating individuals to create a domesticated breed of dragon more suitable to living alongside and maybe working with humans? 6. How / why did they suddenly appear - the sudden manner of their appearance suggests they may have innate hyperspatial abilities, for example. 7. Do they have any other unusual draconic abilities (fiery / other breath, ability to fly with large loads, hide with valuable properties for example) that could make them useful, either as a partner creature or as an animal to be farmed? If my hunch is right and they do have innate hyperspatial capabilities and travelled to Earth as a result of some incident threatening them elsewhere in the universe, then you potentially breed an extremely useful creature rather similar to the dragons in Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, albeit maybe not telepathic. [Answer] So dragons are aggressive predators that reproduce fast, probably need a lot to eat to be able to feed all their kids etc. Maybe some dragons will be kept in special habitats but the war will go on till one side is extinct. At least with the information provided. As fast as way reproduce and the amount of food they probably need will make a co existance pretty hard. Maybe if the humans find a way to reduce how fast the dragons reproduce there can be found a way for them to coexist. But I doubt the dragons would allow some humans scientists to work on them. I don't see a way for them to coexist. The dragons reproduce to fast and needs to much food. [Answer] So the dragons are effectively very similar to the smallpox virus. The world's a far better place since smallpox was eradicated. Or Ebola. It doesn't flare up frequently, but when it does it creates major problems, and kills a lot of people. Still think it's a good idea to just let them live and do their thing as long as they don't kill too many people (and who would decide what's too many, or who gets to decide which cities the dragons can kill people in and which they can't)? [Answer] The few remaining dragons are probably unlike the starting population. Consider some contest with thousands of contestants, spread over years. At the end, the remaining contestants will be unlike the masses at the start. They have survived for some reason. They are different. This is how evolution works. In a [bottleneck event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck) changes to a species can happen very fast. Your surviving dragons may be more cautious and less aggressive, or have different dietary needs. They are different from the initial starting population and less of a threat. If they have the sense to stay away from humans and hide in remote areas, then they are similar to other big predators that have survived to the modern day - like tigers or grizzly bears. One could make a case for leaving the survivors alone and killing (or relocating) those that cause trouble. [Answer] Your story sounds similar to the plot of the Ender's Game series with the buggers. An invasive species suddenly appears, attacks humanity, humanity fights back and wins, but Ender's big dilemma deals with whether its actually right to exterminate them. Assuming you have a reasonable explanation for how the dragons suddenly appeared, I imagine the answer to your question "should we coexist with the dragons" will be shown through your story. ]
[Question] [ Here on "Earth" organisms tend to evolve only enough mental processing power to handle sensory inputs in modest amounts. Taking "human" brains for a quick example, even though we have millions of sensory receptors all over our body that can feed touch, smell, visual and audio information to our brain, most of the time our brain "tunes out" this information. Clearly, if one was too absorbed in all the rustling of the leaves and scents in the air, he or she would be more likely to remove him/herself from the gene pool by failing to prioritize the important thump thump thump of a charging tiger. So flipping the script, let's concede right now that this idea seems counter-intuitive on Earth, because it's cost-prohibitive in terms of energy. If a brain is processing things that are not necessary to survive, the plausibility of the species is questionable. But perhaps this is only the case on Earth -- which brings me to my question. ## Question What kind of environment/evolutionary narrative would need to be assumed to allow for high-throughput sensory brains to become a favored trait? That is to say, we are maximizing the amount of sensory inputs that make it to the conscious level. Further Clarifications: * High-throughput sensory brains: All information is preserved and the brain does not "zone out" any "noise." It feels everything from every sensory receptor and passes it to the conscious mind frequently. * Number of sensory receptors: assumed to be very high. (hence the post title: high-throughput) * Preference: world with a viable food chain in which high-throughput sensory brains have reached high ranks. * World: Optional. If you have an Earth-like evolutionary narrative for high-throughput sensory brains, feel free. Otherwise, explain the assumptions of your world. * Everything else: only limit is the laws of physics. I will allow for hypothetical biology. Side: I will include a quote that a rather like as an optional supplement to the post. Originally, I accredited it to Darwin, but I was mistaken. While not widely accepted, it's still an interesting quote. > > It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most > intelligent that survives. It's the species that responds fastest to > change. > > > [Answer] This answer may be voted as non-responsive, but I think your question may be missing your point. You assert that "filtering out" the unimportant stimulus is a sign of slow or incomplete processing. Instead, I consider it to be a very high-speed approach to eliminating unimportant inputs and allowing the situational intelligence to focus on the unexpected, novel, and important inputs. Instead of considering the human brain to be slow because it only attends to a small percentage of the signals delivered by the sensors, consider it instead to be very wide, very fast, and well trained at identifying items of importance. Much, perhaps most, of the work the brain does is not under constant conscious control. The same brain architecture would work in any situation to identify the important. If you wanted to make brains faster, you would have a few variables to work with. You could increase the signal conduction rate, reduce the synaptic gaps, and develop faster diffusing neurotransmitters. Brains are already a balanced compromise between size, energy consumption, cooling, waste management, infection control, plasticity, and stability, but any balance can be altered in response to environmental factors. Improve the sensors. If you wanted to improve the scope of signals the brain has available, you could make better sensors. Eyes could have wider fields of view, or be a hybrid of mammalian and insect eyes. Eyes could sense deeper into the infrared or higher into the ultraviolet. Eyes could add sensitivity to light polarization, as some bee eyes are sensitive. Ears and skin could be more sensitive to vibrations at lower and higher frequencies. Pattern and texture matching in the visual cortex would evolve to be more responsive to the particular patterns and textures that matter in your world. The skin could include various chemical sensors for basics like pH and salinity, and specific pheromones important to your creatures. What type of world would encourage this? To encourage better vibration sensing, a world with large threats that shake the ground. To encourage a polarization sense, a world with a fairly thick atmosphere but little variation on the surface, perhaps an ocean or desert world. To encourage infrared sensing, a cold world with warm-blooded threats. To encourage an ultra-violet sense, a blue star and little ozone in the planetary atmosphere. To encourage chemical sensing, a dim world, perhaps underwater near a hydrothermal vent. To encourage wider field-of-view, a world where threats come from all directions. This could be creatures who live on the surface and suffer threats from the air, or perhaps an avian or underwater species. [Answer] I think it's more than just the world the creature lives in you also need to account for their habits and the their place in the ecosystem to that end I believe you need to start with a warm-blooded [obligate carnivore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore#Obligate_carnivores), such creatures are almost always on the hunt for the next meal as it is. Then you need to put them in the middle of the foodchain rather than at the top. Now they're either on the look out for a meal or, if they have a full belly, the things that hunt them. Next to maximise the sensory data that they have to process while on the lookout have all local herbivore populations be toxic at certain stages in their life cycles and the life cycles of the vegetation they feed on. Predators now need to take into account the tiny signs around them in the vegetation and on their prey to know what meat they can hunt at any time. Furthermore have the higher order predators that eat them take full advantage of active, chameleon-esque camouflage, so they're harder to spot at a distance and be adept at both stalking and ambush hunting tactics. So now we have a creature that is constantly scanning its environment for, prey suitability cues, prey, and the stealthy higher order predators that specifically prey on it, no detail can be safely dismissed. [Answer] Scarcity of resources is a fact we have to deal with, no matter if we are someone with an IQ of 200 or an amoeba in a muddy puddle. From scarcity of resources follow an economy principle: you use something only if the cost is justified, else it is just a waste of scarce resources. So, for example, if you are an organism living in an underground lake, eyes are pleonastic and will be removed by evolutionary pressure, based on the above economic principle. Coming to your question, if you want the "background noise" to be processed and not ignored, it doesn't have to be a noise, but meaningful and valuable. This can be true for a limited subset of signals in a limited set of circumstances (i.e. a goal keeper during a match might be way more reactive to someone else's movements than he is while standing in a queue at the post office), for the rest it makes hardly sense. [Answer] Most of the information filtered out is next to useless. For instance, if you have ever seen "Tracers" in movies where they are showing people taking drugs, that's an actual thing, not a hallucination--your eyes do not have perfect resolution or response speed. When something moves in front of your eyes it takes a while to fade--your brain figured this out when you were a baby and built a filter for it. Your current vision without the tracers is the actual hallucination! If your conscious is always presented with the 1000 useless smells that are in your home, you might have trouble picking out the new smoke smell informing you that something bad is going on, and if you are always tracking every single follicle your shirt touches you might not feel a wasp that just landed on your arm and the pain from a pin prick might be debilitating for days. We probably make nearly optimal use of our senses as they are. To have better senses that could actually pick up additional information you might need a nose like a beagle or physically larger eyes. If you want to try processing all the sensor input manually, there are certainly ways to experiment with that. [Answer] Your question comes very close to answering itself. For the evolution of brains to be driven by high levels of sensory information this would have to take place in an environment that would be extremely complex, extremely active with lots of stuff happening, and extremely hazardous. In other words, the processing of sensory information becomes the major imperative selection pressure. Such an environment might develop on the type of planet referred to as a [super-habitable Earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhabitable_planet). Planets of this type could have the necessary complex, active and hazardous environments to drive brain evolution through sensory processing. Environments of super-habitable planets have the potential for the evolution of overabundant ecosystems complete with extreme numbers of predatory and competitive species of animals and plants. That's just the biota at the macro-scale, such super-habitable planets would have ferocious and deadly microbiomes. Evolving the ability and capacity to detect colonies of hazardous micro-organisms could be essential. To say nothing of clouds of spores and seeds capable to infecting animals and plants. Any organisms developing brains of any size will favor the evolution of massive arrays of sensory organisms and due to these selective pressures this will in turn drive the evolution of their brains. Those brains will have correspondingly high levels of sensory processing. In conclusion, it's purely a matter of understanding what sort of environments which produce the necessary selective pressures to drive the evolution of brains in relation to their sensory capacity. [Answer] I think you're missing a few details of how brains work, so I'll jump in with a [neural network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network): [![diagram of neural network, from Wikipedia](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ox5ET.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ox5ET.png) You say... > > I kind of just made this term up, so let me explain it briefly here. All information is preserved and the brain does not "zone out" any "noise." It feels everything from every sensory receptor in its whole body all the time. > > > Here's an interesting fact: a neural network processes all the input, all the time. At a theoretical level, a neuron is something that takes several inputs (between zero and one), and outputs the sum of its inputs, giving more importance (weight) to some inputs than others. At a rough biological level, a neuron is a cell that takes inputs from either sensors or other neurons in the form of electrical charge (via chemicals called neurotransmitters), computes the sum of the inputs via chemical reactions, and ["outputs" an electrical potential](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential). Now, you might argue that "zoning out noise" is setting the output of any neurons at the middle layers to zero, and you never want that. That would be a self-defeating argument, as you would need a minimum value for the neuron output, which would become the new zero. Any neural network is gonna have neurons with minimal output at any given time. That said, I think you are aiming for a wide neural network (lots of neurons as input and lots of neurons in each layer) as opposed from a deep neural network (lots of layers). Let me quote from <https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/222883/why-are-neural-networks-becoming-deeper-but-not-wider> : > > The main issue is that these very wide, shallow networks are very good at memorization, but not so good at generalization. > > > You can, in fact, have a very fast neural network (since less layers means less propagation time), but it's not gonna remember anything, and making that neural net learn anything is gonna be a long process. You would also have a problem with memory, since it depends on [loops in the network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_neural_network). Then you can say "well, let's just add more neurons to remember everything, let's make the network both wide and deep"! to which the response would be: such an organism would have an evolutionary disadvantage due to [energy usage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain#Metabolism): > > Most vertebrate species devote between 2% and 8% of basal metabolism to the brain. [...] in humans it rises to 20–25%. > > > In other words, such a creature would need to consume more food than a stupider counterpart able to perform the same abilities. --- So let me flip your question and try to give a world-building answer: > > What kind of environment/evolutionary narrative would need to be assumed to allow for brains with wide neural networks to become a favored trait? > > > I'm gonna say: * No need for long-time memory * Rely only on instinctive responses * High mortality and fertility rates * Reduced metabolic cost of sensory input organs So, [Zerglings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Races_of_StarCraft#Zerg), but with weird [fly eyes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropod_eye). [Answer] I believe it will be a very slow paced environment where resources are very rare. If your resources are hard to come by, you need to invest into a few select sensory organs to help you look for that next meal. This means you specialize in processing all the details that a sensory organ can provide you. So as a twist to your question, you do end up processing all the noise you can, but your noise is limited because you have limited detection methods. For example, if a creature only has a sense of touch, because the live in a super dark environment with no sight, no ability to smell and no ability to hear, they can only focus all their attention of finding out what has touched them. [Answer] Automated sensory selectivity, i.e. not passing sensory data to the conscious mind, is the result of evolution. Certain sensory inputs have been deemed irrelevant and thus placed in a sort of second tier data, which is passed to the conscious mind only if you focus on it. Other answers have provided the obvious explanation that this effect is due to an economy of energy and the need for quick responses to environmental anomalies, which could indicate presence of predators, immediate danger, or simply a new and unknown situation. To prevent this filtering to happen before conscious processing, you may want to avoid any input to be associated with anything usual. I will call this the Schrodinger world, whereby it is impossible to know from environmental cues alone what situation we are in, e.g. whether of danger or safety. As no specific combination of sensory data can be disregarded over other combinations, two evolutionary parts are likely: * energetically cheap: no sensory data is processed. * energetically expensive: all data is passed to the conscious part of the brain, which has to add non sensory information to decide. It is a bit complicated to imagine a scenario in which all sensory data is not sufficient to determine the chance of a situation being free of danger, and yet not being completely useless. To allow such scenario I'd go with peacock-humans, who display all their sensory appendages in a world where they serve no purpose, only to gain a mating advantage: perceiving more of the world is also being perceived more. Mating among such humans is a conscious battle in the entire sensory spectrum, like a chess game in which the defeated candidate retreats after realizing they have no valid responses to the opponent nuances. Why wouldn't this mating dance be handled by the subconscious over evolutionary time scales? The ever changing nature of the Schrodinger world is such that repeatable behavior is penalized. A predator may be lurking for mating humans that display the same patterns over and over, thus keeping their numbers dwindling, as opposed to the very successful conscious-peacock humans. [Answer] In order to increase the amount of relevant details an organism pulls from its sensory data you would need an organism to live in an environment that requires it to know about more details about its environment to survive. To maximize the details the organism needs you need it to be a predator but not an apex predator. This requires it to use its senses to overcome the hiding techniques of its prey and it requires the organism to monitor its surroundings for incoming threats. Next you need the organism to be in tune with its surroundings to move. For example, if the area the organism lives in is flat and stable it requires a minimum amount of relevant details to move about in a predictable way. On the other hand, if the organism moves in a volatile medium, say it walks, but on mountains with a lot of seismic activity, it fly's in turbulent winds, or it swims through chaotic currents the organism will need to know a lot more about its environment to safely and precisely move about. The organism would also require additional knowledge about its surroundings to survive if it used camouflage for multiple senses as its primary means of hunting and staying safe. If the organism camouflages its self visually, it would need to be able to pick out details better than its prey to attack and better than its predators to stay hidden. If it camouflaged its smell it would need to be able to smell better than its prey and its predators as well, etc. Lastly the organism would need to be warm blooded with a fast metabolism. This increases the energy requirements for the animal and would force it to actively move about which would increase the number of times per day it has to rely on subtle sensory information to survive. I imagine something like an arboreal shrew that glides between trees like a flying squirrel and has camouflage skin like an octopus. It would need to sense the wind velocity on its skin, the kinesthesic positioning of its body, the velocity of the branch its standing on, the position of the branch it would need to leap to the smell it is trying to duplicate as part of its camouflage, the colors/textures/patterns of the branch it is camouflaging in, all just to determine the right moment to pounce on prey or to flee to another tree. In an environment that has many effective predators and quick elusive stealthy prey the organism would have to be aware of hundreds of tiny details to avoid death and would definitely have the high "throughput" senses you were looking for. ]
[Question] [ I am building a country in today‚Äôs Argentina (32¬∞-40¬∞ latitude) where Europeans would have settled in 10th century. Would their skin color change over that period? [Answer] Hard to say... [Human skin colour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_skin_color) of indigenous populations correlate with geographic ultraviolet radiation. Paraphrasing the linked article - research suggests this has happened in the last 50,000 years, sometimes in as little as 2,500 years where natural selection encourages this. So it might be expected that after 40% of the minimum time period there may be a perceptible change. However, natural selection may not play as big a role in this situation if the clothing of the Europeans provides enough sun protection to reduce the survival relevance of skin pigmentation. Look at the British in colonial India. The combination of circumstances for this case may make the pigmentation change take 5,000 years, or 10,000 years, so the change after a mere 1000 years may be negligible. More importantly, it was implied in the question that the Europeans were a discrete population. In practice, if there are indigenous populations in the area there is likely to be interbreeding between them over a thousand year time period. This mingling of genes would result in a far greater change in skin tone than evolutionary pressures over the same time period. On the flipside, if the colony maintains trade and immigration / emigration to and from its European point of origin then the rate of change would be slowed significantly. (Note that unless a lot of Europeans are in the colony, such interbreeding is essential for sufficient genetic diversity. Lots of other questions have explored the "minimum colony size" issues so no need to replay them here, just note colony size as a viability consideration.) [Answer] ## Europoid peoples actually do live in the subtropics. They always did There are lots and lots of Europoid (that is, for Americans, "Caucasian") people who live in the subtropics. Berbers, Arabs, Touaregs, Egyptians... They look like this: [![Zinedine Zidane](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Zinedine_Zidane_20minutos.jpg)](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zinedine_Zidane_20minutos.jpg) [![Ibrahim Ag Alhabib](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/TINARIWEN_Vienna_2011_13.jpg/160px-TINARIWEN_Vienna_2011_13.jpg)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers#/media/File:TINARIWEN_Vienna_2011_13.jpg) [![Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Crown_Prince_Mohammad_bin_Salman_Al_Saud_-_2017.jpg)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_bin_Salman) Zinedine Zidane, a famous Frech footballer of Berber descent. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, a singer of Touareg descent. Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud of Arabia. Pictures from Wikipedia. The skin tone of Europoid people ranges from very light in Scandinavia to quite dark in Egypt and India. To the extent that human race has any biological meaning, Egyptians, Arabs and Persians are clearly the same race as Norwegians; they have the same skeletal and muscular structure, the same blood groups, the same kind of hair, suffer from the same diseases and react in the same way to medications. ## Which Europeans? There is very very little physical difference between Greeks, Spaniards and Italians on one hand, and Berbers, Arabs and Persians on the other. So it is quite obvious that by "Europeans" the question does not mean southern Europeans. So it must be some kind of central or northern Europeans, because otherwise the question does not make sense. Now, northen Europeans come into two varieties: most have skin which tans when exposed to sunlight; other have skin which burns which exposed to sunlight. For those whose skin tans when exposed to sunlight (most Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, about all central Europeans) they will change color in a matter of weeks. Fun factoid: in ancient Egyptian paintings it was conventional to depict women with a much lighter tone than men. Guess why. [![Amenemhet and His Wife Hemet](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/10/Egyptian_-_Wall_Fragment_from_the_Tomb_of_Amenemhet_and_His_Wife_Hemet_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg/629px-Egyptian_-_Wall_Fragment_from_the_Tomb_of_Amenemhet_and_his_wife_Hemet_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Egyptian_-_Wall_Fragment_from_the_Tomb_of_Amenemhet_and_His_Wife_Hemet_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg) The priest Amenemhet and his wife Hemet. Ancient Egyptian fresco, around 1800 or 1900 BCE. Note the difference in skin tone between the man and the woman. Reproduction from Wikipedia, public domain. ## Admixture admixture admixture One thousand years is a very long time to maintain ethnic purity; so long that it's guaranteed not to happen. All the people of European descent are related if we go back to our ancestors in the 10th century. We are all descendants of emperor Charlemagne; and we are all equally descendants of emperor Charlemagnes valet. In one thousand years the population will be thourougly admixed with the original inhabitants of the place. [Answer] (Note: 32¬∞N cuts Texas in half, and 40¬∞N is north central Missouri. It's also central Spain, central North Korea and northern Japan.) No, because clothes. Consider these three white men in the (very hot, very sunny!) Australian Outback. All are wearing wide brimmed hats, and two are wearing long-sleeved shirts. When the shirtless young guy gets sunburned once too often (after attracting a nubile young female by displaying how fit his genes are), he'll start wearing long-sleeved shirts, too. More importantly, as long as he passes on his DNA (and providing for the mothers of his children, so that his children survive until adulthood so that they can repeat the cycle) before dying of skin cancer, there's no evolutionary pressure for darker skinned people. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/syE3H.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/syE3H.jpg) [Answer] Boers in South Africa are some of the whitest people on earth because their ancestors came from northern Europe. They've been in South Africa for 400 years with no sign of being darker than the people they descended from. People with mixed ancestry aside. There are pale skinned redheads in hot arid parts of the Middle East. Descendants of ancient populations or at least medieval ones so again several hundred years and still their original colour minus mixing with other groups. If pigmentation is due to the environment then it was established long before clothes were the norm and clothes were being worn 6000 years ago at least. [Answer] White skin is caused by a mutated gene that happened about 30,000 years ago in Africa but was inhibited by other genes until about 6,000 years ago in Europe. It was followed by the extinction of all darker people in Europe probably by war, murder and cannibalization. The gene for pale skin, a " pale skin gene‚Äù called SLC24A5 will not go away, so white skin will not turn dark over time. Humans were originally dark skinned, not pale, after diverging from other apes and hominids and losing their sun protecting pelts. Apes and monkeys have pale skin under their pelt. I suppose that after thousands of years the SLC24A5 gene could be suppressed through another mutation and evolutionary pressure (war, murder, or cannibalization) could eradicate all pale skinned descendants. [Answer] If you're talking about the actual Argentina, and not just using it as an example for the climate you're looking for, I think it hardly matters what nature would have done. Argentina is currently populated mostly by Caucasian people, which wouldn't make sense given the skin color of the native inhabitants of South America as a whole and the territory currently called Argentina in particular. The real reason is that non-European people were slowly eradicated in several wars like President Roca's Conquest of the Desert (Conquista del Desierto in Spanish) and the war with Paraguay, or they were systematically marginalized by their skin color and/or native origin. Given how real history turned out, I believe that a colonization war lasting from the X century to the beginning of the XIX century\* would result in an even more extended and thorough culling of non-Caucasian or non-European people than what we can see today. \*Moving the colonization of the New Continent from the XV century to the X century would probably not change the independence date by much, or at least it shouldn't make it happen any sooner, considering that Argentina's independence was part of the independence movement triggered in the whole continent by the fall of the Bastille. [Answer] Ask Mexicans. Or anyone in South America. Basically mildly brownish tint. ]
[Question] [ So, humans have finally figured out how to build a solar-system crossing ship. On the way to the first exo-planet to be colonized, an accident happens, and a few people wind up floating through space, injured. Aliens find the person(s) individually let’s call each person X. X is still alive, and there are no problems relating to nutrition via another bit I don’t have time to explain. Would the aliens be able to fix X’s injuries? What if X was a child? Or a woman on her period? * for the purposes of this question my aliens are humanoid and carbon-based. * X is familiar with the procedure for first contact, and can successfully initiate it. * The aliens want to help X. * there are no human remains accessible. * aliens are humanoid only in that they are bipedal, have two genders, have four limbs, and hair on their heads. They do not however have hair anywhere else, would this lead to confusion? * the people are basically loose in spacesuits. [Answer] So far all the answers have been in the positive. And I concur with them in so far as that a sufficiently advanced alien technology, coupled with a similar biology, anatomy and physiology, coupled with a desire to help *might could* lead to a successful repair of a relatively trivial injury. An interstellar boo-boo. For anything much worse that a paper cut, I'm sorry but my answer will have to be # NOT A SNOWBALL'S CHANCE IN A RELATIVELY COOL NEIGHBOURHOOD IN HELL!! Two glaring issues spring to mind immediately: * First is time. Life threatening injuries aren't something that you can just wait around for help to arrive. And frankly, your story will be boring as hell if the injuries sustained are anything other than critical! Consider how many people die in auto accidents because the ambulance crew is far away and the hospital is further away. Your characters are floating free in space. Emergency services are light years away. That means they were injured some relatively long while ago. Even if the aliens are lucky enough to discover three or four itsy-bitsy specks of living space debris in the vastness between the stars, it's still going to take a while to get the survivors into the space ship. It's going to take time to figure out how to open the capsule. It's going to take time to figure out how to undo the safety straps. Once they recognise that the occupants are even alive (heck, that they're even people!), they may not immediately recognise that there even are injuries, and let along how severe they are. Even with a medic standing by, they will still require a few minutes extract the occupants from the capsule and several more minutes to transport them to the hospital wing. Once in the hospital wing, the nurses and doctors are going to require time to even recognise that the survivors are injured. They won't know the first thing about how to approach the problem, what the problem is or which problem to address first. It will take a lot of time to assess & triage. And even then, they're just going to have to make a wild (and not very educated) guess at what to attack first. A skilled, competent and sure surgeon can do an appendectomy from incision to dressing in two minutes or less. None of the aliens will be skilled, competent or sure as regards human anatomy & physiology. Even if they recognise that the human is damaged, they won't know what to about it. They won't know anything about how much blood loss is too much. They won't know what electrolytes are critical to maintain or what normal lab values are. They won't have sufficient time to map the DNA or determine what is normal and what is abnormal. Sadly, I fear it will take many hours and probably cost the lives of all the severely injured while the well intentioned but utterly unequipped aliens go through heroic measures to save the victims. Time is simply against them all. * Second is knowledge. Human physicians (veterinarians) do actually perform surgery on animals. If poochie has a cataract, the vet surgeon can take care of that; if your kitty cat has a cancer, that can be whacked; joints can be replaced; broken bones can be mended. But veterinarians have knowledge about the biology, anatomy & physiology of the relevant animals. For the most part, mammals are pretty much interchangeable as far as the insides go. Skeletons, organ systems, physiologic requirements (oxygen, blood, electrolyte balance, etc) These aliens will lack all knowledge of human biology, anatomy & physiology. Even with the surface similarities and even with the odds that they will have similar requirements for life (ingestion and utilisation of nutrients, metabolism, expulsion of waste), your devil is in the details. We have a large organ called the liver that does a lot of waste management activity. Naturally, the aliens will also have to manage waste. But what if they have smaller regional organelles spread throughout their bodies, somewhat like lymph nodes, that collect waste? They won't have any idea what that big squishy brown thing is for. And what about all this red fluid? They may not have a large bipartite circulatory system (arterial & venous) like we do. What if they have four relatively easy-going circulatory systems with smaller vessels and no central heart? They'll wonder, what the heck is that thumpity-thump jiggling around in their throaxes where their soul-nest should be? A female on her period? They might wonder why it is the red humour is leaking from this one's pelvic orifice. If the female is bleeding from elsewhere, they may take that to be a sign of injury. Especially if she's got a tampon shoved up there. They might (easily!) mistake that for a first aid device and simply cauterise the whole mess. Sadly, I fear it will take far longer for the aliens to become sufficiently familiar with human normal & abnormal physiology than you'll have for your story will need for it to have a happy ending. Knowledge is simply against them all. This whole scenario, I'm afraid, simply spells doom for the humans and tragedy for the poor distraught aliens! If the injuries are critical enough to make them narratively useful, the victims simply will not have enough time to make survival plausible. If the injuries are not serious enough that their lives are immediately threatened, then the aliens simply will not have enough knowledge to do the job. Most likely outcome: all the humans suffer and die from their injuries. Best possible outcome: only the humans whose injuries were mild survive, but will probably be at least somewhat butchered by the well intentioned aliens. I am reminded very much of poor Vina from Star Trek's original series (The Menagerie). Vina how she appeared before her injuries (and also as she appeared due to the VR capabilities of the well intentioned aliens): [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sAOza.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sAOza.jpg) Vina how she appeared repaired by the well intentioned aliens but disfigured because they lacked knowledge about how to put her back together properly: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OZoIa.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OZoIa.jpg) [Answer] It comes down to how advanced the alien's xenobiology is. One big advantage here: We are talking injuries. It should be fairly clear to the aliens what is damaged and what isn't. Furthermore, the body is symmetric--in most cases the opposite part of the body will be uninjured, the aliens can examine it to figure out how the injured part should go back together. Furthermore, you specified more than one individual. That provides even more options for looking at others to figure out how the part should be. If they have enough experience treating other aliens I would think they could figure out how a human should fit together. The hard part will be keeping them alive and sane during the process. What materials are safe to use as sutures? What are safe to use as anchors (say, for a smashed bone)? Unless they can learn a lot from our DNA anesthesia is out of the question unless they have samples of local anesthetics in their suits/capsule. Likewise, without a very sophisticated analysis of our DNA they won't be able to produce blood or any drugs. [Answer] ### DNA DNA may be a key. If they are DNA based and have sufficiently advanced technology, they may be able to use a single cell from a human to decipher their entire DNA structure and meaning, including how everything is supposed to work. But that may be a bit much, so they can instead use... ### Surgery for Dummies Language shouldn't be a problem as long as the universal translator is online. So X just needs to tell the aliens how to access Surgery for Dummies stored in the capsule computer. Actually, a quick search found an almost modern day equivalent in this [PDF from the World Health Organization](https://www.who.int/surgery/publications/s16383e.pdf). The key is starting with humanoid, carbon-based life forms. Unlike something radically different, other humanoids will be able to adapt to the necessary techniques and, being carbon-based, some of the key things, like clean water, typical temperature range, etc. will be compatible. ### Replacements? The one problem I see is if replacement biological items are needed. Titanium parts for joint repair? They can fabricate those easily enough. Blood? Not so much. In fact, blood is likely to be the biggest problem because if you need it, you usually need it NOW, so waiting a few days for the scientists to figure out a compatible hemoglobin-based solution won't work. But stitches for minor injuries, setting broken bones, even removing an appendix - the aliens can do it. Just remember to bring your Galactic Insurance Card... [Answer] It depends on how similar the aliens are to humans and what kind of technology they have for analyzing the structures and organs of an entirely unknown species. Similarity If those aliens have red blood, like humans, they will realize immediately that loosing too much of it is fatal. But if their blood looks and behaves entirely different and their equivalent to puss looks red/brownish like human blood, some baffeled first responder might think they have to remove the liquid before realizing their mistake. If the aliens need oxygen to breathe, they will most likely put the human into a breathable atmosphere to help them. But if the native atmosphere of their home planet contains a gas toxic to humans, that's it. Same problem with water or nutrition. Tiny differences in evolution could have made the aliens resistant to chemicals that are toxic to humans. The chances of accidently killing the human are extremely high. Technology The human's chances of survival increase with the alien's level of technology. If we're talking Star Trek level of scanners and surgical instruments that do all the hard work on their own, the human will most likely survive. But this is more handwaving than realistic approach. Currently, despite all the different medical imaging technologies and our best effords, humans are still better at recognizing organic structures than computers. Now imagine having to operate on a creature whos internal structure is completely unknown to you. Scanners can tell you where bones and blood vessels are, but what about nerves? How would the alien know which structures are save to cut (like the skin or appendix) and which must not be injured (like the heart)? How would the alien know which kind of procedures are safe (like cutting with a scalpel) and which are not (like radiation)? Conclusion If the human survived an unspecified time floating in their suit, it's a viable assumption they will not die without emergency surgery. The aliens should offer any help they can, but not take the incentive to start surgery unless they have Star Trek level technology and nothing can go wrong. They should scan and analyze as much as they can, but also communicate with the human as much as they can. Let the human treat themselves. If the human shows clear signs of deterioration, the safest approach would be searching for their ship. Living things in space don't just appear out of nothing, they have to come from somewhere. And floating things in space don't change directions on their own, so the aliens have a good starting point for their search. [Answer] Faster. Stronger. Better. This is fiction. It is no fun if the aliens fail miserably. If they can recreate the efforts of a human paramedic, that is not that fantastic either. Your aliens need to succeed by unexpected means. They can build machines and they are good at it. They can see your survivor contains some nylon and other synthetics from prior repairs and they deduce that material is safe. She has a partial prosthetic joint from an old accident; they conclude that material is safe. They set about to rebuild anything which does not seem right. > > “God?” he tossed over his shoulder, frowinng as he cut me off. “Yes I > supposed He must have had something to do with it, but who said > anything about Crow’s heart not working? It most certainly is > working, and very efficiently at that, but it’s not beating! It’s > humming, purring away like a satisfied kitten in his chest. Or > rather, like a very well oiled machine”! > [The Transition of Titus Crow, Brian Lumley](https://books.google.com/books?id=zsC3KkpsQ7gC&pg=PA220&lpg=PA220&dq=%22titus+crow%22+%22heart%22&source=bl&ots=6ucgbgYjWK&sig=6ZwhTcFteUdTxmko3clsXVXifXM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj4vfyFqrveAhUMmeAKHSU9By0Q6AEwBXoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22titus%20crow%22%20%22heart%22&f=false) > > > In the story, Titus Crow is found mortally wounded by an alien robot, who builds new parts for anything that does not seem to be working right. Crow awakens with a new heart among other things. So too your survivor. Anything the aliens think might not be right has been replaced or augmented. Her bones were all considered to be damaged or inadequately strong, and so have been augmented. Her vision is perfect and she can see two new colors. Her spleen now can contract. But her speech sounds like she is talking into a fan because her diaphragm flutters air into her lung at 10 microbreaths a second - much more efficient for oxygenation; the aliens did not realize that the vocal cords close the airway off from swallowed liquids and phonate as well. You can have a lot of fun with this - aliens who are master technicians and prosthetists, repairing an alien "machine" from first principles. Through the story she will encounter surprises from her own rebuilt body. [Answer] If there are a few injured humans and we presume their injuries are different (they could be related, like everyone has a broken bone but in a different place) then the humans can help the aliens help them. One human has a slow bleed so the humans that can will mime, point, maybe even search the aliens' medical bay. Perhaps they can draw a picture (don't all astronauts carry paper and a pencil? I'm serious, I think that's standard in case com systems don't work while on spacewalks). The humans don't understand the alien medical system or supplies but together with the aliens, they can figure out what they need to stop the bleeding. Next they can help the human with a broken leg. They can draw pictures of bones and indicate that the aliens have to help reset it so it's aligned properly again. Then work with the aliens to get a cast made. If someone needs surgery or medication to survive, they're probably out of luck. Though it might be possible if it is further down the road and the other humans are in better shape and can help. That will be very difficult though. [Answer] A successful Western procedure is almost certainly not going to happen. Our procedures are based on countless decades of careful study and experimentation. If you want to get a sense of what works and what doesn't, look at how we test things on animals before moving to humans. We do plenty of tests on pigs beacuse pigs have a tendency to behave rather human-like in response to surgeries and many drugs. Even so, we are constantly surprised by how a surgery or drug goes, even after successful animal testing. However, an Eastern approach might have more luck. Eastern medicine is more about trying to free impingements in the body so that the body can take care of itself. These pracitces are based less in the rigor of a thousand person clinical trial, and more based on what patterns appear and what the body appears to need at the moment. Many patterns are tremendously basic and shared through all of nature. It would not be unreasonble to theorize that there are patterns which cross xenobiologies. For example, while the precise mechanics of vasoconstriction around a wound may involve dozens of very human hormones to get it right, the fundamental pattern of keeping fluids in is going to be shared among many races. The way muscles pull on tendons and bones is based in geometry, so nearly every creature with a physical body will have some similarity in that respect. These are small victories in some forms of medicine, but they are fundamental building blocks for others. Just remember, they don't need to write a surgical procedure to be applied on all humans. That requires more human experience than they have. All they need is to look at this body and make it healthy. [Answer] I think it depends on what kind of biological/medical knowledge X has, how well X can communicate with the aliens, and luck. Since X is capable of successfully initiating first contact, it seems like communication is possible to some degree. Even a high school overview of terrestrial biology should save alien xenobiologists a lot of time. Factors that would improve the odds: * The space suit contains an emergency pack with first aid supplies, instructions, and fine print. * X is carrying a compact computing device which contains a copy of something like Wikipedia. (Plausible since their destination doesn't have internet and text data is small.) * X is one of the doctors on the ship. * The aliens have advanced AI or superintelligence capable of quickly reducing the language barrier and extrapolating whatever information X provides. * X has the kind of injuries that don't kill them before the cure is found, or the aliens are capable of safely freezing them. * The aliens have a copy machine that can be used to clone X for samples and trial/error. [Answer] It only depends on alien intelligence and technology for scanning and examining the bodies. The human body (like any other animal's body) is a self-sustaining machine, the parts have functions, and we have discovered their functions by dissection, chemical analysis, and common sense. A sufficiently advanced scanning and computational AI can, by logic, understand how this foreign machine works, what is important, how it's healing and nutrition systems work, how respiration and heartbeat work, what has been broken and how to repair it. Especially so because the person is alive and all those systems are functioning. If it is a quantum AI, it should be able to do this accurately in a few seconds. Just like a normal human could figure out how a tricycle works just by examining it, or with some chemical and electrical knowledge examining a running car, eventually understand all the parts and functions using technology that allows them to film any part in action and slow it down. In the same way, the AI won't need any more than the one example, and the medicine it prescribes and procedures it performs will be personalized to the chemistry, DNA, immune system and precise nature of that one human, because it understands 100% of that particular human and will devise all this on the fly, avoiding any allergies or sensitivities. Heck, if the patient was suffering from some prior illness, they might wake up cured from it, in the bargain. That's one limit. At the other limit, the aliens have no idea what to do and would try to treat the human as they'd treat themselves, like most humans would not know how to help an injured dolphin, elephant or gorilla, and might be afraid to even try. [Answer] > > a few people wind up floating through space, injured > > > If you are specifically talking about [decompression injuries](http://www.geoffreylandis.com/vacuum.html) then the alien's best bet is to realise or assume that we breath oxygen and provide life support while the damaged lungs recover. This isn't really surgery, but surgery isn't going to make much difference either way. OTOH maybe we are talking about injured survivors who made it to an escape capsule and are now trying not to bleed to death. Any organic alien will have some kind of circulatory system, so it should be obvious to them that uncontrolled loss of body fluids due to an injury is a bad thing. Hence they will try to repair the injury or in some way stop the bleeding. Provided they don't use adhesives that are poisonous to humans they are likely to be successful. For serious internal injuries such as a ruptured spleen the odds of them figuring it out in time are very low. ]
[Question] [ I'm writing a story about a people that lives in a very cold, icy environment. Their technological level of advancement ranges from stone age to dark ages in different areas. I'd like them to record their knowledge in books, but I'm facing a problem. They live on fish, mollusks and cephalopods. No plants from which to make paper, and no land animals from which to make even leather pages. Also not much contact with peoples from other climates to get paper from trade. That said, I have played quite a few videogames where you gather raw materials to craft your own tools. Recently I got a rather morbid one in which you can harvest skin from human corpses and use that skin to make fine, clear white, book quality sheets of paper. You can also use skin from other animals to make hard or soft covers for books. What I would like to know is whether crafting good old notebook grade paper from human skin is possible; and if it is, by which process that could be achieved. --- P.s.: I don't want this to involve cruelty - rather, I am giving it a respectful, poetic spin. Something along the lines of "our history does not end with death. She taught us with her voice when she lived. Now she tells the story of our people through her remains". --- P.p.s.: I think this may be obvious, but I'll have it written here anyway. Skin color does not correlate with paper color. They will make the paper white as snow through dyes. [Answer] It's called Vellum Quoted from the [National Archives](https://www.archives.gov/preservation/formats/paper-vellum.html) > > Differences between Parchment, Vellum and Paper The term parchment is > a general term for an animal skin which has been prepared for writing > or printing. Parchment has been made for centuries, and is usually > calf, goat, or sheep skin. The term vellum from the French veau refers > to a parchment made from calf skin. The manufacture of parchment is > quite involved. After the skin is removed from the animal and any hair > or flesh is cleaned away, it is stretched on a wooden frame. While it > is stretched, the parchment maker or parchminer scrapes the surface of > the skin with a special curved knife. In order to create tension in > the skin, scraping is alternated by wetting and drying the skin. The > parchment is scraped, wetted, and dried several times to bring it to > the right thickness and tautness. Sometimes a final finish is achieved > using pumice as an abrasive followed by chalk in order to prepare the > surface of the skin to accept ink. Parchment has traditionally been > used instead of paper for important documents such as religious texts, > public laws, indentures, and land records as it has always been > considered a strong and stable material. The five pages of the U.S. > Constitution as well as the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of > Rights, and the Articles of Confederation are written on parchment. > The terms parchment and vellum are also used in the paper making > industry. Parchment paper is made from cellulose fibers prepared from > fir trees or plants such as cotton or flax. Paper can be made which > mimics the thickness and smooth surface of parchment. The terms refer > to the finish of the paper and should not be relied upon as an > indicator of its long term stability. > > > [Answer] You can't have paper, you don't have the cellulose fibres but you can make human [parchment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchment). Parchment has been made from a variety of different animal skins over the centuries. The skins are dried, cured, and scraped smooth to make a consistent writing surface, it can then be cut to make even sheets, or not if you want that rough and ready look. [Answer] Since you seem to be looking for methods of writing in general and because ink might freeze in the environment you're describing I'd like to suggest an alternative to using skin as paper. Many writing systems started out as engravings. Think about Egyptian or Mayan glyphs, but also Germanic runes, Sumerian cuneiform and Chinese [oracle bone script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script). [![A photo of oracle bones script](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5UsnK.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5UsnK.jpg) In your world it could be common for inscriptions to be made on conveniently shaped mollusc shells. The word for page and shell might even be the same. Books might look something like this: [![Shellodex](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CJoKZ.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CJoKZ.png) [![A variety of seashells](https://i.stack.imgur.com/No5eN.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/No5eN.jpg) [Answer] You could possibly even make parchment from the skins of big fish or marine mammals such as whales and seals. Here's a video of the [parchment making process](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-SpLPFaRd0) (you'll see the skins of dead animals, obviously) and here is a short video of how to [tan fish skin to make fish leather](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWpydbk0S7k) (you'll see a dead fish, obviously), so why shouldn't they make fish parchment? Due to the scaly outer surface, you would only be able to write on one side of the skin. So you could use fish parchment for teaching purposes (nobody is born as a master scribe!) and everyday use and seal or human parchment for religious skriptures. [Answer] Human skin is a renewable resource! [![split thickness skin graft.](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zhIUW.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zhIUW.jpg) <https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/876290-overview> Split thickness skin graft, ready to go. [![healed donor site](https://i.stack.imgur.com/camO2.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/camO2.jpg) <http://www.eatonhand.com/img/img00143.htm> Healed skin graft harvest site. If someone has surgery and the resulting wound (or burn) is too big to pull together, you can cover it with a split thickness skin graft. That takes the top layer of skin from a healthy place on the body (thigh depicted) and uses it as a live bandage for the surgical site. There are machines to harvest split thickness skin grafts or you can do it by hand; see link. Atop the wound bed, the skin graft moves in to its new home. The lower half of the skin regenerates the top half. Everyone is happy! In your world where the scribes and monks must use skin as parchment, they can harvest it from themselves and then heal. Large bodies are welcome for this endeavor, and the multiple healed overlapping scars on the bodies of these monks are signs of their piety and dedication. Your scribes might tattoo the works directly onto their bodies in life, then harvest the tattooed skin. When old age or death approaches, the magnum opus of these scholars can be a work tattooed over the entirety of their bodies, then harvested after death and revered as a saintlike relic. [Answer] Before I begin, may I just say that in answering this, I worried my friends quite terribly. May I also say that the research into this involved opening 26 tabs on top of my others, which meant I had about 50 tabs open by the end of it which frankly should be a crime. I don't think that you're going to be able to have notebook grade paper, but you might be able to have something similar. Your best bet would to use skin from stillborn or miscarried babies, or perhaps premature infants if the culture allows their killing. At 30 weeks, an infant's skin has all the layers that an adult would, while it still retains some thinness and transparency. If that is not available, then we use adult skin. This will be what be focus on: the skin of an average 30 year old person. Our victim is perfectly healthy in every way with no injuries. They probably died of a sudden heart attack. It happens. Now, before harvesting the skin we’re going to want to make sure that it’s clean, which can be done by dunking the body in water and scrubbing off any sorts of blemishes. Once this is done, we can begin to remove it. I recommend using a knife-like dermatome, which is nowadays used for skin grafts. Your best bet in this would probably be a blair knife similar to [this](http://www.ijps.org/articles/2013/46/1/images/ijps_2013_46_1_28_113704_f5.jpg), which, depending on the environment around them, could be fashioned from things such as flint and obsidian. Collect the skin from the feet and hands if possible, as this is where it’s thickest. Make an incision through the skin to the bottom of the dermis. Make an incision of the same depth and cut along the skin to connect them so that you have a rectangle of flesh. To prepare the flesh, give it another wash and let it dry on racks. Now stretch it out and place a block of solid material behind it. Take a cloth or dull rock to remove any hair. Then use a dull knife to smooth out the skin, but be aware that perfection is near impossible to achieve, especially since what we’re using is rather thin. The process of making sure it can hold ink/carving will vary depending on the specifics of what they’re using to write. Then you just have to bind it. I don’t really know anything about this subject but I will point you to [these](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropodermic_bibliopegy) [links](https://www.instructables.com/id/From-Paperback-to-Leather-Bound/) [about](https://www.instructables.com/id/Leather-binding-a-Paperback-A-New-and-Improved-Gui/) it. Hope this helps you, and please tell me if I need to clarify anything. Not quite full list of links that I used in this because if I have been taught one thing, it's to have a bibliography: * [Ecopoetics: Drawing on Calfskin Vellum](https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_2/ecopoetics/essays/pdfs/spragueessay.pdf) * [Was human skin used as parchment or vellum before 1500?](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=599436) * [Vellum - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vellum) * [The Active Scrawler: Writing on human skin part II](http://theactivescrawler.blogspot.com/2012/03/writing-on-human-skin-part-ii.html) * [A Binding of Human Skin in the Houghton Library: A Recommendation](http://www.princeton.edu/~needham/Bouland.pdf) * [Books bound in human skin are more common than you think](https://www.mhpbooks.com/books-bound-in-human-skin-are-more-common-than-you-think/) * [How to reduce thickness of leather?](https://www.instructables.com/topics/how-to-reduce-thickness-of-leather/) * [Evolution of instruments for harvest of the skin grafts](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3745118/) * [Dermatome (instrument) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dermatome_(instrument)) * [Skin Anatomy: The Layers of Skin and Their Functions](https://www.verywellhealth.com/skin-anatomy-1068880) * [Skin grafting - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_grafting) [Answer] We use paper because it's convenient. We have lots of plants that give us fibers, the fibers can be pressed together in ways that get them to stick in sheets. If it wasn't convenient we wouldn't do it. Parchment is skin that doesn't need that treatment but does need cleaning, scraping, etc. It works, and it's expensive. If an adult human gives you 20 sheets per skin surface (which I think is generous) that's 20 sheets per lifetime. There might be other possibilities. Hair is fibrous, made of keratin. Felt involves pressing hair kind of like paper, but it's thicker and more porous. There might be ways to carefully heat keratin in alkali to disrupt the hydrogen (and disulfide) bonds and then let it solidify into tough sheets. Blood contains a clotting agent, fibroin. It might be possible to make sheets of something like paper, something like scabs, starting with blood. We haven't done much with this sort of thing because we have so much cheap cellulose paper. But it might likely be possible. I expect there might be much more hair available than skin, particularly from humans who grow hair continuously their whole lives, but provide only one skin at death. If you can get keratin paper from hair, you might also find a way to get it from fish scales. You might get a rough cheap paper if you can merely find a way to glue somewhat-processed fish scales together. Paper from keratin hasn't been much of a research focus because we already have cheap paper. A lot of experimentation might give good results. [general review](https://www.kerafast.com/App_Themes/Skin_1/images/History%20of%20Keratin%20Research%20and%20Bibliography.pdf) [solubilizing keratin](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12649-016-9678-y) [paper from mixed keratin and cotton lint](https://bioresources.cnr.ncsu.edu/BioRes_05/BioRes_05_3_1425_Shi_SP_Novel_Waste_Fiber_Tissue_Prototype_Eval_954.pdf) [Answer] Human leather has been made, it was used to documents the crimes of murders, bound in their own skin. The [BBC](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27903742) has a news article on a book that was bound in human leather. Wikipedia (as always) has an [article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropodermic_bibliopegy). I can't find any references for human vellum, but I won't be surprised if it was made. [Answer] with these environment, adaptive evolution would take place very rapidly...... the arctic people, even if indigenous to the planet, would quickly develop a disorder in their genes that would prevent the flaking of their skins, creating a resistant coating of dead skin cells on top of them, and it would also eliminate the ability to sweat: sweating from a sleep would be very dangerous for anyone who lives in the arctic, causing hypothermia and quick death, making this disorder evolutionally favorable. the dead skin would accumulate and harden, finally shedding in a configuration that results in a flat sheet if unfolded, probably by adaptation, or they could harvest the accumulated thick dead skin from themselves: thicker layers makes leather, thinner layer makes good parchment/velium, and the thickiest layers have a quality comparabe to sheet metal. all these uses again make this mutation evolutionarilly favorable. as there is no technical limit for generating flat sheets by biological self assembly, the people of the setting would quickly evolve the equivalent of wax glands of honeybees: sebum could become wax or cement, and dead skin could become paper, with all the possible origami construction that are useful/constructible by cutting and folding. As this disorder dramatically strengthens tha arctic adaptability of the individuals having the disorder, this adaptation would happen within a few generations. the society would be interesting: as the most important construction materials were secreted, and it is not very plentiful, the people have to compress their written languages extremely efficiently, as there is a maximum rate of skin shedding, and older skins have utility uses, medium for writing and recording would be extremely scarce, and would be limited in rate for each individual. the result would be that information compression and micrography developing earlier, as this reduces the information storage medium requirement for a given culture. construction will be time consuming, and slavery would inevitably form, from higher classed individuals using lower classed individuals as a form of forced material producer. Other consequences includes: empires measured solely by the number of individuals within it; further adaptations for faster, controlled production and shedding of skin and wax; furthet adaptation for stronger shed skin; and most and most disturbing: segregation of classes by genetic specialization, and the evolution of eusocial behavior. long terms short: put humans on an arctic planet without available materials for primitive construction, and they will become ants or bees. [Answer] There is a process of doing pants out of human skin mentioned here [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nábrók](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A1br%C3%B3k) The pants, from my understanding, were made out of dead remains so no crime was committed. The same source may also apply to your parchment. ]
[Question] [ Let's say I have a plenty of supply of diamonds for my archer's arrows and my blacksmiths can easily work with diamonds. Would diamond arrows be superior to iron arrows? [Answer] No Diamond is brittle. It is hard (resistant to scratches) but not tough (resistant to breakage). So the diamond arrowheads would be no better than flint or obsidian arrowheads in this regard. This makes your arrows a consumable. Once fired the most likely case is that the arrowhead is broken, and needs to be replaced even if the shaft and fletching are still intact. Whereas iron arrowheads may be only dulled. [Answer] No, they would be far worse, diamond is dull and brittle. Diamond cannot be made sharp like flint or obsidian, diamond has a regular crystalline structure, but flint is a amorphous glass, it has no crystal lattice, so it forms conchoidal fracture, which is what [gives](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapping) flint and obsidian such super sharp edges. As Nate pointed out it is also brittle, so it will not be any stronger either. There is absolutely no benefit. [Answer] There is one use case I can think of for diamond arrows, and it's not really something you'd find in the real world, but you might be able to create some "trick arrows" like you see in shows like Green Arrow or RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. If, for some weird, contrived reason, the materials for glass are so hard to come by that it's cheaper to use diamonds, you could create diamond casings to put behind your arrowheads and add poison, acid or other dangerous fluids in them. When the arrow hits, the casing shatters and whatever is in the container is released. [![example image of a trick arrow head with a casing](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wecvV.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wecvV.png) Poison applied directly into a fresh arrow wound is extremely dangerous because it directly enters the bloodstream. Acid can inflict hideous injuries and might be usable to damage larger objects that you otherwise would do little damage to with an arrow. Depending on the tech/magic level, you might be able to create 2 somewhat safe chemicals that when mixed combine into something explosive and/or highly flammable. There might also be chemicals to suffocate small flames, but I don't really know how feasible that is. [Answer] Technical reasons aside, I think this would be a very bad idea. Once it became known that your kingdom could afford to spend well over $1000.00 per arrow, you would open yourself to invasion by every other kingdom - that is presuming that diamonds are as valuable in your world. I remember reading a story once about an Indian tribe that, not knowing its value, began to fashion bullets using gold. That tribe was entirely wiped out soon afterward. Greed is a very powerful motivator. ]
[Question] [ So as we know, a crossbow was an overpowered weapon in Medieval Ages. It is a kind of a game-breaker, as it could be operated by a untrained and unskilled person and penetrate armor on short distances. Suddenly, a peasant could take down an armored knight just like that. Nobles feared the crossbow and that is even why the Church banned its use. Is there any other way the whole idea of a crossbow could be restricted/prevented/banned/silenced than just banning its use on the grounds of "your soul is going straight to hell if you use it against a fellow christian" ? (Considering our medieval setting doesn't have a powerful religious organization with influence as christian Church had in medieval Europe.) Is there any way this invention could be prevented altogether? [Answer] You are putting far too much stock in the crossbow as a weapon, depending on where development is at for it. There are [distinct disadvantages](http://www.lordsandladies.org/crossbow.htm) to the cross bow. * It's more complicated to manufacture and therefore more expensive. It also needs specialized bolts for the particular model. * While it takes no training, the person loading it is vulnerable and the rate of fire is much, much lower than a regular arrow. While it can be a devastating weapon, being vulnerable is an important consideration. * For actual warfare,the crossbow gives more of a straight shot rather than an arched shot. While this is advantageous against a single opponent, on the battlefield if your men are between you and the enemy, it's more difficult than say, a long bow. (This is why an untrained man can use it--it's more point and shoot than a regular bow, although angled shots can be utilized in certain circumstances). True, it takes less training to use, and goes through armor, but it often took a team of people in order to use it--to defend the archer, and to load it. (They would often have two crossbows on hand, one that was being loaded by another member of the team and one that was being fired, and they would trade between). But as to the main question, could it be prevented altogether? No. It's an early invention and it would not make sense for it not to exist. However, there are ways to limit access, which have nothing to do with the church. * Crossbows are expensive and rare. So are the bolts. * Taverns and cities don't allow them in city limits without a license. The right to bear arms is given to a limited number of people. * It's only allowed for warfare, issued by the local lord and you would only be allowed to keep it under special circumstances. * No crossbow maker wants to issue a crossbow to just anyone. OR they only do so in batches when a lord orders them for warfare. Treat them a bit like guns in your setting. Socially and otherwise. In the country, everyone has guns for hunting and such, but carrying a gun around in a city, or a school campus is like to result in panic and/or questions. We know not to do it, generally. Add to that the fact that they are hard to conceal... [Answer] # Yes You could certainly have a world in which there were no materials suitable for building a crossbow, although this might make regular bows and arrows also impossible to build, and might require significant deviations from a typical medieval fantasy setting. # A Lack Of Adequate Crossbow Making Materials For example, you could have a world in which there were no good supplies of the kind of wood suitable for making a crossbow (e.g. consider the kinds of wood available in Hawaii, or the Sahara desert, or Death Valley, or Greenland, or "Waterworld", or an everglades scale swamp with no big trees that make suitable wood). In a world with only bamboo, or only shrubby small and thin woods, if any, or no wood at all, it would be very hard to build a crossbow. (This is probably the best "hard science" solution.) In a close variant of this possibility, it would theoretically be possible to make a crossbow, but the materials would be so expensive, that it would be far cheaper to train people to use other kinds of projectiles. Or, maybe there is an absence of the kind of plant or animal fibers that are suitable to stretch for enough pounds of draw to make a crossbow or bow viable as a weapon. In variants of that possibility, maybe it is so hard to stretch the bowstring fiber relative to the draw strength involved that no one is strong enough to pull it and no one has figured out how to use simple machines to draw the string, or maybe the only fabric that is suitable for use as a bow string can only be used once after which it loses all elasticity. # An Environment Hostile To Inventing A Crossbow You could also have a world in which the utility of a crossbow was so low that nobody would bother to invent them. For example, imagine a place that is almost always fogged over (e.g. in a mountain top cloud bank or an exaggerated version of London), or a place so dark that only firefly-like glowing plants provide illumination for very short ranges. In that environment, long range weapons would be useless. Or, maybe the local atmosphere is so thick to the point of being almost gelatinous, or has such a strong gravitational field, that projectiles swiftly slow down even when propelled powerfully. Of course, this would profoundly influence a whole host of elements of your world. # A Lack Of Demand In A Militarized World As implied in the question and noted in another answer, for many purposes, a crossbow is inferior to a bow in the hands of a skilled practitioner. A crossbow can still have utility if you have lots of untrained peasants and you want them to fight with projectile weapons. But, if your world is full of places like legendary Sparta, where every able bodied person was trained for war from early childhood, the crossbow would fill a need that didn't exist, and no one would invent one. Alternately, there might be an alternative that is just better in all respects than a crossbow that is easily to use. For example, maybe someone invents a "tandem bow" that requires one unskilled strong person to draw and notch, and another skilled person who need not be physically strong to aim, and each sub-task is much easier to teach than having one person do everything, that outperforms a crossbow in all respects. # Effective Countermeasures There could also be countermeasures easily available that makes a crossbow an invention that isn't worth the trouble. Maybe your world has a special kind of cork that is easily and cheaply produced and easily applied to armor, that functions like Kelvar and easily absorbs the blow of arrows and crossbow bolts distributing the energy harmlessly across the entire body of the person wearing the armor. Or, maybe your world has extremely fast, easily trained and loyal companion birds to soldiers who are capable of rushing out and grabbing arrows and crossbow bolts with their beaks in the blink of an eye. Or, maybe it has giant companion frogs who sit on a soldier's shoulders who can shoot out their tongue and grab arrows or bolts out of the air. [Answer] No. As Kilisi mentions the Romans employed a [ballista](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballista), for all intents and purposes an oversized crossbow. But it's not an isolated invention either. Crossbows have been used all over Europe and Asia. The Picts have been known to use a crossbow for at least as long and that one was handheld. Still the [Greeks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastraphetes) are likely even earlier. They even constructed large repeating crossbows in 200 B.C. In China they had a handheld [repeating crossbow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeating_crossbow) around 200 A.D. In fact the handheld crossbow was a standard infantry weapon in China before even the Roman Empire was a thing. However a sliver of hope for you. It was never developed in the Americas. I'd argue that this is largely because they never really left the Stone Age. Which is totally at odds with your medieval setting. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5WzEu.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/5WzEu.jpg) [Answer] Use another tool, Honor. I also agree that the physicality of making this simple machine cannot be denied--especially if you desire short or long bows in your world. However, you don't have to resort to strict authoritarian rule to abolish them from your world. Use a societal/social honor system. "Crossbows are dishonorable. Only a coward would use them, and we don't abide cowards in our society." he said to his eager apprentice. "But even a peasant could easily use one to defend his country!" the apprentice insisted. "Even the lowliest peasant has training with sword and bow, and would die with either in his hand before setting grip on one of those contraptions. Only the (insert ancient society name here) have ever used anything like that, and they were wiped clean from the lands--all of them. What for, you ask? For using those things and tipping them with poison, even. Cowards, the lot of them. Speak no more of it!" [Answer] # No one thought of it There is one very simple answer. No one has thought of it. If you are re-writing history anyway, this would be a very simple answer. It is amazing how extremely simple ideas will go undiscovered/un-thought of. Examples being the internal [combustion engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_internal_combustion_engine), which was used as far back as the Romans for sawmills and mining, but no one thought to put it in a vehicle. Or silk, which is just silk worms and water, but legend has it, it took a worm accidentally falling into tea in order to invent it. Native Americas never really invented the [wheel](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/223/why-did-the-peoples-of-the-new-world-fail-to-invent-the-wheel) (though wheels were used as toys) nor the arch nor copper, bronze, steel, gunpowder weapons etc. Just because it is simple doesn't mean it is easy to think of and invent it. [Answer] > > Is there any way this invention could be prevented altogether? > > > No, crossbows were around long before medieval times and they are a logical engineering extension of bows. Romans had a big one called a ballista for example but they got it from elsewhere so it's much older than that. They're thought to have been handheld before 400 BCE in Central Asia. Forbidding them might work, but not in times of total war when all rules are thrown in the bin. Unsure that would solve your problem anyway, other bows were capable of the same piercing and were faster. [Answer] No nails screws or dowel pegs have been invented. Any wooden object has to be carved from a single piece of wood. Do you have wheels? Do you need them? mud roads or slippery rocks laid out on roads make pulling skids by animal possible without moving parts like axles to make wheels. This would mean the trigger system for the bows would be impossible. If you have wheels, the trees for the axles have to be huge to survive the stress, because trees on your world are flexible and weak (making regular bows possible) but small axles for triggers and other mechanical parts are too brittle. Only by making them too large to be handheld would they be possible. No one wants to build a crossbow that takes 6 horses to haul... they and it would sink into the mud. Anyone seeing a giant machine pulled by six horses would have time to move away before they could aim at you, making it very impractical. If it is to be used against a stationary castle, the fields surrounding the castle can be flooded, making the mud impassible for miles around, like a swamp. The crossbow might even float away in the current. Trenches or even tree roots could slow its journey towards you. Horses could be slaughtered or poisoned in the night by spies leaving humans to pull their awkward invention themselves. The monster contraption would have to fire whole trees as arrows, and would take 3-4 hours to load in between shots. Less range than a jousting field (Is it called a "List"?) It would become an epic tale of failure sang by the bards for generations, a combination of McBeth and Custer's Last Stand. "The Tale of the Too-Big Bow" would be told around the campfires of warriors for 30 generations, with characters making sound effects like The Three Stooges. It would become the Anti-Tale of The Trojan Horse. People would laugh at you less if you glued feathers to yourself and jumped off a cliff trying to fly. (only to be eaten by a giant bird before you hit the ground.) [Answer] Make the wood suitable for making regular bows brittle, and needs to be bundled together in stacks, making regular bows heavy.. but a crossbow would be TOO heavy. You do want regular bows in this world correct? As you are only singling out the crossbow, I assumed so. Also, the extra dimension of the handle sticking down makes them fill a larger volume of space, causing it to get easily tangled on low branches or vines. [Answer] You don't have trees or forest in your world for large bows to get tangled in? Create a wild bird that scares horses. They hunt and eat horses on the open plain, or in the desert. Anyone approaching their horse holding a crossbow will be trampled by their own steed no matter how loyal. Horses must fear them from birth, that way no one dares carry one into battle. You only have elephants in your world? No horses? Well this bird eats baby elephants too! Yes, elephants are afraid of mice, but even more of this bird! They sometimes attack in flocks, but a caring elephant mother instinctively attacks to kill the bird(crossbow) and anyone holding it or standing near it. Scared elephants are more dangerous than scared horses. It might take hours, or days to calm one down... elephant psychologist might need to be hired. The pachyderm Whisperer might need to be summoned. Anyone who live near a village caught possessing one would be put to death for endangering everyone. It would be common sense NOT TO have one. they may cause cows and pigs to stampede through town center knocking over stalls in the marketplace. Wild deer, ox or moose may also stampede through crops or tents or even the wall of an inn. Everyone hates someone holding one.. even your best friend wants you dead for holding that thing near them. The birds may not even appear in the story, just remembrances of the last time some idiot had a crossbow and what happened. The birds may also be attracted to running herds of animals...like if the boy who cried wolf actually attracts wolf attacks? This would cause even more anger. The deer keep to the trees in small groups to avoid detection, but huddle together from fear and become easy targets, stampeding through town trampling people.... only to be followed by ferocious birds?! If these things eat horses and even a moose or elephant. Some poor human child trampled by a deer is an easy snack. The sight of you children picked apart by what can only be described as flying piranhas would make you form a lynch mob to hunt down the wielder of the crossbow, his friends, the person he bought it from, the maker, his or her family and all of their neighbors!! [Answer] Instead of a world with no crossbows, what if your world had few/crappy crossbows? Crossbows have existed since ancient times. There was a lower power bronze age crossbow with no mechanism where you hold the string back with your thumb. It took a long time for them to become an important military tool. The reason crossbows became important in midieval Europe was a combination of factors. Since crossbows are most useful in sieges, an environment where siege warfare was common lead to investment into the industry and technology. Improvements in tools, materials, and manufacturing techniques made crossbows more powerful, easier to load and fire, and cheaper. If you break that chain anywhere, by making sieges uncommon, or by stifling innovation, then crossbows remain a curious foreign thing that no one really takes seriously. [Answer] # Use the [Linothroax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linothorax#University_of_Wisconsin-Green_Bay:_Linothorax_Project) Linothroax was an armor type, used by the ancient greeks. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ocPc0m.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ocPc0m.jpg) It stopped an arrow at point blank range! It's light! It's easy to manufacture. Place it under the knight's plate armor and you're good to go. Important side effects: All the archers will be screwed. [Answer] If you just want to limit the ability to use crossbows it might be a good idea to implement it as a high status weapon. A weapon that's only allowed to be used by Kings for example. Make it extremely expensive to create and the knowledge of development spread very thin between the people. ]
[Question] [ In the semi-democratic Empire known as the Aurean Dominate, the small peninsula of Sparteia has seen a population explosion over the past two centuries or so. Located in Argentolia, the most populous (and 2nd largest by land area, around the size of the continental US) province of the Aurean Dominate, the Sparteia peninsula (around the size of Greece) was, for most of its history, little more than a stopover point for ships making voyages between the Capitol to the southwest and the gold-rich mountains of Monsaltu to the east. Now, 4 of the 10 largest cities in Argentolia are in Sparteia. What would be a good reason for a mass migration to such a region like this to occur? Some background on Sparteia: The peninsula is topographically extremely flat and marshy in the north, to the point where around 31% of the peninsula is considered wetlands. However, the Sparteian Alps begin to rise in the center and start running down the peninsula, making the south's terrain much more rugged. Generally, the east coast of Sparteia has a tropical rainforest climate while the west coast has a drier tropical savanna climate due to the Sparteian Alps' rain shadow. The north has a tropical monsoon climate transitional between the two. Some of the higher elevations in the Sparteian Alps experience a temperate Mediterranean climate. Like the rest of Argentolia's tropical north, Sparteia experiences the Pontic Monsoon in the slighyly cooler months from April-August, in which torrential downpours from the Pontic Ocean to the north contribute the vast majority of the area's annual rainfall. For example, Nirossos Bay on the east coast of Sparteia receives an average of 395 mm of rainfall in the month of June alone, while receiving only 72.6 mm in the warmest month of January. While these monsoons are very useful for agriculture in other parts of Argentolia's north, Sparteia is almost entirely composed of limestone and has thin, chalky soils that have greatly limited agriculture in the region. Additionally, much of what Sparteia has historically grown are cash crops like coffee, rubber, sugarcane, coconuts, and oil palms on large plantations owned by wealthy Aureans who often do not even live in Sparteia. Food crops, mostly consisting of rice, citrus, mangoes, and bananas, are generally grown on a small scale by village-level subsistence farmers. The small portions of the more temperate Sparteian Alps that can be used for agriculture are almost completely used up by similar wealthy plantation owners as in the north, with wine and olive oil plantations dominating the valleys between the peaks. The rugged and mountainous south of Sparteia is also known for Sparteian Rangers, a culture of semi-nomadic zebra riders dating back to before the Aurean Dominate conquered the region. Most of them are content to peacefully herd [protoceratops](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoceratops) and [psittacosaurus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psittacosaurus) or serve as light cavalry in the Aurean Military, but enough of them turn to banditry and become highwaymen to make traversing the Sparteian Alps somewhat dangerous. Due to being almost completely surrounded by coral reefs, Sparteia had a sizable seafood industry even prior to the population boom. [Ammonite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonoidea), spiny lobster, goliath grouper, [xiphactinus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiphactinus), and giant reef octopus (giant Pacific octopus but tropical) are all local delicacies. Prior to this population boom, Zanclatis in the north was the only one of Sparteia's cities to host more than 100,000 residents. Now, 7 of Sparteia's cities (Zanclatis, Sozippa, Nirossos Bay, Cape Diosidos, Rizyra, Pheraci Beach, and Porta Burdigala) pass this benchmark, with 4 of them (Zanclatis, Sozippa, Nirossos Bay, and Cape Diosidos) in Argentolia's top 10 largest cities and 3 of them (Zanclatis, Sozippa, and Nirossos Bay) reaching a population of 1 million or more. The technology level of the Aurean Dominate would most closely resemble that of the early to mid Ottoman Empire, although the dominant culture is much more Greco-Roman inspired but also varies somewhat by region. Sparteia specifically has some additional al-Andalus and Caribbean flair to it in some aspects, with much of the urban architecture being very Mudejar-looking and the cuisine using tropical ingredients like plantains and coconut milk. Little has changed in the Aurean Dominate technologically since before the population boom, thanks in part to the Aurean Senate's insistence on strict isolationist policies. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gMKBW.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gMKBW.jpg) Koppen climate map of Sparteia (cities w/ >10k residents in black, >100k residents in white, 10 largest cities in Argentolia province in green). The peninsula where Rigona is is part of the Capitoline Peninsulas rather than Sparteia, so ignore it. Rizyra and Lindesos are generally considered part of Sparteia and have experienced similar population growth, although they are outside the core peninsula. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N5oU6.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/N5oU6.png) Koppen climate map of Argentolia as a whole (same color coding applies to cities as described above, with the addition of purple areas being neighboring provinces) [Answer] Marginal Lands Made Productive (for Food) (For a historical example...) Ireland was a place with relatively little good farmland and most land better suited for grazing. This created a bit of a calorie-bottleneck because there was only so much room for crops while grazing animals require a lot of time and land relative to the amount of food they produce. The introduction of the potato - which was calorie-dense and could be grown on some of the poorer soils - helped farmers much more easily cover their personal caloric needs and allowed a greater share of their better crops and meat/dairy to be sold at profit. This not only massively increased the amount of food that could be grown in the area, but perhaps more importantly, it lowered the average relative cost of food for the locals (leading to a population boom relative to it's historical carrying-capacity). Your poor marshy lands were perhaps historically a similar calorie-bottleneck. Rice is maybe the most likely candidate for improvement here. Poorly-adapted varieties and/or a lack of technological know-how may have kept yields at a subsistence level for centuries. Perhaps a cross-breeding of high-yield foreign varieties (which don't grow well there) with a low-yield local variety (which does grow well there) had finally yielded a medium/high-yield variety that thrives in the local soils and climate. Maybe this change happened at the same time as high-investment farming methods like rice-paddies were introduced. Suddenly, tons of marshy land not suitable for cash-crops becomes massively calorie-productive for the local populace. This calorie surplus allows more of the good land to be used on cash crops whilst the surplus rice becomes a commodity in and of itself. Populations boom as food becomes cheaper and more labor is freed from subsistence-farming toward specialized occupations. Zanclatis, once having been just one-of-many pitstops between Astras and Olynthaseia, now sees much-increased traffic as lower grain prices have made it a much more economically beneficial stop than it had been previously (with Diosidos and Nirossos growing into new pit-stops in their own right as Zaclatis becomes more-and-more congested). Meanwhile the lower costs of food (and increased labor pool) has made various ore deposits along the Sparteian Alps newly economical for mining causing Sozippa to become major hub along the highway from the mountains to Zanclatis. [Answer] Villages tend to explode in population because... 1. Discovery of a local natural resource. 2. The town becomes a center of trade (multiple trade routes, change in resources elsewhere). 3. The town becomes strategically important (war, political maneuvering). 4. Disease, disorder, etc. causes people/refugees to emigrate from other areas. 5. Somebody important moves in (e.g., king builds a "summer palace" in the town), causing the regular courtiers, fans, sycophants, service providers, etc. to arrive. Examples include: palace, abbey/monastery, garrison (specific version of #3). 6. One or more people become craftmasters (a specific version of #2). 7. It becomes a "bedroom community" of a larger city nearby. [Answer] Silver Your geology investigations of the peninsula were highly incomplete, as it was the norm in "early to mid Ottoman" both time wise and technology wise. Since there are already some cities where gold is found nearby, this is off, using coal is off by technology limits, and the other "sudden riches" that could attract that many people to an otherwise poor region that's only use is some level of maritime control over the northern route would be gems, any special resources available in your universe (magical, maybe), or some metals that hold great value in this time and place. Silver looks like the best of all possible findings of this sort. Having silver found would force local government to increase its army, and also allow to buy luxury stuff, more slaves, more tech, for example, to dry out some of the swamps for agriculture, as food would start to be very pricey with such city growth. As an alternative, a global warming and an earthquake somewhere nearby would possibly raise the flatbed of the peninsula, making swamps drain by natural means and leaving fertile ground for agriculture, together with possible access to some delicious local plants or berries, so that a lot more people could feed off local lands, and overall these lands become a better place for living. Having a maritime route would allow influx of people, and local food abundance could allow natural population growth together with foreign. [Answer] A newly discovered resource or industry seems the most likely reason, during the industrial era of the 1700-1800s many cities developed within a few decades from what were previously small villages or towns due to strategic locations on transport links, canals etc, making factories there very worthwhile, or closeness to newly discovered natural resources (coal, iron, etc). In the opposite direction, famine and natural disasters within the countryside and farms also often leads drought-struck farmers and workers to migrate to the cities in search for work, and can vastly inflate city populations during difficult times. Depending on your world's history, a religious awakening could also bring an mass influx of pilgrims to the new "holy land" where the prophet was born, who then settle there over the centuries. [Answer] ## To Answering the Actual Question: Trade While other answers demonstrate reasons why a town or group of towns might suddenly grow, the OP has asked for the most likely reason based on his setup. The sudden discovery of a new resource/technology, population dislocation from a war/disease/famine, and cultural outcomes from things like religion are all common reasons for a population boom, but these are all things that can happen anywhere, regardless of geography. That said, there is one detail in the question that stands out as a reason why THIS region would spontaneously grow very quickly: > > ...for most of its history, little more than a stopover point for ships making voyages between the Capitol to the southwest and the gold-rich mountains of Monsaltu to the east... > > > Towns that sit on major trade networks have a tendency to becoming very large very quickly. What you normally see with these "stop-over" towns is that they start off as places that merchants pass through on thier way to where they are going, but imagine if you are a merchant, and you got 1/2 of the way to where you were going, and you found someone willing to buy what you are selling, and sell you what you are buying. You just cut your route in half; so, even if your total profit is a bit smaller, the time saved is both a major convivence, and increases your profit over time. The difference is made up by locals buying and selling products from either direction that they do not specifically need, but that they are able to resell at a profit. Tolls can also be used to fleece passing merchants and encourage them to make your town thier last stop, and/or to profit from anyone who wants to make the whole journey anyway. These factors causes a massive influx of money to the region for very little work allowing entrepreneurs to quickly rise up to positions of great wealth. These entrepreneurs will want to capitalize on thier excess income by investing in new local businesses. These businesses create jobs pushing up the cost of labor, and the town's position as a trade center means that there are lots of things available for sale. All of these factors work together to make it a popular place to immigrate to because people from near by areas know that they can earn more money, and have the option to buy more goods and services by living here. ## Orchards could be another good reason. Most crops, if destroyed or neglected, can take anywhere from a few months to a year to replace. But fruit baring trees like your coconut, olive, and citrus trees take on average about 5 years to even start producing fruit, and don't get up to "mature" production levels until they are 10-15 years old. So when a region becomes unstable, orchards become a much more difficult food source to maintain and replace than annual crops like wheat, beans, squash, etc. So, the value of these crop goes way up, and can stay up for a pretty long time because wise farmers only plant orchards during times of peace. Historically, this was seen as the biggest factor in the rise of Rome. The Eastern Mediterranean lost all of its olive orchards as the region became embroiled in generations of constant warfare; so Rome, which started off as just a small olive growing community, was able to make a massive profit selling olive oil to the waring Hellenistic Kingdoms, and from here, it did not take long for Rome to grow from a small Etruscan colony to become the largest and most powerful city in the ancient world. Likewise, if a nearby area were to fall into an unstable condition, your region could leverage its already existent orchards to supply the area with over-priced tree fruit products. [Answer] # New Technology Other answers mentioned discovery of a new natural resource. Similarly, the emergence of some new technologies may make extracting natural resources suddenly much more possible or profitable. For example: ## New farming techniques Without refrigeration and bulk transportation, any given region can only support as much population as the local countryside can produce food, no matter how desirable an area it may be otherwise. Advanced irrigation can dry out wetlands or deliver water to arid lands, potentially turning otherwise-uninhabitable areas to breadbaskets (think California). Irrigation canals are as old as history, but Archimedes' screw, which enabled pumping irrigation to higher elevation, is a game-changer and about the right technological level for your society. Beyond irrigation, they could develop new types of fertilizer or discover/breed new crops well-adapted to the local ecology. ## New mining or refining technology Advanced steel alloys and explosives can enable mining in harder rock. Improved smelting or chemical purification techniques can make it newly profitable to mine ores that contain high levels of some desired material but also some contaminants that were previously too difficult to separate efficiently. [Answer] canned peaches Effective Range Like a few people here I lean toward a variant on trade route outcomes, in this case effective range of vessels. Your peninsula is halfwayish, or whatever figure is plausible for the distance, between point A and B. That's not particularly special. Ships require sailors, sailors require food. More food means less cargo, or more cargo and frequent stops. Travelling all the way from A to B requires 5-6 stopovers, or some terrible cases of scurvy from the heavily salted rations. Fortunately a poor-tasting syrup has been developed, which be used as a bulk preservative for fruits. This JUST makes it possible to cram enough food in to just about get a full ship with crew to point B with a single stopover. The peninsula is the lucky recipient of any ship wealthy enough to invest in the healthiest possible ratio of cargo:time:starvation. The other stopovers aren't so lucky. There have been similar towns spring up because they were placed at the limit of a steam engine's effective range. They just have to grow enough to remain relevant once technology marches on again. The food preservatives are an idea I like as they're not directly linked to trade, the shipping benefits as a side effect, but any development affecting range is suitable. [Answer] An option which is not dependent on migration: Higher fertility, lower mortality Maybe they’ve discovered germ theory and use it to drastically reduce childbirth mortality and mortality from contaminated drinking water. Maybe they’ve found ways to produce more food or food with more nutrients, leading to less starvation and healthier children and women. Maybe there is a change in culture or religion which makes having (unprotected) sex and having more children more desirable. Maybe they’ve discovered vaccines, or antibiotics or mosquito nets (to protect against malaria) or any other invention which will drastically improve health and reduce mortality. Note that population growth is exponential. Even just increasing the average number of healthy offspring from 3 to 3.5 per woman will have a huge impact after a few generations. [Answer] # Religion This is the one answer I haven't seen yet suggested, but what about religious motivations? Maybe your empire is currently going through a period of significant religious change driven by an influential prophet or several and there is some prophesy or similar linked to the peninsula. Maybe (one of) the prophet(s) said everyone is blessed in the afterlife who drank water from a local river or lake. Maybe there's a prophecy that claims it will trigger once great cities are built on the peninsula. ]
[Question] [ There are other Groundhog Day questions and other Simulation questions. I believe this differs from all the others. > > [This movie features a] ...TV weatherman who, during an > assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event, is caught in a > time loop, repeating the same day ... [over and over]. > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)> > > > The point is that only one character is aware that same day is repeating. Others all start their day as normal and continue unless their day is altered by interacting with the main character. If you woke up repeatedly like the weatherman Phil Connors and could convince\* yourself you weren't merely dreaming or hallucinating, wouldn't your only other conclusion have to be that you were (a) in a simulation of some kind and (b) it is designed just for you? The reason I say this is that if your universe is the 'real' one then it would have to reset itself purely for your benefit to provide your repeating experience. Resetting the actual universe is presumably much more difficult than resetting a simulation based on one viewer's point of view - yours. --- * When I say 'convince yourself' I don't mean prove it indisputably, I mean decide in your own mind - perhaps to preserve your sanity!. [Answer] No. It would not prove that this was a simulation for you alone, as there are other strong possibilities. 1. This is a simulation, but not for you. Your memory of previous loops are due to a bug. Where your state should be reset at the beginning of each loop, for some reason your experience has been carried over to the next loop. 2. This is not a simulation, you (or your consciousness) are really travelling back in time (to a preset point). 3. This is a simulation and it is for you, but it is shared with others who you have not encountered (it isn't just for you). 4. You're not in a simulation - but all of the "past iterations" you remember are artificially implanted memories which were simulated. (As suggested by Chronocidal in the comments. A particularly horrific one to realise as you choose to skip out on "this go round"). There are many other possibilities, many of which are included in other answers. The key thing is that your experience doesn't rule out enough other possibilities to conclude this is a simulation just for you. [Answer] There are a few flaws in your logic... 1). How would you convince yourself that you weren't merely dreaming or hallucinating? The simplest explanation for what you are experiencing is that you are dreaming. Ruling that out just for argument, the next most likely explanation is that your brain is broken; you are delusional and what you are perceiving is the result of something wrong in your head. 2). Assuming that it is really happening, there is no proof that it is happening outside of the portion of the world that you are directly interacting with. In Phil's case, the time reset need only encompass the town he is in and everything within one day's driving distance (remember that he steals a pickup truck). The rest of the universe could be cruising forward through time at its normal pace. There could even be another instance of the town and surrounds which are traveling forward through time. Phil could have fallen into a pocket universe with an extremely short, circular timeline. 3). Even if you somehow rule out every possible explanation except for virtual reality, there is still nor proof that you are alone in the simulation. There is only proof that, so far, the software running the simulation has not allowed you to interact with any other real people. There is nothing wrong with your conclusion that you are trapped in a simulation, but it is far from an exclusive and thus proven certainty, given the available facts. [Answer] It's a possible theory, and maybe even a strong one but to be your only other conclusion, it has to be the only theory. Another possible theory, albeit a bit sci-fi'ish (but probably no more than the virtual reality), is that person may be slipping through alternate universes, each one exactly like the previous except it was 24 hours behind and the universe he left carries on as normal as for the person he replaces, he could have ended up anywhere. I'm not saying that's a scientifically possible answer or the only answer but it does make the point that no hard conclusion for it being a virtual reality is possible (without other information). Thinking about it, I remember that in a specific scene he got hit by a train and died. Maybe that's a place to start if you want to convince a story character that it was a simulation. His physical body is being reset, injuries healed. This would at least suggest his body isn't traveling between universes. And if the person in question is versed in virtual reality, it may be enough to remove reasonable doubt. [Answer] You couldn't know that time was resetting flawlessly each time, because your own senses and memory aren't perfect, and if you used any kind of external instrument (like, trying to memorise patterns from the cosmic background radiation to see if they repeat) then someone could be manipulating that. All you know for sure is that you remember this day happening, and external events appear to be happening the same way you remember. The Occam's-razor hypothesis would be that it's all in your head. The fact that you seem to know the future does not disprove this, because you could just be misremembering your previous memories. You say "the next card will be a three of spades", and then the card is drawn, and you think "my god, the jack of diamonds – just as I predicted!". If you discount that possibility regardless, then you might think a simulation (VR, Truman Show, etc.) is more likely than the whole universe, outside of your mind, being in a loop. I am not sure that follows. Any of these explanations would require phenomena or technology well beyond your experience, so it's pure speculation to say that a flawless simulation of the whole universe is "more likely" than a phenomenon that teleports a human mind back through time. In fact, I'm not sure there is even any difference from your point of view. If the simulation is so good that you could live in it forever, and have great-grandchildren who colonise the stars for a billion years and so on, then the only practical difference between that and the "real" universe is the label. All the time loop tells you is that, whatever the nature of the universe you live in, something is happening that is outside your previous understanding of how that universe works. [Answer] Speaking as a scientist, it would not preserve my sanity to believe the world and all the people in it were a simulation for only me. It would quite likely make ME a simulation too! (Particularly if, by investigation and/or observation, I cannot find any notable physical difference between my own body and others -- why should I believe they are simulations and I am not?) If not, I'd be the only sentient in the world, and that would be the ultimate loneliness, and make me a rat treading water forever. Since I couldn't kill myself, I think I'd go insane. Also, speaking as a scientist, there is no telling how much energy it would take to reset the universe to 24 hours ago, with only my brain and memories changed. It is entirely possible every moment of the universe exists simultaneously, so no "energy" is required at all. More generally, if you have no idea how something is accomplished, you have no idea how easy or difficult it is. For example, before the existence of gunpowder or other explosives, somebody trying to compute how to accelerate a quarter-ounce stone (about the weight of a 9mm bullet) to supersonic speeds with a handheld device may conclude it is impossible to do with any combination of springs or levers. Does that make a handgun impossible? Of course not, they are just too uninformed to know that there is a pretty cheap, safe and easy way to do it; in fact it is so cheap and safe some people will shoot a few hundred bullets in a day for the fun of it, and never notice the expense. As a scientist, if I can't figure out how something is done, I can't estimate the cost of doing it. Also, I will believe my own eyes, ears and senses: If everything looks like I traveled back in time with my memories intact, I will believe that is what I am doing, and that neither me (or my senses) or the people are simulations. Also as a research scientist, I am perfectly fine saying "I don't know", and I don't need even a possible explanation for a phenomenon, I am comfortable with no explanation. Most of the things science is investigating have no answer, nobody knows why they happen or how to predict them or how they work. It is our job to come up with testable ideas to give us clues to that. [Answer] The real question is the question of proof. If a person was in a scenario where everyday was an absolutely flawless repetition of Groundhog Day, the question is really one of how many possible solutions are there for such a situation. As a standard of proof this answer will use Ockham's Razor (please note the spelling of "Ockham" does vary). Namely, establishing what is the minimal explanation for any phenomenon. One possible explanation is that the recursive world is the result of a simulation. Certainly the person is the only one aware that each is exact repeat and for him it is Groundhog Day every day. But it is not sole explanation. Also, as an explanation the simulation hypothesis has to make a number of assumptions. (1) The world is a simulation, (2) whoever or whatever is in charge of the simulation has taken the person and allowed them to continue advance through the simulation gaining new memories and experience while everybody else does not or they lose that in the daily reset, and (3) what is the purpose of subjecting only one person to the Groundhog Day recursion. Actually of those assumptions itself requires their own explanation. In fact, all three explanations are needed to explain the simulation as such. Simpler explanations for Groundhog Day can be devised. The person is caught in a time-loop type of phenomenon. When he reaches the end of Groundhog Day he is transported back to its beginning. While the nature of the time-loop itself cannot be explained, its consequences conform to those experienced by someone caught in a time-loop. Basically the person experiences the Groundhog Day effect. The person has become adrift in the multiverse. At the end of each Groundhog day the person is shunted "sideways" and one day "backwards" in time to the beginning again. The person is a brain in a vat experiencing an exceptionally fidelity virtual reality which is, of course, Groundhog Day. Simulating the world for one person is much more economical hypothesis than the simulation of the whole world. Voltaire's demon. This concept was a philosophical proposition that reality as we know it was created by a being, possibly a supernatural entity, by manipulating our senses to generate the impression that we were experiencing an actual world. Anyone could be effectively a sort of brain in a vat experiencing an artificial reality from synthetic perception. This means we could be simply conscious spirits floating in formless void with Voltairean demons fooling us into believing we exist in a physical world. This makes Voltaire's demon the precursor of both the brain in the vat and the universe as a computer simulation. In conclusion, with the application of Ockham's Razor and the realization that it is possible to construct simpler counter-examples as explanations for a Groundhog Day than the presumption that the existence of a Groundhog Day would be proof for the universe as a simulation. The answer is no. Groundhog Day does not prove the universe is simulation. Because other simpler explanations are also possible. Also, it is not possible to choose conclusively between the alternative explanations. This makes the suggestion of Groundhog Day proves the simulation hypothesis only one possible explanation among many. [Answer] Although there is not enough evidence, nor opportunity, to make conclusive reasoning, a Simulation Hypothesis would be a major cause you should consider The issue, in a way, with any natural cause is that it is only happening to you. Furthermore, current scientific thought is based on observations of our physical world. 'Everything is physics' [some people say](http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-spotlights/everything-physics#.XAfcNy1L1Bw). So how come all around you everything resets, except the atoms in your brain? After all, your memories (which are still intact) are just collections of chemicals and processes, for which if you remember would have to have been continued unaffected for you to even perceive your days are repeating. This gives credence to the suspicion (and I say that word sparingly) that all is not well, that some alien or other force is artificially interfering with your world. As you are immortal, one way to test this hypothesis is to conduct brain surgery on yourself. Do removing parts of your brain responsible for various functions also carry over? What if you take a drug such that effects should carry over, do these? If memories are recorded and you wake up the next morning, how come your brain is ok suddenly, retaining memories, when last night you removed those memories? Test the boundaries. In a way, this is where physics thrives. It is at its most exciting when investigating things that don't line up, and finding the point at which it does or doesn't. (By the way, I do not condone anyone doing brain surgery on yourself - this is just a theoretical thought experiment - Kids don't do this at home). [Answer] No. Consider HBO's Westworld. For the hosts, everyday is "Groundhog Day", but the simulation is not for them, it's for the guests of the park. [Answer] While Phil has no way of knowing this, the second conclusion (that it was for Phil's benefit) is demonstrably untrue. Groundhog day, as a movie, IS a simulation, and it is NOT for Phil's benefit. It is for the benefit of the movie studios, and the actors, and the people who paid to watch the film. While I cannot rigorously show that a simulation is never for the benefit of that simulation's occupant, no simulation I have ever heard of matches that criteria. Your premise that resetting a universe is difficult is a baseless assumption. We also have no idea how difficult it is to "reset a universe", it may be happening all the time. And while a NEARLY resetting universe (after all, his memory is in the universe, and that doesn't reset) does have benefits for Phil in the short term, that benefit is only real INSIDE that universe - it does not automatically carry over to experience OUTSIDE that universe (unless Phil, himself, is outside the simulation of Groundhog Day). Even if he was "patched in" to the simulation, the things he learned would not be of significant benefit once he came out. His memory is partitioned (he does not recall going into the universe), and the people inside the simulation are presumably NPC (since they don't remember). If he is a player controlling Phil, then it is not for Phil's benefit (and, since he's controlling Phil, Phil wouldn't notice unless the player wanted him to). If the player IS Phil, then Phil would remember going in (or would have his experience partitioned), and the skills Phil learned while in the simulation, could just as easily have been learned outside the simulation. [Answer] Whilst that's possible, even perhaps the most rational, sadly it's a matter of the design decisions of God. If one takes on the assumptions of deliberate design and of retro-active fixes, the possible mechanics of the underlying system become as varied as imagination. In simulations we have the concept of instancing, that is to say that whilst the general system is ongoing and universal, sections of it can be duplicated and isolated (dungeons in mmorpg's, remote user sessions on vm's.) Or in general, a program's continued operation may be delayed or operate using a broad(temporary) assumption whilst a given clackerlation/process/function is completed to derive the data with which the program will operate going forward.(aka local history) Using an instancing implementation every one of those individuals may have experienced their own closed simulation simultaneously, algorithms may delete the memories of those who 'failed the mission' or any other such criterion if a preferred progression path is accepted. There's also the possibility of 'timeline' divergence to consider, common in anything dealing with time travel, each individual user may have had their own realities spun off until they came up with the 'correct' solution/series of events, so far as they're concerned I guess then 'this' reality actually is just for their benefit. [Answer] A ground hog day experience (GHDE) is a backup or a glitch in a simulation for 1 person. Say when a simulator hardware fails etc a full server goes does or/ Lets say the simulator for 1 person is as large as the matrix is but its just for 1 person. But say that computer was the size of a whole world okk... but lets just say it was even 6 or 60 times bigger than that... And just this one persons simulator expanded 6 worlds and each world was just a mirrored server of its brother and sister worlds. Now say the GHDE was one world crashing or dying so maybe the one person who owns this simulation was on that world when the crash happened but because they were locked into the simulation ( or maybe thats how the simulation works you just move from planet to planet for a few years at a time, then they recover ( it might be a very eccological system that we have invented in the distant future (so nothing like the matrix) The GHDE is the backup of that person just waiting in the loop till either the simulation is fixed or linked back up at the cloud. Or maybe its just the backup that is stuck in a loop that will never be fixed ? but because the simulation is designed to run for milenia with no assistance it might just run that loop for thousands and thousands of years and the movie like that movie 50 dates and we are actually drew barrymore. ]
[Question] [ Imagine a small primitive humanoid civilization that developed independently in caves under the surface of Ganymede. We can assume there's enough light that filters through the crystalline surface to support life, and that there's enough air trapped in these caves for them to breathe. But let's say these people also happen have a gravity that's slightly greater than Earth's. How could that be the case? And why wouldn't Earth's astronomers have discovered that before now? Also, are there any other significant factors that would make it difficult for Earth-like life to thrive? Things that would be harder to hand-wave away? (The SF here is about as hard as cotton candy, so answers don't need to be completely realistic. I'd just like to avoid directly contradicting known observations any more than I need to.) [Answer] Don't change the mass - change the density. (Soft science ahead - all hands brace for impact!) One thing you probably shouldn't do is change Ganymede's mass. That would change its orbit (and its influence on the other moons) in unavoidable and easily observable ways. You'd have to do some elaborate hand-waving to make Ganymede appear to be its apparent mass while having a very different actual mass. To have a solution from changing the density will still require some hand-waving, but maybe it's allowable in a "cotton-candy-scifi" universe...you can be the judge of that! To attain earth-like gravity in your caves, we would have to: 1) make Ganymede's core unnaturally dense and its mantle unnaturally light, and 2) place your caves much closer to the core. The handwaving required to make this happen is two-fold: Firstly, to actually concentrate Ganymede's mass this much in the core, you could not use any naturally occurring material in the known universe. Materials made of conventional elements are too light, and electron- or neutron-degenerate matter would not remain compressed under earthlike gravity--it would explode. So...probably the best soft-sci-fi solution (without invoking artificial gravity generators) is that Ganymede's core contains degenerate matter which for some reason can't decompress. (Is it special matter? Is it in a fluke, naturally occurring statis field? Handwave!) Similarly, you'll need to handwave a material to compose Ganymede's mantle that is extremely light and somehow looks to our telescopes like a salty ocean. (See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganymede_(moon)#Composition> ) Which bring us to our next point... We will need to handwave some of our observations of Ganymede's physical appearance and its moment of inertia factor ( <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia_factor> ). To be honest, I don't think there will be any self-consistent and elegant way to explain away all of the observations we've made of it. But at the very least, try to have a reason for why Ganymede's surface is or appears to be made up of water ice and silicate rock, and why it appears to have a subsurface salty ocean and an iron-rich core. (To tackle the surface, I would offer this...our extremely light mantle-material is somehow also fairly tough and rigid, and the silicate rock of the surface is mostly layers of dust/fragments from meteor impacts.) [Answer] I'm sorry, but it's impossible. Ganymede has 2.4% of Earth's mass. That mass is what generates gravity. If it had more gravity then it would distort the orbits of the other moons and we would know about it. We know the mass of every substantial body in the solar system (and in fact some of them were detected because they were distorting the orbits of things we did know about and we were able to go look in the right place). <http://solarviews.com/eng/ganymede.htm> You need to come up with a way to achieve your goals that does not involve gravity as we know it. For example clawed feet to grasp the ice, magnetic boots, or even just bouncing around in ice tunnels are all possible. [Answer] Let's back track and figure out how we know the mass/gravity on Ganymede. [(Longer read here).](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-scientists-measure/) First off, we need to calculate the radius of the Earth. This has been known to a relatively high degree of accuracy for a very long time. Then we need to measure what Earth's 'gravitational pull', or mass, is, by using an object of a known mass. With this in hand, we can actually calculate the mass of the sun knowing its distance to Earth (again, science has proven this). From here we can measure the mass of any planet in our solar system with relative ease. With Jupiter's mass now known, we can actually watch Ganymede and calculate its mass as well. At any point, if there was an error (and rest assured, there isn't one large enough to accomplish what you request), it would affect our measurements of everything down that linked chain. So in your case, we'd have to have grossly mismeasured either Jupiter's orbital movements, or Ganymede's (or likely both to get the increase in mass you need). Suffice it to say, this is highly unlikely. On to your other question, check out the amount of radiation on Ganymede. At 8 rem a day, it is definitely going to be wreaking havoc on your earth-like life over time. [Answer] If the caves is rotating very quickly, the inhabitants would experience something they perceive as gravity while inside the cave. Upon stepping outside the cave they would become almost weightless. Imagine the inside Ganymede there is a sphere that rotates much faster than the planet itself. Why? You'll need a reason, like some other inhabitants wanted an amusement ride, but got bored and left, or something smacked into Ganymede just right. Between Ganymede's surface and the sphere maybe there's a layer of something liquidy, with very little friction. Inside that is a rapidly spinning sphere, or at least an annulus (donut). The inhabitants inside there would believe there was gravity outward toward the surface. Getting to them might require some kind of special arrangement, but if that arrangement is airtight, then your air will stay in place too. [Answer] Possibly there is some semi-scientific or magical form of gravity generators that generate gravity (as in many space operas like Star Trek and Star Wars). Gravity generators are used to provide artificial gravity in space ships in many space operas. And perhaps somebody placed such gravity generators beneath the floors of sealed air filled caverns under the surface of Ganymede. The light in those caverns may also be artificial. If the caverns are sealed and air tight the air will be kept in by the caverns, and the artificial gravity wouldn't be needed to retain atmosphere, but might be necessary to provide gravity for the health of the human population. In fact it is considered possible that there could be lifeforms in liquid oceans beneath the ice covered surfaces of Ganymede and other moons in the outer solar system. So what you are proposing is vaguely similar to that speculation, except that you propose small air-filled caverns in the ice instead of a world wide ocean beneath the ice. The combined effect of those gravity generators should increase Ganymede's overall gravity and make it seem a bit more massive than it actually is. But if those gravity generators are beneath only a tiny fraction of the Ganymedean surface the total effect may be very slight. And when space probes are put in orbit around Ganymede they may detect the effects of those gravity generators, just as the first lunar satellites detected mass concentrations (mascons) in the moon. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)> [1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_concentration_(astronomy)) And possibly analysis of the strange gravity readings may prove that they can't be the result of Ganymedean mascons but must be caused by generated gravity. [Answer] They can live inside a spinning centrifuge. By controlling the speed (and tilting the floor) it can generate any level of gravity-like acceleration needed, from Ganymede to Earth or higher. The centrifuge was left there by a previous, more advanced civilization that also left all their other life-support systems. Is Jupiter's intense radiation a problem for them? [Answer] Ganymede itself is packed with high-density materials such as ~~tungsten and uranium deposits resulting in an earth-like overall mass easily 50 times as huge as it should be.~~ Artificial Superheavy elements beyond anything ever manufactured in a lab. The Surface of Ganymede is covered in a thick layer of [Cavorite](http://www.yourdictionary.com/cavorite) Dust, resulting in its unusually high density being almost wholly cancelled out, what gravity/Mass-Effect that filters through the Cavorite is only a couple percent of its natural strength. Within the caves, gravity is unaffected and the inhabitants experience earth-normal conditions. If you want the surface itself to have earth-normal gravity, you could handwave that the Cavorite attenuates the effects of gravity so that it falls off very rapidly, eg: over a matter of meters. Shortening the length of the gravity waves to something you could measure on a yard-stick. Meaning you can walk around as normal, but throw a ball high into the air and it won't be coming down again. Addendum: Having gone away and looked up material densities, I realised that the required density in order for Ganymede to be literally 5000 times as massive as it appears is well beyond tungsten or uranium or even Osmium or Hassium. You need a material with a density of 779,634,464,751.96 kg/m^3 to do it. I have corrected my answer accordingly. [Answer] I think your only 'realistic' solution is a gravity generator with very limited range. If Ganymede's actual gravitational attraction was larger than it should be, it would affect its orbit, and the orbit of anything else that got near it, which would have been detected from afar by astronomers. A gravity generator (presumably built and then abandoned by some ancient species) that only reached a very short distance above the surface, so as the keep atmosphere and inhabitants firmly rooted, but not far enough to affect orbital characteristics should fill the bill. Naturally, a real gravitational field would not act that way, but since you're inventing a gravity generator that generates artificial gravity, you're entirely free to make that artificial gravity behave in a non-standard manner. [Answer] Some answers are a bit misleading - especially those quoting the Scientific American article. You can only get the mass of the primary object from simple orbital mechanics. So you can't get Ganymede's mass simply from observing the radius and period of its orbit around Jupiter (it's a pretty good way to get Jupiter's mass - but that's not the point). Any object at the radius of Ganymede would orbit Jupiter in the same period - regardless of its mass. For a sphere of given size, the gravitational field at the surface is depends on the density so that: $$ \rho = \frac{3g}{4\pi G r} $$ So if you want Earth-gravity on a planet the size of Ganymede, you'd need to make it out of material with a density of about $15\space g/cm^3$. This is pretty dense - about three times Earth's density. However, if Ganymede is mostly made of some very dense elements like Tungsten or Uranium (as mentioned by @Ruadhan) it would work. [Answer] Magnetizm Replace gravity with magnetizm. Denizens of your caves know only metal. No wood, no furs, no plastics. They wear steel, build from steel, and their food is.. complicated. Beneath the caves there is a powerfull source of magnetism - ancient spaceship or natural phenomenon. (it explains why they have so much iron to start with) So, all metallic objects are pushed down, and since people have nothing else, it works exactly like gravity. Except that people almost fly up if they are nude - but you can use that in your story too. [Answer] Ganymede is not a naturally formed moon; it is an alien spaceship that abducted people in the [insert] age who then defeated their captors and lived inside the spaceship, which then drifted until it was captured by Jupiter. The spaceship has of course artificial gravity and is built around a reactor in the core, but the reactor is on stand-by mode, only supplying the people living there with oxygen, water, etc. needed for their survival. They farm the alien and Earth plants the aliens gathered for study and maybe have some domestic animals, too, also originally gathered by the aliens. ]
[Question] [ Given the current geopolitical uncertainty and chaos, caused by the leaders of some of the current powers and super powers; New Zealand, Australia, Fiji and a number of other pacific islands join together to form the great and mighty\* federation of the United States of Oceania. \Ok the Great and Mighty part is a bit of an exaggeration. (However that is where you come in) The new constitution of the USO gives the mandate for the USO to do any and all reasonable* things in its power to to become a Superpower. "Superpower" is defined loosely as having "Excessive Economic, Political, Cultural and Military influence". "Reasonable" means anything as long as it is not: 1. Nukes (obvious and [historical reasons](https://nzhistory.govt.nz/politics/nuclear-free-nz)) 2. ICBMs (that path is too likely to lead directly to WW3, which would be bad, very bad) 3. Starting a war (nuf said) 4. Something that will look "bad" in the history books (if USO were to 'lose'). (e.g., 1930 German autobahns == reasonable and good idea; other 1930 German ideas == a (very) bad look in the history books, so not "Reasonable") I am not going to elaborate further, but you get the idea. The USO and its Constitutional mandate is in for the long game. So if it takes 20, 50, 100 years that is Ok (but sooner is better). So how would the United Stated of Oceania achieve this goal? [Answer] Invest in your education system stressing cutting edge technologies and bribe the finest teachers from around the world to move to your country and teach. Design the curriculum to be brutally difficult, then provide prizes and loan forgiveness to any students graduating with honors levels in any of the hard sciences. Encourage non-international corporate involvement in the education of these super students to build them into highly specialized teams with the best education and equipment imaginable. Set up a social machine which pumps out a new crop of super scientists every year, then assign them to explore any closed door research which might help solve the current global problems. Focus on famine, drought (clean water), desertification, and climate change and as progress is made on each of those fronts, license the technology (in black box form) to the current superpowers. Offer them fair prices in return for favored nation trade status. Slowly build an interrelated tree of beneficial technologies and as requests for technical disclosures arrive from experts in the open scientific community, entice those experts to immigrate to your country and join in your efforts to save the world. Become the most luxurious and full-filling place in the world for smart people, then watch as precious IQ points accumulate under your control. Intellect is ultimately the most valuable tool in any nation's arsenal. The road to becoming a national super power is paved with higher education. [Answer] So your USO wants to become a world leader. Actually that is understandable, especially given the current state of affairs around this globe. You mentioned military influence, but I will go for the other points first. For me, as a German, the US had been idolized in no small way during my youth, for being the leaders of the free world and whatnot. We have Anglicisms in your language, we wear American trousers and drink American soft drinks (but not American beer), we watch American movies, listen to American music. What this boils sown to is that when I was young, the USA were described as the model of a free and cool country. Let's make sure the USO takes on this role. We will start with universal basic income (UBI), and free access to education for any citizen who is interested. And we add gender equality and non-discrimination to the mix, as well as free use of public transport. This way, we increase happiness of our population (by removing existential dread via the UBI and by removing inequality), we increase the power of our economy via education and happiness, we reduce environmental problems via the public transport route. As a result, we soon get a population that likes living in the USO, and could not think of a better place on earth (As a big bonus, you do have almost all the really cool holiday destinations in your territory, too). Now the one thing you are missing is a good meme industry, a.k.a. movie industry. But i am pretty sure this will pop up all by itself. After all, UBI makes it a lot easier being an actor, or director, or writer. Producing movies, depicting your way of life, is the one superpower you need to make sure everybody knows you, and finds you cool. As for the military: I'd tread carefully there. You want your troops known to be strong enough to discourage any would-be invader. But you don't want to waste half your economic power on a military you don't normally need. You also want to demonstrate their strength at times. If you are very careful, you can send UNO troops to places where they are needed, provide disaster relief where necessary, and since you already have a meme industry, you wan to use that, too. So now you are THE super power, and you are here to stay. You have also advanced mankind a lot. Could I please become a citizen? [Answer] ### Skyhook Build a [space elevator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator). The best place to build a space elevator is at the equator. So build it in Indonesia. I would tend to place it towards the western part. Palau Tanahmasa is probably around the right area, although the western coast of Sumatra is also possible. Funding might be provided based on the markets of Singapore (an island in that area). Independence might be maintained by playing off the United States of American and China. Neither is willing to let the other dominate this area, leaving the USO independent between them. Since the space elevator will be the main way to launch things into space, this will give the country that manages it tremendous influence on space. The counterweight for the space elevator will operate under the USO's laws, and the USO can make it easy to launch space stations under their laws. This will give them outsized influence compared to their Earthbound population. They can also act as the law enforcement of space. So when two space communities have a legal dispute, they appeal to the USO to adjudicate. The USO also could police travel in space. Most things that require lots of electricity will move into space, where electricity comes from solar panels. This will give the USO outsized strength in the area of new energy production after fossil fuel burning is banned on Earth. ### Desalination It's also worth noting that Australia's comparatively low population is restricted by its large central [deserts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deserts_of_Australia). If it could desalinate cheaply, it could hydrate those areas, expanding its populable area. Mining in space is likely to be done by automation in the asteroid belt. The USO could bring back that technology to Earth and use it to build [saltwater greenhouses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater_greenhouse) on the coast of Australia. In addition, a canal could be dredged through the heart of Australia so that saltwater greenhouses could be built all the way through. Solar power could provide the electricity for this construction. Sun not shining? No work that day. But when the sun is shining, push on. This would be slow, but there's no real hurry. You're willing to wait a century. Similarly, the islands of the area may be connected by saltwater greenhouse bridges. These will provide water and crops for communities that will build in what is now open water. These also will provide food for land-based communities built on what used to be cropland. ### Antarctica Like Australia, Antarctica is an island continent in the South Pacific. If its icepack melts due to global warming, it will be available for colonization. Adding it to the USO would make the coalition much larger. Again, the USA, Russia, and China may regard dominance by the USO as better than dominance by each other. ### Luna Another large piece of real estate to which the USO would have superior access is the Moon. To get to the Moon from the Earth, people will need to launch into space. And the USO controls the main space launch facility, able to launch cheaper than anyone else. ### Population Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world by [population](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_(United_Nations)), after China, India, and the USA. Add in the Philippines, and it would jump past the USA. Traditional Oceania would add a more moderate amount, but that would still put it in the top four, even if the European Union was a single country. [Answer] One simple answer. ## Drill boys, drill The most powerful weapon today is oil and gas, with mineral deposits a close second. China is currently busy building artificial islands on unoccupied reefs to stake a claim to the oil and gas reserves underneath. Oil and gas are the reason the US kept Saddam Hussein sweet, and the reason the West went to war against him when he invaded Kuwait. Oil and gas are the reason we're good friends with the Saudis, who in every other respect are inimical to Western values. (Even the USSR was philosophically closer to the West than the despotism of the various Middle Eastern absolute monarchies.) Oil and gas are the reason Russia is still a significant world power, in spite of an economy which otherwise is dead on its feet - they literally have the power to turn off the lights in much of Europe. If your various small islands have banded together, they can reasonably stake a claim to the waters between, or at least to the minor islands between. Either way, they've now got a solid area of territorial waters which they can exploit. Territorial waters are only useful if you can enforce them, of course. Even international agreements are pointless if you can't make them stick. So militarily you need very few soldiers but an effective navy and air force. [Answer] # Below the Surface If they focused expanding downward into the ocean, their expansion would be uncontested and their technology would be if not ignored, but only viewed with curiosity. USO could be a step ahead of the rest of the world when catastrophe strikes. When the oceans rise, the USO has a tremendous advantage over everyone else, and as a bonus they can retreat from the surface and become untouchable by the countries that are surface bound. This could go either the humanitarian way, where the USO helps the rest of the world cope, and become world leaders... or they can use their undersea superiority to raid and destroy the now flooded regions of other nations and prevent them from getting a foothold in the sea. [Answer] There is a Russian and very left/Maoistic writer Alexander Rozov, who basically pulls this off in his fiction verse. I am quite sceptical both of his political views and of feasibility of that kind of a country getting airborne, but there's a book about that. Sadly, he slowly descented in late-Heinlein mode in the sequels, but I digress. # Meganesia Even without Australia and NZ, the small islands in Pacific get bundled up to a very anarchistic government. They basically bootstrap from: * no one is interested in Micronesia and what happens there (really?) * leftist terrorist cells are cool (doubt) * brain drain of highly educated and (if done right: motivated) "superfluous men" (doubt) * mercenaries (doubt it works right) * technological state of early 21 century, e.g. 3D printing and distributed fabrication (hello Mao, doubt it's cheaper than large-scale fab). Time-skip 20 years. The guys are a mix of ISIS (from Western view) and Communist China. Official state warfare doctrine is terrorism. The best way to fight the equivalent of six day war is: put A-bombs on moderately large drones and then drop them on the unsuspecting invasion fleet. Production and industry are decentralised islands per Mao. Politics and government is a mixture of extreme liberalism and Pol Pot. Meganesia acts as a counterbalance to Western democracies. It almost officially use espionage as an official science and research doctrine. Unofficial collaboration of border service and police with NZ, Australia, Papua New Guinea is in action. They venture to Africa (more of less like China in our world does). In local mafia clan wars meganesian mercenaries (not even military) are able to block satellite communications over an area for weeks (this is easy, just launch enough tinfoil scraps to orbit). At the same time Meganesia positions itself as an intellectual sanctuary for people not willing Western bigotry. For example, things like human cloning are welcomed and even encouraged, because, yay, science. --- This review of fiction shows that it is fully possible to create a superpower based in Oceania. Even is suspension of disbelief works well during reading, the reader may have questions afterwards. If you have less resources and a delayed start-up time (try founding a superpower in 21 century!), how would you manage? One thing one might borrow from Rozov is that the publicity of this superpower in the West would be bad. And, to get the state going, probably, they would need to commit quite some crimes, too. So the publicity might be not merely hot air. Another strong point of Rozov is that dual use technologies (even those not thought to be dual use), out of the box thinking, modern technical level, distributed fabrication, and widespread chemicals can also make warfare accessible. [Answer] Food scarcity and sea-level rise, my suggestion is that food needs to drive this, if you look at our current world food security situation (shaky at best) and then look at the potential of ocean farming schemes that have never been viable because of cost etc... then an oceanic superpower makes some sense. The great algal farms of the expanded pacific basin could replace the flooded farmlands of Asia and the Americas, and with the destruction of many of the great coastal cities of the world's current powers they'd be in a vulnerable and even dependent position vis-a-vis the new food supply centres of the world. [Answer] The key to Oceania being a world power: they don't really need so much to rise in power, but have the rest of the world decline. The standard answer is a global nuclear war, leaving Oceania relatively intact and much quicker to recover and expand, like the USA after WW2. Below is a less extreme version of their rise to power. --- Driven by the isolated nature of the many islands distributed throughout their territory, the USO invests heavily in research into localized manufacturing and energy production (specifically using advanced genetic engineering and nanotechnology). As cheap available fossil fuels supplies dwindle throughout the 21st century the global economy undergoes a global recession; Shipping cost rise making world wide distribution of goods less economical. Energy costs rise across the world negatively effecting all sectors of the global economy. A few wars could make this situation very much worse, such as a large destabilizing war in the middle east, or a large war involving China and other Asian manufacturers. The USO however, having developed key technologies finds itself independent from the energy and manufacturing crisis of the rest of the world. Additional breakthroughs in undersea mining and seawater mineral extraction technology grant them a vast resource base to draw on. As the rest of the world declines the USO expands economically growing into a world power. [Answer] No, Australia and New Zealand and parts of South East Asia would be possible. But Oceania as a whole is a dead loss as a Super Power because most of it is just small Island countries with no industrial resources due to their geology. So they would just be a drain rather than an asset, they cannot sustain their own populations unaided and their primary income is from the diaspora. Most of Oceania was colonised by Europeans quite a while ago and then given independence precisely because they have nothing to offer the first World except a market for rubbish goods. The parts that are ex continental were not given independence so easily because they have natural resources that can be exploited. [Answer] In the year XXXX Australia and NZ are released/break off from the states of Commonwealth as the situation in Europe escalates. EU breaks down, as many states start to leave and when Greece says it is not able to pay its debt back, German banks are ruined. Several european states are quickly dominated by foreing economies. Share prices rapidly plummet down and are quickly bought by Russians. Without its buyers China starts to press on USA, to pay back its' astronomical debts. Rich companies start to control USA and large portions of land are sold as a form of repayment. As conflicts in the middle-east start to settle down and I.S. is defeated... Egypt and Syria, ally them selves with The New Persia (Iran and Iraq) and starts to support Russian Federation as the new northern economic power. Without the support of other states Australia has to develop its own industry, the plan is to create industrial zones in the dry main land, the plan is funded by a rich yet mysterious investor from Singapore. As people start to move into the main land, projects for terraforming the desert start to progress quicker than expected. NZ is cooperating with Australia, supplying them with agricultural goods. It is not enough, so Australia looks for partners in Asia. Vietnam and Laos profit from their new trade agreements. Soon other island states start to join in. Japan starts to supply Australia with technology and United Korea (I hope that happens after the olympic games) doesn't want to fall behind. As the small island states grow more dependent on A and NZ, ideas about creating a federation start to pop up and USO is born. With the other former economic giants crushed under their own weight USO, China, USA and RF are only remaining. USO starts to invest into Africa and southern America, creating a new granary for themselves and also supplying their new industry. How is this? [Answer] > > "Superpower" is defined loosely as having "Excessive Economic, Political, Cultural and Military influence". > > > AFAIK Superpower is a relatively new term, I would be surprised if I learned that was a term referring to the USA or any other nation before WWII. My only previous understanding was that the term referenced the point that it was infeasible to attack said Superpower nation because at a minimum the destruction of the attacker was assured or, at worst mutual destruction was assured (MAD). The USO could become a Superpower for solely economic reasons by having a strong economic basis and outstripping all rivals. Given the current global political climate this would likely lead to war even though it would not necessitate starting one. The progression to Superpower would start with the USO forming an economic alliance. Taking control of the United Nations might get the USO to Superpower status also if is is sufficiently strong politically and especially if they are culturally strong and militarily strong also, although, in that case, unless it is by consensus, many member nations might leave the UN. [Answer] The current definition for a "world superpower" came post WW2 and was very loosely defined as a country who has all of the following attributes in great forms: "economic, military, technology, and cultural strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence." The lands that this definition was applied to were either large landlocked countries (the U.S.A. and Russia) and lands right next to large land masses (the British empire at the time). But the conventional definition of "world superpower" doesn't conform with the type of nation Oceania is or could be. What makes Oceania completely different is that it's more spread out than any other country in the world, it's not landlocked, and is a series of islands that're the homes of the Polynesian people. Most people don't know of its history and how despite the times and events going on around its borders in ancient days, it remained very powerful and influential without having a central landmass from which to govern things. THEY ADAPTED TO IT, SO IN ESSENCE THEY DIDN'T NEED ONE. This is an empire of people who not only sailed the entire Pacific Ocean, but colonized nearly every island, the coasts of North America, and all of South America long before the Vikings ever thought of sailing. Due to the lack of technology to stay in communication with each other, each generation grew further apart as their empire grew until it came apart under its own weight. Those issues can be alleviated with modern technology. Their main source of food and way of life was seafood and trade, both of which are in high demand today, but apparently today in that area there's a lack of proper balanced management. It's over-fished. It'd take a complete government overhaul of it to rectify the issue. Threat of war could make a nation like this think of merging with known friendly nations to stand a better chance at survival, especially with ones they share a history with. If the world went to war and economic pressures kick in, which they will, it's very possible that the Oceania we know today would be led by Australia, with New Zealand becoming a part of it. They have a lot of cultural and strategic history together. Australia has proven itself capable of being a financial/industrial powerhouse with a strong government and culture not too different than the U.S.A.'s. A key component would be a strong sense of a unified national identity across the board. In other words, the people of the Oceania islands, Australians, and New Zealanders would have to have the spirit, desire, and will to do so. Otherwise, it would fall apart. If managed correctly by the Australian and NZ entities, the food/seafaring management issues of Oceania could be fixed and balanced out, which would take care of food needs, boost local net income, and gather savings by a lot. Australia has the military know-how, which could be bolstered a bit through the improved economic management and money earned off of trade and other areas not mentioned through their unison. NZ has a strong industrial culture with good economic and seafood trade knowledge that would play a key role in helping to manage Oceania issues. It would be a different kind of "superpower" than traditionally seen, but a power house it would be if done right. [Answer] [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zuCBl.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/zuCBl.jpg)> The new constitution of the USO gives the mandate for the USO to do any and all reasonable things in its power to to become a Superpower. > > "Superpower" is defined loosely as having "Excessive Economic, Political, Cultural and Military influence". > > > So how would the United Stated of Oceania achieve this goal? > > > Given that Oceania is quite literally the antipode of economic power, and is nothing but sea water and desert, the only way to make the USO into a world power is to move the North American continental plates into the South Pacific. ]
[Question] [ Given that you can travel back in time and have a baby there, or alternatively, send your baby back in time, would it be possible that this baby one day becomes your own mother (gives birth to you)? In other words, you would be your own grandmother. This is intended to be a purely biological/genetic question. My main concern is that under normal circumstances you inherit about 25% of each of your grandparents' genes. Here however, you are one of your grandparents, so you would have to inherit 100% of this grandparent's genes and 0% of the other three grandparents. However, I have only limited biological knowledge, so I'm not sure if these assumptions are accurate. Another concern is incest. As you are your own grandmother, the one you have sex with will be your grandfather. (Again, note that for the scope of this question I'm only interested in the biological concerns of incest, not the social/cultural ones) --- I have two ideas of a solution that I'd like to share, but I'm not sure if they are biologically possible: 1. Your egg that is about to become your daughter (and also mother) contains the exact same portion of DNA as your mother's egg that became you. From what I know, eggs (and also sperms) contain a random sample of ~50% of your mother's genes. So, could it be possible (though unlikely) that this random sample contains exactly those 50% that you previously inherited from your mother? This way, you and your mother/daughter only differ by the 50% of genes that the two fathers contributed to each of you. Genetically, you are half siblings. 2. Denote the two fathers `F1` and `F2`. Also, denote yourself `M1` and your daughter/mother `M2`. Via some bootstrap paradox mechanism (see below), it just so happens that your genetic fingerprint contains `1/3` of `F1`'s genes and `2/3` of `F2`'s genes, or in other words `M1 = 1/3 F1 + 2/3 F2`. If now `M1` has a child with `F1`, it will be `1/2 M1 + 1/2 F1 = 1/6 F1 + 1/3 F2 + 1/2 F1 = 2/3 F1 + 1/3 F2 =: M2` and if this `M2` has a child with `F2`, it will be `1/2 M2 + 1/2 F2 = 1/3 F1 + 1/6 F2 + 1/2 F2 = 1/3 F1 + 2/3 F2 = M1` My concern with this is that, even though the ratios of genes match, it's still unlikely that the randomly sampled egg of your daughter happens to contain exactly those genes that are needed to create you, and not a sibling of yours. Please feel free to uncover any flaws in these two solutions. You may also use them as starting point for your own solution. Or, you may come up with something entirely different. But maybe, I'm missing something fundamental about how genetics/inheritance works. In that case please provide an explanation of why this absolutely never ever could work, no matter how obscure and incestuous the scenario might be. --- In case it's relevant to answer the question, here is how time travel is supposed to work: * Time is deterministic. Time travelers can of course try to change something, but they are doomed to fail. Everything will happen as it has always happened. Maybe this fact will resolve my concerns regarding unlikely events that I raised above, because they, well, just happen. * The bootstrap paradox (or causal loop: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_loop>) is a thing. There are several examples of items and information that don't have an origin, they just exist. For example a time traveler takes some book back in time and hands it over to the young author before he has written it or even thought about it. And only because he reads his own book from the future he knows how to write it. The mother-daughter-paradox I'm asking for would be just another example of a bootstrap paradox, where in that case the genes (or some portion thereof) would have no origin. [Answer] In terms of the biological mechanisms, you have two major mechanisms that come into play: The first is the random segregation of chromosomes during meiosis, the generation of the egg cell. The egg cell will contain only one of each chromosome, and you need it to be the "maternal" chromosome each time. This is unlikely (1/2^23 for each generation) but unlikely is not a problem. The second is the crossover mechanism that occurs during meiosis. The parental chromosomes are not directly passed on, they mix with each other and this means you get genetic recombination. So chromosome 1 in an egg cell isn't the same as the maternal chromosome 1 of the individual, or the paternal chromosome 1. It's a shuffled mix of both maternal and paternal chromosomes. The exceptions to this rule are chromosome Y which is passed on directly from father to son and the mitochondrial chromosome which is passed on directly from mother to daughter. It's estimated that crossover occurs around 75 times for human females (55 for human males), but there is nothing biologically that seems force the crossover event, aside from overwhelmingly high random chance. While there doesn't appear to be any mechanism that would check that a crossover has occured in order to determine if the meiosis is allowed to occur, it's extremely likely that it is physically impossible for the chromosomes to all be present during meiosis without enduring crossover events. Not everything is known about how crossover events are regulated but the systems seems to be rigged to always have crossover events occur during meiosis. This makes it a little trickier to argue that it happened despite being unlikely because it might really defy fundamental physical forces. That being said, ignoring the crossover problem and suggesting that it is simply forced random chance seems reasonable enough because there are no known "checks" that crossover has in fact occurred that would stop a cell from completing meiosis if it hasn't. If you want a stronger case, I would suggest explaining that the mother passes on 1/2 of her genes and her entire mitochondrial DNA to M2, F1 passes on 1/2 of his genes to M2. Now M2 has half of your genes and half of F1's genes. Thinking about it a little deeper, I think that the problem you try to solve is not the one you outlined. You're asking if it's possible to "replace" your own grandmother, but you frame the problem as needing to provide 100% of your own genes. M2 and F2 each pass on half of their genes to you. So you regain 1/4 of your original genes from M2. But you also have 1/2 of F2's genes and 1/4 of F1's genes. Why can't the 1/4 of F1's genes happen to correspond to exactly 1/4 of your genes, and the 1/2 of F2's genes happen to correspond to exactly 1/2 of your genes? To think about it a different way, you already know that your maternal grandparents, together, had 1/2 of your genes. You also know that your father has the other half. By going back in time and becoming your own grandmother you're only changing the maternal 1/4, but you know that this 1/4 already existed. The case in which you need to provide 100% of your own genes is if you go back in time and, instead of replacing your own grandmother by having a child with your grandfather, you try to become your own grandmother by having a child with someone who is not genetically related to you in the original timeline. The interesting thing about your question, though, is that it's only possible if a girl replaces her maternal grandmother. Replacing your paternal grandmother breaks the direct heritage of the mitochondrial genome. Conversely, a boy cannot become his maternal grandfather. [Answer] You answered it yourself with your time travel rules: "Unlikely" doesn't come into play with time travel. It happened that way, it must have happened that way, so probability is 1. [Answer] It sounds like you're looking for a single timeline. The only way that works is that you always were your own grandmother and just weren't aware of it. The genes you inherited from your other three grandparents happened to replace the identical genes you inherited from them and then took with you into the past. This is, of course, extremely unlikely, but it must have happened that way because otherwise there would be a paradox. The only other way to avoid a paradox is for you going back to create a new timeline that branches from the old one at the point where you replaced your grandmother, and in the new timeline, your granddaughter would not have the same genes as you, i.e. would be a different person. [Answer] You are overlooking Case 3 (which is the inverse of Case 1) In the (extremely unlikely, but still valid) scenario that your mother passes down to you exactly the genes that her father passed to her, then you can could inherit 0% from yourself. Statistically, this situation (the "inheriting 0% of DNA from one grandparent", not the time-travel) isn't unlikely to have happened at least once - there's less than a 1-in-8,388,608 chance of it happening, but even with 10-million-sided dice, rolling 100-billion times gives decent odds on getting at least 1 to land on 10-million. It's not impossible, just [highly improbable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy). Oversimplified, assume that your DNA is merely 2 pairs of chromosomes, `AB:CD`, instead of 23 pairs. Your Paternal Grandparents are `AS:TU` and `VW:XD`, and pass on the half-pairs `A:T` and `W:D` to your Father, `AW:TD`. You inherit sequence `A:D` from him. Your Maternal Grandparents are `YB:CZ` - who passes on `B:C` - and yourself (`AB:CD`) - passing on any pair `?:?` - leading to Mother `?B:C?`1. You inherit `B:C`, for `AB:CD` without any (non-mitochondrial) DNA appearing spontaneously (i.e. being inherited from yourself, in a bootstrap paradox) Of course, as alluded to in that last sentence (and covered in more detail in [Thymine's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/170393/47510)), the bit that scuppers you there is the Mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down the Maternal line2 - much as the Y chromosome is passed down the Paternal line... What this actually means is you can't be your mother's mother, and you can't be your father's father, but you can be your mother's father! (But not your father's mother, because you would then inherit your own X chromosome from your father3) --- 1: Your Mother could be any of `AB:CD`, `AB:CC`, `BB:CD` or `BB:CC`. It doesn't actually matter, since we will be discarding those chromosomes 2: There are exceptions, such as [heteroplasmy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroplasmy) (where mitochondrial DNA is inherited from both parents), which could lead to inheriting mitochondrial DNA from your maternal grandfather instead of yourself 3: Unless your father was [XXY instead of XY](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome), and inherited the extra X chromosome from his father. This generally leads to infertility, but there are medical workarounds for that [Answer] This is of course a variation of the grandfather paradox. [Here is an interesting video about it](https://youtu.be/XayNKY944lY). My take on this is: # No. Even when omitting the obvious paradoxes and creating the situation where you replace your grandmother, you are not just the sum of your grandparents' genes. You are also the result of (however minute) random mutation. You could obviously go back and get pregnant from your grandfather, but the grandchild you produce would not be you. Therefore you and your grandchild could not exist on the same time line. [Answer] You don't need to inherit 100% of your own genes. You inherit 25% of genes from yourself (grandparent 1), the rest is coming from your other grandparents. It is irrelevant that the remaining 75% of genes from grandparent 1 is the same as yours, as they are discarded. They just happen to coincide with the parts you inherit from your other grandparents. You didn't "become" your own grandparent, you have always been your own grandparent, you just didn't know. [Answer] > > This is intended to be a purely biological/genetic question. My main concern is that under normal circumstances you inherit about 25% of each of your grandparents' genes. Here however, you are one of your grandparents, so you would have to inherit 100% of this grandparent's genes and 0% of the other three grandparents. > > > You are overthinking it. The situation is the same as if one of your grandparents had identical genes to you by pure chance, without time travel involved at all. You inherit 25% of each of your grandparents' genes. You have 25% of Alice's genes, 25% of Bob's genes, 25% of Carol's genes, and 25% of Dave's genes. It just so happens that 75% of Alice's genes are identical to the ones that Bob, Carol and David have as well. Does this cause any paradox? No, not really. Since you inherit 25% of your genes from yourself, those genes are stuck in a causal loop. As with any causal loop in science-fiction, those genes can be anything you want - you could be anything from a normal human to a quarter-demon that's still able to mate with humans. (Just please don't go into detail about the mating mechanics of quarter-demons, okay?) [Answer] ### Maybe. Time travel introduces all kinds of bizarre elements which don't necessarily interact well with one another. If your only constraint here is that one individual replace their own grandmother in a single instance, and that reality itself will bend to accommodate that while maintaining continuity, it is perhaps not literally impossible for this to happen through natural-esque mechanisms. But the overarching issue is that, if people are free to travel into the past and do whatever they want but cannot change outcomes, then you've fully defined the system. It's that assertion that describes what's possible, not real mechanisms interacting with a fantasy mechanism with immutable properties. Because you've already fully specified the outcome, and that outcome has no particular basis in reality, then the word possible doesn't operate here in the same way it does in everyday English. --- Some problems: A view which begins with a metric of genes-in-common is too simplistic to describe this situation. Key events in human reproduction include mutations, crossing over, and environmental factors, including epigenetic factors, all of which exist independently of genes-in-common. Further, it's trivially possible to have the same proportion of genes in common while not actually having the same, specific genes in common, and for continuity you really would need the latter. Let's define A as the "original" grandmother, B as the mother (who is to be borne to her own time-travelling daughter), and C as the time traveler. These introduce several (million) points of failure into the scheme beyond simple availability of specific genes. In the broadest case, which you've considered, it's entirely possible that C will lack genetic information which B inherited from A, and therefore C cannot pass them to B. That situation would mean that B cannot be generated from C. The other issues I mentioned include an extreme degree of randomness-- during crossing over the same chromosomes being replicated by the same process under the same circumstances may see alleles reorganized in new ways-- it's the same gene, more or less, but it may not work in quite the same way as the original did. Mutations also matter, in a similar broader way. The molecules which make up DNA may be altered by a variety of factors, literally changing the blueprint which defines the organism. A similar issue is introduced by epigenetic factors-- environmental effects which influence which genes are expressed, and how often. There are many, many other factors which would matter here (this is a poor summary of a miniscule subset of relevant information). But the underlying mechanisms you're hoping to rely on are far more complex than what was presented in the question, and so a solution that delves into that level of detail would automatically require more detail in order to be even naively valid. --- The solutions Of course, time travel itself is a totally undefined activity in real-world terms, and so you can introduce any properties or constraints that you want onto it. This would be enough to overcome any conceivable problem with the scheme, as the "rules" of time travel can simply override them by fiat. Most of the first-order problems with this sort of loop are a result of randomness: which genes are available, and which specific events occur during cellular reproduction and organism development. If time travel inherently enforces continuity, you can hand-wave all of that away. C simply would have the correct genetic information, present in the correct configurations, in the correct structures, at the correct times to replace A silently. In short, because you've already asserted that the outcomes of events which have "already" occurred cannot be changed, then all possible problems simply fix themselves or are conveniently elided. You don't need any mechanism to do this, because it's all time magic in the first place. The only question is how "the timeline" enforces continuity in the face of behaviors which would, left to themselves, alter the course of events. If C went back in time and tried to murder her grandfather prior to B's conception by putting a loaded, working gun to his head and pulling the trigger, what specifically would cause that effort to fail, given that your time travel rules demand that it must fail? I would posit that the bigger problem is that, because A gave birth to B, there is no way to change events such that C would give birth to B. If time is fully deterministic, as indicated in the question, then it's questionable (at best) for that change to take place-- what would A be doing instead of being pregnant and delivering B? [Answer] I dont think you can be a biological mother or grandmother, but you can be an adopted mother/grandmother to yourself. In the time travel model assumptions. For example, is time effect fixed, or is it cyclic? If it's fixed, you cannot be your own grandmother because when you go back, your current self won't be affected as it will continue as is, and an alternative timeline will start but that cannot impact the current one. In case it's cyclic, such that when you go back, time resets till the time you entered. Then, let's say you born your mother or your self, the kid wont be 'the mother' you have, or 'yourself' as kid will inherit from you. In that case, your mother or yourself will have only the dad as commonality (assuming the father stays the same), which will be biologically not safe (your mother, or you) will be the offspring of an ensest relation. In either case, being the adopted parent might be the safest bet. ]
[Question] [ I'm building a sci-fi world set a couple hundred years into the future. If humans were to suddenly discover FTL space travel (which are handwaved away as generic sci-fi warp speed or something) in a nearby year like 2020, then by something like the year 2400, surely humans would have colonized tons of planets. The problem is though, I don't have the time to write down ultra-detailed histories or map out entire continents for thousands of planets, so how can I force the humans to only discover a few planets (say, 40 or 50) and stop, or at least slow down the rate of discovery massively? [Answer] Wrong tool for the job. > > The problem is though, I don't have the time to write down ultra-detailed histories or map out entire continents for thousands of planets, so how can I force the humans to only discover a few planets (say, 40 or 50) and stop, or at least slow down the rate of discovery massively? > > > You don't need to write down this amount of detail. You only need to write down the detail that is needed for your story. The rest is just sketch, outline. Also this is wrong : > > If humans were to suddenly discover FTL space travel in a nearby year like 2020, then by something like the year 2400, surely humans would have colonized tons of planets. > > > It's 2020 you have cutting edge tech that allows FTL. This is a long, long, long way from having a transport infrastructure capable of moving thousands (or tens of thousands) of people to form a viable colony. And all the kit they'll need to survive (animals, plants, seeds ). At least some of the people will need to be highly qualified (engineers, doctors, even police - stuff happens, the list is quite long). They have to be young (to produce children) yet experienced and knowledgeable enough to be expert in their fields as well as being psychologically suitable. These people won't necessarily be easy to find for what will be a one way trip. And who pays for this and why ? Let's see world governments and major corporations thrash that one out ! Just agreeing who pays (and what they get for their money) would take a long time, maybe the odd war or ten. But even if you can agree all this, traveling to a new planet is not at all the same as colonizing it. Is it safe ? Are there microbes or chemicals that will kill us - this is for the long haul, so those studies have to be comprehensive and will take decades - perhaps a century per planet. Which bits of the planet ate stable ? Which are prone to flooding, earthquakes, wild fires ? What's the weather like ? This won't be like Star Trek. No way are four guys beaming down (without environmental suits) with a couple of tricorders and half an hour later we're colonizing the place. It's a century of study and testing just to check whether it's possible at all and what the best options are for long term sustainable survival. So even if you nail down FTL you're looking at maybe four planets with colonies after 400 years ! OK, we'll get better at that with practice and time, but it's not going to be hundreds of colonies, it's going to be ten, maybe. Factor in a single disaster and everyone who doesn't want it done will create a political climate on Earth that makes it impossible to get any more colonies started for ten for even fifty years. So politics, money and the requirements of science and engineering will slow this down naturally. [Answer] Expand quickly initially and then have expansion limited by lack of desire. Most humans live near cities. They might like the idea of more space, but apparently they value nearness to civilization more. There are no cities on frontier planets. So most people who don't leave initially won't be that interested. The initial colonization might happen quickly, as the government could encourage it as a solution to conflicts. Not happy in Syria? Ship them off to New Syria, New Levant, or New Kurdistan. No need for refugees in Europe. Also, there are a certain number of people who find the concept of space colonization appealing. They might power the first few waves. People who reject local laws might move. For example, polygamists might found the planet of Deseret. As these groups establish planets though, they leave fewer and fewer people on Earth with similar beliefs. Or people can choose existing planets. For example, Muslims from the United States might go to New Levant, as there is already a Muslim community there. These are planets. They're huge. Not every community will need a whole planet. Some will be satisfied with a continent or even an island like New Zealand or Madagascar. ### Not enough population It's also worth noting that in richer countries, fertility has dropped below replacements levels. It used to be common to expect a need for sharp limitations to the number of children per family. But the actual problem is increasingly that there are not enough children. If our population is shrinking, then why expand to other planets? ### Expensive FTL You can also make your FTL drive arbitrarily expensive to use. Maybe we know how to go to new planets, but most people don't want to pay to do so. Or it requires a resource that is currently singular and no one wants to build a new one. E.g. to fuel an interstellar ship requires a gigantic solar array and takes a year; that's less than four hundred ships total. No one wants to devote the resources to building a second one. ### No inhabitable planets Most planets may be uninhabitable. So living there might require massive terraforming, which can take centuries. Consider the Earth a mere three billion years ago, prior to the [Great Oxygenation Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event). There was life on Earth, but it was not anything compatible with us. Most planets might be more like [Venus](https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/F_The_Planet_Venus_5-8.html), where the atmosphere would be poisonous to us. Or like Mars, where there is no atmosphere. ### Alien conflict Perhaps the planets are already inhabited. The aliens tell us that we can have so many planets and no more. We are already surrounded by other civilizations. Beyond our fifty planets, there are no more available. [Answer] # Few planets are habitable There are a lot of planets out there. But given that we might have only a limited FTL capacity (like 2c or something), then there might not be a lot of planets immediately accessible. Lets say that only those stars within 100 ly are able to have been colonized for various reasons including speed of movement. Keep in mind, if you can only travel/communicate at 2c, then it takes 50 years to even get from Earth to a place that far away. That is a disincentive to colonization by itself. ### How many planets within 100 ly? Solsystem has summaries of known stars within 100 ly for spectral classes [A](http://www.solstation.com/stars3/100-as.htm), [B](http://www.solstation.com/stars3/100-bs.htm), [F](http://www.solstation.com/stars3/100-fs.htm), [G](http://www.solstation.com/stars3/100-gs.htm), [K](http://www.solstation.com/stars3/100-ks.htm), and [M](http://www.solstation.com/stars3/100-ms.htm). There are 80 type A and B stars, and those are probably not suitable for forming appropriate planets. F, G, and K have 303, 512, and 947. These are probably the most likely stars for a habitable planet as we know it. M are the red dwaves, of which there are 2000+. So all in all, there are in the range of 4000 stars within 100 ly. Right now the current estimates are in the range of [1 planet per star](http://www.caltech.edu/content/planets-abound), so we can estimate 4000 planets withing 100 ly. ### Are any of these planets suitable for a colony? Now, many of the planets will be gas giants. Many others will be too close to the star (Mercury), too far from the star(Pluto, if it were still a planet), without an atmosphere (Mars), with a hostile atmosphere (Venus), etc. It would be very reasonable to say that no planet matches Earth's conditions well. Let say the most Earth-like planet has about 1g, about 1 bar of atmosphere, and an average surface temperature -40 C. Sounds pretty Earth-like! Its a much better colonization candidate than Mars! On the other hand, it also sounds exactly like Antarctica, and nobody lives there. Sure scientists are all over, and without treaties there might be some mining, but no one has 'colonized' and set up shop with their families. It is just too hostile. I think that even the best of your 4000 nearby planets will be too hostile to colonize. ### Are any of these planets even suitable for scientists and miners? Now, lets walk back that similarity to Earth a bit. What are the changes that a planet has a near-Earth temperature, pressure and gravity? All those are necessary to even have a scientific station on the surface. For example, Venus has Earth-like gravity, but the crushing pressure and ridiculous temperatures means that it is very unlikely any humans would live on the surface until the far-future. Mars, on the other hand, has a potentially dangerous to health low gravity and no atmosphere to speak of. Any colony of the surface would need support from Earth for decades to keep it working. While that might be appropriate for Mars, since it is so close, it is increasingly unlikely with distance that there is the money and political will to support such a colony. Now, for science and mining the cost of maintaining an outpost might be well worth it, so it is much more likely that you will see such outposts in other systems. ### Terraforming takes a long time Just as a last note, your timeline isn't really long enough for terraforming either. Perhaps Mars, being right next door, could be partially terraformed within 400 years, but for planets years of travel away, the likelihood that enough resources were sent to give terraforming more than a start is low. ### Gravity wells are expensive The last note is that going down into a gravity well is expensive. The hardest part of space travel from Earth is blasting things into space. Any planet with similar gravity to Earth would have a similar problem. In general, it is easier if you can just stay in space. If you really want to colonize, and all the potential planets are too hot, or without atmosphere or whatever, why not just put a space station in orbit and colonize space? # Conclusion Given the likely paucity of planets very similar to Earth, it is completely reasonable that no planets have been colonized by 2400. After all, no one has colonized Antarctica for ~200 years since its discovery. A much more likely condition is that the most mineral rich or otherwise valuable ~50 of the nearby 4000 star systems have some sort of mining or research outpost in them. In cases where there is something interesting on the planet itself (like, life) there might be research stations on the planet's surface. But otherwise, most economic activity would be done in space, if possible, to avoid the cost of gravity wells. Finally, if there were people who wanted to leave the sol system real bad for whatever reason, it seems likely that they would colonize in a space station with conditions amenable to human life, instead of on a hostile planet's surface. [Answer] OK, so you have FTL, but the question is, how much FTL? FTL doesn't mean "any speed you like". Maybe you can go double the speed of light. It still takes about 2 years to get to the next nearest star, and maybe 10s or 100s of years to get to the habitable planets. Simply make the maximum speed be whatever you need it to be, to give the radius of exploration which will provide your desired number of planets! [Answer] Well you can take the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is to put them in a very dire and resource draining conflict. It could be a war with aliens or with each other, or even something more devious like the discovery of some type of dangerous life form that can survive in space or seems to be on every new planet they find (think the Xenomorph). The hard way is to design some type of obstacle to the travel itself. Maybe there is some type of cosmic background radiation that slows or even stops FTL travel and just so happens to be very weak in the areas your humans have colonized, but is much stronger everywhere else. Or maybe they travel by using wormholes which are rapidly becoming harder to find. I think this way is slightly more difficult because it requires you to figure out how FTL travel works in the story. Obviously these aren't your only options, but they might work for you. [Answer] You don't have to slow down planet finding at all. We've found lots of planets already, yes. But, none of them to our knowledge are habitable by humans. Even spectroscopy can't verify that a planet is habitable. Sure, there may be water, but there may also be incredible gravity, or the planet is just that bit too close to the sun to be temperate, or it may be tidally locked to its sun, making the ring of dusk the only habitable area (assuming the water is there), etc. The truth is that if we discovered FTL technologies in the next couple of years, it's entirely plausible that it could take a couple of hundred years to find one of the exoplanets that's ripe for colonisation. Finding 40 or 50 means you'd probably have to speed up exoplanet detection and FTL exploration & scouting because the percentage of habitable planets out of those we've found is going to be incredibly low. [Answer] There are a couple of ways you could handle this: ## Weaken FTL Travel * Make FTL Travel Infrastructure Dependent: This can take a couple of forms. One is that FTL depends on wormholes, or other physical characteristics that only exist in certain places. Another is that it works more like a railroad. That you have to put things down ahead of a ship for it to travel at FTL speeds (One hypothetical version of the Albucierre drive does exactly this by using pre positioned masses to maintain a warp bubble). So while you can travel between already colonized areas at FTL speeds, the frontier advances at less than c. * Mild FTL Travel: You can travel at faster than light speeds, but you can only do so at twice the speed of light. This is still very fast, but would limit the number of settled planets to a considerable degree. ## Make Large Parts of the Galaxy Uninhabitable * Very Few Planets Worth Inhabiting or Colonizing: Pretty self explanatory, but inhabitable planets could be very rare. Thus fairly few have been found. * Hazards Make Large Swathes of the Galaxy Dangerous: Very intense radiation from the Galaxy's core could make large regions of space impassable for transit and uninhabitable. Alternately, very strong extragalactic radiation or other hazards could make star systems on the edge of the galaxy uninhabitable. [Answer] I think what you want is to slow down discovery of potential habitable planets. This requires the ability to detect potential life signs on exoplanets. One way to stop it is to have a government that refuses to fund the required technology. What the government would specifically need to not fund is the development of planetary coronagraphs. This could possibly be due to collusion between the government and a corporation, or other entity, that would benefit from decreased colonization. Coupled with a space telescope with sufficient resolution to see the exoplanets as points of light, the coronagraph blocks the light from the host star and incorporates a spectrometer that can detect life related gases (like oxygen, water vapor, methane, etc). Possibly the first to be launched is a planetary coronagraph that incorporates the PISCES integral field spectrograph on the WFIRST telescope, scheduled to be launched in the 2020s. You stop the flow of $$ and the research and development comes to a screeching halt. Planetary coronagraph (skip to Section 4. Extrasolar planets): <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronagraph> Planetary coronagraph with PISCES on WFIRST: <https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20150020906.pdf> [Answer] ## No economical incentives When the New World was colonized, a group of pilgrims could finance the ship and equipment they needed to reach and build their new home. You can make FTL travel as cheap or expensive as you like, but i'd imagine a space ship at least in the first few hundreds of years to be pretty expensive, plus all the equipment needed to create a colony on a planet that has a completely different ecosphere than earth. This will need a financial backer willing to spend a few billion dollars, and financiers expect a return on their investment. A colony might pay of eventually, but it will take quite some time. Not a lot of companies will be willing to spend money with (maybe!) a break-even in 100 years. I guess Elon Musk would gladly finance such an endeavour, and there will be a few others. Also, every major government will like to grab some land for themselves (but there will be political ramifications up to and including war about the choice pieces of real estate), but after the first wave of enthusiasts, economic reality will set in and the colonization efforts will slow down a lot. [Answer] It's often useful to compare a proposed reality to the real world. At the moment we have the knowledge of how to make transports that could travel reasonably rapidly to Mars, even more rapidly to the Moon. We can also reach all the other bodies in our solar system. But I notice a significant lack of colonization on Mars, the moon, or anything else in our own solar system. Why not? Because it's devastatingly inhospitable, and we lack all the other necessary science advancements, like the ability to create a living biosphere. Our best effort at this was Biosphere 2, and look what a complete comedy of errors that debacle was. So even if we develop really awesome FTL travel, so that we can visit any planet on any star in the galaxy and come back within an hour... we'd do that. We'd come back. Astronomers and astronauts and planetary scientists would go out, study these planets for an 8-hour work day, then commute back home and put their feet up under earth gravity, with the windows open to the earth air, and the earth birds singing, eating earth food. So... colonization? Why? Sure, there'll be a minority of people that want to set up a colony just because it sounds romantic, or better than their existing life, or something. And some will even be willing to fund that dream. But given that there are almost certainly approximately zero other planets in the galaxy with breathable atmospheres, what's out there for them, that wouldn't also exist in an underground apartment right here on earth? Really, there are very few draws I can see. Business/government: * Installing, maintaining and operating terraforming or mining equipment. * Isolation of dangerous people. * Secret bases for research, training, retreat in event of war, etc. Sports/Recreation/Vacation: * Low-gravity sports and recreation. * High-gravity sports and military training. Science: * Planetary science research. * Biological study of extraterrestrial life, if any found. * Sociological/archaeological study of extraterrestrial societies, if any. * Other science: humans/biology/physics/etc in different gravities, etc. With so few draws, creating permanent outposts on even a dozen other planets within 20 years seems very improbable given the costs involved in just getting them habitable. Actually colonizing them, which I would interpret as having self-supporting environments in which people can live out a whole life-cycle, including pregnancy, birth and childhood... not very likely within the next 20 years for even one of them. So it seems to me that given the amount of hand-waving you'd need to do to get even a single colony established, even close by like on Mars or the Moon, the problem is definitely not in restricting the number and size of colonies, but rather in how you could convincingly get a colony to grow large enough to be interesting. [Answer] # Terraforming takes a long time. A REALLY long time. First of all, did you know that oxygen likes to bond with stuff? If you leave metal outside, it will rust - that's oxygen bonding with the metal. One simplistic way to describe most fires is oxygen bonding with materials rather vigorously. So why do we still have oxygen in our atmosphere? Simple - there are a lot of things on Earth (plants and phytoplankton) producing oxygen. Without them, we wouldn't expect to see much more than trace amounts of free oxygen in the atmosphere. So if there isn't oxygen-producing life on a planet, it will have to be terraformed before it will have a breathable atmosphere. Let's look at what it would take to terraform the atmosphere of a planet. On Earth the atmosphere is about 21% oxygen, though we could acclimatize to closer to 15%. Earth's atmosphere weighs about [5\10^18 kg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Density_and_mass), so on a planet of about Earth's size (which you'll want in order to have reasonable gravity) you need to have about 7.5\10^17 kg of oxygen in the atmosphere before it becomes reasonably breathable. A quick search suggests that a tree produces about 100 kg of oxygen per yer. This means that you need 7.5\10^15 tree-years in order to produce enough oxygen to make a breathable atmosphere. In order to do this in 250 years, you need 3\10^13 trees - around [10 times as many as there are on Earth](http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/how-many-trees-are-there-on-earth-10483553.html). There's more to it than that - I haven't factored in other sources of oxygen, I've ignored what we'd need to do to reduce CO2 to a breathable level, and I'm sure I've neglected other things we'd need to worry about. However, this should give you an idea of the scale of the problem - it's really hard to change the atmosphere of a planet significantly in a short time frame. With this, it's easy to explain why only a few planets have been colonized. If you're lucky enough to find a planet that has oxygen-producing life, that planet could be fully colonized within a reasonably short timeframe. If there isn't already life on the otherwise-habitable planet, the colony will be restricted to controlled-atmosphere dwellings and will require a lot of outside help before it would have enough infrastructure built up to be self-sustaining, and even then it would not have a large volume of surplus resources to use for growth. The TL;DR version: for however many planets you want to have colonized by 2400, say that a handful of habitable planets without life are being colonized and are in the early stages of being terraformed, with the rest of the planets being ones where simple oxygen-producing life already existed. If you want the planets to be more spread out, simply say that life is rarer and we had to go farther to find it. [Answer] I was writing a similar setting in a sci-fi story. In my story, I had humans slow their expansion by diverting resources towards terra-formation of the worlds they discovered. I kept Earth-like worlds extremely numbered. [Answer] 1. The vast majority of planets aren't inhabitable by humans. 2. Of the few planets potentially inhabitable by humans, some have significant show stoppers (such as plants that use chlorine in their metabolism, resulting in an atmosphere that will kill an unprotected human). 3. Of the few planets potentially inhabitable that can be terraformed in a reasonable amount of time, that still requires a lot of effort and a long time. 4. Unless you're writing an encyclopedia, why would you even bother writing detailed information on so many planets when it's unnecessary? Even in writing set on Earth in the present day, the readers don't get or expect a detailed history and map of Indonesia just because one character happens to come from there. [Answer] Make it really fucking expensive and unlikely to pay off as a business investment. For example handwavery-engines cost billions to operate so naturally companies and governments try to offset this cost with asteroid mining or something. Long story short, they succeed. Every knows the materials came from an asteroid though and earth bound mining companies don't like that so they lie about the superiority of earthern minerals and stuff. One thing leads to another which leads to several more things and for whatever reason the Company is only able to get 80% of the billions it cost to run handwavery-engines out of the asteroid that should have been worth at least 3 trillion. Suddenly no one wants to fund space exploration because it's too damn costly. Offset this with like one person who accidently discovers a cure to cancer on venus or something. If space travel is high risk high reward with an extreme barrier to entry, then exploration will slow down because very few people will be able to do it. tl;dr if you make it expensive high risk high reward that hasn't gone so well for a lot of people, then you only a few really rich people will even be able to explore space. [Answer] Another factor involved: NASA and the CDC are going to put some pretty major restrictions on dealings with alien planets that might be of colonization interest. NASA because they want to make sure there's no indigenous life before they allow you to land stuff that hasn't been highly sterilized, the CDC because they want to be sure there's no potentially dangerous local life before they allow you to return anything that hasn't been highly sterilized. Now, it's likely that alien bugs are harmless but the CDC won't go along with risking the human race until they're sure. And while it's unlikely that alien diseases will get us I would be much more worried about alien pests. Imagine a planet with a more evolved ecology than ours--the local plant-munchers need nothing but calories and trace minerals and can munch most anything organic to get it. They're at least mildly toxic and they have a considerable degree of cold tolerance (go passive but don't die.) Something like that without it's local enemies would redefine invasive species--and if not caught quickly enough it could become an extinction event. [Answer] Light-speed travel merely means that I can travel somewhere in what seems a short time for me. However, due to Special Relativity (assuming that you're not bent on violating it), when I accelerate I "rotate" myself in spacetime such that I experience time (and a dimension of space) differently from those in the reference frame I left behind. If I travel to Proxima Centauri b and back at light speed, it will seem roughly instantaneous to me and will take over 8 years from an Earth perspective. This is without a "ramp-up" time for safe acceleration -- much Sci-Fi ignores the limits on accelerating humans or presumes tech which handles that. If many, many habitable planets have been discovered, people may be quite choosy about where to go, for many practical, social, and idealistic reasons. (You can think of interesting ones. For example, some may prefer a spot where time flows more slowly relative to other populated regions, so that they can develop military or mercantile applications more rapidly than others. Some may want to get the hell away from areas where wars have broken out or disasters have occurred. Some may seek to live near certain features -- like a nebula with a particular form -- because of religions beliefs. Many may have simply "left the map".) If people are choosy about destinations and can travel very far in an instant (from their perspective), it may take centuries for them to arrive, from the Earth's perspective. Pioneers may even like the fact that Earth time leaves them behind. They may anticipate greater progress to have occurred within Humanity once they've reached their new home, or they may have traveled to one planet, found that Humanity isn't to their taste, and then chosen to relocate in order to toss the dice again and alight once again a century or so later (per Earth time). If this came to pass, there might in two hundred years be a sizable portion of Humanity now compressed (relative to Earth) into flatness along their direction of travel, frozen in time (relative to Earth) until they reach their destinations years later. Now, if this were all Faster-Than-Light, it depends on your Physics. The people might again simply remain "frozen" until arrival, but the craft would reach the destination in less than the time it would take light. Another approach might have the passengers regress in time during the trip -- essentially, a new past, causally consistent with the outcome at arrival, would be created, so you might want to think of a creative means of assuring that they still arrived with the ship. Either way, unless communications were FTL, all the diaspora would still be confronted with the problem of long-distance communication delays. Truly FTL might allow ships to arrive in the past, which would presumably send them into an alternate branch of reality -- the one in which they lived on a distant world a few centuries ago. Consequently, we don't hear anything from those pioneers, unless maybe we just now heard from their ancestors, who turned us on to that FTL technology in the first place. Another possibility (I'll just toss this in) is that the FTL method employs spacetime warping, which works great for the traveling craft but stretches out space in its wake, making it less traversible (including for electromagnetism, interfering with observation of that part of space). This sort of spacetime pollution could become a controversial topic. It's a bit like the guy before you in a public restroom urinating all over the toilet seat. He'll never need it again and he's long gone, and you get stuck with the mess. The difference in the analogy here is that the messy toilet seat also happens to have created stretch marks in the fabric of space and time which altered reality behind him, even if you bothered to track him down. ]
[Question] [ The standard weapons of the future soldier (from pistols to rifles to artillery) are, like most 18th century firearms, very slow to fire. It might take 5 to 20 seconds to reload (or recharge, or whatever else has to be done to ready another shot), maybe even longer. Because of the long reloading time, bayonets and swords and other melee weapons are commonly used, especially for urban warfare or spaceship boarding actions (pirates would feel right at home). How would these weapons work? What's a plausible reason that armies would abandon automatic weapons that can fire thousands of projectiles per minute in favor of these weapons that can only fire two or three? [Answer] Only viable offense against a new defense Something changed with technology. We finally managed to regress to the age of knights in one key area: we're better at creating defensive protection than offensive weapons. It might be advance armor, it might be personal shields, it might be some sort of wide-area energy field that is effective at limiting or stopping traditional advance weapons. Well science is an arm race, and somebody cracked the code. The counter to this new technology? Special high-powered weapons that require downtime. There's a number of reasons the downtime might be needed. Perhaps it is to charge, perhaps targeting systems need time to adjust to the enemy's shield's frequency, or perhaps they just overheat like crazy, and need time to cool. However the enemy's technology has a more critical weakness; at very short distances (capable, currently, delivered directly via conductors fashioned in the likeness of bayonets and the ilk) the defensive technology can be negated or pierced. In the case of shielding or the energy field, the blades can maintain a constant charge of the projectile burst which can negate the defenses in a way that the bursts cannot; the field causes the bursts to bleed, while the shields simply cannot overcome the continuous energy contact the blades cause. Note: Pulp sci-fi without any science backing. I don't think you'll reach close to what you describe with hard science, so you'll have to be willing to hand wave the details and application in your world. [Answer] ### Because they are dangerous to everyone! Let us take a trip to Arrakis and elaborate a little on o.m.'s answer. > > "The Slow Blade Penetrates the Shield" - Gurney Halleck > > > In the [Dune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(novel)) series, melee weapons are often used, because they are the only option to safely bypass [personal shields](http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Shield). The short take on Dune's shield tech is that fast things (like bullets) get slowed down until they are useless. Comparatively slow things, like knives, can pass through the shield, when employed correctly. Energy weapons, like the [Lasgun](http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Lasgun) will result in a reaction with the shield that results in a catastrophic (nuclear) explosion, killing the wearer of the shield and everyone "within a large radius". ### How can you use this? Imagine a similar shield technology, that works the other way round. Stopping bullets, but maybe resulting in a critical buildup of compensated energy that results in a terrible explosion. You do not need a nuclear level event to blow a hole into a spaceship or collapse the building you are fighting over. ### Some ideas why slow firing weapons are the solution * The technology to bypass a shield requires a lot of energy and/ or the projectiles are large/ complicated to produce/ expensive. Hence, carrying thousands of projectiles is not feasible. The nice thing about bullets is: they are cheap and easy to make. If your guns launch swiss-made nanotech gold ingots, people will think twice before giving them a "rapid fire" switch. * A capacitor / heat sink / thingamajig needs to recharge. (This has already been mentioned) * They might be dangerous for the user. Each shot might carry a small chance of the weapon failing and injuring or killing the soldier. To sum it up. Everyone uses shields, because you are basically dead without them. Nobody in an enclosed environment who wants to live, fires multiple bullets at a shield, especially not if the rest of the squad might do the same. Anti-shield weapons are bulky, expensive and complicated. In war you need to arm a lot of people in a cheap way, so slow firing ones will have to do. In the end it is still easier to train someone to aim and pull a trigger than to spend years making a good swordsman out of them. Hence, the anti-shield musket remains the queen of the battlefield. [Answer] You would need three things here. * Body armor that can easily resist conventional firearms. * A slow-firing weapon to defeat this body armor. * Edged weapons to defeat this body armor. The first and last points are difficult to combine, but perhaps not impossible. The new armor would have to resist the impact of bullets with different shapes, including pointed and edged ones, but perhaps it takes a sustained push behind the blade to defeat multiple layers of armor. That would be a bit like the Dune novels by Frank Herbert with their shields and blades, except for your muskets. [Answer] The history of weapons and armour is a continuous cycle of better weapons to overcome the armour followed by better armour to overcome the new weapons. However in space all bets are off as there's an easy extra way to die, suffocation by vacuum. Your spaceship boarding action now requires a few extra considerations compared to land based battlefields 1. You don't want to puncture your own hull 2. You probably want to capture the enemy ship intact 3. You may be fighting in a vacuum 4. Spacesuits are easy to puncture 5. Firearms are often useless in tight spaces 6. Any discharge of a projectile or explosive weapon may damage critical ship systems In either an offensive or defensive situation it could be worth evacuating the air from the ship before beginning. It's a high risk strategy but it eliminates direct verbal communication and any unprepared combatants very early on. Further combatants can be eliminated by damage to the breathing system or other integrity of whatever suit or otherwise they're using to survive the vacuum. In close quarters this is most effectively done with a blade. Your slow ranged weapon is likely to be some sort of capacitance based electrical discharge device evolved from a taser with a show recharge time, but while it takes down people, it leaves ship systems undamaged. [Answer] They never had them. [The Road Not Taken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story)) describes an alien invasion of Earth. The twist is that antigravity and FTL technology are ridiculously easy to discover, but we just haven't stumbled upon them. So the aliens invade with their amazing spaceships - but their weaponry is ludicrously underpowered and they're annihilated by a modern army with automatic weapons. Of course, if any survivors got away then decent weaponry is going to be top of the R&D list. But if you're too outclassed, there may be no survivors (or at least no escapees). So the side with the better weapons carries on and steamrollers their attackers. [Answer] There are several technological reasons for a slow rate of fire weapon. The base assumption is that defensive technology (armor, force fields, whatever) have advanced to the point that only a specialized firearm system can penetrate them. 1. Capacitors need to be recharged. The weapon requires a very high initial energy pulse that can't be generated by a continuous power source, so you gotta charge up a bulky capacitor, leading to a slow rate of fire. 2. The new hyper velocity propellant is a binary one that can't be stored together. So the soldier has to assemble the binary propellant at the time of fire. It is far too dangerous to allow pre-assembled ammunition cartridges in the even of an ammunition hit causing a catastrophic explosion. 3. The new warhead of the future has to be assembled on the spot. It uses exotic matter or some ultra fast degrading heavy element that requires assemble/manufacture at the time of use, so you can't preload ammunition magazines of them. Maybe the tiny droplet of anti-matter inside needs to be inserted right as it fires. There could be a portable generator of this exotic matter on the soldier, but he still has to manually "charge" the bullet before firing. 4. The environment degrades complex machinery. Muzzle loading weapons are very simple, with almost no moving parts (especially if you have electrical firing mechanisms). Perhaps the environment the soldiers are fighting in is caustic to mechanical surfaces, so automatic loading weapons become very unreliable and stored ammunition degrades as the primers become inert. 5. Something about the new weapon renders the firearm unusable for a short period of time. It generates so much heat the barrel needs to be cooled, magnetic flux has to be realigned, electrical forces have to be discharged, etc. There could be large, bulky multi-barrel weapons for heavy infantry, but the average soldier just deals with the brief "cool-down" period until the weapon is ready to fire again. The weapons are so expensive to manufacture that giving soldiers multiple firearms to use is fiscally not practical. EDIT: As an aside, as the kinetic energy of a firearm increases, it's suitability as a rapid fire firearm decreases. If soldiers had a kinetic energy absorbing shield that had to be defeated by brute force (with, say, a rifle that generated more energy than a .50BMG [12-15,000 footpounds) then their ability to handle an auto-loader would be limited due to recoil, size of the weapon, and durability of a man portable automatic rifle. There are semi-automatic .50BMG rifles (and I once fired a .50BMG pistol....once :P but these are precision rifles and are not well suited to mobile combat. It is possible that a more powerful rifle would have to be a breech loading (check out the old springfield trapdoor rifles) or bolt action magazine fed rifle just due to the size of the cartridge and the strength of the receiver necessary to handle the high pressure rounds. Even with modern recoil reduction (compressible stock, big muzzle brake, and fancy recoil reducers like the Kriss Vector) a large bore high velocity rifle is gonna be a beast and be inherently slow to fire and reload outside of a tripod mounted belt fed version. [Answer] In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40K novel ['Only In Death'](http://gauntsghostspedia.wikia.com/wiki/Only_in_Death) this exact scenario happens. A besieged Imperial Guard regiment runs out of their normal ammunition and is forced to use alien breach-loading weapons. They are energy weapons of considerable power, but with a slow fire rate. These weapons appeared to be the standard, emplaced weapons for the aliens and designed for siege defence. Presumably there was some advantage in dumping the entire energy content of the ammunition in one mighty blast, rather than spreading it out over multiple shots. So one answer to your question is: "When they have run out of ammunition for their normal weapons". [Answer] These would both be planetside, not spaceside reasonings: Limited Resources Although I also initially considered this in the physical or scientific reasoning behind the given scenario as many others have, I'd like to propose a distinct approach based in economics. We always assume that future civs would have almost unlimited resources, however, while that may be true, these civs would be spending incomprehensible amounts of capital and borrowing like crazy even to refine their raw materials in the scale they'd require, let alone if these are massive energy weapons that require presumably difficult-to-mass-produce circuitry and generators (or in this case potentially entirely modular power plants on crawlers to supply an army). It could be argued that much like in WW1 where nearly everything down to the bullet was rationed, this could result in maybe only a few charges per soldier, per artillery unit, etc lest the allies or axis risk market collapse and severe debt at home; stock markets don't care if you're on another planet fighting the good fight, they'll still depress just fine. Technology aside, the economy of extremely powerful "single shot" anything could bankrupt an army, nation, or planet depending on the scale of the conflict. There is a lot of potential here to design appropriate rationing such that hand to hand combat would become necessary, rather than a "better" solution to other tech. Danger Close Honestly, think of the World Wars as a model yet again. The only other thing I could think of as far as the reasoning behind abandoning extremely effective forward weaponry would be that at some point a "United Nations"-esque entity banned the use of automatic or wide-area-of-effectiveness weaponry due to heavy and terrifying attrition all around. It might be that either the weaponry was so good that the carnage was unbearable to witness for either side (think nukes, gas, bio) or that the weaponry was so effective that it would sometimes be impossible to avoid catching ones own troops in the crossfire. Either one of these could provide a horrors-of-war type reasoning behind the current tech and existence of hand-to-hand CQC in lieu of cutting down entire swaths of an enemy in seconds. [Answer] Linked Consciousness In the future, mankind has evolved to where everyone is mentally linked together at a very basic level. It has been found that emotions are like energy; they cannot be created or destroyed but converted from one to another. While simple emotions like hate, love and fear can be felt by others nearby, they are not life-changing. Contrast this with someone taking another persons life. Upon death, the killer receives a massive influx of the emotions, events, feelings and desires of the person they killed. In some cases it takes months (or having killed the elderly, even years) to work through all of these emotions until the killer can even do simple personal tasks again. As a result, in this society killing is avoided as much as possible. Therefore, the weapons that are used are more personally controlled. The goal of the weapon is to disable WITHOUT killing. Hand-to-hand melee and wide dispersion weapons become the norm so as to avoid the debilitation that comes from killing someone. [Answer] Space is easy. Weapons will need to disable your opponent without putting a hole in the vessel and causing catastrophic decompression. Otherwise there is no point in a boarding action. So, energy weapons rather than small fast ballistic makes sense. Maybe something along the lines of today's tasers. Energy weapons would need time to transfer energy to a capacitor before they can be discharged. Even using something like a bean bag gun might work against unarmored opponents and those weapons are loaded like shotguns. Ground warfare is an interesting one. [We are currently developing armor that can shred bullets on impact](http://www.afcea.org/content/?q=Article-bullet-shredding-metal-foam-poised-market). If your enemy hasarmor that can essentially shrug off kinetic weapons then the next step is to move to energy based ones. Which means we are back to needing to build up a charge prior pulling the trigger. Obviously in this scenario bean bag guns are unlikely to work; however an electrical shock would work very well against an enemy encased in metal. The ground warfare one would mean that most engagements are at pretty close quarters - close enough for an energy weapon to work before it's output dissipates. Of course electrical type bombs would be developed to control large areas. Also, all armor has weaknesses due to mobility. This means a blade might be able to sneak past armor joints in areas such as armpits, necks, etc. Double points if it's some type of an electro blade designed to vibrate it's way past armor... [Answer] Space travel will most likely issue in a new era of swords by default. Only dead people use guns in space. As far as design, Just think about what they are designed to do and the environment. You're going to have some sort of piercing baton/mace with electric discharge capabities. A lot of our clothes are already pretty cut resistent but piercing still has a chance. Blunt force will get through most things or at least damage them or damage the person wearing them. In a space environment you don't want damage to happen to your clothes because it generally means death. The electric discharge is to disrupt tech/stun people which is what you want more than stabbing and getting blood everywhere or just plain get through the clothing with less hassle. [Answer] Force fields Maybe some sort of magnetic field or Star Wars like blue veil. The key point is that it allows passage for any slow moving objects but completely blocks fast moving projectiles. And it's easy to carry and cheap so that pretty much every soldier has a personal shield. Now that you rendered modern weapons rather useless, you have to come up with an alternative. So lets go with laser guns, and they need 20s to charge up mah lazor the capacitors. At this point melee becomes a viable strategy again. [Answer] In [Dies the Fire](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0451460413), S.M. Stirling's world undergoes some kind of "change" that affects physics at a fundamental level: gases don't compress the same way, fuel does not combust, electromagnetism does not induce fields of the same strength... and gun powder simply no longer works. It is a simple handwaving that essentially renders modern warfare impossible. For your example, (depending on your world) you could employ a similar mechanism which renders newer smokeless powder (which is what modern firearms use) inert, while older-era black powder remains effective. You could also invent some kind of economic reason for the same effect: some critical ingredient for smokeless powder is discovered to be useable for eternal youth, the fuel for FTL drives, or the yearly tribute to the menacing alien force that will flatten Earth if we don't provide them with our stockpiles of [insert ingredient here]. [Answer] The anime [Last Exile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Exile) had something like that. In it there was an external organization called [The Guild](http://lastexile.wikia.com/wiki/Guild) that controlled all the technological information and distributed it as they saw fit. They used this to sanction battles between sides, and generally control the world. The anime opened with 2 armies facing off with air-powered rifles from flying ships, complete with boarding parties using bayonets. To recharge the rifles, the operators had to muzzle-load a new round, then pump additionally air into the chambers. Using a system like that, you only need a plausible (or hand-wavy) reason for the guild to exist. Something along the lines of "In the aftermath of a world war, the nations gave up control of information to an arbiter group to prevent future devastation." ]
[Question] [ I have a terminte/winged ant based insectoid species, but it doesn’t fit in well with the rest of the universe. I was reading the Darksaber book by Kevin Anderson and thought that the Taurills were a cool concept, as they were a non-insectoid hivemind. Yes, they had the problem of all getting distracted by a passing comet and such, but I was wondering if there was a way to explain evolutionarily as to why a species developed a hive mind. Especially, if they were mammals or other non-insectoids. Parameters: I would like to see that the organism is: non-insectoid, not a humanoid, and the organism is roughly a meter long, half that wide and has 8 legs. [Answer] If you mean "all the individual organisms are telepathically linked to produce a single coherent mind for the hive", then... even insects don't have hive minds. That's a pure fantasy construct. There are various ways that different sci-fi authors have tried to justify it in a hard-ish science setting (e.g., Vernor Vinge's Tines using ultrasonic networking, the aliens from Robert Forward's Camelot 30K having biological radio transmitters, etc.), but there's no particular reason that such abilities should be restricted to insectoids (and indeed, Vinge's Tines are more similar to dogs than insects). If you just mean eusociality, where the hive behaves like one unified organism from a reproductive perspective, there is the real-world example of naked mole rats for reference. Just make the common ancestor of land-dwelling vertebrates on your alien world 8-legged instead of four-legged, evolve naked mole rats again, and make them slightly bigger (changing size is evolutionarily fast when you aren't running up against the absolute upper and lower limits), and there you go. If you want them to only have one mind, just make the development of self-awareness and higher intelligence dependent on sexual maturity, so only the queen of the hive has a mind, and orders everyone else around. (That's not how the social structure actually works in insect hives, but it kinda is for naked mole rats already.) [Answer] The hard part is the communication. If your SF is soft, you can just say that they are telepathic and leave it at that. How? Narrator doesn't know, reader isn't told. Humans can be pretty hive-mindish at times. Watching a modern military unit operate can be both impressive and scary for this reason. They work as a UNIT, a hive. For humans this is achieved through hard training. Other species can have a stronger group instinct and get there easier, maybe for their entire society. An untrained group of humans can still become sort of a hive mind when they form a mob. However, mobs are stupid to the point where it is debatable whether they can be called a "mind" at all. For a hive mind to form, most of the individuals must instinctually feel that the hive is more important than the individual. Soldiers are drilled in this. For the hive to be smarter than the individuals they need good communication. Soldiers are drilled in this too. Mobs are not. Species where one individual is very fertile while others are sterile has a head start, since the sterile individuals literally have no future except through the hive. Nevertheless, it is quite possible to get there through other paths, as the humans show us. And insectoidness or not really has no bearing on the issue. Organisms on other worlds have no reason to follow the same paths as they did on this world. [Answer] Resistance is futile The Borg seem to hit most of the queues you're going for. Adding a few legs to them and making them look different shouldn't be much of an issue. Two caveats: One is that they are being controlled by a designated leader, i.e. Borg Queen, so not a 'hive mind' in the sense that it is not controlled by a single entity. But most examples of fictional insectoid hiveminds have some kind of queen, brainbug or Overmind at the top. The other being that Borg are cybernetic organisms and their hive-mindedness is much to do with the implants they posess. This might be undesirable, but you're going to want some kind of explanation how the hive mind works anyway. Telepathy being the most common trope, of course. In the real world, I believe insect colonies coordinate largely based on pheromones and possibly electro-magnetic waves. [Answer] They are all one organism And they are connected. What appear to be individuals are in fact organismoid appendages that are connected with one another and also with specialized individuals deeper in the hive. In the wet, cluttered environments where they live the slimy filaments that connect them might not be evident but it is there. The mental connection is not instantaneous - it might be at the speed of nerve transmission for longstanding connections or it might be slower. If one of these apparent individuals is mechanically cut off from its hivemates it will cast about in an automatic manner trying to find the filaments and re-establish connection. Soldier caste organismoids have aggressive automatic behaviors that they can manifest when cut off - attacking any nonself entities in the area. [Answer] It seems to me that naked mole rats on earth have a social behaviour quite close to the societal organisation of insect hive-like species with queen, soldiers, workers. I would say that in order to evolve that way (and that would be consistent with the naked mole rat exemple), a species should just be in competition with species superior to it in terms of access to food and other basic needs. If the only options are to disappear or opt for social specialization, it can go that way. It’s not mandatory that it was the only evolutionary path, only that it was a possible one. [Answer] This already exists in some universes. Here you have an example in W40K: <https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tyranids> <https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Hive_Mind> You can argue that they are insectoids but... not exactly. Something kinda similar in Asimov's Foundation series: <https://asimov.fandom.com/es/wiki/Gaia> Some insight: <https://www.quora.com/How-many-species-on-Earth-can-be-considered-to-have-a-hive-mind> Basically, telepathic hive minds do not really exist. In reality, is a well and long developed social behaviour that some species have. They feel (Maybe by sight, by motion or wathever) other individual movements or actions and they act accordingly for a greater objective. But they are still individuals. They are just constantly monitoring and sensing their surronding fellows to extract the information on what they should be doing. And this, to some extent, is also aplicable to humans. So you are basically on your own. Whatever telepatic hive mind you create won't have a scientific foundation, and the real hive minds are certainly possible outside of insects. It is just the result of biological evolution. I would say it is more probable to happen to small size animals though. ]
[Question] [ I'm imagining taking the "circle hovering in air" image of a portal into the third dimension; a portal shaped like sphere, about halfway sunk into the ground. When you step through the shell from the outside at location A, you set foot "inside" the portal at location B. When you step out from the portal, you step into location B. As an aside, if light obeys these rules, the portal may be invisible from the outside and it always looks like you are stepping into the "wrong" end of the portal. The problem is that blood circulation will be forcing some of your blood back towards the "exit", and a similar issue would arise with flat one-way portals. Similarly, trying to pull one's leg back out of the portal would be ill-advised as it would end up on the wrong side. Is there a way to enter the portal without a gortesque and fatal spray of blood from your veins, as well as lymph and other bodily secretions falling out? [Answer] Speed infrastructure Making special infrastructure can make this doubly safe. First of all, you make sure that controlled infrastructure will prevent/seriously reduce the chance on any collisions or otherwise dangerous situations. Secondly you can add the speed required so little to no loss is happening. If you move with the highest speed of blood in any direction (or even faster), you can prevent such things from happening. If you want to have some cool transition with stepping in and out of the bubble you can use techniques. Blood goes on average 4,8 to 6,3 km/h, or about walking speed. At max maybe 10km/h. Running (on average 10km/h) and jumping, or even just falling through the portal can already reduce the amount of loss to a minimum or fully eliminate it for most people. This is by simple virtue of not being long on the edge of the bubble and speed. Keep in mind that minor blood loss isn't a problem at all in most situations. With the speed of the body any other accidentally moving backwards parts will not exceed the threshold of the whole body. If you move 20km/h one way, you can't 'go back' if you move only 5km/h the other way. [Answer] There actually is no problem. Imagine having a 2D world, and the "portal" is a tube lifting out of the 2D world-sheet in one point, and landing in another. When seen from the 2D perspective, you see that the portal tube is always locally 2D - there are no discontinuities. You are distorted in the third dimension while you travel, but you are unaware of this because the light rays and everything else in your local space is distorted the same way: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eKoED.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eKoED.jpg) If you are Mr. Green Circle, and look around you along the green lines, you see everything as usual. When you start looking towards your friend Mr. Pink Circle though, the light arriving at your 2D "eyes" is the light coming out of the portal from Mr. Orange Circle. In 2D, you see the world in the direction of the portal becoming distorted hyperbolically, you can actually see infinite more and more distorted and thinned-out reflections of yourself, and then the distortion reverses and in the middle you can see, clearer and clearer, a different place. Exactly the same thing happens in 3D. In this image you see a distorted Milky Way, and in the middle the opposite section of the same galaxy - the "inside" and "outside" of the distortion are 30,000 light-years apart. The nearer you go to the portal, the more distortion you see far from you and the less distortion you see near you. Wherever you pass through, the local distortion is effectively nil (for a large enough portal of course - at least, say, one hundred times your own size). [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oWL0h.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oWL0h.png) All this assumes that there is a continuous isotropic distortion around the portal; otherwise, the behaviour of matter and light on the boundary is anyone's guess. The portal might even be impassable (or its borders could act like an atom-thin razor, in which case, in 3D, any object entering would effectively be instantly shredded at the atomic level - not even freezing would be enough to protect biological entities; some ultra-cooled crystals could make it through reasonably unscathed, with just their lattice defects rearranged). If the distortion is anisotropic, then there is a "backwash" effect. Taken to the extremes, the distortion becomes one-way - particles can only move in one direction. In that case, traversing the portal would deliver a nasty hydrostatic shock when blood finds itself incapable of moving in those vessels that run in the wrong direction. For very small times - one hundredth of a second or less, the shorter the better - you would receive the equivalent of a coin sock to the head. Confusion, perhaps loss of consciousness. The longer the time (and passage repetitions), the more damage - up to brain haemorrhage and death. A short passage, or a very thin anisotropic portion of the interface, would reduce the damage down to nothing. Incidentally, this implies that the danger of a portal (if more than one kind exist) may be visually estimated by measuring the distortion and comparing it against its aperture. A large portal with wide, continuous distortion would be innocuous except to very large objects; a narrow one with irregular distortions would be deadly). Also, portals leading to areas with lower barometric pressure (higher up, or warmer air, or the eyes of hurricanes) would suck air, possibly at a considerable rate. If there is nothing to "hold to" near a portal, you might have trouble avoiding going in, or in the other direction, attempting to go back. The "continuous unidirectional matter transmitter" (i.e., whatever intersects the portal plane gets instantly trasmitted from A to B, but not from B to A) unites the problems of unidirectionality to those of discontinuity (to the barometric pressure problem). This kind of "portal" is in practice a matter shredder, and blood coming out the wrong way is the least of the problems; the real killer is that the portal disrupts molecular bonds, or at least long-chained molecules, like DNA, which all continuously vibrate due to Brownian motion. It would be a horrible way to die, but since the brain gets shredded too, it ought to be almost painless, provided the entry is fast. It would probably be, since pressure isn't transmitted, so the portal acts like a perfect vacuum, sucking with a pressure of about ten tons per square meter. [Answer] a TRUE one-way portal would be instantaneous death. . . . for the whole planet it exists on. The moment matter passes over the boundary, it will stop interacting with any matter attached to it. Chemical bonds will fail. nuclear bonds will fail. Even subatomic bonds will fail between that part of an atom that have passed through the barrier, and that part that i still in the originating location. The inevitable result of this is an explosion that will very much resemble an antimatter reaction. The only way to prevent this from happening is to either allow two-way transmission, or to allow the portal to only send intact objects. Intact protons. Intact atomic nuclei. Intact molecules. But some molecules are huge! A diamond is a single molecule. A single DNA strand is formed from all covalent bonds, thus is a single molecule that is TWO METRES in length if unfurled. So your portal must be able to send macroscopic items through, intact. So why, exactly, is it choosing to shred the poor bloodbag person that is trying to step through?? The usual way the technobabble doubletalk works around this is for the portal to accept incoming matter into a 'holding space' within itself, and only complete the transmission when it figures that the transmitting object is complete. Example the Stargates in the series of the same name. [Answer] There are a few potential safety rules depending on exactly how it works. I think the simplest solution, is that the machine isn't constantly running. You enter it, then it teleports the entire contents of the machine to the recieving sphere one way. If any limbs were outside the sphere, they'd be severed, but anything inside the sphere stays intact. If the portal must always be running, and maintain a constant connection to the receiver, a useful guideline will be "machine must be entered under constant velocity." Any people who wish to teleport will sit in a large chair mounted to a track, that ramps them up to such a fast speed, that minor variations in internal movement don't have enough time to affect your body since you enter and exit near instantaneously. [Answer] The portal is one-way, but there is no fixed surface which particles can only travel one way through. It's more like an airlock: you go in, the portal closes behind you, the portal opens in front of you, and you go out the other side. At no point is your blood ever restricted from flowing from the frontal direction toward the backward direction; while the entrance and/or exit surfaces are closed, particles cannot pass through them in either direction. As long as you are fully inside the portal while the entrance closes, you won't get cut in half by it. But it's a one-way portal because the exit can only open after the entrance is already closed. [Answer] A thicker edge to the portal which functions as a teleport area. You step in from A and into the shell-side, this shell-side is essentially a pocket dimension similar to a bag of holding that surrounds the actual portal. If you step back now you return to A. If you move forwards to the center of the sphere you meet the boundry between the shell and B-side. The moment you touch the barrier, the shell-area directly around you collapses into B-side (without affecting anyone else still in the pocket dimension). If you step back now you remain in B-side without re-entering the pocket dimension. You can now walk out safely out of the portal area. [Answer] One potential problem with a portal is the edge/surface. Imagine a circular portal perpendicular to the surface of the Earth. Push something halfway through and then drop it. What would happen? It’s an imaginary situation so this is not definitive, but one possibility is that the circle itself is a very sharp one dimensional edge between two different 3D spaces so the object might simply be cut in half on contact with the edge with one half falling into each side of the portal. The same could also be true with spherical portals. You would want a fairly large portal and want to jump cleanly into it. What would not be good would be trying to use a small portal. Someone walking towards it might find only part of themselves transported through the portal. with the rest left behind. Could be a bit gruesome. [Answer] You're looking at it in a 3D realm, as such there's a big problem with any reverse flows (air, also.) Suppose the "portal" is actually in a 4D realm, though. LSerni came close but that's a wormhole, not a portal. The portal actually moves you in a fourth spacelike dimension. The instant you touch the surface of the portal you have the reverse flow--but instead of being a gruesome mess the body is intact, as Newton says there's an equal and opposite reaction--the reverse flow presses against the portal, the result is the body part that went through the portal is being pushed away from the portal--thus pulling the rest of the creature through it. The creature, being a mere 3D being is incapable of exerting any force in this 4th direction, it's impossible to resist this tug. Thus the result is anyone and any thing (normal vibration of the atoms will do the same thing, just slower) that touches the portal is inevitably drawn through it. [Answer] > > The problem is that blood circulation will be forcing some of your blood back towards the "exit", > > > This problem of fluids alone is easily overcome. Blood moves at about 1.5 meters per second, i.e. walking pace. So at worst, some of your blood vessels will be carrying blood back through the barrier at walking pace when you stand still half-in half-out of the portal. To avoid backward spray, maintain a forward velocity greater than walking pace: then the resultant motion of the blood relative to the barrier will be positive throughout your circulatory system. A bigger problem might be effects that propagate through your body at faster speeds. Nerve impulses can go at up to 100 m/s (230 mph or 360 km/h): unless you go faster than this, a significant portion of the information that keeps your brainstem working in synchrony will get lost in the transition. One missed impulse is nothing to the brain—but if a significant portion of the neural messages that are being transmitted at a particular instant all get lost together, across the whole brain, all bets are off as to what will happen. [Answer] Such a portal would be useful for communication. Photons will not be put out by these rules. I could easily see you on the other side of the portal and you could see me. Radio communication would be equally easy because photons are not obliged to turn around. It is an [ansible](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible) and you can use it to violate causality! Solid objects might be ok and we can play catch thru the portal. I do not see a way around the problem of a heterogenous object in motion like our bodies. If you want to get into the weeds, even the ball we are playing with is in heterogenous motion at a molecular level. You could make it so only photons can safely pass thru. Unless you wave your hands, which you need to do anyway when it comes to portals generally. For example there will be pressure differences and so it would be windy next to the portal unless you decree it not be. A place close to the pole of the planet will be moving slower relative to one on the equator, and speed will need to be normalized to the new place via vigorous handwaving to avoid being hurled against the wall. Points on different planets pose an even greater problems. Places that are moving very fast relative to one another would red- or blueshift light traversing the portal which would be a nifty special effect. You can assert these are nonproblems and broaden your fiat to let people poke appendages into the portal without coming to harm. Or you could keep the limitations you have invented which could be useful for a story. [Answer] Situation A: * Can you pause time inside a box? If time has been paused inside the box, everything inside the box is not moving, then there wouldn't be any problem with things going back or forward (being the box the point of reference) and that way the subject/thing inside the box would be freezed in time. Situation B: * Can you completely freeze somebody at 0 Kelvin for 1 microsecond? I'm saying freeze him completely to make all those fluids you mentioned completely static and completely solid. That would again prevent the fluids from spilling in an explosion of gore. * Can you make someone's speed 0.9c just before entering the portal? The most dangerous thing is passing through the portal as an being with fluids that may spill or parts of your brain that may be disconnected. The faster you get through the portal, the lower the possibility that something goes wrong while any part of yourself is at two places at the same time. Those situations are some solutions to your answer. --- Why haven't I adressed the mechanics of the wormhole itself? I can´t compare, in good conscience, that type of portal to the conception of a wormhole since I was convinced by [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/203023/76433) that mathematically, a 3D space is the only stable configuration of time and space that can exist. And if you got through a wormhole, you would be going through a way different than the usual 1Time-3Space so you will need to use another dimension of space, and that would mean that it is an unstable universe, and thus: > > @4.12.22.4.18.0. You misunderstand the nature of the of the "unstable" here. It's not that a planet or whatever is unstable and would fall apart or something. It's that there are no stable orbits. The fact that there are stable orbits in 3d is directly tied to the fact that there are 3 dimensions and the gravity equation falls off like 1/R^2. In 4 dimensions, all paths through space with relation to another gravitational body either collide into that body or the fling off never to return. There are no stable circular orbits. – > Shufflepants > May 20 at 19:27 > > > Also, there is this: > > A much bigger problem is what happens to the electron orbitals of the atoms in your body. Unlike planets, unstable (open) electron orbitals would continuously lose energy (as photons) and would quickly spiral into the nucleus turning all protons into neutrons, ending all chemistry and with it all life, – > RBarryYoung > May 20 at 20:30 > > > [Answer] It's quantum In the macroscopic world, we are used to all things acting effectively as continuous. This portal treats things as quantum, such that the border is iffy. A human body passes over it and is treated as if all outside until, abruptly, it is all inside. A quantum leap. Nothing can be half in and half out. Why it treats bodies and other large objects like subatomic particles would win the discoverer the Nobel Prize. [Answer] ### Method 1: The Amoeba Effect You need some sort of process to happen at the portal. As I step toward the portal, my mass causes pseudopods of altered space to come from the boundary and encompass me. Up to the point where the field meets behind me can I can back out. Once they meet, I am merged into the B side of the portal. Two references that can clarify this imagery: Watch an amoeba ingest a particle of food. Look at simulations of the magnetic field disconnecting and snapping back during a solar storm. ### Difference in Energy. Suppose that in going forward, you gain about 30 joules per kg. This is equivalent of about a 3 meter drop. Coming back, as you walk toward the surface you have to do the equivalent of lift yourself 3 meters during the distance it takes to go one step. If I push my arm into the field, the part of my arm on the other side is effectively 3 meters higher. You will feel tingling, as your heart can't pump blood thing high, and blood would drain quickly back through your veins. If you pushed your head through, you would pass out. Coming through, you pick up about 7.5 m/sec of velocity in a direction perpendicular to the surface = 22 ft/sec = ~16 mph. This means that a person running a 4 minute mile pace can run into the barrier and get through it. Or a man on a horse. Usually coming through you would trip and roll. This would mean you could send notes through backward by putting them on the end of a stick, and pushing them through. I think sound would cross the barrier too. Air molecules coming in would gain energy, so you would have a warm zone by the barrier on the receiving side, and a cold zone onthe sending side. Since air moves both ways, I'm not sure what the net effect would be. I think I've just violated some thermodynamics laws... ]
[Question] [ I was curious if some biological creature, natural or engineered, alien or Earth-born, might technically be able to get oxygen from oxide rocks. I was similar curious if you could atomically break down water, by any biological means, so as to get oxygen and hydrogen from it. Lunar soil apparently has 45% of its weight in oxygen, for example, and I think oxygen wt% in water is 88%? And according to google, [this article claims that](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/625477?journalCode=jg), "In most rocks oxygen makes up about 92 per cent by volume; all cations taken together (silicon and metals) make up but 8 per cent by volume." This made me wonder if you could have an ecosystem where some organism breaks down rocks/soil or water to get oxygen. [Answer] The short answer will virtually always be "not without some other source of external energy. In which case you don't need the oxygen either." That said there's one kind of scenario it could make sense, which I'll come back to after the main stuff. When chemicals and elements react, to form compounds, the bonds that are formed or broken will mean the reaction needs energy added to happen, or freed energy will be given off. (Technically, there's a bit of wriggle room in that statement, but only a tiny amount, not enough to support a macroscopic body.) Left to themselves, compounds and elements will tend to form the most stable substances they can, chemically speaking. Because the more reactive, the easier to break their existing bonds, the easier it is to break apart and react into something else. Again, that's roughly correct, not technically perfectly precise. As an example, elemental oxygen atoms are incredibly reactive, so you tend never to find them wandering round alone - they've reacted with whatever else was present to make iron oxide (rust banded rocks over time) with iron, oxygen molecules with other oxygen atoms, water with hydrogen atoms, and so on. Then within water some will split again, from H2O to ionic forms in equilibrium (H+ and OH-) If we add energy, we can split these apart again - iron oxide back to iron and oxygen atoms, water back to hydrogen and oxygen atoms, etc. So along comes your organism. To liberate the oxygen again from these, will always require a net input of energy. And because energy is always dissipated in such processes, the usable energy it gets via resulting oxygen just won't be worth the energy it had to get already, to put into the reaction, to free the oxygen in the first place. Note that none of this is technically precise, and some may have loopholes. You may want to check on [Chemistry Stack Exchange](https://chemistry.stackexchange.com) if you need to be more sure. You might also find Wikipedia's articles on [oxygen in geology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen), and the [great oxygenation event/catastrophe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event), informative. But that's the rough outline answer. The one big loophole is this: Suppose a lifeforms has access to plenty of energy (eg, sunlight) but needs oxygen (or other elements/compounds only found in chemical combinations) for some biological process. Then it might use the external source of energy, and use it to get oxygen and break it down internally from its available form into a more useful biological compound. But in this case, it would be using the sunlight as its primary energy source, and part of the energy would be "converted" internally so to speak into oxygen for more direct internal purposes, by being used to break oxygen away from whatever it's natively combined with, before using it. It wouldn't get nearly as much energy from the oxygen as the sunlight it started with, but maybe that's okay. Perhaps it has more than enough primary sources of energy, but biologically ended up developing rocks as an oxygen source for biological processes that are favoured in some way. That's probably feasible. (Carbon life kept underground but with a temperature resilient silicon-based "wings/tail" extruded in daytime, living on the immense raw energy from its blue/UV hot star, but on a desert planet without any significant sources of biologically relevant chemicals apart from underground rocks and deposits???) That would be a bit like how we get our primary energy from food and oxygen and such, but we don't directly power ourselves from those. Instead we use those things internally to break apart complex molecules and create or store glucose and ATP, which we then [use more directly in our bodies to power actual muscles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_triphosphate), even though it loses much of the original energy we obtained, in the process of doing so. [Answer] Photosynthesis? [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8GABR.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8GABR.png) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis> You may have heard of it. Certainly you are fond of immoderately huffing the oxygen product of photosynthesis. And you, and you. You especially, Zeiss. That oxygen comes from water. The plants keep the hydrogen from the water to make sugar. Then you eat that. [Answer] No, you cant use rocks for oxygen for oxidizing organics, like we do, and get energy. However, there is a large set of reaction that can substitute the process that you are interested in. In particular sulphur is common in a form of 'rocks' and it can be used as a weaker way to oxidize stuff. So that it is possible to hunt prey, and then instead of breathing while digesting it, eat some sulphur containing rocks in order to digest the prey. Problem is that it is likely to be much slower and energy budget will also be somewhat smaller. We cant store oxygen inside of us well, but with sulphur it is easier. So this creature will be able to 'hold breath' for many days, if it has eaten its prey and enough of sulphur rocks. Still, it will be slower overall than us, breathing creatures, because we dont have to carry our oxidizer with us that makes about half of the fuel weight, and oxygen gives about twice as much energy after oxidation is complete. So in starvation mode we can survive about 4 times as long, given the same metabolic rate. Another interesting concept is that this creature will actually be able to have more stamina on a time frame longer than 10 seconds, but less than 10 minutes. This is when we are limited by our ability to breath. This is a good time frame for hunting. Not ambush-like, peak power for this will be about the same, as ambush hunting doesnt require breathing much. But full pursue and running type of hunting. Lack of muscles for breathing, lack of lungs in general, lack of need for massive resource transfer, can somewhat make up for lower energy output per reaction and double the mass of energy source. [Answer] There are lithotrophs organisms that "eat" inorganic substrates, as well as chemotrophs. They can get an electron from Iron going from Fe2+ to Fe3+ or sulfur, or other inorganics. Some can do it with just the element, and in others there needs to be a water molecule involved. Some are aerobic processes with oxygen needed as part of the respiration, but others are anaerobic without oxygen. The moon is also a harsh environment, so you can also have reactions that can be catalyzed by the ultraviolet and in some cases visible light. That could lead to a series of different reactions where if you had a water molecule it could be split. There are people trying to engineer these types of systems to split Co2, or Convert Co2 plus water to Methane etc. So with that extra energy you might be able to shift the balance so oxygen could be obtained by the rock. You could also think about releasing oxygen from metal oxide compounds by heating them up to release the oxygen. Then if there was free oxygen around it would reoxidize. [Answer] Lichens can probably liberate some tiny amounts of oxygen since they use acids and enzymes to decompose minerals. They, of course make their own oxygen by photosynthesis. You are probably imagining something with a much greater metabolic rate, but lichens are closer than most life forms we know of that could exist in extreme environments. ]
[Question] [ Set in distant future, a group of super advance civilization formed a special task force to observe and guard timelines, and they are called Time Keepers. The Time Keepers will scan for spacetime anomalies and dispatch their personnel to the scene. Once they established that there is a violation in accordance to the protocol they have to bring in the suspect and log the incident into their diaries. The problem in relativity is there is no absolute point in spacetime for reference. An event happening in one's past could still be happening right now in one's present, or one's future, etc. So is there a way for them to effectively keep a log? Time travel technology is classified but people have tried to abuse it somehow. [Answer] They can reference the time to the the temperature of the [relic radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background) > > The photons that existed at the time of photon decoupling have been propagating ever since, though growing less energetic, since the expansion of space causes their wavelength to increase over time (and wavelength is inversely proportional to energy according to Planck's relation). This is the source of the alternative term relic radiation. > > > and log all the entries with a sequential and unique identifier. Therefore their log would look something like 1. 2 K bla bla bla 2. 10 K bibbidibu 3. 1 K cha cha cha [Answer] ## The diary itself is a timeline The entries happen one after another and as such are representative of the owner's personal timeline. They don't have to be dated, they merely have to be presented in the order in which they were written. If the author is present at a particular spacetime reference, or was for the purposes of the entry, then that is recorded as part of the entry. Attempting to anchor any entry any more specifically to a more mundane timeline is certainly futile and likely to be counter productive. The diary is a personal reference and refers only to personal time. The log is perfectly effective as such. [Answer] If they know the time-line of a universe they will know the universes entropy pattern, not the specific locations in space-time of each celestial object but their positions in relation to each other. This would involve some serious mapping of all orbital paths and positions but every position will be completely unique down to the smallest increments of time. The Supermassive blackholes of the central galaxies in the main large clusters of the local superclusters could be used as the initial space-time locators then homing in to the planets location, relative to its star, its galaxy and then those main location pointers. This position pattern will give the locations precise time in the universe. A highly complicated but precise method that should be achievable by advanced beings outside of the universes time dimension. [Answer] ## Expand the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) Standard Thanks to the circulature of the Earth, man has already had to solve the issue of offset time systems. Let's say a person in New York, USA were to show up in Madrid, Spain. His watch would say 1:00PM, but everyone else around him would be at 7:00PM. This would makes things confusing, but UTC says he can just change his time zone, and the watch will start showing the right time. He does not need to worry about this messing up any timestamps internally in the watch because the timestamp and time zone are 2 separate data points The way we solve this problem in the real world is to take an arbitrary point of reference and pair it with a time zone to modify it based on local time. So, what UTC does is says that the master clock is a specific atomic clock located in Greenwich, England which all other clocks must report in relation to. So, when you look under the hood of everyone's modern smart watches, you will see that the watch in Spain is actually set to UTC + 1 hour, and the watch in New York is set to UTC - 5 hours, and they are both using this time zone data point to modify thier timestamp to local time. Time Keepers also have a Universal Clock. We will call this this Coordinated Temporal Time (TTC). So, lets say the atomic clock is started at exactly "2100-01-01 @ 12:00AM". As long as you are in sync with the TTC timeline, you timestamp everything with whatever that clock says +/- your timezone, but lets say on "2150-05-02 @ 7:00AM" you jump back to "2080-03-15 @ 1:00PM ", you are now at (TTC - 614,730 hours). When you jump through time you can also apply local UTC offset giving a time mark now 3 data points instead of 2. So, if your time traveler goes back to 2080 in New York, his timestamp is marked as (TTC - 614,730 - 5) Where you get the TTC reference time, +/- the TTC offset, +/- the UTC offset. In this way when the time traveler logs an event in his computer/diary, you can compute the local time while simultaneously preserving its relationship to a universal time. TTC also makes sure that time travelers are not running into themselves or aging inappropriately in thier home timeline because a time traveler always leaves from and comes back to (TTC + 0 + timezone) So, if you go back and spend 5 days in Nazi Germany, you don't come back to the time you left, but to 5 days later (local time) to get an offset of zero since your watch continued to run while you were away. To measure displacement, just sync your watch to your time machine. Time Travel, just like other forms of travel, is measurable. A car knows how far its gone by counting wheel rotations or by measuring the speed of passing objects. Likewise, your time machine likely has some kind of countable mechanic that can be used to measure how far its gone. It could be a measure of tachyons generated, some kind of field pulses, power used, etc. What ever it is that allows you to move through time, it is measurable. Then when you get there, you watch should at the very least be very close to local time. One final point is that many historical calendars were not particularly accurate or consistent; so, you may need additional displacements to better sync to true local time. This is where a database of time zones becomes important. For example, in our world the time zone "America/Chicago" is sometimes UTC-6 and sometimes UTC-5 depending on daylight savings time, but "America/Tegucigalpa" is UTC-6 year round. Your timetraveler's database would just need to extend these standards by when they went into/out of effect. "America/Chicago" would have to become "America/Chicago/2022" [since this time zone changes every year](https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zone/usa/chicago). So once you measured how far you've gone and where you are, it is a simple matter of doing a database lookup to set your watch to local time. That way you can log things normally by writing down local times, and your time piece saves it relative to the universal standard so on the backend, a timestamp may look like (2150-05-02t7:15:45,-614730:44:15,"America/Chicago/2080") and it would contain all the information you would need to convert your local time to any other conceivable time keeping system at any other point in time. [Answer] They have their own flow of time The fact that the Timekeepers see the entire flow of time at once (so they are outside it), and they can do stuff (so casualty exists wherever they are) means that there must be another flow of time, or [temporal dimension](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_time_dimensions), running perpendicular to the time we are familiar with. That is the one they are bound to. Much like how we can see an entire piece of flat paper because we extend in the third spatial dimension, Timekeepers can see all time because to them it is flat and consistent. Naturally they can make changes like we can write on paper, but they know the start and outcome at any given moment. So how do they track their interventions? Well, whatever means of time measurement that make sense for their surroundings. Do they live on a planet? If so they can count their own days and years. They would be speaking of yesterday's time intervention: that being their yesterday, and the intervention itself could have taken place anywhere in the primary timeline and have taken however much primary time. If they don't live on a planet, then maybe they count something absolute like the number of vibrations of a caesium atom - that is assuming matter is composed of atoms wherever they are. And even if they have the same atoms, the same temporal properties would probably not hold in this second temporal dimension. So what do they use for time measurements for their diaries? Whatever is regular and countable, as it propagates through their secondary flow of time. [Answer] There is only one time machine. The single time machine is also the single record keeper. It acts as a fixed point, traveling forward in time at the normal speed, where records of all voyages are stored. This removes problems about different travelers having different timelines. Depending on the nature of your time travel, it is possible to look at the records, see one thing, then go back in time To simplify further the machine itself does not travel -- it just sends people through time a set amount. From their point of view they stay in the new time for however long they set and then are magically brought back to their starting time. From the machine's point of view the travelers enter then immediately exit. Because the travelers exit immediately after entering, the machine can only handle one voyage at a time. This prevents problems with one voyage interfering with another one. To simplify FURTHER the machine cannot handle nested voyages. A nested voyage is where you hop in the machine today, travel back two days, then hop in the machine from two days ago and travel somewhen else. Depending on the nature of your time travel, the records might change. It might be possible to look at the record of 15 June 2524, see one thing, then go back in time to 14 June 2524 and convince an earlier voyage not to happen, then return to your time and look at the 15 June 2524 record to find it is different to your memory. [Answer] It's not Easy As highly evolved as the advanced civilization is, well...this is a bit embarrassing, is it alright to admit the imperfections in the whole process? The dangerous problem has forced the timekeepers to create a database that although holographic and interactive and four dimensional, could simply be called a map. It shows the location of every registered time machine in service, the licensed user, date of inspections, registration numbers, dates of entry and exit, current status, and so forth. Encrypted Trackers are built within every legal machine. Thankfully. After return, a debriefing must occur, so that the travel log can include the travellers' observations on divergences from the Origin Timeline. No way around it, paradoxes happen, and they are dangerous. Unfortunately, to draw a parallel to the 21rst century, just because there are laws of the road doesn't mean people obey them. In fact, they look at their cell phones, eat while driving, drive tired, steal cars, and drunkenly bump into guard rails going the wrong way on the highway. Time machines go off line or get stranded. Tracking equipment can go on the fritz. Agents go into active duty to apprehend stolen or damaged machines. Though no one wants to admit it, Timeline Enforcement may even be botching or even falsifying the records, and criminal organizations are trying to hack in. Internal affairs has a heck of a time tracking Timekeepers who don't want to be found. However, these are only exceptions to the rules. [Answer] Trying to make a log entry based in a unitary dimension of 'time' would be like trying to log your position in space using a singular dimension like 'distance'. The co-ordinates of any particular incident in multi-dimensional universe would have to be based on a multi-dimensional co-ordinate system, not a single dimension like 'seconds'. The log would, at a minimum, need one indicator for the universe, another for the temporal position in that universe, and yet another for the spatial position in that universe. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the constants, including c are the same in every universe, so time and c would have to be measured relative to that universe, as well as the acceleration of that universe. Thus, the log would have to include some method of recording what relativistic universe framework the log entry was recorded in. There could be no universal time stamp, single variable, or other one-dimensional method of log entry designator. [Answer] Time is not "relative" in the way you think; it is absolute. The "Big Bang" does not happen in one person's future and another person's past. It is true that our year 1931 is in the future for people in 1900, and in the past for people of 1960, but that is immaterial, we just measure time from a fixed and arbitrary point of time in the entire universe, in our case AD 0, picked for no rational reason whatsoever. The same thing goes for our years, days, hours, minutes and seconds: These are all arbitrary, picked for our own Earth-centric idiosyncratic circumstances. The same thing applies to our distances: A "foot" is the length of some King's foot, a cubit the length of some King's elbow to fingertip. But a "meter" is based on the circumference of the earth, divided by a power of ten, both of which are idiosyncratic to Humans or Earth, respectively. If Martians did the same and all their names for time and distance were based on martian physiology, Mars or Martian history, we would (with examples) be able to translate. So you embrace this arbitrariness. Pick some arbitrary points in time of your own, pick some arbitrary distance of your own, and treat time as a location being visited. So say our arbitrary time is "days", and arbitrary starting point is AD 0, just like now. For convenience we standardize on metric prefixes: In powers of 10 for Deca, Hecto, Kilo (10, 100, 1000), and in powers of 1000 thereafter: Mega (106), Giga (109), Tera (1012). About 3 decadays in a month. A hectoday is 100 days, a kiloday is 2.738 years, a megaday 2738 years, a gigaday 2.738 M years, teraday 2.738 G years. The Universe, at 13.8 G years, is about 5.04 teradays old. Likewise we can pick an arbitrary point in time to measure from. Say AD 0 in our current calendar. So the diary is a sequential series of entries, Each with a location: kday 875.4, Mars, Cairo Settlement: Earth has 365.25 days per year, so translated, 875.5 kilodays is 2396.715 years, or day 261, in a leap year is Sep 17, 2396, Earth time. The Time Keepers themselves wear a device that communicates with their home base. Their protocol is strictly periodic meetings, on some time schedule relative to the home base. Every decaday (10 days). The time keepers themselves age based on their location; on Earth, one day per day of the mission. For convenience sake and to avoid confusion, they only return to home base on meeting days, to their own designated location there. But of course can communicate with each other from anywhere in the universe at any time. That perhaps creates causality paradoxes in Einstein's formulation, but we threw causality and Einstein's formulation out the window with time-travel in the first place. You really don't have to worry about Einstein's Relativity, because you have convincingly disproven it with Time Travel. [Answer] I'd like to propose that they wouldn't use a physical document that has problems with linearity but instead some kind of database, with 'nodes' - each node being an entry, but can be indexed or inserted into one or more lists. After all, they have time travel, why would they use journals? Even with relativity this still works: if you consider a spaceship logging individual entries, and a computer on earth logging both at one per second, the spaceship flies away and then comes back and docks, and the next node pointer (like a linked-list) point to the same node - the two branches have different lengths, but they come to the same point in "time". You might consider it to be a tree, but only for the official space-time flow, but individual agents (or suspects), might have their own personal linking - a series of connections to nodes that represents their own journeys through space. Presumably, this also allows them to have documented points in time which no longer exist - there is a new node in their index that represents what happened, and what actions the agents made to rejoin it. Have a think about how you think time actually works in your universe: is time a single strand and the agents are trying to re-join a divergent strand back to the 'official' line, or is there now two universes with different outcomes (like in the MCU Loki series), or is all of the future timeline now corrupt because a point has been changed (which suggests a more tree-like structure from a single origin - something like Looper or Continuum, where changes to a point in time, change the future (and we ignore the murdering your own grandfather paradoxes). How big an impact does a change have - is it all just localised, rather than the entire universe changing (although little changes do have a habit of rippling out over time). [Answer] Just write down two dates for each entry. Lets say the time traveler has a calendar with him. This calendar shows the time and date of the time he left. Since they can travel through time and space the relativity thing isn't as much an issue, and if it was the personal timekeeping is what is important here. The time traveler writes the date he is currently in, followed by the date of the time he left and will return to once he is done (assuming that is their modus operandi). Or they write down the "current" date in their timeline if they return to a date corresponding to the time they spend in the past. Anyone reading it will then understand the date the time traveler was at and the date that he came from. Naturally you can choose which date you write down first. [Answer] Own age. From their own reference frame, they would age normally. They can use their ageing biomarkers (like Telomere length, T-cell rearrangement, DNA methylation etc) to precisely calculate their age (like 32.145) and use that in their diaries. [Answer] ### Through synchronized vibrations In our universe, everything is moving, vibrating, and changing. There are a variety of frequencies at which even objects that appear to be stationary are actually vibrating, oscillating, and resonating. The movement that oscillates between two states is known as resonance. At its most fundamental level, all matter is nothing more than the sum of its individual vibrations. Because of this universal vibration, all of nature resonates at all scales. When two or more vibrating objects come together, it's common for them to begin vibrating at the same frequency after a period of time. They appear to "sync up" in mysterious ways at times. The phenomenon of spontaneous self-organization is referred to as this. Automatically they have the ability inbuilt to solve merging issues and actively monitor timelines. [Answer] They just have to specify which is their own frame of reference in their log. If they have to follow someone who made a time jump they will have to log all the changes fro one frame of reference to the other. [Answer] On each jump, log time elapsed, destination coordinates in space, time displacement set A mechanical clock inside the time machine will keep the time elapsed. It is entered in the log and reset to zero, on any departure. Suppose the log will stay inside the time machine.. The absolute time does not need to be measured, the amount of time travel is known, you can add up and convert times into any reference frame afterward, if needed. Other information needed for the log: the time machine input destination, in 3d coords.. and the time machine's time target time displacement set (plus or minus in seconds). That data is also logged, at every jump. Optional notes about the expedition can now be added: e.g. to check if the time machine works properly, you could measure and note departure time and destination arrival time in the local time frame. That would help to check if the time machine itself worked properly. And to make sure the suspect was not arrested before the crime was committed. Together, all data relevant to a log will be there: the elapsed time will suffice to check if the agents performed their contractual working hours. The input log can be used to check whether they did travel to the designated time and place and if the prisoner from time X originating from time Y was brought in according to your time travel laws. For most agents, this will be a routine boomerang time travel, returning to some home base and time, with the captured rogue time traveler. The next job will start from the same reference frame. ]
[Question] [ The title sums it up pretty well - I'm basically trying to envision the ultimate predator of much larger prey. A couple of requirements: 1. The predator must weigh 44 kilograms or more (Megafauna) 2. It must be specialized in killing said prey 3. It must be something that could plausibly evolve 4. It must be terrestrial and have legs 5. It must be endothermic 6. It shall hunt in an environment roughly similar to a savannah 7. The predator mustn't use tools to hunt, only its body Pack predators are allowed, but let's limit it to less than 20 individuals in a single hunting group (So no swarming). It can be terrestrial, aquatic or aerial, and parasitoidism is allowed, but not preferred. On the prey's size - basically, assume that the maximum mass of the prey will be 200,000 kilograms, and that the minimum will be roughly 10x the size of the predator. The closer the prey is to the maximum, the better. Michael Kjorling was wondering about how I define efficiency - essentially, I mean "the likelihood of a hunting attempt being successful". As for what I'm looking for in answers, I'd like them to describe as much as is necessary - if only one method or aspect is required for the task, then the rest of the details can be left for me to decide. [Answer] If the terrain, your social organization, and the prey behavior permit...then a [Buffalo Jump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump) will provide your tribe in one day with far more meat than they can eat before it spoils. Convincing very, very large animals to go over the Jump is not easy - it requires teamwork, creativity, and bravery. It is, though, very efficient. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/P10hK.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/P10hK.jpg) [Answer] # Definitely parasitoidism. Parasitoidism is [one of the most widespread ecological tactics in the world](https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2656.2000.00367.x). It's a darn good method with a lot of solid theory behind it. It guarantees that your offspring will have an abundance of food when they need it most, and the incredible specialization undergone by parasitoids implies an abundance of niches and an ability to become incredibly efficient. You'll use a minimum of calories to take the thing out (temporary paralysis, only if necessary) and consume a maximum (the entire body of the host). Also, it's already a thing. Check out [this parasitoid wasp](https://www.whatsthatbug.com/2017/09/09/wasp-parasitoid-cicada/) taking down a cicada easily 100 times its size: [![parasitoid wasp on a cicada](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4dgmDm.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4dgmDm.jpg) While the square-cube law is a different problem for scaling this up to megafauna, it's a problem that's [been solved before](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_prehistoric_animals#Sawflies,_wasps,_bees,_ants_and_allies_(Hymenoptera)). [Answer] The predator could be like a venomous snake, but in a different way. The smaller organism could use a hemotoxin to attack its prey, slowly making the much larger prey bleed out. Then, the predator could drag the carcass back to its den to feed its young, or just leave it out in the open for scavengers. Alternatively, biting the leg of the prey with neurotoxins could cause the prey's legs to become paralyzed and the predator could kill the prey that way, by causing the heart to stop beating. [Answer] The best approach is bacteria. Komodo dragons harbor some particularly nasty bacteria in their mouth. They are known to bite a prey once, and then just follow it as it succumbs to fever, and then death. Komodo dragons happen to be big, but they don't need to be big for this approach to work. They just need to be able to deliver bacteria deep enough into a wound to do the trick. Of course it is enormously wasteful to take down a creature 10x your size. Even the giant snakes which eat entire baby deer are at least eating something on par with their size, and can convert it to fat stores before it spoils in their stomach. As such, I would expect such predators to hunt in packs. A pack would permit consumption and digestion of the meat faster, so it would not waste any food, and there has to be some advantage to working in packs. Evolution is not known to miss out on a free lunch. Of course, if you really want the hunt to be successful, change the game. Consider making this a symbiotic species which helps the health of the healthy game, and prunes the pack of its weak. Maybe they help the giant game find food. Or maybe they help rear the young, but cull those that would otherwise not survive. [Answer] I would suggest a large flying predator with a straight, thin, sharp horn. For evolutionary support consider a swordfish or narwhal tusk. The predator is evolved for a sneak swooping attack from behind on the larger prey, basically it flies silently (As owls have evolved to do), does a sharp U-turn above its prey, in the air. It has strong neck muscles that with a jerk stabs its horn through the eye of the prey into its brain, causing a massive brain hemorrhage. An equally quick jerk back withdraw this stabbing instrument very quickly, and it resumes flight for escape. If the horn is broken, it is shed and a new one regrows relatively quickly; it really only needs to be long enough to penetrate from eye to a major brain artery. I would make them social animals for just this reason; the huge prey is enough to feed the whole flock for a month (for evolutionary support, vultures will eat long dead animals), so if one member loses its horn it still eats for the month it takes to regrow the horn. The advantage of this approach is the prey can hardly develop armor plating for its eyes and still see; the eye with the optic nerve to the brain is a weak point on most animals, and a relatively small brain injury can be quite fatal. If there is bone behind the eye, part of the specialization in the strike is the hunter's horn is precisely the width of the optic nerve for THIS prey, and they find that hole 95% of the time. Several hunters could attack the same animal, if the first fails and breaks its horn, the next guy takes his chance. This is also not a venom (most venoms kill more than one kind of prey). Many dinosaurs evolved bone plates on the their body and foot-thick skin to thwart direct attacks; they can't defeat this attack that way. [Answer] # You want the [Dire Wolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf) Weighing in at approximately 68kg, Canis dirus was a pack hunter believed to prey on megafauna such as the Columbian Mammoth (weighing 10,000kg). This is evidenced by it's large teeth and high sheer bite strength, as well as it's extinction after the [Quaternary Extinction Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event) which killed off a whole bunch of megafauna, and various predators who had just lost their food source, the Dire Wolf among them. From @T.E.D in a comment: > > As a clarification, there are some modern wolf subspecies and dog breeds that get nearly that large. What was really special about the Dire Wolf that modern wolves no longer have is the [bite strength](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf#Dentition_and_bite_force), which the data shows to be directly related to the relative size of a predator's prey > > > [Answer] Your two main choices will probably be pursuit predators like humans, or venom users like snakes and cone snails. Those two techniques are tried and true plus work on prey of incredible relative size. No pack hunter will ever be as good as a single venomous hunter. [Answer] I feel like nothing is going to work better on large prey than a good set of teeth and strong jaws. If you look at almost all the large hunters, they use their jaw. Both on land and in the water (its a bit different in the water). I don't include in the air because I don't see a way for a bird to be able to hunt prey 10x larger than it while on flat terrain (no good air currents to help it gain altitude). It would expend so much energy and while on the ground it would be vulnerable to scavengers and other hunters or the so called large prey its hunting. I would imagine the best way would be to be able to maul the preys throat, preventing it from breathing properly, severing major arteries to the head and letting it bleed out fairly quickly. Of course, the problem with larger animals is that they have larger necks, are usually taller and have thicker skin. So the second best way would be to exhaust it/bleed it out by making numerous cuts on its body. You can watch videos of wolves, lions and other pack predators hunting larger animals. There are advantages to hunting as a pack and disadvantages. Firslty there is strength in numbers. You can fan out, trap and direct your prey. You can have multiple tries at taking down and injurying your prey, weakening them enough until you can overwhelm them. You can also have members sit out of a hunt, either because they are injured, raising young or otherwise unable to participate. Of course the disadvantage is that you have a much larger number of mouths to feed with the same prey. You also have several members that can distract the target while the others attack it. The problem with solo hunting is that if your creature becomes sick, injured, pregnant or generally unwell it is faced with death straight away. Being low on energy and trying to recover can be risky. Being even lower on energy after you have recovered will lead to most of your hunts failing as you just won't have as much energy to use as before. The biggest issue with this is that big prey often develop deterrences and defences to protect themselves. Buffalo have horns. One unlucky stratch for a solo predator is a death sentence and since the animal is larger you cant just over power it. You need to weaken it first before making a killing blow. Another suggestion people are making is using poison, venom or some sort of toxin. This wouldn't work too well for larger prey, especialy 10x larger prey. The toxin will take time to propagate and during this time your hunter is vulnerable to attack from a panicking prey. Just due to size, this can become a huge risk. A single stomp could end you and the prey collapsing on you will also likely just end you. You can also look at the nature of hunters (Snakes) that utilize venom. They are often ambush predators which means they wait patiently for the prey to come near them. This means that they need to be well disguised and have a low metabolism to they don't waste unnecessary energy while waiting for the prey to come to them. The best way for them to ensure that is to be small so they won't be seen, or hide in large bodies of water so they can remain cool and not be seen. The issue with ambush hunters is that they can't just affort to hunt one type of prey. Since the prey needs to approach them, anything they can consume is good enough. Secondly, I don't think I've seen many cases of a ambush hunter taking down something 10x larger than it. THe final point I want to make is that larger animals all tend to be herd animals. Large animals often don't have predators before their large size makes it extremely hard for predators to take them down and for it to be worth it. Since the large prey can't be hunted due to their size and the risk, hunters often go for their calves or babies who are significantly smaller and more vulnerable. To counteract this, the large animals stay in a herd to offer protection. Basically, I'm saying Pack Hunters, built for endurance and multiple short bursts of speed, with really sharp and maybe replaceable/regrowable teeth. You wear the animal down over time and go for the killing blow once its too tired to retaliate. A prey 10x larger is a huge risk to hunt, so they need to be agile. It will be too large to take down instantly via any sort of body part or toxin and staying close and attached to it would be a huge risk to any hunter, so they will need to distract it, and dart in and out, making numerous small cuts and bites that build up over time. [Answer] Endurance, aka [Persistence Hunting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting). The creature could cause it's chosen prey to flee and it keeps on following, never allowing the prey to rest. A hunt might take days but the animal is so exhausted by the end that it can't fight back effectively [Answer] Do you see any Woolly Mammoths today? That's because humans hunted them to extinction. This was achieved by a method of hunting known as "persistence Hunting". The Human animal is actually one of the most physically enduring mammals known to science. Over distance and time, a human will out pace every other animal on the planet. This was part of the evolution to cope with their chosen hunting strategy. It was not find a mammoth and throw rocks and sticks at it until it died... but to know that the mammoth would prefer to flee and while faster on initial flight, would need to rest, and sooner than the human... during the rest of the animal, the human would continue to follow it and catch up, attempt to kill it, only for it to flee, but not fully rested. This pattern resulted in less down time to recover, which only meant less time to put distance between the prey and predator... eventually it would either succumb to it's wounds or just give up out of sheer tiredness... at which point it became dinner. And the larger the animal, the more recovery time it needs. To the animal world, humans are the Terminator. We do not give up, we cannot be negotiated with, we do not compromise, and we never ever stop until you are dead. [Answer] Also find another dinasour, [Deinonychus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinonychus). Bottom quote from [here](https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/mar/29/dinosaurs-behaviour-raptors-pack-hunters). Hunted dinasour is [Tenontosaurus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenontosaurus). Tenontosaurus * Name: Tenontosaurus * Height: 3 meter * Lenght: 6,5 – 8 meter * Mass: 1.000 – 2.000 kg Deinonychus * Name: Deinonychus * Mass: 73 – 100 kg (Grown) * Height: 1.5 meter * Lenght: 3.5 meter "In 1969, palaeontologist John Ostrom described a strange dinosaur from the 110m-year-old rock of Montana. Named Deinonychus, this roughly human-sized predator had grasping hands, a hyperextendable sickle claw on each foot, and a stiff tail that acted as a dynamic counterbalance. Presented as the antithesis of the reptilian dinosaur archetype, Ostrom concluded that Deinonychus "must have been a fleet-footed, highly predaceous, extremely agile and very active animal, sensitive to many stimuli and quick in its responses." Ostrom also thought that Deinonychus was a pack hunter. At least three Deinonychus were found alongside the herbivorous dinosaur Tenontosaurus at a quarry excavated by Ostrom and his colleagues, and numerous Deinonychus teeth were discovered among the remains of the same prey at fourteen other sites. (Since dinosaurs replaced teeth throughout their lives, predators could occasionally afford to lose a tooth or two while feeding.) Where Tenontosaurus bones were found, traces of Deinonychus frequently turned up. Tackling a Tenontosaurus wasn't easy. Despite lacking armour or spikes, an 8-metre adult Tenontosaurus would have been hefty enough to break the bones of an attacker. Killing such a large animal would have required cooperation, and this conjecture – along with the common association between the two species – fuelled the idea that packs of Deinonychus often pounced upon poor Tenontosaurus. The gory conflicts were immortalised in museum displays and palaeo-art ever after and, given a name change, Deinonychus used the same tactics in Jurassic Park. But not everyone has agreed that Deinonychus hunted in packs. In 2007 palaeontologists Brian Roach and Daniel Brinkman argued that the Tenontosaurus kill sites Ostrom cited represented bloody scrambles where individual Deinonychus scrapped over feeding rights. In Ostrom's view, the three partial Deinonychus skeletons that inspired his hypothesis were individuals that were killed while bringing down the Tenontosaurus, but Roach and Brinkman argued that the three were slaughtered by other Deinonychus during competition for the carcass. The dinosaurs were more like komodo dragons than wolves." [Answer] Find something big to do the gruntwork. [![raven and wolf](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ftlpz.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ftlpz.jpg) <https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254704.Mind_of_the_Raven> You leave open the nature of the prey. If your killer does not actually get is own claws dirty, its method could be used on multiple prey types. Your predator is like the raven. It specializes in killing very large things because it knows its neighborhood. When it finds a large prey item ripe for the killing, it knows where to find a large carnivore able to kill it. Then it leads that carnivore to the prey item. Ravens do exactly this. Historically they work with wolves, but they can lead wolverines, badgers, and also people to prey animals. The raven cannot kill these large prey items themselves. But the ravens like the meat, and there is more than enough. [Answer] Dude, you are completely talking about Raptors. When i read your instructions, is said this is Utahraptor. [Utahraptop wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utahraptor) - [Utahraptop dino wikia](http://dino.wikia.com/wiki/Utahraptor) - [raptop family](http://dino.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Raptors) Raptors are knows as close relation family gangs. They can not hunt alone (maybe but rather not to), they can kill preys 1000 times of them with a 10-20 group members. They have reputation even killing big t-rex and biggest dinosaur of all time [Brachiosaurus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachiosaurus). These fellas are very social, they have nested, they have eggs to protect. You can watch Jurassic park movie, they are famous there too. ]
[Question] [ I'm inventing a race for a roleplaying campaign, and I thought about making them live really long lives (or even be immune to ageing) and not be fertile, but I still want them to be male and female in appearance even though they don't have a reproductive system. Is there a way to give a somewhat scientific (it doesn't have to be 100% solid, just believable) reason why they can appear as male and female without having genitals? Can they have gender-determined hormones for some reason? --- Edit: to clarify, I decided that the members of this race were created one by one by a god, who decided to make them not reproduce but instead live indefinitely long lives (virtually infinite). I was asking for a way to explain the existence of gender traits even without having a reproductive system, just to avoid having to say "yeah it's because that god wanted them that way and that's about it". I mean, is there any reason for there to be gender traits (such as breasts or more developed muscular structure) other than reproduction? [Answer] If you take a step back from gender, specifically, and just look at differentiation, there's some value to be gleaned from it. A long-term differentiation like gender can be basically thought of as a long term preparation for something to come. If the "god" could not create a race where each individual has the same physical traits and have that race prosper, he/she/it might give up, and instead develop two distinct sets of physical traits. For example, it might make sense to have one half of the race more capable in terms of strength, and the other half more capable in terms of finesse. Those two goals would lend themselves to what you and I consider masculine and feminine genders. One difficult question would be determining the value of it in terms of immortal creatures. In human cases, the ability to prepare for given roles for years before you are even aware enough to choose which role you take, having some of that build into our genetics was really useful. If you have thousands of years to optimize your own strength/flexibility/intelligence to the world around you, there might be less value to differentiation before each individual is aware enough to make a conscious choice about said differentiation. It also could have been a tool for control. After all, one of the single most effective ways to limit uprisings is to make sure that no one individual is able to do everything. Intentionally give them a weakness that needs to be filled by another, and rebellions get a lot harder to manage. [Answer] How about this; You have one or more gods, who creates the first couple of humanoids. After a while, another god comes along, and decides that creating sapient creatures looks like a lot of fun, and starts copying the other gods creations. Except, he didn't really do his research properly. So while he managed sapience, sexes and the whole walking upright thing, he simply missed the self-reproducing part, simply taking the different sexes as the thing to do without question. [Answer] [A virus](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC99025/), one that infected those with reproductive systems was the main cause of death for a long-lived race, the virus passed down through their DNA and taking lethal effect after a certain amount of time has been reached. Eventually there were those that were [born without reproductive systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCllerian_agenesis) who were not affected by the virus. Of course these could not pass down any genes whatsoever and were eventually the last ones to survive. This allows those last people to both retain their gender-like traits (due to the way DNA works) whilst not being able to reproduce. [Answer] Your race may be a crossbreed between two different races. It is not unusual for such crossbreeds to be sterile. Their immunity to aging may be explained by this particular crossbreed having enzymes replenishing telomeres after cell division. Which otherwise only would happen to stem cells. It's quite plausible that such an individual would be quite likely to get cancer and die from it. So it may only be very few of the crossbred individuals with an immune system capable of fighting off the cancer, which survives. Those few individuals may however be immune to aging and theoretically capable of living forever, though not immortal as they could still die from major trauma. Normally a sterile crossbreed between two races is not considered to be a race in its own right. However it might be that the population of crossbreeds have over time grown so large, that the two original races have been driven to extinction by the competition for food. All of that backstory may have happened so long ago, that even the crossbreeds themselves can no longer remember how it happened. [Answer] Ancient Greek/Roman grade deities\. They created them for fun but don't like the trouble that making little demi-gods every time they stick it in something creates. Hence they created them sexually capable but infertile. \If you don't know what this means, read the versions of the myths not targeted at small children. They're a lot more fun. [Answer] If you are saying that this race was created by a god then a scientific explanation of gender differences is unnecessary as you already have a supernatural justification for the race to be however you want them to be. If you want a narrative reason then one option is to say that they were created as different castes to perform different roles in society. Here direct analogues genders as we understand them in humans may be a bit of a stretch in credibility as any reference to gender immediately implies sexual reproduction but some sore of worker/soldier and administrator/academic division would make some sort of sense and has plenty of precedents in sci-fi and fantasy. Having said that if you are breaking away from a binary gender definition you could emphasise this by having more than two castes. Exactly how this might break down is for you to decide. One well known example of this is the morlocks and eloi in H.G.Wells' 'The Time Machine'. Something else to bear in mind is that this will inevitably be read as a socio-political statement how much you care about this is up to you. Of course if they were created by a god, live indefinitely and don't reproduce then that suggest that suggests that each individual alive was directly created by a this god. An alternative is that they are the offspring of gods, or better still the offspring of gods and some mortal race. This explanation strikes quite a good balance between supernatural creation and fitting in with biological plausibility and established mythological connections. It's also worth noting that some closely related species can breed and reproduce by their offspring are infertile (eg horses and donkeys) so this would work as a proper scientific explanation and the god aspect could just be their own explanation. There is some debate as to exactly how biological ageing works but it's certainly not absolutely beyond the bounds of credibility that a biological organism could be functionally immortal eg [mole rats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat) are unusually long lived for their size. [Answer] Recall the common [side-blotched lizard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_side-blotched_lizard). There are three different phenotypes of male lizards in addition to the female. They evolved into an interesting rock-paper-scissors game within one species with some especially relying on brute strength, loyalty, or slyness. I'm sure you could explain a similar mechanism arising for an asexual species, who would certainly identify to "gender" socially although there is no sexual difference like the male lizards. [Answer] The explanation can be completely natural. Their reproduction process requires not just 2 but 3 sexes. Unfortunately, all individuals of the third sex perished because of epidemic/war/natural disaster/whatever. Since that time the race can no longer reproduce. [Answer] This 'god' race could be a surrogate race ie: they look after another species and have taken specific roles in their breeding cycle, in this manner you may have a co-dependant or dependant species. So your 'god' race develops female forms to nurture the children of the 'sub' race. The male forms are to help them physically or maybe in war or some other such reason. A cool twist would be that the 'sub' race died out millenia ago and because this race just keeps living the individuals still have all their traits. If the sub-race were living co-dependantly of this other race then maybe you could introduce the idea that they were created as a companion race or whatever to the 'sub' race. Maybe they used to be able to breed but needed one of the opposite sex of the 'sub' race to do so (different races, same species). If the 'sub' race need this as well (so both races rely on each other to procreate) but did not have the longevity then maybe that was how they died out. The 'god' race just didn't bother procreating enough. Just some ideas, remember to reference if you use them. Regards, Damien Holley [Answer] Of course. Former they had a reproduction system and were "normal" males and females, but after evolution or technology-changes, they became infertile and those parts of body degenerated. Well, if they were created by a god, he did this for fun, or in order to have balanced or more interesting society he created 2 gender. The funny variant: a god actually wanted to create a one-gender race, but some members were produced with a different gender occasionally or by mistake [Answer] You are interested in establishing that each of these beings are brought into existence one-by-one by a monotheistic creator deity. If you are interested in emphasizing the theology of your fictional cosmos, you could make explicit that the God has both masculine and feminine characteristics. God is both 100% male and 100% female; He is the perfect man, and the perfect woman. God deliberately chooses to withhold the feminine characteristics from his men, and similarly withholds masculine characteristics from the women, in order to accentuate both. Or, He intended to make His created beings, the men and the women, mutually dependent upon each other, or wants to prevent them from being capable of rivaling His power. (In the Symposium, one of the Dialogs of Plato, it was explained that humans were originally made as eight-legged creatures, capable of autonomous reproduction, and then were divided into male and female after revolting against the gods.) Biological reproduction does not happen in your literary universe; but when the people are created, are they physically developed and self-sufficient? Or are the people created as infants? If infants, they would need to be breast-fed, as they are physically incapable of digesting solid food. The women would obviously be incredibly vital for the existence of the species. It makes sense that the God would choose to create the people in this way for the two reasons mentioned above--to make the people loving and caring for one another, and submissive towards God; people that are created as helpless infants could presumably be taught to serve the will of God more easily than if they were created as self-reliant and skeptical adults). The menfolk, likewise, would be built to perform heavy manual labor and could be the builders, warriors, lumberjacks, etc. Obviously, traditional gender roles in the labor market existed for a reason, and were never called into question until the age of machines and automation. Because the men and the women are dependent upon one another in practical, pragmatics ways, and because they themselves were once children raised by a mother and a father, they would be emotionally compelled to complete the cycle; to seek each other's company and agree to cohabitate with one another, promising each to the other their sole attention for a lifetime. Once a household is formed, the deity would perhaps see fit to induce them to take care of another person from infancy to adulthood. Perhaps a baby would be delivered by a stork? Scratch that; perhaps the deity himself is an avian creature who lovingly flies, delivering gift-baskets from the sky to its favorite humans, similar to the sparrow in the Japanese fable shita-kiri suzume, The Tongue-Cut Sparrow. [Answer] Could it be that they weren't always incapable of reproduction or immortal. They discovered the vaccination against death, but it had the side effect of making them infertile! Most people preferred infinite life to reproduction and took the treatment at a young adult age (before they realised the pleasure of children and families). The ones that didn't were in the minority so it was difficult to find fertile partners to choose from (it was before the age of Internet dating) and to convince their children not to take the treatment, so they eventually went extinct. Alternatively, messing about with immortality medicines angered the Gods (who themselves want to be the only immortal ones) and so as punishment cursed the population with infertility. [Answer] Then you could think why we human have difference appearance in each gender Remember that many animal in our world doesn't have difference appearance between gender (dog, cat, monkey almost all vertebrate at least). But human is exception To have difference appearance in each sex is called [Sexual Dimorphism](http://www2.nau.edu/~gaud/bio300b/sexdi.htm) To simplified it. It because each appearance has difference roles and purpose needed for the task, fertile or not, masculine made for doing a muscle work while feminine appearance used for nurture things with soft and caring Appearance is also a way to communicate. You need to have appearance suit for each kind of communication. Diplomat and negotiation is better with beauty and harmless while masculine needed for warning and intimidation. This is very important if those specie made for communicate with human. Same as Angel in Bible Even same specie and same sex could have difference appearance. Ant and Bee for example has difference appearance between drone, worker and queen. Some worker ant also has difference size for difference task. Even there are no god if they are hive specie like ant they could be gender but no sex [Answer] Your race is so scientifically advanced that they can reproduce in the laboratory of life. Through the process of evolution, they lost fertility because all beings have created scientifically to better physical and infertile feature [Answer] Simple answer: to fit in with the humans. The beings all have different personalities, and choose to assume the gender that best suits them, so they are more approachable to humans, easier to understand, etc. Either they have some control over their appearance, or their bodies slowly adapt to their personality and self-image as they age. [Answer] I don't know if you would like it given your thesis and your goals. However As previously mentioned, you could have them been designed as compliments one for strength one for finesse, or - You could simply have them adapted to the outside world, and within their culture there is no gender assigned. However, due to their age and the rest of the world having this view of male and female, they do make it easier to interact with the outside world by adopting these traits or forms. So maybe those who identified or idolized the dress and style of women's make up, clothes etc. have become those viewed as women by the outside world when it merely a choice and those who tend to keep shaved or shorter hair, are seen as men. Or - That rather than having their own children, these people of this god are born through other races, and once reaching age of maturity have this vision of this distant island they have to travel to, which compels them to when they get there. The true nature of what they are is revealed, and thus it is not so much that they don't have genders but the group of people have ceased to look at it that way due to their so rapid and varying forms. Also see Part B Also thinking about your immortal race, they could be infertile due to The god's gift which is given to them, that rather than true immortality that it is more a form of reincarnation. When one of them dies they born a new, but this is a form of their soul, that is put into an available body and so the individuals memories and experience survive, but they are constantly changing so gender holds no bounds because for one century I was a man but I have also been women. And in this way, some may be viewed as we would view children as they are first rediscovering their past lives. And men would be having sex with men and vice versa, some would probably marry, others would probably see it as a burden. Not sure you will like it but this is just a different take on things [Answer] This would be better as a comment. Too bad for rep limits. You know what makes this whole situation kind of funny? The number one cause of death would be domestic accidents. I mean, sure you're possibly a god slaying immortal angel, but you can still fall off a ladder. Think about it a bit. Horx the living fire, eternal and unquenchable in death and destruction had a jack give out while changing the oil in his car. Shar, known for battle tactics and some of the most epic showdowns in history, retired at 34,677 years old. She died when her foot slipped getting out of a tub. Tibth, law mower. Gethic, un-watched candle. Yiddith, well it took a good hour to sweep that mess up. Then there was Cecil Palmer, possibly a street cleaner or Kevin. Biological immortality really kind of sucks. Plus everything that does die of old age would want to research said creatures. I'm not talking a few camera's and some long range watching. I'm talking taking it apart while it's living. If it's really immortal then amplify the horror. You CAN'T die... Your best bet is to not explain it. Just kind of play with it. That's what J.K. Rowling did with magic. There was some half-back explanations, but it was always "A wizard did it". If you get caught up explaining it now, you can't change it later. Plus it might come off as an info dump which will bore readers. I rely on unreliable narrators to avoid the pitfall of a good explanation. [Answer] Is not having genitals important to the story? Since your “deity” is not part of the story, you can assume evolution instead of creation. This species became dominant because of their longevity (and other factors, if needed). Since you mentioned their combativeness in another question, they may have wiped out the competition before starting on each other. Meanwhile, because of their longevity, and the fact that they are more interested in fighting than the other f-word, the gradual loss of fertility\* did not prevent their dominance. \*or the appearance of a virus as suggested by CEObrainz ]
[Question] [ Imagine there lives a serpentine alien species on a hospitable terrestrial planet in a galaxy far far away, they are found around the swampy area and the entire place will become waterlogged during night fall. The moon always cause high tides at night time and the serpentine alien must evacuate their habitat to escape the rising acidic sea water (worst ocean acidification ever). Once the water retreats in the morning, it leaves behind plenty of nutrient for the alien to feast. > > My question is how does the limbless 3m serpentine alien moves a dozen > ping pong sized eggs to a higher place such as a tree? > > > Notes, not rules: * The "snake" only lay a dozen eggs once in their lifetime * They risks being hunted by diurnal predators with flying capability(edited) * They look and moves exactly like their Earth counterpart, boa constrictor. * They need to hide themselves by burrowing underground since all the vegetation including the trees are nigh indestructible, at least no alien can break or eat them. * The eggs grow spikes over time resembling sea urchins, each needle contains a chemical that can induce deadly allergic reaction to all alien including themselves. * Eggs should never be allowed to come into contact with the sea water. * I am thinking super hard for a solution that can protect the eggs from the occasional flooding, but i want the alien to exhibit a parental behavior at least until the egg hatches. * So they will have to shift the eggs themselves and I strongly believes that they must have evolved a unique trait for that. * You need to give a real life example of the behavior or traits stated in your answer. [Answer] The simplest solution is for them to lay their eggs into a cavity in the tree, high above the tide range, and roam around the nest to protect them until the eggs hatch and the offspring is born. If the tides happen every night, carrying the eggs around twice a day meaninglessly increase the risk of losing/damaging them, and considering the creatures only lay 12 eggs in a lifetime that risk seems too high. [Answer] So they need to haul their eggs twice every day, but will die of a lethal allergic reaction if they touch them, right? They use the bag. (A fancy snake skin bag). All lizards [molt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecdysis) from time to time. The molted skin is usually dry and very brittle. Once in their lives, however, these creatures go through a specific type of molting, during which they shed one especially thick and durable skin. This happens right before they lay their eggs, which they do inside the skin. If they need to move the eggs, they move the entire skin full of eggs by holding it in their mouth. The skin can have natural camouflage, a neutral smell (or have an [aposematic pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aposematism)), and/or it can retain some nutritional value for newly hatched creatures to feed on. Edit: As for real life example. [Some spiders tends to carry their egg sacs around.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider#Reproduction) [Answer] Terrestrial snake eggs are laid and are often stuck together in a single mass, though not solid they fall apart and separate easily. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SN8AH.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SN8AH.jpg) Your creatures eggs are laid together to form a cohesive ring, or shield shape that will fit snugly around the neck of the creature, when she wishes to move them. This mass is held together by a resin like excretion from the mother. With a special muscle, the female is able to expand and contract her body within the shape to hold them firmly as she travels up and down the tree. The protective spikes on the eggs are only on the upper side of the eggs so she is able to transport them. As an added benefit of this behavior is that the "egg shield" protects the mother from attack wile she moves them about. [Answer] As mentioned already, the simplest and most reliable method is laying the eggs in the right spot, keeping the eggs inside the mother until the right spot is identified or built. Other options : After the nest is completed in the tree, the creature might carry the eggs one at a time in the mouth like mouthbreeding frogs or fishes. Assuming they move like boa constrictors but the ribs and muscles are smaller and tighter, then the skin/scales could hold the eggs as the creature moves and ascends. Like rolling a coin over knuckles, but the knuckles are inside a thick glove. Change the egg structure a bit from the description, so that delicious stuff grows between the spines. A predator picks up the egg, moves it, and eats the easy good stuff, then leaves the spiny hard core where it's dropped, to hatch later. [Answer] Because of the spikes the snakes can't incubate the eggs with their body heat, which means that they'll need a different source of heat. The easiest source is sunlight. Likewise, because of the spikes something like an evolved specialty pouch doesn't work. But if the eggs had a sticky coating the mother could climb up into the tree high above the canopy where the sun would get filtered out, and lay them on the bark in a place they would get the most sunlight. If the eggs were patterned to match the bark then it would be harder for predators to see them, and once they grow the spines they would be very hard to get at. Being up high has another advantage in that the baby snakes would hatch out of their eggs, and then fall clear of the spikes, meaning that they wouldn't risk getting poisoned staying in a nest with the discarded egg shells. The parents could either stay near by the eggs when they aren't hunting for food, especially in the time before the spines grow, but again because of the spines they can't get close enough to do much other than that. They could also stay below where the eggs are hatching to ensure that nothing tried to attack the new baby once it falls down from the tree. Edit: If you really want the snakes to do the full incubation thing, Another way would be for the snakes to create a nest in the tree, lay the eggs, and then cover them with vegetation. The spines would grow in, but there would be a layer of protection between the eggs and the snake, meaning they could incubate the eggs safely. Unfortunately I can't think of a way to allow the snakes to move the eggs in a manner that would actually keep them safe, and not put them into more danger while transporting them. [Answer] I think the safest way to keep the eggs from the acidic seawater and to move them around is within their bodies. As in to keep them inside until they are ready to hatch and give birth to live young. As long as the adult snakes are safe from harm and survive the eggs should also be safe from acidic sea water and predators and wont be visible as a target. Apparently anacondas which is very boa like and 6 other species of snake that give birth to live young. <https://a-z-animals.com/blog/7-snakes-that-give-live-birth-as-opposed-to-eggs/> [Answer] The snakes swallow the eggs and excrete them up the trees. If the distance is to big, they can crawl with the eggs in there stomache. The eggs are protected against that environment and the poison does prevent the excretion of diggestive tract juices. Instead a sort of glue is excreted, that hardens in contact with air, allowing for the eggs to be glued to the tree branches. Also observed is snakes of the same family, forming a pipeline of eating and excreting eggs, to bring them to the "family" tree. ]
[Question] [ My protagonist needs food from a village during times of a famine, and all she can offer (or pretend to offer) is spinning their animal hair to make rope (nobody else has those skills.) Is there a way that having more rope available would help them with their famine such that it's worth giving food over? This is a village in the middle of a forest. I imagine certain hunting traps and fishing nets could use rope, but other than that, I'm at a loss. The question: what uses could a rural village need for rope during times of famine to help with the food supply? Thank you! [Answer] Rope is super useful for many things, at many technology levels, relating to procuring and preserving food: * Snare Traps rely on ropes for the snares * Fishing, either with nets or with a rod, will require string or rope to make the correct tools * Buildings, for food storage, may rely on ropes for lashing. * Smoking requires an enclosed space for the smoke to preserve food. Once again, rope comes to the rescue and provides material for lashing. * Rope can be used to make cord baskets, allowing people to gather more per trip. * Fencing and deer scares to fend off herbivores. Deer get a little freaked out when they get touched by something they don't see, and a thin rope could be that thing! And I am sure there are more! Like making rope ladders to get high-up fruit, making a bow, starting fires (bow drill), measuring farmland/plots, trellises for climbing vines, and others... I suggest looking at youtube channel "Primitive Technology" to see how much rope is used in various projects, including food projects, in a very low tech setting. As a bonus, this all takes place in an Australian forest! --- FROM THE COMMENTS: The comments have had yet more suggested uses or expand upon suggested uses. Lashings for boats/rafts (@Alexander the 1st) and harness for beasts of burden (@workerjoe) are two big ones. In any case, I tried to keep my list as general as possible, making as few assumptions as possible about what kind of forest, what the climate is, what people eat, etc. Obviously, the technology and climate of the forest village in question affects how they use rope, but the consensus is clearly that rope/cordage is very useful and important to pre-industrial-revolution hunting, gathering, trapping, and farming. (Even then, I bet a modern farmer can expound the virtues and usefulness of cordage!) [Answer] Make fiber. Your spinner does not just make rope. She makes fibers. The ladies of the village use the fiber to make new clothes and clothes for their babies. The men use the fiber to make rope to lead animals, make traps and hang food up away from rodents as well as macrame mankinis which they wear for special nights out. The kids use the fiber to make cats cradles and toys including cat toys which had been sadly lacking. I use fiber from the fur of satisfied cats to make a sweet hat and add my entire feather collection to the hat, and give it as a gift to your character; it looks awesome on her. Your character gets pretty chunky because she gets so much food from these villagers who love her spinning skills. That also looks awesome on her. And she teaches some of the kids how it is done, because the story may compel her to move on from the village, sporting her hat and her new and very sheddy cat Proto ("Proto" because he generates the protohats). [Answer] A village in a forest has many different foods available. A forest has many different types of food that can be collected including foods that normally would not be eaten but would be eaten in times of disasters. These include bark, insects, roots, normally poisonous plants that have to be processed a certain way to be safe, etc. The major reason that a village in a forest would be suffering from a lack of food is because of the tax man coming in and taking everything. In such a case, the best use of a rope would be to hang the tax man. [Answer] You need a rope to access water in deep wells with buckets. Every little hamlet needs it and larger towns away from rivers have many wells. Wet well rope rots, so it has to be replaced regularly. Famines are often caused by aridity, which causes the ground water table to drop, which means that rope that used to be long enough to drop buckets down wells to reach water are now too short. So, everyone needs more rope right now or they will die of thirst long before the famine itself kills them. [Answer] The simplest solution is that the village can trade the rope with a client who needs large amounts of rope. The village itself has no need for rope, it needs food. Your lady is just working like a subcontractor to fill part of a production line. Eg, a ship builder will pay a bunch of cartloads of wheat for X fathoms of good quality rope. This lady knows how to make it while the village has the raw materials. The ship builder is not interested in the raw materials, just the finished product. Lot's of business is done this way right now. [Answer] They have grain but thier gravity mill is broken. They can make flour by hands but it thake lots of time and effort. Mill works with some counterweights wich are in some kind of rope basket. That basket is rised by workers but need strong rope to do it. All ropes maked by locals arent strong enough. Give them rope and they can fix mill, make flour and Your character is Savior from famine. * they cant use windmil - i is forest * they cant use watermil - no river near * they have small/medium amount of grain from clearing farms * regular way is to send grain to water/wind mil but it is 50 miles trip and last one was robed by bandits. [Answer] Make [bowstrings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowstring) of them. It gets used to make bows. Bows can be used for hunting. They can also be used for defending against any bandits who come to steal food from the village, and they can also be used offensively to attack other villages and loot their food. The same can be done with a [sling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sling_(weapon)). Weapons can be useful during a famine. [Answer] # Rope rots and burns Others have pointed out the many, many uses of rope, and the fact that a village where no one knows how to make rope is somewhat unbelievable. So this is a bit of a frame challenge to the idea that the community only wants rope in famine, or for some reason wants extra rope to deal with the famine. Instead, why might the famine have occurred? Two possible sources are floods and fires. A flood or fire could have destroyed the majority of the village's food supplies kept in common granaries, smokehouses, cellars, etc. If a substantial fraction of the village's rope were stored in the same place, it could also have been destroyed. If you want more widespread famine than flooding, you could imagine your village is in a semi-arid climate that has for some reason experienced unheard-of rainfall in recent years that has killed most of the crops, and at the same time all that extra moisture is spoiling other dry goods: mildewing textiles, moldy thatch roofs, and rotting ropes. Your protagonist either knows how to make rope more quickly than the villagers, or knows how to make rope from a different material that is either more readily available than their tradition or less susceptible to rot. If for example the villagers traditionally make hemp ropes, but those crops are also dying in the famine, knowing how to make animal hair ropes would be valuable. ]
[Question] [ I have thought of a sort of desert planet that has a atmosphere pretty similar to earth and with gravity a little lower which has little to no water source and most of it is empty dry wastelands. I also thought of a organism sort of resembles a camel that can produce water on its own to survive in such planet. Is it plausible and if how? [Answer] You are generating new water molecules in your body right now. You just did! And again! That assumes you are an air breathing biologic organism; no offense meant if not. When we combine oxygen with food molecules and burn them for energy, the result is CO2 and H2O. This answer (yes it is mine which is how I could find it) goes into the chemistry. [How could an organism store a massive amount of water?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/91646/how-could-an-organism-store-a-massive-amount-of-water/91661#91661) There are organisms that produce the water they need this way. It is called [metabolic water](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_water) and these organisms don't need to drink. Burning hydrocarbons like gasoline also makes water. That is why car exhaust is easy to see in the winter - it is full of water vapor. I had a scheme for Innocentive about generating water for soldiers in the desert by capturing it from their diesel vehicles. It did not win. :( What your desert things need is something with hydrogen in it (any reduced carbon, any reduced nitrogen, possibly other things) and oxygen. The oxygen combines with the hydrogen to make water, and combines with the other stuff to make oxides. That is totally legit biology. [Answer] Fun fact: [it seems camels emit less methane than cows or sheep](https://phys.org/news/2014-04-camels-emit-methane-cows-sheep.html). You could make it so that your alien camel produces more methane rather than less. Let's say it produces as much as a cow, [between 70 and 120kg / Earth year](https://phys.org/news/2019-07-potential-methane-cows.html). The alien camel could route that methane into a special organ, [where symbiotic bacteria would oxidize it anaerobically](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_oxidation_of_methane). If your camel can also produce or eat nitrates, they can get three water molecules for every methane molecule. Otherwise they are capped at one H2O molecule per methane molecule. The relevant reactions are: * Without nitrates: CH4 + SO42- → HCO3− + HS− + H2O * With nitrates: CH4 + 4NO3− → CO2 + 4NO2− + 2H2O 3CH4 + 8NO2− + 8H+ → 3CO2 + 4N2 + 10H2O (That's a total of 12 molecules of water of output for four molecules of methane in the input). That raises a whole can of worms about how the chemistry of those beings would be, but hey, if sci-fi will take giant worms that swim through sand and beings that can harvest sunlight from orbit, then sci-fi can take a camel with a water plant on its back. Now, as for how much water that generates, let's do a rule of three. The atomic weight of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen, rounded to integers, are 1, 12 and 16, respectively. So: * Without nitrates: $$\frac{H\_2O}{CH\_4} = \frac{18}{16} = 1.125$$ * With nitrates: $$\frac{3H\_2O}{CH\_4} = \frac{54}{16} = 3.375$$ So for every kilogram of methane, your alien camel can produce either 1.125 kg of water or 3.375 kg, depending on how they can metabolize it. Now, to see if that is enough, [I did some quick googling and found this:](https://earthsky.org/earth/do-camels-store-water-in-there-humps) > > Camels can go up to seven months in the desert without drinking water. During such a time, they may lose nearly half of their body weight.(...) Very thirsty camels can drink up to 100 liters of water during a single visit to the well. (...) > Camels are just very efficient at using water, and they’re well-adapted for dehydration. > > > 100L of water for ~215 days means a camel needs 465 mL of water a day, on average. If your alien camel produces as much methane as a cow, and can metabolize with nitrates, they could produce 70kg of methane a year, which would lead to 236.25 kg of water (which equals 236.25 liters in ideal conditions, gotta love the metric system). That's 647mL a day, more than enough to keep your alien camel going! The extra margin could be used comfortably for other activities besides its basal metabolism. If your camel cannot use nitrates, then it will generate about 216mL of water per day. That's half what it needs. It will not be self-sufficient, but it will only need to drink half the amount of water it would need otherwise. In a desert environment where water is hard to come by, this may be a very positive adaptation. [Answer] Several plants are capable of absorbing humidity from the air, but they usually require high humidity. You might imagine this creature to have organic water absorbers - like, say, silica gel beads on its skin. The beads absorb air humidity from under the creature's belly, and when they're loaded with water, the creature might eat them, recycling the silica. Another possibility might be for the creature to have an internal [organic absorption refrigerator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator). This inner organ of the creature would suck in air, freeze the humidity out of it, then exhale the dry air. It would require quite an uncommon metabolism. Or it could do this by gathering foliage cut-outs and other debris in a small pit, then covering it with its transparent skin and expose to the Sun. This would condense the saturated water vapour out of the air (it is a known survival technique: [the "solar still"](https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Water-in-the-Desert)). [Answer] **Dew you think this counts? While actually making water from nothing is a little challenging, maybe no one notices your creature gathering water. In dry places, morning is a cool time of day, and dew can condense on surfaces. Perhaps your critters are gathering water from dew, but no one realizes that is what they're doing. Desert animals take advantage of dew as a water source, some even using unique methods to do so. A company has developed a self-filling water bottle using a dew collector mechanism. Other dew catchers, like nets, spines, and modified beaks could be used to enhance these processes (this article uses high-tech devices, but based on biological designs) <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/five-wild-ways-get-drink-desert-180952845/> [Answer] ## The difficulty with making water from (just) air is that you need hydrogen. I'm assuming that you're assuming a breathable atmosphere (read: contains oxygen). In order to make water, you need both hydrogen and oxygen, which are potentially explosive when mixed together. (Water is the result of that explosive reaction, if it's set off.) Multicellular organisms (and many of the unicellular ones) are actually already capable of synthesizing water; it's a byproduct of our regular metabolism of breaking starches into sugars, and sugars into carbon dioxide and water. (The process requires the addition of oxygen, which is why we need to breathe in oxygen - and breathe out carbon dioxide.) When you eat and metabolize, you've brought in the "extra" hydrogen required to make water, captured in the starches or sugars. (We just happen to need more water than we make - since we use water to carry away many of the other waste products we generate.) Your organism can eat something with hydrogen tied up in its chemistry, breathe in oxygen, and make its own water...** Except this is more or less normal earth biology. Consider, like camels or cactuses, an organism which does a better job of holding on to the water it has? [Answer] All foods (more or less) contain water. A random person on the internet claimed that a kangaroo rat can go its whole life without drinking (as you might guess from that, I haven't checked that). This does imply It depends what you mean by "producing water on it's own" - certainly, it is exceedingly difficult to produce without a good source of hydrogen & oxygen. I think, especially in a desert setting, that retaining water is more important than getting water - you only need to get as much water as you lose. ]
[Question] [ This was inspired by [this YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WGKz2sUa0w) titled "Why all solar panels are secretly LEDs (and all LEDs are secretly solar panels)" and the fact that speakers and microphones are similarly related. So thinking about a contemporary-technology dystopian surveillance society where LED TVs are built so that the behavior of * the display can be switched between display mode and camera mode, and * the speakers can be switched between speaker mode and microphone mode The smart TVs would do this switching rapidly from the OS running on the TVs while the television is "in use". In camera mode the TV screen would function as a (infra red?) camera sensor and record what it sees in the room while the speakers record the audio. All the data would be sent somewhere for further processing. To what degree would this be feasible given current technology, and considering also aspects such as that the flat TV screen would lack a lens and possible aperture control? [Answer] Yes, with interferometry based synthetic aperture imagery, but... It would take several orders of magnitude improvement in digital signal processing technology for it to work at the scale of a video screen. The sensors will need to record at a very high data rate, on the order of petahertz. Every single pixel will be receiving all of the light that is in its field of view, and none of the light will be focused. Fortunately, light isn't just photons, it's also electromagnetic waves. The sensors will behave like antennas, rather than eyes, passively collecting the radio waves at the wavelength of visible light. Radio signal sources can be tracked quite easily, by measuring the timing of a wave reaching multiple antennas. The same applies to all sorts of waves; an earthquake's epicenter is calculated by measuring the timing when the waves arrive at seismometers. We even have the same types of sensors built into our own human bodies. : Our ears can taking a wave and determine the direction that it came from, based on changes of intensity and timing. We have already proven the concept using vast antenna arrays to collect unfocused photons, to create a focused image. We imaged the supermassive black hole M87\* using the [Event Horizon Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope). [![EHT image of M87](https://i.stack.imgur.com/J4ist.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/J4ist.jpg) Of course, when astronomers use the term "photon" they don't just* mean visible light; they mean any coherent electromagnetic wave. This image represents the peak of current engineering feasibility for synthetic aperture imagery. The EHT uses a Very Long Baseline Interferometry, which works in 450 GHz, using very narrowly calibrated equipment designed specifically to tease out the glow of the accretion disk at the wavelengths to detect event horizons around black holes. In order to get meaningful data, though, your sample rate needs to be at least twice the frequency of the signal rate, preferably more than 4 times the signal rate, or you start getting downsampling errors called aliasing. In order to record visible light, which has frequencies between 405 THz to 790 THz, you will need a sample rate that is at least 1.58 PHz. Due to limitations from the speed of light, and the time that it takes electrons to pass through silicon and copper in computers, this is just past the fastest speed that we can record data meaningfully. We would have to pass the data from several sensors in order to build up a meaningful synthetic aperture image from interferometry. We would need specialized recording technology that we just don't have yet. And, there's also the problem that LEDs aren't designed to collect light, even though they're capable of doing it... just as sound coming out of a microphone would sound terrible, and sound recorded from speakers is also low quality. It would take several generations of iterating on the current science in order to use an LED-based computer monitor to record what's happening it a room, and it will always require specialized systems to just record the data in a meaningful way, much less process it into an image. It took several petabytes of data and 3 years of processing in order to build the EHT's image of M87\. It was faster to hand-carry the hard drives from the telescopes around the world to the datacenter, than it would have been to send the data over high speed internet links. It would take a lot of iterative work to miniaturize the chips necessary to do the calculations, but the technology just barely exists. Such a screen would be prohibitively expensive, as it's much easier to just put a lense in front of a cluster of photodiodes (i.e., a webcam) and hide that in the corner of the screen, but those leave physical evidence... you can see the lense if you take the screen apart. It could be possible, with non-digital interferometry, to construct such an image of the room in real time... but that equipment barely fits in the basements of large telescope observatories, and requires cryogenic cooling. You wouldn't be able to collect it clandestinely, and would be much cheaper (and higher quality) to use a webcam. [Answer] No* Screens these days are sheets of LED lights so that might work as a solar panel but not as a camera. At best you might measure ambient light levels perhaps but no camera. That said TV these days are coming out with built in cameras and microphones and will get worse as time goes by. Things like Google Assistant and Alexa will come built into a lot of household devices. [Answer] Even IF - Why would you want to take a photo with zero (or near few mm) field of vision and a lot of blur? Because TV screen would (could) act like a photosensitive paper (or if you are old enough camera film). There would be no lens to focus, no apertures to set the amount of light, no pinholes that would allow you to point to certain area. Screen would take light from everywhere that is not behind the TV. And what would be behind the TV would (could) still have ambient light. So a photo taken with such screen would be very bright (white) on border going to greyish in the middle. Just put a normal camera in the TV. Speakers can work as microphones anyway. [Answer] Yes! ...But not a very good one. Cameras have some combination of mirrors and lenses to focus the incoming light into something recognizable, and without that, you're not going to see much. An LED will return the light level it can see; unfortunately, the light level an LED on the bottom left corner and the light level of an LED on the top right corner are going to be mostly the same, unless you are pressing your face against the screen. A television on the wall across the room won't be able to see anything useful. However, a simple fix can improve the view considerably! Modern televisions have the LEDs right at the screen, or behind little bubbles that spread the light out, so as to produce the maximum view-able angle. But, there exist privacy screens that essentially limit the view angle to a point directly in front of the screen, at a set distance. These screens work by blocking light from escaping in any direction except a very small angle. Beyond that, the screen will look black, because the light has been blocked. And lucky(?) for us, that effect works in reverse! The LEDs will only see the light in a narrow band, instead of the whole room at once; the image will still be fairly blurry, but as long as someone is sitting in the "sweet spot" to view the monitor, the monitor will be able to see them, too! Even without that, your monitor will need a lot of custom hardware to read the pixels; it's a lot easier and cheaper just to squeeze a tiny, fully functioning camera into the TV's frame - say, right next to the infrared sensor? [Answer] Yes, Samsung produced the SUR40 Surface Table for Microsoft. The panel contained imaging sensors used to produce a picture of anything placed on the table. Note that without a lens of any sort the range of images it can take is very limited. Also it suffers terribly in certain lighting condition especially involving overhead flourescent lights. This was from 2011 <https://www.engadget.com/2011/01/06/microsoft-and-samsung-unveil-sur40-the-surface-2-0-experience/> [Answer] Given enough time, a very low resolution image could be recovered by changing the displayed image such that the liquid crystal layer allows light in through only a single pixel (or a small group of pixels). This would correspond to a black screen with a small white spot. By moving this white spot around the black screen and measuring the voltage at the backlight LEDs, some amount of spacial detail could be recovered (depending on the physical dimensions of the screen and the depth of the liquid crystal layer). The size and thickness of the spot will cause light rays to be rejected by angle based on the spot position. The minimum transmission area will be limited by the total amount of light transmitted by the black pixels, so your resolution will effectively be limited by the screen's contrast ratio as the white spot must be large enough to transmit more light than the black pixels over most of the screen. This would only be suitable for taking still images due to the time required to capture one frame, but the necessary mask frames could be hidden between frames during the display of a normal video on the screen. [Answer] A camera needs a lens to work. Screen has no lens in front of it so cannot be used as a camera. This is a single, important thing. The rest would not matter that much. A proper electronics can pick external brigthness reading from the LED no problem. If to put a tiny lens in front of each LED, it may work as a camera at the focus distance of this lens, given enough LEDs to compose a picture ("insect eye"). Some discrete ("individual") LEDs may have lenses in front of the light emitting diode, made on purpose or happening by chance. Hence low resolution banner has more potential for this kind of application. I do not think that IC leds have anything similar. An interesting thing for the story, a water droplet on the screen may act as a lens, suddenly allowing the part of screen under the droplet to "see". I am not sure about the focus distance however. [Answer] Somewhat. What is marketed as "LED TV" is LCD with a LED backlight. There are very few elements and they're placed behind (or to the sides of) a diffuser, so they won't be able to sense anything more than the room's general illumination level. Some high-end LCD TVs do have a full-array backlight with enough elements to potentially make out a bit more information than just general illumination. These are generally even more rare. OLED TVs have individual pixel elements, and they already have some means for recording the aging of individual elements as it occurs. Still, any image you get would have very little fidelity due to the lack of any means of focusing the light. You wouldn't be getting a video. But, if every current from the backlight was recorded, it's probably enough data to forensically distinguish between the patterns of incoming light when someone is in the room watching the TV, and when they're not. After all, isn't that something the dystopian society would care about? Of course, current TVs could already be recording you with good resolution by simply replacing the IR sensor, used for the remote, with a pinhole IR camera. It would keep working as an IR sensor, so no one would know the difference unless they disassembled the TV and closely inspected the components, specifically looking for a surveillance device. [Answer] Actually two questions here: First of the microphone: Yes you can, but as an electrical engineer this needs a lot more electronic in the background to accomplish that, in a dystopian setting this can also be hidden in the chips so that it is not obvious when you have a look at the PCB. Second the screen: Given current level of Signal processing: No. Explained [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/153843/67405) in detail. Give it a few years to a group of signal processing experts and machine learning experts and you may be able to detect how many people are in front of the TV, but do not forget the polarization so you would have a rather small angle of view. It would be easier to use a micro camera that is installed and officially used for video calls on your TV or a hidden camera underneath a one way see through material. [Answer] Making this work technically would be a Manhattan project; there's no reason to make such extreme effort when there's a simpler way to get it done. Selfie-grade cameras like the one on the face of your phone cost less than a dollar in million quantity. Microphones are even cheaper. Simply incubate a social movement that creates some sort of reason some people might want one on their TV. Encourage every TV maker to put it on every TV, all in the name of populism. We pretty much already have this with several social media habits, like cell phones tracking your location. For instance Google Maps tracks your location even in the background, nominally to monitor traffic flow and present local attractions, but also usable by police. Those are things you can turn off if you apply both technical skill and diligence, however you need to apply both pretty liberally, and when you do, and the police have reason to notice, it makes you look guilty and prejudices juries. Eventually it becomes a thing that is on by default, like Google Maps' tracking; you must go to technical extremes to turn it off, and very few people bother. Those who do, the fact that they do is interesting in and of itself. [Answer] A couple years back, I had read that cell phones were going to start using there glass plates as speakers & I believe it had mentioned car windshields as well. Not sure how well the TV screen will work to spy on you visibly, other than to maybe tell when you may have entered the room or left it. But I can see today's tech being good enough to use your tv screen as a mic to spy on you. Don't get hacked! ]
[Question] [ My character is a giant-slayer living in the far North with his family. He is able to bend and generate magnetic fields. The only technology he could use would be something like Feudal Japan and/or Europe. The giants are very slow creatures but 7 times stronger and bigger than humans. They can smell humans and feed on them. On the other hand the small amount of people in their territory determined their species to remain at 100 specimens. Giving this information, what type of tools/weapons and even armor would he use? [Answer] * Your first weapon is a shovel. [Drop an ant from an airplane and it lands safely on the ground](https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2016/6/15/11936802/ant-dropped-from-empire-state-building-science-experiment-mystery-solved) (from Douwe, in the comments), drop an elephant from 2 meters height and it breaks all its bones. Drop a giant... You simply dig traps, cover them up preferably in a way that people at people height can see warnings and a giant can't and wait. Even relatively shallow holes will break the arms and torso of the giant, if not his legs as well. This might not be a totally valid answer if you consider that the giant is surviving the square-cube law. As an alternative he could use a lot of thick ropes strung up around trees to trip the giant. * Make it bleed. To pump all that blood around the giant is going to need a lot more blood pressure, and a cut on the leg for example is going to be much harder to stop bleeding for such a giant creature. Use bows, crossbows, traps or suddenly spring from the bush and use a large axe (not a sword, you need the force and cutting power of an axe, there's a reason we don't cut trees with swords), then try to hide in the brush again. The giant will take a while, but he's much more likely to bleed to death. * Viral warfare Poisons might not be that readily available, but a pit with multi-week old poop from different species as well as some dead critters [will do just as well](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_biological_warfare). Dip your weapons into that before you wound the giant. You could also put that stuff into food you put out in the forest, for example some dead humans to lure them in (criminals if it makes your conscience better, or if you don't have a conscience, use live ones). [Answer] Since the giants are slow and strong, I would recommend just running around naked. That will make your hunter extremely light and nimble and so that they can recover from their I-Frame dodge rolls quickly. Armor is of little use if the creature your fighting is both 7 times larger and stronger. Nothing is going to really protect your from one of their attacks, so armor should really just be clothes based on the environment you are hunting in. As for the weapon, I would recommend poison. There are many lethal poisons out there that even in small doses would kill a giant. So while a drop might kill several humans, a couple more drops will kill a giant. And since they are slow, you just stab them with a needle several times (the needles size will have to vary depending on the giants skin thickness and toughness) and run away and wait for the poison to do its work. [Answer] The smart path would be to use a crossbow or longbow and to shoot the giants with poisoned arrows while on horseback (He does not have to shoot on the move. He could just kite the giants by shooting and then moving away, then shooting again). Keep in mind that the giants would probably be able to throw rocks at him, so he would have to maintain some distance. Also, the giants are quite large, so it would take a lot of poison to kill them. The smart thing to do would be for him to have several people accompany him. He would want to avoid melee at any cost, as even a glancing blow from a giant could smash his head in, no matter what armor he wears. Digging pit traps with feces coated stakes on the bottom and luring giants into them could be viable. Carrying some caltrops and scattering them behind him might be useful, but the giant might just walk around those. They would be quite effective at night. Also, he might want to wear at least a gambeson. Even if it would not protect against melee strikes or thrown rocks, smarter giants might throw clay pots full of small stones at him like hand grenades, and he would want some protection from that. [Answer] Fighting one or two giants are easy, but fighting a group? that's one thing to consider. You can't become a "Giant slayer" just because you killed one, you have to have killed a plenty. That being said, I do think giant killer is a wrong title as your giants are WAAAAAY to strong and WAAAAY to tall for someone to kill with a blade, even with poison. At that height, the most weakest point of the giant is the feet. big, range weapons will penetrate those but they are a burden to carry by one man. A more plausible approach might be, The Giant killing army. Your army can, scatter long, steal spike, drench them with poison, then cover them with forestry. Your main weapon for killing them will be ballistas... Lots of them, as they are the weapon with the highest percentage of killing a giant without any casualties. There should be one improvement however, you ballista must have a reloading mechanism similar to a Van Helsing's [repeater crossbow](http://vanhelsingmovie.wikia.com/wiki/Repeater_Crossbow) because you need to reload as quickly as possible, but pack a punch too. one of your problems however, is that you got 100 persons, give or take that some of them are women, or grandparents and kids, your army lacks manpower, 50 might hold for some time. I also suggest to be on the defensive rather than taking the fight too them, setting up traps is the best way to kill the giants, you need all the manpower to protect your people and ensure continuity of the human race. another problem is giant carcass, yeah you killed them, but if they die close to your encampment then then stench will kill you as well, so you better plan your traps, how you set your encampment, and how you can engage the giants with your ballistas on the encampment, and during the move. you will have a pretty busy life if you ask me... [Answer] "He is able to bend and generate magnetic fields" - Does it mean he can manipulate metal and utilize it for combat? Well... in that case "Avatar: The Last Airbender" comes to mind with metal benders (rather less accurate, meaning it's more like throwing and shooting metallic objects), or X-Man with Magneto (full, precise control), or even Irelia (special weapon) in League of Legends. In both cases he'd carry large blades around, either swords or just the blade parts. When he fights he swings them around on range, pierces his opponents, performs attacks from their backs (when returning the blades). Against giants he would go for the weak spots, which he can reach unlike normal humans. For armor he'd either wear leather (in case the metal interferes with his abilities if it covers his body) or an armor with metallic parts, which he can optionally use as weapons or as defence. Alternatively his armor could consist of the weapons he is carrying around, meaning the blades are part of the armor (the shoulder pads or on the backside). [Answer] Rope. Think of the AT-AT's in Star Wars, just run around it and try to trip it. Other similar things would probably work also like nets. Once it is slowed down/downed, just stick it with the pointy end. If they are slow enough, maybe bring a large crossbow/ballista mounted on a carriage or something. Metallic spike traps, wall or ground mounted if they can manipulated by magnetic force, depending on strength of manipulation. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q69vO.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q69vO.png) [Answer] In the interest of using your hero's power over magnetic fields, let's try a couple of other suggestions. * Can he use the magnetic fields to accelerate a metal projectile beyond normal velocities? If you can take the average bow velocity of 300fps and get it up to 1200fps you could get away with something like "5 smooth ball-bearings and a sling". * Can you manipulate a steel object at a distance? For instance, could you plant a knife somewhere in the giant's chest at range, then use magnetism to work the knife into his vitals? * Now, to REALLY get rid of the giant, a magnetically confined Tokamak reactor...ok, off subject. * As for armor, a magnetically controlled shield would be very entertaining. For balance, you would probably need to make the effort to your hero comparable to the force applied to it. (A giant would still knock it around) [Answer] # Science If there are only 100 giants around at any time, then they are at the brink of extinction. The amount of inbreeding over generations is astounding. The giants are probably stupid to the extreme due to that. Also, with only 100 giants at any time they will hardly be able to keep a culture or be educated. Since they hunt by smell, all the slayer needs to do is dressing scarecrows with clothes recently worn by actual people. Then fill the scarecrows with fresh but poisoned meat. Just wait for a few days before checking for each scarecrow. [Answer] Your main character could use a rope or net studded or made of metal. The rope wraps around the giant to bring them down, and your main character can control the movement of the rope/net very precisely by manipulating the metal in it. Once bound, you have a number of ways to kill it; personally I would recommend just stabbing it until it bleeds out. Go for the eyes first, in case your character’s rope inexplicably fails. For armor, I agree with others; the strength of the armor doesn't matter when going against giants, so ease of movement is key. Clothing or leather is best. [Answer] How strong and precise magnetic field are we talking about here? It strong enough, he can give cannon balls so much kinetic energy (preferably from distance, for example in high levitating matal chair with seatbelts so no giant can reach him but he has nice view of battlefield) to massacre the poor giants to bloody equivalent of mashed potatoes. Even worse, if can generate ridiculously strong magnetic field (like [magnetars](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar)) he would be God-like, being able to distort atoms themselves in Giant bodies (and elsewhere). ]
[Question] [ TL;DR: How can a mortal become worthy of being listened to by the gods? I'm seeking a logical framework to establish a specific relationship between gods and mortals. The Relationship: Mortals can request favors from the gods, such as blessings, help, items, or boons. Additionally, they can ask the gods to curse someone else. However, this relationship operates on a principle of reciprocity, as mortals must prove themselves useful to the gods. The Gods: Each god possesses power over specific sectors of the galaxy, ranging from manipulating matter at the smallest level to more specialized abilities like controlling time in certain areas. Some gods even have power over designated objects, allowing them to reverse time for these objects or perform extraordinary feats like uncooking an egg or bringing the dead back to life. The Mortals: Mortals are biological creatures with limited levels of fantasy and magic, significantly weaker than gods. The aim is to avoid a scenario where humans rely on brute strength or power to gain favor with the gods. Instead, prayers are not inherently magical; they are simply requests made to the gods. For these requests to be heard, the gods must perceive a benefit in fulfilling them. The substance of the question boils down to : Why would you listen the request of an ant, what can vermin do for you? [Answer] Ok. let's play along. * Worship as Power Source: Gods derive their power from the faith, worship, and reverence of mortals. This is a common theme in many mythologies and fantasy settings. The more believers a god has, the more powerful they become. This gives gods a vested interest in answering prayers and granting favors, as it strengthens the faith of their followers and attracts new ones. * Gods as Stewards: Gods see themselves as caretakers or stewards of the mortal realm. They have a responsibility to maintain balance and order. When mortals pray for help, the gods listen out of a sense of duty and responsibility. This would require gods to have some form of moral or ethical code. * Divine Games: Gods are engaged in some form of competition or game with each other, and mortals are the pieces they use to outmaneuver one another. Answering prayers and granting favors is a way for gods to gain an edge in these divine contests. * Divine Curiosity: Gods, being immortal and all-powerful, find mortals fascinating and unpredictable. They answer prayers and interfere in mortal affairs out of curiosity, amusement, or to alleviate their boredom. * Interconnected Fate: The fate of gods and mortals are tied together in some way. If the mortal realm suffers, so do the gods, and vice versa. This forces the gods to take an active interest in mortal affairs. * Karmic Debt: Gods are subject to a cosmic law of karma or equivalent where every action has consequences. Ignoring the pleas of mortals could bring bad luck or diminish their power, while answering prayers could bring them good karma. But the motivations of the gods can be as varied as the gods themselves. Some might be altruistic, others might be self-serving, and others still might be inscrutable or alien in their reasoning. The relationship between gods and mortals can be a rich source of conflict and intrigue in your world. [Answer] Many gods believe in super-gods. It is a widespread belief among gods that helping mortals increases your chances of being heard by a super-god. So many gods will hear the prayers of mortals and help them, because they believe it will help them, when they pray to their super-god for whatever gods want to pray for. Nobody has ever seen a super-god, but gods are superstitious beings. [Answer] ## Bragging rights A bit of a twist on the 'mana' trope. Gods want to maximise the number of people worshipping them, not because it gives them any kind of power but because it gives them bragging rights to other gods, a bit like having a lot of followers on social media. So in some sort of a divine hangout one god might tell the others "Hey, I just hit one billion worshippers!" and another god might respond "Pshah, what a noob. I've hit trillion worshippers ages ago." [Answer] # Friendship Just last week, I was boiling my breakfast egg. I tried to time it just right, but I forgot to put my egg in ice after it was done! Instead of a perfectly jammy yolk, my egg was cooked all the way through. Luckily, the egg-uncooking god that you mentioned is an old friend of mine. I sent him a quick mental text, and he turned my yolk back to perfection. You might wonder why a god would do this for a mortal like me, but you need to rephrase the question. Why wouldn't a friend help out another friend? The real trick is befriending a god. You have to be a real, sincere friend. I knew a guy who treated a god-friend like a personal genie. Things didn't end well for him. Let's just say that he could probably use my egg-uncooking friend's help right about now. Don't be surprised that gods and mortals can be friends. We are essentially different species, but I'm friends with my cat. And I am definitely not the same species as my cat. Just like people, gods come with all sorts of different personalities. Some are quite gregarious. Others can be shy or lonely. The only question that remains is: how do you make friends? There are lots of ways to make friends. One option is to make silly comments on their worldbuilding.SE posts. [Answer] Humans do use "insignificant beings". Bees (and other insects?) for pollination, yeast for bread, bacteria for [yogurt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogurt), bacteria in [bioreactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioreactor), ... So perhaps gods can use humans if they come in great numbers. A great leader or a heroine may get a favor from the gods if such leader/heroine gets most of humanity to do something the gods need or find useful. [Lots of plot opportunities there...] Or maybe they want a [genki-dama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goku#Appearances). [Answer] ## Divine Law In the world Dere/Aventurien, the world of the pen & paper RPG "The Dark Eye" (Das Schwarze Auge) in ancient times the gods had an all out war that nearly destroyed the world/universe. Afterwards they got together and decided on the "Mytery of Kha". It is a contract/vow made by the gods to never again directly interfere in the mortal world and to stay inside their own planes of existance. They are only allowed to grant small favours in answer to more or less direct requests from mortals who have vowed their lives to the service of the god and to further the ideals of that god among the population. Also they may only communicate sporadically through visions and never just give direct commands to mortals. The goal of this law is to ensure that the mortal world will never again be devastated by godly powers. However every now and then some gods will try to circumvent the law or stretch its boundaries, giving potential for conflict. The main goals of these gods are somewhat keeping the status quo and to spread their teachings and moralities. Oh and ofcourse to be worshipped. Not because their power hinges on it, but because they are narcissts deep down in their immortal personality. Just like every powerful person (e.g. billionaires, heads of governments, heads of religions...) in the real life. [Answer] # Rules between gods You said you have multiple gods, each ruling over a certain domain ranging in size and scope from a single object to a region of a galaxy. Let's spice that up by adding some conflict. Let's say the borders between their domains are fuzzy and potentially up for debate. Let's also say the gods generally want to expand their domains. Let's additionally say that they realise all-out conflict between them would be bad for everyone and extremely destructive. A potential consequence of this would be that the gods lay down ground rules for how they can compete against one another. And one such rule could be that they can't act directly to achieve their goals, at most having their servants and champions do that for them, and they can bless the servants and champions in return. This would significantly limit the destructive potential of conflict between gods while serving as a tension outlet and a form of conflict resolution. [Answer] I think Serg Z. has some very good ideas, but here are some other major reasons a divine being would invest in listening to the requests or prayers of the mortals. 1) Divine Favor: Perhaps certain gods are the founders or creators of certain races, perhaps it is because they feel a kind of kinship based on geographical or cultural similarities to themselves, or becasue they have shared ideals and values with a people. Gods, being immortal and highly more powerful beings would gain little from mortal contrivances. However, seeing the success of their core ideologies or the success of beings they see as children or brethren spread to more of the world would generate favor for the people that accomplish such things, making them willing to 'invest' in such people as a matter akin with it being essentially 'mandated' by their own immutable personalities. 2) Relationship: Similar to the Judeo-Christian concept, the more one invests ones time in serving a deity, the more one comes to understand them and the more the divine being draws closer to them, going from servant, to friend, to family over the course of such time. While divine beings wouldn't 'need' mortals, people are often willing to go above and beyond for those they know and care about. This would not have a purely transactional feel, but it would create a society deeply connected to the gods themselves on not just a practical, but also an emotional and daily living aspect. 3) Positional: In this case, mortals would trade their skills and serve in a specific capacity for a set amount of time in exchange for a certain number and quality of favors. This would see the gods more as immortal monarchs that have a duty or desire to hold the leadership position and thus run a society as effectively as possible. This would lead to a system focused highly on merit and occupation. 4) Limitations: Immortal beings and gods would need a certain amount of divine power/mana/cosmic energy/etc, and thus, they can only dwell or manifest their full powers in certain areas with sufficient resources to sustain them. As such, the Mortal who do not face such limitations are their eyes, ears, and arms in the places their power cannot reach, and/or their protectors when in areas they are unable to manifest their power. In exchange for such service, they offer to use their power for the sake of these mortals once such deeds are done or they safely reach another place of power. 5) Worship System: The gods have to derive their power from somewhere, and in this case, that is in a universal order that may or may not have written guides. The worship of their people is like currency they may use for themselves. The more 'power of worship' they receive, perhaps receiving more from individuals of higher power themselves, the more 'units' of worship they can spend to further develop their own powers, and thus their standing and influence amongst the pantheon. 6) Sacrifice: As far back as human religions have existed, all 'gods' have demanded sacrifice, be it material, service, lives, or whatever pleases the god in question can be offered up in exchange for requests. The greater the request, the greater the sacrifice needed. Perhaps they enjoy the smell or taste certain things or even actions give them. Perhaps they use the items somehow to further their own cause, such as granting them to believers in their time of need. Perhaps they are similar to traditional dragons in mythos and have strong desires to increase their horde with nice things, perhaps they like collecting beautiful men or women for the purposes of pleasure. Whatever it is, they are willing to give in order to receive their desires. 7) Divine Purpose: The gods exist for a reason, perhaps for a specific one or each for their own, and that reason is something they are inexorably, obsessively motivated by. Mortals that help them further meet their goals and fulfil their reason are rewarded. 8) Ascension: The drive of mortals is to become gods unto themselves, and thus, various divine factions have reason to test, prod, bribe, and inveigle mortals they believe have potential to add to their power and influence or that of their faction, and thus offer rewards for trials, bribes to increase affiliation, and so on. In this case, obtaining favors requires skill and intrigue. Any of these ideas, or perhaps a mixture of some of them, would motivate divine beings to listen and respond to mortals. [Answer] # Magic is your humans' belief, imposed on the world Similar to Terry Pratchett's small gods, gods need belief. In this case, it is because humans have some small level of magic. If many humans believe a god of time exists, the small amounts of human magic, over many, many humans, cause it to be so. Gods created by this method are not inherently aware of their origins. However, they realise that gods that answer no prayers die out, whereas those who take an active role grow stronger. Humans can also become gods, by this system. A country believing their king is an immortal god makes it so. A mage, who starts off able to do some magic has their power grow as their reputation does - the more people who believe the mage has magic, the more magic the mage has. It, in theory, would be possible to cut out the middle, umm, god, but it's much easier to get a country of humans to believe in a god of the harvest, than the fact that their granaries spontaneously refill. There's nothing in this system that says the gods have to be good, only famous. We'd see sort of "influencer" gods - the flashier the god, the more likely they are to attract belief. A god of the harvest that appears as a burning angel, driving the mice from the granaries. Gods who claim natural disasters as their own, pretending that the volcanoes, earthquakes and tidal waves were divine punishment. Big, highly visible miracles would be standard. People who are best able to get the god more belief would receive more divine attention. Why would you answer some poor farmer's prayer to find their lost cow, if the same energy can give the king something special? Similarly, gods would worry more about losing an important follower than everyday people. It makes more sense, with limited power, to crispy fry a heretic king with lightning, than bothering about some poor commoner. However, gods who carry out too many evil acts have a problem - people's belief in them changes, and so do they. If you're considered the satan of your world, you can't preform good actions. You receive belief, but it's belief that you make bad things happen. Eventually a cultural myth may spring up that you're imprisoned, or bound for punishment by the other gods, and that happens. An evil god might find that he's chained forever in a pit of fire - simply because the humans believe it. [Answer] user104995, welcome. The mortals could do the same thing that humans did (and still do) in polytheistic religious systems, and trade with gods for mutual benefit. This is most obviously done through sacrifices, and various modes of divination or omen watching are then used to check if the god accepted the offer. The god(s) for their part would provide a desired miracle to fulfill their part of the bargain (assuming you were able to articulate your desires accurately, nothing accidentally messed up your offering, your request is actually within the power of the god you spoke to, the god didn't get so upset by your request that he lied to you about accepting it but has in fact decided to backstab you as a punishment, etc.). You would also perform some rituals which have been determined to please the god, or gods, whose favour you most require, and they will repay this by sort of making things easier for you at a background level. But you the mortal will never be seen by the gods as being inherently worth listening to, and will be promptly brought to your place if you start getting ideas above your station; sorry. [Answer] # Natural treasures spawn randomly Natural treasures are magical rocks, plants, animals, and even people who have unusually high magical potential. The feats of the gods are dependent on these items. The items are randomly distributed according to magical currents, and can't be easily snatched up by godly powers and so it makes logical sense to get mortals to collect them. Mortals will wander around, find such items, and can sacrifice them to the gods. If Kronus the Time God wants to reverse time to disrupt Tempolla, the goddess of alternate timelines who creates chaos in spacetime, they need 10 billion clockwork petals. That means they support lots of villages in the hopes of getting those petals. In return, they will use lesser magical powers that don't need natural treasures to support them. They'll summon a chronoserpent to drain the lifeforce of a monster that attacks, give the priests a special time mana that lets them preserve crops for longer, and directly give people rare knowledge that they passively gain from their knowledge of time in return for these treasures. [Answer] First the why, 1. The gods see themselves as fathers or teachers of humanity so reward what they see as good behavior. 2. braging rights against to other gods like when your child wins first place in race or in a spelling bee. 3. To spite other gods, if one god has plans or goals for humanity then other gods can interfere just to try and mess with the other god. 4. They like worship and or praise. I like when my dog comes over and wags is tail and gets all excited over me the gods could be the same. Lastly the how Look at history, Get attention/support of the gods is a common human goal. There are may methods. 1. Sacrifices, shedding blood is common way to get attention of the gods and show them your devotion. Cattle is traditionally used however for more darker gods humans may be better There are two methods to of going above and beyond in give sacrifices. First is to increase the amount if everyone is giving a hundred bulls you give a thousand. The other is to increase quality instead of just a regular bull how about your favorite bull you have raised from childhood. As for why this works tipicly it shows the gods your devotion and love. And gives them bragging rights. 2. Offerings, gifts for the gods this can come in form of money for there priest or land for temples. Anything can be used so long as it is dedicated to divine servous in some way. Also look to increase the quantity and quality as you did with the sacrifices. As for why this works again it show devotion which the gods appreciate, addition gods like pretty temples and well dressed priests like we enjoy nice clothes. 3. Righteousness/virtue. If the gods have give ideals or commands to their followers then look to go above and beyond to follow or embody the commands and/or ideals. 4. Bring in new followers, this only works for evangelical Religions but if your god values new converts then working to spread there religion can also be used. 5. Praise, if your god is looking to increase or improve his reputation among mortals promise to spread words of his good or powerful deeds done for you can be a type of payment. 6. Humiliating other gods, if you're god has enemies among the other gods then position your request in such a way that by helping you he can flex on his enemies. [Answer] Gods like to feast on human food and consider cooking below their standards. Gods need to eat, they eat mostly godly stuff like [Ambrosia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia). So probably they also have taste like everyone else and enjoy variety of human foods. But why would god waste time with cooking? Let the humans provide food and drink as sacrifice. Since every god's taste is different and gods do like variety offering same food (while super tasty) does not work for long and for multiple gods. Helping or using someone provides pleasure to god itself Gods also enjoy other humanly pleasures [from primitive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeus#Affairs) (sex) to something sophisticated like [mentoring someone](https://findyourpleasure.com/the-pleasure-of-mentorship/) so from time to time they also accept live humans as sacrifice for temporary or long servitude of all sorts. [Answer] # It's a job I have a job which gives me many benefits. I also have a group health insurance, which makes things like medicines cheaper for me. I work 40h/week for my employer. I log into their network, put in some effort, clock in and out, and in the end I also get paid. How do you think my employer would react if a random stranger were to ask for money, or any of the benefits? Or how do you think a pharmacist would react if you claim to have health insurance but you can't produce a card or a membership ID to back it up? Likewise, you wanna get them miracles and divine spells, you got to work for them and your gods are your bosses. This is actually in the rules of Dungeond and Dragons, in which clerics must cleric for at least one hour a day if they want to be casting. I think in older editions they had to cleric even longer. [Answer] Here's one I haven't seen yet. # They Have No Choice Either due to their nature or because of some absolute divine contract, the gods are compelled to heed and answer the calls of mortals. Not because they fear the consequences of not doing so, but because not doing so simply isn't an option. I could see this manifesting in a couple of ways: ## The gods are machines While the "technology" that powers them is beyond what any mortal could ever hope to comprehend let alone replicate, the gods are effectively nothing more than omnipotent AI programmed to serve the mortal realm for all eternity. These all-powerful automatons could no more ignore a mortal's prayer than a hammer could ignore the swing of the arm that wields it. ## The gods are Djinni Because the gods have no choice but to answer the prayers of mortals, they amuse themselves by doing so in unexpected ways. What amuses each god varies, but it almost always results in a mortal getting their prayers answered in a way they didn't expect - sometimes for better, other times for worse. [Answer] You want to avoid a scenario where a mortals’ power or strength is useful to a god. What are you left with? The mortals’ amount of time spent should be valuable, but the value of any commodity spent should be meaningless. How to make time itself valuable to a god? Gods have an infinite, concurrent attention span for each and every mortals time. Gods feed quite literally off of the attention of each and every mortal. Thus the mortal becomes worthy by sacrificing time, and nothing else. This makes for a rather boring game mechanic. How to make for a more compelling story? Maybe mortals can use specific holy objects which help focus their attention or frequently remind them that they need to focus their attention. Holy objects which help gather the focus of other mortals may be more pleasing to the gods. So for example if a mortal carries around a giant sigil of their god, they may gain favor with the god, at the expense of affecting others, by making them jealous or angry or lovestruck or all three. ]
[Question] [ Let there be humans who can move their limbs three times faster than is typically possible. This is the only enhancement: Their reaction time and brain speed is normal, and they therefore cannot walk/run much faster than a regular person Would such a power be useful in the sport of fencing? Normal modern fencing gear (made for normal-speed humans) is used by the faster humans [Answer] # Yes. Ex-uni fencer here. Yup, yup and yup, especially if the person in question isn't just some rando but an actual fencer who trains and competes. In the end, all that matters is that you hit your target before they hit you. That's why we have electronic rigs that measure that for us, because it's usually not possible for the human eye at a high level. Near-simultaneous touches are common and every millisecond will count. Remember; there are three kinds of fencing. Epee, foil, and sabre. This may have a small impact on what you're doing. # The different swords. In epee fencing, the goal is to hit 'em with the pointy end, literally anywhere on the body. The sword is the longest of all three, and more firm than flexible. In foil fencing, the only valid target is the torso, including the groin, not including arms, legs or head, and again, you use the pointy end. The sword is the shortest of all three, and exceptionally flexible. In sabre fencing, the target area has increased to "anything above the waist". The sword is between foil and epee in length, with a slight curve, and typically fairly rigid. In sabre, we slash instead of stabbing. Think pirate fights. # Advantages and disadvantages I would expect increased speed to have the least benefit in sabre duelling, because the slashing technique lends itself to larger blocking arcs and more back and forth. Though, sabre fighters are notoriously... violent in technique. Long charges forward and sharp "samurai-style" cuts down upon the head for instant victory are fairly common. In epee duelling, I would probably expect the most benefit. Many epee duels end with touches the opponent's toes, because everything is a target. If the duellist is accurate, they're likely to win every single time. However, the sword is quite heavy and rigid, so it tends to be harder to reorient and change its momentum. In foil duelling, I would expect an extreme advantage, but probably less than in epee. This may be an unpopular opinion, though. The foil is an extremely dextrous and agile weapon, and foil is all about speed. But, due to the shorter sword, closer distances and smaller target area, I would also argue that, as your fictional fighter doesn't possess increased reflexes, their increased speed may be of slightly less help. # Summary: Your guy probably crushes everyone. Ultimately though, I would have to say that all of these are subtle differences that are unlikely to matter, because a speed increase of 200% is such a phenomenal advantage, that against a normal opponent, I would expect your character to essentially win every single time. I am open to being challenged on this. I once had the pleasure of wheelchair fencing a silver-medal Paralympian. On his first attack, I didn't even see him move, I just felt horrible pain as he whipped me directly in the vertebrae. He was that quick. So, up against Olympic-grade athletes, the tables may balance somewhat. Hope any of this is useful! ## Addendum 1: Momentum One thing to question is whether the increased speed comes with increased torque. Do they have more strength? If yes, don't worry, they'll rock everything. If no, a small problem emerges. Let's say your dude thrusts with the sword, three times faster than normal. Well, they'll also need the grip strength to maintain a grasp on a heavy sword travelling that fast. Just a thought. ### Sub-addendum: Forces and Damage One thing you may also wish to consider; if you choose to give your fencer the additional strength/torque required to handle objects at their increased speed, one issue may come up. Your guy may actually find themselves breaking swords, or possibly even striking lethally. While the safety gear is pretty tough, injuries do happen, especially if the sword breaks or the gear is damaged, and at 3 times regular speed, you're looking at 3 times the regular force being delivered. ### Sub-addendum: Collission As @Oddrigue has pointed out, body-to-body contact in fencing can get you penalised. Consider that, as a triple-speed lunge is going to impart a lot of momentum on a body. This has to be balanced and corrected to avoid tumbling forwards. ## Addendum 2: Reaction Speed I covered this somewhat above but I felt I should clarify something. The reason reaction speed shouldn't matter much in fencing (which is amusing in and of itself) is that it's first blood that counts. All your guy needs to do is make the first move every time and they'll be fine. In a situation where they're on the defensive though, they'll struggle much more. Reaction speed is more important to your defense than "ability to move a sword quickly". But, with even a basic sense of offensive strategy, they should dominate at an Olympic level without breaking a sweat. ## Addendum 3: Priority This one completely slipped my mind, but as @Nobody in the comments pointed out, in foil and sabre fencing, there is a system called priority, and touches that both land within a second of one another are settled via this system. Occasionally, the judgement here is a simultaneous touch. In epee, you don't need to worry about this at all. Stick 'em with the pointy end. In foil and sabre though, this is going to have a major impact on your fencer. They may potentially lose a lot of points to simultaneous touches, and without quick reflexes, they may even lose points on priority. I still think that the advantage would be overwhelming, but this definitely balances things. As @Nobody has opined, it could actually be make-or-break at the Olympic level. [Answer] Yeah, I'd say it would be a significant advantage. Firstly, their attacks would be much harder to block - although with time and practice and getting used to the additional speed a very skilled fencer might be able to mitigate some of the advantage. Also on defense - seeing an attack and being able to move to block it aren't the same thing, especially if you have commited to one parry or a thrust of your own, being able to reset if you will 3 times faster than your opponent would be a great advantage here that is less easily mitigated. [Answer] # Definitely (sorta) Despite the normal thinking speed, it still means the speedy human can easily attack the opponent. The opponent can process and see the attack in their mind, but will not be able to carry out the parry/block, unlike the speedy human. Furthermore this will ensure the opponent can't see the attack coming, much less be able to block it. NOTE there is a difference between fencing faster and fencing better, so the advantage is limited. [Answer] A few years ago I estimated that, at my top speed, I could run (100m?? 10km) or swim crawl/freestyle (100m, 1000m) at half world-record speed, very roughly speaking. Possibly optimistic. I trained somewhat, but not seriously. Let's call that "average" or "normal person". So an elite athlete is about twice as fast as a "normal person". And an elite athlete beats a "normal person" easily, hands down. Granted, running and swimming are not combat and don't tax reaction speed (probably). Your "speedy human" is three times faster than their opponent. Perhaps this kind of comparison can help you reach a useful conclusion. [Answer] I'm not any sort of fencer, but my prediction would be "yes, and significantly so". I'm naturally assuming our super-speed fencer is properly trained. All else being equal, the faster swordsman can better exploit openings in the foe's defense. Defending has a few basic steps: 1. Detect the threat (the incoming attack, its direction, force, etc.) 2. Determine the response (a parry, a direct block, how to angle one's blade, etc.) 3. Make the response (actually moving your sword into position) There's a finite amount of time to go through those steps. Obviously, the faster the attacker's blade is moving, the less time the defender has. Moving at three times the regular speed means that a normally quick strike might literally outpace the defender's reaction time when launched by our super-speed fencer: by the time their brain has recognized the movement as a swipe or stab (#1) and ordered their arm to bring up their blade in a block (#2/#3), they've already been hit. However, you've specified that our super-speed fencer's brain has normal reaction times, etc. This means that their speed isn't as strong an asset in defense. In that three-step guide to defending earlier, their speed is only helping with #3: their reaction time being normal means it takes them just as long as the other fighter to spot the threat and figure out a good answer to it. An unexpected or misjudged strike can get through their defenses despite their speed, because it doesn't matter how quickly our fencer can move in step #3 if they've been hit before they finished the first two steps. Normal reaction times with higher movement speeds also imply that precision of movement could be an issue. Sufficient training would overcome this, but they are at greater risk of botching their strikes and parries (aiming for the shin and having the blade go towards the thigh instead, for instance). [Answer] ## It's an advantage, but not as much as you might think Being able to launch a fast attack has obvious advantages, in that your opponents will have less time to react to your attacks. Because of this they will have a hard time parrying or dodging your attacks; however, there is a lot that happens before the attack that your speed doesn't help with. A skilled opponent will be able to figure out how to exploit any weaknesses in those aspects of the contest, particularly once they realize that the opponent is too quick to parry. One of the most important techniques in fencing is controlling the distance. There is an optimal distance for launching an attack. Start too close, and you won't be able to get your blade in line with valid target before it lands. Start too far, and your opponent will have loads of time to thwart the attack, even with your speed advantage. A good fencer will try to manipulate the distance so that you come into range when they are expecting it and you aren't. Additionally, two of the three fencing weapons, foil and sabre, have a rule called "priority". In these weapons, once a fencer begins an attack, they have established priority, and the opponent must deal with the attack (e.g., by parrying) before making a counterattack. If they do not, then the attack with priority will score (assuming it lands) over the counterattack, even if the counterattack lands first. If your movements are quick, but your reactions normal, then you are vulnerable once your opponent establishes priority. In particular, attacks with a change of line will be difficult for you to counter, as your speed actually works against you. By the time you notice that the attack has changed line, your faster movements have carried your blade even further out of position than would be the case for a typical fencer. You will have to work very hard at keeping your movements small and precise, even more so than a typical fencer would. Epee, on the other hand, has no priority rules. I would think that any time you get caught out you could rely on your speed to at least salvage a double-touch ("simultaneous" hits score a point for both competitors) with a quick counterattack. Your opponent will have to find some exploitable flaw in your technique to score on you. Nevertheless, controlling distance still helps, and crafty opponents have ways to lure you into leaving an opening. These theoretical arguments match with my practical experience. When I was fencing, our division had a lot of college students, but also some middle-aged fencers who had been at it for a long time. Some of the college kids were very quick, yet the "old" fencers (they don't seem so old to me now) routinely finished in the top spots. They couldn't match the younger fencers' quickness, but they made better use of tactics. So, I would expect your speedy fencer to absolutely dominate regional competitions. However, the further up they go, the more they're going to struggle, particularly if they have been relying on their speed to the detriment of their other skills. By the time they got to national-level competitions, I would expect that, for foil and sabre, at least, they would be getting beaten pretty routinely, unless they have developed other skills to complement their physical prowess. Their speed alone might take them further in epee, where their opponents don't have priority rules to protect them from quick counterattacks, but even then I would expect top international competitors to be able to find a strategy to cope with it. [Answer] I'm going with "no" Technically, you've already answered your own question: > > Their reaction time and brain speed is normal, and they therefore cannot walk/run much faster than a regular person. > > > Which means they can't fence faster than a regular person, either. But let's ignore that and assume they'll try anyway. What I would expect is: * They would be constantly losing their balance as their arms (and therefore their center of gravity) end up someplace their brain thinks they shouldn't be. * They would be constantly bruising themselves and breaking bones as they fail to stop their arms from colliding with walls, tables, lamps, etc. * They'd likely pull their own shoulders out of their sockets. It's certainly true that musculature, ligaments, cartilage and bones limit how fast a limb can move. But it's just as certain that your brain limits that speed. There are reasons a trained martial artist can move like greased lightening and I can't. At the top of the list is that their brain has been trained to accommodate the speed. One more issue just came to mind. 3X movement speed but no faster reaction speed means you have a very high chance of opening yourself up to attack without the ability to parry. 3X movement speed but 1X reaction speed is the same as 1X movement speed and 1/3X reaction speed. The conditions you've suggested seem to me like a very fast way to get very dead. [Answer] ## In certain situations not a direct advantage Being fast is an advantage and reaction speed limits this advantage a bit, as mentioned by the many good-looking answerers before me. I want to add: The interesting part (which i haven't seen mentioned) though is that, if two opponents hold out their swords and walk towards each other (newtonian style) no matter how fast they are, both hit each other (practically at the same time) and its a draw Fencing is not all about physical fitness and after all a game of skill and bribing the jugde :P [Answer] # Yes absolutely Even if his reflex can't keep up with his speed, by just casually living and experiencing stuff, your character is going to adapt and deal with it as we always do, and will come up faster than anyone that doesn't have this perk. Also, I think if you throw two people at each other, whoever has a lead, be it of skill or a pure "stat boost", wins in the long run, so if you character train and isn't against someone that is used to people moving this fast, he wins by a wide margin. I would also argue that even the best fencer in the world isn't expecting his opponent to be THIS fast, sadly skills can't always keep up to such a wide gape. ]
[Question] [ [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ypkrm.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ypkrm.png) Even though this is filed under the "reality-check" tag, I'm looking more for semi-plausible explanations as this is almost assuredly impossible using real world physics. In my world people use special non-electronic instruments (as this is set in a pre-modern time period) that emit sounds that get progressively louder the farther away you get from the source, within a certain radius. In practice this means that up close and personal with the musician the tunes will sound of normal amplitude but as you get away from the musician you shift and enter a middle distance where the sound progressively gets louder the farther away you go. That is only until you reach the maximum distance the sound waves emitted by the instrument can travel while remaining somewhat audible. Where the sound gets progressively quieter the farther away you go until it becomes completely inaudible. [Answer] ### It's probably at least theoretically possible to some extent, but you need a rather large instrument. Or rather, a rather large reflector. When sound disperses freely in 3 dimensional space it decays roughly quadratically with distance. The easiest way to see why is probably by imagining a large sphere around the sound source, and realising the sound should sound equally loud around all the sphere. As the area of the sphere increases like the square of the radius r, the loudness must thus decay like 1/r^2. This is free space though, and any kind of reflecting materials could complicate this. Probably, the simplest example is to build a large wall; if we imagine an ideal wall (as I will henceforth do for all surfaces) it's reflection will double the loudness of the sound in the non wall direction, but it would still decay with distance. If we are inside a very wide building, with a floor and a low ceiling, we could use the same argument as above to see that the perceived loudness should be equal along a circle, and thus decays like 1/r. Though still decaying, this is a huge improvement if the distance is large. Now, to get our instrument to sound louder when we move away, we need to do better. Enter the [Ellipse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipse)! An ellipse, in the mathematical sense, is a precisely defined closed curve with many interesting properties. The one of interest to us is that it has two so-called focal points: [![Focal points of an ellipse](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hAKCL.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hAKCL.png) When something, like light or sound, is emitted at one of the focal points it will bounce off the walls and come together to focus at the other. This is true no matter the length of the ellipse. This gives us a First answer to your question: In an elliptical room with the instrument at one focal point, a listener could move away and first hear the loudness decay, only to increase again when she arrives at the other focal point. Now, I presume you want this to work outside. The key observation is that you could take away some segment of the ellipse and still have the sound bouncing off what's left be focused on the other focal point! For listener midway between the points, most of the sound energy will, so to speak, go around her. If you only care about the loudness in one direction, this is fairly straight forward. Second answer: Make a large (10m?) bowl-like reflector and place your sound source at the closest focal point. For large distances, this will be very similar to a [Parabolic reflector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_reflector), but with the important difference that the reflected sound would not be "parallel" but focused. For a very close listener the sound is loud. Moving away it first gets quieter but then increases as the focal point is approached. Now, I assume you would prefer this to work in any direction. I'm not sure how feasible this would actually be, but here goes: EDIT: I've updated the third answer, and I'm much more confident it could work now. The old "mushroom" from my previous answer is replaced by another shape, perhaps more resembling the underside of a "flower". Third answer: Build a large round ceiling, shaped like this: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/reSk9.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/reSk9.png) The cross-section is shaped like segments of two intersecting ellipses with a shared focal point at the same height the instrument would sound (preferably near ground level to get as much gain from reflections from below as possible) at the centre. The other focal point would form a circle around the player. Like I've drawn it, the "focal ring" would be at the ground, but you'd probably want to tilt the ellipses to get the ring at ear level. You MIGHT even get away with using a reflector small enough to be almost portable! The more of the elliptical arc you cover the more amplification near the ring. Most of the reflection happens near the centre, so once you reach a certain size you don't gain enormously from making it just a bit bigger (until the edge gets close to the other focal point) The proportions shown in my image should give a noticeable effect, as long as it's large enough that much of the sound goes above the heads of near by spectators. --- If you only care about certain directions, and especially if you want a portable solution, my second answer is probably the most relevant. It could be adapted further depending on precisely what context you have in mind. [Answer] ### Yes - but only if the stars align acoustically. So this is very concocted setup, but hopefully it tells the idea of what's happening. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/O2rM4.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/O2rM4.png) An instrument played at the yellow point, observed by a listener at the green point, will be heard to come from the two red points that are the openings in the wall. Because the geometry isn't perfect - the sound travels a slightly shorter distance to one side by a precise amount, when the waveforms re-join at the green point, they're out of phase, and cancel each other other out. This results in a significant reduction of volume of a particular frequency, which due to luck in the measurements is the precise note that is emphasised most in the peice the instrument is currently playing. Eg for middle C, the distance from yellow to both red points must differ by about 66cm. As the green observer walks away down the line, the phase difference becomes less significant, and the apparent volume becomes louder and louder, towards the end of the line, it will become softer again unfortunately. But for a bit of his journey, it will increase. [Answer] What you describe looks like the acoustic equivalent of an optical amplifier. How does an optical amplifier work? You need a medium with inverted population, meaning that all of its molecules are in an excited state, and you need a beam of light travelling through the medium. The photons of the light beam will induce stimulated emission in the active medium and therefore more photons will add along the way. Since you have no cavity to select the frequency, you will be basically amplifying all the wavelengths in the beam: the more the beam has travelled in the inverted medium, the more photons will have been added to it, and the growth of the intensity will be exponential. I am not aware of any general mean to produce inverted population in the acoustic domain, therefore strictly speaking what you describe cannot happen unless you use a combination of microphones and speakers. [Answer] You need an elliptical dish that has a second focal point that is far away from the noise source, and a block that sits between the source and observer. If the observer is standing right on the other side of the block they will hear nothing if the block and dish are perfect. If only a partial block then they will hear some sound as they sit close. As they move away they will exit the dead zone created by the block and begin to hear more sound. As they move towards the focal point the sound will get louder and louder. Once they pass the focal point it will again begin to get quieter. So in you don't need a special instrument, but rather a special setting. Whatever instrument they hold, the musician must sit in front of a curved surface of some kind that acts to focus sound at the audience. This surface could be a portable set of wood panels that assemble into a reflector of say 10 foot diameter or so, or it could be a permanent feature of a stage. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WFae9.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WFae9.png) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xtbl2.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xtbl2.png) [Answer] Using conventional physics, no. Simply because once the sound wave is produced by the string in your example, it dissipates into the surrounding medium. However... If you're willing to go with an instrument that maintains loudness the farther you get from it, then kindly allow me to introduce to you to two concepts: the stroh fiddle and the speaking tube. The [stroh fiddle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjNIJoIz9V0) is an instrument that amplifies and projects the sound of a stringed instrument, channeling said sound through a tube & horn. Vibrations from the strings activate a grammophone diaphragm which sound is then amplified by the horn. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/C17si.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/C17si.jpg) The [speaking tube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaking_tube) is an instrument that transports sound over a distance, channeling it through a tube. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PSzCs.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PSzCs.png) Your instrument will simply connect the two pieces together: replace the flare of the horn with a long tube, and then, add a grammophone horn at the end of the long tube. Sound waves, once emitted from the diaphragm, will propagate through the length of the tube without dissipating and without much loss of energy. The sound will appear to become louder with distance simply because it will be louder than the unaided sound travelling through the surrounding air. [Answer] An individual wave is always going to be loudest at the source, but there are options: Route the sound above the audience: An instrument that does this when played in a grand hall, or from a specialized gazebo could be designed to bounce the sound off a high ceiling while muting direct transmission. The sound at ground level is loudest a specific radius from the instrument and gets quieter as you approach until you are right on top of it. Cheat and use ultrasound: While the design itself would be anachronistic a non-electronic directional speaker should be possible. Something like an adjustable dog whistle could be constructed long before its time. That gives you a means to produce ultrasound at a controlled frequency. A mechanical attachment converts the source note into two inaudible ultrasound waves which are directed at a target. When the waves collide with the target a audible wave forms at the differential frequency. Adjust the wave frequencies and aim the waves at the right target and sound should appear to emit from that location. [Answer] # Your instrument is the room We know, that a greek amphitheater is a marvel of acoustics: With the right setup, there are spots on the stage where a whisper can be heard as if the speaker stood next to the listener yet he is some 50 meters away! The straight back wall and the dish-like shape of the ranks result in constructive resonance from the speaker's position to the auditorium. Now, you also can design a room in such a way that soundwaves that would have escaped or have been directed to the front ranks before now get channeled to the back ranks more. With the right setup, first, the back ranks get an equal sound as the front ones, and with strategically placed reflectors upwards, the back ranks can get more volume than the front rows. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sjreI.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sjreI.png) The front half of this reflector setup's ower half reflects the sound up into the dish, which then focusses the sound into the indicated upper area on the right - the very first sound wave gets reflected 3 times inside the dish before ending on the higher edge of the benefiting sector, meeting with those waves that come from the middle of the lower reflector. If way the sound has to travel is a multiple of the wavelength of the sound, then we get positive wave interference and as a result, the amplitude (which we feel as loudness) increases. If the sound waves however come in such a way that it is an odd multiple of half the wavelength, then we get a spot where these sound waves cancel out - and that spot is suddenly silent. Sound acoustics are really hard to make right, yet the ancient Greeks managed to build their amphitheaters without a computer and knowledge of the underlying physics! It took us more than 1000 years to recreate this feat of sound engineering. [Answer] Create a density gradient in the atmosphere above you using carefully controlled temperature and humidity that refracts and bends sound waves downwards. The beam your sound up into the air. It's quiet near the instrument (at ground level) and gets louder further away. You could do the same underground and refract seismic waves upwards. Or build a circular instrument completely surrounding the audience. The sounds become more concentrated towards the centre, further from the instrument. Or build the instrument on a very tall vertical tower, phased such that the waves cancel out near the foot of the tower but reinforce further out. [Answer] It is possible for particular sinusoidal frequency to use standing wave principle. The sound will be periodically louder in arrow points and silent in nodes of standing wave. The distance between reflecting surfaces, walls in building, need to be adjusted for frequencies, and location of listener need to be focused to arrow points. This will be effective for low frequencies and long waves. High frequencies have short waves that better for which ray acoustic is fare more better when solving such problem, as @EdvinW shows. Another principle which is really possible is density gradient, rise earlier by @Nullius in Verba" The source amplitude need to be large (as in open air festival). If specific environment conditions, namely cold ground and warm upper air exist, a sound will travel slower near to ground and faster in air which gives bending of sound waves to ground which focus in some distance from source. This can be observed at late summer dusk in distance about 2-10km from concert place, and its mostly audiable in low frequency beats. In both solution the sound will be loudest at the source, if no electrical amplifying device is used. ]
[Question] [ I need a way for a NASA spaceship to be able to dock with the hatch of an alien spacecraft. The alien ship is automated so there's no communication, and being alien, the hatches on both ships should be a total mismatch. Does anyone know of a "universal" hatch, or someway of connecting an airtight tube or conduit between two ships in space so I can get astronauts on board the alien ship? [Answer] An air tight tube should work. They will need some way to attach it alien ship, but as long as there is an opening to get in, they can put clamps on its edges, and tie the tube to these clamps. But the bigger issue that there is no air in the alien ship, or their air is no good for us humans. We could pump our air into the alien ship, but it could mess up their systems (oxygen is quite corrosive to many substances). In fact, if alien ship is robotic, there is no reason to make it air-tight. In addition, alien ship might have radiation or toxins. So your astronauts will still have to wear suits inside the ship, so no need for an airtight tube leading to it. A couple guide cables across space will do. And if the alien ship just happens to have perfect environment for humans, it looks too much like a trap, imho :) [Answer] Imagine the NASA ship was designed to dock with emergency hatches on a wide variety of craft. This kind of connection would be much less rigid than the dock between an Apollo Command Module and the lander, or between the ISS and a transport capsule -- those connections would hold if one of the ships fires engines to adjust the course. It is merely good enough to evacuate injured people who cannot possibly be stuffed into a space suit. * The rim of the docking tube is flexible to adjust to curved hulls. * It has a glue/sealant to make the connection pressure-tight. Perhaps the outermost ring will be discarded on undocking. [Answer] The short answer is: They wouldn't dock with it. At all. Ever!. Well... maybe not never, but not any time soon. Here's the reasoning: 1. We have an alien ship. We suspect that it is automated, but by what? We don't know where it was made, by whom, how, or with what (other than what we can see from the outside). One species' automation may be another species biotech, after all. 2. Since we don't know the origin or construction of the ship, we must consider it to be a biohazard. To allow anything human-made to come into contact with the ship or its contents and then return is very risky, even after decontamination. 3. We don't know what effect humans or human technology would have on the alien ship or its contents - it may be negligible or it may be catastrophic, and since the ship represents an irreplaceable source of knowledge, extreme care will be taken in investigating it. 4. Until we know a whole lot about the construction of the ship and everything that is on or inside it, no human will be going anywhere near it. In fact, no human-made object will be going anywhere near it and coming back afterwards either. So, any analysis of the alien ship will be conducted using sacrificial remotes and equipment, carefully constructed to be as neutral as possible, and rigorously decontaminated before being sent. These instruments and tools will be sent across to the alien ship through the vacuum of space. Ideally, the hull will be investigated first, and once the airlock is opened (assuming that it is actually an airlock and not just a door designed to be opened in an atmosphere) with a protective membrane across it to catch any potential ejecta and prevent any atmosphere loss, the airlock interior will be investigated in detail and new remotes prepared to take the next step in the investigation. Once any piece of equipment has made contact with the alien ship, it will not be brought back, under any circumstances, unless a comprehensive molecular-level analysis of the ship has taken place first - and that could be expected to take years to centuries. Likewise, any personnel working on the project will be people known to and employed by - or at least contracting to - NASA for a long time. They will not be "experts" recruited especially for the mission but never having worked with NASA before - they will be people known to many NASA ground staff. Before going on the mission, they will be given full health workups including comprehensive psychological profiling. So, once on the mission - directing the remotes from yet another spaceship, the crew would be in contact with the ground via one set of computers and transmitters, while using an entirely separate, air-gapped set of computers and transmitters to control the remotes and gather data. The two sets of computers would be designed to be unable to communicate with one-another ordinarily, and would also be set up so that if a data connection was made between the two, they would both immediately self-destruct, along with the whole spaceship. The reasoning behind this is that the alien ship builders may be attempting a colonization by stealth. By creating an air gap that the crew it told to never close under any circumstances, our world is safeguarded against any direct transmission of a virus. Of course, the crew may be subverted, hence the initial and frequent psychological testing, but that is not infallible, and a crew member may disobey orders for whatever reason and connect the computers together. To handle such an occurrence, the Earth-communication computers would be looking for any connection to the remote control computers, and the instant such was detected, it would, for example, simply close relay #525, which would be the trigger for the detonation of enough explosives to destroy both computers, kill all astronauts on board and disintegrate the ship. While on the mission, the mission crew would have their psychological states assessed on a daily basis at a minimum, and would make any reports verbally or via manual keyboard entry on the ground-communicating computers. Any significant deviation from the expected psychological profile could lead to the person so affected being recalled and quarantined immediately at best, or the research ship being destroyed immediately at worst. It is only after a very long period of getting to understand the alien ship and its exact composition would any attempt be made to dock with it, at which point a docking coupling would have been made to fit. If this seems a bit paranoid, that would be correct. Any missteps could cause the extinction or subjugation of the entire world. Numerous Hollywood movies have examined the consequences of ill-advised contact with aliens, and while some are a bit unrealistic, the message that comes across is that any real first contact must be handled with the utmost caution, and that any risk whatsoever could have catastrophic consequences, and therefore must be mitigated as far as possible. The security personnel for such a mission must refuse every risk, no matter how minor it seems. They must be constantly thinking about how an enemy who knows our systems, technologies and procedures could subvert them for their own gain. The likelihood is that this is ridiculously paranoid, but if it is not.. Also consider... After the first moon landing, the astronauts were quarantined for a period of 21 days, this after contact with an extra-earth body that has been in close proximity to earth for billions of years, and was thought to be lifeless. [Answer] You have already selected an answer, but here goes anyway. This is a common theme in many space operas about warring factions, requiring boarding parties to the alien craft. Why go through the hatch? Why not make your own? Consider: an adapter that has a hatch suitable to your own ship, and on the other end, a flexible seal that attaches to the hull of the other ship. The adapter is attached to the other ship (maybe even cutting off the existing hatch), and when the seal is made, breaching the hull of the other ship. There is no need for the NASA ship to be even close during this operation. It could even be done by remote control. The other end of the adapter, with the hatch that matches your hatch, could be sealed when the hole is breached, maintaining any atmosphere integrity. Once the adapter is connected, then your own NASA ships can dock and leave at will. The adapter, of course, could be as roomy as you needed. It could have appropriate sensors to measure atmosphere, toxicity, radiation, and whatever before the NASA ship even docks. It could also incorporate its own air lock, to transition between two environments. [Answer] I would assume that the best way to do it is to not really go in at all and use probing tools to examine what is going on inside. An automated ship I assume is mechanical and electronic, my assumption is that you could probably 'scan' the ship from the outside and learn what they are up too before you ever even enter. There is likely no logical reason to enter the ship beyond cool factor. If you do still really need to enter, send in an automated drone through any of their entrances, one that doesn't need anything beyond its own battery pack, and be accustomed to the internals of the ship whatever it may be. That's something that could be done with even current technology. If you really need to get the astronauts on there for plot purposes, maybe skip the docking all together and have the ship just land on top of the alien ship and the astronauts explore its surface until they can find a way in through their hatch using suits with ideally high resource carrying capacity so they can explore the ship in their suits. ]
[Question] [ On the lush planet of Leena, there is a large plant called the ecotitan. The ecotitan is a carnivorous plant that can live for up to 4,000 years. When it reaches maturity, at age 500, it finds a good spot, and roots itself into the spot it chooses. It is 200 feet long, and weights about 600 tons. It can eat prey up to the size of an African elephant, and it separates its prey into different stomachs. Once the prey is inside its stomach, it cannot escape as spikes go inward down its throat lining prevent it. The prey is crushed inside the stomach, as muscle walls, like teeth, go up and down crushing its prey. There is only one problem. So in my story, a human gets trapped after he inadvertently walked inside it. My question is, how could the plant attract a human to it? Edit: just assume the human is average intelligence Edit: The planet has only 50,000 humans scattered around the planet, and they don’t have agent orange. There are also some livestock animals, like cows and pigs, and crops. [Answer] That is not very difficult. 1. Make it look harmless. This plant should be either well-hidden or resemble some other, harmless plant; 2. Provide a bait. The bait can range from tasty fruits to an image and voice of an attractive female. [Answer] This is no cave... The human is taking refuge. The opening looks good enough and what is behind her is definitely bad. [![millenium falcon in cave](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lbUy6.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lbUy6.jpg) <http://www.starwars.com/news/5-of-the-millennium-falcons-greatest-feats> [Answer] The plant could lie partly underground and assemble [a death trap like an antlion's](https://youtu.be/iT_xb1wNlpM), only much bigger than the insect's. Since the plant is extremely large, the trap part could be located relatively far from other parts that are exposed above ground. [Answer] Lets look at real life. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bpn2R.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bpn2R.jpg) Carnivorous plants tend to be adapted to grow in places with high light where the soil is thin or poor in nutrients, especially nitrogen, such as acidic bogs and rock outcroppings. So the soil where the your plant grows could be very nitrogen poor. The important thing to remember is that carnivorous plants aren't eating their prey for the sake of energy. They're eating their prey for the trace minerals and nitrates they contain. The plant doesn't need to eat in the same way that a human does. They're getting food or calories from light. A relatively small meal can assist the plant until the trace nutrients escape. How often is has to eat is entirely a matter of how efficiently the plant can recycle nutrients after it's absorbed them. Meanwhile it's not unusual for carnivorous plants to use bait. Things like sugary liquids or gels that the plant can produce almost for free from sunlight and air but which animals and insects need. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HiygF.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HiygF.jpg) So one way would be for the plant to simply produce delicious fruit. Starving humans know it's a trap and 999 times out of a thousand they can grab that delicious fruit and they're fine. Occasionally they don't have quite the secure footing they thought they had, slip or fall and suddenly they're in the belly of the beast and on average the plant wins. Ways to draw in extra victims could include a strong scent of ripe fruit, think the smell of bananas but mixed with other wonderful scents that might make a starving man or animal extra desperate to get to the food, to take that little extra risk and lean a little farther out. [Answer] A plant that eats animals should probably not eat animals that know how to make fire, machetes, and Agent Orange. That would guarantee the destruction of the entire species. You might be better off having the plant provide a benefit for humans. Your character would be accidentally eaten by the plant during a late night alcohol induced aphrodisiac fruit hunt. [Answer] A way to look at how this plant can attract animals, is to see how it fits in an ecosystem. Plants (and animals) are interconnected... so the way it attracts food could possibly lure a human, as well. But you have to think, if the plant is aware of the threat of humans... then they would also have to adapt to that as well. So then the issue of survival is tied in with this question (I would think it's implied, but then again it may be irrelevant because you didn't specify how many humans live on this planet... but for sake of the answer, let's just say it's well inhabited by humans). --- so let's address the survival part first: Best way for this "plant" to survive is to be adapted enough to ward off the threat of an apex predator/species. If humans knew the danger of such a plant, surely the would burn them all, unless there is some reason to keep them. Camouflage I would think that this plant, as large as it is, would have to camouflage with other plants in it's habitat somehow. One way I can think of, is that it is intelligent enough to self-graph itself - break off one of it's branches and attach a different plants branch to it... eventually looking similar to the one's around it. Living Spiritual Icon You didn't specify what kind of plant this is, but let's just say it's a tree just because of it's size. If you are in Asia, you'll notice large trees have shrines around them, and have some kind of "holy wrap" around them (forgive me I can't think of the word for it off hand). But I've heard the reason for this is that it is a house for spirits. This could be one reason why people won't try to irradiate this carnivorous plant. Perhaps there are cults that worship it... or give sacrifices to it. --- Attraction FRUIT! What better way to attract prey then produce some succulent sweet tasting fruit? Even better if it looks similar to other plants that are not carnivorous... which would explain a human inadvertently getting eaten by one. Can also explain how it tricks other animals, like an elephant. EDIT: I didn't see the comment before that it's a vine. Graphing is more for trees, but with a vine perhaps it could blend in with plants/vegetables... like a kind of giant pumpkin or cucumber! Still... these concepts could apply. Maybe not the spiritual association part though. [Answer] Human curiosity is enough to get kids and adults up a tree before they consider the trip back down. To attract a human consider a plant in real life that uses scent to attract bugs and whose size was enough to have it added to several botanical gardens called the giant corpse flower. Though this flower uses the scent of rotting flesh, yours might use a pheromone that draws humans the same way the smell of fried chicken or some other cooking food pulls people to a kitchen. ]
[Question] [ This question already has answers here: [What are the enabling factors for melee combat in modern or future settings?](/questions/3358/what-are-the-enabling-factors-for-melee-combat-in-modern-or-future-settings) (17 answers) Closed 6 years ago. What would be the feasibility of short ranged weapons, such as swords, brass knuckles, clubs and gauntlets in a sci-fi-fantasy setting? To clarify further, we are ignoring the standard bullet-beats-knife scenario, we are talking about sci-fi-fantasy, in a universe where both highly advanced technology exists both in coexistence and in standalone form from any sort of magic or special non-standard-universal-rules powers, in particular we are talking if there would be any sort of usage and if it would be of any use, in normal sci-fi scenarios we can almost instantly remove the regular usage for any melee weapons (excluding the odd light saber) because typically sidearms such as high powered pistols would have taken the role of these weapons. But what about a more non standard setting? Could a high-elf carrying a magical claymore have any chance against a human carrying a highly powered mag-prop gun? Or would everyone eventually decide that high-technology is a much better choice? Further clarification, since my question was flagged as a duplicate: it is not a purely sci-fi setting, its a sci-fi fantasy, meaning that this particular universe isn't purely centered around highly powerful technologies, but highly powerful technologies with magical properties added, in this particular scenario we are also discarding any sort of energy pulse weapons i.e. Lasers or Plasma beams, and most weapons are based on ballistic or magnetic propellants. The question in factor was to ask if melee weapons, wielded by magic users, could have any sort of use against non-magic users wielding long-ranged firearms. [Answer] There are several authors who agree with your notion. Each of them is careful to specify a specific reason that guns aren't the order of the day. The Deathstalker series, by I think Simon Green. They have laser pistols which are devastating, but for take some time to recharge. I can't recall the reason that gunpowder weapons are out of style, but there is one... Anyhoo, guys run around with lasers and cutlasses; think pirate stories, where your pistol is good for one shot then it's down to cold steel. The Dune series, by Frank Herbert. Shields make both pistols and lasers impractical -- shields block anything moving too fast, so bullets bounce off, and laser/shield interactions resemble nuclear blasts. So it's swords, swords, swords all the way down. The Emberverse series, by SM Stirling. A mystical event has occurred such that high voltage electricity and high-speed combustion don't work. There is a teensy realism gap, but it allows knights and cowboys to fight Roman-style legions, and this excuses many sins. So, the short story... Guns are good. Guns are great. You need some reason -- physics, interfering technology, magic, or social convention -- to suppress their use. [Answer] There are always a need for short-range non-powered weapons: * They're quiet * They require no power * Close quarters, a knife ALWAYS beats a gun * they can be improvised * They are cheap * they are untraceable * They don't ricochet * They are good if the areas are crowded (caves, tightly packed space stations) * If you miss, you're not going to cause the highly unstable unobtanium to explode * A miss won't cause a hull breach * They don't jam. (Thanks to reed and IllusiveBrian for those last two) [Answer] More to Richard U's answer: I suppose even futuristic humans will still want to breathe fresh air, take a hot bath, have sex with other people. So they won't have their nanotube armored clothes on all time. Once being exposed, they can be attacked. Whatever your ranged weapon is, it needs energy to do the job and it needs a frame for the projectile. Gun powder, batteries, springs, whatever, the energy source can be detected and you can effectively detect and restrict them. Melee weapons on the other hand can be improvised from the most harmless things. Every string can be used as garrotte. Every heavy piece of material (boule ball, even a bar of soap) can be turned with a towel or a sock into a powerful mace. Every pointed object (pencil, pen, screwdriver) can be used as dagger. Killing someone with a ranged weapon also leaves traces (bullet, type of weapon, where did the shooter stand, blood or skin marks) while e.g. garrotting someone does not leave any trace and allows silently disposing/hiding the body. So (improvised) melee weapons are great for assassinations or infiltrations to avoid raising alarm. If futuristic ranged weapons are not build inside the clothes or transplated into the body, once a victim is close they can be avoided by getting close and wrestling so that the victim cannot point and trigger their ranged weapon. It can even be used against them. Also ranged weapons are also mostly worthless in melee (with the exception of rifles which can be used as bat and are really, really dangerous with bajonets). So to make a ranged weapon disadvantegous, prevent that the wielder has room and open sight. [Answer] Your reasoning for having Swords alongside Lasers can have it's roots in 2 different things. Practicality and Culture. Practical Reasons. Projectile weapons and energy weapons have something in common. If you miss, you can injure the innocent bystander a long way off rather than the innocent bystander that's right up close. That's less likely with melee weapons. This is especially important if you are inside a sealed tin can surrounded by hard vacuum. Other practical issues are included in other answers. Cultural Reasons. This is the bigger one. There are references all throughout literature and movies about using simple weapons in a tech society. Take the Klingons in Star Trek. Skill with a Bat'leth is a prized thing and dueling with one is relatively common. You can look at Firefly, where the Code Duello is alive and well on some planets. The concept of Honor is powerful, and the Old weapons are ideal to have combat that could be lethal, maybe not, and Honor can be preserved without much in the way of collateral damage. The Professional puts out there that the more skilled the Assassin, the closer in he will kill, and the best will strangle and use knives. This one is particularly fascinating because the killing will have a psychological impact on the survivors. If your boss gets his throat cut, you are also being told "We can kill you and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop us". Culture also gives you the freedom to even say "I have swords in my story because I like them" Just be sure to put at least a little reasoning behind it. [Answer] The root factor here is NECESSITY Necessity is the single most driving factor for the creation and utilization of any weapon. So in your world you can create situations that dictate the neccessity of a melee weapon Here is a simple scenario: An assassin needs to pass through security and quietly eliminate a target. Highly sophisticated and technological weapons will be easily detected by scanners. However, a dagger composed of material invisible to sensors is preferable and unless applied a small charge acts as a cloth which would evade hand searches. The assassin could then find their target and stab them with their very well engineered melee weapon. But if you are looking to somehow overturn the old addage of "bringing a knife to a gun fight" you might as well accept light sabres. [Answer] In a straight Scifi setting, if you are on a spaceship of space station, they don't like projectile weapons due to the potential of a miss creating a possible explosive decompression. In all likelihood, guns could be banned and carrying one could carry the death penalty if caught. [Answer] There are a few good reasons as to why melee weapons would still be preferred to high powered sci-fi ranged weapons. First of all, a melee weapon is generally pretty easy to make or get your hands on. Sharpening a piece of steel isn't hard compared to aligning focusing crystals and getting your hands on an unobtanium battery to power a space-age laser. For this reason alone, the lower economic classes will often prefer melee weapons. And as long as stabbing someone still works reasonably well, these weapons will continue to be in use. That brings us to the second reason melee weapons are often used in sci-fi: many sci-fi stories have powered armor of some description. Others often have cybernetic augmentations or similar items that dramatically enhance a person's survivability and physical prowess. When you get to the point where your warriors can casually flip tanks or punch through armored bulkheads, it makes sense to bring a melee weapon. It's not that much of an investment, energy-wise, and it's a damn fine backup weapon. Third: Assuming melee weapons are at the very least viable as a means of killing someone (that is: shields and/or armor haven't reduced anything below a kiloton in power to the equivalent of a bb gun), they're fairly safe. There's almost no chance of your sword accidentally decapitating a civilian or punching a hole in a space-ship. It takes skill to use a melee weapon well and anyone trained in its use is going to be relatively safe if their weapon gets taken away by an untrained opponent. With a gun, if some rebel steals it, you're going to end up with a hole in your chest. Fourth: Supply. Melee weapons (usually) don't need to be reloaded, don't need much servicing and, if properly taken care of, can last for decades of service. That's real useful for combatants operating without much support from their command. They're also comparatively lighter, when ammo is taken into account (presuming ammo is finite in your universe) Another point in Melee weapon's favor is the psychological effect. Assuming proper training for your soldiers/combatants, one of them getting shot isn't THAT much of a problem for them. Find out where the shot came from, get to cover, return fire. With melee weapons, that dynamic changes dramatically. If someone just decapitated the soldier next to you, you need to deal with that, NOW. There's no scrambling for cover, no finding out where the attack came from. The attack came from here and needs to be dealt with NOW. And last: Non-lethal incapacitation. A melee weapon offers much more control over a person. It can be used as leverage, it conveys a threat that's understood on an almost evolutionary level and is generally much less likely to accidentally kill someone compared to a rifle or god forbid, a shotgun. That makes things like staves, nets and batons invaluable for riot control units, slaver empires and kidnapping rings. [Answer] The usefulness of melee weapons often comes down to a) your ability to reach a target before getting shot to pieces (i.e. your own mobility and defenses) and b) the weapon's ability to penetrate your opponent's defenses compared to e.g. a ranged sidearm. In addition, in any setting where you want a diverse set of weapons, it's useful to keep in mind that armor and other defenses tend to "evolve" to counter whatever is the dominant threat. This means that weapons don't necessarily have to be equally powerful in order to remain feasible, they just need a niche. 1. Sophisticated point defenses could drastically reduce the power of ranged weapons by shooting down missiles and evaporating bullets while certain nano materials would reflect or disperse attacks from directed energy weapons. Typical point defense weapons would not have the "damage output" to harm a properly armored target, so a melee combatant would be more or less unaffected. Armor designed to resist radiation (without being incredibly heavy) should also be relatively easy to penetrate with a sturdy blade wielded by an augmented/power armored/magically enhanced fighter. 2. Illusion magic like DnD's Mirror Image or WH40K's Holofields could make it difficult to accurately locate and thus hit a target at range. A few people with, say, swords and long whips are probably more cost effective (and a lot safer) than bombarding the entire area. However, a swarm of drones might solve the problem just as easily. 3. Expanding on that, directional invisibility (e.g. via metamaterials) would be pretty useful in a long range engagement, but could be negated by flanking. The closer you are to a target, the greater your (potential) angular velocity, so locating an enemy might involve coordinated sweeps at relatively close range. I'd also assume that firing would reveal your position, so people would need to be pretty mobile in general. Add "mobility magic" like short/medium range teleporting into the mix and you have a setting where small groups of teleporting melee fighters become a viable option. [Answer] Not a practical use in any capacity, but... Because swords are cool The Swiss Guard at the Vatican shows off with halberds. It is 100% entirely for show. If you want your personal guard to look awesome and fierce, wielding melee weapons will usually work. Do note, That doesn't preclude having real guards with SMGs behind the folklore. ]
[Question] [ A genius programmer (someone with initials PJ) created a neural network aimed to provide the best results in running marathon for human. Thanks to Google deep dream project, this programmer also realized what each of the cells in his neural network does and how the neural network actually works. In other words, given a usual human we can determine what that human should eat, drink and how the subject should generally behave in order to run marathon perfectly. My story centers around idea that this programmer devotes two to five years of his life to get himself trained by this neural network. He basically lets this network decide what and when he should eat, he feeds it with all his biological data and so on. Can we expect he will win the [marathon race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Marathon)? In other words: * We start with an average human * This human does exactly as told by the Neural Network * The Neural Network in question is trained perfectly to understand the human body and its goal is to run marathon as fast as possible (minimize marathon running time) * This human obeys everything the neural network tells him to do for a maximum of 5 years in row * At the end of this training session, this human is so good in running marathon that he can win P.S.: This human does not use any illegal doping, but is willing and able to eat food supplements in tablets if neural network tells him so. [Answer] This neural network doesn't seem to have access to any more advanced biological knowledge than the rest of the world. It applies existing knowledge very well to its subject, but he starts out with very average athletic ability. No, this will not produce a world-beating marathon runner. Current winners of marathons are selected for outstanding talent in the field, and then spend more time than PJ training. Their coaches are trying hard to create individually optimised training programs, and they are very skilled coaches. The advantage of a slightly better optimised training program (and the advantage isn't going to be very large) will not make up for the much better talent of the conventionally selected athletes. [Answer] Olympic athletes in track and field have started by winning a genetic lottery. I'm not talking about the West-African fast-twitch muscle fibre theory. Nor the East African endurance runners bias. However sprinters are tall and have the best physical dimensions and ratios of muscle mass to bone density to limb length and balance (plus more fast-twitch muscle fibre). Endurance runners have advantageous anaerobic endurance systems. They are also smaller than sprinters. Neuroscience research suggests that elite athletes also have atypical brains. So that may be a genetic lottery factor too. So phenotype is important. Assuming your genius programmer has an appropriate phenotype to become a world class marathon runner then yes he can win. Even if he is currently out of shape. In addition to that perfect training and perfect discipline, the greatest advantage of the neural net will be in reinforcing and growing the biological neural net of the athlete. By developing atypically superior biological and psychological responses to the biological stress of the marathon the athlete will have a better chance of winning the race. Training the athlete to deal with Central Nervous System fatigue intrinsically (via genetics) and through physical training & therapy, diet, supplements, legal drugs and neuroscience. If the artificial neural net can train the athlete's brain to produce less serotonin and more dopamine relative to other athletes then that is an immediate advantage. See the wikipedia article for a summary of the current neuroscience <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_nervous_system_fatigue> The reality is that White European athletes can and have been competitive in endurance races, ultra-marathons and walking events. I missed this point > > we start with average human > > > in which case the answer is no he will never win the race. Average humans with superior knowledge and training only win when the training or knowledge is the determining factor. It's like elite special forces troops. All types and branches reject far more candidates than they accept. The candidates are all in superior physical shape. They look for an X Factor of mental toughness and then train the soldier. [Answer] This is not possible because current artificial neural network technology will not be able to solve this problem and also because you have biological limits over which you cannot optimize yourself any further. Current artificial neural network technology will not be able to solve this problem Simplifying, a neural network is nothing more than a huge statistical correlations calculator, regardless of how complex its design might be. During its training it ingests large amounts of data about the problem you are trying to solve, and if properly configured is able to find subtle and complex correlations in your data. However these insights will quite likely be useless outside the reality that is portrayed with your training data. For instance, let's suppose we manage to collect a huge dataset on professional runners, with info on their diet, training plans, medical data, race performances and so on. A neural network trained with this might be useful for inferring what kind of diets or training plans lead to better performance for certain groups of people. If the network is very good at it, it might be able to generate useful advices for specific individuals. It will work like "OK, so you are PJ and this is your data, which kind of resembles the data of these other 5 runners, and they managed to improve this marks by doing THIS and THAT". It's really not so different from Amazon's "other similar clients bought also THIS". But these advices will only be useful to improve your current marks, not to take you to a champion level. You might try to ask the network, "OK, so I'm this data point and I want you to take me to the data point where this champion is". This could be possible if you were a 100% configurable entity, such an universal mathematical function, but you are human, which takes us to the next point. But even if you were a superhuman with such capability, there might not be any single example in your data of an individual who managed to go from average human to champion runner, so the network will be at a loss. You have biological limits over which you cannot optimize yourself any further Following paulzag answer, you have a lot of biological conditioners: genetic biases, past and current medical conditions, psychological conditioners, ... even though your body and brain are somewhat flexible there are limits you won't be able to break through. Even if the network finds that the answer is "you'd better start running 40km every day before breakfast" it might be impossible for you to do so. About Deep Dream Let me also clarify what Deep Dream does. Again simplifying things, it is just a gigantic neural network, specially designed for recognizing different classes of objects in images and trained with millions of them. The Deep Dream trick is then to feed a random image to the network, and tell it to transform it gradually to things the network can identify as objects seen in the training photos. That's why images of clouds suddenly transform into all kinds of animals parts, because the network was trained to identify animals, not clouds. There are however some techniques to get some insight into what each individual neuron in the network is doing. But the same is true for biological brains, where it's easy to isolate a neuron and see how it works, yet we still barely get the whole picture. It is the joint work of all neurons in a network what is hard to give an interpretation, because this joint activity exceeds the complexity of the sum of individual behaviors. [Answer] Let's see each point of your list... --- * We start with an average human So basically you are asking if training and knowledge can convert the average human into the best at a physical skill. I can ignore the rest of the bullet points and tell you here that the answer is: NO. Why? Because for any sport there is selection bias on the athletes: only the people that has an inclination or some form of proficiency will try the sport at a proffesional level, and only those who perform well will be selected for world wide competitions. This selection will translate to populations with biological adventages being overrepresented. For intance the average height of males in the USA is 175.7 cm (5 ft 9 in) [2014 data] but the average height of NBA players is 201.3 cm (6 ft 7 in) [2004 data]. So, it is expected that the average human will underperform compared to the best biologically fit individuals. Edit: Note that is given that such individual had decent training. --- * The Neural Network in question is trained perfectly to understand the human body and its goal is to run marathon as fast as possible (minimize marathon running time) I'll take the AI knows as well it is possible to know the body of the person it is training. Each body is different, perhaps the AI has considered the available information on all known athletes... And I get you are using the work "understand" loosely here. The AI you want probably isn't a simple neural network. You have stated that it has a goal, so, if you are using a neural network for this, the "smart" part is not only in the network itself but on the algorithm you are using to trai it. Just saying.... --- * At the end of this training session, this human is so good in running marathon that he can win Sure, he can win. But it will depend on who is this human running against... Consider that there will be competitors that are have a better biologically fit body, and they have gone in exhaustive training too. Even if such training is inferior to the one provided by the AI, it doesn't need to be perfect training... just good enough. Of course that is asumming all competitors had a similar preparation time and they are using equivlanet equipment. Edit: by "equivalent equipment" I mean, during the competition. You may disregard this - because it is standard - but clothing and footwear may mean a huge difference. --- * This human does exactly as told by the Neural Network * This human obeys everything the neural network tells him to do for a maximum of 5 years in row 5 years may not be enough. The training for the best performers in some sports may take 10 or even 20 years. > > In other words, given a usual human we can determine what that human should eat, drink and how the subject should generally behave in order to run marathon perfectly. > > > The execution of the actions may be limited by the resources of this average human, such as access to equipment for intance. I wonder if this AI gives financial advice so that this human can buy the best equipment and best food. And to think it knows what is the best equipment and food, would require perfect knowledge! The AI needs to be trained for all possible food items, that would have to include all possible recipes, even that one your neighboor just invented yesteday and that new brevage that is coming to the market next month. The AI needs to be trained for all possible training equipments and exercises. Again, this requires to know all that is in the market. Also consider that the best exercise may be one that requires apparatus yet to be invented. The best we can realistically aspire to is an AI that is constantly learning. --- Addendum: Does this AI care for what is legal? It may tell this average human to steal the equipment, to use illegal drugs, and to undergo surgical body enhancements. And such action may not only break the law but also disqualify him from the competition. And of course, killing all potential competitors with a better fit body would also "help". [Answer] It could be plausible. As many people have commented, varying the type/intensity of training and diet alone will not make up the difference. But who knows what could happen with a wholistic lifestyle change that is radically different (but perhaps superior to) that of other athletes. Maybe the Neural Network realizes the ideal training cycle for his body is 15 hours per cycle. Not many people live on anything other than a 24 hour cycle, and while it's true that life has generally adapted towards this, it may not be the optimum for transforming into a perfect Olympian. Or, for easier math, maybe he does 12 hour cycles of 30 min eat -> 2 hours workout -> 30 min eat -> 2 hours workout -> 30 min eat -> 2 hours workout -> 4.5 hours sleep. In 24 hours he'll work out 12 hours, eat 6 times, and sleep 9 hours. The demands placed on the mind and body by this training regimen, long term, would be extremely high. The Neural Network would need to be able to motivate him highly, or induce a long term trancelike state where he is highly susceptible to suggestion and follows orders when any sane human would quit from exhaustion. Also he'd likely need access to training equipment beyond just running. Run too much and your body breaks down. Combination of low-impact water-resistance activities (water cycling, water running, swimming) and direct electrical stimulation of muscles in Neural Network determined patterns. He'd accomplish no work outside of his training, no time for socializing of any form, and the cumulative stress might push his body to the breaking point right after the marathon (collapse with a heart attack crossing the finish line). Maybe the Neural Network knew this but didn't tell him because it would impact his motivation for training. Even then, maybe it requires special circumstances for him to win. Like moderate rain during the marathon. Most competitors start out slower, and no one chases the underdog who goes out fast. No one can draft off of him, and he unexpectedly holds on to win with a time 15 minutes slower than the world record marathon, but still faster than what the other competitors did that race. Again, Neural Network might even know that him winning is a long shot, but lie to bolster his confidence, and in your story rainy conditions just so happen to occur. Even with such an advanced AI, I don't think he could remain at the top of the Marathoning field for say, 4 years (enough to win 2 Olympic gold medals). You generally need to win the genetic lottery in a big way to get near the top, as others have stated. You might fudge your way in with absolute perfect preparation as an average joe, for one performance under ideal circumstances, but sooner or later your "averageness" is going to catch up with you. Most human bodies cannot handle the stress of performing at an elite level over a sustained period of time. Of course, this AI has already gone far beyond just proper diet/training, but I'd be willing to believe this one, if the author met me half way and acknowledged that in the end, even with all this (near-suicidal) prep, it was a 50/50 gamble. [Answer] # If You Want Him To The best chance of winning is not to have a neural network for marathon running, per se, but rather one that understands human biology at an unprecedented level. For instance, if the NN understood the proteomics of PJ's body at a fine-grained level, as well as his microbiome and the methylation patterns of his DNA, it may be able to tailor a program which alters all of these in ways which current humans cannot even conceive. # Genes Aren't All That... Everyone is hung up on having the perfect DNA, but the biggest surprise of the Human Genome Project is how few genes we have, and how little genetic variation we have. The reality is that genes get turned on and off all the time, as part of regular processes, or in response to environmental conditions. A gene can become enabled/disabled long-term (say, over several generations) via [DNA methylation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_methylation). The pattern of methylation forms what we call [epigenetics](http://www.whatisepigenetics.com/dna-methylation/). # ...But They Are! Now, if humans have so few genes, where does all the complexity of human biology come from? Well, it turns out that humans are mostly alien. Only 10% of your cells have a genetic pattern which can be recognized as "you". The rest? Parasites and symbiotes (hopefully mostly the latter), primarily in your gut: your microbiome. Only [1%](http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/microbiome/) of the genes floating around the fluid bag which is you are "your genes". Part of the reason we are the ultimate chemical factories, transforming everything from plants to animals into energy and building materials is that we are host to thousands and millions of highly specialized chemical processors. And what we feed those microbes changes their relative balance. # Conclusion So, while you pretty much cannot change your human genes, you can affect the methylation patterns, which can affect all kinds of internal body systems. And you can definitely change your microbiome, to the extent of wiping it out almost entirely and starting from scratch (which is what strong antibiotics and diarrhea do, basically). If your NN can then use these tools to remake PJ into a super-runner, I personally wouldn't question it too much. Oh, and there's the boring things like using the NN to create the perfect stride form for PJ's biomechanics. But everyone probably believes that is easy, more or less. What might be more interesting is if it also taught him how to alter the stride during the course of the race as his hydration level and other dynamic factors change his weight balance. For instance, there can likely be fine-tuning when climbing and descending hills, taking sharp turns, etc. Or, it is even possible that he can shift which muscles are used in order to rest some of them during the race by altering his stride, though I have no idea if that is a net benefit or not (think lactic acid buildup, etc.). [Answer] Neural Networks work just like a human brain - they get some data and learn how to output other data. We usually teach them to output something we won't - e.g. an input is a photo, an output - information whether or not the photo contains tank. See, no magic. This won't tell you the purpose of the universe. It's just a tool that if trained properly can be really good at something(e.g., game called GO). Creating a proper exercise plan and diet is all about biology, chemistry and keeping an eye on the progress, so that you can change the plan if the need comes(e.g. injury, better or worse results then expected, etc.). What does it mean for us? It means that this neural network could become a cheaper alternative for personal trainer. This wouldn't revolutionize the field, certainly wouldn't instantly start producing ubersoldiers capable. Sorry, that's not how Neural Networks work. [Answer] To answer your question, no, we cannot expect him to win the race given substantial competition, for instance if there is a substantial cash award for winning. What might be more practical is to train a neural network to optimally train a runner using a particular training philosophy - say Lydiard or Daniels. Feedback to the neural network would be the runner's behavior - details of workouts, weight, injuries and aches and pains, diet, etc. [Answer] ## No. Consider your godly neural network as just a black box. It consumes whatever information, and emits commands for your human. This is no different from having the best marathon coach in the world to train you for 5 years. The coach also is a black box who consumes information and spits out commands. If your body starts out average, it will stay average. You will, at the end of the day, be an average person trained perfectly to run marathons. Everybody that started out with a non-average body will beat you easily (assuming they also train for a few years, of course), even if their training is slightly less optimal than yours, because there are things influencing your running that cannot be changed by training (like the length of bones, the absolute upper limit for certain structures in your body to grow with training (i.e. cardiovascular capabilities etc.) and so on). ]
[Question] [ In more modern media, elves are typically depicted as slender humans with pointy ears. However, in some settings like DnD the appearance of the elves is much more distinct from that of regular Human. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kgUB0.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kgUB0.png) Asides from a more angular and extended mandible, the eyes of the elf are much larger than that of typical human. This of course bring up the question of whether or not the eye could actually fit in the skull without compromising the intelligence of the elf. Thus, can a elf with eyes as large as depicted still be as intelligent as human? Assumptions: * The eyes of the elf are round like that of a humans * The overall dimensions of the face are similar enough to a humans that we can roughly use our craniums as a reference point. [Answer] The brain is fine. the eyes of humans sit mostly in front of the brain. If they are wider they really only compete with the sinus for space, so they wont effect the brain much at all but the sinuses would be smaller. With smaller sinus elves might have a hard time in the dry desert or the cold artic which would explain why they stick to forests and jungles. If you make them deeper front to back then they start to compete with the brain but this could be offset by making the skull just a little taller, because it is mostly the top of the eye competing with the bottom of the frontal lobe. Which would also give the almond shaped skull. Keep in mind in the image you give the eyes are not necessarily bigger they might just be farther forward. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WANIY.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WANIY.png) Here is a bunch of sections to make it easier to visualize. <https://www.vonhagens-plastination.com/pages/medical-teaching-specimens/von-hagens-plastination.php/anatomy-glass-sub-brain-and-head-slice-overview> [Answer] John's answer addresses cranial capacity well, but the question is about intelligence. The idea that brain size maps significantly to intelligence has been thoroughly debunked since the era of phrenology. Scientific American notes that "[brain size accounts for between 9 and 16 percent of the overall variability in general intelligence](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-matter1/)" in humans, and digging into the studies shows that this measure of brain volume has stronger correlations with potential pathological factors than it does to innate volume-- many forms of brain trauma or developmental issues incidentally also reduce the volume of brain matter, but two healthy individuals with similar backgrounds but different brain volumes have even less difference in measured intelligence. In other words, I'll make better guesses about my friends' IQ if I know their childhood nutrition and adult drinking patterns than if I know their hat size. I should also keep such speculations to myself if I want to continue calling them "friends". These studies are also using only human participants, for obvious reasons. The same article discusses how structural differences allow other species to have highly developed cognition in particular realms regardless of their brain size. This is to say that brains which develop differently will think differently. So depending on the origin of your elves, I'd expect them to do badly on human IQ tests, but humans to also do badly on theirs. Again, [social factors have an enormous impact](https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/9-2-the-social-cultural-and-political-aspects-of-intelligence/) on efforts to quantify the huge messy collection of traits we loosely clump together as "intelligence", and that's within the same species. CJ Cherry's "Foreigner" books are all about how apparently human-like aliens have fundamentally alien cognition, and the traps that come from attempting to map their abilities and motivations onto a simple spectrum defined by human perspective. Of course, this all assumes we're landing on the material side of the Cartesian duality debate. Tolkien's elves (and humans as well) explicitly have a non-physical self, the "fëa", which exists independently of their body. If gods are tethering thinking and feeling souls to ambulatory meat, then all bets are off in terms of brain size and intelligence. Perhaps the brain in that case merely functions as the interface between the meat and the astral self, and merely needs to be large enough to send and receive signals. TL;DR: No, big eyes don't mean less intelligent-- and also that's probably not the right question to ask about how a different species thinks, and why. [Answer] Elves, being an inferior race, have a severely compromised intelligence relative to humans. It is a reasonable theory that some of that compromise comes from the size of their buggy eyes. Clearly the eyes take up an inordinate amount of space in their heads. Since the effect (or lack thereof) of brain size on intelligence in humans is not applicable to unnatural life forms, the tiny brain of an elf probably does contribute to its lower intelligence. However, even if their eyes and brains were normal size, elves would be significantly less intelligent than humans because their brains do not process as efficiently. ]
[Question] [ I am trying to work out whether it is realistic to have a collection of locations throughout a near future Earth, that are high above the ground (eg. sky, trees, buildings) but secure and either not very visible/obvious or very difficult to get to. These could be either in an urban or completely natural setting, but as well as the above, there's the consideration that supplies and maintenance will still be required. So the added challenge is how to still allow outside workers and supplies in without compromising the security of the location? Some examples I have thought of: * building atop a mountain where the severe conditions sheild the visiblity and make it difficult to get to * skycraper with dedicated (otherwise inaccessible) floors and blacked out windows * I have considered some kind of large aircraft, but I think that would be too expensive and difficult compared to other building based solutions. Some additional details without getting too much into plot: * Think something along the lines of secret rebel hideouts * Budget doesn't matter as much since the occupant/rebels of some locations may have more wealth than others eg. wealthy urban rebels may use a skyscraper hideout, while humble rural rebels may use a mountain fort [Answer] This detail makes all the difference: > > ... Secret rebel hideouts ... > > > While there are many valid answers for securing something up high, a secret rebel hideout has extra considerations that matter. For one, secrecy is just as important as security. An airship or mountain top fortress might be hard to access, but they stand out against their backgrounds such that surveillance is bound to detect them. As for the hideout part, radio towers will be way too small. ## This makes skyscrapers the ideal location Because a skyscraper is already host to thousands of visitors a day, and has a massive logistics need, you can drive trucks full of supplies and rebels in and out of the place all day long and no one will see anything unusual happening there. This means no amount of aerial reconnaissance will reveal your location. While one other answer suggests using unofficial space like mechanical floors, such places will be prone to inspection by outside agencies and will have no legal stop-gap in place to keep law-enforcement or fire inspectors out. Using the building's official space would be even better. Because it is common for skyscrapers to host a variety of data sensitive civilian firms (Banking institutions, IT companies, medical records firms, law offices, etc), high security in parts of the building is 100% to be expected. All you need to do is buy up a bunch of office space and establish a small front office that looks legitimate. As long as your front should legitimately be following an escalated security standard like PCI, CMMC, HIPPA, etc. then no one will really question why you have such strict visitor policies, plus it gives you rights to limit certain kinds of access to law enforcement. For example, let's say a cop shows up and he has a warrant to search your "medical archives company", because of HIPPA, his warrant will generally be very limited in scope. In most cases, your office staff can prevent the officer from doing a physical search under the grounds that a cop could not reasonably search for the thing of interest without going through records which are protected under HIPPA and are not part of his investigation; so, it would be common practice for your archive staff to fetch things of interest (like specific medical records) for the cops rather than granting physical access. Or another example might be if a fire inspector drops by unannounced. If you were hiding in the mechanical floors, you would be discovered. However, if as a high security firm, you can tell him you need time to secure your sensitive information and schedule him to come back later after you've had time to hide all of your illegal, I mean "sensitive" materials. As a last line of defense, a skyscraper has the added advantage of being positioned right above the heads of thousands of innocent civilians. This means that if your location is discovered, they can't just call in an airstrike without incurring massive political fallout. If they want to assault your position, they have to go in by foot without the advantages of air or artillery support. This gives your rebels a fighting chance to hold the position long enough to destroy records, await reinforcements, or if they are fanatical enough, to detonate any self-destruct devices there might be. [Answer] ## Airships For once, these are a good answer. You've said that resupply is required, but that the main consideration is altitude. For that, passive lift is difficult to beat. They benefit from economies of scale, too. Airships are handy because you can move them, so you can change to different areas of interest without having to incur your construction costs again. --- Edit after OP Clarification Airships are too visible for this purpose, even in remote areas. Thank you for that clarification. [Answer] # Water Towers Nobody goes knocking on the front door of a water tower. Construction: Getting your own water tower (without it being obvious that it doesn't actually hold water) is probably the hardest part. There are a few ways to do this, with the one I'd recommend being: 1. Find a good location, between two fairly large towns (so there's justification for having a fairly large water tower) 2. Convince both of them, through bribing some employees, that the water tower belongs to the other town/city 3. If necessary, have someone who works for each town who can fake anything necessary to keep the secret Design: Some water towers have pretty wide columns/towers to hold them up; if you go for a design with one central one holding it up, you can fit an elevator and some rooms into it. The main part is of course the giant "tank" on top. You can't have windows, but with a sufficiently large design you could probably fit a considerable number of rooms and people inside. You also get the advantage of fairly good fortification; even if your water tower is revealed as a fake, it'll be pretty sturdily constructed anyway due to the huge weight of water is supposedly holds. [Answer] # Hide in plain sight Sometimes the best way to hide is to go where there are so many people that you won't be noticed. Hiding in a skyscraper is a great idea. Every large building has a lot of space dedicated to maintenance and operations. I used to work in a building that had a whole wing of offices that I couldn't access with my keycard. I never tried to get in or asked what was there. My coworkers never expressed any curiosity about it either. You could hide a lot of people in the upper floors of a building, even if the building is actively being used by other workers. And resupply would be as easy as unlocking the front door or tossing some rope down to the ground (you can buy 80 meters of strong rope for [around $400](https://www.rei.com/product/192135/edelrid-tommy-caldwell-eco-dry-ct-93-mm-rope)). EDIT: As Darrel Hoffman points out in the comments, you could easily remain hidden by hiding in one of a highrise's [mechanical floors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_floor). The linked article shows just how much space different skyscrapers devote to these non-occupied floors. [Answer] Radio towers. [![radio tower](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AhtgR.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AhtgR.jpg) [source](https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMWN7G_WAGA_DT_Channel_5_North_Druid_Hills_Atlanta_GA_USA) They would be more impressive if they were not so ubiquitous. And old. The American landscape is dotted with towers, in town and in the country side. Radio towers are really tall and also built to last. If the top of a building is not ideal for your purpose (available buildings not tall enough or too accessible) then siting your operation on a radio tower might work. Radio towers often host cell phone antennas in their lower reaches. You will be limited by space and weight. You cannot put a mobile home on the top of a radio tower. You cannot host a dance party... hmm. Maybe there is a way to host a dance party.... [Answer] Alpine Bunkers They can be super high up and hidden in plain sight, just like these buildings in Switzerland. It might be interesting to check out the concept of the [National Redoubt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Redoubt_(Switzerland)) in general. [![picture of bunker in alpine landscape](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LfnHX.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/LfnHX.png) [Answer] You can have different ways of going away from the surface of Earth, but you said that being at the top of a mountain is also possible if that means that the access is difficult and there is poor visibility. So, we are searching for means of being high above the plains, and if there is a way up to your place, that it must have low visibility or be difficult to access or to traverse. These are your options: -Airships, as Anon already said, you can get passive lift from lighter-than-air gasses. Also the bigger you make them you will have more space to put gas in and get a greater load up in the air. They can be pretty manouverable too. Now for the specifics: You have two possible gasses to use: Hellium (He, non reactive, very scarce on Earth) or Hydrogen (H, reacts violently if you put it with Oxygen and blow a spark: see the [Hindenburg disaster](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fURATK5Yt30), however, it's a lot easier to contain, it has a greater lift capacity and it is very easy to produce through the electrolysis of water). There are more [Lifting gasses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifting_gas) if you are interested in continuing to research this option. Airships will also need fuel and oil to run the motors; periodic maintenance checks to the superstructure, the motors, the air sacks, the water ballast, etc; a way to obtain lifting gas, as it will slowly dissipate through the cover... -The top of mountains + castles. You already commented about it. The fact is that you can try that, but if the objective is to run from zombies or the like, I recommend to make the scenery in Europe, where you might find a great density of castles, forts, batteries, walled cities, and other types of fortifications. You will usually find them at the top of mountains. In Spain and Portugal (Iberian Peninsula) you may have a special case. As they waged a 'war' for over 700 years with an enemy to their south and it has a very irregular orography, you will find a nice evolution of castles from north to south. If you are looking exclusively for difficulty of access you will be able to find some fine examples like the Segovia Castle, the Alhambra, the Palace of Sintra or some superfortifications like the fortified complex of Elvas. [![fortified complex of Elvas](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aHVAh.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aHVAh.jpg) However, for forts more contemporanean than 1850 I sugest not to look in Spain. Or make the scenery on the coast of America (North and South). While it may sound contradictory to mix coast and top of mountain, you will not be dissapointed. Here's an example of what you can find: [![Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zh5xa.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Zh5xa.png) [![Panorámica Castillo S Felipe de Barajas](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vQ5Ul.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/vQ5Ul.png). -Second to last, the top of buildings. It is a plausible aproach to the problem, however there will be a lot of problems with getting supplies to the top unless you are able to use a lot of man-powered cranes and long and resistent enough rope. You could use the lifters' holes to put the cranes at the top. Probably there won't be any electricity so that means that basic things like water pumping and active air ventilation won't work. -For the last one, it's not exactly an airship, but if you already have all the materials and you have a complex enough chain of crafting to make each component, you could make a space station and live there, and using hydroponics to get food. Actually, this last one would be the most safe one, because you would be far from the ground, with difficult access (because you need a rocket to get there) and supplies and maintenance will always be required. [Answer] Oil Rigs There's the classic example of [SeaLand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand) that has been used over the years by various groups as an off-grid escape, but a full size commercial Oil platform way out in the middle of the ocean would be an idea. You can get supplies in/out by sea and air, it would be relatively easy to protect, and depending on how far out to sea it is, would be difficult for attackers to get to unless they're very well equipped. You'd see anyone coming from miles away, and a point defence system would keep things relatively protected. A lower cost solution to protection could be the large fire suppression hoses which would be enough to knock down an incoming chopper or flatten any marauders trying to scale the sides. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fxecH.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fxecH.jpg) [Answer] I would say The Moon. It's not that hard to get to. We've been there many decades ago, but not just anyone can go easily. You would be able to see any large enough structure with telescopes but small enough structures in the craters would be hard or impossible to see. Or if you really want to hide, then just make the base on the 40% or so of the moon that isn't visible from Earth. Obviously resupply would be an issue if the moon base wasn't self sufficient. But it's not hard to maintain security in this case, since I would think it's relatively easy to detect and validate any incoming spacecraft. Another, less realistic, option would be, some sort of additive to clouds that make them able to support weight or some foundation material that was less dense than clouds so it could float and be suspended in the cloud. The cloud would hide the structure to everything but planes and such. [Answer] How about [nuclear airplanes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_aircraft)? No development project has seen completion, but such an airplane would fly for years without landing, more with a minimum level of handwaving (a molten salt reactor could potentially be refueled in flight, for example). Supplies and personnel can be rotated with smaller, conventional planes who can hook themselves under the mother plane, a precision manoeuvre but well inside the means of current technology. Unlike air ships the mother plane can reach very high altitudes to the order of 20km, making it virtually invisible, and it could possibly be designed for radar stealth. It would probably have to get lower to meet with the supply deliveries, though. ]
[Question] [ Following my mutant thread, I'd like some insight on one of them. I wrote this first generation highly powerful mutant whose ability revolves around metal. (Context, skippable if you're only here for the scientific part) > > For the context, a group of first-gen mutants got together, and seeing their power could loosely represent the greek pantheon, they decided to spin their super-identity around the concept. The metal bender is Hephaïstos. > > > The mutant in question, on top of being extremely strong, can "shrink" (and un-shrink) metal, while making it retains its mass. He creates several tons oversized weapons, then shrink them and use them in combat. (Some more skippable context) > > To be precise, he shrinks them until they're bauble-sized, wears (litteral) tons of them, and un-shrink them/seize them appropriately when needed. (Needless to say, Hephaïstos is buffed) > > > From my basic understanding of physics, you could theoretically accomplish that by forcing atoms to stick closer to each other. The process would increase the density (so mass is conserved) and produce a lower volume - equal weight object. *I'd like to know if it is theoretically plausible* and if so, what would be the consequences: 1. Would the object keep the same composition? (I.e. Iron keeps being iron, and does not become uranium) 2. Would the object retains its weight? 3. Would it affect the object durability in any way? Thanks for pointing out any mistakes in the reasoning or the consequences, and please excuse any misuse of physical terms (I'll be happy to correct if you point it out). The exact process by which atoms are forced to stick closer to each other is the hand-waved part. [Answer] Of course it's plausible!** Your world, your rules. Since you have what is basically a human doing the shrinking & expanding of the metal, the obvious means is a kind of magic. As you already said: the mutant squeezes the metal so that the atoms press closer together, then reexpands the metal to its normal dimensions. Consequences: * eventually, if he squeezes the metal enough, he might end up with a neutronium bauble. * if the number of atomic particles remains constant, then the weight will remain the same; it'll just be in a smaller space. * durability should remain the same as well. Magic after all! * the only open question is how Hephaistos keeps the metal squozen down into bauble form: we would need incredible pressure generating machines & technology to accomplish this feat, and would need to keep applying those forces in order to keep the metal compressed. He must also be making use of some kind of force field that maintains the bauble's diminutive size. Presumably, if he falls unconscious or is killed, his weapons will lose their magical integrity and will explosively expand back to their original volume. [Answer] Nice idea, but unfortunately not very realistic Here's why: * First off: Of course the atoms would be closer together but they would also repel each other. Which means as soon as you release the pressure, the atoms would push each other away and the weapon becomes bigger again, maybe not as big as originally but definitely quite close to that * Heat is an important factor. If you pump your tire with a hand pump and you touch the shaft of the pump afterwards you will notice that it will be quite hot. If you compress a weapon like you described there will be a lot of heat that has to be transported away. Else your weapon would either melt or lose its properties (see below) * Even if two pieces of metal or composed of the same element they can be different in the shape of the metal crystals. E.g. If you heat iron in a forge and cool it down slowly it will be softer and more flexible. If you cool it rapidly it will be very hard but break more easily. So the components in your weapon would probably loose their properties if you compress them. * Let's say you could compress them regardless of the facts above: How would you do it? If you apply pressure in one direction the weapon will squeeze towards the other direction. So you'd need to apply the pressure from all direction and it has to be exactly the same amount of pressure. Else your weapon will deform and will be useless after inflation. * And last but not least: How would you inflate it again without deformation? You'd need to reverse the process described above with perfect precision [Answer] While not realistic per se, as pointed out by the answer of CKA, it can work as an "arbitrary" superpower, as long as it is consistent. So, what would happen if this Hephaïstos actually had the power of squeezing metal atoms together by thousandfolds if not millionfolds? He would create [degenerate matter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_matter), the stuff white dwarf stars are made of. The compression would heat the metal to immense temperatures, so I will assume that the extra heat is temporarily stored by the power itself, and put back when it stops acting. Heat transfer depending on surface, it may have an immense heat capacity for its size, assuming the stable degenerate matter somehow keeps working like a metal in that regard. If the power stops instantly, then those baubles are bombs, possibly equivalent to nuclear weapons. If his power has an "inertia", and the bauble only slowly expands back to its original size once the effect stops, he can still use the expansion to break pretty much anything, but in the way of a hydraulic piston instead of a bomb. Inversely, the compression itself may be used to crush things with irresistible force, possibly up to nuclear fusion level. If you want to avoid this, the compression or expansion effect may be resisted externally due to how the power itself works - if expansion is limited, an object could be kept indefinitely in its compressed state if, for example, encased in something hard. Baubles massing several tons are extraordinarily scary things. They will fall through the ground if you leave them there. So as Hephaïstos is strong enough to wear it, he is also strong enough to throw them, and there is nothing (barring other superpowers) that can survive that level of armour-piercing. If he needs less armour-piercing and more impact damage, simply compress it less, to have more contact surface for the same projectile mass and speed. If he can compress and throw shrapnel, armor-piercing dust would also be a terrifying weapon. And of course, a bauble knife or cutting wire will cut through anything. Conversely, compressed armor will stop any non-superpowered attack with sheer mass and density. Also note that Hephaïstos is not only immensely strong, to be able to carry those, he also has an incredibly resistant skin (and clothes), or some sort of telekinetic powers. Otherwise, the baubles will go through him as easily as through any ordinary matter. (This type of [required secondary superpower](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RequiredSecondaryPowers) is similar to how Superman can grab a car by its bumper without ripping said bumper apart.) And of course, let's not forget that he is wearing literally tons of equipment, so a car hitting him will stop the car, not send him flying. [Answer] Metals are to some degree compressible, and they may be compressed even further undergoing some phase transitions to denser modifications. Plutonium is a metal famous for having many modifications and a more dense modification created under high pressure is one ingredient of a nuclear bomb. However, under given conditions (pressure and temperature) only one modification is stable and the other modifications are usually unstable or in rare cases meta-stable (like diamond, a meta-stable modification of carbon/graphite under normal conditions). A phase transition is always mass preserving and the chemical identity of the material is unchanged, but the stability of an object is usually not guaranteed and sharpness of weapons is surely not preserved. The best your mutants can have are weapons made of very dense meta-stable metal causing heavy violence to the victims and breaking weapons made of low density metals. Live transformations from small to big or vice versa won't work. Depending on the tech level, those very heavy weapons are probably copy-protected (but still can be conquered or stolen by non-mutants). [Answer] I'll be looking at the energy side of this with my admittedly very cursory understanding of degenerate matter, because it's pretty interesting. If you want to compress metal down to small, but still macroscopic sizes it's probably alright to disregard anything to do with the nucleus and just look at the Fermi energy of the electron gas within the metal. The energy per electron is $E = \hbar^2 (3\pi^2\Electron Density)^{2/3}/2me $ in a Fermi gas. According to this table <http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Tables/fermi.html> the value for iron would be $17\10^{28}$ free electrons per cubic meter. Which gives us about $11 eV$ of energy per free electron. If you want to cut the iron's density by a factor of say, ten, we have ten times higher electron density and an increase in energy of $10^{2/3}$, ca. $4.64$. So each free electron has an energy of about $51eV$ now. As said before, there's $17\10^{28}$ free electrons in a cubic meter of iron. Each of those has 40 additional electronvolts of energy now, which comes up to a total of $1.09 \ 10^{12} J$ of energy, or $260 t$ of TNT equivalent. Yep, a block of metal is practically a small nuke. Formidable indeed if your mutant can also spontaneously decompress metal. To answer 1): The density in a White Dwarf is a hundred thousand times larger than iron, but the nuclei still stay intact in the degenerate electron gas. Iron will stay iron even for a very high compression. 2): Yes, I see nothing that would indicate otherwise. It's just very dense. 3): Realistically it'd be a white hot nugget of extremely high temperature, see math above. Having it be stable requires handwaving. It makes intuitive sense that extreme density would also result in an increase in durability though, there's simply more mass to move out of the way if someone wants to punch a hole into it. Another cool property you could give these metals is superconductivity. Highly compressed hydrogen is theorized to turn into a superconducting metal for example, so it's not a farfetched idea to apply that here too. There's all kinds of cool stuff coming with that, like levitating in magnetic fields. [Answer] Don't forget about inertia. You must push as hard to move a bauble as if it were its normal size & every movement continues in its direction & rotation until you put in the same energy as you did to get it started. (Consider handling a piano via an attached bracelet charm.) This also means that the force & pressure to push it and get the friction to twist it is increased. On the other hand, you really don't need weapons or metals, you can just compress rocks or for that matter marshmallows, because when you throw them the target is going to have to donate the same amount of energy at the same pressures as you. PS Asimov addressed some of these issues in the introduction of, text of, and essays about his novelization of the movie Fantastic Voyage, wherein humans & their submarine are shrunk to do surgery. [Answer] These are just my musings, I might be wrong in some things because i'm not a scientist, but these are items I would incorporate/account for. If your weapons are made of a pure metal there shouldn't be much issue I would suspect, but if you have some form of contaminant I would imagine it would work like squeezing water of out of a sponge, the carbon for example leaking out of the metal because it needs to make room for the lattice of the metal atoms that are squeezed together by the power. Or you follow the astronomers interpretation of metal and that's basically everything is a metal that's not hydrogen and helium. But even then the mixing of materials could pose problems due to different atomic sizes when compressed that hard to reduce size. Assuming the magic applies uniform pressure causing the metals to shrink the metals could "bounce" out like a spring when it's uncompressed too fast. Your mutant will need patience in order to prevent growing damage when expanding. <https://accendoreliability.com/stress-metals/> explains it pretty well. Also from the same site: > > With most modern metals yielding usually occurs at about 1% of the theoretic strength of the atomic bonds. Many materials yield at about 0.1% of the theoretic strength. > > > The reason metals have such low strengths is because of imperfect atomic structures in the crystal lattices which make them up. Often a row of atoms will stop mid crystal and a gap is created in the atomic structure. These gaps act as huge stress raising points known as dislocations. > > > So basically his weapons need to be metal perfect, without any imperfections. That would make his materials of course extremely valuable for the scientific community and could be a nice source of income. His swords or metals could make for a nice bomb. Imagine a metal slab the size of a pellet, but actually is the size of a brick. He throws it at the enemy and as it lands there he releases his magic. The spring effect from the sudden pressure release will probably tear the metal apart sending shrapnel flying everywhere, and depending on the rate of expansion send a shock wave through the air that will rupture internal organs. It's a very dangerous power he has. [Answer] \Your World, Your Rules\** Having a basic understanding of the physics in our world can help you formulate a reasonable alternative for your world. Here are a couple of articles that explain atoms and nuclei, * <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_nucleus> * <http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/physics/sobel/Nucphys/atomprop.html> Roughly paraphrasing the CUNY article, > > An atom is about 10e-10 meters in size. Although atoms of different > elements vary in sizes, use a rough estimate of 10e-10 as the size of > any atom. > > > An atom is composed of a nucleus surrounded by an electron cloud. The > nucleus is about 10e-15 m in size (about 10e-5 or 1/100,000 of the > atom). A good comparison of the nucleus to the atom is a pea in the > middle of a racetrack. > > > The nucleus is composed of protons (positive) and neutrons (zero). > There is a nuclear force which is (mostly) attractive and acts between > protons and neutrons, and is stronger than the repulsive electric > force. > > > Your blacksmith could generate some 'field' or alter metals to, 1. manipulate (amplify) the nuclear force of metals 2. moderate (reduce or weaken) repulsive force between nuclei of metals 3. add another particle to the nuclei of metals (to do the above) Option 3 makes the most sense to me, depends upon how your desired storytelling [Answer] The size of atoms, the size of molecules, and the distance of metal atoms in the crystal grid are determined by the size of the electron hull, which in turn depends on the interaction of the electrons with each other and with the nucleus. Electrons around nuclei behave a bit like three-dimensional standing waves, comparable to a resonating surface, but in space. The wave's shape is determined by the electric charge of the electron and proton, the mass of the electron, its energy and the [vacuum permittivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_permittivity). The latter in turn is connected to the light speed; higher speed of light would decrease the permittivity which in turn would increase forces between charges, if I understand correctly. Let's assume that higher forces would result in smaller atoms and denser crystal grids. All your hero needs to do is to locally increase the speed of light. I would think that that is equivalent to locally speeding up time. Easy ;-). ]
[Question] [ When describing my alien civilisations, I frequently see the necessity to define a particular civilisation's technology level. How can I do it? The alien civilisation I'm currently working on is spacefaring and has first outposts in a few of the neighbouring star systems. At the same time, humans have a few permanent settlements on Mars and a research outpost on Europa. One idea that now came to my mind is to compare spacefaring civilisations of my universe by how fast they can travel through space. Another idea I have considered is how much work has been invested in attaining particular technology and how much work it saves. \Faster-than-light (FTL) travel of any kind is not possible. [Answer] The key thing here is not to define "a level" of technology. Doing that ties you to the sequence of discoveries we had in the real world, and one possible future sequence. Instead, there is a tree, with differing progress on differing branches. Just consider steam engines and gunpowder. Historically, gunpowder was first. How about a world where steam came [earlier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile)? A society might value fast sublight ships, and spend much effort increasing the specific impulse. Or they try to increase the fuel ratio by making their environmental systems more efficient, and spend effort there. Or both, but nobody can do everything at once. So while the answers suggesting to look at RPGs like GURPS and Traveller have merit, for something like a novel you should definitely write a tree. Some things like available power sources will influence others, of course. If they have solar arrays on a planet like Mercury, they might be able to produce industrial quantities of antimatter to power their ships, and that also affects the drives. If they have large, efficient lasers or masers, they can boost their ships that way. And so on. [Answer] The go-to answer for how do you measure alien civilizations technology is the [Kardashev Scale](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ab792b). The basic idea behind this scale is that since the purpose of technology is to do things and doing things requires energy, you can measure how technologically advanced a civilization is by measuring how much energy it uses. Your idea of measuring how fast a spaceship can travel would actually be included in this scale because [velocity is related to kinetic energy](http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/ke.html). It is hard to say if the Kardashev Scale is a good fit for you because it is not clear what you want your scale to do. If your scale is suppose to convey military threat, manufacturing ability, or resource consumption, then I think the Kardashev Scale would work. If you wanted to measure how intelligent a civilization is, then a scale based on the available computation power or information storage limits may be better. [Answer] Your best source on this will be role-playing games that handle a broad range of settings, or which are specialised for science fiction. The first game to have a technology level system was Traveller, and its [system is described](https://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Technology_Level) on its wiki. * GURPS' technology levels are similar in concept, although the details differ. Again, see its [fandom.com wiki](https://gurps.fandom.com/wiki/Tech_Level). [Answer] Define a civilisation's technology level by what they are capable of doing and what they are incapable of doing. This can be broken down into subfields. For example space travel, medicine, biological engineering, artificial intelligence, and how well structured and utopian is their society. For all subfields we can speak of depth. For example how smart is the smartest robot? Do they have self-aware robots? We can also talk of breadth. For example how widespread are these robots? Can every household afford one? [Answer] # Use a few scales The first and biggest is the [Kardashev scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale). This measures the total amount of energy the civilizations has harnessed on a logarithmic level. K-1 is "has harnessed all of the energy the sun would deposit on Earth". K-2 is "has harnessed all of the energy the sun emits, period". K-3 is "has harnessed all of the energy an entire galaxy of stars emits". Each 0.1 on the Kardashev scale is a factor of 10 -- these steps are $10^{10}$ or a factor of 10,000,000,000x apart from each other. Human civilization is currently around 0.72 on this scale, give or take a few 0.001. With this scale you can measure "can they dismantle a moon"? "Can they launch a slower than light ship to a nearby star?" - both of these are fundamentally questions about energy budgets. The engineering may be tricky, but once you can deal with energy on the scales required, they aren't fundamentally difficult to do. But energy isn't the only thing that a civilization technology can be measured on. Two other ones I would suggest would be information or computation and the ability to manipulate and control small things (and how small they get). For information, just a simple logarithm of the bits of information we have catalogued, stored and can manipulate. Humanity today is in the 10^15 bits range. For small scale control, humans can futz around with stuff far smaller than they can control. We have nearly full control over stuff at mm and above scales. At nm (nanometer) scales our ability to control stuff is in clean room labs with limited materials. We can print computer chips at that scale, but we have limited control over DNA, for example, or biology at that scale. ## So how about 3 numbers * Log base 10 of the Watts the civilization has access to. (Humanity is 7.2) * Negative log base 10 of the scale of things we can manufacture (computer chips are 8.5) in meters. * Log base 10 of the number of bits of information the civilization has access to. Humanity is currently about 15. ## How do use these numbers A human brain has $10^{11}$ neurons. If it takes 100 bits of data to describe its connections, that means a single human brain requires 1% of our current civilizations entire information storage to describe. This would imply that human-level AI is at the edge of what we can possibly do. An Apollo-moonshot level of effort. This seems plausible. If our civilization had $10^{20}$ bits, a human brain would be a trivial amount of information to process. You can do the same for fine control -- at 9.5, Tailored DNA is possible; the information required to know what it does may not be around, but you can specify with DNA something has. Being able to program DNA and make it do what you want is going to require 9.5 or better fine control, and enough information capacity to understand biology. There are a number of people who have worked out how much information there is to understand evolution; a single human has about 6 billion bits of information (9.5), not that high. But decoding what it DOES could be harder. The information required to understand the evolutionary history of humanity, at ~100 generations per 1000 years, $10^{8}$ or so times larger; closer to $10^{18}$ bits to fully model the evolutionary history of humanity back to single celled organisms. If that is what is required to create a custom species (make life do what you want without having to experiment), then a $10^{20}$ bit civilization would find custom-creating a lifeform to be an Apollo-scale task (requiring 1% of its entire civilizations information capabilities). We don't know how hard it is to decode how biology works, but it is probably in that range. ## Now, look at futurists. Information, small scale control and energy are known ways for futurists to think about what human future capabilities look like. So by using these 3 scales you can find futurists talking about this kind of thing and play around with what they can do. What more, by having one civilization have advantages in one area and not another, you can have interesting differences in development that aren't "well, those aliens never noticed fire could be useful". ## Growth Exponential growth is not atypical in our technological development. On a log scale, exponential growth is linear. So if we are at 14 on an exponential scale and get 3% better per year, $log\_{10}(10^{14} \* 1.03)$ is $14 + log\_{10}(1.03)$ which is $14 + 0.013$. 3% growth means about 80 years to move up 1 unit on a $log\_{10}$ scale. This applies to all of information, fine control and energy. [Answer] # [Their energy use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) Energy is the ultimate currency of the universe, so an obvious way to measure how advanced a civilization's tech is can be done by measuring their energy. Earth is currently at 0.72, using a small fraction of the sunlight hitting the planet. If the alien civilization has mastered fusion or mass solar power plants, or has the energy output of several worlds they are probably closer to 1, full mastery of a planet of sunlight. They probably have several orders of magnitude more power than Earth to throw at a problem. [Answer] Mostly this makes me think of space strategy games, like [Master of Orion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Orion). Not to say you should do it like video games do it, but it raises some things to consider, like how games like this create [tech trees](https://masteroforion.fandom.com/wiki/Technology_tree). The fundamental point is that technology advances are not necessarily linear or relatable and therefore they are not easily measured against each other. We humans have had great leaps and bounds in computer technology and electronics miniaturization. I think it can be said that this is due to our lack of any major discoveries in other areas, namely power generation and storage. Our current power schemes are very primitive and have improved only slightly in the last 100 years. Our computer advancements have been a necessity -- get more work out of less energy, because we suck at generating and storing energy. Of course, you could take the view that these sorts of things are universal. Maybe there is no fundamental understanding we could have stumbled upon that would allow for batteries with 1000x the energy density of lithium ion. But for a sci-fi story, it's easy to imagine some other race did exactly that, and their advancements in other areas might have gone very differently because of this. Maybe they ended up never developing advanced computers, or any form of AI. They still aim all their guns by sight. But their tanks are powered by a [Mr. Fusion](https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Fusion) reactor. How would they compare to us in terms of technology? So I see two possibilities: 1. There is no "technology level". Each race must be individually defined and can have radically different levels of advancement in different areas. 2. The, er, Galactic Science Council has actually seen the same problem you do and has defined a comprehensive system of tech classification, based on an average of many different factors: maximum ship speed, maximum energy production from a single reactor, maximum energy storage, total civilization energy production, total manufacturing capability, etc, etc, all are given "points" and this creates sort of a rough estimate of where a civilization currently is overall but doesn't necessarily tell you if it's a good idea to go fight them. (The Cowpeople of Sirius III have a high score but it's actually all agriculture. SUPER advanced agriculture. Can grow a plant in 3 seconds with a single grain of sand. Something about "dimensional transitions" but no one else understands their science. For weapons, however, they have bronze spears.) [Answer] Like others have said, a lot of games like GURPS and Stellaris have already answered this question. When it comes to space empires, they are often ranked by how much territory they control. Empires can rank from interplanetary to interstellar to intergalactic to even multiversal. Generally speaking, an empire that is intergalactic has to be much more advanced than an empire that is merely interplanetary in order to build and maintain the empire in the first place. There can also be sub-ranks like a small interstellar empire and a large intergalactic empire. For planet-bound civilizations, time periods and prehistory eras on Earth are often used. That would be from stone age to bronze age to iron age to antiquity to medieval era to Renaissance era to Enlightenment Era to Industrial Era to Diesel Era to Atomic Era to Information Era (which is modern times) and beyond to more futuristic eras. [Answer] Pre-space cultures would be labelled by comparison to Earthly history; named for their kings or discovers, describers, inventors or technologies. That would give Elizabethan/Tudor, Culumbian, Dickensian, Einsteinian, Victorian or Steam Age. Beyond that, how could it be other than up to you? ]
[Question] [ Blue is a rare color in nature. If you think of one random organism, there's a high chance that the organism won't be blue. That's why some filmmakers use "blue-screens." But what if there exists a world where all creatures are blue--where the flowers, trees, and birds are all shades of blue? --- So, is it possible that all creatures (limited only to animals and plants) are blue? If so, how? Details 1. All-blue, as in only all plants and animals are shades of blue. The environment (like the ground) doesn't have to be blue. There could be some gray here and there, but mostly shades of blue. 2. No colorblindness solutions. This is because red-green colorblind vision would mostly see in black and white with occasional blue. 3. I would prefer a scientific solution. So a world where all animals are blue or evolved to be blue because of a certain environmental factor (what is that environmental factor?). 4. By world, I'm just meaning one life-sustainable planet. 5. I'm asking if this is realistic, so no fantasy or magic. 6. The world doesn't have to have Earth-like conditions. There could be different types of organisms than Earth and different environmental factors. There doesn't have to be intelligent species like humans. 7. On Earth, basically everywhere you go, you see creatures (insects, plants, humans). The blue world should also be densely populated with creatures (it doesn't have to be as much as Earth, though). 8. Biodiversity. There are an estimated 8.7 million species on Earth, and this blue world also should have a similar level of biodiversity. 9. If blue isn't possible, another color would be okay. 10. If blue plants aren't possible, only blue animals would be okay. [![image from Google](https://i.stack.imgur.com/edyX3.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/edyX3.png) Basically, a world filled with only these types of creatures [Answer] I think you are starting from a false premise > > Blue is a rare color in nature. > > > It would be more correct to say that our eyes are made in such a way that we don't see that much blue around, because they are not so sensitive in the UV part of the solar spectrum. Just give a look at [how different birds](https://www.demilked.com/bird-vs-human-vision/) see the world around us (of course the rendition of the bird vision is done in human terms, so it's not "true"). [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3VyVX.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3VyVX.jpg) Simply said, what we call color is just a sensation created by our brain when processing the signals coming from our eyes. We cannot even be sure that what we call "red" is the same for everybody (and many languages do not agree on the colors, either). Anyway, if you want to have a blue shaded world, just shift the star emission more toward the blue side of the spectrum, this will steer the evolution of sight to be blue centered instead of yellow centered like with our Sun. [Answer] From my small knowledge of biology, animal colour is either to hide the creature or to highlight it. So if there is a significant variety of predators then almost everything would want to camouflage, prey to stay hidden, predators to sneak up on the prey. so if on you planet, instead of the browns of bark and the greens of leaves, you have instead both the bark and leaves to be blue. Then the best colour for camouflage would be blue. Plants on earth mainly use 2 chemicals to adsorb light to "eat", [Chlorophyll A & B](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophyll), they mostly adsorb light in the red and blue sections of light, leaving green, so when light hits the leaves the plant adsorbs the red and blue light and the green light isn't adsorbed. That is why leaves are green. So if your planet's plants use a different chemicals that adsorb the green and red light then they would have blue leaves. As to why the plants would use the green and red light, if the star that your planet is orbiting is slightly colder (about 1000°C colder than the sun) then the peak in the intensity verse colour, will be on the green yellow boundary. Compared to our sun where it is on the blue-green boundary. Bark gets its colour from a collection of chemicals called [Tannins](https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/what-is-tree-bark), where they are used to discourage things eating the plant, again if the plants on the planet have compounds the do the same job but are blue then you would have blue bark. A point to mention is that most blue animals get their colour from [structural colouration](https://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/animals-blue), where the colour comes from microscale structures causing, compared to having a pigment. hopefully that helps [Answer] # Copper Sulfate Your planet's creatures need lot's of copper(II) sulfate as an essential nutrient for some metabolic process. Copper(II) sulfate has a bright blue color when dissolved in water, so as long as your planet has a lot of it as life evolves, it may be incorporated into some metabolic process. Admittedly this is unlikely, due to copper's density and rarity, but if for some reason your planet's crust has lots of copper, acid rain containing sulfuric acid, and not much water, it may appear in significant concentrations in the water. If this is the case, all cells may have large amounts of Copper(II) sulfate within the cytoplasm, giving all the cells a blue color. If this evolves early enough in the history of life on your planet, it may become integral to a number of processes. This means that if there was an evolutionary pressure to be a color other than blue (which there will be), Copper sulfate would be too important to get rid of. Note that copper sulfate is toxic to much of earthen life when ingested, and is in fact regularly used as an herbicide. Humans probably won't die from just standing on the planet, but I would advise against drinking any of the water there, or eating any animals native to there, or swimming in the water on this planet. [Answer] ## Their genetic material is a dye in visible wavelengths of light Our DNA is actually a very good dye - we just don't see the ultraviolet frequencies it absorbs in. If you look at [a table like this one](https://www.promega.com/-/media/files/products-and-services/instruments/detection/tbs-technical-support-docs/dna-rna-080409.pdf?la=en), plain DNA absorbs UV light about as well as protein that has been dyed by various procedures (Lowry and so on) absorbs visible light. Your planet's lifeforms have a genetic material that absorbs a broad range of reddish frequencies. While anyone with a sunburn (or a melanoma) can tell you that having genetic material absorb light is a BAD idea, it has been known to happen. At least red light has less energy per photon and is less likely to catalyze an unwanted chemical reaction. Additionally, it is more plentiful, a source of photosynthetic energy for plants. Perhaps life originated on your planet that was capable of photosynthesis from the very first molecule. [Answer] One thing to also remember about the "Blue is a rare color in nature" is that well, you're discounting a huge chunk of life that lives "Under the Sea". Do to the properties of water, red is not visible underwater from a shallow depth of 20 feet and as the depth increases, the higher end of the color spectrum starts to fade. By 60 feet, most things look Blue or Green because that's all that can be seen. There are a number of blue marine life, but there are also several land animals that are blue. Among marine life, we have the Leatherback Turtle, which is a grey-ish blue color, the Blue Whale (largest animal ever known), the Beta Fish or Siamese Fighter (though the blue coloration is caused by selective breeding by humans and more prominant in males as males are more desirable for sale), some species of parrot fish, Angelfish (including the blue and yellow striped Emperor Angel Fish), sharks (including the Blue Shark, and muted blue whale shark), the Blue Crab (as a Marylander, I see these things live in the store and it's a very bright blue) and quite famously among Pixar fans, the Blue Tang (aka Dory from Finding Nemo, who is, as she claims, a natural blue). Terrestrial Blue Animals include Blue Macaws, several species of lizard (including many with blue tongues) the Blue Poison Dart Frog, Tree Frogs, Blue Penguins, Casowarys (nasty birds), Blue Jays, Humans (blue eyes seem to be recessive, though many adults with eyes of different colors had blue eyes as babies), Grand Cayman Iguanas, as well as the ever famously named Blue Footed Boobies. As for the use of Blue Screens for special effects (AKA Chroma Key Compositing), you forget that it's way more common in the industry to use Green Screens rather than Blue (Green being the most common color in nature, thank you all the world's plants ever). The reason blue is used has nothing to do with natural colors. Chroma Keying was developed in the 1930s and blue screens were used prior to CGI because the film could be chemically treated to turn the blue back drop clear on the film, and then over lay the remaining images onto the backdrop that will be used in the final product. Green Screens were much more favored in television production because local news used Chroma Keying for weather reports and meteorologists tended to wear navy blue suits on TV. Green Screens were also used in films where characters were expected to wear blue colors (Superman was green screen because he wears alot of blue.). With the advent of computers and CGI, the background color for Chroma Keying can be any color you want it to be. I've done photo shops using a white backdrop because it was all I had on my budget. Blue and Green are just common because it's what everyone in the industry always used and it ain't broke. [Answer] ## Solar Output + Evolution Looking at the way life on our own planet has evolved can give some possible clues as to how another planet might see life adapt under similar, but not identical, circumstances. The spectra of our star, Sol, peaks right around the 500nm wavelengths that correspond to green light (as we'd expect for a [blackbody radiation source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body) with temperature ~5800K). As such, when organisms started evolving chlorophyll and similar compounds to take advantage of solar radiation as an energy source they evolved compounds that could efficiently absorb light in those most abundant visible wavelengths. Presumably, if that were the whole story, then chlorophyll wouldn't be green because it'd be too efficiently absorbing green to reflect any back to our eyes... but if [these models](https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduce-the-noise-in-photosynthesis-20200730/) are correct then sacrificing some peak-power efficiency for smoother steady-state operation can actually be a net-benefit trade-off that favors absorption at wavelengths to either side\* of the peak output rather than dead-centered on the peak. (\* The wavelengths are on the "shoulders" of the peak where solar output is still high, though.) Then, since chlorophyll evolved to be green, plants evolved to be green, and lots of animals evolved to camouflage themselves against a background of green plants. So, based on that line of cause-and-effect, to get blue animals we'd need: a background of blue plants, which would require "blue chlorophyll" centered around something like a 450nm wavelength, which would require a solar output corresponding to a blackbody temperature in the ~6500K ballpark. Basically, your world just needs a 12% hotter sun. --- Do note that this line of reasoning doesn't really say anything about the browns and blacks that are so ubiquitous in our world. Presumably, being a jet-black night predator is just as important there as it is here, and evolving broad-spectrum absorptive pigments as "sunscreen" to protect from solar radiation is just as important (if not more-so due to higher UV levels); so, you're still likely to see plenty of browns and blacks over there. [Answer] To me the question is more along the lines of 'Is it possible to have every exterior part of every single living thing of 3b+ species on a planet' not reflect more of any color than x' (x because you said blue was just your first choice) And to this, the answer is 'no, mostly'. Radiation is one of the few energy gradients steep enough for life to latch on to - and if it is bright and hot enough to see by (which your question implies; 'blue' does not track for a world bathed solely in NIR, with beings only vision being in NIR, for instance), it would also be a viable source of energy, which would be used, because evolution (even if other energy gradients, like chemical gradients were the dominant source). - If visible radiation is present, there is no evolutionary pressure to restrict the reflectivity to specific spectra - blue pigments might have some chemical drawback that makes them too cumbersome to have, but as the reflective spectrum can also be shaped by physical properties (e.g. gratings), and vision would be a form of communication, there is simply nothing that would preclude some creature from being not-x-colored, for at least part of its lifecyle. If everything is non-x-colored, being x-colored will be so incredibly visible, it would be irresistible to occupy that ecological niche for reproduction, dazzling, anything. Unless there is evolutionary pressure to do that. Have botswarms circle the planet wiping out everything non-x-colored? Presto: nothing x-colored evolves. (This might only work for bot-visible parts - if some creature has non-x-ish innards, that are not visible unless the creature gets gutted, that might be a blotch of color the bots do not get to before it is too late (shooting a corpse will not affect its viability...)) If the planet has no natural light source, and everything evolves in darkness, again, there is no evolutionary pressure against non-x-colors. Because how could there be? There might be pressure towards specific colors (incidentally, as a byproduct of some chemical reason), but that does not preclude some outlier from using some chemical or physical facility that, besides the main evolutionary attractiveness, also reflects light in a way to seem blue. (Light from the torches of explorers, that is) So 99% x-colored ? Sure. 100% ? Nah. Unless color-seeing killbots are in the picture. [Answer] Worldbuilding isn't reality… that's the point of world building. In reality, the all-blue world won't work. In worldbuilding everything including all creatures - and plants, and minerals - being blue depends solely on the builder's abilities. [Answer] ## Sure, through natural selection. Essentially, imagine your world fits the following criteria: 1. The flora - the grass, the trees, the leaves, the plants, or whatever your planet's equivalents are - are for the most part, blue. You can justify this with another answer's reasoning. 2. There is at least one superpredator species. Its intelligence and ferocity is so incredibly intense that species which fail to camouflage themselves within their natural surroundings are rapidly removed from the gene pool. 3. Thus, the species that survive natural selection are almost always some shade of blue in order to disguise themselves in their surroundings. As a result, they can easily hide themselves from the predator species and thus not go extinct. [Answer] As I understand the question, it's asking if there's a plausible scientific reason that life on a planet might by (mostly) blue to the human eye. If all light reaching the planet is blue, then this becomes an obvious "yes", and makes the creation of blue-only images easy :) As @hszmv mentioned, one way (and arguably the easiest) to do this is to place the planet surface underwater. Another might be to place it under ice: massive ice caverns. People typically wear red to be visible when exploring such caves, but if you google image search "Glacier cave", you will see that the people within them mostly look like they are wearing black/white/blue unless they use artificial lighting or stand near an entrance where the light is unfiltered. And the overwhelming color of that image search page is blue. Deep cloud cover could also do this, perhaps, but it would probably need to be very deep. Finally, something else in the atmosphere and/or in the star itself could be blocking sunlight so that only a narrow band of wavelengths of visible light reach the surface: 450–495 nm. This is a definitional issue. Arguably, none of this means that the creatures and plants there are blue, if exposed to white light: just that, in their natural environment, which is what I assume you'd be drawing, they would look blue to a human eye. A photograph of them using an Earth camera without a flash would show them as blue; with a flash (so, adding artificial white light) they might be a rainbow of colors, unseen to themselves, or visible only when near bioluminescent animals. I'd expect that most bioluminescent animals would also tend to be blue-glowing, though, since 1) if the filtering is atmospheric, it's the light that travels farthest, and 2) either way, it's the light that eyes are most sensitive to. There might be a significant benefit to bioluminescence that's far outside the blue range, though, if it means the glow would be visible only to creatures adapted to see that color. This could allow artistic use of small points of contrasting color. ]
[Question] [ I am currently reading the Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein, and the second book introduces us to a unique weapon used by Outskirter tribes who have very little access to metal. Rather than forging swords entirely out of steel, they carve a wooden core with a horn grip and then press-fit a sharpened band of steel around the edge. This is sort of the same idea as an Aztec macahuitl, but more sword-like and less club-like, and replacing the obsidian with steel. But while a macahuitl is an obvious synergy, improving a club with sharp bits and improving a small obsidian blade with reach, it is less obvious that this is a good idea for a thing to do with limited supplies of steel. So, is this actually a viable idea? [Answer] > > improving a club with sharp bits > > > The classic solution to having access to a stick and a small amount of sharp stuff was to make a spear out of it. The pattern has been repeated across many civilizations using many different materials across a very wide span of time (from about a quarter of a million years ago, to Napoleonic lancers, for example). It works well with a wide range of skills and military tactics. Producing and maintaining a spearhead is a relatively straightfoward task compared to a sword blade, and the old pointed-stick design can be extended to things that get thrown (probably in an emergency, given the value of the material in your case) or things that can be used effectively from horseback in the form of a lance. Other than spears we have axes and picks which are perhaps a little closer to the "sharp club" idea you're looking at. Both easier to make, easier to repair and maintain that the steel-edged wooden sword idea, both tested on the battlefield. > > Outskirter tribes who have very little access to metal > > > How do they make the steel edge? Creating and working steel is a relatively complex technical task, and it seems mildly surprising that they'd have almost no metal but a comparatively advanced skill with the forge. I'd have thought they'd be much more likely to use stolen or traded steel weapons, or work with more forgiving materials like bronze. [Answer] No, it won't work. Wood moves with the moisture; first rain and the wood will swell, 2-3 days after with a nice weather and the pressed strip of metal falls off. BTW, wood swell/shrink mostly on the [radial and tangential direction](https://www.swedishwood.com/wood-facts/about-wood/wood-and-moisture/moisture-related-wood-movement/). Better (or worse) yet, the wood is stronger along the fiber, so you will press your strip on a tangential direction - the direction most affected by the movement with the moisture > > For practical calculations, 7% can be used as the average figure for movement in sawn pine and spruce timber, which corresponds to 0.24% per 1 percentage point change in the moisture content. > > > > > Example: A 145 mm wide floorboard with a moisture content of 17% is laid in a room with a climate equating to the wood’s equilibrium moisture content of 10%. The change in moisture content is 17−10 = 7 percentage points. The board shrinks 7 x 0.0026 x 145 mm = approx. 2.6 mm in width. > > > --- While not as durable as a metal sword, wooden swords as weapons [aren't a thing to be laughed out of the door](https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a25329/wooden-sword-joerg-sprave/) > > To explore the actual damage-dealing potential of a wooden sword, slingshot master and unorthodox weapon engineer Joerg Sprave whipped one up from a log and began putting it through its paces. The results are pretty impressive. Wood can do some real damage against cardboard, cloth, and ballistics gel, even though it can't be sharpened to a hair-splitting edge and loses whatever edge it does have very, very quickly. > > > [Answer] Wood and metal are not very good mechanical friends, except for putting a round bit of wood in a round hole in the metal, or vice versa. Handles or shafts, basically. That is not what we need here though. The thermal expansion ratios differ too much, the response to water differs enormously. Wood loves to absorb water and expand! However, not all is lost! If you only want a nice cutting edge, and rely purely on the wood to provide the structural body, then you can use something like this: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ma59u.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ma59u.png) We are all familiar with this simple technique to put a really sharp cutting edge onto a very much non-cutting structure. I've managed to cut my thumb to the bone on a simple aluminium foil dispenser, imagine what you could manage of you put a strip of this along the edge of a nice Bokken. Your metals strip will need to be demountable, replaceable and reforgeable, because with its extreme thinness it will take damage in any fight. Consider the extreme example of this technique: a safety razor. That is a lot of sharp edge, using very little metal indeed. Now just juggle the layout a bit to remove the "safety" aspect. [Answer] One quick but critical point before getting into the details. Metal blades tend to be really thin, often as much as structurally possible, so this question really boils down to: can wood actually help you make an effective blade with even less metal? --- I think the biggest issue is the use of a wooden core. Combining wood and metal is certainly nothing new (there are plenty of historical weapons that use metal sparingly) but this approach would undermine the advantages of both materials. We can look at the fascinating (and very effective) wooden weapons developed by Maori communities before they had access to metal. Even thin wood weapons like the wahaika below that provide highly concentrated impact (seriously, these really hurt and can definitely be lethal) are still much thicker than sword blades. [![The edge of a Maori wahaika](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZAyW5.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZAyW5.jpg) ([image source](https://www.arthurbeaupalmer.com/cms/gallery/maori/13-consultant-investment-fine-and-tribal-art/maori/111-maori-wahaika-tiki-war-club)) A wooden core would probably have to be quite thick to sufficiently handle weapon impact. A thin wooden core, or even just a thin wooden edge on a thicker wooden core, would raise a lot of durability issues when creating a sword-like weapon. Imagine applying metal film on thin wooden chips - I can't think of a way to make that simultaneously sharp and strong. You need to make it relatively thick. What makes a good sword blade? The complete opposite. To cut effectively, you want very thin, flat blades (not a thick wedge). You would lose a lot of cutting capacity by making it thicker - consider wood axes, which are great at splitting wood but terrible at cutting. A combat axe will feature a much thinner flat blade like the Dane axe (11th century replica) below. [![A modern replica of an 11th century Dane axe](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RMgJx.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RMgJx.jpg) ([image source](https://www.arms-n-armor.com/collections/axes/products/danish-axe)) In short: I can't imagine how this kind of design could be thin enough to cut effectively and while still being durable enough to be practical. You are much better off with a proper metal blade - even a small, thin one - mounted on a wooden body. --- So, what do you do when you make an effective weapon with only a bit of metal? Throughout history and across the world, this is where pole arms really shine! As several others mentioned, the spear family is probably the thriftiest way to combine a bit of metal with a wooden body. There's a reason they remained the most common infantry weapon for millennia (vastly underrepresented in modern media, but don't let that fool you). [![Some examples of various pole arms, featuring different advantages and manufacturing requirements](https://i.stack.imgur.com/StECW.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/StECW.jpg) However, since they are perhaps the least sword-like pole arm, I wanted to add that you can reclaim some cutting capacity with larger (but still relatively small) metal blades. The glaive family is essentially various knives mounted on wooden poles - a good way to get something closer to a sword without much metal (and an opportunity to really optimize, if you need to). [![A few different glaive designs, demonstrating a pretty variable use of metal](https://i.stack.imgur.com/r76p6.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/r76p6.jpg) ([image source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glaives_by_Wendelin_Boeheim.jpg)) It's hard to pick a single best design without a full understanding of the context, since that will determine the right tradeoff between cutting capacity vs metal quantity, but something on the broad spectrum of pole arms would be a much more effective way to combine a bit of metal with wood to create a practical (and sometimes vaguely sword-like) weapon. [Answer] Perhaps instead of some sharp bits stuck onto the wooden sword, it could be more of a steel-clad sword with a wooden core, hilt, and handle. Something where to the casual observer it would still appear to be an almost entirely metal sword. I think a very dense hardwood like Leadwood, quebracho, or camelthorn would make for an excellent core. Hardwoods like these also tend to suffer less from shrinkage and expansion caused by changes in humidity. As far as the edge goes, the outside of the sword would still be all metal so could be made to take as fine an edge as a standard metal sword. Fastening could be done both mechanically using internal burs in the metal or with small screws and also with glues such as tar, sap or pitch. Yes, it would still use more metal than just a strip stuck in a piece of wood, but it would save metal compared to a standard sword. Probably enough to make two swords out of one. I could see this being more of a status symbol, (knock-off sword if you will) rather than a weapon intended for actual combat. Although with the right construction it would still be effective as a weapon. [Answer] No. It doesn't make much sense. Sword is a sword because of its combined qualities. It's a piece of balanced metal giving you ability to cut, stab, block and has a certain fairly fixed ratio of durability to mass. It's also expensive, requires training and has limited range. Spear is simple, cheap, can be made with almost no metal and you can often kill someone with a sword before he can cut you. It's also damn hard to fight a spearman. Sword becomes a deadly weapon in hands of someone in an armour, preferably on a horse. Other than that - spear. [Answer] ## Who needs METAL? Just make a wooden sword. :) [It's like a wooden steak knife](https://phys.org/news/2021-10-hardened-wooden-knives-slice-steak.html), only bigger. Digest out the lignite, press down until it's 23 times harder than wood and 3 times sharper than a metal knife, coat in mineral oil. I'll admit though, while it's impressive to drive wooden nail it is rather sad to watch how slow it is. Miracles should be snappier. I'm not sure how well the sword will really do - but at least you can make more! [Answer] Take a good look at the Aztec weapon called maquahuitl which was wood with a bunch of obsidian glued in. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ceremonial_Macuahuitl.jpg> ]
[Question] [ In my fictional nation, the government has figured out how to provide sufficient nutrition to the entire population indiscriminately. This leaves most citizens time to explore and develop technologies and artisanal crafts. This is similar to what has happened in real life. However, due to the increased life expectancy, there has been an enormous jump in human populations. This image uses data from the UN Population Division:[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YTXcv.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YTXcv.png) If I am looking to avoid this scenario, how can I achieve this using hard science? Background: My fictional nation lives in a mixed temperate grasslands and forests biome on a planet with average wind speeds of 20 mph where they live. Basic food and water are provided for every citizen, but harder-working citizens earn better supplies. Disease is unfeasible since these humans have an immune system similar to bats. I want to create a civilization that has a limited population at all times. This can be in the form of long-living humans or a high death rate. Systemic purging and relocation are not feasible options. I'm looking for biological changes, like something about fertility or decreasing life expectancy. This is not a governmental issue, I purely want to prevent ecological and societal damage from humans over the years on this planet. A stable population is preferable, just at low numbers. Question: So, what can be done to avoid a growing population in this fictional utopia? I am completely new to Stack Exchange, so please let me know what I can improve [Answer] ## It will happen automatically, in fact it has already happened in your society. You are worried about nothing. If you have a civilization with the following features: low mortality, high standard of living, abundant resources, the population stops growing. Evolution actually favors K strategy in these situations, that having few offspring but investing a lot of resources in to them. This is why the populations of most first world countries are stable once you account for immigration. K strategy is having few children and investing a lot of time and effort in those children. r strategy is having many offspring but having to devote less time and energy to each becasue you divide it among a larger number. r strategy works best if child mortality is high, K strategy is much more successful if child mortality is low because the children of K strategist are on average much more desirable mates. Populations grow primarily during the transition from high mortality to low mortality, which is happening and has happened all over the earth right now. Many countries are transitioning to high standards of living ([Here is a great talk about this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usdJgEwMinM)). the population grows when people are still having children as if most of them will die when most will survive. If your civilization actually has the features you describe its population will be already be stable, just like in real world countries it happened within the first generation or two of mortality reaching the point described. [Answer] > > provide sufficient nutrition > > > But not sufficient space. You've solved the famine issue - great. Now you've got to solve access to health-care, access to living space, and every other problem we struggle with besides getting 3 meals a day. Japan already don't have enough new births to sustain their population. Competition for jobs is usually blamed. Japan already has one of the highest life expectancies in the world and nationalized health-care. It's an island so space is also at a premium. People just don't want to start a family. [Answer] Technological solutions (assuming unlimited advanced tech): # Merging persons Create a technology that smoothly merges multiple persons into one. At first compatible (i.e. similarly minded and bodied) people are selected. The more population number is, the more chances that some persons would be almost identical. The super-technology then connects their minds together: initially they are just subtly starting being alike of each other, then start sharing thoughts, ultimately becoming one hive mind. After that it wouldn't be much of a problem to merge bodies as well to one big. That big body can than be shrunk, selecting better cells and discarding poorer ones. Just trade 10 aging and sick bodies to 3 healthy and rejuvenated ones. This may solve most of ethical problems by advanced enough tech - population number is going down, yet nobody gets killed and can procreate as much as wants. [Answer] Make it so that people can't get / don't want children. I'm assuming that your society has a fairly high tech level, at least one close to the late 20th century. The more advanced your civilisation, the easier my suggestions become to implement. The things I'm about to suggest go against what we would concider foundational values of our current day culture(s), so one might question if such a society could be seen as utopian. But utopia is a state relative to your values. A right wingers utopia would look far different from a progressives, and both would seem dystopian to the other. With that out of the way, let's go. As I said, if people don't want children and can't have them, you avoid overpopulation. The first and most important thing is that your civilisation fundamentally believes that normal people having children is an inherently immoral, even evil thing. There are many legitimate reasons for such a belief. Maybe they consider the conservation of nature to be a fundamental duty of their species, and thus controlling their own population is considered to be the right thing. Think "you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not spread uncontrolled". Another option would be that they believe that parents bringing up children is child abuse. After all, in what way is a mother qualified to care for her child? True, nature gave it to her, but nature also gave her arms and legs and when they are broken, she doesn't "know best herself". No, she goes to see a medical professional. Thus, bringing up children is also the job of professionals. After we took a look at the cultural requirements, its time to consider the biological ones. I don't see any of the beliefs above developing or remaining in place unless people can't have children for biological reasons. The biological software that evolved to make parents care about, "love", their kids is strong and probably hard to remove. Thus, either everyone is just borne sterile, because the species has been genetically modefied or its members are sterilised after birth. So how do they actually keep their numbers up? There are many options. One might employ artificial womb technology or use sutabile women as wombs. The children are then put in the kind of environment this society considers optimal to bring up children. Maybe there is rigorous testing for suitable couples or groups bring up children in professional patchwork "families" or the children are brought up by some kind of institution. The point of it all is that these constraints allow them or even force them to make very conscious choices about their population growth. They can plan ahead, project population requirements for their goals, adjust for the losses along the way and get exactly what they want. [Answer] You could have a stable society where, say, 90% of the population is retired from work. That's only a problem if your economy depends on most people having jobs. But if the proportion of elderly people had been the same for centuries, then of course you wouldn't run your economy that way. Consider that, medically speaking, there is nothing to stop modern humans having five surviving children per adult, which would lead to catastrophic overpopulation within decades. But we don't need artificial limits or catastrophes to prevent that; if anything, societies with low infant mortality tend to have the opposite problem. Humans can reason about the future, and humans in industrialised countries can see that having lots of children restricts your (and therefore also your children's) economic and social prospects. This is reinforced by social changes that accompanied falling child mortality. Industrial societies banned child labor, made school compulsory, and did other things to ensure that the burden of each new life falls on the individual parents at least as much as on society as a whole. In fact, by the time women gained more equal rights, it turned out industrial economies had disincentivized having children slightly too much (and continue to do so). So, if you had a really prosperous socialist society where everyone lived to 300, then you might want to mandate that all children be supported in full-time education until age 30. And a lot more jobs would involve elder care. But as long as it happened gradually enough, there's no obvious reason such a society couldn't be sustainable. [Answer] # Enforced birth control: (by government OR by nature) The answer is right there in your question statement: > > provide sufficient nutrition to the entire population indiscriminately. > > > and > > but harder-working citizens earn better supplies > > > Just put contraceptives in the basic food ration, and for those that qualify include either drug-free food or a counteragent for the drugs. This is easily done via some form of government control. But as the OP has expressed a desire against this approach, it is still a viable pathway. The "free basic food ration" is an easily-grown crop that is available for everyone. However, this plant has a natural defense against over-grazing. It does NOT become poisonous exactly, but the more it is stressed (by over grazing/harvesting) the more it excretes a hormone that reduces the fertility of the eaters. As long as the general population is dependent upon this one specific plant for food, their population density in a given region will adjust to fit the ability of the plant to feed them. Too few, and they are fully fertile and population grows. Too many, and fertility drop, reducing birthrate to below natural death rate thus reducing population. [Answer] Cash bonuses for sterilization: As a philanthropist, monarch, or governmental agency offer a cash bonus to anyone willing to be sterilized. This has two major advantages over forceful kinds of eugenic acts suggested in other answers: 1. People are doing this voluntarily so nobody can complain about fairness. 2. The people who are doing this are reversing the dysgenic trend portrayed in Idiocracy. So instead of smart healthy people waiting for the “right time” to have a single kid while the rest of the world breeds uncontrollably, those who cannot afford to take care of a child (they need the money) are permanently prevented from doing so. [Answer] ## Scythes. Essentially, have a government agency ([or all-powerful NGO](https://www.goodreads.com/series/188984-arc-of-a-scythe)) whose sole job is to kill a certain number of people every year. [Answer] Fecundity inhibitors One way to do it biologically would be to make it so that some humans emit a hormone that acts as a fecundity inhibitors when in presence of a lot of other humans. This ability could have emerged with a darwinian process on subsets of the whole human population. People in a certain continent had an overpopulation which caused famine and lack of resources while others developped more slowly because of this ability. This slow evolution allowed for a more efficient use of resources. If it doesn't come from a hormone they produced, it could come from some lifestyle habits that reduce fertility like eating a plant which reduces libido or having asocial behaviors in highly crowded places. [Answer] Free Market Economics. As presented in Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. Ration that amount of children the population as a whole can have without explicitly enforcing limits on any individual. > > Because you get good narratives, right off the bat. I mean, if the governments of the world would say, "OK, everybody has the legal right to three-quarters of a child, and so you and your partner have the right to a child and a half when you add them up, and so after you’ve had one child you’ve got a half-credit left, and then you either have to buy another half, or you can sell your half," the soap operas that result from this scenario are fantastic! > > > ]
[Question] [ I am interested in the idea of a moon orbiting only the southern pole of a planet. Could it theoretically be possible (though unlikely) that a moon would, for instance, orbit a planet parallel to the equator, but at a latitude halfway or closer to the southern pole? [Answer] Not quite. Orbits are constrained to have a focus in the system's barycenter, so you cannot have the satellite orbit a planet favoring one hemisphere only. What you can do is alter the orbit so that the dwell time favors one hemisphere - you can have the moon stay 80% of the time over the Southern hemisphere and 20% of the time north of the Equator. It is called a [molniya orbit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molniya_orbit). Needless to say, it requires a very small moon, and the orbit is not stable for geologically significant periods. Your moonlet would have to be a captured asteroid of some kind. [Answer] No. A moon has to orbit the center of mass, and it has nothing to do with planet's axle of rotation. The Moon, for example, does not orbit around Earth's equator, but rather around Earth-Moon [barycenter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter). [Answer] Yes. The other answers are correct about barycenter orbits, but we can adjust that with density. The average density of Earth’s crust is 2.83 g/cm3. The element osmium is the densest material known that can exist under merely planetary gravity. That metal has a density of 22.61 g/cm3. It’s neighboring elements of iridium and platinum are similarly dense. That 10x difference can be used to create a planet where one end is much more dense than the other. What you need is a lopsided planet, where a very large ball of these dense metals rests at the South Pole. That moves the center of mass of the planet away from its core. Creating such a planet is not trivial. What we know about planetary formation says that the heavy mass will sink toward the core. Here we get out of my comfort zone... others may have a better way to create this planet. But based on other posts I’ve read on this site and their sources: you could have a planet where a metallic comet hit an existing planet, and knocked a big chunk off the side. The asteroid now sticks off one edge. This planet is probably tectonically unstable (because that osmium mass is always trying to work it’s way to the center), has a large asteroid belt (from the debris). The moon in question may be detritus from the impact. [Answer] No. There are different shapes of orbit, but they all go all the way around the planet. You could have a low orbit over the equator which cannot be seen from the pole, but not the other way around. [Answer] The moon could be in an orbit with a period of exactly one day, so it is never seen from the other side of the planet. Then, something could happen, e.g. In the way the moon casts its shadow, that causes an equatorial point to be the coldest zone on the planet, much like conventional poles here. Note that the orbit doesn't need to be around the equator; it might stay over one hemisphere but wobble up and down. This wobbling might coincide with when that polar=icy" area is facing the sun, causing the cold zone. If the rotational axis was quite oblique from its orbital plane, it would mean the rotational poles would have seasons, but like I say, this one zone is the coldest since it's usually either in winter or in eclipse. [Answer] This may not be the answer you wanted, but this might give you an idea. Suppose the Moon is in a polar orbit. Suppose it is also extremely eccentric, with a periapsis of, say, 100,000 km and an apoapsis of 1,000,000 km. It will appear very close from the south pole at its closest approach, and very small everywhere else. If it has the same size as our Moon, from the South pole it will appear to be 16x larger. When it is over the north pole, it will appear less than a quarter the size of our moon. [Answer] A moon that orbits at the L1 Lagrange point of a tidally locked planet, in theory, could do the trick. the planet is tidally locked-- which means that there is now a distinct gradient of hot and cold that may create "poles" for the inhabitants. For civilizations that lives in the twilight zone, the night side would function as the "north" as it gets colder as you move up the night side; whilst the day side would function as the "south" as it gets hotter the further you move down the day side. The North pole would simply be the point that is directly opposite to the star, and the south pole would be the point that is directly facing the star. Lagrange points are not truely stable-- a moon that orbits there is instead put into a Halo orbit, which fits the "orbiting around a pole" argument. A large moon will cast shadow onto the planetary body it was orbiting-- for the Earth, it happen rarely as solar eclipses, but for a planet that have a L1 moon, it would be permanent-- directly above the "south" (star-facing) pole of the planet. Due to the sun being obscured by the L1 moon directly above the "south pole", the temperature at the pole will be very cold from the lack of starlight-- just like the real south pole of the Earth! [![A map of the hypothetical world](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hp3Nq.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hp3Nq.png) [Answer] Not in the way you are thinking for the reasons given. However, don't give up hope just yet. Apart from geosynchronous orbit above a fixed point on the equator, you could have is something at or orbiting a Lagrange point (L1 or L2). This wouldn't be over the South Pole as such (unless the axis of rotation points at or near the sun making the planet nearly uninhabitable) but it might give you what you need. [Answer] This is possible if we use another planet, not a moon. (this could be the size of the moon, or appear to be a moon at a distance, but have the gravitational effects of a planet) Step one, take two planets and put them in a binary orbit. Step two, make the planets rotate at their angular velocity, so the inhabited planet is tidally locked to be in the same orientation at all times with the other planet. Step three, orbit that system around a sun. Step four, have the axis of rotation on the inhabited planet be out of line with the line between the two planets, adding a new rotation component. Step five place the south end of the planet pointing to the other planet. Results Now, day and night are caused by the orbit of the planets. The orbit of the moon is caused by the rotation of the inhabited planet. The tilted planet still results in seasons. [Answer] A lot of answers here effectively state "no, but ..." and what I read was correct. I'll give you another "no, but ..." solution: You can adapt various other parameters to make it appear as if a moon was only orbiting in the southern area. * Give the plant an axial tilt of about 90°. This exists in the Solar System, specifically Uranus. * Have the "moon" orbit the L4 or L5 point, depending on what you consider the south pole. The L4/L5 points are Lagrange points staying in the same relative position to the planet This way, you'd have a moon in a stable orbit, almost only visible from the southern hemisphere. However, it would not exactly be a moon as it wouldn't orbit the planet. Instead, it would be considered an asteroid or dwarf planet sharing your planet's orbit, similar to Jupiter's Trojans: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_trojan> The relative location to the sun would mean that it'd always be sort of a half-moon, always visible on the day-side in the southern hemisphere. The high distance would also mean that it would appear very small. ]
[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 6 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/93183/edit) The context: Imagine some (near future) soldiers who have - as part of their standard kit - cameras built into either their helmets or body armour. They'll be recording, and possibly transmitting, while the soldiers are in the field. So very like: * The [bodycams](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24662243) used by some modern UK police officers. * The helmet cams of the Colonial Marines in the Aliens movie. * The kind of footage captured by military personnel and made into the BBC documentary [Our War](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01175hg), except it is 'official' footage not personal mobile phone recordings. Now, if the Colonial Marines are transmitting their footage, I get that it will be encrypted to military standards and cycling through frequencies to avoid detection. I'm happy with that. But what about the physical kit? What happens if Hicks and Hudson get killed, and the enemy picks up their helmets and runs off with the camera card with a view to offloading their footage? There might be all sorts of sensitive information in there. What the inside of their ship looks like, or call signs, for instance. The question: What sort of encryption or protection needs to be on that footage? [Answer] Basically, you have three options: ## Livestream The camera doesn't record a thing. It instead immediately uploads it (through a secure channel) to your military base, and the recording is mad serverside. Advantages: If anyone manages to steal the camera, he will just steal a nice satellite/3g connected camera with a send-only apparatus. While this might be useful to reverse-engineer the technology used, your enemy will have no footage of your operations whatsoever. The live feed can also be used by commanders to make last-minute decisions and have a tactical advantage. Disadvantages: If the enemy produces a jamming signal strong enough, you will have no records of the camera. This can be also used as a decisive hit to your intel capabilities, if your generals are using the live feed to take decisions in real time. The signal could also be used by a technology advanced enemy to triangulate your soldiers' position. (thanks Agent\_L) ## Recording The camera records everything, and all is encrypted on disk, using a system like [Bitlocker](https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/windows/device-security/bitlocker/bitlocker-overview) or similar. The recording can then be reviewed safely at the base. Advantages: All footage can be recorded in high quality, regardless of available bandwidth or connection loss. Disadvantages: The enemy may be able to capture your soldiers and force them not to disable the camera, so they would (theoretically) be able to retrieve the non-encrypted datas still stored in memory. With modern cryptography techniques, this could amount to a few minutes, seconds, or even a few frames of recording, so the advantage of this for the enemy may vary (thanks MichaelK, André Paramés). Internal storage size will also limit the quality/recording time of the camera. This becomes important for older (less space) camera models or very high resolution cameras (thanks Taegost). ## Mixed This is the system I would use. It involves a bit of both, and consists into recording everything, uploading all the recorded data to the base, then deleting all data already sent. Advantages: No quality loss, recording will take place regardless of signal, basically the advantages of both approaches combined Disadvantages: If the enemy jams the signal for long enough, you will fall back to the "Recording" case, as data never gets uploaded to the server. [Answer] Since you took the path until figuring out that transmission will be encrypted, it's not far fetched to imagine that also stored data will be encrypted with same standards. Or, even better since the most valuable info is not the footage, there should be some device which monitors the bearer vital signals and destroy the systems if signals cease without proper procedure. With this it should also come a "self destruct" option in case the soldier is captured alive. This to prevent that your enemy get a nice overview of your capabilities and can get proper countermeasures. [Answer] Encryption can pretty confidently hide data from adversaries, but meta data can be very important and is much harder to hide. With sophisticated enough listening equipment it should be possible to count and locate every transmitter. Standard video encodings use more bandwidth when images change more, so you might be able to guess when people are being active. If you know the specific video compression used you can create images that compress poorly and guess someone is looking at the image if you see spikes in data transmitted. If you can see the size of stored recordings you can guess how long a soldier has been deployed. To make use of them the footage must be available somewhere, and might be vulnerable to spies: Viewing large volumes of this footage would give very meaningful insight into tactics and doctrine. This might be usable by adversaries to make sophisticated traps. [Answer] From a crypto standpoint this is very possible. Public-key cryptography allows one machine to encrypt data but not decrypt it. This is because the key is split into two versions, one that can both decrypt and encrypt, and another that can only be used to encrypt. The camera would record happily, splitting its output into ten second chunks, these would be encrypted against the Homebase public key and stored neatly on the SD drive and maybe uploaded at the same time. The original unencrypted chunk is then deleted. To do this without the chunking you could research into "public key stream cipher" methods. The only downside is that the original camera would not be able to view their own feed, if that was somehow needed? [Answer] The simplest way to prevent leaks of sensitive information if an enemy captures a camera is to make sure that there's no sensitive information on the camera. The cameras would only be turned on when the officers are on a mission, and the memory cards would be copied to a computer somewhere and wiped after every mission. That way, enemies would only be able to capture footage recorded of things they could've seen with their own eyes that very same day. Of course there would be rules as to when the cameras would be running and when they must be turned off. There's no sense in getting anything the least bit sensitive on tape, even if you don't anticipate that footage getting stolen. As for whether to record or transmit: Depends on whether or not camera capture is more likely than transmission interception, and on how reliable the radio link is. If you can't get any signal, no sense in trying to transmit; but if you're worried about cameras with valuable footage being stolen, you don't strictly need to store anything on them at all. [Answer] You do want backup memory on the camera, so that it keeps recording even if the signal is blocked, so that when the camera gets back to base later the footage can be analyzed. The trick then is to make sure that the camera memory is write only when recording, with no overwrite or delete, and nothing can be played back on the camera itself, and when it writes to memory it uses the same heavy encryption. So if a soldier is killed and the enemy captures the camera, they can't possibly play it back. This is also useful if things go before a judge, so that any footage of wrongdoing can't be removed, overwritten, or lost. [Answer] For transmission, public-key crypto (see @Tom's answer) is the way to go. On the camera/recorders themselves, I'd suggest a combination of that and tamper-resistant hardware. (Or, more accurately, hardware that can't be tampered without destroying it.) Take a look at what iPhones have: all stored data is encrypted, and the encryption keys are kept in a tamper-resistant "secure enclave" (basically a tiny [hardware security module](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_security_module) that enforces whatever data access rules it's been programmed with. [Answer] Don't forget you have to store the video after it's collected! This is actually one of the hardest parts. Video files are quite large, and with many cameras they're going to pile up fast. You're going to need a secure place to store these video files that can be quickly scaled to fit the needs of your police/military force. This is much more difficult than you might imagine. If you need to store the footage securely, then the most secure option that still allows quick retrieval is in a server on a local intranet. Depending on how many cameras you're talking about you'll need to shovel lots of data, fast. So you're likely looking at a cluster. Clusters are expensive, and take expensive people to maintain. Also you'll have to encrypt all of these drives or the people who maintain it are going to be able to pull a drive and walk home with it. This isn't feasible for most (the US military could certainly do so, but local police forces could not), so you might want to look at something like Amazon Web Services. They will do all the maintenance for you, but then you have to worry about it not being stored in-house, and that it has a direct internet connection. If you're not using the files often, it might be worth it to store it all on magnetic tapes and lock it up in a warehouse. There won't be immediate access, but it's secure and cheaper than a cluster. ]
[Question] [ So I want robot enemies in my series, but I also want gore without killing living creatures (related to [this](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/73375/defeating-this-fleet), because the opponent is the same, the gr8 computer) So basically the robots I talking about mimic human biology to some degree, more specifically they use a muscle-like tissue, that's stronger than it's natural counterpart, now this technique is used in all types of robots. I proposed a few ideas for having liquids inside robots: * Liquid conductor * Required for the artificial muscle to work properly (might or might not overlap with the liquid conductor) Questions * What could be the justifications for giving the fluid a red coloration? Please consider using [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_muscle) (the robots employ composites of these to achieve the best possible combination) [Answer] You could have hydraulics. Hydraulic arms are routinely used in heavy machinery. In the first Terminator movie the Terminator was finally defeated by a hydraulic press. Hydraulic robots are real. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qonxS.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qonxS.jpg) I googled up hydraulic fluid explosion and got this fine video. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fD2Qm6xJ60> If that is not a jet of gore from a dying robot I don't know what is. [Answer] The red could be a dye so a fluid leak would be visible and therefore easier to patch without taking the whole unit off line for diagnostics. An internal gauge might show a drop in fluid pressure, but wouldn't show where the damage has occurred. [Answer] It could be for cooling down the robot. [![Computer](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OwSY1.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OwSY1.jpg) The robot might have the liquid inside like computers do to cool it down. The enemies might have only cheap motors available and they need to cool them down regularly to prevent the robots from overheating. Also this might be useful for the good guys because when the robots are stabbed and they lose too much "blood" they won't be able to cool themselves down and will overheat. Here's a coolant for pcs that it could use: [![coolant](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z9i0g.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z9i0g.jpg) > > Eco-friendly Anti-corrosive Solution Being non-toxic and > non-flammable, the Coolant 1000 is an eco-friendly pre-mix solution > with 2 years shelf life, providing great performance while preventing > the entire cooling system – copper, brass, nickel, aluminum, and steel > – from corrosion. In addition, users can easily refill by using the > refill bottle. > > > * Boiling Point: 210.2℉ (99℃) > * Freezing Point: -4℉ (-20℃) Composition of Coolant 1000 as below: > > > [![makeup](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aEAyi.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z9i0g.jpg) From: <http://www.thermaltake.com/products-model.aspx?id=C_00002609> [![Robot](https://i.stack.imgur.com/TBRDR.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z9i0g.jpg) This Japanese robot called the [`SCHAFT`](http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/japanese-schaft-robot) has a > > "high-voltage and high-current liquid-cooled motor driver" > > > Further Research For more info on coolants check out the wikipedia page: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolant> This is the general definition: > > A coolant is a fluid which flows through or around a device to prevent the device from overheating, transferring the heat produced by the device to other devices that either use or dissipate it. An ideal coolant has high thermal capacity, low viscosity, is low-cost, non-toxic, chemically inert, and neither causes nor promotes corrosion of the cooling system. Some applications also require the coolant to be an electrical insulator. > > > [Answer] An advanced robot using nanotechnology will be much more like a living tissue. It will naturally have circulatory fluid that can carry materials needed for the self-repair features, even if it’s not carrying fuel. This is especially useful for the skin, which self-repairs heavy wear of the surface and the connective tissues that flex and stretch. So, they bleed when cut. In my story, it looks like milk, being made up of tiny bits of various materials encapsulated in a membrane bearing tags describing its contents. But this becomes a commercial product with brands marketed to the sentient robots that need to use it. Adding to the reasons listed by others, * the color might be part of the brand recognition. Making it red like organic blood is a marketing tactic. * the proprietary formula for the encapsulating membranes may happen to turn out to be some color. This can be the natural color or dye can be used to make it more appealing, since it wasn’t bright white anymore and an “off” color could be perceiced as undesirable. * other substances dissolved in the water (not encapsulated in membranes) may be strongly colored, but are not there because they act as dyes. * smaller encapsulated nanospheres will start to have optical properties. ![gold particle size](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Gold255.jpg/268px-Gold255.jpg) From Wikimedia commons: Solutions of gold nanoparticles of various sizes. The size difference causes the difference in colors. The last is particularly elegant: the liquid is red because the nanoparticles it carries have a [surface plasmon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_plasmon) capability and the particle size is getting so small as to affect the resonance frequencies possible. [For the cancer drugs pictured](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_nanoparticles_in_chemotherapy#Color), “…These colors play a necessary role in the synthesis of AuNPs as indicators of reduction.” So (the last reason), it’s not red because it has red stuff in it, but for deep physical reasons involving what makes it suitable for what it is. [Answer] * It's red because it's artificially produced blood, and is made of hemoglobin. See--the human body is a machine, an efficient one, and it's a pretty good model. If the tech exists to create a person with a system that converts proteins which can carry oxygen throughout the body, it might look a lot like hemoglobin. Hell, it might BE hemoglobin. Your blood is red because, even though it's created, it IS blood. You say: > > Liquid conductor > Required for the artificial muscle to work properly (might or might not overlap with the liquid conductor) > > > To which I say, yes, we have that too. It's called blood and it carries oxygen (fuel!) to our muscles so that they work properly. You are calling it a "liquid conductor." I assume you mean electricity? That seems a bit...old tech to me. Besides, if it is a liquid conductor, when you stab one, mighten you receive a bit of an electric shock if this is so? Like stabbing a toaster and hitting the wiring or something. But hey, guess what? Blood is a conductor of electricity! Mainly because is salty. Here's a pretty [indepth paper](http://www.bloodjournal.org/content/5/11/1017?sso-checked=true) on what determines the conductivity. Click on where it says PDF to read it. The upshot is, they were trying to figure out a quick way to get a count on the number of red blood cells--and found that the higher the concentration, the higher the conductivity. [Answer] Modern technology is already blurring the line between organic and machine. One solution: your robots use [bio-batteries](http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/everyday-tech/blood-battery.htm) for power. Bio-batteries charge quickly through contact with any fluid that contains glucose. In other words, your robots look like they have blood because, essentially, they do. Losing too much of it will cause them to lose power and shut down, just like a living organism (though it will be possible to repair and refill them afterwards). The robotic blood doesn't have to be red, but as wetcircuit's answer suggests, making it red would help engineers quickly spot leaks to repair them. The human eye is particularly good at picking out the color red. The blood can also double as coolant. Actually, blood does have a secondary function as a cooling mechanism in living organisms, which is why people sometimes turn red when they exercise (blood flow increasing near the skin to radiate heat better). As Noah points out, liquid-cooled robots already exist. Bio-batteries charge faster than conventional batteries, but they also (currently, at least) are not as good at holding that charge over long periods of time. Your robots may need to refuel (eat) on a regular basis to keep them ready for action. [Answer] Just have a general purpose "carrier fluid" - acting as fuel for a fuel cell, lubrication, coolant/waste movement, and hydraulic fluid. You could even have it conductive for "liquid"/"microfluidic" circuits. This would greatly simplify logistics - since you would only need to stock a single type of fluid, and dump and change that periodically as needed. You can handwave any characteristics you need (like hardening in oxygen in the absence of some inhibitor to be self sealing) on top of that. [Answer] I know you're looking for robots, but have you considered using [cyborgs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyborg) instead? You have a lot of latitude in deciding how much of the human is left, from [RoboCop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCop_(2014_film)), who has just his brains, lungs, and possibly part of an arm left from his original, human body\, to someone who is fully human but [has an implanted defibrillator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyborg#Overview). I do understand from your question that you "want gore without killing living creatures;" depending on your implementation of cyborgism (?) and definition of life, that is possible. If something is >50% machine, is it human? More than 75%? What if the brain/mind is replaced by a computer?\\* A human body with a robotic or remote control brain will bleed, but will probably not be alive according to most [definitions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_death) of death.\\\* --- \* If I remember correctly. [Here](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/132891/41144) is some discussion on the original, though I have only seen the 2014 version. \\ These are questions that can give a lot of depth to your work. If you want to integrate some philosophy in your work, you can raise or answer these questions in the story, either implicitly or explicitly. \\\* Though of course many disagree with the definition of [brain death as death](https://judaism.stackexchange.com/q/376/5323), I'm pretty sure if the brain is completely removed, almost everyone will agree that the organism is gone. [Answer] There are already [experimental systems](https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/10/5d-electronic-blood-ibms-secret-sauce-for-computers-with-biological-brain-like-efficiency/) that delivery power to electronics, while also cooling them. This allows the system to save volume, since both power and cooling are done by the same system. The colour of this electronic blood could be red if it included things like copper or iron oxide. Copper seems more plausible, perhaps it helps with power transfer and/or the heat capacity of the fluid. ]
[Question] [ During [Operation Barbarossa](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa), the Germans came dangerously close to capturing Moscow - in fact they were [within 20km of the city](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Moscow), and some could even see its buildings. The failure to take Moscow is often considered a clear indication of the failure of the entire operation. What if the Germans had succeeded in capturing and holding Moscow? Most say that the Soviet Union would still have fought on, given they still had a significant industrial base east of the Urals and plenty of forces from Siberia, but how would this have affected the course of the war? Would this have delayed Germany's defeat, or maybe even hastened it? [Answer] The military and strategic benefit to Germany would probably be minimal. If anything, it might have hastened Germany's defeat. * The USSR had contingency plans to evacuate Moscow. In fact, most military and civilian officials [evacuated the city](http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=37) between 14-28 October 1941. * In all likelihood the defenders would have fought to the death, through a combination of patriotism, fear of German atrocities, and fear of reprisals from their own government. This is what happened at [Stalingrad](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad) in Aug 1942 - Feb 1943. Germany failed to take Stalingrad after months of brutal house-to-house fighting, which left the city in ruins. * If Germany captured Moscow, it would pay a very high price in casualties and materiel for doing so. * Hitler was obsessed by symbols. Having captured the Soviet capital, he would have refused to allow a retreat under any circumstances. This would allow the USSR to encircle and destroy the German army in Moscow (similarly to what happened at Stalingrad). * About 130 years earlier, Napoleon [did capture Moscow](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia) but Russia continued to fight and eventually won. Given all this, what might have changed? * With all German resources committed to Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad probably never happens. It is possible that Germany begins its retreat from the USSR a year earlier. * In our reality, the Normandy landings (by the UK/USA/Canada) took place in June 1944, and Germany surrendered in May 1945. If Germany collapsed a year earlier, then the USSR could end up occupying all of Germany (not just the eastern part) and part or all of France as well. This would have extensive consequences for the postwar settlement. * Stalin was determined to remain in Moscow [as long as possible](http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=37). If he mistimed his retreat, it is possible he would be killed or captured, with far-reaching consequences. Possibly Krushchev or another figure becomes leader in his place. * The most likely scenario is that the USSR fights on and Germany is defeated as above; but there is always the chance that the fall of Moscow and/or death of Stalin causes a collapse in Soviet morale and prolongs the war or even brings about a German victory, we don't really know. [Answer] It's uncertain what would have happened. On the one hand, Moscow was (and still is) effectively the hub of the Soviet transportation system: the vast majority of road and rail routes pass through it. Capturing Moscow, or even besieging it, would greatly hamper the Soviet ability to move troops and supplies. Having soldiers willing to fight to the death doesn't help if they don't have weapons to fight with or food to eat. On the other hand, the Soviets were highly skilled at relocating anything movable in response to German advances. The transportation hub would be the only thing the Germans would capture with Moscow -- no factories, no administrative facilities, etc. It also depends on how the Germans captured it. A smart commander would understand that urban combat completely negates the German advantage in maneuver warfare. He'd surround the city, leave a beseiging force to contain it, and move on to confront the Soviets elsewhere. More likely, though, would be for Hitler to make one of his strategically inept decrees that Moscow must be captured at any cost, resulting in German armies grinding themselves to pieces in house-to-house combat. Depending on the details of what happens, the result of capturing Moscow could be anything from victory over the Soviet Union, to wearing themselves out to the point that the Soviets could defeat them in 1943 (which has its own consequences). [Answer] Capturing Moscow would not have helped the German army much. The Soviets would have fought to death like they did at Stalingrad. They were under heavy pressure by their own state. The Soviets were not allowed to flee the battle. This is something we see a lot in wars but discipline was very strict at the moment of the war, especially if it's in order to keep the most important city. The Germans were able to take Stalingrad but they payed a heavy price. Several weeks could be required to take full control of Moscow. They would have to deal with street warfare and guerrillas. These are very costly even with a numerical advantage and they slow the advance of the army. By that time, the army would also suffer from attrition and other Soviet troops can reinforce their reserve to organize a counter offensive. Even without Moscow, the USSR would still be able to fight, defensively at least. German troops were busy fighting elsewhere and the tide had already started to turn before the battle of Stalingrad. My point is that taking and holding Moscow would be costly and would yield only little benefits. If operation Barbarossa had not been delayed by several weeks, the Germans would have been able to start the siege before winter and maybe they could have won, avoiding many causalities. But that is another story. Why soldiers will fight to the end? * (I will find the exact passage tomorrow) In the Art of War by Sun Tzu, there is a passage where the author tells the story of a siege. The city is at the bottom of a cliff, facing the sea. A similar configuration as the beaches of Normandy during the D day operation. The general is the besieger and needs to win the fight. The army came with boats. The army get off on the beach and as soon as the left the ships, the general order to put all the fleet on fire. They army is trapped. The only possibility is to win the siege, otherwise, everyone dies. [Answer] [Richard Sorge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge#Wartime_intelligence_supplied_by_the_Sorge_Ring) supplied to Stalin info that one of the conditions of Japan attacking USSR was capturing Moscow. So possibly instead of attacking Pearl Harbor, after Hitler's victory in Moscow, Japan would attack USSR, opening eastern front, and USSR would not be able to fight war on two fronts. > > this information allowed the release of Siberian divisions for the > Battle of Moscow, where the German army suffered its first tactical > defeat in the war. > > > Total collapse of USSR was not even necessary. Hitler's main interest was Caspian oil fields, as the lack of fuel was crippling German war efforts. Also, without Perl Harbor, it would take much longer to mobilize US economy for war, which might allow Hitler's U-boat to win [Battle of the Atlantic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Atlantic) And Hitler could capture Moscow if he only did not diverted tanks from near Moscow to [Battle of Kiev](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kiev_%281941%29). So yes, you are right, it was very close, and only wrong strategic decision of Hitler to postpone attack on Moscow lost him the battle, and ultimately, the war. [Answer] I once created a "take-off" on Civilization II to answer questions like that. While I have only a "beta" copy of my version, I could get some very interesting results using a "whole world" board for World War II (not just Europe as in the Civ II version). I'll supplement the results by using "real world" battles. The seven countries are America, Britain, Soviet Union, Germany, Japan, "Neutrals" (e.g. Spain and Turkey in a grand coalition), and "China" (four cities in the back country, Yenan, Chongqing, Llass, and Urumqi). My theory is that in order to win on the Soviet front, Germany needed to capture both Kiev and Moscow in 1941. And they couldn't. It was one or the other, and they opted for Kiev first, which is why the couldn't get Moscow, and ultimately why they couldn't win the war. If they advance on Moscow in the fall of 1941, they forego their attack on Kiev. They capture part of the city by December, but by then it's winter, and they barely hold their positions, more or less, as in real life. It takes them until summer to capture the city entirely, and by the time they have finished mopping up partisans (an important feature of the Civ II game), it's almost fall. By the end of 1942, the Germans have captured Moscow and possibly Leningrad, but have let the "big prizes," the southern economic zones, stay Russian. Meanwhile, the Americans have destroyed the Japanese navy in the battle of Midway, in June, 1942, and the Anglo-Americans have captured North Africa by early 1943. When the Germans resume advancing on southern Russia in summer 1943, the Russians are backed up by Anglo-American troops coming through Persia and the Caucasus. Other American and British forces open a "second front to the north and east; the British land in Archangel (after winning the battle of the Atlantic in the spring, 1943), and the Americans land in Siberia, joining up with the "locals," and attacking German holdings in Russia from the east. All, like the "White Russians" against the Communists in 1919-20 (the British actually occupied Archangelsk at the time. Joint Anglo-American-Russian forces beat the Germans west of the Urals, invade East Europe together (the Anglo-Americans invade Italy in 1944 to co-ordinate around the Black Sea. The key is that the Americans get involved with Lend Lease, and a modicum of ground troops. In that way, "locals" will rally around them. [Answer] I do not confirm most of the answers! 1. They ignore morale 2. They ignore the fact that Stalingrad might not have been happened To 1: Nazigermany was build on a broken nation. The people had big problems and Hitler gave them very effective solutions. (Not to say he was a hero, don't get me wrong. But he did right in the right time, to receive the peoples trust). The 3.Reich was build on many symbolic values just as the first step of the war had been. The strike against Poland had the aim to get back old Prussian terretories due their symbolic value of "This is part of our fatherland, get it back!", just like some other regions. The invasion of France was pure revenge. See [Dolchstoßlegende](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth) and [Treaty of Versailles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles) Treaty of Versailles (not only the content but it's way of creation) was a huge shame for the Volk and the victory take the shame off germany. Afrikakorps had no real strategic value but gave an big advantage in moral. Germans wanted to be a big nation like GB, Netherlands or Russia, but they weren't able to conquer that many nor so valuable collonies. To conquer these big landmass in exotic africa gave them the feeling that they are at eye level with the other big nations. Ever thought about the symbolic effect of the Hakenkreuz? These and many other examples show how important glory and symbolic has been for the germans. This make me think that the conquest of moscow had changed a lot. A frenchmen(Napoleon), that bitter old enemy which is the pure evil, once captured Moscow but failed to hold it. That the germans where not able to capture what the france had done was a shame again. But if it had been done, to conquer the capital of this big, old and mighty nation, had been another huge symbolic improvement in morale. Sure, the strategic situation had not altered that far at this point, but do not underestimate symbolic. To 2: If Stalingrad had never happened, over 800.000 (!) men had not been lost at this time. Battle of Stalingrad was grinding. Even the fact that german propaganda was super effective, the Volk did noticed how long it took and that so many men must have been died during this battle. This was a big problem. All strikes so far, have been working very well. No one seemed to stop the Blitzkrieg until this point. Stalingrad was the turning point of the Ostfront and without that, Wehrmachts next stop probably had been the Ural (which for sure can not be crossed in winter). This again means, that the german troops had the chance to set up havy defence lines like the [Atlantikwall](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Wall), which shows that they do such things very well. Think of all the heavy losses USA took while invading the Normandy. Did you know that Hitler assumed the USA would invade somewhere else? Maybe the USA had not have any chance when the defense had been at full strenght. So I assume that the capture of moscow had changed everything. At this time Hitler had not done any big mistakes. Later he had done plenty mistakes wich finally had leaden to lose. [Answer] Moscow wouldn't have made much difference. Remember that Napoleon 'captured' Moscow, and it didn't do him any good at all. Moscow was just a symbol. It was a potent symbol, but it was just a symbol. What Germany needed from Russia was the natural resources further south, especially oil from the Caucasus. In the end, Hitler made a lot of strategic mistakes in overextending Germany. [Answer] Surely, capturing Moscow would have made little difference. At this point, the soviets knew what Hitler was about. Why would you surrender, knowing that the future would be bleak for you at this point - if you even had one, let alone the worry of what would become of your family? Why would you surrender then, just because of the collapse of a city? If you have no choice and the government was still in power and waging you to fight on, why would you collapse just because one city has fallen when you still have thousands of miles of unoccupied land, it's just ridiculous. The fighting would have continued beyond the capture of Moscow, however, the war finally ended. [Answer] I like the answer by Royal Canadian Bandit. But there is also yet another twist that somehow nobody considered. If Moscow had been taken, it's (almost ?) given that Hitler would have come to visit it (and specifically the Kremlin) - it'd be a big milestone, and even without other reasons, the propaganda machine must have used it to the max and show the head of the state in the conquered capital of the enemy. Given the practice of mining the abandoned cities and leaving special forces and organized guerrilla units behind when leaving the cities, and also the system of secret bunkers, shelters, underground tunnels existing in Moscow for government use (see [example](http://rbth.com/science_and_tech/2013/12/26/underground_soviet_shelters_and_the_secret_metro-2_32967.html)), it's not unthinkable to imagine that the Hitler assassination attempt performed in Moscow would be successful. Again, nothing unprecedented: [example](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Anthropoid), [another](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Heads). Now, that would significantly change the course of the war and history. ]
[Question] [ As a follow up to this [question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/184155/in-a-world-with-regenerative-magic-why-would-creating-an-item-not-allow-you-to-r). When the greatest wizards of all time decide to retire, they place great pride in creating an Artifact encompassing their life's work. Schwarzschild's staff of miniature black holes would be a subject of study and used quite often and recharged between uses(as per previous post). An Artifact would be usually comprised of the majority of a person's magic and is very much reviewed like an entry to a scientific journal would be here. Artifact's persist past death of the creator and recharge the same as when the creator was living. Since created items are often singular in purpose, for purposes of war, live mages are often better than a singular item. This does not prevent them from using Artifacts. Why would these massively powerful artifacts not work for war despite, * being rechargeable * being powerful What limitation could prevent them for war but let them be used for study (even if they are destructive)? Answers should consider the systemic restrictions to be applied and that they need not be a perfect method of restriction/limitation and should not consider social forms of enforcement such as law enforcement. [Answer] The risk of loss to the enemy. The Artifacts are not only tools of great magic but also demonstrations of subtle techniques for manipulating magic which took their creators a lifetime of research and experimentation to master. We and the enemy both have Artifacts, but each documents and demonstrates a different aspect of magic. If the enemy could study one of our Artifacts they would learn a lot about how we understand magic, and their wizards would use that knowledge to become even more powerful. Similarly, if we obtained one of the enemy's Artifacts, our wizards would study it and become more powerful. Both sides keep their Artifacts safely locked away in vaults within their well-guarded schools of magic. Given the vagaries of war, it is far too dangerous to bring them into battle. Even an overwhelming advantage in any single battle isn't worth losing the Artifact, and as a result, losing the war forever. [Answer] Nuclear reactors VS hydrogen bombs: When you think of nuclear war, you're thinking thermonuclear weapons. In reality, while nuclear bombs feature in the theory of war, the actual use for them is quite tiny. A nuclear weapon is too uncontrolled and terrifying to deploy, and if you did, then there would be an explosion (pardon the pun) of similar uses. Mutual assured destruction creates a strong incentive to not deploy such weapons. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean nuclear power isn't going to war. Depleted uranium projectiles make tanks deadlier. Nuclear power plants power defense factories churning out weapons. Last but not least, all the really critical ships in the navy are nuclear powered. The same principles can apply to your artifacts. Don't make a water elemental powered artifact swallow whole fleets, but maybe you can make ships that are almost frictionless in water. Don't make fire elementals that burn whole armies, but instead liquify metal and make armor for armies. Don't make the earth swallow enemy walls, but instead make stone-tipped arrows that go through metal like it wasn't there. Direct deployment of artifacts is anathema, and will lead to uncontrolled proliferation and global destruction (who knows, maybe this has happened before, and your culture is built in the ruins of a once-great civilization that was destroyed by their artifacts). Subtle application of the powers of the devices IS, however, a perfectly acceptable use to benefit society directly and the military as a side-benefit. It all depends on how your magic system works. [Answer] Artifacts are difficult to transport and their effect can not be easily directed. Thermonuclear weapons are the most powerful weapons known to modern humans. However, the very first thermonuclear charges had a certain problem - they had to be built and detonated in one place. They depended on large amounts of liquid deuterium, and there was no practical way of delivering this weapon in form of a "hydrogen bomb". How good is the weapon if you can't strike your enemy with it? Only later thermonuclear weapons had become as portable as fission ones. So, these magic artifacts just can't be brought into battle. Even if they are small (and technically can be moved), their activation process requires them to stay in one place for some time. They can only be used for demolition - for example, an enemy captures a castle, and defendants obliterate the castle, the enemy and themselves in one big blast - but this provides only a very limited use. [Answer] Usefulness besides war It's been alluded to and outright said in some answers, but here's a deeper view on the usefulness outside of war. Powerful artefacts can be used for much more than war. They might be things like a weather staff. Capable of irritation through rain or prevent fields from being flooded through sun these things can be used in war, but it's impractical. A large army can consume fields just as well, and large armies are probably required to defend such a piece in war. It would be too valuable not to defend it with a large army. That makes it not as effective and hazardous to your own troops. These artefacts are a lifetime's work. There are too few applications for a lifetime's work to go into war. Politics, arts, agriculture, artisinal crafts and much more are the things where the work and money is. Sure some wizards will focus on war, but many will go to anything else. And the lifetime artefacts that are created by war wizards might just be altogether too dangerous to be used. Artefacts of destruction are seldom able to distinguish friend from foe, nor foe from useful things you might want to use later, like a mill of planting fields. In short, artefacts are often more useful for prosperity. Lifetime artefacts used for war, or created for war, are too dangerous, too valuable and/or impractical to be used for war. [Answer] Artifacts need to be atuned to the local properties of the magic field, a very slow and labour intensive process. If you really put your mind to it you can get one active in about 2 years of time, otherwise it'll have to stay within a few kilometers of were it was attuned to previously if you want to actually use it. Problem of this answer: using artifacts for defensive siege warfare would be trivial, assuming that the artifacts effects are appropriate. [Answer] # Proper application as weapons We have lasers in industry that can cut a half-centimeter (approximately 0.2 inch) thick steel at a rate of 6m (~20 feet) per second. Fire it at a person's head and it's instant death. So why don't we use it in war? Because it's a female dog to aim and shoot. It's a very heavy machine that takes too much electricity to power. It would have to be mounted on a nuclear powered tank. The tank would need to have technologies for cooling both the laser and the engine that have not been developed yet. And the target would have to be stationery, because the laser takes long to warm up and is only that damaging at its focal point. Boeing and Lockheed were reportedly testing laser weapons mounted on military aircraft since the 2000's or so, but due to so many complications lasers still remain common weapons only in scifi and cyberpunk literature. --- With magic weapons it's the same. So yeah, Ponder Stibbon's Hex-controlled Reactor is a powerful device that is able to split thaums (the basic particle of magic). You could probably use it as a siege weapon against a castle, if you are able to spend a decade building the machinery inside the castle in the first place. The real world equivalent would be building the Large Hadron Collider around an enemy's bunker, and then tuning it so that particles collide at the bunker's walls. [Answer] Magic is often a strangely misrepresented thing in fantasy. It's almost solely aimed at combat and war, which is not how it would really go if magic were "real". Magic would follow the same lines as technology. There won't be any fireballs thrown in the beginning. Instead the first magic that was discovered is about the 3 S's: Sex, Shelter, Sustenance. Sex contains everything from making sure you look good to attract a partner, convincing said partner, getting pregnant, giving birth to a healthy baby and then continues with getting the child to grow up healthy and strong while teaching him things he needs to know. Shelter contains everything from building something against the elements, from a small fire to keep you warm to the clothes you wear (or don't need to wear because magic) and everything around your home. Hell even just something to prevent your home from catching fire would be worth gold in ancient times. Sustenance is all about the food. Finding it, making it, hunting it, protecting it, herding it, growing it, keeping it free from disease and poisons, preparing it, stockpiling it, keeping it fresh etc. It is likely that you would see magical refridgerators before you would see advanced weapons. The items your mages leave behind are focused on this, and likely given to their children or those they care about. An artifact that can cure diseased crops, keep the soil fertile or even just harvest all the grains without harming the stalks so they can be harvested again would be invaluable. An artifact that can cure disfigurements and change one's appearance to their wishes would be a most powerful tool in such times (it would be a powerful tool today!). Or what about a tool that makes people immune to certain diseases? Child death would go down, horrible diseases that we get shots for today would be eliminated (but what if the artifact causes autism? GASP!). Even if it can only be used for a single family, a powerful mage would not hesitate to give this to his own family so they can be strong and healthy for years to come. Or imagine leaving something to improve the homes of your family? They could be fireproof, always a comfortable temperature without the need for heating or cooling, the space inside could be larger, furniture could be immune to wear-and-tear. It might not seem that powerful, but if you never have to replace your furniture in the olden times it save a lot of time, money and effort. Not to mention how it can increase the status of the family. Most days aren't about warfare, and as miss Nightingale proved even war is less about the war and more about the hygiene needed so infections dont kill literal magnitudes more than the actual fighting does. Many wars never even happened because supplies are more important, and the ability to send home your troops so they can help with harvest is invaluable for the country as a whole. The amount of magical artifacts focused on warfare would be minuscule compared to the amount of magical artifacts focussed on just making it through to the next year. [Answer] # Non-sentient magic can be disrupted by enemy mages Your magic system could allow mages to disrupt magic unless the caster resists them. Spells might be magic constructs ("balls of light") which have to travel to the destination before they activate. Left uncontested, an enemy wizards might be able to disrupt a spell before it activates, causing it to dissipate without effect. If a wizard casts a spell, they could be able to resist enemy wizards trying to disrupt their spell, so that it activates as normal. But it could be impossible to defend a spell cast by someone else, or by an artifact, so that they are useless in war. (You would have to say that continuous-effect magic like shields can be disrupted unless the caster actively defends them. Possibly there are disruption-resistant materials which would allow for permanently enchanted weapons, but the process of enchanting them is slow and creates magical "ripples" which allow enemy agents to detect and , and can be disrupted like any other spell.) [Answer] Artifacts leak. Specifically, while they recharge like a living mage does, in the presence of large numbers of people this magic will leak out into others. Leakage rate is a function of population density within a known distance. This means artifacts can be studied and used in isolated universities, but in a war setting just having people nearby makes them useless. ]
[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/104045/edit). Closed 5 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/104045/edit) CASE: There is a sentient life form that is snake-like in appearance, and cannot have the means to write or perform elaborate body gestures due to a lack of fine motor skills. Their only proof of sentience is a means of verbal language and an ability to order obedient domesticated animals to construct their buildings, and in turn they get food and shelter. How could a civilization's concept of technology, opinions and history be recorded without any form of books, and in particular an alphabet? How can information even be stored without the usage of a book? How can a civilization that has the ability to write, yet not, further progress (important point #11 down below) Let's say that they've all the resources that Earth has, and have no motive towards making their domesticated animals to write books as they can only comprehend simple tasks, and amazingly yet are highly skilled in construction after thousands of years of domestication. Things to know about the Snake Aliens: 1. Photographic memories. Able to pick out the tiniest detail and comprehend complex rules of nature/physics/chemistry naturally. 2. Enhanced communication powers (due to lack of books). Can speak with two peers about different topics at the same time and also speak 100 times faster than us. 3. Matures at a young age, 2-3 years old. 4. At it's current state it is able to produce technology like video and audio signals and formulate audio files from worker animals using chain production. 5. They are not Humans! They have already built a civilization around not using writing! Even though it may have taken longer/shorter for them to do it, they have achieved what our monkey brains have a hard time to comprehend! 6. Their vocal language has different tones mapped to a vastly more in depth detail of the true intention of the speech, therefore they are 15 times more efficient in explaining what they want than us. This is also due to a lack of body language, as they don't have any limbs 7. Average Life span: 150 - 200 years 8. Architecture involves mainly wood/brick. closely resembles Maori architecture, with the exception of using bricks as materials 9. Planet is 90% Ocean, think [Scarif](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Scarif) from Star Wars 10. Mental Capacity over 200 Zetabytes. They remember everything in their lives. 11. The only form of a written language in their planet is ancient Runes (that they have translated) from an ancient alien race that tell them not to pursue writing, or else they face the same fate as they did (extinction). 12. They co habit with domestic, monkey like creatures that are similar in affection to each other like dogs are to humans. They both rely on each other to survive. [Answer] Songs. Do you wonder why you, a not particularly musical person, can hum the tune of thousands of different songs you have heard on the radio or in church? Why an average person can remember the lyrics to hundreds of songs? Why is the human brain so thirsty for songs and song lyrics? Humans are singers. There was a time when songs were how knowledge was passed down. Relics from that time exist: the [Vedas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas) is a body of myth and legend that was originally transmitted orally and then written once the Indian civilizations acquired writing. > > Transmission of texts in the Vedic period was by oral tradition, > preserved with precision with the help of elaborate mnemonic > techniques. A literary tradition is traceable in post-Vedic times, > after the rise of Buddhism in the Maurya period,[note 3] perhaps > earliest in the Kanva recension of the Yajurveda about the 1st century > BC; however oral tradition of transmission remained active. > > > The Norse sagas were transmitted orally before there was writing. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are the culmination of centuries of oral transmission. The ancient songs like the Vedas which were converted into script intact are the culturally important songs that describe myth cycles and religious events. But you can bet there were songs about just about everything else too. Our alphabet song has made it into the current day - a memory aid for the preliterate young. So too your aliens. They would have songs which include in their lyrics and tunes the accumulated knowledge of the species. And with their vocal apparatus these aliens have, the songs would be awesome. [Answer] So my first question is how can either the master species or their domesticated animals be highly skilled at engineering and construction without writing? What would the impact of no writing be on the civilisation? It would literally (no pun intended) limit the advancement capability of that civilisation. Writing is one of the advances that has allowed humans to advance so quickly. Without it, the ability to transfer information between minds is greatly reduced. The novice or trainee can only learn while around their master, and only from their master. They have to listen and watch intently, and the master also has to remember what he or she has told the novice, and what hasn't been communicated yet. Also, the novice has to remember it all. Bottom line is that even if the master has come up with a new advance, it doesn't mean that the novice has the same skill to understand that advance, meaning that there's a high probability that the advance in understanding will be lost. Writing changes that. Writing is an efficient way of recording information to share with many novices, all through time. You can add to it as you remember new things, and the novices can always refer back if they forget something you've said. Most importantly, because you've written it down, the novice in his time doesn't just re-write what he's learned from you, he writes down the stuff that's new to the practice. Mathematics for example is the cornerstone of engineering. It's also a cumulative subject. Mathematicians have been building on their knowledge for millennia and it's important to note that while every senior secondary student today who does maths is taught calculus for example, it didn't exist 500 years ago. Leibniz and Newton (depending on who you believe) created it in the 1600s and Principia Mathematica in particular became a treatise for cutting edge mathematics that we now largely take for granted in our lives. The understanding of math at this level (and the perfect transmission of this maths into so many new minds) simply isn't possible without writing. The reason why the Information Revolution (as our modern times will be known as in history) is so important is because we're dealing with Gutenberg Mark II; where the printing press revolutionised the ability to disseminate written knowledge and spread it among a wider population, the internet is taking that to another level again. It is that very proliferation of knowledge that is driving the proliferation and advancement of key technologies at such a rapid rate. None of it would be possible without the ability to read and write, because before YouTube you have to be able to transmit simple text because of the early bandwidth requirements. Even if that wasn't the case, I defy anyone to tell me that they can truly understand deep scientific concepts through video discussion alone; text is still a crucial element to learning and will continue to be for a long time, if not forever. Even if that isn't the case, the ability to record an individual speaking about a topic is just a more advanced form of writing in any event. It's still recording knowledge for easy transmission, just in a far less efficient way. So without writing, your sophisticated building capability doesn't exist. The only thing you can rely on is the memory of the individuals within your species, and their ability to articulately and completely share all their knowledge verbally with others of their species. Good luck with that. Seriously though, writing is the cornerstone of civilisation because it's a low energy, highly effective manner for capturing information and spreading it to others so they can use it and build upon it in their turn. Without that capability you need another way of doing that (like telepathy) which allows everyone the ability to know what you know about a specific topic, otherwise you'll lose information with every generation, like a leaky long range pipe. Some of what you need to know will eventually get there, but what will you lose along the way? To address edits in question: Sure, it can be argued that writing was necessary to us as a species because of otherwise limited communication abilities and less than perfect memories. With that in mind, a more perfect species capable of disseminating and retaining information more efficiently than a human mind might have less requirement for writing. Even for such a species however, writing would still make things easier. Albert Einstein was once asked how many inches were in a yard, and his answer was 'I don't know. If I ever do need to know, I'll look it up in a book. Why clutter my mind with stuff I don't need to know when I can use my mind to come up with new ideas?' (quotes probably not required here, this is from an anecdote so I can't verify the accuracy of the words, only the intent) The point being, that even since Gutenberg human memories have become less adept, but our reasoning skills and analytical capabilities have significantly improved. While this also ties in with the ideas of specialisation in the OP edits, writing is a low energy way of storing data that allows anyone to access it if they're curious. So even with perfect memories, it's a great way to preserve knowledge from (say) natural disasters, plagues, or some other form of destruction that could remove minds with key knowledge from the population. If nothing else, it's a backup solution. [Answer] I would recomend you give a read about aboriginal Australian oral tradition, they had elaborated methods of crosschecking to assure their knowledge wouldn't be corrupted from one generation to the next. [Answer] Writing solves a few issues endemic to civilization that you'd need to get around. 1. Distribution: written information can be read by thousands of people, and each of those people will read the same thing. This scales up even more when you have printing presses. 2. Durability: as many other people have said, what happens if Joe the Accounting Snake gets hit by a bus? Does the company lose all of their accounting data? 3. Accountability: your aliens have perfect memories, but what happens when Joe the Accounting Snake decides to start taking a bit more for himself? Who's going to say he's wrong? An external auditor can't trace through his accounts. Fortunately out in our real world we have something kinda similar to snakes who can communicate with multiple other people at the same time, can listen in on any number of conversations without engaging directly, remember everything that's ever happened to them, and might get hit by a bus at any time: distributed computers. How do distributed computers handle similar issues? We've got various different ways, like [gossip protocols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_protocol) to distribute and find information, [transaction logs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_log) to keep track of what's happened and [consensus protocols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_(computer_science)) to figure out what reality is. How would you map those concepts to a biological system? * Make your aliens highly social - have them feel weird and alone if they can't hear at least three other snakes (and preferably lots more). * Have every snake talk constantly, even if they're not talking to anyone; when they're not engaged in a real conversation with someone else, they're using both their voices to narrate their day and the important stuff that's happened to them. * Have every snake work in at least triads on any knowledge-based task, with every snake cross-checking every other snake. * Have snakes enjoy finding new and interesting people to talk to, in order to exchange full life stories. * Have snakes get sick of talking to the same people for more than a few hours, which makes them go and find someone else to talk to for a bit (this includes work triads - they'll go take a smoke break or something and chat with other people, and this aversion generally means that they'll leave work at different times) * Make it so that in snake culture, keeping any sort of secret is viewed as being deviant and wrong. They'll talk to anyone and everyone about literally anything and everything, including data other snakes have told them. So, let's run through a scenario. Joe, Jack and Jane, the triad in Accounting, just happen to accidentally get run over by the same monkey bus one day. Just from gossip, the rest of the company remembers most of the accounting data. They come together, check what they remember of the life-narratives, and discover that they're missing about 10% of the data. The company hires Aaron, Aron and Arron, a premier data recovery firm, to get the rest of it back. Thanks to living in the general vicinity of the company, AAA remember about 2% of the remaining accounting data anyway - although none of them knew any of JJJ directly, they'd picked up a certain amount of data just from gossip. The other 8% can be quickly recovered by talking to the grieving nest-mates of JJJ, who obviously have full dumps of the accounting data. Since this is the most common means of recovering data, AAA have experience diplomatically handling distraught family members while getting full data dumps out of them (hence why they charge a premium for their service). [Answer] If all they're doing is herding animals and making structures, they don't need a written language, non-literate people have done the same and more for millenia. You would see them having highly skilled members who memorize important details and events, most likely some kind of religious or teaching caste. Elaborate stories and songs will be the norm for passing on and sharing knowledge. Depending on their domestic animals abilities, megalithic structures are possible. The Incas built a civilization with no recognized writing, although its debated if Quipu, [knot language](https://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/khipu/), was a language or a memory aid. The Aztec and Mayans had a logorams and syllabic glyph language, but all surviving copies seem to be for [religious purposes](http://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/civil/maya/mmc04eng.shtml) rather than architectural or science based. We can see similar things in Europe, North Africa and Asia, where large cities and temples were built pre-literacy or just as literacy was becoming known but before it was used for technical details. [Cuneiform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script#Proto-literate_period) one of the earliest writing systems in Mesopotamia was first used to keep track of goods and religious events. So when it came to building structures everything was communicated verbally, and writing was used to track supplies, i.e. "Town A sent 5 large stones, 16 workers, 10 mules, etc" The problem for this civilization would be advancing beyond this. It doesn't matter how good their memory is, if they can only pass on knowledge face to face, they're stuck. It will be like the secret societies of mages and alchemists during in Europe from the late Roman era to the 1600's, they didn't want to risk writing down information that could be stolen or used against them, so they used hard to crack codes and memory. Now all we have of their 'discoveries' are impossible stories and fragments of papers that we can't decipher. That will be what happens to the snakes society after a generation or two has passed. The masters will be remembered but their work will be garbled and lost. Edit: "At it's current state it is able to produce technology like video and audio signals and formulate audio files from worker animals using chain production." This is not possible without some kind of written language. You need something for the sending and receiving device to decipher. Basic telephones, radios and even TV's are possible without a written language, but once you get to digital you can't get away from a written language or code. [Answer] What counts as "writing"? If you're just looking at how to, e.g., replace books for the preservation and transmission of knowledge, that's relatively easy. Plenty of ancient philosophers thought writing was a terrible idea because it would lead to the degradation of memory and the loss of oral tradition. Which is absolutely true. And strictly oral transmission of knowledge could plausibly get you to the point of building very simple audio recording devices (assuming that they somehow are able to instruct their domesticated beasts in how to do that kind of fine work). Once you can record audio and make copies of the recordings--bam, you've got the equivalent of books for preserving knowledge, and transmitting it to far more people, over far longer time, than could've been done by a single person with their unaided voice. Large parts of our culture could then be copied over nearly wholesale, merely substituting every instance of "reading" with "popping a recording into the audio player". They just go straight to audiobooks, skipping the regular paper books stage. But we use writing for so much more than that. The tricky bits would be all of the tiny samples of writing that would be missing. Labels on buttons. "Push" vs. "pull" signs on doors. Street signs. Traffic signals. Replacing all of those affordances with audio signals would be... impractical, at best. So, are they permitted to have iconography, as long as it isn't a code for their spoken language? If so, a modern civilization without writing could look pretty much like any of our modern civilizations, just with all of the books replaced by audiobooks and signs populated solely with well-known icons, and no actual words. Are they prohibited from having any sort of written communication at all? Then I doubt any such civilization could actually exist. [Answer] A lot of posters here are getting hung up on the concept that it is only TECHNOLOGICAL advancement that is relevant. We have been so brainwashed by materialism that we consider the only measure of intelligence and superior intellect is based on an ability to make increasingly complicated and complex *stuff. We modern humans have become so hung up on making bigger and better technology, that we have forgotten many of the really important things that make humans great. Music, for instance, as has been pointed out. If this race had an excellent ability to perceive pitch and to memorize music just by hearing it once, they don't need to transcribe it. A civilization can be founded on musical greatness, as opposed to building stuff. Bigger and better musical compositions as a sigh of advancing intellect. Story telling can be done through oratory. Shakespeare's audience could neither read nor write, but they still enjoyed the play. It was written down only because of the limitations of our memory, but I am sure many of the actors were as illiterate as the audience. Philosophy does not need a written record, as long as the beings have perfect memory. A great deal of our modern science originated from the musings of philosophers. Plato and Socrates developed and taught their ideas by speaking and listening. Philosophical debate is done much more effectively orally than when written. You would, of course, have to give them the ability of 'idiot savants', that is, the ability to do complex arithmetic in their heads. I doubt if it would be base ten, but a really good mind could process arithmetic faster and more accurately in binary than in decimal. All arithmetic operations can be done in binary, for instance, just by doubling and halving. Most logic can be reduced to truth tables, and these can be memorized. There is no reason an advanced mind could not visualize an entire truth table at once, yet communicate it line by line, entry by entry. Same with a logic diagram. A mind that is good at visualization could build up a very complex system of gates, one gate and one connection at a time. People really good at logic gates and logic diagrams can go between visualizing gates and the Boolean expression at will. Once the Boolean equation is memorized, and visualized, there is no reason to believe there could not be a particular mental structure that could process it. Computers are, after all, nothing but logic gates and logic expressions. Stephen Hawking, because of his physical limitations, has developed mathematical mental symbolism that he can manipulate in his mind. Humans generally are, in fact, hamstrung by our dependency on written language. We have an absolutely vast ability to imagine and manipulate very complex patterns in our minds, yet we do not use it. It is the limitations of written speech and its requirements on structure that limit our ability to communicate these patterns. But poets and artists have the ability to speak in holistic images and paint mental pictures rather than sequential thoughts. In fact, spoken English is a completely separate language from written English. You can SAY 'There are three ways to spell the English word two' and retain its meaning, but as I just proved, there is no way to write it down accurately. If you read a transcription of a conversation, the meaning can be completely lost. Tone, intonation, pauses, emphasis, are all important in spoken communication but simply lost in written communication. TL:DR* With a society of beings that had a mind capable of advanced visualization using complex mental structures, and an oral language sufficiently developed to translate and communicate these visualizations, there is no real impediment to them developing a very advanced body of scientific knowledge. They just wouldn't be able to BUILD it, or design practical experiments and apparatus to prove it. They just wouldn't have the great quantity of materialistic *stuff* we 'advanced' humans have. [Answer] The question seems a bit ramshackle. On the one hand it asks what would a society be like without writing..and on the other.. how would it write. On the one hand, pictographs, nor any form of writing actually has fine motor control as a basic requirement. It's not like they'd be judging each other for neatness, their standards would be entirely different. On the other, dictation between humans and from humans to machines is a well established mechanism for turning words into visual aids. A species that can train animals to build structures for them can teach animals to translate verbal commands into physical actions ('painting by proxy,' i believe it's possible to teach elephants to paint using torture.) We can also consider more fantastical means. Phenomenal pheromones..whatevz! I wonder what modern means, in the question, also. Humanities approach to the use of abstract visual informational exchange aids has and continues to change, as does the verbal. One would assume a species for whom the act of writing/painting or any kind of visual communication is awkward at best, would be encouraged to develop far more precise, logical and capable verbal languages to aid in both shorthand and precision... [Answer] They don't have hands, but that's not a showstopper. There are humans who don't have hands, but still create art just fine: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0fX18.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0fX18.jpg) If the snake people have prehensile tongues or mobile lips for instance, then they could use them to hold a pen/brush/stylus, as well as other tools, or just used to make imprints directly on a soft surface. Likewise, the tip of their tail could be used as a writing instrument in clay tablets given a bit of fine muscle control, and could have tools designed to fit it if you need more force than a tongue can provide. Another option, if the language allows for it, it rhyme. To quote the Daniel Suarez book Freedom(tm): `They were the ones who invented rhyme and meter—the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum—a mnemonic device. You couldn't f with the code or the rhymes didn't work; and if the rhymes didn't work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you f'ed with the code, then society lost its collective mind.` ]
[Question] [ Consider a planet identical to Earth except that it has no moon. 1. How long is the complete day-night cycle on this planet? I've heard that having no moon would speed up the planet's rotation, resulting in a day-night cycle of 6 hours. Is this true? 2. If so, then what would the conditions be so that this planet could have a 24-hour day-night cycle without a moon? (For example, would having a larger mass make it rotate slower?) 3. What would the seasons look like on this planet? Would there be seasons at all? I've heard that having no moon means that there would be no changing seasons. Instead, certain areas of the planet would be locked in a single season, and that season would vary depending on the area. 4. Would the temperature of this planet be different compared to Earth because of its lack of a moon? 5. Are there any other notable things (besides the tides, the darker nights, and the lack of eclipses) that should be mentioned? [Answer] Removing Earth's moon now would not speed up its rotation. The tides caused by the moon have slowly reduced the speed of Earth's rotation over billions of years, but the current length of the day is a result of the original speed of rotation and the Moon's (and the Sun's) tides. Read the Wikipedia page on the [Giant impact hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis), which is our best idea at present for how Earth acquired the Moon (summary: Splat!). If that didn't happen to Earth (as it didn't to Venus), we wouldn't have a large moon, but that doesn't tell us anything much about the length of the day. That would be determined by whatever speed Earth ended up rotating at after it accreted out of the Sun's [protoplanetary disc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System). So an Earth-without-moon can have whatever length of day you like, and nobody can say you're wrong. The seasons are not driven by the moon. They're a product of Earth's orbit and its axial tilt, and if those things were the same, the seasons with be pretty much the same without a moon. In the same way, the moon doesn't have any drastic influence on Earth's temperatures. [Answer] The one item I feel is missing from the last responses that you might want to consider...the moon does act as a gyroscope for the earth. The result is that the procession of the earths axis is regulated. Without the moon, the earth's axial tilt could vary much more significantly over a much shorter time period (still millions of years - short for earth, pretty long for most book plots!). So on such a world, we could find a sun directly over the equator - essentially a planet without seasons and days and nights of equal length year round. Or a world tilted "on its side" where the sun was directly over the pole at solstice (24 hour day for one hemisphere and 24 hour night for the other) and directly over the equator at the equinox; a world with dramatic seasons, to say the least. Since current lunar theory holds the moon is a part of the original primordial earth that was ejected during a massive collision, your moonless earth could be more massive than our earth. A more massive earth could be more volcanic and have more active geology in general due to a higher core temperature. Additionally, earths magnetic fields could be significantly stronger due to a more energetic core leading to different conditions in your earths radiation belts - impacting aurora's, radio communications, orbital equipment. The moon is pockmarked with craters, many quite significant. Some percentage of the objects that impact the moon could instead have impacted the earth. Asteroid extinction events might be more common on your earth, driving a different evolution...? The moon sweeps earths near orbit. Small bodies, such as asteroids would be difficult for the earth to capture due to the moons presence. Without a giant moon, your earth would be more likely to capture a satellite from the asteroid belt or even generate a satellite as the result of an asteroid impact. Examples are the moons of Mars. Your earth could actually have several such small captured satellites on odd crossing orbits of different periods. If your earth is indeed more massive, your atmosphere would be more dense. Depending on how massive, your atmospheric composition might be different, with different gasses, more gases that we see only in trace amounts. But I am not the person to do that sort of chemistry and calculations. Similarly, this could have an impact on surface temperatures and weather, but that is the topic for another questions if and when you decide more precisely on the evolution of your earth and its atmosphere. [Answer] > > How long is the complete day-night cycle on this planet? > > > This depends on the angular velocity, and little else. The effect the moon has is that [it slowly slows the earth over time](http://www.brighthub.com/science/space/articles/53525.aspx), because of the friction caused by tides and the movement of the moon's mass away from Earth. So knowing the length of the day/night cycle would require knowing when in Earth's life you're talking about. > > What would the seasons look like on this planet? Would there be seasons at all? > > > Seasons are caused by a variety of factors, but the primary one is the tilt of the Earth and the relation of that tilt to the Sun. Loss of the moon would affect this, because it would affect tides and therefore affect the meteorological effects of the seasons, but it would not stop there being warmer and cooler parts of the year in various places. > > Would the temperature of this planet be different compared to Earth because of its lack of a moon? > > > Not significantly, likely. > > Are there any other notable things > > > It is likely that tides and moonlight affect a great number of species in a wide variety of ways from navigation to life cycles (werewolves) to how they get about (fish returning to spawning grounds, turtles to the ocean). Thinking about how humans work with the tides we can already see how a great number of things would be different if the seas were (relatively) stable. [Answer] Not much would change without the Moon. It is often suggested that the Moon was key for life on Earth but there are nothing concrete to back that up (for example, see here: <http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/earths-moon-may-not-critical-life/>). For instance, Earth's axial tilt is indeed stabilized by the Moon at Earth's current spin rate. However, after formation Earth spun much faster (the exact rate was determined by the last couple giant impacts on Earth). At a faster spin rate, the Moon is not needed to stabilize Earth's spin. And newer work suggests that a Moon-less Earth would still have a pretty stable spin axis. So, the Moon never actually made much of a difference in terms of stabilizing Earth's spin axis. However, Earth-Moon tidal interactions did cause the Moon to be pushed farther from the Earth and the Earth's spin rate to slow down (making the day longer) The day-night cycle is only affected by the Moon in terms of the length of the day (which would be much shorter, probably around 4 hours long, without the Moon). The seasons don't care about the Moon, and neither does the surface temperature. There are a lot of mysteries related to the origin of the Moon (e.g., <http://nautil.us/blog/the-genetics-of-the-earth-and-moon>). And there are a lot of opportunities for imagining life on moons in science fiction (like Pandora: <https://planetplanet.net/2014/11/18/real-life-sci-fi-world-6-pandora-from-the-movie-avatar-the-habitable-moon-of-a-gas-giant-planet/>). But I don't think the Moon disappearing would have that big of an effect on the Earth. [Answer] I think other answers give you a pretty good idea of what the differences would be between a moonless Earth and our own. But there are a few points that I think might be highlighted, that seem to be missing. As others mentioned, the Moon has no deal with Earth's seasons, aside from estabilising its axis. But the impact that created the Moon - if this is what happened - or even the capture of a small-size planet, if we believe otherwise - could have had whatever consequences a fiction writer wants. So you could position the South Pole of your fictional Earth in Africa - or whatever continent it would result in its place from the Moon not being created/captured - and explain that away by stating that what put Antarctica in the South Pole was the creation/capture of the Moon. The same goes for the length of the day: while the existence of the Moon slows Earth's rotation very slowly, the acquision of the Moon might have brutally reduced the rotation speed in one coup - or, on the contrary, accelerated a tide-locked Earth. (Note that a moonless Earth would be more different from actual Earth if the Moon was indeed created by an impact; it would be unlikely that in that case the outline of continents or oceans would be remotely similar. If you don't want to rebuild our geography too much, it would be probably better to postulate that scientists are wrong, and the Moon was a neighbouring dwarf planet that got gravitationally captured into Earth's orbit.) More importantly, though, the tidal effects of Moon affect all of Earth's liquid parts - most obviously the oceans, but also whatever liquid or semi-liquid parts of its mantle and core. This creates heath of itself - imagine the amount of attriction it generates - and also tends to stir the inner parts of our planet, making the decantation of heavier elements towards the core slower. In other words, a moonless Earth would quite probably have a bit less internal heath, resulting in reduced vulcanism, perhaps a deeper crust, even to the point that tectonic plates would weld into each others, and quite probably would have a crust less rich in iron and heavier than iron elements. And really heavy, radioactive elements would be even rarer, which would result in an even cooler interior, as part of the Earth's internal heath comes from radioactive decay inside it. Nights would be darker. Would we have to adapt to this, too? And would other animals become more - or less - dangerous from the total absence of light at night, without a cycle of darker/lighter nights? It would be interesting to see what impact the absence of the Moon would have upon human knowledge, supposing that your moonless Earth is inhabited by humans (but would it be, or, as Asimov suggests, reduced radioctivity would have slowed evolution too much?) Would realising Newton's laws be made more difficult without a close example of an orbit? Would time recording be too difficult for early men without a relatively easy-to-count 29 day cycle? Would we be able to realise the regularity of years/seasons without months and weeks to mediate/facilitate the calculus? ... and, of course, there's the pressing question of whether would there be such a thing as "romantic love" in a Moonless Earth. [Answer] Without the moon we'd have no tides, or at least very weak tides (the sun does exert some tidal force). Tides are actually quite useful: they serve to keep smaller bodies of water like bays and estuaries from getting stagnant. And that's not even addressing the fact that many marine animals (as pointed out by Hurda's comment) use the moon for navigation, among other things. Some animals, such as jellyfish, time their spawning according to the lunar cycle. I'm no marine biologist, but I think it's safe to say that ocean life in general would look quite different if we had no moon. [Answer] The lack of a moon, or even more dramatically, the lack of a moon and any other planets close enough to be seen with the naked eye, would probably retard the development of mathematics and physics. These observations were critical, for example, in our capacity to generalize gravity to the Newtonian and the general relativistic state, and made it necessary to use precision observations to make complex calendars work. [Answer] To answer a question not entirely covered by the other answers, the day-night cycle would indeed be shorter than that of Earth -- assuming that the planet had no moon to begin with -- as the Moon was the main factor slowing down Earth's rotation from 4 hours a day to 24. Without the Moon one day would be closer to 6 hours. The planet having a larger mass would make it rotate faster, not slower, in general; the best way to ensure a 24 hour day/night cycle is to have the planet be closer to the sun (i.e. having a dimmer K-type (yellow/orange) sun pushes the habitable zone closer in). However, as Luis Henrique's answer mentioned, the Moon would be needed to ensure a stable axial tilt with an Earthlike day/night cycle. This would mean that at some points in the precession cycle (lasting several million years) that the planet would have small axial tilt, resulting in barely any seasons, and at other points the tilt would be extreme resulting in extreme seasons. The temperature of the planet would not be significantly affected; though it can be set at various values higher or lower than Earth's by placing it at slightly different orbits. There would still be tides due to the sun; and if it is indeed closer to the sun than Earth is, the solar tides would be stronger (given a planet in a corresponding position to Earth and appropriate mass/luminosity relations, they are roughly proportional to the solar luminosity to the power of 1.2). Now, if instead the Moon disappeared from Earth, it would be a completely different case. ]
[Question] [ I have a friend who is a practitioner of HEMA (Historic European Martial Arts), and who adores telling me all about realistic fighting techniques and why all the fight scenes I love suck. Well, I know he's right, but I'd want any world I build to have flashy fighting scenes anyway. So... What would be a good reasoning for flashy fighting styles to be practical? You can assume any facts about the world, but the people fighting should be symmetric opponents. Note: Flashy fighting does not mean stupid fighting. I'm taking it to mean "more dramatic overswings and full-body blows" rather than "Spin around holding two longswords at arms length". [Answer] A possible solution is to use weapons that somehow generate a gyroscopic effect. This is used in Star Wars lore as the reason why Lightsabers are so hard for anyone but a Jedi to use. In short, a weapon that generates a gyroscopic effect would be resistant to changes in its velocity. When the weapon is at rest, it would resist any attempt to make it move...but once you got it moving, it would resist being stopped. HEMA combat is based around a lot of short, abrupt strikes with a blade; if you had a weapon that was hard to start or stop from moving, then the better solution would be rapid, flowing strikes that never ceased to move. As it is easier to redirect momentum than to stop it entirely, you would want to create a fighting style based on circular motions that flow your attacks and defenses into each other in a seamless pattern. This would give you your dramatic overswings and power strikes, because you would never want your weapon to stop moving. A logical reason for a weapon that does this is that it would hit much harder than a normal weapon would...because when it hits something, it still resists being stopped, and would deliver more Force for an equivalent strike. [Answer] The easiest solution is to add an audience or other social aspect to fighting. A fight is not necessarily about killing people, it could easily be about impressing somebody. Or about entertaining the audience. Or about proving that you know the proper forms. Or about intimidating the opponent. These scenarios happen outside warfare in entertainment fighting, trial by combat, formal duel and ritualized tests of skill. Basically civilian fighting which is quite separate from combat fighting. If your setting has a strong tradition of such practice, their martial arts might include flashy moves. (This answer was initially much longer, but I removed lots of rambling tangential to the question.) [Answer] As Philipp said - defence is more important than offence. So lessen it from the equation by giving fighters extra defence, allowing them to focus more of bypassing that then defending themselves. I'm thinking particularly of Dune where fighters had energy shields that worked better the more force was used - so bullets were completely ineffective and the only weapons that made sense were knives and similar. If you have to fight slowly, your technique is much more important than your lucky or quick strikes. You'll be encouraged to make flashy moves to disorient or distract your opponent from the relatively slow strike you'll finally make when you have the right opening, and can ignore anyone who just jumps at you. [Answer] This answer describes a solution for a soft sci-fi scenario which is internally consistent but not necessarily founded on hard science. ## More jumping, less standing around One reason why real-life fencing is rather static, is because defense is more important than offense and the most reliable way to defend is not to dodge but to parade the attack with your weapon. That means fighters keep their weapon close to their bodies to parade any enemy attacks. To favor a more offensive and mobile fighting style, have energy-based melee weapons which can not block each other. That means the only way to prevent getting hit is dodging. Your fighters will jump and roll around a lot during combat, making for some very spectacular acrobatics. ## Wider swings The only reason why you would use a spectacular wide swing instead of a short poke is because it gives you much more speed and thus more impact energy. This could matter when your target got some kind of protection which negates any impacts which are not fast enough. The only way to build up enough momentum to break through is to use wider swings. Armor would be counter-productive, because it would make the fighters less mobile. But what about a personal force field which covers the whole body and only lets the aforementioned energy weapons pass through when they move very fast? This force-field technology could also be used to justify why nobody brings a gun to an energy-sword fight: Have the force-fields block any personal firearms but not personal melee energy weapons. ## Going beyond human capabilities The major factor which holds your fighters down is their human clumsiness. Only a few extraordinary humans possess the agility, dexterity, strength and spacial awareness to perform all these movie-like stunts, and even those only when choreographed carefully. To see such action pulled off in life-or-death combat by your relatable everyman protagonist, you need to augment them somehow. You could, for example, give your futuristic high-tech fighters exoskeletons or artificial limbs which enhance their speed and jumping capabilities and neuro-implants or drugs which enhance their reaction speed and spatial awareness. [Answer] I can think of a few ways. For "more dramatic overswings and full-body blows" put at least one of the combatants in full plate armour. There are a few ways to beat a man in plate, and one of those is with a poleaxe - basically a Very Big Hammer on a very long handle, with which you hit said man very very hard. As has been intimated elsewhere, put the combatants in a competition with particular rules and equipment. Why are so many punches thrown in a boxing match? Because the hands are protected by gloves. Why is Taekwondo dominated by big kicks? Because the rules mean nothing else is worth doing. Why is the foil fencer not attacking? It's not his turn (or 'right of way') yet. And maybe my favourite if you want some acrobatics - the combatants are fighting "abroad" on a planet with much lower gravity than they were born to. They'd be much tougher than the natives, able to run faster, wear more armour, wield heavier weapons, jump higher and further - you can imagine one of these tanks leaping into a native formation and laying about them. Finally the sci-fi trope of 'powered armour' could combine the outcomes of points one and two. [Answer] There is always the HP Lovecraft reason: Non-Euclidean geometry. Fighting can look like just about anything when a straight line is not the closest path between two points! [Answer] What if the God of Fighting likes a good show? This would require a magic setting. But maybe there's a god who likes flashy, and rewards it. Probably not in obvious ways, but through luck/accuracy. So a big, dramatic blow is more likely to land, and harder to dodge than you'd expect from a purely mechanical universe. More likely to strike a weak point in your opponents armor, or hit just right to cleave through them, etc. Quick, efficient moves are the opposite - they are less likely to strike, or to strike well. They almost never hit critical/weak points, even when aiming for them - instead they strike wrong, or deflect away. When they do hit, the wounds are shallower than you'd expect, just missing vulnerable points. [Answer] I'd imagine that fighting with incredibly impractical weapons might lead to an interesting show. For instance, making them really heavy will lead to those longer wind-up times, and make it harder to stop your momentum which leads to overswinging. Even blocking will become a difficult process, so turning your block into a deadly counterstrike would be difficult. Also, a weapon without a pointy end means you'll have to slash your target to death, which requires you to get a lot more close and personal. I'm not sure how you could justify this in a medieval or modern setting, but I imagine in a futuristic setting, fighting with a sort of energy sword might have this effect. Maybe armor is way better in the future, so the only way to hurt your opponent is to cut them up with a blade of plasma generated by a big, clunky, sword-shaped machine. Since it's so heavy and the blade only covers a part of the weapon (since there's plasma emitters on both ends, there is no point), it'll take a lot of precision and power to get it to the target, which should lead to interesting drawn-out swordfighting against evenly matched opponents. Heck, you could probably even say that striking two of these things together gets them stuck, which could lead to those great sword-locking scenes they always do in the movies. [Answer] In MMA fights are usually somewhat realistic in a sense that rules are meant to prevent injury rather then enforce a style, as such most of them look less flashy then movies, but flashy moves are still possible and even sometimes effective, look up Anthony Pettis off the cage kick, or a nice flying armbar (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdDG5QaJI_0>). Some fights have been just generally impressive in terms of their ferocity (Don Frye vs Takayama). So I would look at various impressive moves and fights in MMA because they were all done by regular people in real life, and such are about as realistic as can be asked for. Granted they are not common, but then I'm guessing you are not writing about common fighter either :) [Answer] A few people have touched on the use of varied weapons- another family of arms that require consistent and smooth movement are whip, rope and chain weapons. These are interesting because they are highly effective in the right hands, can be packed down very small and require skill and flowing movement to use well. In fact, as was mentioned in @guildsbounty's answer, they behave in a fairly gyroscopic manner. They are also very hard to block because they will simply bend around most things placed in their way and also offer opportunities for disarming an opponent. The biggest risk to the user is if the opponent catches their weapon and takes control of it, but if you have two experienced chain fighters, this would probably be a part of their style and pulling anything like that through an opponents hands could result in painful burns. If you look at a traditional weapon like the kurisigama you might get an idea of how these might operate. One thing to be aware of with any of these "fancy" fighting styles is that they favour the individual - they are not really battlefield styles. This is because all those big flamboyant movements take up a lot of space and if you are packed up close in a battle line you are likely to cause more problems to your allies than your opponents. This is one reason that line fight battle tactics tend to look fairly similar through history and few people were more effective than the roman "disable enemy shields, walk forward, stab" approach to frontline combat. Consequently if your heroes are in a large battle you probably want to put them with the skirmishers and given them plenty of room to swing. [Answer] Add an external source of energy that's channeled by "flashy" moves. For real life, there's two main reasons you don't see big flashy moves - they leave you open for counterattack (meaning someone who is just trying to win will shank you while you're setting up), and they take more energy for the same (or less!) effect. (As a Vampire Slayer put it best: what's powering that kick, raw enthusiasm?) So, as a fighter who is busy trying not to die, there needs to be an advantage to the extra flailing - and specifically, an advantage to combat. And that means there needs to be some additional energy coming into the equation that makes the swing extra-strong or fast or whatevs. Now, you could flavor this as generic superheroism, or as a ki power (Mortal Kombat or the classic "your kung-fu is weak"), or as magic (Airbending). But the key point is that doing this makes you fight better. [Answer] IF your setting is on Earth or an Earth like setting, then perhaps the best way to hand wave a "flashy" fighting style would be to require the use and generation of momentum to unbalance and knock down your opponent for the killing blow. This would be sort of the opposite of Aikido, which uses your opponents momentum against them (the Aikido practitioner generally is static or moving relatively slowly against his opponent), but a "spinning" style where you generate momentum to grasp and throw your opponent, while they are doing the same against you (or moving in the opposite direction to negate your momentum) sounds close to what you are asking for. If your fighting style is in a low gravity world or in zero gravity (somewhat like the battle school of Ender's Game), then different rules wold apply. "Flashy" moves would be needed to change your momentum vectors, either to get into the fight or to avoid blows. ]
[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. ## The Technology We're in the year 2250 on an Earth-like planet. All the space on the earth's surface has been used up by the population of 15 billion, so we're moving into the air. Cities, along with all the farming and other capabilities they need to thrive, are being built on hovering platforms. ## The Situation The construction project is almost complete. Wiring, services, roads, buildings, all have been put into place. There's just one thing left to go in: something on the end of the wires to squirt power juice down them. And nobody can decide what to use. ## Supplies This hovering city will come over another major city once approximately every six months. The city has batteries: total capacity 4GAh. At this point, cables and pipes are dropped, and supplies and power can be sent up to the city. After 24 hours, it disconnects again and moves on. ## The Question What power source is the best to plug into the end of the wires? It has to satisfy the following conditions: * Sustain a city the size of London (7 million people) for 6 months at a time without refuelling. * Can supply the city with a deficit of 4GAh over the six months; the deficit will be made up by the batteries. * BONUS: Can keep the city hovering indefinitely. I have tagged this [hard-science](/questions/tagged/hard-science "show questions tagged 'hard-science'") because I am looking for a numerical comparison of power sources, since that is the only way I see to qualify a "best" power source to avoid this being too subjective. [Answer] The only possible answer to your question is nuclear (fusion or fission, I'm not picky) and that still isn't reasonable. I'm afraid "hard science" answers won't satisfy your criteria. Some critiques of your question. How Much Power?! A large city uses GW of power not MW. According to [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom#Overview) per capita energy usage in the UK is 244 TWhr / year and this site claims [average energy consumption of 35.8 GW](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom). Since London's population is about 11% of the UK total, this makes London's power requirements about 3.9 GW of operating electrical generation. This is about 100 times the energy storage you planned to provide. City Power Renewables don't work for you they are energy diffuse - meaning you needs lots of heavy things to generate the necessary power. One of those giant high efficiency wind turbines might have a rated power generation of 2 MW but likely generated power of less than 20% of that. So your city might require 70,000 or more of these to generate its power needs for all things excluding hovering and that's a lot of weight - which we'll find out later, is a bad thing (TM). *4/23/15 correction* London requires about 3.9 GW of operating capacity not the previously quoted 47 GW. Wind Turbine Rated Power Generation ![Wind Turbine Rated Power Generation](https://i.stack.imgur.com/c3ebf.jpg) Just how much might such renewable energy source weigh? I ask because weight will be a hugely important factor, you need something energy dense (lots of energy per unit weight) as well as something that doesn't require fuel $ \rightarrow $ so you're talking nuclear power (fusion or fission). Here's an interesting article about the [energy efficiency](http://www.brighthubengineering.com/power-plants/72369-compare-the-efficiency-of-different-power-plants/?PageSpeed=noscript) of various power generation schemes. Solar Power Mass produced solar cells [can produce up to $ 175 \frac {W}{m^2} $](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panel#Efficiencies). However, if you plug inefficiencies into their operation (such as 50% of the time, they generate no power at all and most of the day they produce far less than the advertized peak generation), you'll get about $ 44 \frac {W}{m^2} $. In order to completely supply the necessary power for such a city (ignoring the hovering), you'd need about 893,141,945 $ m^2 $ or a square about 30 km on a side worth of solar panel. Energy Storage You mentioned story your power in batteries in between "refueling" stops and using it when intermittent energy sources (like solar and wind) aren't available. For a test case, let's think about storing a night's worth of power. A night is 12 hours \* 3.9 GW power generation = 47 GWh of power storage. Battery Specific Power ![Battery Specific Power](https://i.stack.imgur.com/0MgQX.jpg) If we take our storage needs of 47 GWh and divide by the best storage shown on the graph of 200 Wh / kg we get: $$ M\_{batteries} = \frac {47 GWh}{200 Wh/kg} \rightarrow = 234,449,761 kg = 234,449 tonnes $$ Batteries are limited by the energy of molecular bonds. However, nuclear power comes from the energy of the strong nuclear force and this is a 1,000,000 times more energetic per unit weight. Even though we suck at extracting this energy in an efficient manner (we can only extract about 0.25% of the nuclear reaction in our power plants), it's extremely high energy density makes it something like 10,000 better for energy storage and extraction than the next best option. Hovering Hovering introduces all sorts of issues of its own. The first of which is we generate lift by means of a propellant via conservation of momentum. Aircraft engines and wings use the atmosphere as a propellant but must supply the energy to move it. The only propulsive scheme ever proposed to produce the kind of thrust you would need is the [Project Orion nuclear pulse propulsion](http://jim2b.blogspot.com/2010/11/the-case-for-space-viii-nuclear-pulse.html). It uses nuclear bombs to provide the energy, detonating about 1/sec. This engine could lift 8,000,000 tons (about the size of a small city into orbit) using only 800 bombs with a yield of about 272 kt each and do it in about 14 minutes. You'll need something even more energetic than this to lift itself and keep your London sized city floating for 6 months or more. If we assume a "small city" is one of 70,000 people and London is a city of 7,000,000, then we need to scale this huge craft up by a factor of 100x. The Project Orion designers didn't include any planning for something of that size so I have no idea if that's practical (the engineer in me says we'll run into problems) but let's assume we can. This means we need to boost our bomb yields up by 100x - putting them at 27 mt each. Scale test of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQCrPNEsQaY> Even this highly energetic propulsion scheme could not carry its fuel and keep a city floating for 6 months. So your city must use a propulsion scheme even more energetic than detonating nuclear bombs under it to keep it floating. Detonating nuclear bombs introduces a host of other issues (radiation protection and variable apparent gravity chief among them). Although we could make life in your city survivable, it won't be comfortable. But imagine the conditions on the world underneath your floating city with something more energetic than a 27 mt nuclear bomb detonating every second for a 6 month period. We're talking about total annihilation of all life on the planet in very short order. The Answer If you exclude the power required to hover, you could reasonably power your city with either sort of nuclear power. If you include the energy costs of hovering, then hard science isn't your friend. You'll have to introduce a lot of handwavium to make your dream a reality. The combine requirements for energy storage, propulsion, power generation, etc. all don't fit with the world as we know it - not even in theory. You need fiction to make this work and plausible fiction won't do it in this case. A Possible Out One possible out to the above problems is this: physics says energy isn't expended if the object doesn't move in the gravity field. Putting this another way; if you can find a way to levitate this, other than through conventional propulsion, then you aren't actually expending energy. One possible way to do this is magnetic levitation. Create a track that generates a (hugely powerful) magnetic field and place superconductors in your city. Superconductors expel magnetic fields from the material and this results in levitation. Although the physics say this is possible, I don't know what the strength of the magnetic field would have to be (certainly many orders of magnitude stronger than the Earth's) and we'll also require a new family of superconductors which don't break down under such powerful magnetic fields. There are 3 properties that cause superconductors to lose superconductivity; they are temperature, current, and magnetic field field strength. This is WAY above the critical magnetic field strength for anything that we know about. Chart of Maximum Critical Magnetic Field Strengths for various superconductors. ![Maximum Critical Magnetic Field Strengths for various superconductors](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jc3G3.gif) [Answer] Since the easy answer (lots and lots of helium/hydrogen balloons plus pretty much any power source, like nuclear or solar) would be boring, let us reach for something far more exotic: Geomagnetic. The city isn't so much hovering, as orbiting the planet. It has a [Space Elevator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator) of its own, plus a bunch of enormous sails that "anchor it" against the air. The space elevator is long and heavy enough on the end extending past the (semi-)geostationary orbit, that it keeps the city afloat, in a precarious balance between falling to the ground and flying into space. As it travels through the magnetic field of the planet, it acts as an [Electrodynamic Tether](http://www.tethers.com/edtethers.html) delivering all the needed electricity for the city - including power to [Air Ionisers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_ioniser) that stabilize the city's altitude and speed, negating effects of unpredictable winds and loss of altitude due to electrodynamic drag. In effect, the -actual- energy source is the wind power - not of natural, weather wind but of air drag against the atmosphere preventing the city from stopping and falling; propelling it along the planet surface; the huge sails return whatever is lost through electrodynamic drag of the tether. The tether itself acts as the generator of the wind-powered power plant and supplies energy for adjustments for the air ionisers (acting as jet engines) whenever just adjustment of sails would be insufficient. Ultimately, the original source of power is the rotation of the planet, transferred to the city through air drag. Edit: The [Wikipedia article on Electrodynamic Tether](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether) has enormous amounts of scientific analysis. "In 1996, NASA conducted an experiment with a 20,000-meter conducting tether. When the tether was fully deployed during this test, the orbiting tether generated a potential of 3,500 volts." The voltages available would be absolutely enormous, although the current would be limited by ability to discard ions - the Air Ionisers would play a critical role at the bottom end while the top would need powerful plasma emitters to provide the amperage - they wouldn't so much use the energy as provide it by turning the high static charge into current flow. Unfortunately I can't find any numbers on efficiency of these devices; still, most of their complexity, cost and losses nowadays come from need to provide enormous voltages - in our case we have more than enough voltage. (and if you want a simpler way or more current, lower a cable until it starts spewing thunders at the ground... the people below do have lightning rods, don't they?) Dissipation of ions on the other end of the cable would need plasma emitters, but there's just ludicruous amount of space for them there. Essentially the power available is regulated by ability of the sails and ion propellers to catch up with electrodynamic draw, with optional restriction of efficiency of the propellers at dissipating the ions, with the "trailing storm cables" option to remove this restriction. [Answer] The power source that's best for a hovering city is the one that has the [highest power to weight ratio.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-weight_ratio#Photovoltaics) There's a nifty new solar panel that's essentially [printed on kapton plastic](http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/95/22/10.1063/1.3268805), and provides about 150 MW of power if spread over an area the size of London (1,572 $ km^2 $). That's not a very big power plant, but it weighs very, very little. The downside, however, is that you're shading your city, and increasing your citizen's needs for artificial lighting. However if you instead put the panels on wings away from the city you can increase the size of the panels exponentially while preserving the direct light for the city. People below might complain. Also keep in mind that these are fragile - more weight might be needed for heavier plastics that can withstand the winds and storms you fly around in - but my guess is you'll actively avoid turbulence anyway so it might not be an issue. Beyond that, you're really looking at nuclear power. You can produce tremendous amounts of energy using nuclear reactors and it weighs significantly less than coal, oil, gas, and other energy sources. This will probably supply the bulk of your power. If you correctly harness the waste heat you won't need the huge cooling towers, you'll instead use it to provide for all the heating needs in the city (hot water, hot air, cooking, etc). Consider nuclear submarines and air craft carriers as examples - two smaller nuclear reactors designed to support a small city worth of people for months away from port at a time. You'll just have to scale it up further. [Answer] I can't even begin to answer the Bonus of how to make that city hover. But for operating the city... ## TL;DR: You can power your city with rooftop solar. But then you won't have rooftop recreation and farming available. --- I worked on a demonstration project of rooftop solar power, just plain-jane flat solar panels, but it was in Abu Dhabi, where there is lots of sun. It was much smaller in scale than what is needed to power London, but it gives me a good idea. Sorry I don't know how to do the pretty math things, but I'm just scaling up proportionately. I [had calculated](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/14581/just-how-unrealistic-is-a-hovering-city/14602#14602) that you need 2.8m residential units and also the associated Ground Floor Areas (GFAs) for a 7million person compact urban development. I also mentioned I received approvals on all the utility requirements for a complete standalone city I project managed for 100,000 people and the facilities, etc. associated. For a city with 100,000 people (and all the other 'buildings'), the total demand load was 319MVA. You're a city in the future, so much more efficient, so we're going to say a thousand people and their other facilities, homes, retail, etc.: 1,000pax:1MVA. Your seven million require 7,000MVA. Our rooftop solar project calculated that for about 1,000 people (and the offices, clinics, hotels, schools, etc. that come with it) we needed the rooftops of 4 hectares (ha): a lot, but if roofs are 80% of the urban portion (4,500ha), that means you can have 35,000ha of solar, and I'm sure you will have advanced solar by the year your story is happening. Enough to power your city for sure. The problem here is that we used a lot of your rooftops as recreational and farming uses in a previous question, in order to keep the city compact. I'm happy to calculate your demand loads, stormwater, domestic water, wastewater, TSE, etc. if you like. :) [Answer] Never going to happen unless you change your definition of hover to include hovering at a height of 35,786 km, a.k.a. geosynchronous orbit. Drop in an O'Neill cylinder there and you can maintain self-supporting colonies of 7 million people. O'Neill cylinders could be scaled up to support much larger populations too. And you could deploy large numbers of them in geosynch, Lagrange points, or orbits in general. You will need to master mining the asteroids too, but that should be realistic by 2250. You probably also want a space elevator to make getting up and down cheap. Also, by 2250 there would be no technical problem supporting a population much larger than 15 billion people on the earth. You adopt widescale fusion power, solar power satellites, or whatever combination of power sources that make the planet energy rich and clean and you can grow all the food you need with hydroponics or suchlike. Asteroid mining will also be useful for getting resources that are relatively rare on the planet. However you eventually reach the point where you want to move population off planet if the population grows without bound. [Answer] This is a supplement to @SF.'s answer just because. [Atmospheric electricity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_electricity) can be used to provide you some power, and technically could be done even without a space elevator. > > In 'fine weather', the potential, aka 'voltage', increases with altitude at about 30 volts per foot (100 V/m), when climbing against the gradient of the electric field.[3] This electric field gradient continues up into the atmosphere to a point where the voltage reaches its maximum, in the neighborhood of 300,000 volts. This occurs at approximately 30–50 km above the Earth's surface. > > > You could also put some capacitors and stuff to capture the lightning strikes that would be attracted by this giant structure too for a quick power boost. [Answer] As always, direct matter conversion ($ e=mc^2 $) yields the "best" power source and one does not need to have batteries or wires to charge them. Just suck in air and convert it to energy. Using @jim2b's calculation of 47GW for a city you only need half a kilogram of material a year to power your city. Given our pace of progress it is entirely plausible that we will know how to safely harness a technology of that sort in 200+ years. As others have said, levitation is your best known way to achieve a hovering city and again, the pace of discovery and innovation cannot be underestimated - especially if we devise an ASI. However, Isaac Asimov (I think?) came up with a 'gravitational lens' that focused a more distant body's gravitational attraction onto an object that allowed it to overcome 'local' gravity - focusing the Sun's or Jupiter's gravity on a car for example. How plausible this is is unknown but we can focus light as well as other frequencies of the EM spectrum. Gravity has the same drop off characteristics in its 'field strength' $ 1/r^2 $ - perhaps that is a tenable enough connection to believe that one can focus gravity just as we do light. [Answer] The answer is very simple, but you need to throw away your assumptions about how the city hovers in the air. It would not need to have any sort of power plant or batteries, but simply be built as a hot air balloon of enormous size. Buckminister Fuller described this as a "Cloud 9", after inventing the geodesic dome, noting that when the radius of a sphere doubles, the internal volume increases 8x. For very large spheres built on geodesic dome principles, once you get beyond a diameter of about a kilometre, the mass of air contained within is so vast it massively outweighs the structure of the dome. At this point, heating the air within by as little as 1 degree F compared to the outside air would cause the dome to float. A "city" capable of containing all the people of a major metropolitan city like London might not be possible as a single sphere, but a cluster of spheres, each several kilometres in diameter and linked together by cables, walkways etc. might be feasible. This has the added bonus of allowing "suburbs" to cast off for various reasons, as well as preventing a singular disaster from bringing the entire city down at once. Urban renewal is also much easier, since old bubbles can be detached and new once installed in their place. The heat energy needed to keep these huge hot air balloons aloft can be collected by solar energy during the day, and venting waste heat from internal activities and machinery into the interior at night. Moving farther north where the average temperature is cooler makes floating these bubbles much easier, while moving south to the tropics would require much more heat input into the domes to maintain a temperature differential between the inside of the dome and the outside air. One issue with any flying city, especially large ones, would be to minimize the unwelcome effects of shadowing huge areas of land underneath. "Cloud 9" balloons could be largely transparent, allowing some sunlight to pass through to the people below. [Answer] It would greatly depend on how high you want to hover. The density of air reduces as you go too much higher. And using air flow (or resistance of certain shapes to air flow) can provide lower energy solutions at lower atmospheric levels. This is not dissimilar to buoyancy. At lower depths, the buoyancy exerts more force than gravity (with density of material determining what the equilibrium point is). Certainly, egg-drop competitions provide a lot of insight into how to resist gravity with as little energy as possible. But if you want to float too high up, the atmosphere will be of little help. [Answer] Some things to consider: * Nuclear fission is high-output, but also very heavy not good for floating city. * Nuclear fusion is even higher output but the weight is same so not good. * Renewables such as solar,wind, might be good for you because they are slightly lighter but also they don't produceas much energy * Fossil fuels plants are similar to nuclear, they produce less energy but are still heavy - not good. * Hydroelectric or tidal is impossible/impractical that high in the air. Out of these option I think the best is probably mix - some renewables for less weight and maybe small scale normal power plant for more power. Batteries can be charged but will not produce energy, only distribute. [Answer] There is a way to pull this off without blowing up a 27 megaton nuke every second! For the city to be in orbit is obviously the best way to have it 'hover'. But in orbit there is no air! So what can we do? Well, for an object to be in orbit it's center of mass has to be at that elevation where its in balance between gravity and the centrifugal force. We also need air on the city, so the best solution I can think of is to have a counterweight on the city, above it, at a point that is far up enough to have the entire thing's center of mass at that perfect balance point. You will also probably need many carbon nanotube ropes of considerable diameter to hold these to massive objects together. A problem is that the city wont be able to stop to refuel. This can be solved by having ships fly to deposit the goods on the actual city, which would be expensive, but it would still be less expensive than having some sort of engine on 24/7. The distance would probably have to be adjustable because of the refueling (mass changes). This can be overcome if it is guaranteed that the waste removed has a similar mass to the new goods that are coming onboard. Another solution to prevent having to adjust the distances would be to have small correction thrusters or movable weights that move about the ropes. (Elevators) A benefit is that the carbon nanotube ropes could serve as space elevators, and then you can have a space suite on the counterweight, where people can hang out and see the stars. Additionally, you can have vast solar arrays on the counterweight, to power the city below. Or you can have nuclear generators up there, at a safe distance from the city. Solar panels would have direct light (no atmosphere to worry about, so the light is more intense). [Answer] Why do you want a single type of power? We as a society combine multiple types for a very good reason. Assumption - 7 million people = 3 million households. Power consumption from the hovering is a significant power draw. Now, a 4 GAh battery is pitiful for this city. The average British household uses 4 MWh/year. As I am lazy, I am equating 1 GWh = 1 GAh. That means that the battery can power 1000 households for a year, or 3M households for 2.67 hours. Less as we have to power the hoverdevice, and also maybe power industrial/commercial load. Any single power source is unlikely to be able to meet our needs. Solar will lead to the city crashing on the first night. Wind will lead to the city crashing when the wind dies down for several hours. Coal/Gas would be too heavy and would lead to the city crashing when the fuel runs out. Nuclear would either be too heavy (needs a lot of water as shielding) or would ether explode or leak radiation (can't remember off hand which is likely to be the biggest issue). Power would come via a hierachy. 1) Solar/Wind. 2) Hydro. 3) Waste to energy. 4) Demand Response. 5) Battery Storage. 6) Fossils. Power would need to come from a variety of sources, and demand response would be essential. Solar and wind would be the best in terms of total power produced over a year/weight required at the start, and by using both, you reduce how 'intermitant' they are. You would then need to have some contingency plans for when the sun and wind were both low. You could stretch the renewables a bit further through the use of hydro. The basic premise would be'catch water in the city (wastewater and rain), empty it out into pipes over the side, and at the bottom of these pipes, have a turbine. The higher the city floats, the more turbines you can have.' This also can be used to mitigate the risks of intermittent power, as you could store the water in the city until it is needed. Waste to energy solves two problems in one. Do it. Demand Response/Storage. Obviously, there is the battery as storage, we also have a great storage type, similar to 'pumped hydro' storage systems. We have a pumped city storage system. When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, have the city slowly ascend to the highest point it can by using more power for the hover device. At night, when the wind drops, take power out of the hoverdevice and the city gradually sinks. You can also use more normal demand response and simply cut off people's power if the wind and the sun both drop - people would prefer the TV to cut off than a horrible fiery death in a city crash. Then, you would want some fossil fuels for when these options aren't sufficient. Gas would likely be the best, as it can be turned on/off quickly to react to sudden drops in wind/solar. I really haven't looked up energy output per weight required, but that doesn't matter, as this is expected to be a low % of total annual power consumption, this is just "the city is about to crash, turn on the backup power". Coal takes hours/a day to spool up. Edit: I should make a comment on realisticness, and over 200 years of technological progress. I am assuming that all technology increases in efficiency by roughly the same rate, and that this rate is sufficient to make the question answerable. The evolution of batteries is the one exception, which I am assuming have evolved to the point where we can afford the 1 battery mentioned in the OP, and no others. These assumptions may involve some handwaving, such as assuming floating cities can be done without annihilating everything below. ]
[Question] [ Humanity detects a very suitable planet, lets call it Vaung, that is roughly 80 years away from us with their current technology. A ship is made and sent to colonize it, same old stuff. The issue is the following. At some point in the journey, after 30-40 years did not decide yet, our astronauts suddenly discover a planet that is even more suitable for human habitat. The ship is fitted with powerful telescopes and whatnot so detecting the planet is not an issue. The issue is how can we not detect this planet that is like 30-40 years closer to us? Note that humanity spent billions of dollars and over 4 years frantically searching for a suitable planet and deciding on the original chosen planet because of it's proximity. So. I want a scientific or scientifically based phenomena that can lead the astronauts to be like: That makes sense as to why we did not discover the planet earlier. Guess we better consider setting up shop here because it's even closer. This is an important point as there are other elements at play here and I want my astronauts to be really oblivious to anything unnatural happening on the planet. I understand that deviating from the mission should not be accepted but this is not here or there. Nor what is on the planet since I do want to explain this in a normal natural way instead of hand waving it with magic or a super duper advanced alien civilization...etc What explanation can be plausible? Edit: Sorry if the distance is not clear. Lets just say planet B is half the distance of planet A. Planet A is the original destination that is discovered earlier, while B is the one we want to be discovered later. [Answer] Short version: The planets of the system are small and the ecliptic is tilted vertically, and perpendicular as seen from Earth but the ship gets close enough to resolve an individual body or for its point of view to show transit events. Long version: There are [five ways to find an exoplanet](https://www.paulanthonywilson.com/exoplanets/exoplanet-detection-techniques/) from Earth, we need to eliminate them all. So if you have a star system with no gas giants in it, at least no big ones then Direct Imaging is out as it mainly detects massive young exoplanets in wide orbits. Radial Velocity will also fail as it is best for finding massive planets in tight orbits. All planetary orbits have an [ecliptic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecliptic#Plane_of_the_Solar_System), a flat plane along which the orbital track lies. For Transits to be visible the ecliptic of the exoplanet needed to cut across the star as seen from Earth, the same is true for Microlensing which is caused by the transit of a world too small to resolve in the glare of its parent star. Transit Timing Variations rely on being able to see transits in the first place. For the vast majority of the star systems we have observed it is the case that its orbital tracks are close enough to parallel to the Earth's own for transits to be visible. All these ecliptics lie close to the rotational plane of the galaxy as a whole but it is possible for a planetary system to have an ecliptic that is perpendicular to our own. If that were the case then we couldn't see any occlusion of the star by any of its planets. Given what we are continuing to learn from the [Kepler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_space_telescope) data not being able to see any evidence of planets in orbit from Earth would be a curiosity worthy of scrutiny on the way past. Being much closer may allow the crew to directly observe the back scatter from a world with high [albedo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo). Being at a different viewing angle may allow them to observe transit events that are invisible from Earth. Either of these may invite further investigation if slowing down is not too expensive. [Answer] The habitable "planet" is actually a moon of a super Jupiter. Telescopes in the Sol system were unable to resolve the moon from the planet it orbited. However, as the colony ship passed much closer to it on its way to the planet that was detected, they got a better look and spotted the moon. ## Edit An lengthier answer in response to comments: The question doesn't give any information about how fast the ship travels, just that journey time is 80 years. Lets assume a distance of about 20 light years. That makes the ship fast, but not completely unrealistic with near future tech. If they check every star system within that distance, that's a survey of 83 star systems. That feels like a lot of work to do in just four years. The search was presumably for habitable bodies. Exactly how they orbited the star would be of less importance than having surface water, suitable atmospheric pressure/composition, comfortable gravity, protection from solar radiation and so on. However, while detecting exoplanets is really hard (See Ash's excellent [answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/215417/78620) for a summary of the techniques used), detecting exomoons is even harder. As of October 2021 I don't believe that a single confirmed detection has been published, although there are several good candidates. Given the difficulties and time pressure, it doesn't seem unreasonable that researchers might look at a system and say "There is a large Gas Giant that makes a Terrestrial planet in the habitable zone impossible... Lets move to the next system." Missing the tiny hidden signal that gives away the presence of the moon... The searchers pick their (more distant) target and launch the ship. By good luck however, the star system with the better habitable body is close to the trajectory to the target star. Passing within a few thousand AU, the difficult to spot (at 10ly) moon sticks out like a sore thumb to the ships sensors. [Answer] Have you ever walked in a fog so thick you don't see a pole until you slam your nose onto it? This is what might have happened: if in the line of sight between Earth and the planet there was something increasing the noise, the signal of the planet presence would simply become too small to be detected. It could be dust, it could be gas, it could be a more luminous star. [Answer] It wasn't visible from the original angle: Since you're talking about distances in 10s of years, I have to assume the planets we're going to are extrasolar (that is it orbits a different sun than our own/their own). If it has a very long orbit (Pluto take 247.78 years to orbit the sun), then perhaps it was just behind the sun the whole time! Once you got far enough around the sun, the slowly orbiting planet was revealed. If they're inside the solar system, the timescales are a bit off I think, but you could do the same concept, where the orbits are synchronyzed with the planet always hidden behind our sun. [Answer] The simplest answer: the star, and it’s planets were not visible from earth *because a nebula was in the way. Nebulas are clouds of gas and dust (mostly hydrogen) that obscure visible light. We don’t really know what may be on the other side of one and indeed something like half of the Milky Way is not visible to us [because of obscuring nebula](http://www.astronomynotes.com/ismnotes/s2.htm#:%7E:text=The%20interstellar%20medium%20makes%20up,the%20rest%20is%20%22dust%22.). So we can actually see more of the Andromeda galaxy than we can of our own. Here’s a famous example, the Pillars of Creation [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/E7Nud.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/E7Nud.jpg) In this image, the stars that look like they might be in* the nebula are actually in front of it, we do not know what is behind it. However, a spaceship that had moved far enough away from the earth, could see what was behind it, including perhaps, previously unknown stars and their planets. Here is an example of a true dark nebula, Barnard 68 [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/B5DQa.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/B5DQa.jpg) Like all known dark nebula it is large and far away. However, this does not mean that all dark nebula are large and far away. In fact there is every reason to believe that smaller obscuring clouds of gas and dust (i.e., dark nebula) are very common, however, the problem is that like Barnard 68 above and the vast majority of dark nebula we cannot see them, we can only infer them because of what we cannot see. So we can "see" Barnard 68 only because of its size and the large bright star field behind it. (the Pillars of Creation nebula is one of the rare exceptions, we can truly see it because it is lit up by the stars just in front of it). For smaller nebula that are not in our line of sight within the galactic plane, there are neither enough stars behind them, nor are they large enough to allow us to "see" them in this way. However, because stars are created from nebula, there's every reason to believe that nebula are quite common. [Answer] I make no claim to sufficient expertise in astrophysics to assure you the following is credible... [but I did sleep virtually (given a bit of literary license) in a Holiday Express last night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dOHEw8izno), so you're in luck OK, I admit it, I slept very comfortably in my own bed last night. Still... * [Parallax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax): the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions, e.g. through the viewfinder and the lens of a camera. * [Gravitational Lensing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens): A gravitational lens can occur when a huge amount of matter, like a cluster of galaxies, creates a gravitational field that distorts and magnifies the light from distant galaxies that are behind it but in the same line of sight. The effect is like looking through a giant magnifying glass. * The second planet orbits a [white dwarf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf), a star that is hot, but dim. * The second planet orbits a [star that dims oddly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_that_dim_oddly), meaning that there's some unknown effect causing the star to be dim at the time the first planet was discovered, so the second planet couldn't be ~~easily~~ detected. Examples of what theoretically could cause the dimming would be a massive dust cloud in orbit around the star or a massive planet in a closer orbit that orbits at one heckava inconvenient orbit. * To build on @L.Dutch's answer, a dust cloud or nebula that masks the view of the second planet from Earth, but the point of view changes as the ship travels, allowing it to see behind the dust cloud or nebula. * The planet orbits (very close orbit, here!) an unusually warm [Y Dwarf star](https://www.space.com/12714-coldest-failed-stars-brown-dwarfs-wise.html) that's too cool and too dim to allow the planet to be seen from Earth, especially with that whomping close orbit.... [Answer] (this answer assumes sub-lightspeed travel, say less than 30%) They came too close, the cloaking does not work anymore The newly discovered planet has an advanced civilization. Unfortunate events in the past were a good reason to develop a planetary cloak. This cloaking technology prevents the planet to be discovered by pirates roaming around the section at warp speeds. It is based on a trick involving satellites and light interference patterns. This cloaking field has a certain distance threshold. When you come near, at some point you'll not see the interference patterns anymore, you see the planet. The colonists have come really close. Of course their approach was discovered by the aliens years go.. it was no reason to change the cloak, these primitive humans pose no threat.. [Answer] ## Trojan planet Trojan planets, which follow or precede the lighter of two stars at a 60-degree angle (L4/L5 points), [can usually be detected](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.03455.pdf) by transit timing variations. This is important since the Earthlings would not have launched an interstellar-level project without some very good research, possibly including unmanned observatories flying several light years into space and measuring transits not visible from Earth. However, the paper cited also shows (Table 5 at the end) that the transit timing variations can be extremely small for a few cases. So there is a point at which astronomers could have written off the odds of a planet in a given system based on a limited period of instrumental data availability. Coming nearer the system, observing it with the best available instruments, the ship might detect more subtle variations, or brute force an image resolving the planet by eye, or use some cleverer astronomical deduction. [Answer] Consider the real-life case of trying to see planets orbiting our nearest neighbor: the binary stars are too close together so the glare spoils the effort. The star in question could be a binary, or an "optical binary" where another star is in our line of sight behind it. Either way, having another star in the field where advanced telescopes carefully block out the image of the central star to try and see planets — and also obtain the atmosphere spectra of the planet — would prevent such an observation. Perhaps we knew there were planets there. What we didn't know was the exact mass and radius and "life signs" primarily gained through visible direct observation of that planet. Years later, such measurements became possible due to further advances in technology, or the movement of the stars out of the way, or observatories that are stationed far away from Earth. [Answer] A simple solution would be orbiting directly opposite the star <https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/could-there-be-an-unseen-planet-on-the-other-side-of-the-sun/> added from comments: A counter-Earth can't exist in our solar system specifically because of the gravitational effects of our exact solar system. Nothing in the question specifies this is the context. In another solar system, there's no reason a counter-earth-like planet can't exist. ]
[Question] [ We are building a 3D game world that portrays an advanced lunar town that's as technically accurate as possible, for the purpose of people roleplaying living there and learning about space development. We have a complex rover right now closely based on one that was designed at JPL for the Constellation program. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/D30M6.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/D30M6.png) It's still rather rough, it doesn't have much detail and the joints need redoing. It's very large, in this posture the distance between legs is around 15 m. We'll be making other more conventional vehicles but this one is good for considering the issues, I think. The town is large and vehicles need to get around quickly on the surface. Never mind if that's how a real town would work, for the game, it's necessary. The vehicles are going to need a top speed of 120 km/h or so. Control at that speed is the issue. I said the rover can use its legs to shift its weight to help it go around curves and brace when it brakes. That helps, but it isn't enough, and I don't know that it makes sense to do that with other vehicles. Roads can use some kind of porous sintered surface to maximize grip. Also helps, still not enough. I've toyed with the idea of drifting - having the vehicle software do planned slides where the wheels accelerate into the direction being turned towards while working with the fact that the vehicle is going to continue in the previous direction to a large degree until the friction of the wheels succeeds in moving it in the new direction. I think it's better explained by watching a few seconds of Tokyo Drift. <https://youtu.be/mFglGV3n5SM> That might be enough but you'd need wide roads, and to anticipate turns always, and you don't want anything unexpected. Although one nice thing is that all the wheels on the rover can turn in any direction they like at any time, and spin independently in either direction at whatever speed served navigation best. Banking the roads a lot will help. But might that be a problem for vehicles moving slower, as it might need to be extreme? Maybe it would be necessary to also have lanes that aren't banked, for slower vehicles. The last concept I have is to put claws on all wheels, that dig in when necessary. So road material would also need to be good for being dug into. Can anyone help me refine these concepts into an overall system? [Answer] # Tramlines Just run rails next to the roads, or between movement lanes. Your vehicle clings to the rail, allowing it to zip along at much higher speed than mere surface traction allows. This could even allow them to crest a "hill" and not fly off into the distance, which would be a very real problem when gravity is low, speeds are high and the terrain is not perfectly flat. In effect, your vehicles move like amusement park rollercoasters. With the difference that they are self-propelled, and their agility allows them to move from one rail to an adjacent one with ease, thus allowing navigation. They would still be able to move over "non-road" surface, but at the vastly reduced speed that surface traction on dusty regolith will allow. Certainly much, much less than along a prepared, railled, roadlane. [Answer] ## Basic limits Your vehicle is limited by the coefficient of friction between the tyres and the road, multiplied by the normal force. Since both the required force to accelerate and the normal force are proportional to the mass of the vehicle, this works out to be "like Earth, but slower due to the lower gravity". However, that only applies to acceleration. Your vehicle can ultimately reach higher speeds than Earth vehicles due to the lower wind resistance. I'll assume from now on that you want high acceleration for "cool manoeuvering". --- ## Teeth If your road surfaces can be relied upon to be either hard-to-shift or sandy (easy to dig into), you can borrow from cold-weather wheels on Earth, and add spikes to dig into the road. This increases the lateral force you can apply, by exploiting the mass and inertia of the soil which has to be moved before the spike can move. In sandier soil, your wheels might have shaped blades on them to dig deeper and come out more cleanly, at the cost of not being able to venture onto hard ground. In game terms, this will look like bladed types, flying sand, and a slight y-offset. ## Don't drift On Earth, there are complicated anti-lock braking systems to prevent drifting. This is because drifting occurs with imperfect contact between wheel and road, or when one-or-the-other is disintegrating. Drifting actually reduces the force you can apply. ## Banking Banking the curves is possible and is used on Earth to allow inertia to substitute for gravity. At the logical extreme, a rollercoaster loop uses this - and you will notice that gravity always feels like it points "down". Yes, you would need different slopes, but a continuous curve will work better than lanes - faster vehicles will naturally travel higher up. However, there's a reason that Earth highways don't have sharp turns - the inertia of the passengers will squish them "down". This problem will be exaggerated for people used to lunar gravity. For a game, that just means your vehicle will sink lower on its simulated suspension. ## Rails Anywhere you can build a road, you can build a rail. Rails require tensile as well as compressive strength, but that's already necessary if you want your wheel to have maximum grip. Taking a high-speed tram from A to B is likely to be better for all trips except long exploration, unless the trips are short enough to walk. Magnetised tyres can also stick to a metal rail, giving players an incentive to follow the tracks with vehicles. ## Cheat If you're making a game, you can declare positions to change precisely as you wish - or ramp up the ground's coefficient of friction until your lunar surface could grip greased butter. If you need it to, and it doesn't cause other problems, it's an acceptable break from reality. ## Thrusters JBH's answer mentions sticking a rocket on top of your car. But at that point, why point it downward? This is far from efficient or realistic, but has gameplay advantages. If you want to justify it, your car can scoop up soil and toss it out behind - hardly efficient, but nor is reaching 120 km/h in a couple of seconds for a trip so short that the acceleration time matters. ## Hookshot You only need lateral force, and nobody said it had to come in via the wheels... if every street /intersection has a sturdy pole, you can use that to make any turn you need. Road rules and collision avoidance are your players' problem. (Though I'd advise some "please slow down in urban areas" signage.) Sharp corners only matter if there's something to corner around, and if there's something to turn around then there's something to grab onto. (Oh, except for chasms. "Aaaggghh!") [Answer] My first idea is a bit facetious, but velcro. Now, having said that, let's create something velcroish. * Let's magnetize the roadway. High power magnets are interwoven into the rubber (or whatever material you're using) of the tires. The roads are built with ferrous tracks. Basically we're holding the car onto the road, allowing for greater speed. EDIT: Or, now that I think about it, put the magnets in the road where they can have a boat load of power applied to them and make your tires magnetic-steel-belted radials. Probably a bit more efficient. Cheers. My second idea was also a bit facetious, but vacuums. ... * I've often wondered if race cars develop a vacuum under the car to hold it onto the road better (beats me if they do). Extending this to the moon, where there's already a vacuum, let's add thrust to the top of the vehicle to compensate for the lack of gravity holding it down. I doubt an ion thruster would be enough, but since we combust with gas here on Earth, what's to say that a little gas (and oxidizer) wouldn't be useful on the Moon? A little illogical logic suggests that you'd get the same mileage since the fuel you're not using to push the car forward would be needed to hold it down. My third idea is a lot less facetious. * We already have a thriving monorail system here on Earth - why wouldn't you use a monorail system on the moon? (I know that you have game requirements that demand personal, free-to-drive-anywhere vehicles, but I'm throwing this out there. Call it a [frame challenge](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7097/40609).) [Answer] If you are going cross country then you'll want something approximating a dune buggy - which unsurprisingly is pretty much what the lunar rover looks like, which the other answers have noted. I could imagine a suspension system that could point the axle of any wheel in any direction, under software control, which could proactively retract (raise) a wheel that's about to go over a bump to smooth out your ride and reduce the risk of going "air" borne, or point it sideways to improve cornering. If you're building roads rather than going going cross-country, then "low friction" isn't a problem; rubber tyres will still give you roughly 1-gee (lunar, of course) of static force in any direction. (If anything, traction should be slightly better because there's no air - or water - getting between the tyres and the road.) However maybe the real point of this question is acceleration, braking and cornering, rather than friction per-sé. In that case I would just assume that you make all the corners 6× wider, the race 6× longer, etc. I think you're going to see a more endurance racing style rather than drag-race style. You might want to consider having broadly 2 classes of vehicles: pressurized and open. Rules for crash-resistance would also be a bit more stringent than on earth, as you not only have to protect the occupants from impact, but also protect their life-support systems (at least long enough for the "ambulance" to arrive). [Answer] ### Wrong kind of wheels and tyres If you're going any kind of speed, then baby pushchair wheels are not your friend. They're too thin so they'll snap with any kind of side loading, they have next to no contact area, and they don't roll well over anything but an ideally-smooth surface. You want motorbike tyres. They're designed to roll well in a straight line, but also with curved walls to allow the wheel to lean and apply side loads well. Instead of "pushchair" wheels with a central mount and two skinny wheels on each side, you want "bike" wheels with a mount on each side and one fat wheel in the middle. The lower joint of your rover will basically be a bike fork. The tyre has some natural "give" to let it roll over unsmooth surfaces, and the legs of the rover presumably will become active suspension. I'm not clear how you expect this thing to get up to speed. Will you have motors driving the wheels? Or will it essentially be a roller-skating robot, like a [Wheeler](https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/474285404504684964/) with more legs? [Answer] Vertical walls on curves Put a vertical wall on the outside of each curve. The rover keeps the middle outside wheel remaining vertically oriented on the ground and raises the forward and rear legs to the horizontal position so the wheels are running along the wall. Key considerations: * This only works for curves, not intersections, unless you want the rover to be using its legs to jump over walls when it wants to go straight ahead! Maybe use the magnetic system proposed by JBH as part of the traffic control at intersections only without needing to magnetise all sections of all roads. * By corollary, roads can be relatively crude surfaces so long as they are smooth - hitting even a very mild bump at 120 kph at 1/6 G will send a rover soaring out of contact with the road surface. * Height of the wheels running along the wall (ie the practical wall height) needs to be as high as the centre of gravity of the vehicle to allow for considerable speed. * Practical engineering consideration - given the specified top speed of 120 kph, build the walls and legs so they can take the outwards force they will experience at that speed. One disadvantage of a wall with wheels rather than banking the road is that significant sideways force will be experienced by the occupants and cargo of the rovers - secure payloads accordingly. One further general consideration is emergency braking for cars travelling at 120 kph on the moon. Braking by friction with the road will be very slow. Parachutes (as used by drag racers on Earth) are obviously no use. Retro rockets are the best bet for emergency braking, firing anchors requires very careful engineering of cables and will have variable results depending on the surface the anchor is interacting with. [Answer] # Maglev Since you are in a vacuum, and in low gravity, a maglev track needs to spend far less energy to keep the train elevated, and does not need to worry about drag. Additionally in the vacuum environment, you may be able to keep the superconductors cold without excessive effort, so long as they are not attached to anything warm, as the vacuum forms an insulator. [Answer] Larger curve radii and larger braking distance Being able to control a car at 120 km/h isn't easy in the Earth, either, so we need large highways with smooth slopes, long acceleration lanes and large curves. In the Moon that isn't different, but since friction force is about one sixth of that in Earth, for the same design speed curve radii should be about six times larger than here. Acceleration and braking lanes should be about six times longer. Other answers have mentioned banking. Banking six times more than in Earth highways don't seem to have to cause problems, although the exact ratio depends on the combination of radius and speed. And just a side note: beware of dust. Lunar dust might affect the friction coefficient between wheel and highway. Although I can't be sure about if it is going to increase or decrease it, that would be worth investigating before designing your highway. [Answer] Softer rubber, terestrial automobile tires are a fairly hard rubber that grips poorly. Using a softer rubber with a higher coefficient of friction would cause faster wear, but with the reduced gravity there will be less load on them. Drag racers use soft tires to get more grip. Banked corners will help too. see "indy500" and "wall of death" for extreme terestrial examples If you're going off road sling-shotting around, or hopping against fixed obstacles may help with rapid cornering. Your machine has long legs that with the right spring-loaded hinges could do quite an effective sideways hop. [Answer] ## Tubes of lunarcrete At speeds on 120 km/h and higher, the equivalent of motorways on Earth, a manufactured road system on Luna would ideally consist of single-direction tubes with bendy curves, with branches but no crossroads (multiple levels instead, like motorway intersections on Earth). A system of arteries, more or less. The cars could resemble formula racecars, with wide wheelbases and low centers of gravity. If the curvature of the tube is smooth enough overtaking faster vehicles can pass almost overhead, riding upside down for a second. Some markings on the inside of the tube are probably needed, otherwise it would be very hard to tell up from down. The inertial accelerations will be dominant, so passengers and cargo will need to be secured in all directions (multiple seatbelts, etc.). If driving upside down inside the tubes is too scary, car designs with triangular wheelbases could be trialed. The tubes could be pressurized or not. Fully covered ceiling probably also evens the temperature conditions inside, and protects from smaller meteors, even without pressurization. [Answer] Travel by jumping This robot/rover seems to be able to jump, and to absorb and dampen jumps, thanks to the large clearance of its legs. Moving on the moon by jumps can have the advantage of freedom of exploration. There could be two type of jumps: Small electrically powered hops (1m to 20m distance, max height say 20m) could be powered by the legs only. Bigger planned jumps assisted by a thruster lit at say 20 m of altitude, both for the departure and the arrival. (in order not to raise too much dust) The initial jump and the reception are assured by the legs, the same way as for non assisted jumps. The thruster does not allow the vehicle to go orbital and provides gentle acceleration and deceleration, whatever the length of the jump. (say max 2g) Anyway large suborbital distances can be possible. This solution cannot be all electric since it requires a main thruster and maybe attitude control thrusters. Yet when out of fuel, small electrically powered hops are still a way to get back to the base. [Answer] Flat roads, with lateral guard-rail (emphasis on "rail"). The vehicle moves at whatever speed it needs to: when necessary it extends two lateral legs and connects with the guard-rail (it could be a vertical border with a deep horizontal groove). Then, centripetal force is supplied by the mechanical reaction from the groove. Two counterlateral wheels could be shaped in such a way to optimize connection with the lateral grooves at the sides of the road, using whichever of the two is more convenient. Or if necessary, the road could be exactly as wide as the vehicle with both lateral balancers extended, so that both grooves could be used - in that case, overtaking wouldn't be possible of course. ]
[Question] [ Suppose Ship A is being targeted by Ship B, which intends to use a laser weapon in an attempt to destroy Ship A. Ship A has special technology that allows it to alter gravity (mainly used for generating artificial gravity for the crew and to lessen the effects of inertia when changing direction), but this device also allows it to increase the gravitational pull of the ship, as if it had more mass. If Ship B points it’s laser weapon directly at Ship A and fires, and Ship A created a gravity well (similarly to an interdictor from Star Wars), could the gravity produced by the ship shield it from the laser by redirecting it via gravitational lensing? And if so, would using this trick inadvertently (on the captain’s part) turn Ship A into a black hole? [Answer] There are several problems with this. First of all, when someone fires a laser at you, you aren't going to know it until it hits you, so this would only work if Ship A were CONTINUOUSLY creating a gravity well in between itself and ship B. You couldn't use it reactively without letting it hit you first, although you could potentially limit the damage. > > And if so, would using this trick inadvertently (on the captain’s part) turn Ship A into a black hole? > > > No, but in order to do this you'd have to be able to artificially CREATE a black hole, and a pretty massive one at that, in order to deflect a laser beam any meaningful distance. At that point it'd be simpler to just create the singularity right on top of Ship B and destroy it rather than mess around deflecting laser beams. TLDR: If you can create a gravity field powerful enough to deflect a laser beam, you're so powerful you don't have to worry about deflecting laser beams. [Answer] [Gravity lensing](http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys240/lectures/grav_lens/grav_lens.html) works for light paths skimming the attractor. For light paths crossing the attractor the impact would not be avoided. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PJ5to.gif)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/PJ5to.gif) So, your device would simply deviate the laser passing around the ship, not the laser hitting in. Basically, it would work on protecting the ship only if the enemy had a poor aiming. [Answer] Depends on the range and timing. * Ship B tracks ship A with visual sensors. Ship A has this "gravity shield" running, so the apparent position of A will be distorted. * Ship B fires a laser at the apparent position of A, and the laser beam is distorted the same way the detection is distorted. The laser hits the actual position of A. What you describe might work if the distances are high enough to "re-focus" the "gravity shield" between firing and impact. In that case, wouldn't there be time for conventional evasive maneuvering? So your idea calls for long range combined with an inability to dodge. Even with gravity manipulation technology, does A require fuel or reaction mass? Or is it really large? [Answer] Since such a shield would need to be turned on in advance of a laser being fired, it must cover all points of the ship that might be hit, effectively wrapping the ship in a layer dense enough to exert a high enough force on a beam of light so as to effectively make it miss the target entirely. This would place enormous force on the ship itself, as it would basically be drawn to collapse outward into said layer. Also, as pointed out in o.m.'s post, any changes to the path of an incoming laser beam would also equally change the apparent position of the ship, cancelling out the efficiency of the shield. However, an application of this that fits his parameters of the target being shot at from long distances and being extremely large could be interplanetary laser strikes, so maybe there would be a use. Of course, the ecosystem on the planet would be catastrophically altered by the addition of a black hole layer to the atmosphere. [Answer] L.Dutch is correct in his answer. Increasing the mass of the ship would be useless if the enemy has good aim. It will still be hit at the center. You could then be smart and fire a mass effect missile. The missile itself becomes more massive and deflects the laser. But how much mass would you need? Einstein himself calculated that the Sun works as a lens with a focal distance of 542 AU's. The formula is: $$ lensing \space angle = \frac{4GM}{rc^2}$$ Where $M$ s the mass of the lens, $G$ is a well known constant, $r$ is the distance from the center of mass and $c$ is the speed of light. So at for one Earth mass, if the beam passes by the mass at a distance of 100 km: $$ \frac{4 \times G \times 6 \times 10^{27}}{10^5 \times (3 \times 10^8)^2} $$ That equals a whopping 2,666,666.666 x $G$ degrees. However, G has a 10-11 built into it, so it works out to a fraction that is closer to $\frac{1}{100,000}$ degrees. You'd have to go very far for that to cause a miss. Now think about what you just did. If you are able to summon the mass of an Earth to use as defensive measure, don't use it as a lens, use it as a shield. The Earth has a radius of around 6,400 kilometers. It's more than enough to hide behind if it comes trailing at you, and massive enough that you should not be hit by the laser. ]
[Question] [ Could an atmosphere of 50% O₂ 25% Neon 23% Nitrogen and 3% trace gasses be survivable for a human being at the similar or slightly less atmospheric pressures as Earth? [Answer] Some of the information in this thread is questionable, so I'm adding my 2 cents (as a qualified rebreather diver): * rebreathers use soda lime absorbent material to remove the CO2 in their breathing loop. The CO2 passing through the scrubber absorbent is removed when it reacts with the absorbent in the canister; this chemical reaction is exothermic, which results in heat and moisture. * we target a PPO2 of 1.2 for most dives. Going above 1.6 is where toxicity starts to become an issue. That said, many divers report blurry vision after long (4+ hours) dives at 1.3. References: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebreather> <https://www.shearwater.com/monthly-blog-posts/co2-scrubber-divers-rebreather/> [Answer] This environment is almost certainly fatal, due to [Oxygen Toxicity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity): > > When the exposure to oxygen above 0.5 bar (50 kPa) is intermittent, it permits the lungs to recover and delays the onset of toxicity. > > > 0.5 bar would be your 50% O2 level at atmospheric pressures, so current medical knowledge says exposure to this environment must be intermittent. Oxygen toxicity occurs at points above 0.3 bar (30% at 1atm). It's more trouble as one progresses to higher levels, but that shows that such high oxygen levels are going to cause problems. [Answer] Even if the toxicity didn't do them in, this atmosphere would turn a small firecracker into a grenade. Higher concentrations of oxygen make things burn and/or explode more intensely. Don't believe just because I'm saying this. [Watch this video](https://youtu.be/_JkHB1hV7Hw) (you may jump to 0:50). Humans are dumb, and explosions are a recurring theme in the Darwin Awards. Any large group of people wouldn't survive in that atmosphere even if they were breathing an Earth-like mix of gases from a scuba gear. [Answer] If 3% traces are not a problem. Then the only thing that rises concern is an oxygen levels. Oxygen toxicity, as stated, will be part of your problems, as there are more, like production of oxygen species, sight defects and blindness in infants and more. * Oxygen at 50% is around levels that have no prominent toxicity for humans. So any healthy adult human will be able to live in such an atmosphere. * Such levels will be a problem for the weaker ones: children, elderly, sick. Your population will age faster and live less, your child mortality and birth defects most likely will push them to extinction. Good options are: * We live high. With altitude there is less air, so less oxygen partial pressure. Living 4000 m - will deal with most of problems, around 6000 meters will be Earth like. Do not forget your pressure cooker. * Balance atmosphere pressure and composition. You would like your oxygen partial pressure to be less than 30 kPa. Of note such an atmosphere is a fire hazard and promotes corrosion. [Answer] It would be survivable for moderate durations, but probably not for many days at a time. A partial pressure of oxygen (PPO2) of 0.5 (50% of O2 multiplied by 1atm of pressure) is considered the cusp of noticeable effects of oxygen toxicity and the equations used in diving for computing the allowable time limit works from that, so a PPO2 of 0.5 wouldn't return a valid result. The closest data point is the first entry in [diving tables](http://archive.rubicon-foundation.org/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/6310/SPUMS_V26N3_13.pdf?sequence=1) at a PPO2 of 0.6, which recommends a time limit of 720 minutes. If you wanted to increase the atmospheric pressure to 2atm, the new PPO2 would be 1, as 0.5\*2. Using that you should be able to find the allowable time for any combination of oxygen percentages and atmospheric pressures. ]
[Question] [ One day, a type 2 civilization with a taste for unusual meat stumble across earth. They then capture every human being on earth and take them to a planet where they are placed until they are eventually killed off and sold to every supermarket in the galaxy. And the females are also used for there milk which can always be found in aisle three in the dairy section. What would be the best way to butcher human meat and most efficiently? [Answer] > > a type 2 civilization > > > These would be people with the ability to make black holes from light ? Own their own Dyson Swarm and so on ? Seems very unlikely a type II civilization would need to slaughter actual animals to eat. It's practically a given they'd be able to manufacture meat that was indistinguishable from the real thing. > > I was asking what would be the best way to butcher and collect the meat and most efficiently > > > Most efficiently ? Grow your own "steaks" in a factory using advanced biochemistry or cloning technology or some technique. This avoids the slaughtering problem, the disposal of unwanted bits and the need to worry about breeding animals (always messy and terribly inefficient :-) ). Likewise milk. And I'm trying hard to imagine a reason a completely alien species would not find human meat and milk actually dangerous to eat, never mind like it. And I'm failing. So no butcher, just a large biochemical plant doing complex things with advanced techniques available to your average Type II civilization. [Answer] Humans are expensive creatures to keep. Slave holding was already dying in hte US when the civil war erupted because it was not economical in the long run. However, the easy way to farm humans is to leave them in place, then harvest a fixed percentage on a regular basis. Having never tasted human meat (apart from my own fingers burnt when soldering too inattentively) I would presume that there is a "best age" for the harvesting. Typically, farm animals are harvested as young adults. The ideal venue for harvesting, then, is (drumroll ...) high school. Lure the "favored" graduates into your slaughterhouse with the right incentives and then the rest is much like any cattle slaughter operation. [Answer] # Harvest after a growth spurt Here is a graph of human mass gain by year. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dnVwh.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dnVwh.jpg) There seem to be two best times. Either harvest after the steady childhood development phase, at age 6-8; or harvest after the adolescent growth sport finishes around age 15 for females and 18 for males. However, humans waste a lot of time and energy developing big brains. If you are really a Kardashev II civilization, you might do better breeding something that grows faster for the taste you want. Assuming that there is something in primate genetics that tastes good, a gorilla might be a better bet. They will grow to ~70 kg for a female and ~135kg for a male in only 10 years; plus they are easier to feed on a cheap, all-vegetation diet. Also, you are going to hell for making me think about eating 6 year old children. Teenagers are fine though, no one would miss them. [Answer] Don't take all the humans - take a subset (kidnap babies, or even kidnap humans, harvest eggs and sperm and create a first, clean slate generation) , bring them elsewhere and and create a primitive society. Have periodic sacrifices to the gods with humans or milk. Unlike most livestock, you can probably get them to grow their own food and feed themselves and just periodically skim your product off the top. Modern humans are too likely to rebel and you don't really need to ship humanity elsewhere. I'd actually suggest protecting your market by keeping other races away from earth, and keeping the humans from going too far away, while you run your primitive human farms. [Answer] What would be the best way to butcher human meat and most efficiently or what would be the most efficient way to farm humans? These are two completely different questions Free-range humans is the easiest. 1. Leave the humans on Earth. 2. Start "Move to a new planet Corp LTD" 3. Offer free land grants for new settlers on a planet 1500 light years away 4. Pop your willing settlers in their cryochambers / the snack freezer 5. Profit People will leave expecting to never return and they'll bring their whole families or just themselves if they have no-one. This will leave more room on Earth for more humans to breed, your snacks will freeze themselves and there is no communication with a planet so far away so nobody will notice for thousands of years that they're even missing. Just imagine the poor of China, Africa or India that have no land and no future. You'll have huge waiting lists to fill your snack cupboards up. Health checks and immigration rules means the beef will grade itself. It's food that farms itself..... [Answer] Unfortunately, humans aren't very "cooperative" when it comes to being farmed. As such, traditional farms would be immensely inefficient. With that in mind, I suggest more of a "free-range" approach. Here's the rough steps: 1. Find a suitable population of humans. 2. Reduce them to a stone-age technological level, provided that they aren't already there. 3. Gradually "harvest" humans at a rate slightly below the reproduction rate (to account for natural deaths). There's one catch. Assuming an average reproduction rate of 1.25 (2.5 per female) over a 35 year average life expectancy, the rough doubling rate is 120 years. With some slight jiggering to account for natural deaths, sustainable harvesting rates are on the order of "half the population every 130 years," which is quite low for a meat animal. In other words: *You're going to need a huge* population for this to work. [Answer] The question of efficiently harvesting humans for a type II civilization is somewhat strange since, at least I, would not expect such a civilization to be bothered that much with efficiency. That being said, one of the most efficient ways would be to keep them (us) like cattle. Keep them indoor and separately or in small groups and add mind numbing and reproductive drugs to the water supply and put them on a high fat diet or what the alien prefer. Without group interaction and after some generation you can breed preferable qualities, docility, etc. The efficient** butchering can be done per group the same as cattle. A little bit more technology minded would be to use the same method as shown in the matrix. Just keep the humans asleep in the pods and add the appropriate nutrients. Depending on the civilization this might be more efficient. [Answer] Perhaps the Type II civilization uses social engineering. Perhaps changing our society to be like Logan's Run, so everybody who turns a certain age (determined by testing for us to be highly flavorful) turns themselves into the church to be enlightened, and never more to be seen by living humans. The actual butchering is hidden from us. Or maybe we each have an implant designed to show when we are most flavorful. At any rate, I would separate human society into different regions/cities such that each one thinks they are the only one. It's better to have contented cows, er... human meat organisms. [Answer] Actually, this is fairly simple like dogs. In the early days we selected for traits that were desirable in the species. I.e. cute, loyal, etc. We just need to do the same thing with humans. So what records are we looking for? Accelerated maturity. Take a look at the youngest natural births. Some of those kids were as young as 6 or 7. This gives us a goal and test subject. Next we need to know how to increase muscle and fat production. That is simple. There's two copies of a gene that restricts the amount of muscle on individual for lean beef specifically. For fat it'll call for a high carb diet. For penning then in, put them on an earth with slightly more gravity or a solar system to far away for them to reach another easily. Alternatively you could breed intelligence out of them but that would drive profits way down. ]
[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/99595/edit). Closed 6 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/99595/edit) Let's try to imagine a human civilization where no religions were "invented" at any point in time. How could it be possible? My thoughts are about some specific type of thinking in such a civilization: for example, if they saw a lightning for the first time, people would not think "Zeus is angry", rather they would be thinking "Wow, what could it be? I need to investigate this thing!". As a possible way of developing such a type of mind, I'm thinking about ancient times, when people were not yet Homo Sapiens. Probably they were living in a dangerous environment, where they need to solve some logical puzzles to survive. And so this type of thinking is evolutionarily developed and leaves no place for thoughts about any supernatural beings. 1. What kind of environment could this be? Or, maybe, can you think of some other ways how such a civilization may appear? 2. How will this civilization progress? What will be the main differences in contrast to our current civilization? [Answer] The main problem here is that humans have a few inherent tendencies that lend themselves very well to becoming religious. For example, humans have a very strong ability to recognise patterns - so strong that it can be described as overactive. We tend to see and want to see patterns in and intentions behind any event and we'll imagine a pattern and imagine an agent behind it even when there may not be a pattern at all and everything just happened randomly that way. This is an evolutionary trait - the famous example is that if you hear a rustling in the bushes, assuming it's the wind when it's really a tiger gets you killed while assuming it's a tiger out to get you when it's really just the wind only makes you a little spooked, so that's what survives. With this tendency, imagining things like spirits of things or divine plans or guidance isn't far fetched. This isn't really an instinct you can make go away, only learn to restrain it with rationality. Humans also have a somewhat teleological world view. We are tool users and tool makers and this trait is pretty deeply seated within humanity - it's maybe the second most important trait after speech. Now, looking at the world in terms of what things are good for and/or made for also predisposes us to believe in purpose, and thus, divine purpose. Furthermore, since we make things for reasons, it is easier for us to think that other things may also have been made for reasons. Then, maybe the world and we are made too, and someone who could make us and the world would have to be super powerful - poof, you have invented creationism and religion. There's also mind-matter dualism, the belief that our consciousness is immaterial and different from matter. This is likely to be partially inherent as well, because children tend to assume this quite naturally. Of course, our consciousness isn't a thing, it is a process, but a process running in our material brain and body. It just doesn't feel this way to us. And us not feeling material makes us likely to believe in souls and spirits. So basically what I'm saying is that humans are naturally predisposed to develop religion and you'd have to either change your humanity into a differently working similar species or you'd have to introduce external elements that pressure your humanity into not becoming religious for some reason - I can't really think of anything besides some other more advanced species teaching them. It is said that humans will readily believe what they wish or fear to be true. So maybe your humanity could have evolved in a place without predators, where instincts like fear weren't as important to survival and maybe wouldn't be as overactive. This could enhance curiosity and thus learning and experiments/exploration, but reducing our pattern recognition will likely also weaken our scientific ability. [Answer] > > Let's try to imagine a human civilization where no religions were "invented" at any point in time. How could it be possible? > > > Historical evidence would suggest this is not possible. AFAIK every single human civilization has evolved a belief system and an associated religion (and often more than one) as part of the process of becoming civilized. It appears to be a foundational step for organized large scale societies. One of the primary roles of organized religion has been basically governmental. They define what's acceptable social behavior, what is a crime and what is not, what is a reasonable punishment and what is not. They form a framework for the development of more sophisticated (but not necessarily better) forms of control. > > My thoughts are about some specific type of thinking in such a civilization: for example, if they saw a lightning for the first time, people would not think "Zeus is angry", rather they would be thinking "Wow, what could it be? I need to investigate this thing!". > > > Your thinking here is flawed as the two views are not mutually exclusive. There are plenty of scientists who believe in a supreme being who created everything, but are still going to investigate everything they can. Curiosity and Belief can co-exist and have done for most of human history. > > As a possible way of developing such a type of mind, I'm thinking about ancient times, when people were not yet Homo Sapiens. Probably they were living in a dangerous environment, where they need to solve some logical puzzles to survive. > > > Which is exactly the way we did evolve. Your mistake is excluding developing a belief in a God or Gods is reasonable not a way of dealing with some of those puzzles. Realistically there is no way for early man to answer questions like "what is fire ?" and "what is lightning ?" or "what are the stars ?". Any answer you form will be a wild guess and in some ways it's simpler to just put these aside and file them under "Work of God" until you have the tools to investigate more. > > And so this type of thinking is evolutionarily developed and leaves no place for thoughts about any supernatural beings. > > > Not possible, IMO. The need to seek an answer to "where did this all come from ?" is what you want to evolve, but it's what we've had and it is in fact what generated the answer "God" just as much as it developed the tools of science and logic. Logic does not exclude belief. > > What kind of environment could this be? Or, maybe, can you think of some other ways how such a civilization may appear? > > > I do not think it's possible at all. [Answer] > > Disclaimer > > This is clearly written from an atheist's point of view. Feel free to disagree, but I would prefer to not devolve this into a discussion of religious people taking offense at my interpretation of what religion is. > > Live and let live; believe and let believe. I'm as entitled to my belief as you are to yours. > > > --- The core reason for why religion exists is because people can assume and hypothesize. Anyone with these skills can reasonably come up with a random (correct sounding) explanation and then based their actions off of that assumption (which is the basis for religion). * This thing has happened. I did not do it. I have no idea why or how it happened. * (Hypothesis) There could be someone else who did this for me. That would be a valid explanation. * (Assumption) I can't find any other explanation, so there's probably someone who did this for me. * (Religion) I really like the guy who did this for me. In return, I should be nice to him. > > My thoughts are about some specific type of thinking in such a civilization: for example, if they saw a lightning for the first time, people would not think "Zeus is angry", rather they would be thinking "Wow, what could it be? I need to investigate this thing!". > > > You're sort of missing the point of where religion starts. A conclusion such as "Zeus is angry" already implies that this person considers many things as facts: * There is a God names Zeus. * He is capable of emotions. * He takes his emotions out on us. * There is no other source of lightning. You say they're seeing lightning for the first time, yet they're already aware that Zeus is capable of controlling lightning? That's a contradiction. Either they know about it already, or they do not. It can't be both. You're not starting from the basis of religion, you're describing what someone who is already religious will conclude. You're putting the cart before the horse. Everyone (whether they're religious or not) who sees something for the first time, will wonder what that thing is, and where it comes from. Assuming that it must be (a) God is a subsequent step. The reason for makign that assumption varies from person to person. * A might immediately defer to God because it's clearly not manmade. * B might ask around, understand that we cannot control it, and therefore defer to God. * C might spend decades researching the event, unable to explain it (because they don't know what electricity is), and then eventually conclude that it must be metaphysical (thus deferring to God). * D might think that it's not God. But when he sees E being hit by lightning seconds after E insulted D's wife; D will suddenly defer to God. --- > > As a possible way of developing such a type of mind, I'm thinking about ancient times, when people were not yet Homo Sapiens. Probably they were living in a dangerous environment, where they need to solve some logical puzzles to survive. And so this type of thinking is evolutionarily developed and leaves no place for thoughts about any supernatural beings. > > > Even with the logical puzzles, a religion can be formed: * Who put these puzzles there? * Why did they put these puzzles there? * We have the puzzles (and the puzzle maker) to thank for our intelligence! Whether they end up worshipping the puzzles themselves (like the monkeys and the monolith), or the imagined puzzle maker; doesn't really matter. It's a religion either way. There is a logical problem with religion, in that it accepts something that cannot be (or has not been) proven. You cannot prove a negative, which means you cannot prove the absence of a god. Even if you exhaust all the empirical options, there's always the argument that "God does not want to show himself to us, and he is capable of doing so". Even though religion will start from observed phenomena (which create an assumption of an omnipotent being, and then runs with that idea), an existing religion may be perpetuated based on assumptions that are never observed (such as the existence of a god). --- When you think about it, the only real difference between science and religion is the level of certainty that is required to turn a hypothesis into a fact. Without sufficient corroboration, it's not a fact, but merely an assumption. Science tries to not "jump the gun", and prefers to keep something as a hypothesis until they are certain that it's not just an assumption, but an actual fact. --- ## Conclusion > > 1. What kind of environment could this be? > > > I don't think this is related to the environment, but rather the cerebral abilities of the humans. Religion exists in the mind, not in the world. The assumption of the existence of a god is a mental phenomenon (which is triggered due to observing a random environmental phenomenon). > > 2. How will this civilization progress? What will be the main differences in contrast to our current civilization? > > > If you rewrite human history by removing the ability to assume and hypothesize, then you are going to invariably hamper our civilization's evolution, most notably its technological advancement. Hypothesis is the foundation of the scientific approach, which leads to technological advancements. Without the skill of hypothesis, that means that humans can only think about things that really exist. > > This isn't all that far-fetched. I've seen studies that point out that 200 years ago, the average man was not able to consciously* hypothesize.* > > The given example was asking two men (one born in 1990, one born in 1790) the same question: "If your stairs at home had 30 steps, how many steps would you take to climb it?" > > > * The 1990's man would think, calculate, and reply "30 steps" (or 15 if he's someone who takes large steps). > * The 1790's man, on average, would respond with "You're wrong. My staircase has 20 steps, and it takes me 20 steps to climb it." > > > And this is the crux of the issue. If humans cannot hypothesize, they can only deal with what's in front of them. That means that any discovered knowledge must have been pure luck. Note that our real-world history contains many of these cases, where people stumble on a discovery (e.g. penicillin), rather than knowingly find out something they were actively researching. If you take away the ability to hypothesize, all discoveries will be stumbled upon, no discoveries will be hypothesized. As a simple example: Columbus sailed West, because he believed that there would likely be a passage to India. Without hypothesizing, he would have had no reason to sail West. America would not be discovered until someone sailed West (for a concrete reason, e.g. fleeing from pursuing attackers, or e.g. being rendered unconscious and his boat floating West due to the current/wind). > > 1.1 Or, maybe, can you think of some other ways how such a civilization may appear? > > > Taking away these skills will dramatically change the world and our civilization's evolution. It will make the world unrecognizable to the viewer/reader. So how about we paint a picture where we once had the skills, but no longer have them now? * People were capable of hypothesis. They had religion and science. They built our civilization. * We built our civilization up to a point where everything is either automated or well documented. No further technological research was deemed necessary. * Humans lost the ability to hypothesize and reason. This could be due to many circumstances: + You could create a villain plot, where a villain (disenfranchised by the horrors of religion) genetically changes humans and removes their skill of hypothesis. This could be unintentional; he thought he was removing the "religion gene", but instead ended up destroying the entire skill op hypothesis and assumption. + It could also simply be a scientific experiment that got out and infected everyone, as seen in many, many zombie stories. + Similar to how the people in Wall-E could no longer walk, humans may simply have unlearned the behavior over a long time period. If they haven't needed to make any discoveries for centuries/milennia, they will no longer be teaching their children these skills. While technically capable of hypothesis, no one has bothered to do so because there's no reason to do so anymore (everything is already taken care of, no problems need fixing anymore). + Humans may be able to hypothesize, but their freedom is limited in a way that they're not allowed to do so anymore. There is an global autocratic government (that thinks of itself as a scientocracy but in reality is merely traditionalist and fascist). To a degree where dissent is nigh impossible (e.g. immediate execution when a "spy chip" in your brain alerts that you're hypothesizing). [Answer] Gods. Really mundane gods. The other answers have pointed out that people will always always try to find answers to questions, and so offering logical problems will not dissuade them from questioning and, ultimately forming opinions. Instead, give them answers. Some would argue that having gods would inspire religion, rather than quenching it. However, there's no inherent reason why we would worship someone who created us. Hence we can make sure we don't, but having mundane, present-on-Earth gods who really don't want people to worship them. Maybe Athena runs the butcher shop in a particular town; she's technically omnipotent, and may reluctantly display this to skeptics, but she's otherwise just a member of the community and should not be worshipped. (EDIT: Perhaps these gods did the whole 'lavish me with praise and build temples in my honour' thing before, and it ended spectacularly badly, so they built this world and agreed to keep their heads down?) At your discretion, you may add a book written by the gods that details most of the secrets of the universe, just to really tamp down on those prone to bouts of questions. (I understand that this may not solve your problem, depending on why you want this irreligous society, but I think it nicely answers your question as asked.) [Answer] Re: pattern recognition (connected to that video I linked in the comment section) maybe if the cost of a false negative equalled the cost of a false positive, evolution would promote the survival of individuals who tend to be rational/sceptic about most things. For example, the movement of the grass might be a predator or might be just the wind, but running away from it wouldn't save your life as you'd starve to death if the grass happened to be growing around the only oasis for miles and miles. Although at first the running away would prevail because the danger from a predator is more immediate, but maybe after that the individual would think of a way to investigate? Maybe this is not a good example. But patterns don't only mean predators, patterns could be the sign of an impending natural disaster, like smoke when a volcano is about to erupt or the waterline receding before a tsunami. So maybe if they lived on a planet where such things don't happen but that planet would have to have no weather, no satellites, no tectonics, maybe if they lived on a rouge planet drifting in space between galaxies? The belief that consciousness must continue after death could be dealt with if it really did, maybe in the form of genetic memory, or maybe a hive consciousness. Maybe they would be like Turritopsis Nutricula - a jellyfish which doesn't die from old age - but that doesn't prevent dying from other things. Maybe they can restore life to an individual that died? Or don't care about individual life because they have a hive mind and losing one individual would be like for us to clip a toenail. [Answer] Your society will need a highly authoritative and trusted education system, which may be difficult to achieve at various points in societal development. I agree with many that a total lack of religious precedent is very unlikely in any environment, not just because of humanity's natural habit of pattern-recognition, but also because religion has been historically used as a tool for education (and public safety) in areas where education can't reliably keep the public informed. Leviticus claims the following regarding seafood: <https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+11%3A9-12&version=ESV> > > 9 “These you may eat, of all that are in the waters. Everything in the waters that has fins and scales, whether in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat. 10 But anything in the seas or the rivers that does not have fins and scales, of the swarming creatures in the waters and of the living creatures that are in the waters, is detestable to you. 11 You shall regard them as detestable; you shall not eat any of their flesh, and you shall detest their carcasses. 12 Everything in the waters that does not have fins and scales is detestable to you. > > > Shellfish are classically bottom feeders, and prone to carrying disease and parasites. This is a difficult item to educate the public on, as people are hungry and the reason some shellfish harm people is poorly understood, so the important yet debatable information is absorbed into religious, therefore infallible, decree. This is present in many cultures. Pork is prone to carrying parasites and stores poorly compared to chicken or beef. Both Islam and Judaism banned consumption, and both again ban consumption of Shellfish, while the practices of Halal and Kosher slaughter has some roots in safe food preparation. In India cows could be used for Milk, Ghee, Agriculture, ground Fertilisation. The loss of long-term value to a community through slaughter is immense, and they were again enshrined in religious law. For your society to function you will need a method of disseminating information to the masses in a form which is inherently trusted and understandable by the public, as widespread adoption of this information without belief in a scientific method will often manifest itself in a religious belief in the forces which cause uncomprehensible facts to be a certain way. [Answer] I'm not sure this is logically possible. Let's take a thought experiment: suppose you spin around - you feel something pulling at your arms and legs. You might hypothesis that some sort of force is created by the act of your spinning. Some people, not nearly as interested in the problem, may take your hypothesis on faith and use it to design gyros. Others may think your hypothesized centrifugal force is supernatural junk - and they would be right after a sound hypothesis for linear and angular momentum is proposed. To have a world in which no one has blamed things on an unseen intelligent actor, the idea must have just, somehow, not ever occurred to anyone. Any trait that makes people too suspicious to be capable of believing one idea, I think, makes them too suspicious to believe any other idea requiring an equal amount of faith. [Answer] # No, because Sociopaths Others have commented on various human abilities/traits that tend to generate beliefs and systems of beliefs. While this is true, it ignores a very important fact: Religion is a great way to control people Marx wasn't far off when he said that religion is the opiate of the masses. Disregarding dualism, monism, spiritualism, and any other -ism, from a purely social perspective, religion is a great way to organize and direct large groups of people. Even if you don't call it religion and don't place some diety at the center of it, religion-like organizations will pop up. Sociopaths will craft a narrative that meets the needs of those who might follow. Those in the population who want a simpler narrative for their life than Raw Unfettered Nihilistic Reality, will buy into these narratives. They will pay the price required for inclusion in the group that adhere to this narrative. The narratives will naturally benefit the Sociopaths who made up those narratives. Controlling what other people think and do is very appealing to certain people. Whether the organization is called a religion or a kingdom or a corporation, there are people who will be willing to create self-beneficial narratives and there will be plenty of people willing to buy into those narratives. [Answer] "Intelligent" creatures will always invent religions (the want to explain things, the need to believe in good and evil, the fear of death). Possibly the only way to have a society without them is to have creatures that are more skeptical and inquisitive, prone to long logical debates. They would have to be creatures that were in control of their emotions (they could still have emotions, just not be anywhere near as hot headed as we are) rather than ruled by them. Possibly then, they would shoot down the religions they invented as not being real or rational. [Answer] It may be impossible never to have invented religion, but I think it certainly is possible to evolve away from needing it. It seems, looking at religions in the world today, that the poor and the uneducated are much more religious than the educated and wealthy, and thus if you extrapolate that if we get to a society where everybody is well-educated and have everything they need, that religion will fade away and eventually get lost in time. ]
[Question] [ I'm building a world based in a mid-future dystopia, where the government has consolidated all sovereign power under its control but has imploded under debt and now basically exists to funnel wealth to its bondholders (most of whom are running it). One of the ways it will do so is to sell people into slavery who have committed (or plead guilty to) crimes, or who have declared bankruptcy or been ajudged to be unable to pay debts (being bankrupt is a crime in this universe so it's all really the same thing). I need a logical reason for the "Government" to be able to actively participate in this process, without a simple hand-wave that all present-day laws forbidding slavery simply no longer exist or are being ignored. Something where a privileged lawyer-type character in the book would be able to logically defend what the government's done so far (however appalling the state of affairs being described is to the reader), up until a specific line is crossed that is so blatantly wrong it makes that character question the whole thing. The closest I have is some fictional landmark case from a stacked Court, that essentially de-fangs existing anti-slavery laws through an interpretation that reads their original meaning out of existence. Something like what the Slaughterhouse Cases did to the 14th Amendment's "Privileges or Immunities" clause. Such things have obviously happened before, and the Slaughterhouse interpretation of that clause still stands as the law of the land in the real-world United States, outlasting many other decisions attempting to mitigate the effect of the Reconstruction Amendments. Does anyone else have a good idea for a mechanism by which the "Government" can condone and participate in slavery in a universe where the laws are still ostensibly on the books and the legal system is not completely ignoring them? [Answer] According to the [13th Amendment](https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/document.html?doc=9&title.raw=13th%20Amendment%20to%20the%20U.S.%20Constitution%3A%20Abolition%20of%20Slavery) to the US Constitution, slavery is outlawed in all its forms "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted". Thus, if you're looking for an environment similar to or derived from the U.S., you can enact any law you want that indicates an appropriate punishment for violating it is a form of indentured servitude or slavery. Since slave owners would be responsible for maintaining living conditions and providing food for slaves, tallying the expenses for that maintenance and applying it against the individual would allow the system to perpetuate, creating a new slave class of people unable to work enough to pay off their mounting debt. [Answer] One of the great things about humans is that they often don't let laws stop them from doing the terrible things they've always done. In the case of slavery, it's easy to find examples of of it, even after the 13th and 14th Amendments. For instance, there have been many systems created both in the past and today where people themselves are free to choose, but only have one good option, which usually benefits someone else. For instance, say you are a blacksmith, but some rich man owns your tools, or you're a farmer but someone else owns your land, or you're a factory worker and someone owns your tools, land, house, and all nearby businesses. You're tied to this owner, almost as if they own you, but really all they're doing is controlling your source of income. If you choose to leave, and you can choose to leave, all you'll be taking with you is your inalienable rights; if you have a family, leaving behind your house, your job, and the tools of your trade is not an option. Aside from that, I think a form of slavery disguised as punishment should be well within the rights of the law. Just look at prisons, where prisoners all have jobs to do. Maybe instead of cleaning toilets or crushing rocks, a prisoner can be contracted out to a private business. In fact, I know this already happens; my sister used to work with prisoners in a restaurant. I don't really know the details, but it seems to me as though if someone is in jail, they have just enough freedom lawfully removed from them to be used in a form of slavery. You may have to pay them, but it doesn't have to be minimum wage. This system reminds me a lot of indentured servitude, which as far as I can tell is a mostly ethical form of slavery, so long as you make the deal of your own will. If you choose to become a 'slave' for a certain period of time, after which you are freed, and both parties agree upon this contract and outline the parameters, I don't see why it wouldn't be legal for indentured servitude to exist. I think what it comes down to is that you should avoid the kind of chattel slavery that was present in America as much as possible, but build up a system that closely resembles it. Make it somewhat voluntary or crime-based, offer some sort of payment (whether it's up-front, over time, or after the fact), make it temporary, and if none of that works, make it a system where trying to leave is tantamount to suicide, even if it's perfectly legal. [Answer] Historically indentured servitude was the answer to this. In the modern era I would suggest highly specialized training putting workers in debt combined with Intellectual property and non-disclosure laws, essentially giving no other employment opportunity to the worker. There is also the old 'company script' routine, '16 tons and what do you get...' [Answer] # Indentured Servitude In most Gulf countries, the company pays for a laborer or worker to fly over, get their residency visa, and housing set up. Then, they may hold onto the passport of the worker for as long as they deem the debt has been paid off. For some (like me), it was fair: we got to keep our passport, travel with our time off, etc. For others, it is a nightmare of slavery: there were reports of laborers being kept longer because they 'didn't work hard enough,' or maids whose passports were kept by their 'masters.' In the latter, it was even more like slavery, in that most large villas had tiny maids rooms with no windows, and there were often reports about locking them in at night. Also, all refrigerators that you can buy, at least in the UAE had locks on them so that maids couldn't eat/drink what was in the house. (note that the horror stories were minimal, but very real) [Answer] Do what countries have done for centuries to get around anti-slavery laws: Make prisoners work for free. To help gets lots of prisoners, you could make all drugs illegal and then implement a "three strikes and you go to jail" policy. Oh wait, they did that already. Remember - even though they're mostly black, they're not slaves now, they're prisoners. [Answer] How does the U.S. reconcile torture and bombing of civilian targets and unlimited detention without due process and warrantless spying on everybody with their laws? Just do it, deny parts of it, deny carefully constructed straw men, and call the rest something else. When in doubt, cite national security and a state of war and say that the country has to be able to defend itself against attackers and enemy combattants and that anybody against that is a supporter of terrorism and not a patriot wanting to serve his country. It worked in fascist Italy, France, and Germany, and still works in military-industrial U.S.A. [Answer] Slavery as an institution can persist well outside the realm of slavery as a legal status. Wage slavery is a sort of slavery that's frowned upon in many countries, but still exists. Basically, you are paid, but not enough to ever leave your employer or rise above poverty. The employer can induce you to do many things simply by threatening to fire you. This is exacerbated in situations like corporate towns, where one huge corporation is really the only game in town if you want a job (think of the mining town in the movie October Sky), and that corporation also owns the land your house was built on, the stores you buy your necessities at, and the bank you store your money at. That way, they pay you, and your paycheck goes right back to them as a revenue stream, and they can control you by hiking prices. Other ways wage slavery is exacerbated exist when a group of employers are conspiring together to refuse employment to people who want to be paid more (collusion), or when debt can land you in prison (there are laws against that in most countries, but they don't always work). Touching off that last bit, slavery can also exist inside prisons. In the USA, many (most?) of our prisons are actually run by private for-profit corporations, which are legally allowed to employ their prisoners below minimum wage. This gets ugly when the prisons lobby for laws that make it easier for people with debts or minor, common infractions with high recidivism to get back in jail - they aren't provided with the tools in jail to avoid getting right back in once they're out, and thus it becomes a cycle of wage slavery enforced by the penal system. Those two means of legally condoned slavery are real and exist in our world today. I'd also like to touch on ways that slavery could come to be in a first-world country at some point in the future. One way this could occur would be if we digitize our consciousnesses and upload them to a large computer network, living a simulated reality. On the face of it we are simply recreating life inside a computer system, so all the same laws and regulations should hold - but at the same time, you are also making yourself into, essentially, a program. Programs are works of art and subject to copyright and patent law. If a person copies themselves, it is arguable that they can claim they own the copyright on that copy - yet a copy of a person is another person. Owning the rights to a person - owning a person - IS slavery. To avoid this you'd have to update personhood laws (at which point theoretically non-human programs could also become people, which is problematic to say the least) or else copyright laws (at which point you run up against a huge corporate lobby and the very real problem of potentially rendering profit impossible in a digital economy). Alternatively, imagine a monstrous version of Monsanto (it's not so hard, is it, lol?) that has created some DNA which your genetically-engineered body is using. They might be able to charge you licensing fees for the use of that DNA. It would become slavery (or at the least, an insane form of indentured servitude) if that same corporation created people whose DNA was entirely synthetically-created and patented by that corporation. There were other ways I intended to write down here, but I forgot. I'm sure you get the picture though; through technology, anything is possible! [Answer] Government should not consider that they are doing slavery. In my opinion that criminals should first sign a really bad contract with the government for protection and health, but if you don't follow the rules well your contract says that I can treat you as a good and not anymore as a person. [Answer] I'd say to somehow combine the Collegiate Sports / Roman Gladiator models. Everyone wants to be the best or at least try to be. The penalty for not doing it is to either remain incarcerated in a cell and die there, or maybe they "escape" (get taken) and mysteriously "disappear" from existence (with concrete shoes in the ocean) and maybe their family too. No one in the public will be the wiser and the excuse will be that they were criminals after all, who knows what they're capable of wink, wink! You make them entertain people, paying them nothing and housing them in a sort of free-range compound, then reap the profits from merchandising and ticket sales. Legal slavery, and everyone is on board. ]
[Question] [ In a world with infinite food (each organism had access to an infinite amount of food/energy from another universe), would human intelligence develop through some evolutionary mechanism? If resources were infinite for every organism... it wouldn't make much sense because that would lead to very utopian interactions between organisms. I mean... if an organism has infinite resources to be protected from a virus, and that virus has also infinite resources to propagate... there is no winner. But instead of infinite resources, what would happen if only food and water were infinite? How would life (the first organisms) evolve? Would there be intelligent life (like human beings)? I'm imagining that, even with infinite food, humans would need to cooperate to create shelters to avoid storms, to curate diseases, to avoid animals that would like to kill humans for no apparent reason etc... For instance, some animals could fight for shelters, mates, whatever... And then, there would be an explosion of biomass (dead bodies and excretion), so, with less living space, a species could start to eat/hunt/kill others species towards extinction until there is no more competitors in the world. With infinite food, and even with other environmental factors, I'm not quite sure if humans would evolve in a scenario like that. [Answer] # Fast reproducing organisms would have a major advantage In biology there's an idea called r/k selection. Some organisms optimize for fast cheap reproduction, some for high quality reproduction. High quality reproduction is favored in stable environments where not much changes. With infinite food, the environment would be extremely unstable. Fast reproducing organisms would have a massive competitive advantage as they could rapidly adapt and destroy competitors. You probably wouldn't evolve much beyond bacteria and other single cell creatures which would aggressively work together to destroy competitors with massive pillars of bacteria which rose high up into the sky. [Answer] # Rate-Limiting Step/Why is there competition? The question is: where does evolutionary pressure come from? It's unlikely that the kinds of pressures placed on organisms would require intelligent interactions to solve, possibly not even motility. Your organisms would most likely be bacteria, or resemble fungi. * SPACE: Your world would need to be something like a Dyson sphere to provide near-infinite space, so competition for space would be the first logical barrier. * ACCESS: How does this food get delivered? If it's something like a cornucopia, then access to the food will be a selector. But if it's essentially teleported to the organism, then there would be no need for autotrophs, motility or predation (except to avoid being crushed by the ever-expanding mass of dead organisms that don't decay because there are no decay organisms). * COMPRESSION: Your organisms would be constantly being crushed under the mass of the organisms growing. There would be pressure to replicate faster so as to not be crushed, develop high compression resistance to survive inside crushing masses of organisms, or some ability to float to the top to avoid crushing. * GAS EXCHANGE: Your organisms would have no motive to produce oxygen. So your world would not evolve an aerobic atmosphere. Food would need to be broadly defined as containing the reaction materials to break down food. But waste gasses would be constantly building up. * ACIDITY/TOXICITY: Your world would be awash in metabolic waste products. There would be a definite advantage to organisms in being able to tolerate high pH (acid being one of the common waste end-products). There would be pressures to produce toxic waste products to eliminate competition for space. * INCREASING GRAVITY: Over time, the gravity of your world would increase as organisms replicated and buried their ancestors in an ever-compacting mass of biology. The gas pressure from wastes would skyrocket. * WASTE HEAT: All this metabolism from infinite energy input would make for constantly increasing temperatures. There would be no need for external heat from something like a sun. So eventually your world would start to look like a massive super-Earth-like Venus, with extremophile-like organisms able to tolerate high temperatures, pressures, and seas of boiling biological waste products floating atop a mass of dead stuff. Not much room for intelligence. [Answer] Evolution of intelligence would slow down * Evolution is in many ways about competition for resources. * Food is Resource #1. * The evolution of intelligence is in many ways about problem solving. * And you just took away problem-to-solve #1. I'm being very simplistic with those statements, but excepting the last 500 years, the most important innovations in human history revolved around food. Agriculture, irrigation, storage & preservation... People often had to figure out how to traverse mountain ranges and live in new environments because of food. And now they don't. There are obviously a great many problems to overcome that would otherwise lead to the evolution of intelligence. But taking away problems to solve will never, IMHO, lead to faster evolution of intelligence. Necessity, after all, is the proverbial mother of invention. Having said that, it might be that we look at people like Michelangelo and DaVinci, who had patrons, or folks like Isaac Newton, who was rich, and conclude that all people need is time to think and intelligence will evolve faster. But in those cases it isn't intelligence that's evolving ‚Äî it's merely the pool of knowledge that's expanding. Modern thinkers have millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization building behind them such that they already had an evolved intelligence. You're looking back far enough that life hadn't yet learned to think at all. And having the free time to sit around thinking isn't a benefit when you not only don't know how to do it, but evolution hadn't even given you the tools to try. If food and water are free, that's just one really important reason why the capacity to solve problems needn't evolve in the first place. [Answer] Very unlikely. The important question here is why human beings developed superior intelligence. We don't have a definitive answer for that, but we do have a number of good theories. It's not our big brains, our opposable thumbs, our upright posture, or our tool-using that vaulted us to the top of the food chain. We had those things for a couple million years, in all likelihood, and for the majority of that time, we were living in the shadows, terrified of being eaten. What is it really that produced intelligence? A lot had to do with food. Some researchers believe our original niche was that of a scavenger: Homo sapiens wandered around the savannah and waited for apex predators to finish up with their carcasses. When they were finished, we'd descend upon the picked-clean body and use our rocks and basic tools to break open the bones and extract the nutrient-dense marrow. Just like the niche of giraffes is to reach high-up leaves, the niche of early Homo sapiens was to scavenge for bone marrow. This scavenging required tool-use, and more importantly, it required cooperation. Human beings are not biologically superior to other organisms: we are socially superior. We learned how to work effectively in groups, first small, then large. As our tool use and cooperation enabled us to move from scavenging to hunting, and then to hunt larger and larger game, we collaborated in post-hunt planning sessions that very likely generated the first languages. (Hunting is actually not a good time for language--better to gesture silently--but planning and celebrating post-hunt is perfect.) Languages are indispensable for cooperation and abstract thinking. Even more important to cognition was the domestication of fire. Not inherently because of fire's utility as a tool, but mainly because of its tool as a time-saver. Chimps spend 5 hours a day chewing raw food. Imagine if you had to spend that long, or longer. Instead, you can wolf down cooked meals in a matter of minutes. Cooked food not only allowed for increased productive time during the day (less chewing = more free time), it also allowed for the shortening of the intestinal tract (cooked food = efficient nutrient absorption = shorter intestinal tract). This was critical in the development of the brain. Why? Because digestion and cognition are both extremely energy-intensive. Allocate less energy to digestion, and you've got so much more to put toward cognition. There are other considerations in the evolution of intelligence, but these seem most relevant to your question. With infinite food, what pressures would exist pushing early hominids toward cooperation, tool-use, and fire domestication? In addition to figuring out the logistics of where this infinite food is coming from, you'll probably be interested in determining whether it needs to be (or can be) cooked. (If you're interested in the evolution of human beings, I highly recommend Y. N. Harari's Sapiens, from which most of the details in this answer are sourced.) [Answer] # Intelligence can still evolve I once read that the increase of intelligence for humans came from a time of prosperity. We had some intelligence and when there was food in spades we had time to grow this incredibly power hungry organ to impressive sizes. If we didn't have prosperity we probably wouldn't prioritise such energy earers. These kinds of findings are often in motion, but I would argue we are still in a time of prosperity. Of course not the whole world is in full on prosperity, but a large chunk of it has food. A snaller chunk of that has so much that obesity is a huge risk factor. At the same time we see that our intelligence keeps rising. We need to adjust the IQ range every so often (100 is 'average') and our understanding keros growing. I read article years ago that teens today have a different brain make up. They think and do more fluidly to adapt to a world that changes faster and faster. Interestingly we don't seem to need increased intelligence. We are already prospering, so why keep increasing an energy hungry organ to enormous sizes? Natural selection. It can be as simple as that. We see enough vestigial organs and appendages in the wild. The increased brain size is no different. We like intelligence. Intelligent people often earn more, make better life desicions and live better. That makes for more and better offspring. With infinite food intelligence will be more favourable as people want a bigger house and a better car, or a better conversation. Of course people can change their preferences over time, or change cultures so that intelligence is a purely sexual orientation that doesn't give an advantage. But even then sexual preferences can stay a long time. I would bet in intelligence to keep increasing. [Answer] ## An Infinite Non-Vacuum Must Expand or Collapse The state of matter you are describing may have existed somewhere near the the Big Bang. If the Big Bang contained a significantly finite amount of matter, then the universe would have instantly imploded into a black hole; however, the leading theory is that so much of the universe was in gravitational equilibrium (with infinite or near infinite mass in every direction) that the universe was able to expand despite its high density. If life could have evolved in this contiguous medium, then it could have simply expanded in every direction as far as it wanted too... however, this state of exitance can not exist forever. A universe in this state must expand or collapse. Even if it was in perfect equilibrium, the moving around of lifeforms inside of it could upset the equilibrium to begin this expansion or collapse. A collapse will surely end all life, but if your universe decided to expand, then human life can evolve. As the universe expands, matter will begin to collapse into planets and stars and large voids will form between them. Your life that existed since the beginning of time will seed countless worlds where it will for the 1st time begin to evolve under the constraints of scarcity. Give it a few billion years, and eventually you will have humans. ### But could intelligence evolve in the early universe before matter all drifts apart? Life will spread out like an explosion in all directions chasing the infinite food while leaving an ever expanding wasteland of consumed food, and slower lifeforms behind. These slower life forms will not have infinite resources, instead they will either starve or evolve new features that let them live in the wasteland; so, they will begin journeying back into the hostile inner parts of the sphere of life where competition for resources will be a very real thing. This could lead life down an evolutionary path towards complex life and intelligence... so no, the outer life forms where food is infinite will not become intelligent, but they could give rise to intelligent life inside of the sphere of waste they left behind. [Answer] You're up against a couple of things. You might notice that most of the semi-intelligent animals on our planet are predators. The running joke is "how smart do you have to be to sneak up on a blade of grass?" This doesn't explain elephants, but their size creates its own disadvantage. It may be that the evolutionary pressure in this case would be predation, but that wouldn't actually result in humans, who are biologically an apex predator. The other problem would be overpopulation. With no limit to food, the population would expand exponentially. Theoretically the predators would also expand exponentially. You'd eventually run into space issues. (Read this: [How 1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of Humanity](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/).) Basically, the creatures would start killing each other for the next most scarce resource, whether it's space or mating choices. If they produced intelligence, they would wipe out whatever was feeding on them, making matters worse. Isaac Asimov calculated that, if we could move people anywhere with a snap of our fingers, then turn anything into food with another snap, and we were capable of surviving anywhere (like in vacuum), then in 5000 years, the entire universe (UNIVERSE, not just galaxy) would consist of nothing except people. No stars, no black holes, no planets, just people. Would it produce intelligent life? Maybe. Would they be human? No. [Answer] ### If it was only "effectively unlimited" and somehow only human-like species could take advantage of it, sure While infinite food from the dawn of life would almost certainly never require evolution beyond single-celled organisms (as other answers have noted), if you're positing a more limited scenario, in which evolution proceeded as on Earth until around 10M years ago (around when we split off from our nearest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos), with the sole difference being that ape-suitable food was in unusual abundance (enough that there was no need to come up with strategies to acquire it, merely wandering at random would always find "enough"), intelligence might take longer to evolve, but it could still occur. The reason being that seeking food is only one of the things that intelligence helps with. Others include: 1. Dealing with environmental changes that occur on timescales too short for evolution to handle (e.g. a climate pattern that swings from hot to cold and back on a timescale of a few hundred or a thousand years; the available foods may change based on climate, and surviving in a constantly changing climate with limited adaptations for both heat and cold requires some mental agility) 2. If food is not unlimited for other species, intelligence (and bipedalism, a prerequisite for freeing the hands for tool use) can be selected for as a means of spotting, avoiding and working together to defend against predators. 3. Intelligence can be used in attracting mates, producing more elaborate courtship displays. While this may seem pointless, the mere fact of possessing intelligence is a proxy for health (if you're repeatedly beset by parasites, you'll grow up unhealthy and with lower intelligence and make a less suitable partner for producing and raising offspring) 4. Eventually the result of some combination of these evolutionary pressures (especially ones that lead to bipedalism + basic intelligence) leads to tool use and control of fire, and once that happens, intelligence becomes more and more important. As language develops, it becomes easier to pass along detailed information, not just "How do you make and use a tool?", but "Here's how your seven-times great-grandfather survived the last mini-Ice Age". Again, this involves a world with merely "vast" food resources (ideally ones that are poisonous or otherwise unavailable to non-apes for whatever reason); if food for any living creature is available in infinite quantities, you'd never have gotten apes in the first place. [Answer] It's already happened What you are describing is essentially the condition we had in early-earth where the sun gave free food to all the things that wanted it. After a while they reproduced so that you couldn't reach the sun's free energy any more and had to either evolve to eat things that got the free food or evolve to find a different way to reach the sun (Leave the ocean). Life WILL eventually block all access to your magic free food by simple reproduciton and the same thing will happen (Unless you continually expand the surface area of the food access). Your senario really is exactally what happened on earth. On a more evolved scale, some existing species that can over-produce so much that they block their own access to food have created (Evolved?) behaviors to kill off large parts of their population--A group migrating in one direction until they hit a cliff or the ocean... also overcrowding in many more advanced species leads to fatal in-fighting. Disease is another control mechanism that comes with overcrowding, but I can't say that really has a purpose--but perhaps it is part of successful evolution. I'd guess that any species without any population control will go extinct after a few rounds of overpopulation/mass starvation because they will eventually become unlucky at the "Low population" point where they could easily be permanently destroyed. [Answer] ## Yes I once read that one of the major drivers behind human intelligence was mate selection. So the argument went: modern humans are wayyy smarter than is needed to address the challenges of hunting and gathering. So, why did our evolutionary forbears evolve to get smarter still, after environmental pressures were much lessened? The sexes have different incentives in mate selection, because reproduction affects human males and human females differently (specifically, because women carry the young and men... do nothing). In general, men have an incentive to trick as many women as possible into having sex with them, even if it's just one time, while women have an incentive to be more selective because they'll need help at least during pregnancy (and ideally after). This creates a kind of intellectual "arms race," which feeds only on itself and does not depend at all upon the environment. I think I read this in a popular science book about genetics called The Red Queen Game, but that was like 20 years ago and my memory is foggy. (The title is a reference to a scene in Alice in Wonderland involving the Red Queen character.) ]
[Question] [ As the title suggests, I'd like more insight into what a futuristic society would prefer for warfare. That is, from a skill and economic perspective what should countries invest more in? Should they delve deeper into organic-machine interfaces to create cybernetic super-soldiers? Or should nations invest heavily into creating a fully-artificial being? The only reasons I can see that limit or give one type of soldier preference over the other are the following: * Technological feasibility: maybe its easier to upgrade the mind than build artificially from scratch; ditto for the body as well? * Ability to replace: as it suggests, which futuristic soldier can be quickly and easily replaced? An android built in a machine plant or another human being supped up by machine hardware? * Mass production capabilities: is it easier/cheaper to prop up an "android" factory or build separate, custom parts that can be attached to human hosts? + (Note: while this one and the 'ability to replace' do share some similarities, I do think it should be its own category. As 'ability to replace' suggests rapid production/deployment of resources during wartime and mass production capabilities is more for long-term, peace time scenarios; e.g. is it cheaper to maintain standing armies of cyborgs/androids) * Cost (short-term downpayments/future supplemental costs) and availability of raw materials. What would be a realistic result in the future based on those variables? Cybernetic soldiers or androids? Are there other variables I am not accounting for? [Answer] I think that whether or not to go with androids vs cyborgs depends quite a bit on the background of your society and their level of technological development. Dictionary.com defined 'Cyborg' as "A person whose physiological functioning is aided by or dependent upon a mechanical or electronic device." So technically we have been had cyborgs in existence for decades thanks to simple hearing aids and artificial organs, or even centuries if you count prosthetics. Thanks to 3D printing and advances in neuroscience we are actually starting to have fully functioning mechanical limbs as well. From a military standpoint, it isn't difficult at all to alter any of these existing components to make an individual a superior killer. Really the only reason we haven't done is because of the ethical barrier rather than the technological one. That said, history still hold a few examples of prosthetic weaponry such as captain hook (hooks seem to be the go to for evil men with one hand) or men that have used their prosthetic leg to hide embedded guns. Androids are almost an entirely different monster, despite the natural tendency to imagine them together. From a mechanical stand point there is really no reason to construct the two the same way as cyborgs are limited by the human form and the need to interface with the brain. The closest contemporary to an android would actually be military drones or self-driving cars. Both are purpose built to function primarily autonomously, only requiring the human element for primary instructions. This technology, although long sought after, is fairly new in comparison and immensely more expensive. Besides the expense, the other huge hurdle for androids would be that of artificial intelligence. We still haven't achieved true artificial intelligence, and likely won't until we perfect quantum computing, which we are just now starting to even develop. The primary need for this is the ability to make decisions and properly determine friend or foe. Current military drone can do so only through a very strict series of preprogrammed protocols, and fail to function properly in a scenario that is not already predefined. So essentially, the moment your opposition comes up with something you never considered your android becomes more of a liability than an asset. Likewise, androids probably wouldn't be able to barter for information, pick up on the nuances of human interaction to determine motives and future actions, or make judgement calls of any kind really. At least, not without several hours to compile all the available information, but often these decisions have to be made in seconds. This is the reason quantum computing is necessary. Some in-between alternatives to either full android and full cyborg might be the use of organic computers/human brains to get over the artificial intelligence hurdle. This would require some handwavium since both are only theoretical technologies. You could also combine both options entirely by making use of AI assisted cyborgs. This is honestly the most likely real future as mechanically assisted soldiers (about a step from cyborgs) with situation analysis software (pretty close to AI) are already in full use by the military. A few examples in popular media of this might be Master Chief and Cortana, or Iron Man and Jarvis. [Answer] Cyborgs, because creating an android requires everything from head to toe -- and everything in between, including real AI -- to work, whereas you can replace bits on humans one piece at a time. Which is what we're doing now. [Answer] Technological unknowns give you the freedom to shape your future as you see fit. Consider some other questions: -How hard is human-level intelligence to simulate, really? At the moment, it's not clear how far we are from having sentient computers. The human brain is a fantastically complicated piece of organic computing, and programmers are having to replicate the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution by hand. You could decide, for the sake of your fiction, that neural nets and quantum computing are right around the corner, making a future where intelligent computer software is commonplace. On the other hand, you could posit that even with advances in technology, a sentient intelligence capable of replacing the common soldier is still beyond reach. Also, if intelligent machines are readily available, androids could be more economical even if they're more expensive or difficult to produce than simply turning a human into an equivalent cyborg. Remember, training a soldier is expensive, as is raising a human to military age. There is a finite limit on how many conscripts a nation can summon for military service at any given time, before you start running out of people, and it takes time to train them for combat (let alone convert them into cyborgs). Androids neatly sidestep these issues. -How important is the human element? Is sending cyborgs into combat, risking human life, less politically acceptable than sending robots? Do we trust robots to employ lethal force, or do we want a human pulling the trigger? Robots don't need veterans' associations, ongoing pay and employment in peacetime, or retirement benefits, so what ancillary costs are involved with cyborgs? Do you want tactical independence from your soldiery, or is that seen as a liability? -How hard is it to integrate cybernetics into the human body? Despite ongoing progress in prosthetic development, cybernetic augmentation is a complex subject. You can write a piece of computer software to drive a servo motor trivially using off-the-shelf components, but translating an electrical signal from the brain to perform the same operation is considerably more complex. There's also acclimation to the new changes, and constant issues of rejection by the host tissue. Building a wholly cybernetic, autonomous system to drive a piece of mission-relevant hardware might ultimately prove easier than trying to coerce the human body into supporting it. Or it might not. Maybe a wonder drug can solve rejection issues and a chip can translate crystal-clear instructions from your brain, making cybernetic augmentation easy and hassle-free. There's no simple, easy answer to your question. You have the freedom to modify the parameters of your setting to get the kind of balance you want. Whether you want all androids, all cyborgs, or a mix of the two for different roles, it is possible to construct an internally-consistent set of justifications for your stylistic choices. [Answer] Neither. There is nothing about the human shape that makes it superior for warfare. Robots and drones will be the future of warfare but it doesn't need to be androids or cyborgs. You could have a quadrupedal design which is faster and more stable like the [robot cat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTcOOzD-JQs) design from Red Planet You can also have drone swarms "[slaughterbots](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecClODh4zYk)" that flood an area and kamikaze any targets. If you look at the terminator series, the only reason for the cyborgs was infiltration to root out the human resistance. It had plenty of robotic units that were non humanoid. [Answer] Let's look at this from the perspective of technology development 1. Simple automation. Whether it's a catapult or the motor turning a turret. The first technology developed will be something that enhances, improves, or automates the experience. This technology does not enhance the person, nor can it operate on its own. 2. Complex automation. Whether it's an [exoskeletal prosthesis](https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/exoskeletal+prosthesis) or an aeronautical drone, this level of technology either replaces the basic abilities of humanity or extends the human reach. It still does not enhance the person, nor can it operate on its own. 3. At this point the technology diverges... but it's all still being developed. It's impossible to believe that one would "develop first," and if one did (by a day or two) it would be circumstantial at best. On the one hand, having learned how to replace and extend, we now want to enhance and automate. This would lead to implants (rather than prostheses) that enhance the person and the experience (beginning with, perhaps, implanted telecommunications, sensors, emergency medical, etc.) and basic battlefield A.I. (an unmanned, unmonitored, tank, also known as a [Bolo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_universe), a term coined by author Keith Laumer). This would be the beginnings of cyborgs and "androids." 4. The final step in this technological chain would be sophisticated human implants and full A.I. automation. If we ignore the specific definition of "android" being a "humanoid" object and allow that some androids may be bipedal, others wheeled, others quadrapedal, etc., then we've reached the point your looking for ... and we have both. The issue, if you think about it, is that the two technologies (cybernetics and A.I.) have different applications despite what appears to be substantial overlaps. I believe (and it's only my subjective opinion) that cybernetically enhancing a human to do what an equivalent android could do would be much more expensive and result in something more easily damaged ("all that revolting flesh," a quote from the movie, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum). Therefore, cyborgs would be used in safer applications where the expense can be protected while taking advantage of the intuition and flexibility of the human mind. Androids would be used in more dangerous applications where judgement is required but where grabbing a replacement off the assembly line is no big deal. In both cases we're talking about the proverbial "six-million-dollar something", so neither "tool" will be unduly risked. For that we have the common grunt, the traditional G.I. that's easily and cheaply replaced because humans breed like rabbits. When it comes to cannon fodder that needs to follow orders rather than use judement or intuition, it's much more economical to hand the average 18-year-old a gun and a flak jacket. [Answer] To me, there are two basic ways to have one nation build androids and another cyborgs: For cybernetic soldiers to become more commonplace... If a nation suffers from resource scarcity (in rare-earth metals or semiconductor material), overpopulation and poverty, this could provide incentive to devote resources into making expendable, cybernetic soldiers. This would cut down on overall base-material cost by taking advantage of a plentiful pool of impoverished, displaced peoples. One strategy to use, for example, would be to supe up humans with basic machine interfaces such as mechanical arms and legs, ocular implants, etc. And then gradually add more machine parts after battle once they receive injuries. This would enhance their performance in future battles. (I should add, this is a pretty dystopian scenario, but maybe a possible outcome?) For android soldiers to become more commonplace... If a nation enjoys resource surplus, small population, and overall economic prosperity, this would provide incentive into researching androids for automated warfare. A small population with a booming economy wouldn't want to sacrifice its own people and couple that with resource-surplus it'd compel this nation to build androids. I welcome any feedback in my own personal analysis. [Answer] Well, you can have either, but I would lean toward cyborg. Let's analyze this and break it down a bit. This is how my mind works, so humor me, I lean on a very Euclidean way of thinking (with a bit of dyslexia for good measure). It's what makes me such a good programmer. We'll start by defining what these things are. * Android - a humanoid robot. But it's much more than that because we have robots and we have robots in humanoid form. So I will define it as a robot controlled by an advanced AI, something that approaches the level of a human mind. Rather or not it has to be sentient (self aware) is a matter for scholarly debate. It also has to take humanoid form. You could have an extremely smart self aware car, like KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand, from Nightrider) but you would not call it an android, the same applies to drones or aircraft with a high level AI built in. * Cyborg - a robotic human. Simply we could say this is the opposite of an android. But it has to be more then that, and it has to be more then humans with mechanical parts, because we already have that. So I will define it as humans consciously controlling robotic parts that are an intimate part of themselves. Like an arm, but not like a pacemaker. Also it is not a human controlling a robot by remote control. We have that too and have had that for sometime, we don't quite have a machine human (brain) interface, but we are close. A lot of people make the mistake of not defining specifically what they are talking about, I'm not one of them. Perhaps you definition of these things are different then mine. But this is my post, so I will use my definition of them. So lets outline some of the similarities. They both use mechanical parts that resemble human parts. Now rather or not they are covered in organic skin is not really important to my discussion here.. In other words a metal arm is not fundamentally different then a metal arm covered in skin. Granted there could be some major differences depending on how real you want to make it, does it bleed. is the skin warm, is it mechanically quiet etc. But, the fundamental nature of the "robotic" part could be said to work the same for either an android or a cyborg. You could have an android that has humanoid form that doesn't mimic a human. And you could have a cyborg that has humanoid form but doesn't mimic a human (as described above). So you could have a cyborg that from the outside looks the exact same as an android. On the surface is A=B and B=C, then A=C. Let's look at the main differences. The simple answer is who is controlling the robotics. A robotic arm is a robotic arm. One controlled by AI would be said to be android, one controlled by an organic human mind would said to be cyborg. Now these 2 control systems can have very different technologies involved. For a cyborg, it more about the brain machine interface. For an android its more about artificial intelligence. The two things diverge at this point, this is the defining difference. As I said, you could have a robotic body that could be interchangeable between a human brain, and an AI core. This is the main item that separates and defines them. Now that that is out of the way, I would lean towards cyborg being first. Lets look at the reasons I think this. It's opinion that it would be easier to build a brain machine interface then to build the brain. It's also hard for us humans to give machines the authority to kill humans. We have problems with this right now with drones, and I doubt we would feel any better with more advanced AI given this authority. There is also a question of why and it brings to mind a third option you didn't mention. I'll cut to the chase and say what it is. That is genetic engineering, and I mean this on an extreme level(humor me). Ok, back to the why. I don't think you can justify building androids solely for war not unless you have a very long time of warfare. Certainly they would could be used in warfare, but I don't think they would be developed for warfare (not as I defined them). It makes no sense from a cost standpoint. You could build a AI drone, or tank. It makes no sense from a giving away your technology standpoint. Enemies will capture some of these at some point. And it makes no sense from a morality standpoint. The main reason I see developing any of this (humanistic technology) is for medical reasons. People are greedy and selfish, and any way to prolong life, or to increase the quality of ones life are things that one could reasonably expect most people to pursue. If you had an arm severed in an accident, or say even military action. Who wouldn't want to regain the use of an arm? I think most people would. So for that we come full circle with the third option. You can build a new arm, or you can grow one. Now lets look at the why of an android. I am sure there are reasons, but when compared to the above motivation I find myself searching for one that comes even remotely close to that. Something like a glorified butler just doesn't cut it, nor does building a humanoid to do a job a human wouldn't want to do. Sure you could build one for work people cant do, like going into a nuclear reactor. But than again, you could build some kind of tracked vehicle. Humanoid robots are hard to build, they are much more complex then a simpler design. Often times the form of human is not a requirement for a robot. It could help to be humanoid, to have arms, but does it have to be. All that extra work to make it humanoid could be directed at making it do it's job better. I think people will always pursue building things like androids, for curiosity sake if nothing else. Besides androids are cool. Even if you argue some rapid advancement in AI that outpaces a human machine interface. You can still have a useful AI in a box. Having an android body is not a requirement of a useful AI. Having a AI is a requirement of an android. Therefor we could have a useful AI and we could have robotics sophisticated enough for an android body, but putting those 2 things in the same entity are not a requirement of either. One last thing, we could get to the point in genetics where creating a cyborg doesn't make sense at all. If we could engineer living organism and tissues to fulfill any need one may have of mechanical systems then it could skew the motivations. This was the reason I brought up the third option, because the most important question is why. The how is assumed, because if there was no how we wouldn't be talking about this. Hope my reasoning makes sense, its a bit rambling. I find it best to always go back to the basic questions of: who, what, where, when, how, and why. [Answer] Autonomous killing machines are already possible with current technology. Half-autonomous killing machines already exist today in form of armed drones. They are capable of flying on their own, but a human operator on the ground still has to pick the target and press the fire button. But there are already prototypes for fully autonomous killing machines. Their real-world application is pretty much right around the corner. Regarding androids: There is really no good reason why killer robots would need to immitate the human body shape. You can build far more efficient killer machines when you don't have to follow this pointless "must have two legs, two arms and one head" design constraint. Sure, androids can be humanized which makes them useful for human-machine interaction scenarios, but if the main human-machine interaction is to get killed by it, this doesn't really matter. One highly specialized case where android soldiers could make sense is covert infiltration. But it will still take a while until we can create androids which are so human-like that they can be mistaken for a human. Especially when people actually look for them. Regarding cyborgs: I doubt that there is anyone who currently seriously considers to add cybernetic augumentations to their soldiers with the goal to improve their combat potential. Prosthetics to alleviate disabilities acquired in combat exist for centuries (like the pirate's peg leg in the answer by James). But even modern prosthetics are not considered enhancements. They still only lead to a partial restoration of the combat abilities of the soldier at best. Most armies consider people with prosthetic bodyparts not even fit enough for desk duty, yet alone fit for front-line combat. And then there are ethical problems with amputing a perfectly healthy bodypart just to improve a soldiers combat abilities. Sure, following ethics and winning wars are two priorities which don't go well together, but it's still a barrier to keep in mind. Before we see the first cyborg soldier armies, prosthesis technology would first have to advance so far that their benefits outweight the cost and the ethical concerns. And that will still take a while. tl;dr: Definitely killer robots first. Cybernetically enhanced soldiers (maybe) later. Android soldiers are just silly. Android agents might make sense, but for that we need more advanced technology than for cyborg soldiers. [Answer] Why not both? We are currently working on both precursors to such technology: prosthetics (and some orthetics), and 3D printing living cells. Prosthetics will slowly become more advanced with actuators, engines, power storage and increasingly sophisticated materials that at some point we'll replace or support bodyparts with them. While such tech has been developed for years and every year some company boasts about the newest Electronic hand prosthetic that "is truly like a new hand", the technology is far from the sophistication that our hands are. 3D printing bodyparts is already a thing. Take cells from the person you want to print it for, genetically change them into the cells you want like skincells, then grow them in a petridish and 3D print them in the shape you want. Wait for the cells to adhere to eachother like natural cells do and you have a bodypart! The biggest hurdle with such technology is bloodflow. Your body contains incredible amounts of tiny bloodvessles that make sure every piece of your body keeps getting the oxygen and materials it needs to stay functioning, but they haven't solved it yet when printing bodyparts so all they can do right now is simple, thin/small things like the outside of an ear. Surprisingly cottoncandy might be the solution as it's shape and thinness approximate that of the cappilairies they need to emulate and after building the bodypart you can wash away the cottoncandy easily. As both technologies progress, you see both become more prevalent. At first you see simple additions to the body and people who can go through life with a prosthetic so lifelike they arent handycapped and orthetics that can aid you like a simple exo-skeleton to carry heavier loads, while simultaneously people migh extend their lives with grown coronaries, a new kidney or clean lung tissue. Then you see prosthetics and orthetics that are superior to the human body, and people will voluntarily replace bodyparts with them creating your cyborgs. 3D printing will also allow people to build new bodyparts superior to those we are born with, like better smelling noses, removing the blindspot in the eyes and building your muscles with the strength and sizd you want. People will also have realised that you can create a new set of genes and not just build a single bodypart, but entire humans out of it. These biological androids would be build from the ground up for the task they will perform, and they'll have superior bobe structure, muscle tissue and the like to benefit from. Depending on cost/efficiency, as well as available resources (fuel/electricity vs food) they would add cybernetics to these androids as they are build. The reverse could also be true: cybernetic parts from various materials become much cheaper and faster to produce, people then start building entire humanoids from these cybernetic parts. Biological parts have properties like constant self repair and lubrication that could still be beneficial for certain components, so parts of these humanoids is replaced with engineered biological components to reduce the cost and reduce the amount of servicing and replacement these humanoids need. The Final result will likely be the same though: cybernetic implants that are so close to biological components in their functioning and self-sustaining capabilities that it becomes more of a synthetic biological machine, this is supplemented with biological parts that are similarily close to being machine parts. But that is far into the future... Or as far as the singularity is from us. [Answer] Avatar I think the best approach would be with an avatar technology; mechanical constructs linked to a human controller similar to modern day drones but with advanced interface or sensory capacity. The problem with cyborgs is you lose the experience and time investment when the human host is killed. The problem with androids, as mentioned previously, is that you miss out on the nuanced decision making ability of a living person, barring a super sophisticated AI. Avatar drones, whether bipedal, quads or flying, would have the benefit of human control while still taking advantage of the latest AI tech; less vital systems could still be automated by the units allowing a squad of drones to be controlled by a single human operator, keying off their position and covering a specific attack vector or surveying the escape route just as players do currently with some video games. Drones could be mass produced, constantly upgraded and easily replaced without impact on the overall experience level of the army of pilots (hmmm, is that an oxymoron?). [Answer] # Cyborgs We already have [autonomous military drones](https://www.nato.int/docu/review/2017/Also-in-2017/autonomous-military-drones-no-longer-science-fiction/EN/index.htm) and autonomous [footsoldiers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator_Tactical_Unmanned_Ground_Vehicle) that roughly do the job. Humanesque movement is already becoming old news, so if it were practical to make robotic soldiers in human form, I think it would have been done by now. Their biggest advantage would be over regular robots would probably be their ability to use scavenged equipment from enemies, but adequate equipment for a robotic soldier seems like a tiny cost in comparison to creating the robot itself. Also, making cyborgs relate to humans (an underacknowledged priority in modern military settings) would probably be much easier than trying to make androids so convincingly humanlike. [Answer] First come the cyborgs, because they are basically humans with technological augmentations. Then the androids will be superior, because no matter how many augmentations a cyborg could have, it will still have as a base a human and there's a limit to how much you can augment, not to mention you can't redesign from scratch. Also remember that androids are robots with human appearance, and the restriction of having that appearance has only limited use in warfare. Because it is simpler and most effective the first robots would be like the drones or armored vehicles. After that I can easily see an armored and weaponized version of this used in combat: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuA50H9uek> :) [Answer] To answer this question you may need to know that one of the simplest resources used in much of human warfare is humans we see it going back to the time of the Neanderthals to modern day when this question was being asked. If we look at common global population growth it would not be immpossible for there to be a line of expendabele humans to be used and turned into cyborgs but also in some other countries in the world using the USA as an example and <http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/> as a reasorce the growth in population is going down due to a variaty of reasons one of them can be that there is simply not a need to have large families even in ones that once usually had seven kids and then those children had seven more kids are instead are choosing to stop at one or two. So, if your idea of the world relies heavily on overpopulation then humanity will likely turn to the more cyborg side of things with others using androids if they can or don't have the population growth to justify the costs of sending people out to fight. Leading to both being created and used in the world but the amount of them being used will vary depending on what the country or area they're from will have in terms of population ]
[Question] [ At some point in the far future, humankind has sufficiently advanced to construct spacecraft for warfare, ie. space navies. The smallest of these crafts are comparable in size to contemporary fighter and attack aircraft, and are used as such. The largest of them, meanwhile, dwarf contemporary supertankers, and take on the roles of massive battleships, supply transports, or command centers. The superpowers construct carriers to house, transport and launch their fighter spacecraft (or space fighters), much like contemporary aircraft carriers. Since space fighters require no lift to launch, they could be stored in individually designated pods, chambers or hangars, and a carrier could launch - and recover - its entire compliment of fighters simultaneously. However, no matter the builders or the sizes of these carriers, all of them use one long, flat, exposed flight deck, combined with multiple elevators, to launch and recover their fighters, almost exactly like contemporary seafaring aircraft carriers. What would be the reason to build spacecraft carriers this way, ie. in the image of contemporary aircraft carriers, instead of building corn-like carriers where each "kernel" houses a fighter, and could all be launched or recovered simultaneously? [Answer] One possibility would be to have the "deck" work as a rail/coil gun, accelerating the launched ships. The longer the rail gun, the higher the survivable relative top speed. A corncob sized accelerator trying to push the fighter to the same speed would end up being occupied by a think film of meat paste. That would give the smaller ships a higher initial speed and give them a higher initial survival chance. This assumes slow/armored carrier and light fragile fighter that uses size and speed for defense. The smaller craft would also have less storage for fuel/energy. The speed boost would allow the carrier to bear the cost of the initial acceleration. Or, maybe they just happened to convert an old Japanese carrier instead of a battleship.... Edit: Another reason: the carrier presents a smaller profile to the enemy if it presents its narrow end. A corn cob design is either going to have the fighters launch with no acceleration boost or will need to face broadside to the enemy. Also: Might as well put wings on the tiger... ...put a spinal mount laser on it and you have a weapon pointing toward the target of the fighters. You can also use that launch system to throw out missiles and a very high initial relative velocity (pull the safeties off and zoom!). [Answer] To protect the hangars, and other portions of the ship, from the small craft themselves. Flight decks are largely giant slabs of armor with equipment on top. One of the things this does is protects the ship from errant landings. With a modern carrier, the small craft can come in damaged or with engine problems or other things. There are numerous examples of aircraft landing poorly and smacking into the carrier's flight deck, but aside from the flames and other associated issues, the ship itself is largely undamaged. Clean up the debris and you can start functioning again. With a spacecraft, this could be even more important. You want landing areas to be different than the work areas for the vehicles in any case, but when you have potentially damaged craft and pilots trying to land, you really don't want to have them trying to fly through a door or other relatively small opening. A great big flight deck can let them land or dock a lot easier because it's a much larger target. There can be equipment on the flight deck to launch and recover craft easier, but it also serves to make the craft significantly easier to recover - Which means they can take more damage and still be saved. It helps your pilots survive, and it helps the ship survive. A craft hitting a hangar door can take the entire hangar out of commission - Annoying if it's a shuttle bay, but if the shuttle bay hangar on a battleship is taken out, it's just an annoyance. If one of the launch hangars on a carrier is taken out, it can potentially cripple the entire ship's fighting capabilities until it is repaired. [Answer] Solutions have to reflect the environment they are to operate in, so I am going to say there is no reason to make a ship which resembles an aircraft carrier in space. Consider the USS Macon and Akron. These were explicitly aircraft carriers, yet have no resemblance to oceanic aircraft carriers, since they operate in a different environment. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jL6Yx.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jL6Yx.jpg) USS Macon ZRS-5. No flat decks here I won't go into the argument that space fighters are a non sequitur since they operate in the same medium as the other spacecraft, but lets look at some other issues: * Spacecraft can come at you from any direction. Since space is both vast and 3 dimensional, the idea that you will majestically steam head on towards the enemy isn't going happen. They will follow orbital paths or direct trajectories, hide outside the plane of the ecliptic or maybe hiding inside an asteroid. A carrier needs to be able to react by rapidly launching sorties of fighters in any direction. A "corncob" or something resembling a sea urchin could point coilguns in many different directions and sortie multiple fighters at once. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mysmc.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mysmc.jpg) Sea Urchin as inspiration for a carrier * To cover large volumes of space, you need to sortie multiple craft at once. This means firing volleys of missiles or launching waves of fighters in quick succession. Of course, lots of fighters being launched in quick succession mean you have to recover them quickly as well. A carrier might resemble something like a multiple rocket launcher open at both ends so fighters can be launched and recovered in large numbers. There is no particular reason they all have to be facing "front", you could conceivably have 1/2 the fighters facing forward and the other facing aft in the launch tubes, providing more flexibility when planning and launching sorties. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iW1e2.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iW1e2.jpg) A WWII German design. If you imagine the launch tubes mounted on a turntable like this on the ship, you have a fairly flexible design So frankly, the amount of handwaving you'll need to do to make a spacecraft carrier look like a modern oceanic "flattop" is going to detract from your story, and probably induce strange anomalies in your plot as the spacecraft crews need to work around the awkward design which isn't suitable for space combat. [Answer] Here is another reason to keep the traditional carrier like design. Have your carrier be able to operate both in and out of the atmosphere. Why would you want to do this? One reason would be the ability to project power effectively while planetside. Planets are going to be the primary place where the most resources are. The best way to take and control an area is to get boots, literally, on the ground. Have your capital ship be able to get down to the ocean of the target planet so that smaller boats can get boots on the ground. Have attack aircraft launch from the carrier in order to provide support for ground forces that were delivered by various means. For those craft to return, while in atmosphere, the long flat deck is more practical. If those small craft can also serve as space fighters, that's a major bonus. When the small craft are in atmosphere, they will need to be aerodynamic in order to function efficiently. You might think that if the fighter support craft are launched directly from orbit, keep in mind that it will take time and a ton of energy to get them back into orbit. Much easier to do it from within the atmosphere. A very large capital ship like this could almost be thought of as a self sufficient military colony, able to go from planet to planet and tame the surrounding area. It can operate both in the vastness of space and in atmosphere. [Answer] For taking off, while it is possible to just boost directly away from the carrier, you might want a little extra speed without burning fuel. So have a magnetic linear accelerator along the length of the deck that boosts the fighter up to attack speed without a lot of wasted fuel. Likewise, while you might not really need a long deck for launching, you do need a way to slow fighters down when they are returning to the carrier. An easy way to do this would be bring the fighter in parallel to this long deck, power up large magnets, and use the magnetic field to pull the fighter toward the carrier where conventional wheels and brakes could slow it down. Or use the magnetic accelerator in reverse to slow the fighter down if you don't want to use conventional brakes. [Answer] There is no real reason to have an long exposed flight deck. On earth the fighter need a catapult since it need the lift from the air and the craft have not so many space to reach its lift-off velocity. In space you have not this problem, you can simply release the planes and let them go. (and here you have a couple of solutions like Battlestar Galactica or the anime Yamato 2199) Not to mention the difficulties to work on such setup: what happen if an deck operator will drift away in space ? How you plan to pressurize the hangars under the flight deck ? How the lifts works ? Just to mention some of them. So the only thing that I can think about is that the landing require some sort of rendez-vous to land (like a mechanical arm that catch the plane) so a big somewhat exposed deck mean more fighter land per minutes but this have its problems too: the deck is out in the space and you probably want to put them in the hangars, like on the actual aircraft carriers. [Answer] Space is big, and you want to save fuel whenever possible. Not just to stay up (that's actually the part that requires least fuel), but to go to a higher or lower orbit. The spacecraft carrier could act as a sort of a railgun, launching these fighters from the deck using electromagnetism, giving them the velocity needed to reach the required orbit. Not only that, but when these fighters return, rather than using their own fuel, the same process can be reversed to slow down the fighters to a stop. By my amateur space enthusiast calculations, this could save up to 30% of fuel! [Answer] For lasers and relativistic projectiles, point defense systems may be impractical. So you are left with two options for defense, armor and evasiveness. For a fighter, thick armor is likely impractical so you want them to be moving with significant velocity before they leave the armored safety of the larger ship. There are two options for this, launch tubes and a flight deck that is facing away from the battle shielding the fighters with the belly of the ship. If you give the fighters engines that cannot safely be started inside the ship, such as fusion torches, and cannot be started after a mass driver launch, due to warm up or a need to be kick started by the carrier, then launch tubes won't work. And you are left with the solution of a long flight deck along a single side of the carrier. [Answer] Say you have artifical gravity. The technobabble means that "down" must be the same direction on the entire ship, but the direction can be chosen independent of the axis of thrust. Next, consider that you do not want to carry fighters, you want to generate fighter sorties. * After a mission, a fighter comes in for a landing. The fighter may be damaged but repairable, with limited fine control for maneuvering. The landing space needs ot be relatively large. It helps if there are force fields to keep the air in while fighters can pass through. * After landing, the flighter might need a little servicing and maintenance on the sortie generation line, or it gets diverted for more time-consuming repairs in a proper workshop. * Before the next mission, the fighter goes to refueling and rearming. Handling armed missiles should be done away from the armored core areas of the ship. * The crew gets back in, and multiple fighters in a flight are spotted in a convenient holding area for near-simultaneous launch. Fighters get moved from position to position. Considering the gravity, it is convenient to have small wheels on the fighters and to move them on a level surface, instead of lifts to move them upwards or whatever. As a side benefit, this would be compatible with planetary surface bases. Are the starfighters atmosphere-capable? Imagine a long tube for fighter operations. Fighters enter it on one end, get processed, and leave on the other end. Almost like one of the nacelles of the Battlestar Galactica, except that launch catapults are not necessary if the fighter engines are good enough. The tube might be straight, on perhaps an S shape to reduce length. An U shape would launch new sorties into the incoming fighters. [Answer] Launch rails to protect the carrier Other answers have suggested launch rails to save on fighter fuel, but I think the boost that would give may not be that relevant if your fighters have enough delta-v (number describing the capability of a spacecraft to change velocity, usually in m/s) to actually do interesting things. Either way, I can think of one other reason why you might need a long launch rail system: The fighter engines are powerful enough to damage the carrier. Long story short, if you want both high thrust (i.e. enough that you can do maneuvers other than ponderously spiral out of orbit) and high specific impulse (i.e. you have enough delta-v that you don't run out of fuel in minutes), you need very high engine power. This means that at close range your engines are likely to be dangerous - doubly so if the power source is nuclear, which it likely has to be. If your engines are powerful enough to harm the carrier, you have two choices: Use low power thrusters to get away from the carrier, or use some sort of launch rail. Using thruster fuel for this adds mass on each fighter, whereas the launch rail adds mass on the carrier. I'll ignore that space fighters might not make any sense, but this would apply also to drones and missiles with sufficiently powerful engines - in general, any high performance carried craft. It doesn't imply a flat deck though, but at least it implies distinct hangar space and launch facilities on the ship. [Answer] A corn-style carrier would have a few downsides due to the many hangars: 1. Hangar doors that open cannot be as thickly armored as a solid wall could be. So now the outside of your carrier is full of weak spots, and your most valuable possession (the fighters) is right behind the thin doors. 2. Airlocks present a lot of complexity and are also difficult to armor. But repairing the fighters is easiest done in normal air pressure. So it makes sense to have a few craft elevators with built-in ship-sized airlocks. [Answer] They don't all have long carrier flight decks, though there are ones like Battlestar Galactica that have fast-deployment rail tubes to shoot the fighters out at high speed, presumably to get them far away from the carrier and into action asap without using the fighter's fuel reserve. Other sci-fi places have a more realistic approach, such as Babylon 5, [seen here launching StarFuries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnnlnHQKk7I) in this youtube clip. [Answer] The question makes it sound like your future humans just started building space navies not too long ago. If true, then there could be a simple explanation. Coming up with radically new designs (corncobs and sea urchins) would involve building prototype ships and rewriting crew member training and operation procedures from scratch. Not only does this take potentially huge amounts of time and money, the end result may be extremely inefficient since the crew would be trained purely theoretically to operate on a brand-new, unproven platform. Instead, the construction of space carriers in the image of naval carriers means that a large portion of tried-and-true carrier training dating all the way back to the mid 20th century can be carried over to the space carriers. Both officers and enlisted crew members would be trained with proven centuries-old techniques. Obviously the crew would require additional training in how to operate the carriers in a true three-dimensional space (as opposed to operating on the ocean surface, which is far more two-dimensional), but the time and cost of such training can be reasonably presumed to be lower than the construction and testing of new designs. [Answer] ## Why would you want to store the fighters? The entry points for a modern space-based carrier ship aren't storage modules. That's ancient thinking. Space combat is dangerous and fighters are unlikely to come back entirely in one piece; there's likely damage to the armor plating at the least. Probably the engine is also quite damaged from the amount of energy pumping through it, and the laser based weapons also tend to burn out at around the exact same time that their battery runs dry (the engineers were clever like that). The "hangar bays" atop the flight deck aren't actually used to store any fighters, they are entry points into the factory line. You extract the pilot and then pull the fighter through the dis-assembly line when it comes home; take it completely apart, fix (or eject) all the broken parts and just store the fighter's components in the carrier's storage. Need to launch a new jet? Just pull all the required parts from storage and run it through the assembly line (in the other direction) and it's good to launch out the main flight deck. Sure, you lose a little bit of time in launch speed. Not much, mind you. We found that the main bottleneck in launch speed was getting all the pilots to their launch positions. But you win a lot in both craft durability (just getting rid of the refuel-caps has increased survivability by 5%) and in operational sustainability. The old ideas for a corn-cob based design were nice in theory, but it turns out that having 10 kernels with banged up fighters isn't as practical as disassembling them and building 6 new ones from the parts that still work. And as a bonus, we get to use the entire length of the ship for armor plating, magnetic launch systems, defensive counter measures and other such useful things now. [Answer] You would never have a large flat deck like ocean based carriers. The purpose of the flight deck is to give enough space for a plane to take off and land. In space, there is no gravity so you never need to take off. The moment you launch, you start floating before you fire up the engines. Landing is a case of slowing right down for the ship to pick you up exactly like the shuttle docking with the International Space Station. If you want to use a rail to accelerate the launch, there would be a hole like a gun barrel but strictly isn't necessary. In all likelihood, the corncob design is the most sensible design. The ship is cylinder and spun to give a gravity like effect for the crew. With the fighters mounted on the outside, the moment the clamps release, centrifugal force would fling the fighters away from the ship. ]
[Question] [ We Earthlings like to live in gravity wells but also have a taste for the exotic and are a bit lazy. Why not make colonies that take advantage of local conditions? Cloud cities over Venus, much less fun ones on Titan, an Atlantis under the ice on Europa, Domed potato farms on Mars etc. It seems to me that making a series of earths would have dubious benefits and huge costs. Why change the spin of a planet when you can just genetically modify your crops etc. So tell me why I am wrong. I will not fight you :) [Answer] There are reasons to Terraform and there are reasons to not Terraform. ### Assumptions For my answer, I take the term "Terraforming" as a generic term to create a passive closed-loop environmental system capable of sustaining human life. It's only external requirement is to supply the system with sufficient energy to drive the system. This includes massive Terraforming projects like making the surface of Mars habitable as well as creating passive closed-loop environments inside of asteroids or domed craters on various bodies (e.g. Mars and the Moon). ### Terms * Closed-loop - The system only requires an energy input (e.g. sunlight) to keep it running. * Open-loop - The system requires constant replenishment of various components (oxygen, water, food, etc.). * Active - The system requires machinery and/or human intervention to keep it running (e.g. the [Closed Ecological Life Support System (CELRSS)](http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18278/could-you-maintain-breathable-oxygen-for-long-term-space-travel-through-shipboar/18283#18283)). * Passive - The system runs without machinery and/or human intervention (e.g. a biosphere). ## Reasons to Terraform 1. Maximize the space available for human settlement 2. Minimize risks of environmental system failures 3. For long-term habitability of the colony The following sections discuss these 3 reasons but not in the same logical grouping. ### Optimal environment By definition, humans evolved to operate in a "shirtsleeve environment". Operating under conditions outside of this bound (too hot, too cold, too much gravity, not enough pressure, etc.), reduces the productivity of humans. In some cases, it also has adverse affect on human biology. Terra-forming provides a technique to create a shirtsleeve environment in as large an area as possible. For planetary bodies, this ultimately would mean terraforming the entire body. Before that though, [the colonists will Terra-form smaller sections (e.g. domed craters)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps). Domed Lunar Craters: [![Domed Lunar Craters](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tRjur.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tRjur.jpg) ### Environmental systems As @o.m. pointed out. Humans require a pretty tightly controlled environment in which to live. You can either create these environmental conditions using an actively controlled environment or you can create a passively controlled environment that doesn't require human intervention. Closed-loop active Closed-loop active environment systems (e.g. something you'd put on a spacecraft) require constant supervision, maintenance, and other human intervention. If the responsible people get hit by a bus or the machines break and the people can't repair them - then everyone dies. Open-loop active Even closed-loop active systems are large and massive. For trips of less than 1-2 years duration it makes more sense to just bring the supplies and forget all of that machinery and chances for problems. The problem is you throw everything away after it is used. Which means everyone dies if you don't get regularly resupplied. Closed-loop passive (aka Terraformed) For very long-duration missions, especially ones in which it's possible the crew will forget how to maintain the environmental system, then you will want a closed-loop passive system. Passive environmental systems function with or without human intervention. For long-term colonies or generation ships, some form of closed-loop system will be a requirement and making it passive will be the goal. ## Reasons against Terraforming 1. Cost 2. Project time 3. Mass ### Cost How much might it cost to redirect comets to strike Mars and increase its volatiles inventory? Hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars? Even the "richest" entity capable of running a project like this on Earth (the US Government) would find it difficult to finance such a goal. Give the time horizon mentioned below, it would be exceedingly difficult for other organizations to justify the risk. The current cost combine with the risk would not be worth the distant reward. Even when you ask questions like "how much might a fully terraformed Mars be worth" are actually not important when the payout goes to the great x50 grandchildren of the person making the investment. ### Project Time Terraforming even the most Earth-like planet (e.g. Mars) might take a thousand years or more. For even the most optimistic humans, this is well beyond our normal capacity to operate. We just don't think in terms of projects lasting that long. Large corporations are arguably the best at long-term planning and execution and they aren't really capable of managing projects beyond a time-horizon of 10-20 years. By comparison, elected governments may plan for 10-20 year time frames by have problems with execution follow-through when elections replace the original planners. After all the people reaping the rewards won't be born for more 50 generations. I suspect we won't see serious discussion of massive/costly Terraforming efforts until human life-expectancy gets to be close the length of time such an endeavor might take. ### Mass Passive environmental systems require much more "stuff" than the active ones. It won't make sense to use passive systems on anything intended to move around (e.g. most spacecraft) unless the mission requirements require it (e.g. a generation ship). Carrying the extra mass of the passive system would simply cost too much reaction mass to move. Of course planets & moons will be likely targets for Terraforming. However, we might see Terraforming and development of passive systems for giant space habitats (e.g. [O'Neill Cylinder habitats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder)). Interior of O'Neill Cylinder: [![Interior of O'Neill Cylinder](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rvd4x.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rvd4x.jpg) [Answer] ## Safety and security. Humans naturally desire to live in safer and more secure environments. The prehistoric ruins of Jericho show that humans have built [fortifications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortification#Ancient) around their living spaces (cities) [over 10000 years ago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho#Pre-Pottery_Neolithic_Age.2C_c._9600_BCE). It is not unthinkable that much older settlements with defences exist, but have been lost by the ravages of time due to them being made of less sturdy materials (such as wood or loose rocks). A spaceship or other self-contained environment is intrinsically unstable. While safeguards can always be built in, malfunction of that environment would result in catastrophic death to everyone inside that environment. For example, a floating cloud-city on Venus, if it leaked and crashed, it would spell certain doom for everyone inside it. Such self-contained cities are also highly susceptible to sabotage, and considering the extreme warlike nature of humans, it is likely that enemies would make such self-contained cities a prime target, as they can provide the maximum damage to enemy lives and materiel with the smallest cost. It makes much more sense to consider terraforming as an ultimate extension of humanity's need for security. A terraformed planet has a stable biosphere, and cannot have its biosphere easily destroyed (short of targeted asteroid strikes), and even in such cases, terraforming technology may be able to reverse much of the damage from the resulting nuclear winter. Furthermore, a terraformed planet also greatly reduces the need for further maintenance once the terraforming is complete. While a Venusian cloud city requires constant input of lifting gases and possibly replacements to its [corroded external compartments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Composition), a terraformed Venus would not require as much maintenance, and would also be far more stable. Therefore, humans would generally not start with terraforming planets due to their large capital outlay, but as more and more people begin to settle on the planet, humanity's natural need for security would drive them to terraform it. [Answer] Stability, Safety and Security Machines require power, machines break down, domes split or puncture, machines require parts and constant maintenance. Planets don't. I'm not going to doom my children to trying to survive against a bunch of aging machinery. I want them to have the stability of a planet. I want them to be able to play outside the way we did. People are going on about cost, but what is cost. A home is a home, it has no value that could be measured by mere cost. We talk of the richest organisation on Earth, but what do they control compared to a whole world? The cost is nothing compared to the reward. Lifespan What's the lifespan of your machines? 100years? 1000? What's the lifespan of a planet? 1,000,000years? 1,000,000,000? For an order or two of magnitude on the costs? Really? False economy all the way. Stop pretending the bubble cities are anything other than temporary accommodation for the workers while they terraform. Then there are the other costs What is the cost of mining when you have to make the whole mine airtight or have every miner in a space suit? What is the cost of popping over to visit a friend in the next city when it's 400C in the shade? What is the cost of food when you can't farm? The last of these is the killer, you can exist in a bubble world but it can never be a true colony, it can never be a true home if you have to import your food or grow it in vats. Until it's terraformed it can never be a free world in its own right, it remains an experimental outpost. How dare you condemn my children to living in a slowly decaying box when they should be dancing in the rain for the sake of short term costs. > > “Finally, a planet is not a world. Planet? A ball of rock. World? A four-dimensional wonder. On a world there must be mysterious mountains. Let there be bottomless lakes peopled with antique monsters. Let there be strange footprints in high snowfields, green ruins in endless jungles, bells beneath the sea; echo valleys and cities of gold. This is the yeast in the planetary crust, without which the imagination of men will not rise.” - Strata, Terry Pratchett > > > p.s. Don't bother pretending you can change the mass/gravity of a planet. That's technology of another order. [Answer] On the long run, you want a self-sustaining ecosystem to live in. A place where people can live and work in shirtsleeves and survive if the computer network fails. And the best scale for that is an entire planet. Don't put all your eggs into one basket. --- Edit in response to comments: You could gene-modify humans to live in various places, but that would limit the ability of humans to travel. The goal is a shirtsleeves environment for resident and visiting humans. [Answer] ## Egocentrism. Nothing else, really. When you try to colonize a uninhabitable place, there are 2 options: 1. Convert the place to support your kind. 2. Convert your kind to support the place. There are two questions when choosing the best approach: * Technical : which one is more feasible? * Moral : can humans bio-engineered to live on Venus be still called "humans"? Can conquering of a foreign planet be called successful if the "conquerors" will never be able to set foot there? The last one answers your question: our conscience tells us that option #1 feels right and #2 feels wrong. So it's just a "human thing" to do #1. (Nature does #2 and look how it ended.) [Answer] Have you ever red the [Mars Trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson? A lot of the questions over terraforming are addressed there. Most of these have already been raised in other questions, concerns like Security, Safety, Convenience, Stability, increase of space ETC, so I won't address these. My point is that the Ethics of terraforming are simple if there is no native life. To parphrase a fantastic quote from (iirc) Blue Mars, Terraforming is not in any way an ethical concern. Mars doesn't care if it's lifeless red rock, or if it supports life inimical to humanity, or even if Mars is turned into a New Eden of life for the human race. Mars is a planet, not a person. It has no personality or consciousness that we are aware of. I personally would argue that If we are to colonise planets, Terraforming makes the most sense, and is indeed ethically desirable. We as a species are growing exponentially. We will run out of space on this planet, and as our species continues to expand, we will need more and more space. Bubble cities simply will not cut it space wise. Therefore, it depends on how your universe is developing. If you want something quite cyberpunky and dark, go with Bubble Cities, Floating Towns, Undersea Atlantian metropolis. The slums of an atlantis would be fantastic for some cyberpunk - dingy light filtering through from the surface, corporations rationing your o2, dodgy recycled "rations"... Alternatively, if you're going more utopian, go with a green garden planets your characters can frolic in, or make them part of the process :) [Answer] While o.m. raises a valid point that you want your structure to be sustainable, terraforming wouldn't be worth it. There is the potential to upset the balance in the solar system, and it's overall way too much work. It would be much easier to just reinforce their space bases. It would be a lot easier to take it in small parcels, a dome here, and asteroid there. Maybe your people have metal woven into their clothing, and live above giant magnets. Or create some kind of gravity generator. Or spin an asteroid. ]
[Question] [ I'm curious what factors a terrestrial planet impacting the Earth would require for the impact to cause negligible damage to the larger planet, while destroying the Earth. [Answer] That really depends on what you consider 'negligible'. Is it 'Sterilization of all life, but planet is still there in one piece in the same orbit'? Or is it 'Everyone in the direct impact zone gets squashed and the rest of the planet suffers earthquakes, but after a decades-long volcanic winter we only have a mass extinction event'? The second case might be a bit hard to achieve. Even if you use some kind of super-tractor-beam-technology to gently lower Earth onto the surface of the other planet (escape velocity or less), the two planet masses will meld together. This 'melding together' means Earth breaks apart, penetrates the comparatively thin crust of the other planet and then merges with the magma of the other planet to create a combined 'super-planet'. # Super-planet Calculations I am going to ignore following energies: * all the deformation energy that gets released when earth and the other planet get smushed into one piece, heating up the merging planets * The impact energy (assume the tractor beam lowers earth onto the planet surface with next to 0 relative velocity) Even ignoring those two things, it is not really survivable. Some Math: Volume Assume that $V\_t$ is the total volume of the original planet volume $V\_p$ plus the earth volume $V\_E$: $$ V\_t = V\_p + V\_E $$ Radius We assume that the combined planet will be a sphere, just like the original two planets were. With that, we can use the formula for calculating the volume of a sphere $V = \frac{4}{3}\pi r^3$: $$ \begin{align} \frac{4}{3}\pi r\_t^3 ={}& \frac{4}{3}\pi r\_p^3 + \frac{4}{3}\pi r\_E^3\\ r\_t^3 ={}& r\_p^3 + r\_E^3\\ r\_t ={}& (r\_p^3 + r\_E^3)^\frac{1}{3} \end{align} $$ Circumference The circumference of a sphere at the largest point is the circumference of a circle with the radius of the sphere $C=2 \pi r$. The total circumference will thus be $$ \begin{align} C\_t = {}& 2 \pi r\_t \\ = {}& 2 \pi (r\_p^3 + r\_E^3)^\frac{1}{3} \end{align} $$ ## Ten Times Radius - Unsurvivable! Assume that the other planet has a radius 10 times as big as earth ($r\_p=10r\_E$). That means it's about the size of Jupiter and its volume is 1000x bigger than earth. For the circumference after combining that means: $$ \begin{align} C\_t = {}& 2\pi ((10r\_E)^3 + r\_E^3)^\frac{1}{3}\\ = {}& 2\pi (1001 r\_E^3)^\frac{1}{3}\\ = {}& 2\pi r\_E \* 10.00333222\\ = {}& 2\pi (r\_p + 0.00333222r\_E)\\ = {}& 2\pi r\_p + 2\pi \* 0.00333222r\_E\\ = {}& C\_p + 0.021r\_E\\ = {}& C\_p + 0.021 \* 6370km\\ = {}& C\_p + 133km\\ \end{align} $$ What does that mean? That the combined planet will have a circumference that is 133km larger than the original planet - meaning that at the very least the tectonic plates will be ripped apart to somehow accomodate 133km more space. That? Can't be healthy. Or survivable. (If the life forms haven't been incinerated before simply due to the deformation energy heating everything up) ## Hundred Times Radius - a habitable Planet? $$ C\_t = C\_p + 1.334km $$ Adding a whole kilometer to the circumference - that doesn't sound too bad or unsurvivable. On the other hand - your planet has 100x the radius of earth - meaning a volume of 1 million times that of earth. Even assuming the other planet is 'only' a comparatively light gas giant like Jupiter (still has 10x the radius of Jupiter, meaning it's 1000x bigger than Jupiter!), it will still have more gravity than Jupiter's 2.5g. And considering that Jupiter is just a bit too small to become its own sun, your planet would probably have achieved fusion! If it's not made from fusible materials (similar composition to earth), it will be a lot heavier than 1000xJupiter - meaning the gravity on the surface should be in excess of 50g (too lazy to do the gravity calculations but I'd say it's a good guesstimate). I dare you to find a life form that can survive something like that... [Answer] If the two planets are not on a direct collision course, but they pass very close to each other, the bigger one might destroy the smaller one with its gravitational attraction. I mean that the gravitational force is different on different parts of the planet depending on the distance from the center of mass of the bigger body, this difference is often enough to break into pieces an orbiting body. After that the bigger planet will have to withstand a shower of very big fragments, but not a full impact. [Answer] As far as we know, there was an impact event between the Earth (12700 km diameter) and a 10-15 km size object about 66 million years ago. This caused non-negligible damage, wiped out 75% of the species (non-avian dinosaurs are the most well known). So an impact with a meteorite with merely 0.1% of diameter (0.0000001% of volume or mass, if we assume roughly similar density) changed a lot. If you replace that meteorite with Earth and Earth with "Planet XXXL" and assume a same proportion of size causes a similar (non-negligible) damage, you get that "Planet XXXL" has a diameter of 12700000 kilometers, or about 10 times the Sun (1390000). Your planet is a star, and even that would get damaged. [Answer] Assuming that the impact will happen at velocity $v$ of one planet with respect to the other, the energy of the impact will be $1/2m\_p v^2$, where $m\_p$ is the mass of the planet. Depending on your definition of negligible, you can get a ballpark figure on the mass of the planet. If a 1% is negligible, you "just" need a planet 100 times more massive than Earth to achieve it: the planet will get from the impact 1% of the energy it is giving to Earth. [Answer] The incoming planet has giant rings that serve as a shock absorber. [![giant rings](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1vu3f.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1vu3f.jpg) <https://earthsky.org/space/huge-distant-planet-has-rings-200-times-bigger-than-saturns> The colossal rings and many moonlets around this planet act as a giant shock absorber. The incoming earth is battered by each ring in turn as Earth draws closer to the planet. These impacts slow the earth, robbing it of its kinetic energy. By the time Earth has traversed the entirety of the ring system, it is barely moving. It will gently kiss up against this other planet and they will form a shared atmosphere binary planet. The planet does not care about the loss of its rings. Earth, on the other hand, has converted most of its relative momentum into heat via the impacts of all this ring material, and it has become quite warm. hmm... sharing atmospheres with a ball of magma might warm things up for your other planet. But it was chilly there before, so all good. [Answer] As the other answers already explained, your idea of planets colliding with negligible damage to one is pretty much impossible, so we'll need to think out of the box. If your population lived on a large dyson sphere - or maybe an interconnected dyson swarm - surrounding a large star, the earth-like planet colliding with it could crash through the surface and fall into the star in the center. Sure, you'd lose an earth-sized chunk of the surface and probably quite a bit more, not to mention the solar flares from the earth-star-collision, but a large enough dyson sphere or dyson swarm could survive the collision with some of the population alive if it was thin and brittle enough to take up little energy from the collision. You could think of it like a needle piercing an egg shell. You lose some of the shell, but most of it stays in one piece. It might cause the dyson object to become unstable and tumble into the sun after some time, though if it's big enough, it could take millennia during which scientists have time to find a solution. I do not have the knowledge to calculate how big and thin it would have to be, I don't even know if it would be viable at all, but it's the only possible survivable planet-to-"planet"-collision I can at least imagine. ]
[Question] [ Elephants are some of the most intellingent mammals, and they have large brain sizes compared to people. They are [said](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition) to present self-awareness among other things. How could one go about raising the intelligence of elephants to a level closer to humans? I imagine a thousand year project doing this. [Answer] # Overview Force them to solve problems, of course. Elephants are not smarter than they are because they don't need to be. Humans and carnivores are relatively smart because hunting requires more intelligence than eating stationary plants (for the most part). Many animals can also learn by mimicry, so teaching a few elephants to do cool tricks would also let younger generations bootstrap their knowledge by observation. So...how do you force an elephant to solve a problem? # EchoPraxia This is a mild spoiler for a decent story. But the short answer is: pain. You give them a puzzle that they must solve, and longer they fail to solve it, the longer they are exposed to pain. You can also force them to communicate by the same means: give one confined elephant information, and put another in pain, which they can only escape when the first elephant communicates the information to the other. In fact, we know this technique works, because we already have elephants who are smarter than wild elephants: circus elephants. And the way you train a circus elephant is via pain (aka bull hooks). # Enhancement You can accelerate their learning by giving them an explicit language. You can either construct a language from scratch, and use the pain technique to force them to learn it, or you can try to associate existing vocalizations and movements with particular symbols, imbuing their natural movements with semantic meaning. For instance, you can teach elephants a sign language by showing them images, moving their trunks and ears in a particular way to demonstrate the sign associated with the image, and use positive and negative reinforcement to seal the association. You can also make them learn to recognize signs by a similar system: one elephant is shown a picture, then "encouraged" to sign it to another elephant, who then must select the correct picture from the other side. I think these techniques alone would get you quite far even in one generation. Selective breeding of the best learners would probably yield promising results, especially if one could augment with any kind of dietary supplements which favor higher brain utilization. In fact, changing their diet to one which provides more glucose for brain activity would also help (one theory is that human brains could expand when they mastered fire for cooking, unlocking more useful calories in food). # Cyborgs If you have advanced technology, you may be able to implant chips directly into their brain to stimulate their visual cortices, etc. This would accelerate their ability to communicate, as well as the ability for their teachers to communicate with them. Once you teach them an elephant language, you can teach them human ones, and then they can learn by [forced] reading. Instead of spending all day eating plants, they could spend all day learning. Surely you would reach the limits of their neural capacity in short order! [Answer] With current technology we can't. We don't have enough knowledge about what it means to be intelligent to even begin to make such a thing happen. If we were going to uplift Elephants using some form of future tech handwavium we'd do it by making them more intelligent. Probably by tweaking their genetics in such a way that they have a more intelligent brain. Pick some cool sounding brain locations (frontal lobe), pick a cool sounding method of genetically modifying an organism (CRISPR), munge them together in a cool sounding sentence ("We used CRISPR to enhance their frontal lobes and ever since they've demanded that we give them the same rights as people.") and you have an excellent description of how your super smart elephants were uplifted. [Answer] Sheer brain size is not very important, encephalization quotient is considered more representative and elephant (1.2..2.0) one is only marginally superior to cat (1.0..1.8) and much lower than Homo Sapiens (7.2..8.0). This method is not universally accepted, mainly because it gives only a rough estimate. Main idea behind this is a certain (large) amount of the brain is used to control and "model" the body, i.e.: it's used for "general maintenance". Since nervous tissue is very expensive, in terms of nutrition requirements, there's a strong evolutionary push to keep it to the "minimum required". A much better approach would be to really try to understand exact functions of the various brain structures. This has been attempted, but attempts have been hampered because, while certain functions are quite clearly localized, other (especially "higher" functions like language) are only pertly localized (even lateralization is far from being clear-cut), many functions are carried out involving large sections of the brain, sometimes virtually all of it. In practice encephalization quotient, corrected with any known "special requirement" (e.g.: dolphins "excess cerebral mass" is largely used to implement their sonar sense) gives a reasonable hint without the obvious anomalies the sheer mass has (sperm whale should be much smarter than we are and women should be less intelligent than males (yes, I know a lot of people is convinced of the latter, but that doesn't make it true!)). The key to reach self-awareness is language. to date we are the only species who developed one (not a set of signals, but a real language capable of grammatical and syntactic transformations). I need to expand this to explain I consider a language a construct following grammatical and syntactic rules capable of recursive definitions, so that is able to describe and manipulate concepts not immediately related to physical objects. Regardless of "common usage" I do not consider the simple passage of information as sign of existence of a real language, otherwise bees would have a language (fairly structured too, but inflexible conveying information on a single topic) as most, if not all, animals. Language creation seems to be a necessity of the human species, when in sizable communities (see: Nicaraguan Sign Language), while humans grown without contacts with other people won't develop one and can't really be taught a language anymore (there have been a few cases of children raised by animals in the wild). This characteristic seems to be what put us apart from other animals and strictly connected with what we call "self consciousness". This process could be duplicated, of course, if we knew what really makes the difference, but I strongly suspect we still lack the necessary insight to understand what needs to be done. [Answer] Fund big studies on intelligence in rats. Once we have some clues about how intelligence works in rats then try similar techniques with elephants. Rats are better because they breed really fast even in captivity and we have less compunction about killing them. Selective breeding (or culling) might in time raise the average, but in an uplift you care more about peak than average, and it has not been proved to advance the peak. Wait until we have figured out intelligence in rats to try it on elephants seems like a much more likely path. [Answer] You can probably selectively breed them for your definition of intelligence. 1000 years however isn't really long enough to get good results because of how long each generation takes for an elephant. We have been breeding dogs for tens of thousands of years and there is definitely some selective pressure there from humans to get more intelligent dogs. People would want dogs that are social to humans and are easy to train. Dogs will probably score better than wolves at human intelligence tests because they been bred to have all the human characteristic enhanced. The problem however, with breeding elephants with selective breeding is how long it takes to breed them. A dog has a life cycle of ~15 years and can reproduce at age 5, which means a generation of dogs to the next is ~5 years. For elephants, females are fertile around 10 while males take about 15 years. So each generation takes more than 2x as long. In 1000 years, you can only do about <100 generation of elephants and that is just too few to selectively bring out traits you want. Keep in mind even with tens of thousands of years of selective pressure for smarter dogs, they are still nowhere near what most people would consider human intelligence. You might be able to breed "smarter" elephants in that time but it is unlikely they'd show the difference you are after. [Answer] Rather than only using genetic modification (either artificial or through selective breeding) consider using digital enhancement. Interfacing computer circuitry into brains could allow for a number of modifications and improvements in cognitive abilities much faster than breeding elephants. This would also provide means for the elephant cyborgs to communicate and interact with their surroundings without a large amount of changes to their physical form. They could communicate with a speaker/microphone based speaking system or through other digital communication methods and they could use robotic arms or other manipulators to allow more dexterous tool usage (although elephant trunks are actually quite dexterous as is). ]
[Question] [ Suppose there's a country which is very large by land area, (close to the size of Brazil), but which has a very small population (1.5 million). Majority of the population lives in a several high density zones, which are usually cities situated on the coast. Rest of the country consists of a land that is very sparsely inhabited. Mostly due to being a barren wasteland, deserts on the south and tundra on the north. There are occasional settlements like mining towns and agricultural villages but they are usually very isolated from each other. Would they be able to control their borders? I'm not looking for solution against invasion by foreign military, but from keeping individuals & small criminal or opportunistic groups to prevent things like: smuggling, poaching, illegal mining, illegal grazing etc. Assume that country is industrialized and relatively wealthy. No foreign mercenaries. All the law enforcement personnel must be citizens. The technology level is Earth in the 1970's. The population is made of humans and the planet is Earth like, but continents are quite different. [Answer] # Technology can do a a lot At the risk of sounding like Bubba, we've got border patrol boats: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ulq7x.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ulq7x.jpg) Border patrol ATVs: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YFvQl.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YFvQl.jpg) Border patrol cameras: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RueKW.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/RueKW.jpg) Border patrol drones: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OxZd4.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/OxZd4.jpg) Border patrol cowboys: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jbMz8.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jbMz8.jpg) Border patrol helicopters: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rfgdy.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rfgdy.jpg) and best of all, border patrol walls: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/55qzv.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/55qzv.jpg) There were no pictures available for a search of 'border patrol claymores.' But that would work too, as a last ditch effort. A few people can go a long way with all that technological backup. [Answer] # The Zone You want to turn to Russia, but not because they have a similar population density. No, you want to borrow their playbook because they are very good at area denial. You said it yourself - the country has way too much land, and for the most part it's a barren wasteland. So it's not going to bother your citizens to make the wasteland even more barren. Dial up scorched earth tactics one thousand percent and lay waste to the perimeter of your country barring some controlled areas. [Cobalt bombing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb) your borders would be a good start. Let's see those smugglers and poachers deal with 50-100 miles of irradiated, water-less, food-less, shelter-less, utterly inhospitable hell. # Conventional backup Beyond the Zone, and in the permitted corridors, your regular border guards pick off whoever survives. The more resourceful criminals will try to bypass your Zone with vehicles. Air-based vehicles will be beyond the means of most, and are easy to detect, engage, and destroy with conventional military weapons, so we won't worry about those. The biggest issue will be all-terrain vehicles. But Russia has that covered too - General Winter's most reliable subordinate is [Colonel Mud](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-D11bY0VLscA/VGr4_B1thNI/AAAAAAAAIB4/MSOItfEY-74/s1600/truck-mud-Russ.jpg). He defeated Napoleon's artillery, Hitler's tanks, and he will do the same to the trucks of your criminals. He does not need to destroy them, merely delay them until your border guards can detect the party and deploy a unit. The Russians' own strategy for dealing with muddy roads is to make [enormous specialized vehicles](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/7e/4b/8b/7e4b8bffa8dc51693bcb99b8bb12a508.jpg) but the bigger they build 'em, the easier they are to detect (and the more expensive they are). # Internal control Ultimately, no border control is 100% effective, but layering a nuclear wasteland, an impassable mud pit, and your regular guys with guns will make it hard for all but the most determined and wealthy criminals to get through. Once they get through, though, they will still need to actually do their business and leave. Ensuring that your nation is a poor environment for doing crimes will help deter people from even attempting to pass through. If all mining sites are properly secured, there will be no illegal mining. Same goes for grazing (or you can just torch the grass), smuggling (they have to get the goods to market, catch them there), poaching (keep an eye on your animals), etc. [Answer] The question as asked calls for a very very sparsely inhabited country (average density less than 0.2 people per square kilometer). Even Canada has a density 20 times higher. The only way for such a country to exist is to be located in a very inhospitable climate, and, just like Canada or Australia, have no neighbours or have neighbors only in those parts of the country where the population density is not ridiculously low. 0.2 people per square kilometer is simply too low for a functional country. Think of what happened to the large but too sparsely populated Mexico in the 19th century. (At the end of the century it was much less large.) Russia obviously qualifies as a large, sparsely populated country (largest country in the world at 17 million square kilometers, 8.4 people/square kilometer, less than 6 people/square kilometer in the Asian part). What do you think - does Russia [control its borders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Service_of_the_Federal_Security_Service_of_the_Russian_Federation) or not? Russia has a 7500 km long border with Kazakhstan (another very large and very sparsely populated country) and a 4000 km long border with China. Are there many Kazakhs or Chinese casually crossing the border to mine, graze, or poach? See also the Wikipedia article on the [Border Security Zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Security_Zone_of_Russia) of Russia. The basic idea is that on a strip of land of several kilometers from the border (exactly how many kilometers depends on the local command of the [FSB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service)) "economic activity and access are restricted to require permission of the Federal Security Service". Just being caught in the zone without a specific permit is enough, nothing more needs to be proved in order to send the criminal on an extended tour of Siberia. And in the 1970s the Russian Empire (which at that time called itself the Soviet Union) was even [more fierce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Border_Troops) in controlling its borders; Wikipedia says that in 1989 the Soviet Border Guard had 230,000 men. The brave Soviet Border Guards even fought two micro-wars with the Chinese in [1929](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_conflict_(1929)) and [1969](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict). [Answer] you don't need to control your borders just control access to the cities and Main populated areas. Your borders are Wasteland criminal can have that land for all you care. But what you want is to keep them from smuggling guns drugs and contraband into your populated areas. You can do this by establishing checkpoints, you will have checkpoints both along major roads and at the borders and entrances of cities and populated areas. Most of these checkpoints will be focused along the Border aria were the Wasteland meets the populated areas. [Answer] It's already being done. 1.5 million people in Brazil (8 million square quilometres) yields a density of 0.18 inhabitants/km2. Greenland has 55,000 inhabitants in 2 million square quilometres, therefore with a density of 0.025 inhabitants/km2, six times smaller than Brazil one, and Greenlanders seem quite able to manage to control their borders - with [one major exception in 1931](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_the_Red%27s_Land). Of course Greenland is an extreme case, surrounded by water and not an independent country. The closest independent countries I could find were Mongolia in 1956 (1.5 million km2, 845.000 inhabitants, 0.54 inh/km2) and Mauritania in 1950 (1 million km2, 657.000 inhabitants, 0,64 inh/km2), both of them three times more densely populated than your imaginary country. And as a reference of the effort needed to control empty lands, according [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North-West_Mounted_Police#Origin), in the late XIX century it was expected that "a force of 100 to 150 mounted riflemen could maintain law and order" in the about 2 million square quilometers North-Western Territories in Canada. If your imaginary country can use motor vehicles, planes and helicopters, a few hundreds or thousand police officers could be enough to control your wastelands. [Answer] Drones Buy, steal, copy, or reverse engineer UAV technology. USA successfully used [Ryan Firebee](https://sites.google.com/site/uavuni/1960s-1970s) since the 60's. In the 70s USA developed Ryan SPA 147 while Israel created IAI Scout. They are both good starting points, but for such a huge land area you'll need to develop drone making industry. Combine them with helicopters & transport aircraft for quick deployment of guards and they should do rather well. [Answer] You could also look back a bit farther in history to Ghengiz Kahn's Techniques for keeping an empire several times bigger than the old Roman empire under control. To Generalize his primary tactics were speed, Co-opting the existing structure in those areas he conquered, and efficient ruthlessness. Here is how those can work for you: 1) Speed. In your scenario, the ability to cover large areas very quickly is vital. Ghengiz did it on horseback. His advantage was that his horse were organized in such a way that they didn't have much in the way of baggage so they were able to spend much more time in motion than anyone else, increasing relative speed. He had ancient city bound kings freaked out because he could come in from any direction and they wouldn't have time to adequately prepare. Given your 70's tech level that could mean low flying, agile aircraft that could be serviced easily wherever they landed, making permanent bases less of a factor. 2) Co-opting the local power structure. Take your guys and instead of taking even more territory, simply go to the border towns more likely to house smugglers and get the leaders to make it so hard for smugglers to operate out of them that they don't really try. Brutally murder some of the head Smugglers in a very public way. Ghengiz demanded tribute, your country could simply demand absolutely draconian measures to prevent smuggling bases to even come up. This leads us to the 3rd point. 3) Efficient ruthlessness. This is what Ghengiz used to keep the cities under his control to toe the line. He really didn't demand much, but when he felt thwarted he destroyed even large cities utterly in extremely short periods of time. Take one of his forces of maybe 50,000 vs a city of 100,000 (my numbers are hypothetical but I'm pretty sure this kind of stuff happened). 10,000 are simply tasked to bring the emperor 10 heads each. Severing 10 heads doesn't take all that long. The punishment for failure is so severe that no-one would dare slack. The other 40,000 are to herd people to the butchery. Return to the destroyed city a few days later to round up stragglers and kill them. Allow a very few survivors as witnesses. Now to negotiate with the next town. "Remember deadville? Here is the deal, unless you want to share the same fate, you are going to impale all those who try to smuggle stuff into my country on stakes on the roads leading to the borders as a reminder. Otherwise, we'll leave you alone. Just do this one thing and Unfortunate things won't happen to your town. Have a nice day." Monitor, leave a few piles of skulls around the place, and let your neighbors patrol your borders for you. This is kind of fun in an absolutely morbid kind of way, but I gotta admit, Bryan McClure's answer makes a lot more sense. ]
[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/64375/edit). Closed 7 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/64375/edit) A while ago a question was asked about the benefits of having sex with an alien and while it brought up some excellent points, there was a problem I had found. That question had made the assumption of plastic forehead aliens, aliens that are practically human, which made me wonder, could you have sex with an alien? Considering the fact that a alien would, to a human, basically be a super intelligent alien mixed with the obvious note that human and alien reproduction is infinitely unlikely to be the same, I find it hard that not only could one could not have sex with an alien, but they would be unlikely to feel sexual attraction. Is it even possible to have intercourse with an extraterrestrial? [Answer] There are people who [feel attracted to all kinds of animals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoophilia). So someone feeling sexually attracted to a life form from outer space is not that far-fetched. Assuming that there are intelligent aliens who are just as perverted as we are, a xeno-sexual relationship is quite conceivable. How would it work? Our erogenous zones react to various forms of stimulation. Aliens might have appendages capable of giving us the stimulation we consider pleasurable. They might have erogenous zones on their bodies which feel good when stimulated by us. If you would like to know what your extraterrestrial lover needs and how they could satisfy you, there is just one way to find out: together. # First of all: communication There is one prerequisite: You must be able to communicate with each other. If you can not signal each other your desires, needs, intentions and feelings, there is a good chance that one or both of you might end up bored, frustrated, traumatized, injured or even dead. And some of these states might not be desirable for them. Even worse, they might misinterpret your attempts at flirting for hostility. We are exploring the galaxy to make love, not war! So establish some reliable communication method first. If you can not find a way to communicate, forget about it and try hitting on something else. [There are enough other aliens out there](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation) longing for some human touch. But other than communication barriers, your love can conquer all obstacles. # Safety Inform each other about things you need to be careful about, like any body parts which are fragile or orifices which must not be obstructed. You might also want to consult a biochemist to check if any of your bodily excretions might be hazardous to the other. If so, estimate the risk and use appropriate protection. # Finding out what feels good First communicate to each other what your erogenous zones are and what kind of stimulation feels good on them. Suggest some practices which might give them or you the stimulation you desire and discuss if you both feel comfortable trying it. If it turns out one of you is anatomically incapable of stimulating the other, don't rule out the aid of tools. Before you decide to try something, make sure that you both know how to signal to each other you feel uncomfortable and would like to stop. Respect each others boundaries and don't go further than you consented to. After the act, discuss what you liked or disliked and how it could work better. And most importantly, have fun! By the way: Other members of the same species might not react to the same stimuli in the same way, so when you switch partners you should repeat the above procedure. When an alien feels attracted to an abomination from space like you, then you can assume that it is quite a sexual deviant. Its other preferences might be just as unusual, even among those who share their weird fetish for opposable thumbs. # Contraception Your chance of having any offsprings by fooling around with an alien is practically zero. Human/alien hybrids are just not going to happen. Imagine rubbing your genitalia against a mushroom (which are the reproductive organs of fungi, by the way). How do you estimate your chance to procreate that way? The mushroom at least evolved on the same planet as you did, so the chance is still higher than when doing the same with an alien. But by squeezing the mushroom against your private parts you might release its spores and spread them around. This might help the fungus to spread. Something similar might happen with your alien friend with benefits if you play around with their sexual organs. Or maybe they are hermaphrodites capable of self-fertilization. Then your activities might also very well get the alien pregnant. But even if members of the species are not capable of reproducing with themselves, you still need to be careful if you decide to get intimate with more than one of them (note that you might have trouble telling them apart). When you don't clean yourself properly between them, then you might inadvertendly transfer genetic material from one to the other and get them knocked up with each other. It's the same way bees assist in the polination of flowers on Earth, so this isn't very far-fetched. So learn how the procreation of their species works, if there is a realistic chance that your activities might result in alien babies and what responsibility they will expect you to take if that happens. [Answer] ## "Diddling" can be broken down further Which leads to the answer "it's mostly possible but be careful and do your research please" --- > > Note: From here on out, I'm going to assume you're talking about species that reproduce sexually. If you're describing asexual > reproduction, there is no need or even want for the other party to have sex in most circumstances - therefore, > the answer would probably be no. > > > --- ### Attraction? Possible As other answers have pointed out, there is a community for virtually any sexual interest. Assuming your alien species is the same way, there are likely to be some pairings, though unconventional. Attraction can happen. It's worth noting that some species do not have consensual sex, even on Earth. It is possible (although unlikely) that this alien species reproduces this way. Therefore, it's possible that one party involved in this exchange (human-alien) may not ever give consent. --- ### Communication? Possible By the time we observe aliens, we will likely have the technology capable of translating their language. Sound waves? Great, we can speak those. Light? Can be recorded and reproduced. Tactile communication? As long as they aren't toxic, sure. This is important if you want consensual pairings. --- ### Stimulus? Possible Assuming sex "feels good" for your alien species, [as it does for many animals](http://www.livescience.com/9631-animals-enjoy-sex.html) on Earth, then there must be something that can be stimulated to do so. Perhaps a human would need a machine to produce those effects - ex. light, magnetism, electricity, extreme heat or cold - or perhaps it would be tactile, something humans can mostly accomplish. If sex does not feel like anything for your aliens (or the gender involved with humans does not usually give consent) then the motivation behind sex, assuming still that there is consent when a human is involved, could be for profits. That eliminates the stimulation problem. --- ### Reproduction? Statistically impossible First and foremost, these organisms are probably very different from us genetically. Major differences in genetic code, and in chromosome count, make it so that cross-species reproduction will not work (most of the time) on Earth. If your aliens have a completely different [LUCA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor) (last universal common ancestor) there's no telling how different these things will be! Additionally, there are many speculative replacements for DNA out there - numerous molecules can carry "genetic" information effectively. It might not be a question of different genes or a different chromosome count, but rather XNA instead of DNA. It's also worth noting that reproduction requires compatible gametes - sperm with eggs, etc. There are other effective ways to make this transfer - alien gametes may not be able to interract with human gametes. Finally, the idea of cross-species reproduction also assumes that males are diddling with "female" equivalents, and that females are diddling with "male" equivalents. (1) Even if genes and chromosomes are compatible, DNA is present, and gametes are compatible, perhaps the ones that give birth are the "males" - like seahorses - and the females transfer the genes to them. Acts with this species would result in combining sperm with sperm, or eggs with eggs. (2) It's the future; ideas become more liberal as time passes. How many of these acts will be "heterosexual"? --- ### Healthy timeframe? It depends Metabolisms vary between organisms. Humans are born, see the world, live, and die through generations while single generations of some trees are around. Millions of successive generations of bacteria flourish throughout a human lifespan. If your aliens have similar metabolisms to us, expect somewhat healthy timespans. If they have longer or shorter - expect complications. --- ### Safe? It depends See my answer to [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/59156/how-useful-would-be-genetic-engineers-of-near-future-to-human-colony), which addresses the possible effects of alien organisms on Earth crops. The same ideas apply: There is no reason for diseases to be compatible if they evolve different genetic material, but the toxins they release may harm humans - and vice-versa. Or perhaps the aliens themselves are toxic to humans! It all depends. [Answer] So assuming that the alien has biology that can be manually stimulated, then I don't see why not? The alien biology might not allow for something like PIV sex, but neither do some human configurations. So if the alien can be stimulated, and has the ability to stimulate the human one way or another, then it doesn't matter, had sex. For reference the short story [Spar](http://escapepod.org/2010/07/08/ep248-spar/) (VERY NSFW) [Answer] You need a universal adapter kit. Before we find aliens, there will probably be whole-body haptic suits and VR, with technology driven my revinue from porn. So, each partner wears a sex suit, but rather than sending commands to the haptics of the partner in the normal way, they are translated into suitable equivalent actions. Likewise the virtual avatar presented of your partner will be anatomically suitable for you. Without going full VR, you can imagine small specific mechanical adaptors for individual body parts. For example, it may be shaped [like this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis#Birds) on one end (choosing an example from real Earth life— it might be three-fingered tenticles or a wide plate; very un-Earthly) and a human female shape on the other, with [mechanical actuators](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrator_(mechanical)) triggered by the human’s action. And don’t forget the very bottom of [this answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/46825/what-would-count-or-define-as-an-eldritch-abomination/46832#46832). [Answer] ## Yes, but would you want to? The OP doesn't go into detail about the specific details of this alien, so some degree of conjecture will have to be done. First, humans are sex machines and will have sex with practically anything: humans with dissimilar anatomy, humans with similar anatomy, themselves, animals, holes in a rock, plastic holes, plastic sticks, ice cubes of various shapes, warm apple pie, etc, etc, etc. (No, I'm not linking to any of these.) Given this immense array of human sexual affection, it shouldn't surprise anyone in the least that some horny person got the hots for an alien and wanted to see how far it would go. ## Wear a condom Sex with an alien means that you'll be merging, perhaps for the first time, two complete biospheres with completely different evolutionary histories. While on the one hand, this alien may have an STD that might convey eternal youth on humanity, it might also unleash the Plague Of End-Times. Wear a condom or make them wear a condom. ## Mechanics As long as there's an approximately penis shaped appendage or a penis-sized hole on/in the alien then sex with a human can happen. It may not be comfortable; lubricant of some kind may be required. There's likely to be some degree of biomechanical incompatibility here, so be careful. ## Psychology Anything can happen here. The universe of possible alien psychology is so large that to answer in any meaningful way will require will speculation. ]
[Question] [ I'm imagining a world where every human spends their entire life in a confined space that just barely fits the human and provides the with everything they need. Essentially, it's like wall-e taken to the extreme. ![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1nGae.jpg) Unlike in wall-e, these human do not need to directly interact with (or even perceive) the outside world. However, I would like these spaces that contain humans to still move around a lot. And that's where my problem lies: How do I justify robots moving these spaces around if the humans in them don't want to physically go anywhere? I'll provide some direction for the answers, but you can ignore it if you have a better solution that goes against what I suggest here: It seems likely that initially, these spaces were more optional and largely meant for transportation. And that humans slowly started to spend more and more time in them. For some time, people would probably still want to be able to get their two spaces together and get together in some communal room. It's therefor not unlikely that the system that moves the spaces around is still there and functional. There will of course still be situations where human will need to move out of their space (or at least the space needs to move), such as medical emergencies. This can certainly explain some activity. The difficulty lies in justifying it being used a lot. [Answer] I would go for a simple and logical software decision: Let's say the infrastructure is designed to care for humans but has limited self-repair capabilities. When a section of the humans warehouse starts to fall apart, the software might decide to move some humans to a new place (either temporarily during a repair attempt, or more permanently, abandoning this part of the building). Now imagine the new section they are in also starts to malfunction (after all, it has been so long any human has ever gotten out of their containers, things are degrading out there). The software will try and find a new better place for them (and this might very well be the previous section it got them out of in the first place because it now appears in a better state than the new one they are in at the moment). Just relocating the humans to the best available section of your infrastructure, if said infrastructure is slowly crumbling down, would be enough to provoke a constant moving around of humans in their containers. A software designed to manage stock always takes into consideration costs (here it would be cost of moving vs cost of leaving them in a section that is falling apart) and as soon as the balance tips, it triggers a migration of part of your human population. And finally, as mentioned by [Cragor](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/207/cragor), this also obeys the [first law of robotics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics): > > A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a > human being to come to harm. > > > [Answer] If the humans in question have no need/desire for external stimuli, the motivations for moving them about is entirely dependent upon the conditions and operating instructions of the system managing the humans. The first things which come to mind are relocation for facility maintenance (presuming maintenance of the holding bay for human pods needs attention more often than after the full lifetime of occupants) or specialized medical needs (presuming small pods cannot handle any and all medical issues or that resources are even spent on advanced medical care), but after that I think of less specialized (and maybe completely obsolete) reasons. Humans require both physical and psychological care. People spending time at the park, in the sunlight and fresh air, engaging in social activities, might be part of the System's programming on how to provide an environment for optimal care. The people may now live in completely self-contained pods, so they have no need whatsoever for going to the park (and are probably completely unaware of the move), but the System still brings them to the park because there is some residual operating parameter which says a human should be in the park for X hours a day for optimal health. The reasons for the park might be completely gone, but the instruction suggesting time in the park is beneficial is still in the code. These kinds of instructions can get quite perverse over time - if nobody keeps a close enough eye on the system and bothers to correct such things. [Answer] It could just be a result of efficiency. Is it more efficient to stockpile food/nutrient shots in one location and have every person's cube drive by it occasionally or would it be more efficient to deliver everything to every person? Currently, we have a combination. People go to the main stockpile (stores) and pick up what they need for their own personal stockpile (food at home). Since it seems each person doesn't have the space for a personal stockpile. (And maybe eating food is just a simulation now - not even really happening) it would make sense to move each person to whatever they want/require rather than delivering medical supplies or food or whatever to each person. This also makes an optimization of space, ideal for a huge population. [Answer] If the machinery is still in place, perhaps idle, it would probably do nothing. A few possibilities enter my mind, however, that might be reasonable explanations for why the robotics may move the units around. 1. Software glitch that starts periodically moving the contained units around. 2. Some automated system that cycles the units around to empty receptacles to clean any input/output pipes/ducts. (Water, ventilation, food, sewage, etc.) 3. What if a person dies, or gets sick? Might need to move their unit to a medical area. 4. They may still need to meet up for one reason or another, so there's always that. Some people may never become all that unwilling to move. [Answer] It's possible the reason is no longer widely known, such as [how the space shuttle is related to the size of a horse's rear end](http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html), or [why the newlywed cuts the ends off of the roast](http://www.snopes.com/weddings/newlywed/secret.asp), or [why we vote on Tuesdays](http://www.whytuesday.org/answer/). They move around because they've always moved around, and people who question the status quo are treated like they're crazy. Why take the risk? Another reason might be environmental. It would probably take quite a harsh change in environment to force such a social species inside. Perhaps they need to periodically move to the shade to keep from overheating, or to stay out of shade to maintain solar power. They could be avoiding hazards like predators, deadly radiation, lava, or acid rain. The reason could also be political. The powers that be need to move the people around to keep them from forming associations that could lead to an uprising. Perhaps the rulers don't even want people to remember they used to be able to own a piece of land. They don't want them to think of a geographical area as their own. Perhaps it was originally designed as the solution to [white flight](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight) or [gerrymandering](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering). Perhaps the system is designed such that one person can't move without everyone moving. One person moving for legitimate reasons would affect everyone on the same rail. [Answer] Imagining a pod that provides a human being with every need, we have to account for things like: * lighting that can simulate sunlight * immersive entertainment * human companionship * exercise (via electrical stimulation of the muscles) * feeding/hydration * waste management * medical monitoring * growth If we could truly immerse people in a virtual world, the rest is actually trivial with today's technology. You could (virtually) eat steak and lobster three times a day, but your feeding tube would still dispense the same nutrient rich gruel. No one would ever have to physically meet up with another person. Even the emergency situations mentioned elsewhere probably wouldn't lead to much movement, as it would be easier to simulate your husband after he dies of a heart attack than to get his pod to an emergency room in time. Second and subsequent generations wouldn't even question logical impossibilities such as why dad lived to 160 years old. Procreation could even happen over long distances via tubing and robotic assistance. Ew. The hard part to imagine is the first generation of humans volunteering to spend their lives in this system, but I leave that bit to you. One reason that you could have to regularly move whole populations is if you set this far enough in the future. The Earth is slowly loosing its moon, and as it drifts farther and farther away, its stabilizing effect on Earth's axial tilt diminishes. This will lead to greater seasonal variance, perhaps to a degree that solar powered pods can not function in Winter. The mechanical systems could simply hibernate during these times, but humans can't, so to save them there would be mass migrations twice a year. Unfortunately, I don't know why you want them moving, but this is a reason why everyone would have to move rather than just a reason that pods would need to be able to move. ]
[Question] [ I'm working on a big feline who lives in savannas and grasslands. It's a solitary ambush predator, 1,4m / 4' 7'' to the shoulder, preys upon medium and big animals (antelopes, buffaloes, camelids, ground sloths), not very fast but powerful. My question is, what's the best camouflage for an animal like this? or it doesn't matter? I mean, we have tigers with stripes, cheetahs and leopards with spots, lions and pumas plain yellow/brown, African wild dogs with yellow, red and black spots, etc. What kind of fur would be better for this really big cat? A more detailed image of the savanna/grassland: climate like Africa, very few trees, reddish-brown stones, shrubs and grasses between 30cm-1,2m / 1-4foot tall. [Answer] ## Multi-Scale Camouflage According to decades of military research, [multi-scale camouflage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-scale_camouflage) is the most effective pattern you can use for passive camouflage, and has become the basis for most passive camouflage patterns used today. The idea behind multi-scale camouflage is that your pattern has large chunks of colors, but those large chunks are super imposed with smaller patterns as well. This style of patterning is effective for 2 reasons. 1. In nature, objects tend to have multiple scales like this. IE: a pattern of rocks contains smaller patterns of bumps and shadows or a pattern of branches contains smaller patterns of leaves, so on and so forth. So, multi-scale camouflage most accurately represents a typical environment you would need to blend into. 2. When you use camo that has too small of a pattern, it loses contrast at a distance and all the colors blend together so that it fails to disrupt your outline. When your pattern is too big, it fails to disrupt your outline at closer ranges because the pattern blocks become large flat visual objects themselves. Multi-scale camouflage works at both near and far ranges unlike any single-scale pattern can. So for Savana, you want a pattern that looks sort of like this: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/H1s3v.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/H1s3v.png) One thing to note though is that the "digital" patterns used in military camo are not necessarily the best shape, it's just easier to design and manufacture. In nature, multi-scale camouflage can be made up of more amorphous shapes. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZWLug.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZWLug.jpg) Of the existing Savana large game predators, the best camo probably belongs to the [African wild dog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wild_dog) because its fur pattern includes these sorts of large color blocks disrupted by smaller patterns. Their exact patterning is more ideal for the arid forests around the edges of the Savana than the open grassy parts, but by minimizing the the deep blacks, and focusing more on yellow, orange, tan, and umber using the same general patterning, you should have an ideal tall grass ambush hunter. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HvrS0.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HvrS0.png) [Answer] The best camouflage depends on the visual skills of the target preys of this feline. It's well known that the [tiger stripes](https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/we-now-know-why-tigers-bright-orange-color-is-actually-excellent-camouflage/), for example, are effective at hiding it from the view of dichromats (a), while for trichromats (b) they are pretty flashy [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iKHD2.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iKHD2.jpg) As another example, to somebody using IR visors or echolocation, a person wearing a mimetic suit is as visible as if they were naked. Therefore you should first decide which type of vision the preys of this feline have, and then design its camouflage based on that. ]
[Question] [ Stealth isn't possible in space, but what if you just shine a laser in their eyes and make a whole lot of noise somewhere else? The situation is this: A shuttle full of pirate marines must dock to a warship orbiting a trade station. The warship is fully operational and armed with missiles and coil guns that will destroy a vessel that tries to make an approach. The warship has radar and a suite of telescopic sensors (i.e. visible, infrared, and radio telescopes) that let it detect other ships. The trade station is also a large hub for civilian space traffic, so the "airspace" is rather full, and the warship is able to communicate with the station to retrieve flight plan data and intervene with deviants. The warship is not an invading force, and so it will not fire on civilian targets, only on potential hazards to itself or to the civilians. These ships are operating on real technology for the most part. So no forcefields, or psionics, or gravity plating. They have thrusters, reaction mass, and have to deal with heat management. The warship also has no windows, instead, it has a layer of armor that is absent on civilian vessels (because bullets are a bigger concern than the view in the case of a warship). [![A modified corvette from the game Children of a Dead Earth, a good source for realistic space warfare.](https://i.stack.imgur.com/V9gb4.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/V9gb4.png) If a significant number of the civilian ships were equipped with non-standard equipment, could they effectively blind the warship long enough for a shuttle to make an approach and dock to it? My only idea is that these commandeered civilian ships would have to be outfitted with lasers and emitters that could saturate the radio frequencies and attempt to overload the sensors of the warship from many angles. With this distraction and confusion about what is or isn't a civilian target anymore, I hope to sneak a smaller vessel up to docking range with the warship. Edit: To clarify, the pirates can have a significant number of commandeered ships disguised as civilian vessels to use against the warship. But their goal is to commandeer the warship itself, so they don't want to destroy it. [Answer] How about this scenario: 1. Civilian torch ship uses fusion for propulsion. Exhaust is basically blackbody radiation. 2. Civilian torch ship is poorly maintained with green crew. Or so the story goes. 3. Attitude control on torchship malfunctions badly. Tugs come and grab torchship. Torchship fusion reactor turns out, out of control, and exhaust hits warship. Warship stays put because its armor can take it and if it moves the exhaust will hit the station. It intercepts the exhaust until mechanics can power down the reactor or evacuate the crew and let the empty ship leave. During this, the warship is blinded by fusion exhaust. This sort of thing has happened before and is part of their job. 4. Pirates come up while warship is bathed in exhaust and sensors are overloaded. Pirates had better come up in the shadow of the warship, or exhaust will hit them too. They must come between space staton and warship and so might be seen if space station has windows. --- I suggest this because if several civilian vessels simultaneously take hostile actions, the warship crew will figure out something is up pretty quick. They will leave in a straight blind line, possibly taking out anything in the way. They will then turn around and come back. Things will not go well for civilian ships. Pirates will probably be hightailing it away when things go south. [Answer] Using lasers to blind may work - but it'll be noticed and they'll assume something fishy is going on. Other people have pointed out that deception is a much better approach. Stealth in space is really hard ([Stealth in Space: How realistic is it?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23313/stealth-in-space-how-realistic-is-it)), but approaching a single static target with stealth is just within the realm of possibility. There are 3 approaches I can think of: * A front shield cooled to 3K so that your ship disappears into the background noise on the IR spectrum. (And coloured matt black, and radar absorbing) * Come "Out of the sun", keep a straight line between the ship, your ship, and the sun. * Find a blindspot in the target ships sensors. Eg the cone of its engine. If there's two ships, or it can read sensors from another location, none of this will work. [Answer] You could overwhelm the sensors as you describe but it would be easy to detect, putting the warship on high alert. One of the facets of an alert status would be locking down all ship access, which foils the intent. In my opinion, there are a couple other plausible solutions. 1. Prior to the operation introduce a virus that would render the warship conditionally sensor-blind without alerting its operators. It wouldn't require a hack, just someone on the inside who can slip a thumb drive (or the equivalent) into a port. 2. If the warship has a dock, odds are it's intended to be used. Rather than risk a head on conflict with the warship if the sensor ploy doesn't pan out, pirate a supply ship or personnel transport and smuggle the marines in with a Trojan Horse. That way you don't have to bypass any security at the airlock. There are plenty of solutions, but most depend on the lead-up to the operation and how much time and resources are available to the assault team. [Answer] Presumably the warship designers read this thread and consider the possibility of blinding their sensors, wether it be by laser, or microwave, or radar or whatever and considered countermeasures: Distributed sensors A bunch of small satellites are sprea out around the ship, they are all relativly small, use mostly passive sensors and are cooled to 4-5K before launch, so hard to detect. While unable to see everything the mothership with its better and active sensors can see, the emission of someone blinding the mothership will surely be detected. This would also protect against an attacker hiding behind a cooled shield. Distributed missiles Same as above, but the satellites are in effect missiles with a small drive and warhead, when the warship sends a "we're beeing blinded!!\\ signal the missiles autonomously select the closest likely culprit and attacks Shielded sensors The warship has a suite of sensor that are too insensitive too detect "normal" emissions, but, but can handle sensor jamming. Think cameras behing really thick sunglasses, or hardened radar receivers with ultra low gain connected to the same antennae Gravity, Gamma and X-Ray detection The approaching vessel has mass, the tidal forces this causes may (a hundred years from now) be detectable by a sort of LIGO on the warship. More plausible, the reactor of the approaching ship emits Gamma or X-Ray radiation, that can be detected and pinpointed by an array of sensors placed throughout the warship. Of course a graser (gamma laser) could blind these too, but then we are close to a death ray that can kill anybody on the ship. Summary It's hard to conceive of a way to sneak up to the warship. Your pirates need to look into another bag of tricks: bribing or blackmailing a crew member to let them approach, sneak onto an (expected) supply vessel, fake credentials, provoke the warship into boarding them (and then what? I don't know), electronic warfare against the ship ... Or a combination of these. [Answer] Assuming that your real goal is to get the pirate marines to get into the warship, I think you would get much further with deception. Your pirates could ~~wear bustles and disguise themselves as women on an abandoned ship~~ simulate a damaged spaceship or need to send a message / object / person to the warship, thus being able to dock them. Note that the warship will be the biggest ship around (not counting the trade station itself), thus the most suitable for certain actions (such as having a pressurized shed were the faulty ship could land or having a surgeon on board). Plus, the warship will try very hard not to fire to any ship, even if it looks suspicious. Killing hundreds of civilians which happened to had a broken radio would not please higher-ups. Story wise, this lets both sides to list all the technology and arms of the warship and how no enemy could dream on attacking that trade station, with the warship stationed there. Just to have them overthrown with a little trick (and then direct the warship weapons against the trade station). That is, assuming they managed to gain control of the warship once docked there. This will probably only work once, though. [Answer] If there are lots of other ships in the area, have another ship run interference for you. Get a large ship that has a perfectly normal reason for flying around that particular area (cargo deliveries, refueling, etc) and that frequently visits that station. Have the ship fly past your target warship, passing uncomfortably close to it (but not colliding) on its way to wherever it's going. The ship's crew apologizes for passing too closely, blames the rookie pilot for transposing navigation coordinates, etc. Your pirates are in a smaller vessel, hidden in the shadow of the large one. The warship can't see your pirates at all since they're directly behind the larger ship. Any sort of readings coming from the pirate ship would look like they're coming from the larger ship (hiding from the sensors is much harder than simply making your readings look innocuous and uninteresting). At the larger ship's closest approach point to the warship, your pirates' ship slips away and docks onto the warship for boarding. To make it extra difficult to see what's going on, do this while the ship is directly between the warship and the sun. The warship should be too preoccupied with this civilian ship's near-collision to notice the smaller pirate's ship. Even if they did detect you, the time between detection and docking would be too short to do anything about it. Besides, there's a civilian fuel tanker right there. Firing a weapon and accidentally hitting the tanker would cause unacceptable civilian casualties, plus might damage or destroy the warship. [Answer] The problems as I see it are as follows; 1. ALL ships will have multiple types of sensors both active and passive as listed by you. The military vessel however will have MORE and BETTER versions of these. It will also have more BACKUPS and an ECCM suite designed to counter threats exactly like this. You have to blind/defeat them all. 2. Attempting to do so, even if successfull will alert the ship to hostile intent. Whereupon, after going to 'battle stations' the ships captain can, in no particular order (a) commence evasive maneuvers which will throw off your shuttles approach vector (B) launch one or more sensor probes to try and identify/locate the source of the attack. That probe or probes will then also have to be jammed (C) 'handshake' with the station and use its sensors and traffic control network to try and locate suspicious vessels in the area. (D) request assistance from the other vessels in a similar vain. 3. traffic control by default will almost certainly alert the warship to an approaching shuttle as a matter of course unless the the warship has advised them to expect its arrival - which in this circumstance is not the case. This is a matter of routine. 4. The crew, alerted to a potential threat will be armed and suited up, and the ship in lock-down with any internal security protocols activated. I say this because since there are 'pirates' in this scenario and they have captured other ships in the past boarding and anti-boarding drills will be a matter of routine for the warship's crew. (Lets throw in automated collision/proximity alarm systems and external cameras for inspecting the hull and the space immediately around it for good measure - I'm feeling mean.) Remember the take on this is that the warship is initially in a stable, pre-determined position or orbit. (It doesn't have to orbit unless the station is so big it generates its own gravitational field BTW) relative to the station. The shuttles approach is governed by that orbit. If the warship maneuvers in any way the shuttle must adjust to intercept and that immediately gives its intent away to an independent observer. In short I think the odds of success are very low. If the warship was docked at the station for re-supply/maintenance etc that would change the situation enormously, otherwise???? One last thing, stealth in space, limited forms and for sticky limited duration may be possible. (See the Tough SF website for details.) Obviously certain materials can reduce radar cross sections but to defeat heat emissions there are only two ways I think you could pull it off - for a while at least. 1. 'power' down next to a much larger cold body like an asteroid, imposing its bulk between you and a known observer. Works only until relative positions change or you are spotted by another set of eyes operating from anther angle. 2. Use a specially designed ship equipped a large supply of liquid hydrogen or similar coolant. The coolant circulates around the outer hull to maintain a temperature around that of space in the local environment. The inner hull is insulated to protect powered systems inside. Heat is removed in the form of gas vented into space. Maneuvering is via 'cold' gas jets only. When the last of the coolant supply is used up your time is up. Sensors are passive only, you have no active 'hot drive', no weapons nothing that produces any form of excess heat. Only really good for one thing - spying and almost certainly automated not manned. [Answer] Send out a swarm of industrial/commercial drones that seek out sensor subsystems, attach, and then spill thick sticky globs of highly conductive paint to block the sensors. Unarmed industrial drones carrying paint obviously won't draw suspicion. ]
[Question] [ So it's 3 years after the apocalypse, there are 2 characters that are living in the wild, I want them to be able to listen to music (any type), but they don't have any electric power. They need to be able to listen to music while working so it can't be by playing instruments. How could I achieve this? [Answer] Given the sheer volume of disposable electronics that have been manufactured to date it seems inevitable that junkyard scavengers would be able to get some working again. Old smart phones, iPods, etc.. are literally in landfills. No cellular network left but as long as you have battery power it can still play music. Charging a small DC battery really is not that hard when you remember that the difference between a generator and a motor is the direction the rotor is spinning. Rig up a small windmill and put it in a cordless drill chuck and you can recharge a battery on a windy day - probably one of the easiest. It's not as high up the chain as food, medicine, shelter.. but I think it would be a luxury item the best organized groups would have a few of - and having one would be a good way to buy their good favor. [Answer] Until Edison patented his [phonograph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph), the only way for people to listen to music was to be present at a live performance. Therefore I see two possibilities here: 1. rather tongue-in-cheek, if they want to listen to music, they just need to build musical instruments and play them, or have someone play for them. Percussions are probably the easiest to build, followed by some type of flutes and cord instruments. 2. if they have some mechanical knowledge and access to the right materials, they can try to replicate an Edison's phonograph, and power it by charging a spring and a fly wheel. They might even find some old recordings while looting in some museum or music shop. 3. Shanties / Chants de Travail / Work Songs are another option. No instruments needed, no electronics needed, and they are a fact of historical folklore. [American Chain Gang Work Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI8NH1421-c). ~~ [Scottish Tweed Waulking Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CmGJ5dwBuk). [Answer] Old-style wind-up phonographs would be the way to go. They require no electricity; just turn the handle to wind up the spring. They use flaring horns to amplify the sound picked up by the pickup. In some travel versions, the horn is built into the lid. There are plenty of old phonograph records out there, but it might be difficult to get recent pop music in this format. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pu9Qu.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pu9Qu.jpg) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1W0jS.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1W0jS.jpg) [Answer] Making their own music is surely the most likely outcome. Whistling, singing (and making up songs, most likely), and simple percussion (clapping or stomping) don't require any equipment. Simple whistles (which can be made from twigs with loose bark), more advanced flutes (an animal thigh bone or the slipped bark from a branch, or a reed stalk), more advanced percussion (logs, animal skins stretched over clay pots or hollowed logs) and so forth. Music apparently dates to the Neolithic (instruments have been found in caves dating back tens of thousands of years). That said, clever folk, if old enough to remember vinyl records, could improvise a player rather quickly. Look on YouTube for a greeting card phonograph. The needle can be a literal needle or pin, or a sharpened nail; the sounding diaphragm can be plain paper -- and for one or two people to listen, no horn is needed. The record can be turned by hand, at a minimum (though clever folk will quickly find a way to turn it automatically, perhaps even regulate its speed). [Answer] As an example, look at the player piano: This existed in a couple of versions: One was very much like a music box, and it played with very little expression. A more sophisticated one make recordings that captured the style of the person making the recording (pianist) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_piano> The principle is pneumatic -- air powered -- for all but the last generation. Lots of instruments can be automated, but many are difficult to do at a volume suitable for a outdoor workforce. All of them require a person pumping bellows, changing paper rolls,etc. One of the most versatile entertainments for this situation is the work song. I have done many canoe trips as troubadour singing songs of work, war, love, and life. I had about 8 hours of repertoire. [Answer] A wind up phonograph will give you varied music provided that you can find records to run on it, pressing new records without electrical power, and plenty of it, is hard but not impossible but they do wear out so it will be necessary to replace them eventually. For single pieces that you want to be highly durable and which are relatively easy to manufacture without electricity I would suggest [lamellophones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamellophone), especially for systems that already incorporate mechanical motion that can be tapped to run a "pin cylinder" such as treadle run elevators. [Carillons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carillon) can also be used but are generally much larger and more mechanically complex. The only alternative is live music rather than anything like a recording. [Answer] One idea is that they can make some of their work elements BE instruments. We know how to make, say, a music-box, or a "piano-roll" type of punched spaces (which can allow varying air-flow like wind instruments) -- so if they need to MILL their grains, they can design the mill to have a musical element - a pleasing harmonic background, "wasting" some of the energy generated, potentially, but in the service of improved morale. With this baseline, others may improvise or share songs as they work. You may have a few people whose main job is music/morale -- it's worth giving up one set of hands (to play the instrument) if it keeps 10 people working longer, or more in-synch, or more productively. More likely, I see it being a turn-based thing, so at the start, no one gets to be ONLY a bard (unless you want that for dramatic tension purposes). Since I re-read the question and saw it's post-apocalyptic, how long do batteries last? Can they be hooked up to run existing players (whether vinyl, cassette, CD?) It may be worth researching the Amish and other groups that are deliberately limiting their use of The Grid -- I believe I've read they have cell phones, kept in a central place for use in emergencies, for example. Perhaps your society can have a resource library where one person per work-area checks out a media-player, media, and power (to avoid redundancies, and the isolation of headphones -- brings music back to being communal). [Answer] Musicians are possible. I've been to a re-creation where the community harvested grass/hay in the old fashioned way (central sweden, circa 150 years ago). The men formed a line across the field, and started slashing away with scythes. The women and children raked the cut grass into heaps, piled it onto a large canvas sheet, and periodically dragged it away. Meanwhile a few musicians sat behind the line and played folk music. As the work progressed, the men would get further away from the music and it got hard to hear. So the musicians would periodically stop, move close again, and continue playing. Despite being the hardest days work I ever did, it was a nice day, and the contribution of the musicians was actually really, really welcome. As were the children who ran around with water and juice for us. There was no questioning the value of these contributions. In older days the same scene would be repeated on the next farmers field, and the next, until the whole community harvest was completed. Keep in mind that music has existed for many thousands of years, but recorded music only 100. ]
[Question] [ Alright so I'm not really a physics person by any stretch so forgive me if I butcher some physics jargon on this post. So I'm making this hard sci-fi interstellar ship with a rotating habitat that can house its crew as the usual trope we all see. So I thought it would be powered by fusion rockets and matter/anti-matter hybrid engines allowing it to reach approximately 60% lightspeed travel in space. So I already figured that out but there's one thing that is actually bothering me a bit. Can a ship with a rotating habitat be stable as it travels space that fast for years? And I know there's no wind in space which would be a threat to its stabilization but let me show you an example. The ISV Venture Star (Avatar) [![Screencap from Avatar](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XTjvA.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XTjvA.png) So in universe, The ISV Venture Star was the second transport ship developed by the RDA that transports a thousand crew the fictional planet of Pandora in the Alpha Centauri system. A hybrid engine itself, it uses solar sails to travel from Earth to Pandora with the capacity to travel 0.7 or 70% lightspeed. The ship is approximately 1,646m long & 330 m wide. [![Photo of ship](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qx3zx.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qx3zx.png) So I figured that this was a very great hard sci-fi design indeed and one of the best. But there was one thing that I didn't notice until a friend told me. So in the beginning of the film the habitat section was completely in rotation and functional. But it turns out that the Venture Star was a sleeper ship. The majority of the crew is kept in stasis for the duration of the flight and that these modules are actually folded parallel to the ship when everything is under thrust. [![Diagram of ship](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9xPSK.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9xPSK.jpg) Then I started thinking, If we accelerate a ship at at those tremendous speeds similar to the Venture Stars capabilities, Is it actually possible for a ship with a rotating habitat to do so? I mean, would it have an effect on the habitation's stability and the people inside it? And the Venture Star was not really a rotating torus as it was just two sections linked by a passage. But what about a ship like this: [![Drawing of ship with multiple torii](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qTlrK.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qTlrK.png) or this [![Drawing of another ship with multiple torii](https://i.stack.imgur.com/c9hci.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/c9hci.jpg) Can ships with large rotating torus habitats be safely accelerated at tremendous speeds? Or is there actually a limit to how fast these ships should travel to safely navigate in a stable manner in interstellar space? [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sNQvN.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sNQvN.png) If so, how can it affect the Coriolis effect on-board if it were to travel that fast and the physical problems it would cause for the ship. This was just something I'm wondering so I just want to hear from people who are physics savvy on what they have to say about this. [Answer] > > Can a ship with a rotating habitat be stable as it travels space that fast for years? > > > The speed it travels at is irrelevant. The stability is important, but quite unrelated... the interesting gyroscopic effects of rotating bits of spacecraft applies just as much to starships as "stationary" habitats. It is in the nature of starships that you will need enormous engines (or other devices to provide thrust, like a photon sail) and enormous shields and huge reaction mass tanks (for rockets) and supplies and all the rest... this works to your advantage, because the rotating part of the ship can be relatively light and small compared to the rest which will help with stability. Combined with [reaction wheels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wheel) and [reaction control thrusters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_control_system), your ship should be stable enough. > > If we accelerate a ship at at those tremendous speeds similar to the Venture Stars capabilities > > > Pedantry alert: you don't "accelerate at a tremendous speed". Acceleration is the rate of change of speed. If relativity is to be believed (and evidence suggests that we probably should believe in it) one [inertial reference frame](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_frame_of_reference) is pretty much like another. So from here on, I'll ignore speed (almost) entirely, and concentrate on acceleration because that's all that matters. I believe that the Venture Star was designed to be accelerated at 1.5g, which is an impressive figure. At that rate, you don't need your spun gravity... you'd just turn it off. Given that modern day engineering is capable of making structures that can withstand 1G of acceleration for extended periods of time, having your spun sections cope with 1.5G should be no problem, especially if you parked them ahead of time. Which is of course exactly what the Venture Star did. > > Can ships with large rotating torus habitats be safely accelerated at tremendous speeds? > > > You've got three quite separate issues. 1. Are the support structures capable of standing up to the main engine thrust, even when the rotating sections are parked? I'm going to assume "yes", because having a ship that falls to bits when you press the go button is a bit embarassing. 2. Are the bearings up to snuff? That's harder to say. With the engines switched off, the forces on your bearings are largely radial. Turn them on though, and now the hub is being pushed forwards and the outside will naturally want to lag a bit. You now have to use [thrust bearings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrust_bearing) instead of simple bearings, which will increase the complexities of the engineering somewhat. 3. What happens to the direction of artificial gravity when the engines turn on? It'll start pointing backwards, is what will happen to it, because the contents of the spun sections will be experiencing acceleration due to both centrifugal and engine thrust forces, and those vectors will add up and point somewhere other than straight towards the stern or straight away from the axis. Here's a couple of helpful diagrams shamelessly stolen from [Project Rho's](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/artificialgrav.php#whichwaydown) informative page on spun artificial gravity, which you seem to have visited before but might be worth you revisiting: [![non-thrusting](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qZoEd.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/qZoEd.png)[![thrusting](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6o9nI.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6o9nI.png) If you're prepared to park your rotating sections before lighting up your engines (which for a toroidal gravity deck simply means reducing its rotating to zero rather than folding it up too) you can avoid these problems, but if you want to combine both forces (eg. because you have low thrust and you run your engines for a long time) you'll want to have intermediate, angled positions so that your artificial gravity vector always seems to point down. Here's a nice example of acceleration due to gravity (indistinguishable from thrust due to your engines) combined with centrifugal forces: [![fairground ride](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aZiZI.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/aZiZI.jpg) (also demonstrating that we are capable of making suitable bearings capable of withstanding forces as strong as 1G of thrust, though making it work for years in a vacuum is left as an exercise for the reader). Note the outward movement, with hinge points at the top of each tether. [Youtube link for a slightly more exciting ride](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmQ-Ha-aLEY). Take home message: a torus is great if you're not accelerating, that's why they appear on lots of habitat designs. A starship will necessarily have long periods of acceleration, which makes its use inconvenient during those times. The ratio of thrusting to coasting will inform your design. A torus might be best for very long coasting flights. > > Or is there actually a limit to how fast these ships should travel to safely navigate in a stable manner in interstellar space? > > > Your speed limits in space have little to do with your artificial gravity. Firstly, you're very sharply limited by your drive technology. For a rocket, even a super high tech beam core antimatter rocket like the Venture Star, you are limited by your exhaust velocity. For a beam core antimatter rocket, that exhaust velocity is about 30% of the speed of light (for reasons I'm not entirely certain about; the pions coming out of an annihilation reaction are travelling at .94c, but the quoted pratical exhaust velocity figures for beam core rocket designs are lower than that, eg have a look at the Robert Frisbee's excellent paper [How to build and antimatter rocket for interstallar missions](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d2ad/c77de39251b894462c98d79e68c80763a4d8.pdf) which goes into some detail on the issues and performance of antimatter-driven rockets). Your ship's delta-V, $\Delta V$, is the maximum change in velocity it can perform. If you carry all your fuel and reaction mass with you and travel at modest speeds, this is constrained by $\Delta V = V\_e \log\_e(R)$ where $V\_e$ is your exhaust velocity, $\log\_e$ is the natural logarithm function and $R$ is the ratio of the fully-fuelled mass of your ship to the unfuelled mass. Important Note By "modest" I mean "not too close to lighspeed". As your [Lorentz factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_factor) creeps up (and by .6c it is a non-ignorable 1.25) the less you can make use of simple equations (as Hypnosifl helpfully pointed out). Similarly, when you're using a rocket where a substantial amount of the stuff going out the back simply turns into photons and departs unhelpfully, you can't just use the regular equation. The highly complex and ugly relativistic antimatter rocket equation is available in Frisbee's paper, if you're feeling brave. For simplicity, and to give you a rough idea of what you're up against, I'm ignoring it. Just remember that the numbers I'm giving below are hugely over-optimistic, and real figures will be much, much worse. Now, that said: If you want your $\Delta V$ to equal your $V\_e$, you need a mass ratio of $e$ (or about 2.72). To add anothe $V\_e$ metres per second to your $\Delta V$, you need to multiply your mass ratio by $e$. If you want to get to 60% of lightspeed and your $V\_e$ is 30% of lightspeed, you need a mass ratio of about $e^2$ or 7.4. To get back down from .6c to 0 again, you'll need a total $\Delta V$ of 1.2c and hence a mass ratio of $e^4$ or 55. For a 10000 tonne starship, that means you need more than a quarter of a million tonnes of antimatter on board, and good luck with that. Take home message: Rockets are terrible for interstellar travel. There's a good reason the Venture Star used a [laser sail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion#Laser-pushed_lightsail_2) for boosting (though I prefer [sailbeam](http://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/597Kare.pdf) designs). You should probably use a [magnetic braking sail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_sail#Interstellar_travel) too. The second issue is shielding. You'll note that the Venture Star diagram you've shared has a massive stack of plates marked "debris shielding". I won't go into the details of shielding a ship trucking along at a decent percentage of the speed of light, but it is hard and the damage it will take will be punishing. Lose that shielding and you're dead. Your speed is therefore limited by how much shielding you can get your engines to push. Centrifuges won't come into it. Oh, and a third potential issue: > > safely navigate > > > Navigating starships is tricky, because working out which way you have to go isn't entirely trivial. Once you've solved that issue, you light up your big rocket (or other boost mechanism) and away you go... you don't need to do much steering on the way. In the case of spun sections, that's very important. Off-axis accelerations, such as those caused by rotating the ship, will have all sorts of very unpleasant effects and will definitely put large and uneven loads on your bearings. Turn off the rotation before turning! (also, partial turns at high speeds are a terrible idea, because you'll get high-velocity crud slipping past your shield and wrecking your ship. don't turn at high speeds. interstellar flying should be in straight lines.) > > If so, how can it affect the Coriolis effect on-board if it were to travel that fast and the physical problems it would cause for the ship. > > > Important note: the artificial gravity is provided by the centrifugal force, not by the coriolis force. The former affects all objects in a rotating frame, the latter only affects objects which have a velocity vector relative to that frame (eg. a person walking around in your hab section, or a dropped object, etc). So long as you're thrusting along the rotation axis of your gravity decks, and so long as your bearings are strong enough to withstand the force of the engine thrust and the stresses of your rotating sections, you'll be just fine. [Answer] If you have ships capable of reaching .6 c, rotating habitats are not only unnecessary, they're counterproductive. Your main concern isn't getting 1 g acceleration to keep the crew from getting sick from weightlessness, it's getting only 1 g to keep them from turning into the new paint job. Accelerating at about 1 g, it would take about 200 days to get to 60% c and it would take the same amount of time to slow down for rendezvous with the target. What you would want to do is constant 1 g acceleration for half of the journey and constant 1 g deceleration the rest of the way. That's as fast as you can go anyway and it also coincidentally completely solves the micro-gravity problem. Edit: To answer the question directly, considering the only purpose of a rotating habitat is to keep the human passengers healthy, about 3 g would be a hard upper limit. Sustaining those kinds of forces for a period of days or more might be possible. Any more and there's no way the hearts of the passengers could pump blood up from their legs. The technology currently exists to build bearing that could take that kind of beating so whatever the passengers can survive, so will the habitats. [Answer] The basic answer is "of course" but that answer comes with a caveat which is "if you're willing to take the time to do it" i.e. if you only accelerate at 1/1000th of a gee you can almost certainly leave your rotational sections running while you do so. It will take your ship a very long time to get up to a noticeable fraction of the speed of light but you will get there eventually. If you want to boost up to 0.1c in the space of minutes or hours it's a different story; that kind of acceleration is going to be a brutal strain on the fabric of your ship already without having things like floating bearings in it's design let alone working. Any acceleration that is a noticeable fraction of the pseudogravity being produced by the rotation will cause a decided "lean" in the net gravity felt by any inhabitant. [Precession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession) is an issue that needs to be addressed at the design stage to ensure that ships don't "wobble" in their course. [Answer] For rotation, you need a bearing. For a section that size and operating that long I see no realisitc alternative except for an active magnetic / electric bearing. The benefits of this type over closest alternatives are: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/93Xn4.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/93Xn4.jpg) 1- low to negligible friction - less wear / decreased maintenance and risk of failure 2- gaps in front and back between rotor and outer race of the bearing are monitored by inductive sensors and compensated by the controller. This will counteract vibration before it increases destructively. With a bearing this size, that could amount to a non-trivial amount of power needed to stabilize the rotor. That said - I think it would not be a great idea to keep this assembly rotating during acceleration / deceleration. As acceleration places load on the spaceframe, the bearing's rotor (and everything it is supporting) will be pushed back towards the engines likely overpowering its compensator. It would be grinding against the back of the race and given this size it would likely just shatter. I could see it having a "locked" position where some kind of caliper brakes immobilize the rotor and picks up the structural load. That means spinning down the torus before a hard burn - and spinning it back up to desired rpm once the burn is complete. If it's easier acceleration like from a light sail or ion drive then as long as you're within the compensation range of the bearing you'd be ok. ]
[Question] [ In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. The world has become a barren wasteland that is inhospitable to the the human race, which has been forced to take residence in hive cities. These are massive industrial metropolises that are densely populated and built deep into the Earth's crust. This has been the case for thousands of years, and the human race now number in the hundreds of trillions. As a result, these hive cities are overpopulated and resources are always in dangerously short supply. However, one invaluable resource that is always plentiful: bodies. The hive cities make use of every available resource, no matter how grim. The bodies of the dead are not buried or cremated with respect, but processed into a paste called corpse starch. This nutritious paste is broken down human remains mixed in with various ingredients, which are then fed to the starving dregs of society. Practically, billions of people die every day. People who have died of natural causes or accidents from unsafe working conditions, executed prisoners, unwanted children who have disobeyed their parents too many times, etc., will all be turned into food to feed the living workers and the armies that keep hive cities safe. This is so the nobility can save the real food for the important and relevant higher-ups of society. Of course, the kind and benevolent leaders of the hives hate having to take this route with the masses, but it is a regrettable sacrifice that must be made for the survival of humanity. With heavy hearts, they have taken it upon themselves to design a system that processes bodies into food that maintains the nutrition of the population? How can I make this work? [Answer] NO Can you feed the entire population? No, you cannot grow enough new bodies on dead bodies to feed existing bodies, its a closed loop which will not work in biology (or physics). You must have a large source of fresh energy and resources. One adult corpse has around ~100,000 calories ([assuming you eat everything](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep44707)), the average person needs ~2000 calories a day, that means with perfect recycling one corpse can feed someone for 50 days. But it takes 7300 days for a human to reach breeding age. So you still need to feed said person for 7250 days with something else, and that's if they die at age 20. So under perfect conditions corpses can provide 0.7% of your populaces caloric needs. Recycling corpses does not provide noticeable benefits, your rich folks are just screwing with your poor people. If you feed the people nothing but the dead, you need seven and a half corpses per person per year, (that's a negative 214% decay rate) If you start with 10 trillion people the last person will starve in 14 years. Keep in mind an industrial civilization is expected to collapse if it looses more than half its population which will happen in the first year. So in this case your aristocrats were beaten to death and fed into the machines in the first year by a massive angry mob. [Answer] Sounds like your looking for a way to throw people into a meat grinder and make ground beef. And you know what, that's is what you need to do. First though, just like with cattle, the human needs to be checked for diseases. Assuming they don't have mad human, they can have their bowels removed, possibly deboned, and tossed into a giant meat grinder. Might be a good idea to smoke the meat like ham before packaging and selling. If your looking for problems with this though, almost everyone has a disease of some sort, and many can spread through the stomach. So this is likely to just make your sick and weak people sicker and weaker still. Eating tainted food doesn't make you healthier. And to expand on the mad human, @Luke has a great explanation > > Cannibalism greatly increases your risk for prion diseases. Prion > diseases can develop spontaneously (e.g. sporadic fatal insomnia) or > as a result of a genetic variation (e.g. fatal familial insomnia), and > cannibalism would spread these diseases to more people. Mad cow > disease became an epidemic because the cow's food was contaminated > with cow remains. Because of this, the risk of supplementing a > population's diet with corpses is very great indeed. > > > This is also only a temporary solution. It would clean up the immediate dead bodies lying around, but a human body contains roughly 125,000 calories, at 2000 a day that's only 62 days. So you could feed your starving people for 2 months assuming there was 1 dead body per starving person. After that, the food runs out. [Answer] ## Pretty sure this would violate the law of conservation of energy. I'm pretty sure you and the people who made the matrix had the same idea (remember, humans are used as batteries and the dead humans are recycled to feed the live ones). The matrix would never work because that assumes that you can always run at 100% efficiency, which is impossible. You have an even thornier problem in that you need humans to be productive members of society, so your conversion rate would be way less than 100%. You could always pull a "Soylent Green" where meat is so rare that people are willing to by "Soylent Green Meat" without asking too many questions. [Answer] ## Cannibalism Alone Cannot Support Any Species For Long It's just mathematics, really. Creatures gain or lose weight by a simple formula: energy in - energy out. Humans lose weight by either increasing exercise (more energy out) or decreasing caloric intake (decreasing energy in). There is no way to get energy out to equal 0 short of something like cryosleep. How low you can get this energy varies greatly from species to species, but mammals can't get very low and still survive. This means that, just by the process of living alone, humans burn energy. A lot of it. Every movement, every breath, every heartbeat is energy you got from eating a corpse that somebody won't get by eating yours. Life needs a constant influx of energy to survive. On Earth, that influx of energy comes from the sun. Plants get energy from the sun, animals eat the plants. New energy to Earth. If you cut external energy sources out of the food chain, your food chain will collapse extremely quickly and there's nothing you can do about it. [Answer] It's quite a stupid and useless aproach that actually wastes food. Instead of building industries that process meat just use the space to cultivate grains and beans. 1kg of meat has 2800 kcals, 1kg of rice has 3450 kcals, 1kg of pasta has 3750 kcals and 1kg of beans 3800 kcals. See the point? Wether you eat human or animal meat, the meat can't be magically created it has to come from a living organism which has been fed to grow. If you feed a human with food and then kill it for food, you get less energy. That's why in all jistory of humany meat was for the rich and hunters only. Just burn all the corpses and use the ash to fertilize the soil, this is the most efficient way and is actually ecological. ]
[Question] [ A battle takes place on the outskirts of a colonized solar system between attacking and defending forces. Would any stray shots have a chance of hitting a ship or station closer to the center of the system? Millions of shots are fired, most from railguns or similar weapons. Lasers are used mostly on larger ships, as smaller ships can't handle the heat they output. Nuclear missiles are used but usually hit their target. There are a few inhabited planets in the solar system, and there is frequent trade and transport between them, large space station factories, and other nearby systems. The entire solar system resembles the Sol system in size. Is there any chance of railgun rounds or even lasers traveling far enough to be a danger to the stations or ships in the system? What would the effective range of these weapons be? [Answer] Lasers? No. Lasers need to be focused. They diffuse fairly quickly (on solar distance scales) and the more they diffuse the less damage they cause. I don't believe they'd be dangerous to anything not inside the battle. Railgun rounds? There's a chance, but it's infinitesimally (read: "only if you say so in your story") low. They'll just burn up in planetary atmospheres, so it's really only ships and bases that are at risk. Unfathomably low risk. Not zero, but really low (as in "millions of rounds wouldn't bring the percentage chance to 0.1% low"). Nuclear missiles (I know you said they almost always hit, but just for completeness). Honestly, the chance of this much-larger-than-a-railgun-round object hitting something is only slightly better than the railgun round itself. But, if they're armed when they go missing... then there's a chance they'd go off in a planetary atmosphere. It would still be written in as inevitable in your story ("Make it happen, Number One!"), but what a light show! In the long run, I'd say you need to throw out the statistics and use or not use the idea to serve a purpose in your story. When you do, a totally rational comment like, "what were the odds of that!" would be appropriate. [Answer] Wow! This is something I have honestly never thought about! But now I will :P Every object within a solar system has only a few possibilities where it might fly along: 1. Stable orbit around the star: Well, exactly what it says on the bin. The bullet is on a stable orbit around the star, and may not hit anything within the next ten thousand years. 2. Stable orbit around a planet/ planetary body/ moon: Nearly the same as above, but unlikely, if the battle was fought in interplanetary space. If the bullet was fired within a stable orbit around a planet, and the velocity of the bullet is not high enough to escape the gravitational field of the said planet, it might work (but I don't believe it). 3. Exiting planetary orbit, reaching stable stellar orbit: Combination of 1. and 2. The bullet leaves the planetary gravity field and enters an orbit around the system's star. 4. Collision trajectory into a planet/ moon/ asteroid: Now it is becoming interesting! If the trajectory of the bullet directs it directly onto a planetary body, it may be a danger for everything in orbit around that body. 5. Escape trajectory out of that star system: The most boring possibility. The bullet leaves the star system and will fly in the dark void between the start, doomed to wait for millennia to meet anything. Now, how high are the risks for a stray bullet hitting anything in that star system? To be honest, I think that the chance of being hit by a lightning, a comet and a freight train simultaneously would be higher. Remember, > > Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams) > > > The chance that some of these stray bullets hit something is, honestly, astronomically small (Pun intended). But how about lasers and other beam weapons? Most lasers do not keep their focusing for a long time. I remember an experiment where my physics teacher took a laser from the lab, pointed it across the yard and showed us that the beam diameter increased significantly. Your weaponized laser may be more precise, but even they would lose energy on interplanetary distances. Maybe they would heat up a distant spaceship or station, but nothing more. Tl;dr: Only in a vein of very very very very VERY bad luck would something being hit and receive damage. [Answer] Compare with objects in Earth orbit. Look at a real-time display of [stuff in orbit](http://stuffin.space/). This represents over 21,000 objects in Earth orbit. This is very, very restricted compared to the size of the solar system. The volume of the solar system compared to earth orbit is on the order of 1E15 times as large. Given how crowded Earth orbit is, and that the foreign object density is trillions times greater, clearly the collision rate in Earth orbit must be huge in comparison -- yet actual impacts with space debris in earth orbit are rare. They do occur, proving that impacts are possible and will occur given time and chance -- the frequency of impacts is decidely low. It will be many many times smaller for bullets fired from the edge of the solar system. [Answer] The number and energy of the objects is lost in the background noise. ISS already gets hit by stuff; it has armor and emergency procedures in place. With bigger stations and budgets redundant systems should be able to absorb occasional high energy impacts with minimal disruption. There are about half a million tracked objects near Earth between 1 and 10cm: Holding your space battle in orbit would only about triple the chance of something getting hit by accident. [Answer] I saw no answer explicitly using the surface of a sphere for an argument, so here goes: Hitting a target can be thought of as hitting a shape the size of the target on a sphere with you in the center and a radius of target distance. The probability of hitting said shape while shooting wildly into any direction then is the ratio of target-area vs sphere-surface. Sphere surface is 4\pi\r², but i'll round 4\pi to 10 because it's not going to make much of a difference. Thus, at 10m distance* (in space. no gravity, and you can shoot any direction you want) the probability of hitting a 1m² target (~human or thermal vent of the Death Star) by shooting blindly is 1/1000 ( = 1m²/(10\(10m)² )- not bad. Because of the r² in the denominator, this probability will drop sharply. At 1km* (10^3 m) the probability is at 1/10 000 000, which is about jackpot-level in a small national lottery. (Here a note about statistics: If you take 10 million independent shots, this does not mean you are guaranteed to hit the target- i you fill out 10 million lottery tickets, you'll make sure that you pick different numbers, independent shots are comparable to buying 10 million lottery tickets and then letting monkeys fill them, you'll get lot's of doubles; -- To compute the probability of hitting a human in space at 1km distance by 10 million independent, random, shots, you have to take the probability of not hitting him with one shot nh = (9 999 999/10 000 000), multiply this with itself by the number of shots snh = (nh^10M) and substract from one h = (1- snh); You then have the probability of hitting that poor guy once or more. That probability is about 2/3. Again, not bad, but you are now shooting 10 million bullets.... At 1AE (distance earth - sun, harshly rounded to 10^12 m) the one-shot probability is 1/10^25, or much more impressively 1/10000000000000000000000000, if you say the target is 1000m² big (instead of 1m²) you are allowed to take three zeros off that (1/10^22). Probability of hitting this station-size target with 10M random shots is 1/10^15 (or about as big as winning a mid-size national lottery twice, in a row, with only one ticket per draw). --- Hitting a specific moon (~ earth moon, 1^12m² target surface) gets your one-shot probability up to 1/10^13, and you 10M-shot probability up to 1/1M ! (Though if a bullet hits a moon, and no one notices... did it hit?) 'Being on the outskirts of the solar system' might mean 10AE distance, bringing the one-shot-station-hit-probability down by another 100 to 1/10^24 Taking gravity into account changes the numbers only slightly (in a civilizatory timeframe, i.e excluding multiple passes of objects on huge orbits)- Shooting away from the sun at less then escape velocity will bend the bullets back, thereby about doubling the bullet density sun-wards. So instead of 1/too\_much, you now have 2/too\_much. Lasers are out because the beam gets too wide to damage stuff, and nuclear rockets are not that much different from bullets; Assuming they explode near the unlucky non-target (if not aimed that way why should they, though?), their kill-radius is now the effective target-surface, otherwise the equation is just like with the bullets, but you'll probably not spray 10M nuclear warheads around in an encounter. One last number fest: Assume there are 10 battles a year, with 10 combatants, each spraying 10M bullets wildly, for 10 years; Further assume there are 1000 stations with 1000m2 target area each, floating 10AE away (never occluding each other for ease of calculation). --- 10^12 bullets at a combined target surface of 10^6 m² in a sphere of 10^27 m² : 1-(( ((1- ((10^6)/(10^27)) ))^(10^12) ) = 1/10^9 - actually not as bad as i'd assumed coming in ! Please heed the note about probabilities given above! While winning the powerball lottery has a 1/10^8 chance, and there have been winners, this is because a lot of people play, and have been for some time. Number of 'players' (stations) and time have already been factored into many of my above values, so they are not directly comparable (Or rather, comparing them you have to keep in mind the givens: the last of my numbers, 1/10^9, is the probability of any station being hit at any time, by any of the bullets shot during 10 years, while the powerball probability of 1/10^8 is the probability of a specific player winning with a specific ticket at a specific draw...) [Answer] Lasers aren't particularly dangerous in space outside of space battles. Due to the nature of how they work, they cannot be precisely focused at every distance, which is what makes them so dangerous. A combination of them being less focused at long range and reflection on the few particles that exist in space means that they likely won't cause too much damage to accidental targets. At worst, a capital-ship laser fired in the outer system might accidentally burn out a sensitive sensor or telescope but not much worse. Solid projectiles, on the other hand, are a bigger issue. In theory, the range for a solid projectile is infinity. Several kilos of heavy metal accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light is going to destroy something when it hits and the only way it's slowing down is if it actually hits something. With that said, on a long enough timeframe, the odds of a mass round hitting something is 100%. Most likely, that thing is going to be a black hole or star, neither of which will be impacted by the hit in any meaningful way. As for effective combat range, there are some technological constraints to this answer. First of all: what's the capability of your ships. You mention a battle at the edge of a system, indicating that FTL is possible. If that's the case and your ships have functionally infinite energy for maneuvering and flying around (think star-wars or star-trek, where orbits are a suggestion) so the answer above remains in terms of collateral damage. Accuracy of your weapons and thus destructive potential is going to be limited by the maximum acceleration of your ships and their size vs the velocity of your rail weapons. Imagine, if you will, a railgun capable of spitting out rounds at 10% of the speed of light. That lets you put a round in a target at ~30.000 km with a travel time of 1 second. The target has 0.9 seconds to move away from where you're shooting. Assuming an acceleration of 1G, the ship can go a little under 8 meters in any direction, basically guaranteeing a hit on anything larger than an F16. A quick reaction by the pilot (or rather, automated systems) might mean you hit a cargo bay or secondary reactor instead of center-mass, but at 0.1c, that doesn't really matter much, seeing as 100 grams of matter at that speed has kinetic energy in the same ballpark as early atomic warheads. However, distance is where it gets interesting. At 60.000 km (still fairly close in terms of space distances, only 1/6th of the distance to the moon), the target has 1.8 seconds to get the hell out. That's twice the time but four times the distance covered. Instead of trying to guess where your target will be within a ~8m radius sphere, you're now looking at a sphere with a radius of ~31m. That F16 sized target you were basically guaranteed to hit last time? not so sure now. There are two methods of dealing with this issue with regards to rail weapons. The first one is the simpelest and most dangerous to yourself: get close. If you know the maximum acceleration of your target, you know how close you need to be to guarantee a hit with your rail weapons. Get within that distance and you're guaranteed that your shots will hit. The alternative is much safer for you and a lot less safer for anyone in the vicinity of your target. If distance and acceleration tell you you have a 5% of hitting your target, just fire 20 or 30 rounds in a spread pattern. You might miss with 6, the enemy might dodge another 12, but the rest is going to hit. And that's good enough. Now all of the above is predicated on the assumption that your ships have functionally infinite delta-V as far as combat situations are concerned. If that's not the case and Hohman transfers and orbital maneuvers are the order of the day, things get interesting. You see, when everyone's on set orbits with no good ways of changing them, then hitting becomes less of a matter of dodging and weaving and more of a matter of gaining positional advantage. You begin doing things like firing weapons in a specific orbit to force the enemy out of an optimal cruising altitude so they have to expend fuel to maintain or correct their movement. A hit might signal a win, but in this kind of warfare, victory is more likely determined by whoever runs out of delta-V first, mostly because ships at this level of tech have less powerful weapons, giving the enemy enough time to dodge. The biggest downside of this low-maneuverability combat is that it tends to take place in beneficial orbits. The same place where civilian infrastructure tends to hang out. A volley of railfire in low-earth-orbit might scare an enemy warship into a different orbit, but once the fight's done, those rounds are still there, orbiting and eventually burning up or wrecking a satelite or two. [Answer] # Lets pull out some math...for funsies. What we need here is the [mean free path equation](http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Kinetic/menfre.html), which is good for things like "how far can a molecule travel without bumping into any air molecules" to "[proving Han Solo wrong about hyperspace jumps](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf4AB-JYTWU)." But it works for us, too. $\LARGE {\frac {1} {\pi r^2 n\_v} } $ $r^2$ here is the radius of our fired slug as it travels through space plus the radius of what we're interested in hitting (space ships) and $n\_v$ is the average density of the objects we're interested in hitting (other space ships).1 We'll be generous on both fronts and round the numbers up a little bit2: * $r^2$ = 2,000 km (approximate radius of the moon) * $n\_v$ = $1.5 \* 10^{-37} g/m^3$ (average density of the solar system) This results in a mean path length of...$5.3 \* 10^{29}$ km or $5.618 \10^{16}$ light years. That's approximately 604 thousand* times the diameter of the observable universe that the shot would need to travel, on average, in order to hit anything. But, I can still find enjoyment in [stories like these](https://365tomorrows.com/2012/10/09/the-neodymium-accord/) anyway. 1. "Average density of the objects" meaning, their frequency of occurrence in a given volume space. Not their material density. 2. Larger values here result in shorter distances. [Answer] Don't think it would cause any problems to people on the planets, as meteors much larger than bullets(even cannonballs) have simply burn'd up in the atmosphere. Space is big, but it could happen(not sure how likely) that some of the bullets hit other ships nearby, depending on how many were fired. As far as lasers are concerned, it would depend on how well focused they are(see [this what if xkcd article](https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/) for more information about that). If a missile missed all the ships, but was programmed to seek something, then either some other ships or some place on one of the planets would have a bad problem if it didn't hit the star or get really confused and run out of the system. Anything that doesn't seek out anything isn't really likely to do anything but get sucked into a planet or the star or just fly off into deep space. [Answer] Your question reminds me of this question: [Could an astronaut safely shoot the Sun with a gun?](https://space.stackexchange.com/q/26276/6863) TL;DR No. Basically, the Delta-V required to change the trajectory is HUGE! Much, much bigger than the feeble amount of energy needed to hit the nearby ships (about 25 times as much as firing a bullet into the Sun from Earth's orbit). Your spent munitions would (in most cases) be on only a slightly different trajectory from the ship there were fired from. If your ship is in an elliptic orbit, so will its munitions be. If your ship is on a hyperbolic trajectory leading out of the system, so will its munitions be. Only in extremely borderline cases (e.g. a parabolic trajectory) will the trajectory type change, however, it's extremely undesirable to be in such a trajectory in the first place because of the waste of energy to do so. See [Eccentricity classifications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orbits#Eccentricity_classifications). It's unlikely that any ships will be on a trajectory that will intersect (read crash) with a planet or other body, since the Delta-V to into that trajectory is huge, and the Delta-V to get out of that trajectory is equally huge. It would be suicidally stupid to waste so much energy in space, even and especially in a space battle. It would be a waste of energy to have weapons that could significantly change the trajectories of their munitions, when much lower powered weapons can still destroy or incapacitate an enemy vessel. The guns would also need to be massively reinforced to be able to deliver that much energy in one go without sustaining damage that could cause a critical failure, and believe me, when you're using that much energy you don't want your gun exploding! Missiles would have to have huge fuel stores (picture launching the [Space Shuttle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle) or [Falcon Heavy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy) or bigger for every missile). Again, this would be overkill and a waste of energy and resources. What would happen is that you would end up with a cloud of debris that would gradually spread out since each piece is on a different trajectory. It would become so diffuse that it's unlikely that any piece would hit a future ship passing through the area. The gravity of the planets in the system would slowly change the trajectories over millions of years to either stabilise them, or throw them out of the system. This is similar to the cloud of orbital debris around Earth (which is only a very slight problem at the moment) but much more diffuse. A high Earth orbit is above 35 000 km (more than 40 000 km from the centre of the Earth). The Earth is about 150 000 000 km from the centre of the Sun. That's a ratio of roughly 1:4000. None of the pieces have any chance of hitting a planet for millions of years. There is a very slight chance of a piece hitting a ship in the same area, but no chance at all if the ship is elsewhere in the system. Lasers dissipate with the inverse square law, just like regular light does. So over astronomical distances, it would be so weak as to have no effect, again unless you were willing to waste enough energy to overcome this, and all the engineering challenges this would entail. See also [XKCD: What If? 58 - Orbital Speed](https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/). P.S. The effective range would be infinite, if you consider an orbit to be never-ending. Otherwise, limited to the difference between the [perihelion and aphelion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perihelion_and_aphelion) of the munition's orbit. [Answer] The primary reason that you would have few issues with the stray rounds striking planets or causing issues, besides the immense distances between objects in space, is the fact that weapons fire would likely be faster than the local escape velocity. A battle between spacecraft in LEO where projectile velocity is faster than the @ 7 km/sec of Earth escape velocity would see bursts of projectiles flying out into deep space. Interplanetary space battles would need correspondingly higher velocities of the projectiles, since the spacecraft would also be moving at interplanetary velocities. In the Earth's solar system, the fastest an unpowered object could go while remaining bound by the Sun's gravity is @ 72 Km/sec, and many proposed weapons systems might actually be capable of moving faster. Nuclear propelled "shotgun rounds" can capture 5% of the energy of a nuclear explosion to accelerate pellets to 100km/sec. [Nuclear shaped charges and EFP's](http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.html) can move faster yet (See the [Atomic Rocket's](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php) website for more details). Even objects moving at less than solar escape velocity would pass the vast majority of planets, asteroids and so on, and zoom out on highly elliptical orbits like those of comets. We are talking long term comets which take thousands of years to return to their origin points (and even than they might persist in their orbits for billions of years before possibly intersecting another object). But the [Gun Captains](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpgxry542M) on space warships are a pretty tough lot, and would minimize even that [Answer] Laser beams are very straight but they do slowly diverge. If aimed at a distant planet, the beam will probably be spread over millions of square kilometers and will be very weak, barely even detectable. Railgun slugs will burn up in the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet, so only spaceships, space stations and people on planets without atmospheres will be vulnerable. Since they will be carrying just as much energy as when they were fired, they can potentially do damage, but the vast majority of slugs will hit uninhabited rocks that no-one cares about, so we're talking about rare events where a single hole is made through a station, possibly killing someone but not destroying the whole place. Nuclear missiles contain conventional explosives which have to be detonated with the correct timing to make the fissile material go supercritical. If the missile simply smashes into something it is likely to explode but it will not be a nuclear explosion, it will be as a dirty bomb. Treat it as a regular missile. Regular missiles are probably the most dangerous, since they may be partly designed for atmospheric use and might not burn up in the atmosphere. This greatly increases the number of potential victims, and a stray missile from space could kill a lot of people on Earth. All that said, there has not been even one recorded case in history of anyone being killed by a meteorite, and meteorites will remain significantly more common than stray shots from a space battle. [Answer] At "the outskirts of the solar system", there is, as everyone has written, no real big deal. What about in orbit around an inhabited planet, though? Even there, the problem will not be the bullets, missiles, railgun slugs, or whatever, since there's only one of them per bullet. The problem instead will be the debris that other people have mentioned in passing. The bullets will be fired from something moving at orbital speed, to something else moving at orbital speed. The bullets won't be significantly faster or slower than orbital speed, because once you're moving at a good few miles (or kilometres) a second there's really no point using a lot of energy to go much faster. If you're in orbit around an inhabited planet, this could be devastating. By destroying a single satellite, the Chinese in 2007 added over 3,000 pieces of trackable debris into orbit around Earth, as well as a cloud of countless smaller particles. At orbital velocities, paintflecks strike with the same kinetic energy as a rifle bullet. A 4in (10cm) object would impart kinetic energy equivalent to 25 sticks of dynamite. If the battle is in low orbit, and explosively destroys a significant proportion of two fleets and all the shrapnel from their missiles, then within 15 minutes (or whatever the low orbit period for that planet is) the planet will be surrounded by a cloud of debris: satellites, space stations etc which are hit by those will be shredded, each one adding a few thousand more particles to the cloud as it is hit. The particles in the cloud would also intercollide, creating more and more fragments in a runaway reaction. But how likely are they to be hit? For an estimation of the risk: currently, collision avoidance maneuvers are performed a "couple of times a year" on the ISS (I'll call this "once every 200 days": anyone got more specific stats?) and are performed if the chance of collision is higher than 1 in 100,000. There are about half a million pieces of debris being tracked. So naively, to get a probable hit once a day you'd need 200 \* 100,000 \* 500,000 = 10M particles. Statistics isn't linear, so multiplying by 100,000 doesn't change that 1:100,000 into a 1:1, but it's good enough for our purposes. To get a probably hit once an hour, which is what you'd need to have a good chance of hitting anything that launched, you'd need about a quarter billion trackable particles to blockade the planet. This would make launches completely infeasible and wipe out all satellites and space stations at that level. Whatever level the battle happened at, it would likely destroy everything below it and an almost equal distance above it, through elliptical orbits and orbital degradation. Anything happening at a significantly higher levels much, as if the orbits were that elliptical then the debris would collide with the planet. So if the battle happened in low orbit, geostationary sats would be mostly safe, for example. You'd need rather more particles as your orbital radius increased, though, as every doubling of the altitude would cube the volume. This leads to an obvious military approach of "dusting" planets with a few billion particles each to prevent them launching against you, when you attack their solar system. At that point, you then have air superiority, and all the planets have to do what you want or you drop bigger rocks on them. ]
[Question] [ I'm exploring a setting where Al-Qaeda manages to smuggle significant number of shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles from Syria into Europe. Would the airlines cease their flights until police locates the missiles? [Answer] # Yes [RAND](http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2005/RAND_OP106.pdf) has released a detailed report on this after 9/11. They assume that airlines would shut down due to both the legal/financial penalties of losing 300+ passengers and the immediate drop in number of people willing to fly. The short summary of action is that there are 35 instances of man portable missiles being used against civilian aircraft with 24 kills. Most of these aircraft were helicopters or other small propeller planes, so total casualties amounted to 500 people. Large 4-engined airliners are relatively safer, with only 2 of 5 missiles resulting in catastrophic loss of the aircraft. The latest report (as of publishing date) was DHL Airbus 300 struck by a missile while taking off from Baghdad that was able to turn around and land safely. Fiduciary penalty to the airline would come to about \$1 billion between cost of the aircraft and legal claims from the survivor's families. US wide economic damage of a total flight shutdown is \$1.4 billion per day, to $70.7 billion per month. [Answer] Not completely On the short term the airlines might cease many flights, but if the emergency situation persists they will redirect flights to smaller airports. Also they will invest in countermeasures like Elbit's [MUSIC™](http://elbitsystems.com/product/directed-ir-countermeasures-2/) which is used by Israeli flag carrier [El Al](https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/paris-el-al-fields-first-c-music-protected-737-387353/). [Answer] It may depend on the airline and the policy of the government. Israel's EL Al apparently has various countermeasures both on the airliners and at Israeli airports. Because the airline and air freight is such an important part of the global economy, you can expect that other airlines will follow the lead of El Al, and world governments will put heavy security around airport approach lines. [Answer] No, not in the long run. Expect some changes though. This is assuming the threat can't be mitigated by somehow tracking down the missiles (e.g. it might be possible to simply buy a large fraction of them back by just offering enough money). Shoulder launched SAM's are necessarily short ranged and the warhead is necessarily small. This means the only phases of flight a commercial airliner is vulnerable to them is shortly after launch / before landing. At cruising level they are simply out of reach. So a way of protection would be altered flight corridors (emphasis on gaining altitude fast, lower altitude as late as possible before landing). Closely monitored/prohibited zones around airports could be established to protect airliners during takeoff/landing. In case where this isn't feasible (urban airports), checkpoint systems could monitor entry into the zones (expect something like border control when entering a city near an airport). By extension this is exactly the same what we already do to protect airplanes against bomb threats and hijacking. Just the scale is much, much larger. There is also the possibility of active countermeasures, flares (either from the plane or ground based), monitoring by drones, ground based interception systems (all these exist to an extent for military purposes already, although adapting them for the job and deploying them in numbers will take time and money). In consequence flying would become more expensive (to pay for all the security), and for vacation trips car/train/ships probably see more use, leading to a decline in passenger counts (some airlines will go out of buisness). The number of airports in operation would probably be drastically reduced by this, either due to them no longer being commercially viable or their location being untenable. Regional flights may become commercially incompetetive with other transportation. Intercontinental flights on the other hand will probably continue and passenger counts would be impacted less than regional, there is no alternative available that can compete in speed. Even if ticket prices went up 10 or 20 fold, there would still be customers willing to fly. [Answer] In this litigious, risk-averse world, I'd have to say the answer is yes. A single jumbo jet full of passengers would produce losses of billions of dollars for the airline using it, since the threat would be known and the airline arguably conducting its business "with a reckless lack of concern for the welfare of its passengers". Or at least, that's what the plaintiff lawyers would say. [Answer] Except for El Al, where they have installed flare dispensers to defeat heat-seekers. MANPADS are not likely to be present in the US, though. They are tightly controlled. Also, they require specialized batteries so can only last so long without new ones. So they have a limited shelf-life. It's not like you can replace D batteries to make them work. ]
[Question] [ In my world, some people discover how to use inter-dimensional energy to change reality (magic) and how to communicate with inter-dimensional beings (magical creatures). This leads to at least one nation rejecting advanced technology, and using only magic and some primitive forms of tech. Why would they do this? Magic is very powerful, but takes years of specialized training. Your average person can only use magic to make small changes to reality. Bigger spells can only be done by a person with specialized training. Very Powerful spells (city destroying and/or creating) are very dangerous to do without the help of magical creatures, and even then are still dangerous. Some other countries have also switched to using magic, but most still don't. In these countries there are a few magic users, but they can do only what the average person can do in high magic countries. The countries tech level was about the same as ours is right now. Magic was discovered about five years ago. [Answer] ## Magic makes tech expensive and redundant If magic, with training, can complete the functions of technology, without spending time and money on research; if the average person can train in magic to reach this point; and if these functions are safe; something like a "magic school" system may be set up. Different classes could be set up researching different fields of study, and college-level courses may open up for specialization in a particular (non-dark) art. Who needs a car* when there's the* Spell of Short Range Teleportation? Who needs a computer* when there's the* Vex of Collective Knowledge? Who needs space shuttles* when you can* Astral Project across the universe? [Answer] Some reasons have been diecussed in older questions. First, (as explained [here](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/8/must-magic-be-tied-to-medieval-tech/17178#17178)) a universe with highly teleologic rules that are what’s needed for magic is not good for the scientific method which is based on simple rock-bottom rules. > > If physical law were teleological instead, an attempt to understand physics would be more like psycology or politics. It would have more in common with Madison Avenue than Mathematics. > > > The nature of teleological rules with regards to making magic possible was a theme across a few of my answers around the same time. If you had a universe with both rock-bottom laws and some kind of teleological rules, they might interfere with each other (as elaborated on [in this Answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/17404/science-religion-magic-can-they-be-maintained-in-equal-and-parallel-oppositio/17422#17422)). > > Experiments get messed up by magic influences. … The same would hold for commercial applications. So, your electronics would go haywire if brought into a household where all the appliances and comforts were based on magic. A household would be strictly one or the other, beyond the most robust physical "simple machines". > > > In the first case, science may never develop or be possible as we know it. In the second case, different societies might choose one or the other, making for a more interesting world! [Answer] One subject that it would be helpful to research is the Amish (as well as a few conservative Mennonites and the like). They have chosen to reject some forms of technology while accepting others. This is based around the idea that some technology can lead to temptations that would break apart their current way of life. Specifically, they believe that their current culture encourages salvation of the soul, giving people good odds of going to heaven. Amish (and other conservative Anabaptist) ideology states that faith is not enough for salvation; people must also do good works. Amish life emphasizes keeping oneself focused on God. This includes avoiding temptations of the world that would distract them. Fashion and photographs of people lead to "pridefulness" and vanity, circuses and recorded music make us focused on the sensual pleasures on Earth, and too much convenience leads to sloth (as well as less connection to others in the faith community, since it is easier to do things without cooperation with others). One great source of information would be <http://amishamerica.com>. The comments section ranges from actual Amish and ex-Amish to people who have never known an Amish person and hold romanticized or demonized views of them. The posts themselves, however, are well-informed. This leads me to one final point: the Amish do not reject all forms of new technology. Things that are considered helpful or neutral for community well-being are embraced. For example, many communities allow milking machines (involving plastic tubes attached to cow udders during milking time and pumping the milk into a vat) for commercial dairies. The reasoning for at least one community is that, since women and girls are usually not as physically strong as menfolk, the family is apart during milking time. With the machines, everyone in the family can participate. (Hauling the milk by hand would involve several trips carrying 80-pound bucketfuls of milk.) I hope this gets the creative juices flowing, and this is is just the tip of the iceberg! Happy writing. [Answer] A couple of thoughts: ## An advanced civilization requires full commitment in one of the two Technology how we perceive it is the result of an entire technological ecosystem. It's not just that someone invented the smartphone, but that we have the means to make it widely available to the population: * an industry that requires specific materials to produce what economics requires * economics highly influenced by population\industry needs that relies on communication systems * communication systems that both power and relies on products of industry * politics that fights internal end external power games to gain advantage in one or more sectors, using the other sectors as weapons and so on. If your tech is based on magic and not on science, the targets and balance of this sectors would shift towards the different needs dictated by the different requirements. * All of a sudden that mineral exploitation is far less important than the damage to the magical crossroad in the area it is causing : better stop it and start the building of a portal to access that power. * Having satellites or internet will do you no good if the standard message spell requires another crystal relay to avoid aether saturation. * The markets boom of guano farms after the last improvements in fireball-powered heating has made go bankrupt half of the traditional farming field: that international agreement about standardization of cereal prices HAS to be made. Furthermore, every sector requires specialized personnel to keep working. Its not easy to become a senior nuclear engineer or a 12th-level transmutator. Only exceptional subjects could achieve to become both. A timeframe of 5 years is more a transition period for this kind of scenario and, for the big spells, magic tech would still be considered "cutting-edge tech" for specialized users. Give it a couple of decades, and it will be integrated in society as mundanity, with science tech, and its requirements, slowly fading away. ## It becomes a cultural matter When something has been made in a certain way for so much time, so much has been built around it and so many people use it, there is no real gain in changing it. Even for the better, if it requires a revolution. If everyone around me measures distances in imperial units, it would be a questionable choice to keep using the metric system, even if it's more globally acknowledged. And then there's the ones who say Macs are "clearly" better than PCs. I mean, who am i to judge. Introducing magic, there will be an initial shock and undoubted resistance, but if your magic keeps growing over the science tech, give it enough time and things like interdimensional cooking will be perceived as normal. You could then cook with a microweave, but you will be considered a weirdo or a nitpicking foodie. It will become so rooted in the society that doing things with magic would be considered the normal, preferable way. [Answer] They wouldn't! Magic as you describe is just rebranded science. Technology would be chosen because nearly anyone can use it, a cheap flight on passenger jet is more accessible to the masses than flying spells. While in the real world the ratio of the population that understand biochemistry or quantum mechanics to a useful degree is small, the requirements to use the fruit of that knowledge is minimal (i.e. switch on a computer or put washing powder in the machine). The whole technology vs magic thing has always struck me as odd (as well as the notion that they are mutually exclusive), because in a word where magic works and does so consistently it ceases to be magic and becomes a natural phenomenon that science can study. In the real world Isaac Newton wrote more books on alchemy than he did on physics, in a world where magic works he would blended the two and magic would be part of physics. Magic using societies would probably either be wiped out by neighbours, remain decentralised and clannish/tribal or become magocratic. Magic is a great equaliser, if a peasant with no wealth and no army can destroy a castle, or cause a famine by controlling the weather, then they wield power comparable to a monarch....and monarchs would take a dim view of that. The status quo would either suppress all magic or make the exclusive province of the ruling class. That is before you get to neighbouring societies fearing/having taboos about magic. [Answer] Perhaps the choice to use magic was not made by the society as a whole but by those ruling it as a means of control. Technology may be outlawed as it presents a threat to the ruling class of powerful mages. As an example, perhaps a mage can defeat any blade wielding adversary but guns/canons may present a challenge. Or mages may use their abilities to monopolize services which machinery would make far more publicly accessible, removing sources of great personal wealth. Refrigeration, mills or large excavation as examples, it all depends on where your people are technologically. [Answer] A quick google definition of technology is "the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry." Definition of science "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment." I think magic, in most cases, can be argued to be the application of unknown scientific principles. The study of magic is much like science in that it is cause and effect, experiment and observation. Technology is just the application of science, so if magic is science, then technology can utilize that and still be technology. It just utilizes different science. In this case, maybe the preference for magic tech is intentionally influenced by the government, by subsidizing magic tech studies and universities and research. This way there are more magic technicians, more magic based businesses, more magic based inventions, and more magic based technology. The reason a government might choose this could be lack of natural resources, and conversely less dependence on importing goods or other technology. Once the issue is less magic vs real life tech you can explore more political and or social aspects of that choice. Maybe religion could be involved, too. Maybe in terms of why other countries don't use it. [Answer] Combining two answers to another reason. There could have been a war so devastating for this nation that the goverment curses technology (definitely metaphorically and possibly literally) and forbids its use. For law breakers, death penalty awaits. [Answer] Your question has a hidden premise that is false. Societies do not make choices, people do. A society that chose magic is simply a society dominated by people who chose magic. So there are actually two questions here : Why would a significant group of people choose magic? Why would this group dominate a society? The first question is fairly easy. These people are powerful magicians. Due to natural talent, years of dedicated study, or a pact with magical being their power as magicians vastly exceeds what technology could give them. Or perhaps they just enjoy using magic more. The second question is also fairly easy. These people are powerful magicians. They made it happen. Maybe there was persecution and magicians congregated for mutual safety. Or maybe just freedom from prejudice and acceptance. Maybe this place has more mana or a shrine that allows easy contact with magical beings. Maybe magicians joined together for study and information. Either voluntarily or after "persuasion" by a shadowy government agency. Maybe the magicians were deported to remote location where risks were easier to manage. Maybe there was this single very powerful magician others gathered around. Maybe there were simply some magicians with leadership ability who got organized. Whatever the cause this place had much higher concentration of powerful magicians than usual. And they then "took over" the society. Maybe the location had few non-magicians to begin with. Maybe many people left when weird people and magical beings started becoming common. Maybe there was actual conflict and the magicians won. Maybe the magicians have access to mind control magic. Maybe they made a deal with a powerful government. Note that the maybes are generally not mutually exclusive. Mix and match as you will. [Answer] ## "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke ([more info](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)) In other words, you should treat magic like another form of technology. Other answers have tried to argue that using magic over technology precludes the need for both education and research, but in all magic systems I can think of: 1. Magic users still need a very high level of education (otherwise Hogwarts wouldn't be necessary, or all D&D characters of all classes would know spells & be able to cast them at any time) 2. Advances in magic only come from hermit-like mages who devote their entire lives to the study of magic (sounds like research to me!) To an ancient Roman, a car is magic. We know how it works, which makes it technology. Any magic, as soon as you know how it works and how to use it, becomes technology rather than magic. If you want to have a people who have rejected one type of technology for "magic" (which is just another technology), there are many reasons to do so: 1. Magic is easier to teach than the available technology (is learning casting a teleportation spell easier than driving a car or flying a plane?) 2. Magic is less expensive to use than the available technology (is [Floo Powder](http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Floo_Network) easier to make than jet fuel -- and the jet itself?) 3. Magic is religiously ([think Amish](http://www.discoverlancaster.com/towns-and-heritage/amish-country/amishandtechnology.asp)) or socially acceptable over technology (combustion engines require consumption of fossil fuels, which depletes the earth!) ... and many more. Basically whatever you can think of. But *however magic works in your universe, it should be treated as an alternative technology, rather than an alternative to* technology.** [Answer] Technology is very dependent on your ability to predict what you will need in the future. Technology always takes the form of a 3 step process: * Use your willpower to create a technological device that you believe will do what you need, expending energy to do so. * Wait for the opportune moment * Use said technology to reap benefits This approach requires a mixture of two factors to be successful: * You need to be very good at predicting what you need in advance, or... * You need to have a lot of spare energy to waste. In our world, we happen to be very good at predicting what we will need. We construct airbags years before the 75ms where it gets used during an accident. We also have an incredible amount of energy to waste thanks to fossil fuels. If you get the technology wrong 10 times, and then get it right once, you can still come out ahead. What if this wasn't the case? What if we didn't have a bunch of energy and resources to waste on failed attempts? What if we had to get it right the first time. Also, what if we weren't so good at predicting what we need? Our technological approach today is very dependent on the assumption that our choice to make a technology doesn't noticeably perturb the world in a way that makes the technology useless. Warfare example: I want to hurt you, and there's a stick on the ground. I can use that stick as technology. I can take the energy to pick it up, grip it tightly, and then look for an opportunity to bean you on the head. What happens in reality? When I choose to make this "technology," you see what I'm doing, decide you don't want to be beaned on the head, and strike me while I'm getting up from picking up the stick. My technology failed me because you reacted to it before I could leverage it. If your magic can break free of this 3 step process, it would have great value. Perhaps you can weave spells that actually do what you want. Perhaps they take less energy. And, of course, these are also cultural decisions. Your other more technological countries may have developed cultures which strike a different balance where technology is applicable. Waxing philosophic a bit, consider the iPhone. The iPhone was a strange invention in that Steve Jobs was very good at predicting what the market would be AFTER the iPhone was in play. All of his competitors looked at that sort of phone and said "the market isn't right for this." Steve Jobs saw that his invention would perturb the market dramatically, and how it would do so. This let him put out a technology that broke the mold. It relied on those perturbations in the market instead of assuming that there would be no perturbations. Oddly enough, if you talk to people about this decision of his, the wording and tone that they use to describe this choice is almost magical. They treat him almost like a wizard casting a spell because, somehow, he found a way to create a market AS he created his technology. Maybe magic is closer to us than we think! [Answer] First off, I assume they aren't abandoning ALL technology, like, even the fulcrum (lever, club), wheel, pulley, swords, bows and arrows. All amazing technologies, revolutionary in their times, and normally present in magic using stories. Best way to look at your question, IMHO, is that the magic is just another field of technology. So the real question becomes, "What would make a society use one technology and shun another?" Others above have hit on a couple major points, economic reasons, social convention, and societal control being the major and most plausible themes. Those answer above go into fairly good detail on those routes, so I'll go another. FEAR One answer briefly touched on this but didn't take it very far. Some event, perhaps a war, or religious preacher, has stirred up fear in the populous to abandon a specific type/category of technology forcing them to repurpose and utilize the technologies that remain. In our own history, there are many who fervently called for the complete abandonment of anything to do with nuclear power following the Chyrnoble incident. In the years prior the populace was full of visions of a nuclear future, everything powered by nuclear fission (and maybe someday fusion). There were even plans for nuclear cars and planes. While some of that was infeasible to begin with, the point remains that the public fear following Chyrnoble and other such accidents shut down a significant portion of our research into the field for almost two generations, and there are still those claiming that we shouldn't be doing any research in nuclear science at all. So what if the extremists had won out? What if the fear of a given technologies dangers was so overwhelming that they banned it as a society. There would still be those who refuse, those who continue to research and study the banned technology despite any laws or social strictures against it, but the society as a whole would find other ways to live without the banned technology. One of my favorite webcomics is a very magical world, but the specific category of fire magic is socially banned (in some places the ban is legally enforced) due to the nature of fire being wild and unpredictable. Everyone in their world who uses fire magic burns themselves, burns the world around them, and eventually, they are almost guaranteed to kill themselves with fire and release a raging magical inferno that will take days to extinguish. Or so we have been told. That is what the people believe, and this fear keeps all but the most sociopathic of people from reaching out to fire magic. It has been hinted in the comic that fire can be controlled if you have a calm mind, but since only the insane ever try, they end up erupting and reinforcing the public fear. Will our protagonist risk the taboo and try to control fire through calm? I've no idea, but it's been fun reading so far. [Answer] Perhaps we are a remote tribal agrarian society who never had access to technology anyway (like the ones that actually currently exist) and are happy that way. We use the magic to greatly improve our lives, but just don't care enough about the outside world to buy into the whole industrial culture. Our magic is less powerful than currently available technology, so we don't necessarily have big businessmen coming to exploit us for its use, but it provides everything we in particular need or want. At the same time, our monetary resources are poor and population relatively low, so we don't have big businessmen coming to sell us their technology with any great enthusiasm. So the only visitors we get from the outside world are hippies who are trying to prove to themselves that our way is superior and the odd documentary maker. Both groups of people make us feel very good about our way of life and we see little technology and have no need to change. e.g. the hippies tell us all about the noisy, dirty cities where people are starving and exploited by cruel mega-corporations, and well why would we want technology if that's what it brings? And we do get to see all the impressive camera equipment belonging to the documentary-makers, but they are no better than our crystal balls, and we don't need all those big electricity generators, wires, etc. hanging off them. [Answer] If somehow technology became a threat to society or its leader, it is likely that they would decide to reject it naturally and automatically. Let's say that the goverment find a way to control and spy on every spell casted by civilians under its power. It is likely that magic ouputs some sort of aura/wave which can be detected and `analysed` through some sort of device. If everyone has access to magic, watch and record every action one could make would became an piece of cake for the goverment. Developing and studying technology could be seen as a way to avoid the control over the population for example by doing things without being `analysed` and thus controlled. Technology would be used more or less - even not at all - depending on the society and the control over its civilians. [Answer] The obvious answer to the question why a society would abandon something that is useful is always "religion". A society would not abandon useful advances. Even if there were laws against it, it would be used in secret. As long as there is a net benefit, someone will be using it. Except if there is a religious taboo. This is a topic in Dune, for example, where computers were intentionally abolished on semi-religious grounds. It is a topic in the modern world as well. If technology were forbidden by religion, it would stop. There would be some low tech done in secrecy, the same as witchcraft. However, any higher technology requires a full supply chain. You need metal works, power sources, fine manufacturing and a dozen other things that a sole inventor or a small, secretive group cannot accomplish. Most of our day-to-day technology would be impossible to build without a full industrial base behind it. [Answer] Perhaps magic doesn't pollute the environment or something, and works just as well, so they abandon technology to save the environment. [Answer] The only reason people would abandon technology is if they were incompatible. In [The Dresden Files](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dresden_Files) by Jim Butcher, the hero is a wizard living in Chicago. He lives in a basement without a fridge and most technology because magic causes technology to fail and the more advanced the more likely magic will cause it to fail. He can get away with old tech such as a revolver most of the time but machine guns or semi automatic weapons jam. He drives on old VW Beetle because modern electronic system in anything built in the last thirty years is likely to die from exposure to his presence. Even so even the Beetle dies regularly. Now if a nation went magical, technology would fail for everyone living there. Now to take it to next step, a magical nation could use magic to wipe out the technology of any nation they chose. Smart guided missiles are useless with no electronics. Even planes would avoid flying over magical nations. Soldiers with simple guns would lose against wizards that can make shields and throw fireballs. A magical nation could rend itself invulnerable to modern military forces and have the ability to push a technological country back into the dark ages. [Answer] Magic changes society in a way that is detrimental to technological progress (and maybe vice versa) Simply put, technology advances when you have high population densities and a great amount of specialisation. If magic allows teleportation or rapid travel, it would discourage the formation of cities and towns, as people can have a farm (and thus a source of income) and also be able to quickly pop over to a trading post to do some business. Since almost nobody spends all day in a dense city or town exchanging news and ideas, technological concepts don't spread as well as they usually would. Combined with the potential for magic to appear to have an easier solution than technology, many technologies could die out in this environment. For example: maybe magic missile is superior to a short hunting bow and outcompetes it. Everyone stops making bows. Because of this, they never develop longbows or crossbows, which would be far better than magic missile. If you add in a reason that high population density is bad for the development of magic, you create a situation where a society has to choose. ]
[Question] [ Time: 100 years from now and energy weapons have been perfected. Location: gun show for lethal energy weapons for home defense My problem is: I have two types of energy weapons one has a removable energy cartridge/ammo that you can charge separately. The other energy gun was designed with a non-removable cartridge/ammo for convenience (can also be charged) * Both are safe when handled by trained shooters. * Both are safe from overcharging. * Both designs are stable for long storage. * Both designs have safety switches to prevent accidental firing. * Both designs have the same shot count 15 shots * Both designs charge to full in 15 minutes * Both designs have trigger guards * Both designs are priced the same The only difference is the removable cartridge/ammo design. The removable cartridge design allows you to buy 2 or more cartridges, and no residual charge inside the gun once cartridge is removed (gun is not loaded once cartridge is removed). The non-removable cartridge means you are always loaded and ready. Which will be the biggest seller? Will more people prefer the conventional removable cartridge/ammo design or will they prefer the non-removable cartridge/ammo design? [Answer] Based on the psychology of modern gun holders, the removable cartridge one would win by a landslide so long as there is not an overwhelming form-factor advantage of non-removable. Gun owners consider their guns to be their last line of defense. If given a choice between a weapon which can be used for 15 shots and then becomes a completely useless paperweight for 15 minutes, and a weapon that can be used for 15 shots and then reloaded mid-combat combat, there literally is no comparison between the two. Gun owners would flock to the removable-cartridge energy weapon, and would simply sneer at the 15-shot paperweight. Sure, someone worried about this might carry multiple non-removable guns, but why would they pay to have 2 or 3 times as many guns ($$$) when they could just buy more batteries. The one place where a non-removable cartridge weapon could gain popularity is if the removal of the cartridge could change the form factor of the gun. Compare this to Apple's decision to no longer support removable batteries; in exchange, they saved something like .7mm off of their phone thickness. If the gun could be made substantially more convenient to use by removing the ability to reload mid combat, it could earn a place. Perhaps the non-removable will be easier to conceal because of the form factor, or lighter weight and less threatening looking (which are currently factors gun makers consider when developing a "ladies" gun). [Answer] Lots of answers already, but as a gun owner myself (including for self/home defense) I figured I'll weigh in anyway, especially since many of the parallels being drawn between your weapons and cell phones just don't make sense -- you don't use a cell phone for self-defense, so (in the mindset of someone making the purchase) the trade-off in reliability isn't as serious a concern. (No offense to anyone making those parallels, it's just a very different mindset.) I'm going to draw parallels between your energy weapons and today's firearms. The removable-battery version is obviously most akin to modern pistols with removable magazines. The key draw to these weapons is that in a high-stress situation (i.e. a shootout), you can quickly eject an empty magazine, slap in a loaded one, and get back in the fight; you can also execute "tactical reloads", where you take advantage of a moment's pause to eject a partially-fired magazine and load a full one (the reason being that you might not have another chance to reload). With just a little practice, an otherwise untrained civilian gun owner can reload a pistol and begin firing again in under 2-3 seconds. The non-removable version is more akin to a revolver. While, yes, we do have things called "speedloaders" that make reloading them easier, their bulk means that most revolver owners don't ever carry them, and many don't even own any; even with a speedloader, reloading a revolver takes considerably more time. The net result is that, effectively, a revolver is a paperweight once you've fired every round in your cylinder -- just like your non-removable battery weapon. And yet both types of weapons are popular among self-defense shooters. Pistols have the advantage that you can very quickly reload them, while revolvers have the dual advantage of fewer moving parts and being all but immune to jamming, especially from the all-too-common misfiring round. You'd have a similar thing with interchangeable batteries: Sure, you can eject a spent one and slap a new one in place, but did you notice that one of the contacts had some grease smeared over it, preventing it from making a solid connection with the weapon's electronics? Fine, it doesn't work, eject it and slap in a third battery -- only now the grease has been transferred to the contacts on the weapon itself, effectively making the whole thing useless until you can sit down and clean it!! The one point where this analogy falls apart is form factor. Modern pistols can be made much more compact than revolvers, and do so with higher capacity. With interchangeable versus non-interchangeable batteries, the former is going to have the disadvantage on form factor (capacity is irrelevant, as you've stated both have 15-shot charges). This difference is going to be largely negligible, however, to the point that the difference in grip texture and shape are going to be far more significant factors in making a purchase than the relative size between rechargeable and non-rechargeable. *Bottom line: both* types of weapons will sell, and sell well, and both will have their vehement supporters and vitriolic detractors (as well as no shortage of people who acknowledge the advantages and shortcomings of both and then pick whichever one they just happen to like better). The interchangeable-battery version may sell slightly better, but that will just make its detractors all the more vitriolic, while making supporters of the non-interchangeable version all the more vehement. [Answer] Design and Marketing is the key Have a look at today cellphones. While from engineering point of view, you would say that the models with replaceable battery should win (once I am out of energy, I can switch to recharged battery), the latter is true and [one of the most desired phone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_6) comes with non-replaceable battery. So, who do you aim for? Who is the target customer?** Gender stereotypes: If it is woman, the weapon has to be red. If it is for a guy, it has to be big. And if Apple sells it, people will buy it even if it can fire only 4 shots, where the competitive one from Google can fire 12 and has replaceable cartrige. (Yes, you will need the gun to finally resolve once for all the holy war of who is better. Apple or Google?) So, whatever design has better advertisement, it is winner [Answer] Removable ammo: Pros: Removable ammo, specially in an electrical system, gives the ability to maintain a more continual rate of fire. Where the only downtime one would have would be the time where the capacitors had to recharge, and the time it takes to change the Disposable Ammo Charge Pack. Cons: Disposable ammo is bulky and you have to carry it around. Along with that, it leaves a lot of waste in empty DACP. Non-removable ammo: Pros: This weapon just keep firing and firing. And with a steady flow of shots, you will keep it that way. Cons: In a stressed firefight, where stuff gets intense, and you shoot faster than you can draw energy from the air around you, you will have time where you wait for the shot to get recharged. This can be dangerous. Conclusion Edit- The bigger seller would be the non-removable, i forgot to read the fine print "for home defense" sorry. The biggest seller: The DACP weapon, the reason for that is the DAC-Pack would be applied to weapons like assault weapons and shatter weapons (energy shotguns). Where as the Non-removable ammo pack would be applied to weapons like Precise Sniping Weapons, sidearms and stun/shockwave weapons. I don't think you can rule out one of them as bad, it would be like asking if tank-tracks or wheels would be the better seller. Both have their purpose and applications. And none of them are bad for what they do. [Answer] The first question that comes to my mind: How is the energy stored? The US-Navy just equiped some battleships with laser guns and their biggest disadvantage is the charging time. You need to store the necessary energy, if you can't produce it fast enough. There are a lot benefits over projectilweapons, but also disadvantages, keep that in mind. It's very unlikely to carry a mini-nuclear-reactor in your handgun, so you must store it. Which requirements must the storage suit? 1. Fast energy release. You can't be lethal if you give a view watt per second. This is really the biggest problem today, how will your future guys solve that? 2. Small, the smaller the better until, lets say the sice of a cigarrbox per 20-30 shots, at least. Fast energy release: A storage that we know today which can release energy very fast are capacitors. These have problems which make them unsuitable for our purpose, like an energy drain over time and small capacity. Batteries cannot release energy fast enough. Fuel cells could be a solution due they could set high amounts of energy in very short time but are technically very complex, depending on the fuel. Due we are in SCI-Fi here, our todays problems can be solved in your setting and the complexity might not be a problem anymore. Biggest Problem of today with fuel cells are heat and low efficiency, but that has been the same with OTTO-engines 100yrs ago, so what... Size: You want your weapon to be handable by small woman hands. For home-defense very small pistols are not uncommon and you must try to fit that requirement. It's not necessary to provide 50rounds if an average person cannot hold the weapon, 5-10rds are good. One container or cartridge? Both have their advantages. As it has been said, for military purpose, where a lot of shots are fired in a short time it is essential for the safety of the gunners that there is no delay between triggering and the shot. But in home-defense you don't have to spray a lot of ammo, a few rounds is good to strike back an attacking person. So far booth, container and cartridge fit the requirement. Advantage of container: You can just fill them with the needed chemical, its basically a fuel-container and thus easy to use. You have only one source of errors here, not like cartridge. Every cartridge could be damaged and block your weapon, even if the next one is fine. This is both, an advantage and a disadvantage, if you have a jam with your cartridge just release the magazine, unload the blocking gardridge and reload. To fix a broken tank might not be that easy. Advantages of cartridge: The handling of cartridges is easy but a little work, if you have ever loaded some magazines, you know what I mean. Error sources are plenty, like I wrote at the Advantage of containers. But what makes cartridges really good is the fact that you can load various cartridges! It's not unusual in military purpose to load some tracer bullets at night or AP-cartridge if some enemies might wear bodyarmour. You cannot know what comes and thus different cartridges are a high benefit! Especially with energy weapons. We are talking about home defense and you don't want to kill someone but might tranquilize the attacker. If you have 10rds in your magazine, you can load 5rds tranquilizer, 2rds lethal if the tranquilizers don't work for any reason and if in the worst case the attacker wears body armour 3 further shots of armour piercing ammo. Or whatever you want. For me, cartridge is the winner! [Answer] For home safety? I would guess the built in one. The Cravats would be that it can hold a charge for long periods of time without losing power. It also would need to have about 3 x the number of shots that would be thought 'needed' to do the protection. And how long does it take to recharge. If the vast majority of home owners have a gun that can shoot 5 times before needing 8 hours to recharge, you are back to the old westerns, 'That was 6 shots pardner, you're out!' EDT: Also the price points could be a big difference. If they are very close in price to get the replaceable one and not much more to get an extra battery pack That would make that one more popular. (You can shoot 15? I got 30!) [Answer] Many kinds of firearm are designed so that the only rapid operation is replacement of one present ammunition-feeding device with another; the firearm itself will often keep one round available internally while the ammunition-feeding device is switched, but there's no way convenient way to transfer enough rounds from a magazine to "top off" a gun. Some fixed-tube-magazine firearms, however (especially shotguns) make it easy to add individual rounds even while a firearm is in ready-to-fire condition [though one would want to get one's hand clear of the loading area before firing], and some other fixed-magazine firearms make it easy to top off a firearm using stripper clips of various sorts. I would suggest that the relative preference for fixed-vs-removable energy storage would depend upon how readily energy may be moved between storage media. If recharging an energy storage device would take many minutes, having it be removable for rapid field substitution would be better than having a weapon be inoperable during the time required to recharge it. If, however, recharging would only take two seconds, then an internal device which could be charged as needed from an external supply device might be better. Another possibility to consider with energy weapons would be the possibility of conveying power via cable between a possibly-shared large energy-storage medium and hand-held weapons which may or may not be able to hold a usable quantity of energy when the cable is detached. Finally, regardless of whether one uses fixed, swappable, or cable-connected energy sources, it may also be worthwhile to consider the "rules" for transferring energy between devices. For example, given a small device with a charge of 4/10, and a larger device with a charge of 85/100, it may be possible to quickly transfer energy so that the devices would be charged to 8/10 and 80/100, respectively [since the energy would in a sense be running "downhill"], but it might be much slower and less efficient to try to transfer energy "uphill". The effect would be that once the large unit was down to 50% charge, reloads would be required twice as often, a "fact" which could help make increase the level of danger and excitement. [Answer] Having declared that there is absolutely no difference between the weapons other than the ability to remove the power pack, you've made it quite simple. There's no reason to buy the non-removable version. If someone doesn't care about having a removable power pack, they will be equally happy with either weapon as they can just leave the power pack in the weapon at all times and would gain no benefit from the non-removable weapon. Gun enthusiasts can get pretty worked up about the most trivial of differences between weapons, but even they would have a hard time here. Have it shave a gram or two off the mass, reduce charging time by 15 seconds, or something like that and they'd have something to work with. So, any sane manufacturer would either only make the removable version, or re-design the non-removable version to take advantage of not having to be removable to improve the weapon. [Answer] How much energy is being delivered and how is it being powered? If were talking about modern energy weapons the power cost would be unbelievably high, so high that energy weapons wouldn't exist! Thus I must assume that we have 'somehow' adapted our technology to be more efficient. If we assume an efficiency such that energy weapons are practical at all were talking about the sort of efficiency such that a single weapon can hold a rather substantial charge. At this point were talking about a system where one would not be swapping cartridges in the middle of a gun fight, but recharging after a battle. There wouldn't be a significant need for carrying many cartridges or any advantage for carrying multiple, the risk of running out of ammo in a single battle should be non-existent. Frankly the only justification to switching to energy weapons over projectile is for the limitless 'bullets' it could store. Thus the question is one of convenience, or more accurately logistics. Whatever type large military organization would use is what everyone will use, and militarizes are concerned about logistics. A military would likely choose rechargeable cartridges because it's easier to handle resupply. You can hand a soldier a cartridge and take his back to the place where it recharges quickly and easily, you can pile up lots of 'spent' cartridges to carry, and since the cartridges are not weapons they don't need the same level of guarding and security that toting around a lot of partially spent weapons to the recharge station would require (note, they would still be potentially lethal if they carry that much charge, and thus need caution, just not as much as a full weapons). In addition you only need two cartridges per soldier (one he is using currently, one that is being charged) instead of two weapons per soldier; and building the full weapons is likely more expensive then the cartridge. IN addition if a cartridge is lost or stolen it's less of a security risk then a lost weapons. From a large military logistics perspective it's much easier to keep your army going with rechargeable cartridges to weapons, thus they will win. However, I have to point out that energy weapons are actually pretty impractical. Projectile weapons will likely rule unless we get armor to protect against them or such advances in technology that the very idea of having a military armed with guns is ludicrous (even now tanks and air plans decide any large scale battle, guns and infantry is pretty rare). Now if you imply that energy weapons were developed which allow infantry to be a threat to tanks that would change everything, but would be a huge cultural and military twist. [Answer] I don't think the rechargeable version would have ever hit the market, because of a few crippling draw backs. Other have mentioned them, but let's pull together the really knock-down cons Shooting is a rural activity Yes there are gun ranges, but the vast majority of shots fired are fired more than a few feet away from an outlet. No body takes just 15 rounds out to the lake to shoot some cans, let a lone a hunting trip. Not to mention the psychology of rural self-reliance I wanting to feel like you could "make it" off the grid. Learning to shoot 1 clip at a time would be slow and boring. Practice shooting would look like shooting for 1-2 minuets and then waiting 15 minuets. A a little wasted time because new shooters aren't fast and you're talking about a clip every 20 minutes. That's just a hard way to learn. Reloading is really important in combat. Actually hitting a target in combat is hard. Laying down cover is really effective. Having more shots to work with is just a strong advantage. A psychology of preparedness Most cops, who's job it is to go looking for trouble, never fire a shot their whole career. The odds that a civilian will actually need a gun for defense is vanishingly small. Owning and caring a gun is mostly about wanting to feel prepared and capable for anything, however unlikely. Given me and the gun owners I know, the 15 shot paper-weight just doesn't give that same feeling of knowing that if push comes to shove, you can bring a lot of force to bare. As for the pros, there explicitly aren't any the form factor argument is valid, but you said the reloading is the only difference. Someone mentioned the reliability of the revolver as a nice parallel. This doesn't really hold. Energy weapons don't really have moving part. There is nothing to jam. The amazing reliability of energy weapons is one of their few strong selling points. All that said, if you wanted to try and bring some "balance" to the two systems you could make clips insanely expensive. Which is plausible, creaming enough energy for 15 lethal bursts into a man portable, let alone magazine sized package is really hard, and justifies the cost. You just can't take the price too too high though. There has to be a reason people switched from slug throwers to energy weapons. [Answer] It is planned that the phone will be replaced before the battery wears out, and the rigid case for the battery is a significant bulk. A gun will not be tossed and upgraded in a few years, right? There may be some engineering issues with making the battery safe to handle on its own: other than flatness, what could make that a compelling reason? Perhaps the way the primary power cell is connected to the capacitor: special superconductors, embedded in special insulation, no "connector" any more than the real chip inside the IC package can come out. The wiring is delecate and permanent. Integrating the primary storage cell (copious but slow to delive) with the "charge cache" capacitor may allow deep integration as part of the cathode, for example, and that is the expensive part and you don't care to exchange that too. I wonder though what an energy weapon would do. It's more of a sci-fi trope than realistic "hard" SF. Maybe it could be a railgun that fires a slug using electricity rather than chemical combustion. That would let you tune the power on a per-shot basis. [Answer] To me it seems that fixed-cartridge would be by practical means same as removable-cartridge with single cartridge that user never removes. That mean that it has advantages and no disadvantage. (Advantages are for example shooting more then 15 shots; especial for training or sport-shooting would be "15 shots and 15 min wait" crippling) ]
[Question] [ I'm writing a near-future story in which a form of teleportation has been invented. It's only been around for few decades, and is still very complicated (and expensive) to build, so it's only used for large-scale industrial and governmental purposes. The average civilian's life hasn't been greatly impacted at this stage. That was my initial plan, anyway. I just realized my version of the technology would definitely allow for perpetual motion, so potentially infinite "free" energy. Most of my story takes place in an impoverished Appalachian town. Assuming I don't rewrite the tech, I'm wondering how this would impact the characters' standard of living. As I said, it requires a significant investment upfront, but definitely feasible for major corporations/organizations/governments. My gut reaction is that a $0 energy bill would be very helpful for many people, but not necessarily enough to lift them out of poverty. But I feel like I'm probably missing a lot of indirect effects this would have. How do you think the living conditions of my characters would compare to the present day? [Answer] Cynically, it will likely not affect them at all at this stage of the technology. At least based on the standards of living today. ### Profits Over People While large and cumbersome, there is still the infrastructure surrounding the power generation. The turbines that spin to make the power, the lines to transmit it, and the facilities that make the power. As such, most of the costs of the power are still there, it's the manner of generation that has changed. As such, the corporation that runs the power plant will not lower prices. The public company might not raise them as fast later which could be a small boon, but a private company will absolutely just pocket the extra profits and still keep their price hikes on schedule. As anecdotal proof, my family has gotten a gas bill demanding money for administrative charges for sending them a bill to tell them they used no gas in the month. Likely an automated process to boot so I doubt that any person actually touched those bills outside giving them to the post office. Depending on the limits of these teleportation machines, there could be an argument that there are some interesting transit applications using one to be able to teleport people to a larger centre where jobs are more available. Considering your definition of the setting, it is unlikely that an impoverished Appalachian town could afford to have one built for transit purposes or would be of strategic value enough to warrant one being placed. ### On Free Energy Now the overall availability of free energy may have its own implications to the setting as a whole. Being independent from needing a particular strategic resource means that a power plant could be built wherever it was most profitable to build one instead of close to where the resources are. Depending on how clean the teleporting technology is, they may be able to be built anywhere where there is need for tele-power. With a potential higher availability of cheaper power, certain things that might have been infeasible before enter the realm of possibility. A cascade of invention based on a perpetual and stable power source could follow if it is allowed to. It is those inventions that might lift impoverished communities out of the poverty they are in now. It is an optimistic view of how such a thing would go down. But I remind you that we are discussing America (or Canada technically). It is likely that oil and coal lobbies will be advocating against this technology to protect their profits unless they already have a vested interest in this. Their money will speak louder than the millions that would benefit from any of this. But that is my cynic's answer to this question. [Answer] Your teleportation machines are expensive to build. They may be able to be used to generate 'free' energy, as part of a machine that generates a net surplus of energy as a consequence of its operation, but since the machinery is expensive, the energy it produces will never be economically free. This answer presupposes that a teleporter-generator machine can produce a sufficient surplus of energy in excess of that required to operate the teleporter. Fusion power research has shown that a theoretical energy surplus does not mean that a practical energy surplus can be obtained. The companies that produce teleporters and teleporter-generator (telegen) sets will most likely be private companies interested in profit. That means that as they either own the telegens or sell them to a utility company, they - and the utility companies - will try to make a profit from the relevant transactions. A best-case situation for energy consumers may be if the telegens are government owned and operated and the energy surplus they produce sold at break-even cost. Just because the energy is laws-of-physics-free doesn't mean that even a government can afford to just give it away for $0.00/kWh. This means that energy produced by telegens will still have a monetary cost to those that consume it. Now, we might assume that if we price energy from telegens the same as from traditional energy sources, there may be a point at which the energy produced and sold will cover the startup costs. However, there are still the telegen maintenance costs to consider, as well as the costs associated with the energy distribution infrastructure. These costs will still have to be covered and a well-run company will pass on these costs to energy consumers. If we are considering the effects of telegens on an 'impoverished Appalachian town', we must consider the political situation. Is the town in question attracting sympathy for its situation, or is it just one of a multitude of similar places? If the town has rich and powerful people sympathising with it, the place may have been supplied with free telegens with sufficient capacity to power the town, in which case, the only costs to the residents would be for maintenance of generators and transmission infrastructure. This would lead to cheap but not free power. Otherwise, it seems likely that the townsfolk would be paying the same for energy as anywhere else. In neither case will the impoverished townsfolk's energy bills be $0... unless they are living off the grid. [Answer] Solar power is "free," too, in that way. It didn't slash energy bills for consumers. Where your teleport device will matter is not energy supply but transportation/commute. Your impoverished Appalachian town might experience that a commercial teleport device goes online in the next time over, and that people with New York salaries show up and buy up most decent houses with decent views. They flash their money and price locals right out of the markets. The old residents either work for them, or resent them, or both at the same time. [Answer] Some real improvements this provides 1. Water stops being a limiting resource. Desalination is as easy as purification, the amount of drinkable water on earth just became basically infinite, transportation costs for water are just material and maintenance cost. There is now vastly more arable land and drought is not a factor. For billions of people their standard just drastically improved. It is the green revolution all over again and will come with many pros but also some cons. 2. We don't have to burn coal or gas for power anymore, so we drastically reduce the impact of and on climate change. [Answer] eyelash, welcome. We have actually run a similar experiment in the 19th century with coal, which was not strictly speaking infinite nor free but it was plentiful and much, much cheaper than the alternatives for the amount of work that could be done with it. In very broad strokes, it went like this: First, coal-powered mass production outcompeted small-scale production, throwing most people into poverty. Second, coal-powered mass production allowed mass production of armaments, which were then used to conquer/subjugate countries that have not yet industrialised. Those unfortunate countries were then used as a source of cheap raw materials for the industries at home. Third, on the back of those additional resources it became possible to pay the factory workers adequately, and things started consistently improving (at least for the people living in the industrialised countries; it was only possible on the backs of their colonies being thrown into poverty). Fourth, the whole thing dissolved into a bloodbath (we know it as the 1st World War) when coal at a price that the economy of the time could afford started to become slightly scarce. Fifth, an energy source even cheaper for the amount of work done was found in oil, which allowed a return to point 3 above (after another bloodbath unimaginatively called a 2nd World War), and in time even allowed industrialisation to spread to some of the former colonies. So based on this, we can assume that adpoting perpetual motion will have similar effects - except that it will stop at point 4, because there will be no cheaper energy source to supplement it. But this will not be relevant for your setting, which takes place in the near future i.e. during the events of point 1 or perhaps early point 2. So think of your Appalachian townspeople enduring a life of ever greater deprivation, while some of them enlist to fight resource wars in faraway corners of the globe using fancy-tech weaponry. As I understand, this is a fairly accurate description of the most recent 50 years of the region's history. [Answer] It strictly depends on how much the energy output is. I can gift you a hamster on a wheel - to you it's free, also useless. In realism terms, I think other answers don't sufficiently acknowledge (1) future; (2) teleportation. Simplified, their analysis is "investment cost != free" - which is true and consequential, today, but also assumes the energy output isn't that great. Suppose we have literally infinite energy. Energy-matter conversion is a thing. Accounting for (1) and (2) (if not today already) there already likely exists technology to simply will stuff into existence (make atoms, 3D print, etc). Free energy of sufficient magnitude is, for most purposes, economic utopia - assuming non-dystopian government. Now, teleportation isn't just "thing moving things A to B" - it's a huge deal. The technology is extremely sophisticated. It's much easier (scientifically) to build a [Dyson Swarm](https://youtu.be/pP44EPBMb8A), which will have tremendous output - but perhaps harder logistically (distance, tons of materials, etc). A thing I dislike about sci-fi is neglecting such things. "We have a teleporter but we can't do XYZ" - yes, you absolutely can. Buuut realism isn't top priority for a good story (and considering you say "near future", it's certainly one of those stories, unless GPT6...). Some may object - "realism is irrelevant since perpetual motion isn't possible" - but we don't need truly free energy. Black hole farming is more than sufficient. It all depends on how the teleporter works, and I'm granting some room for fiction. This is more of an extended note on realism - other answers/comments give much better story material. (They're also more "realistic" with the "near future" assumption, assuming non-tremendous energy output). [Answer] Your perpetual motion machines can produce all the energy you want for free but they will not provide free power to the masses unless they can be produced on a scale that can be given to the masses. The underlying problem will be the costs to manufacture the machines, perform maintenance on them, distribute it as needed, pay for distribution maintenance, and various other expenses. While the costs are likely to be lower to the energy producers the fact that they can get the energy for free won't reduce the other costs associated with it. [Answer] Zero energy bill is unrealistic, there is no imperative to give it away. More likely the bills will be the same and the companies who invested in it will make larger fortunes. If there was a zero energy bill, then the impact would be huge. A lot of people could run businesses and produce products that they couldn't previously, and the standard of living would leap forwards. [Answer] All poverty is essentially energy poverty in some form or shape. So perpetual motion, aka, ifinite storage of power, makes low energy inputs harvestable. So you have a sort of farm energy to device, that ocassionally is moved towards the grid or the end-user. And then you run smack first into the fact that most societys needs for energy are exponential. Society demand will always outgrow the supply. Thus, unless you can generate a perpetual motion that creates energy.. fundamentally nothing changes. [Answer] See Robert Sheckley's short story 'The Laxian Key' (minor spoilers follow). The protagonists buy a machine from Joe's Interstellar Junkyard that can apparently make something for nothing. Reasoning that anything for nothing must be worth having, they turn it on. I don't want to give away too much, but the Laxian Key in the title is the thing that turns it off. Are they siting the gadget that makes infinite free energy in this Appalachian town? If I lived there, I would want to know what else it makes. Heat? Pollution? Radiation? Wrath of the Gods of Physics? Why not put it somewhere more central and export electricity on the grid? [Answer] > > I just realized my version of the technology would definitely allow > for perpetual motion, so potentially infinite "free" energy. Most of > my story takes place in an impoverished Appalachian town. > > > A bit cynical but hey: if you do not want it, it will not effect your story at all. Reasoning: even today some countries offer benefits (free healthcare, unemployment money, pensions, ...) for residents. Just because some countries offers those, it does not mean those are available worldwide, everywhere to everyone. The same goes for your "expensive" form of free Energy - especially if a significat amount of money has to be spent as buy-in to make it feasable. [Answer] So you mention a big investment up front. But then the maintenance is? How long does the generator last? That's really what's going to drive the effects. It's "free" as in "it comes out of nowhere". But it still requires some effort to harness. So what form does the free energy take, and how hard is it to get and transfer around. For example: You could get practically infinite "free" energy delivered to your doorstep simply by teleporting a cubic inch out of the core of the sun and plopping it on your front lawn... This would not end well for you.. Or your neighbors... Or probably anyone on your half of the planet... On the bright side, that would technically eliminate poverty entirely within the affected area... So you've got thermonuclear bombs at-will... And at any size you like. Obviously you can probably figure out a way to harness this. Or if you were thinking more like self-powering water wheel that's fine too. All a matter of scale really. But there you're just looking at a highly efficient generator. It still needs to be built. It still needs maintenance. And unless it's small enough and cheap enough that you can just slap one in everything you're still going to need to deal with some kind of transmission infrastructure. So basically look at the economy and set the price of fuel to zero. That's definitely going to make pretty much everything cheaper. Everything getting cheaper tends to make the lives of the poor easier. But fuel is only part of the cost of producing usable energy. What the end price of harnessed energy will be is a fairly simple finance calculation based on the cost and longevity of the equipment and what the people with money to invest in building it are willing to work with in terms of interest rate on their money. That last will depend largely on how risky they think it is. How much that helps the poor will depend on why they're poor. Poor because they live in the middle of nowhere and the cost of shipping their output to market eats up all their profits? Cheaper energy will probably help them substantially. Poor because they live in a third-world dictatorship and the thugs at the top just come and take everything useful they try to build? They might end up worse off if the thugs get free energy first and use it to consolidate their power. On the other hand, the teleportation aspect might let them just leave... On the gripping hand the teleportation aspect might let the warlords hit anywhere they like, any time they like... This gets really messy really fast unless there's some kind of counter for it. Poor just because somebody has to be at the bottom and their skills aren't all that useful at the moment? They'll probably stay at the bottom in the short-run, but the bottom will be easier living that it was before. Long term? Long-term is where it gets interesting. Long-term is where you see things like the local recycling plant being just a big incinerator which burns hot enough to separate the waste into individual atoms. Then you just centrifuge those atoms to separate them by type and use them as feedstock for your atomic-scale 3d printers to create anything you want. Long-term is where you see all the basic necessities of life becoming as cheap as air. Relative poverty will still exist, but nobody's going to be starving to death. For a peek into what kind of society might form around such a mighty power source once fully developed, check out James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear". ]
[Question] [ There have been questions about how to protect against specific superpowers in the context of high-value/high-risk target with answers that require a very controlled environment, this question is more what steps a competent security manager would be able put in place given the constraints of productivity, budget and staff retention at a normal office. It's a U.S. like environment, with similar laws, including restrictions on use of lethal force and significant issues with forcing implantation of devices and similar intrusive practices. Tech level is maybe 5-10 years further along (self driving cars and natural language virtual assistants, but no general AI to rule the world) Super powers are not new, they've been around for a couple of generations. A relatively high percentage (10-20%) of the population have powers, but almost all of those are uninteresting in the context of the question (change hair color at will). Only a very small percentage of the population has tactically useful powers at a powerlevel that is useful for anything. Actual powers are varied, and generally are at the spider-man level or below. This is not a world where super heroes and super villains exist. No legalized vigilantism. There are criminals that have super powers and there are police and military who have superpowers. Vast majority of people with powers work regular 9-5 type jobs (maybe exploiting their powers if they are useful at all). The facility to protect is a normal office, think branch office of an insurance company, a graphic design shop or a company that manages real estate. Mostly concerned with protecting people, intellectual property, infrastructure and physical assets that don't have much individual value. No major terrorist organizations are targeting your organization, which is great, but it does mean the CEO is always trying to cut your budget. (If you want to talk about functional manufacturing facilities or warehouses that is also of interest to me, but not the main point of this question) Competing interests: 1. Budget constraints - Your boss balks at every expense. 2. Inconvenience or productivity - The employees need to be able to effectively collaborate and do their jobs. 3. Employee retention - If the employees (or managers) find the process too onerous or invasive they will leave to work at another company. So, what technology or processes does a competent security manager put in place with their limited dollars and influence that they would feel protects against a broad cross section of powers, with the understanding that the chance of being targeted by such an individual is fairly low. Scope: 1. Mostly interested in physical security 2. Computer security already has to deal with the idea of a compromised node, so this is probably an issue that can be informed by real world research without the need for world building. 3. Key cards, locks, etc would be an interesting space to explore that I haven't come up with an interesting idea for yet. So far this my answer, but I'd to hear ideas approaching from other angles. Relatively easy and with low intrusiveness would be a dual spectrum (visible light/thermal) cameras backed by an AI to always be watching and noticing discrepancies. Get enough cameras to get close to full coverage. Pressure plates add to it, but more expensive after construction probably. A little more expensive for company morale might be tracking badges on everyone at work. If the suveilence system noticed a person without a tracking badge that would be an alert. What would you do if you were the security manager? [Answer] Nothing at all. The low prevalence and diversity of useful powers means it is not worthwhile to implement highly specific security measures. A high fence won't stop people who can fly, password-protected systems won't stop people who can read minds, cameras won't stop people who can turn invisible, heavy locks won't stop someone who can teleport, etc. It's unlikely that anyone targeting your organization actually has superpowers, and if they do, you likely won't have implemented whatever measure is needed to stop it. Your security measures are only as strong as the weakest link, and with an unknown diversity of superpowered threats, you have a lot of potential weak links. As we all know, villains tend to congregate in groups, giving the group a wide array of powers at their disposal. If you haven't defended against every possible superpower, you are still vulnerable, so implementing any measures at all is usually just a waste. Most offices like the ones you describe already have minimal security which can be circumvented by a determined individual. Office security is usually designed to prevent casual intrusion but not a targeted criminal attack from even normal people, so expecting to defend against a targeted criminal attack from someone with superpowers probably isn't even on the table. To put some numbers on this, suppose your \$1M-a-year company might lose an entire year's worth of profit from a superpower attack. The odds of any attack at all are pretty low, though, perhaps 1/100 for a given year. The odds that the attacker has superpowers is also low, perhaps 1/100, giving you a 1/10000 chance of being subject to a superpower attack in a year. Given that you have only a 1/10000 chance of losing \$1M due to an attack, you're justified in spending only $100 this year on your security system, and you need to make it 100% effective at that price - it's simply not going to happen. Spend any more than that, and you have a negative expected ROI for your security system. You're better off eating the loss, or as @Alexander suggested in the comments, just buying an insurance policy (which will also have negative ROI, but does not require a world-class security system for your run-of-the-mill office). I'd expect the minimum cost of almost any effective system to run into the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. In the example above, you can increase both the cost and likelihood of a superpowered attack by orders of magnitude, and still not reach the break-even point. Defending against superpowered attacks is only worthwhile for targets with a high likelihood of being attacked, in which the expected damages would be enormous. It's simply not feasible for your average company that is not a high-value, high-likelihood target. [Answer] Lawyers > > "Mostly concerned with protecting people, intellectual property, > infrastructure and physical assets that don't have much individual > value" > > > Super villains rarely have a desire to rob photocopying shops for stationary supplies. Stealing intellectual property means they need to commercialize their theft to make it worth it. Simple answer is sue the people responsible. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oT9vD.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/oT9vD.png) [Answer] / with the understanding that the chance of being targeted by such an individual is fairly low/ Spread the risk across many such facilities, using insurance. This is how it is working with unlikely and expensive events now. Rather than massive security to prevent unlikely events, the events happen and the facilites who suffer loss are compensated. If it a robbery, the robbers are not resisted - they leave with what they want. This is essentially what is happening with cybercriminals now: the criminals hold hostage the infrastructure of the facilities and get what they want in the form of a payoff. An event which could be devastating for an individual facility is more of an inconvenience when spread across the many facilities at risk. The best defense is a good offense. The problem is when the events become more frequent. This is also the case for cyber crime. Insurance becomes more expensive as in our world. My proposed solution: Certain individual insurers can charge lower rates and companies insured by these insurers will advertise they are so insured. These insurance companies have a "reimbursement" arm which is deployed against entities that inflict damage on insured facilities. The insurance company covers the loss to its insured facility, then reclaims its money (with interest) from the criminals responsible. The "reimbursement agencies" would make for exciting fiction! I could imagine that these might be autonomous and retained for given jobs by the insurers. Agencies differ in methods and also ethical standards. Some are government arms. Perhaps at one point 2 or more agencies are deployed by different insurers against the same criminals. [Answer] As in real life, minimal security is the norm. Security is seen by most corporations as a low concern, because most people aren't criminals and security is not earning money. In real life, you can have super power like powers as well. You could get a gun and attack a major corporation. If you're hot, you could seduce an employee to mind control them into giving secrets, and these things do happen rarely. There are a few steps they take to deter these things. 1. A wall around your property. If people can't just walk in, they need to either be good at climbing or be loud to get in. A wall slows people down for a bit. 2. Cameras everywhere to watch stuff. You can see people (and teleporters) doing their thing. 3. A few guards with guns to patrol the area. 4. Badges to get access to areas and access sensitive data. Unless the superheroes have a very specific powerset, this would deter most people. For heavy threats? They'd also need a heavy threat response team. I imagine some companies would get a bunch of ex military people and superhero heavy hitters and some teleporters or helicopters, and in the rare incidents where super powered people went crazy, go crush them with overwhelming force. Numerous businesses across the country would sign up for a small monthly fee. They'd also have someone regularly go to police meetings and other ones that monitored crime, to find out if there was anyone with an unusual power to counter. All of these are fairly cheap security measures. I see no need to modify them in a superhero world. You could do more with knowledge of specific threats, but you didn't describe any of the superpowers they would face. [Answer] ## Exactly the way we do it in the real world Physical security in the corporate world is almost never about being impenetrable, it's about being good enough to prevent crimes of opportunity. For 99.9% of businesses, that means a lock on the door, a receptionist at the front desk, and maybe a few hundred dollars worth of surveillance equipment. However... * A locked door can be defeated just as easily by kicking it in or picking as phasing through it. * A receptionist can be convinced to authorize you with a good lie just as easily as with mind control. * A camera can be defeated as easily with a mask as by turning invisible. So if you consider this in terms of normal people, what keeps a person from commiting crimes against a corporation is not thier inability to defeat all the security options in place, but an inability to do it without risk. It only takes one layer of security foiling you to turn your calculated risk into jail time. Committing a crime is easy, not getting arrested thereafter is actually the hard part. And since the police have supers too, it is very likely that there are even more ways for an individual criminal to get caught in your world than there are in ours. By stacking several layers of mundane security features, a criminal may have a single power that gives them a distinct advantage against one of the countermeasures, but does nothing to reduce the risk of being exposed by the others. Since no one power defeats all countermeasures with 100% certainty, your would be super criminals are more or less equally deterred from taking the risk as normal people are in real life from grabbing a gun and mask and doing the same thing. [Answer] ### Back up your business data offsite To be fair that's a free tip for any business owner, whether you live in a world with superpowers or not. Equipment can be replaced, but data is lost forever. Back it up, once a day, on a remote server, there's plenty of companies that'll take care of that for you so you don't even have to worry about it, and in the event all your computers are destroyed by Superbadman, or something far more likely like a flooding, at worst you lose a day of data. Other than that and typical office security (whatever is typical for your business), not much you can realistically do. I want you to think that right now that, somewhere in the world, there's possibly a UAV with missile lock on an unsuspecting target. If as a security manager the sound of protecting against drone strikes sounds expensive and ridiculous, I'd like you to rethink just how much of a threat a rogue superpowered criminal is to your business. [Answer] You say in the question you're *Mostly interested in physical security, but later explain in comments: > > The threat model is primarily the protection of intellectual work product of the company. The threat is not originating from terror or state actors, but more likely competing companies. They may hire professionals to acquire those work products, and those professionals may include those with superpowers. The threat is not one single person with one single power, just as we don't protect our computers from only one virus. We have to make a compromise between security, usability and cost > > > Depending on [what you consider](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html) by "intellectual work product", there might be: is it *"and original and highly useful idea nobody has though about"? Patent* it and thus let everybody know about it, making no point in stealing it, and get protection by law. The idea/method will get out of the bag sooner or later anyway: + either someone else will think of same or better idea, or + disgruntled or money-hungry employee will steal it out on his phone or whatever and sell it to competition (or make competing startup himself) , or + you'll eventually produce product or service from which somebody skillfull enough will be able to reverse-engineer it and recreate same or better productAll of those happen today without superpowers (and most of them are way cheaper and easier then running in dodging bullets and stealing HDD from a server), and if you patented it, you'd at least have some recourse. (not that patent litigation in cheap or painless, but is usually better then nothing) * is it *"some great computer software you're going to sell"* ? Really? It's going to get "[pirated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#%22Piracy%22)" before you know it, probably by some of your regular employees, or even more likely by one of thousand exploits in your IT infrastructure. It will be out superpowers or not. You can try to protect yourself with copyright, or insurance, but really, you should've open sourced the whole thing and built your business model some way that is not doomed to crumble to dust. * is it *"some novel clothing design by popular brand"? Just trademark* it. World will be overflown with cheap copies on ebay the week it makes it out (or before, by regular employees trying to make buck on the side, as it is trivial to hold in you head and you don't even need data-exfiltration methods), * is it *"some immensely huge amount of data that requires a lot of work and time to collect, and you sell access to very limited API to query it"? This at least is the only one that might in some cases might be somewhat related to physical security. Still, solution is IT-based: instead of storing it all in one datacenter (it is huge, right, so you can't keep on few hard disks situated in your company anyway!!), you should shard it with redundancy over multiple datacenters in multiple continents. Any single person is not going to all that trouble for miniscule chances they'd be able to successfully collect thousands of hard disk around the world and reassemble them correctly (and if they do, you'd sue them on database protection rights* anyway - and your sysadmins would surely notice disks disappearing way before they could get it all) * is it *something else? what exactly? (especially which form of so-called "intellectual property" exactly)* And anyway, if it is anything based on value of particular combination of `zeros and ones` (and if you say "intellectual works", it is), you'd use regular techniques as we do today: * repetitive offsite backups (to prevent loss of data, not just in case of physical breach, but also hardware malfunctions etc) * data encryption (to prevent someone from gaining knowledge by stealing physical pieces of hardware) * access control (smartcards with passphrases, biometry, and other forms of [multi-factor authentication](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-factor_authentication)) to prevent unauthorized online access * insurance to recoup hardware costs (helps not just with theft of equipment, but also earthquakes, fires, floods etc). Also optionally you might insure for data leaks or whatever. TL;DR: you don't really need anything extra to target adversaries with superhuman abilities that responsible company does not already account for today. And if they don't, the company in question will probably fail sooner or later (likely sooner) - regardless of existence of any superpower adversaries. [Answer] Always start by dealing with the most likely threats first. Which of these is the most likely type of attacker that you're going to face? * Someone who can fly * Someone who can turn invisible * Someone who can liquefy and flow under the door (think T-1000 from Terminator 2) * Someone inside the organization who has a grudge, or who wants to make some extra money by selling secrets * Someone who walks boldly past your security, carrying a clipboard If your organization is anything like most companies today, there'll be a number of incredibly low-tech attack vectors that you simply aren't guarding against. (Seriously, the clipboard is effective against a crazy number of security checkpoints.) Why stress out about the highly unlikely possibility of a flying invader if anyone can just walk in wearing a post office uniform saying "Package for John Doe, where's his desk please"? Adopt a multi-pronged defense that doesn't concern itself with specific attack vectors. Others have mentioned insurance, and of course the standard legal protections (copyright, trademark, patent, as applicable to what you're doing). Having basic security cameras can help against a wide variety of attacks, since you get a good chance of having some footage of the infiltration that can be perused afterwards. But most importantly, make sure that people actually know each other. The hardest place to defend is one in which there's constant staff turnover, because anyone can slip in, pretending to be the new guy/gal. It probably isn't applicable here, but for some types of business, you can actually buy some top-quality security guards for a fairly low figure. For instance, a sign saying "free coffee for on-duty police officers" might reduce revenue a small amount, but who's gonna rob the Starbucks with a constant stream of blue uniforms going in and out? :) ]
[Question] [ Roleplaying in a survival game, building my own world and now I'm colonizing a new land. For the sake of realism and immersion I want to find the most effective and efficient staple foods out there. I thought about garlic because it only takes 40 days to grow from one clove to an entire bulb, so it's quite fast but not the fastest food out there. But most importantly, because historically garlic was used for health purposes, it can burn pretty much most living cells that's why it was turned into creams to apply on wounds. Which is nasty and painful but preferable to a dead limb. It was also used to keep the mouth and gut free from dangerous bacteria. And to this day some poor countries still use it to fight sexually transmitted viruses and infections. But here's the problem, it turns out garlic requires a temperature below 5 degrees Celsius or below 40 degrees Fahrenheit to grow... which is quite a problem since the new colony is located in a continental zone without any strong oceanic winds to temper the climate. Therefore it's always burning hot, except during the winter, which is deadly cold. So could garlic still be used as a staple food by growing it only in the winter and storing it for the rest of the year? Technology level: No freezers. [Answer] This is a [Frame Challenge](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/7097/40609) Garlic would be a poor staple food. Consider the following nutritional facts about garlic ([Source](https://www.verywellfit.com/garlic-nutrition-facts-calories-and-health-benefits-4114318)) and Wheat ([Source](https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/wheat)): \| Nutrition (100g) \| Garlic \| Wheat \| \| --- \| --- \| --- \| \| Calories \| 150kcal \| 340kcal \| \| Fat \| 0.0g \| 2.5g \| \| Carbohydrates \| 33.3g \| 72.0g \| \| Fiber \| 3.3g \| 10.7g \| \| Sugars \| 0.0g \| 0.4g \| \| Protein \| 6.7g \| 13.2g \| \| Sodium \| 16.7mg \| 0.0g(?) \| (?) = The 0.0g sodium for Wheat is based on its lack of representation in the link Summary Wheat has 2X the calories per serving, 2X the carbs (don't let diet fads fool you, the body actually requires carbs — just not as many as people tend to eat), 2X the protein, 3X the fiber, etc. gram-for-gram it's a much better product with only one exception: that fast growing time enjoyed by garlic. So, what could you use? From [here](https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/garden-planning/staple-crops-zm0z13jjzsto) we learn something my wife has been telling me for decades: > > Potatoes (along with grain corn) will give you the most calories for the least space. They are easy to grow — just bury a piece of potato about the size of an egg with a couple of “eyes” on it in the ground in a 4-inch-deep furrow. In climates with cool summers, plant early, midseason and late varieties two to three weeks before your last spring frost date. Potatoes will be ready to harvest in about 65 to 90 days, depending on the variety.Sweet potatoes, with their high beta carotene content, are one of the healthiest foods you can eat. They love the heat, but you can grow them as far north as Canada. > > > > > But if you want more options, let's look at this list from a [great article on survival gardening](https://www.epicgardening.com/survival-garden/): 1. Beans 2. Corn 3. Squash 4. Cabbage 5. Potatoes 6. Kale 7. Sweet Potatoes 8. Lentils 9. Onions 10. Tomatoes 11. Spinach 12. Peas 13. Beets 14. Carrots 15. Berries 16. Garlic 17. Peppers 18. Cucumbers 19. Melons 20. Herbs What's the take-away from that list? There is no "one food." Even staple foods like wheat, corn, potatoes, etc., are not recommended to be a super-high percentage of what's on your plate. Frankly, if you're looking for a food that can be the, let's say, 80%-of-what-we-eat-food, you probably should be thinking of fish. [Answer] If the purpose is food, then the best crops by far are: Corn (maize) for warm regions with just enough water Rice for hot and very wet regions and potatoes for cooler regions. All three of these also have really excellent storage shelf life. Wheat can be good, but is more fussy as to the climate it wants. Garlic? Garlic would be around #1734 or so in my list of best plants for subsistence crops. But your info on garlic temperature is incorrect, they want 13C to 24C. Garlic would be an excellent minority crop for seasoning and medicinal purposes. [Answer] Garlic is not a good staple food. No civilization has ever subsisted on it. I would suggest growing cereal grains and pulses over tubers because they last longer. Wheat, rice, beans, lentils, and corn last much longer than potatoes or taro. Here is a good blend of crops that I would suggest to ensure proper nutrition and long shelf life: * Wheat * Maize * Duborskian rice * Barley * Oats * Lentils * Soybeans * Beans * Peas * Chickpeas * A variety of leafy and root vegetables (which can be preserved through fermentation and pickling) * A variety of fruits (which can be made into preserves like the ones shown here: <https://shop.donnascountrykitchen.ca/Fruit-Preserves-c30324188>) [Answer] ## Frame challenge Chickens and/or cow/horses. Cows have milk which you can use straight away or it can be converted into stuff that can be stored for years(cheese - good stuff good stuff), and there are numerous ways to preserve meat without freezers. Smaller and more wilder versions like goats is also a legit and sometimes more convenient option Horses pretty much the same - meat, blood, skin, etc - everything is useful. Both are used for transportation as well, which survival-wise is helpful. The best thing about them, they eat grass, and the grass grows pretty much on its own, at all places. (Winter however is a problem, as one needs to store that grass) So yeah there are reasons why those animals were popular among nomads, in cold places where bananas do not grow, etc. In places where it is possible to have them, it is quite convenient to have them. Chickens are another good stuff. They can't sustain themselves on the grass alone, but they bring eggs which shelf life is half a month easily, and those eggs can be a replacement for meat. And here is the good part - they can eat bugs and all sorts of insects and worms. They eat meat, including those you do not want to eat - spoiled a little bit. They eat plant food as well grass, seeds. They are like pigs, you can feed them what you do not want to eat. And here is a good part, one of the things you do not want to eat - insect larvae, fly of all kinds - there are many. Flies(and some other insects as well) are famous for eating things which, hm, how to word it, hm, basically only them eat that stuff. You can convert trash, grass, plants, meat spoiled not spoiled - whatever you have - into worms. You can make worms out of all kinds of trash you can find around and have them being feed to chickens with grass as well. (Sure there are ways to do it good and right, and not so well. But there is youtube and there are videos on that topic. A keyword is probably - composting, chickens, soldier fly, red worms.) Animals are in some aspects more robust in terms of environmental conditions, they have better immune systems, they heal. They are more forgiving of some mistakes. They can defend themselves or escape, at least the number of creatures wanting to eat them are lesser in numbers. For a variety of reasons, including - one chicken(for lack of words and simplicity) can get you 50-150 new chickens a year - chickens are better than garlic. Animals, in general, are the way to convert inedible vegetables to edible stuff, and they are ready to do so from the get-go. Things are not that simple, but nomadic tribes which did and do have animals are proof of viability. Animals allow people to survive and do pretty well in places like extreme north where most of the year no plants are growing at all, not even winter garlic of yours. Next best option is hunting-gathering - really nothing new, good old still the same. ## clarifications * okay, seems there is a need for some ### cows There are around 250 recognized breeds of cows, for all sorts of purposes and with all sorts of properties, they even have a mini jersey cow, the size of a dog(a very big one), lol, how much better it can be. But here [American Milking Devon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Milking_Devon) this is the gold, this is a cow for those who wish to survive, like OP, this is the cow of settlers since the 17th century. Its purpose and goal and properties is to survive and let people survive with it as well. It is a multipurpose cow. It not best at milking, meat quantity, but it good at eating whatever is available grass, saplings, or whatever it finds to chew on. It is a healthy, well-established breed, probably a bit in decline those days but. So if you decide to take a cow for you to survive - you take this one. ### difficulties raising animals It is a truth that a novice has 50/50 chances to kill an animal this or another way by his care, especially ones which are not suited for free-range, or in circumstances when such option is not available, or productive breeds. I assume wilderness is freely available there, no charges, no money, and only one's efforts, self-reliance, as survival in stone jungles is a whole bunch of a different story. There are easier breeds, there are more demanding ones. There are different goals for them. Never you take for survival productive breeds, especially modern ones - be it for milk, be it for meat whatever they made for it implies good care, and for good ones it implied you will do extremely good care and assumed you do know exactly what you do and have access to all sorts of modern stuff. They require special care to achieve the performance(and some just to stay alive or not become crippled), and not necessarily do good without it, they not necessarily healthy ones, they won't survive in wild - humanity goes puff so will they as well. But there are robust ones, and those are the valid option. There are animals and breeds of those which are easier to take care of. 10000 years of selection weren't for nothing. ### are plants better? No, it is categorical no, period. Why? The main problem isn't as it is the same situation for novice farmers to kill plants, or that if you noticed something wrong it is too late, and not that plants can't moo to you hinting some problems. No, the problem is that even if you experienced farmer, decades of experience, the whole life you live from land - the result isn't guaranteed. Even today, even on farms which plant stuff day in and day out for since the inception of the farm hundred few hundred years ago. The result isn't guaranteed. There are few reasons for that. One of which - plants can't move. Not by themselves, not by your efforts. You can think - it isn't a big deal, right? Well, it also means you can't cover shelter them in bad weather - hail, strong wind, strong rain, too much sun - those are dangers for plants which by nature have to be under the sky. And if it happens, and it does, then even today there is nothing of help. Planting, as a process may be easier with today's technologies, but without it - if there are no animals to aid you in the process, planting enough will be pain in the rear. Not impossible. Harvesting is also a problem, and it does not come without work in between. Plants are sensitive to the structure of soil (is it lose, is it clay-ish, is it...), to acidity, to other stuff. Sensitive to climate, how good was the weather for them, etc. Crop rotation, fertilizing, etc. It can't run from insects, it can't outrun even a snail, which creeps on it. If someone thinks it such a carefree thing, oh boy ... There sure are good things about plants as well. So as for animals. And there are bad things about both of them as well. But converting non-edible plant matter into edible stuff - there really something futuristic there in that. ### Wrapping up If one can, take animals and plants. If you managed both - animals your food from get-go. Do plant tpse plants as well and do pray they grow as you plan them to be. Cows it for serious colonization, settlement, they not the best animals to get initially, but they can be a great help in planting and harvesting. The main reason for why not, because they multiply in numbers too slow. Rabbits, chickens, pigs - those are fast guys. Out of those only rabbits can live entirely on grazing. Chickens are suitable for the free-range approach, but they need supplementary meaty stuff if they do not have enough of it on free-range. Worms can be one of the ways to close the loop on grass, and there are such examples. Pigs are the worst, works if you have enough food for yourself plus extra. And only chicken(or any other egg-laying bird of that kind laying eggs once in a few days, which is not typical for any random bird) do provide food from day zero, and one can sustain on it fully and there is no plant alternative for such performance. [Answer] Others have made some good points and suggested a lot of great plant or livestock options. I would also add bees to the list of things you might want to bring with you. They don't give any meat, except if you are willing to eat the drones which don't have a stinger. But they provide a very important service that is fertilizing certain crops and they will give you honey and wax which both have medical applications or high calorie count. They even can be used to fight of dangerous animals or attackers, there are some "bee-fences" used in Africa to stop elephants from eating farmers crops. [Answer] Having garlic as a staple food would result in malnutrition and possibly even mass starvation. First of all, garlic is very low in fat and a lot of other nutrients, such as fiber, calcium, iron, etc. Therefore, people would have to consume a LOT of garlic. You would have to eat ~500 servings of garlic a day to get the daily amount of 2,000 calories, as each serving of garlic has 4 calories. Plus, garlic by itself tastes bad, as it is very spicy and hot. Although it is flavorful, it is NOT something you would want to eat in large quantities, and this is from experience (mine). Wheat, corn, rice, and other grains are much better staple foods than garlic. ]
[Question] [ This is a follow-up question for [Finding Nymphs Before Predators](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/195608/finding-nymphs-before-predators) and covers the terrifying possibility of Nymph-infused superhumans. So.... Recap: Magic bleeding through from an alternate reality combines with built-up residual life force (which is found in cemeteries, warzones, battlefields, anywhere where lots of things die) to form Nymphs. Nymphs appear to be human women in their prime and are unaffected by hot and cold (making them able to stroll through the Arctic and wade in lava flows) not to mention able to breathe air and water with equal ease, speak and understand any human language, and even know any animal or plant in their environment. Despite all of this knowledge, Nymphs still have childlike awe and love of nature. Nymphs are born clad in leaf clothing (a la Tinker Bell and her fairy friends), being naive, peaceful, curious, and with a deep longing and belief: the longing is to find their purpose, and their belief is that fate is real (ie. that they will find their purpose in the course of their journey). All Nymphs go on a journey after being "born," both to see the wonders of nature for themselves and to find their purpose. However, this is where my question comes in. You see, Nymphs have a natural ability to "return to nature" by being eaten, which infuses their consumer with their potent natural energies and enhances them. As an example, a Nymph-infused tiger is supernaturally stealthy, becoming invisible in shadows, and is fast and strong enough to A) catch up to a running horse and B) rend that armored knight on the horse's back. It also has all the nature-related knowledge and human intelligence of a Nymph. That being said, the problem with someone eating a Nymph is clear. A natural runner would be able to outrun a horse at top speed, while a well-built warrior would have the strength of a gorilla. Their senses would be enhanced (actually, as put above, their everything would enhance, but only one thing will be the most enhanced) and they'd have both the ability to speak and understand any human language and the knowledge needed to survive out in the woods. Never mind a human's main advantage over other animals: endurance. Biologically speaking, animals have the advantage over us in every area except this one. Well, Nymph-infused humans will have that advantage over everyone else. That runner mentioned above? Yeah, there's no way your cavalry can catch up to him, even with a head start. You'd have to catch him napping. And you can pretty much forget about wearing down that well-built warrior; no sane army would take him on. So, my question is: How Can an Early Medieval Society Deal With The Danger of Nymph-infused Humans? Specifically, how can kings prevent an upstart (noble or peasant) from finding a Nymph and becoming a serious threat? (Please note: the previous question concerns finding Nymphs before predators do, so Nymphs don't become monsters and terrorize the populace. However, the system used to do this also makes it really easy for someone to find a Nymph if they want to....) One Final Note: Thanks to everyone for all of your thoughtful comments! Each and everyone was useful, but in the end, I had to pick one. [Answer] This sounds like a non issue, at least as it applies to human on human interaction in the medieval ages. Based on your previous post nymphs are effectively a natural resource. Countries will fight over it and those that exploit it better or have more of it will have an advantage. The same as cavalry, steel or human soldiers. Overall Answer Human nature wouldn't change. People won't fight without a reason. Simply eating a nymph confers the ability to have a comfortable life in the wilderness, regardless of any other circumstances. In order for a nymph bearer to be involved in an attack on the status quo, they would have to have a lot to gain. Kings will handle upstart nobles and outlaws in the same manner as they always have. Taxes, tradition, law and armies. Taboo. Eating humans is uncommon and nymphs look like humans. Eventually humans will learn of the power they can gain by eating them but if a strange woman walked up to wearing just leaves and told me to kill and eat them I wouldn't trust them immediately. Tradition. Wild nymphs are valuable (for their enhancements) and dangerous (because of a predator eating one) so traditions that survive will involve capturing or killing them in some way. Some traditions will say the king is divine and nymphs belong to him. Some traditions will restrict accurate information on the properties of nymphs to those in power. Eating strange women even those who are telling them to eat you would be pretty unnatural to most people. Once everyone believes they are devils that can only be eaten by the divine bloodline of the king, most of them will get turned in. Taxes. The central authority will be hunting nymphs in the area they control directly. If they have areas that they receive tribute from that tribute may contain a payment of nymphs or nymph soldiers. The amount of nymphs tributed will depend on the culture. Law. Access to nymphs would be restricted just as horses, swords and guns have been in the past. Military. Eating a nymph may give you the strength of 10 men and the stamina of 10 horses. However, so does having ten men and ten horses. Having a single nymph isn't going to be different than having a small band of outlaws or fiefdom to conscript. When a noble attacks his king it will be exactly the same as if a noble attacked his king in our universe. The proportion of empowered to unempowered will likely be the same if the are in similar climates but the central authority will levy a tax on nymphs and have more than those that rebel. Military Power of A Nymph I can't tell from the post how powerful a nymph makes a person but it doesn't seem to make them immune to arrows, poison, spears or swords. In a pitched battle nymph soldiers will be valuable but if a human is elevated to have the strength of a bear and the speed of a horse, a bunch of arrows and spears is still going to kill him. In skirmishes, ambushes, scouting, assassination or guerrilla warfare the value of the nymph goes up but so does the value of having an opposing nymph. Overall this seems to favor the king who will have more nymphs. Naval Power Naval power in [The Golden Age of Piracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Piracy)<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Piracy> would be a good analogue to the effect of nymphs on power. A small group could hijack a ship and set off on their own, they could raid and pillage and many would be helpless against them. A single ship represented a significant amount of power. They could disappear and without a ship to follow them they would not be caught. However, the golden age of piracy came to an end because eventually the organized powers had more ships. I was making the following assumptions 1). Nymphs don't stack. You can get the power of one nymph at time. 2). Nymphs can be captured and given to someone else to eat. This is what I got from my reading of the previous post but I wanted to spell it out. 3). Eating Nymph doesn't change how much food you eat. This doesn't much but I assume they still need to eat and breathe but won't require an entire village to feed each one. 4). Killing a Nymph User doesn't get you a Nymph. The nymph supply stays fairly constant. Without this there would be a continuous build up of nymphs. 5). Nymphs aren't rare. As long as nymphs aren't a once in a generation occurrence, eventually the more powerful groups will have more nymphs than the less powerful on average. 6). Normal humans still pose a threat to those who have eaten a nymph. Not much but a crossbow or axe through the head will still kill even someone who has been empowered. Eating a nymph does not turn you into a god. Even if nymphs render all other forms of military power irrelevant it would come down to whoever has the most and best trained nymphs which would be whoever can gather more. [Answer] You deal with it the same way the police and armies deal with the common folk: by being more organized and having the monopoly on violence. In most places in medieval times only knights and nobles could wield longswords and wear armor. In your case only knights and nobles can be around and consume nymphs. Anyone else who eats a nymph gets treated like a modern american driving an armed tank around in Manhattan. [Answer] # The same way the law maintains order One person is still just one person, even with an awesomely destructive weapon at their disposal. Somewhat comparable incidents have happened before. Marvin Heemeyer spent months creating his [Killdozer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer) (as mentioned by @TheSquare-CubeLaw in a comment) and then there was the time one [Shawn Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Nelson_(criminal)) just walked into a National Guard installation and helped himself to a tank which he proceeded to joyride around downtown San Diego. You'll note both individuals did wreak havoc for a while, but only on a small scale (relative to a whole nation) and then it was over. Why does it turn out this way? Because there was only one of them, they were easily contained and dealt with. An army of Killdozers would be very bad news, but one? One's not nothing, it can do a lot of damage; but Marvin Heemeyer can't win as long as it's just him. He can't force the government to the negotiating table and win any political concessions. So the governments maintain law and order the same way they've always done: make penalties for threatening it draconian and don't screw around. As long as everyone respects the law, only small numbers of folks will want to challenge your authority or screw around. And small numbers of folks are a solvable problem. All you really need to do is make sure that small problems don't turn into large problems. A hundred nymph-enhanced hostile people per year will be a very big problem. You deal with this in one of several ways. Any kingdom that wants to remain stable must necessarily have one (or more) of these things: 1. A military force capable of dealing with nymph-enhanced people that is constantly active and monitoring for them. 2. A force dedicating to securing new nymphs. It will need to know how to find them to make sure the government finds them first. (What to actually do with the nymphs can vary from 'exile them' to simply 'provide protection so nobody tries to eat them' to 'kill them immediately' or 'feed them to my generals', depending on whether these are good guys or bad guys.) 3. A group of nymphs that work for the kingdom so when an enhanced person starts making trouble, they're there to put a stop to it. 4. A group of nymph-enhanced law enforcement officers to do the same. If this looks somewhat boring and similar to how real world law enforcement operates today, well, that's not a coincidence. [Answer] Like I said in one of your earlier questions regarding nymphs, eating them can grant great powers, but it has a cost, too... ## Self-aware nymph-eater creatures become insane What you forgot about humans is that they are one of the more clever species on Earth, and have much similarities with nymphs, as much in form as in personalities (curious, looking for a sign of fate, sometimes naive...). Someone who eats a nymph is known to become quickly mad. There are many different cases depending on the personality of the nymph-eater, but doctors of that time have noticed the growing of the following symptoms: * [Tinnitus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinnitus), vision blur and unability to focus or to [sleep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insomnia) : Patients tell that they sense the world as a double of itself, but with a very slightly displaced point of view. Overfeeling the roots of the world itself through all senses give them strong headaches and prevent them from focusing on any task. * [Split personalities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder) : The nymph and the human share the same body, at different times of the day. The soul in charge changes as often as sunny days come to raining ones, and raining ones come back to sunny days (rumors say it depends on the emotions felt). And well, because nymphs think -or rather feel- it's a good idea to get eaten, it's quite rare to see one of these people alive very long. * Fused personalities : Similar and yet quite the reverse of the split personalities, both souls fall in an endless struggle to get the control of the body. Most of the time unfortunately, the wild nature of the nymph overpowers the soul of the patient. At this point, only a glimmer of the victim's soul remains, as if they were forced to [watch their life from a distance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depersonalization-derealization_disorder), before they ultimately meet the jaw of a monster. * [Hallucinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination), [schizophrenia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia), and [dementia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia) : One of the worst cases, where the patient become a shadow of their former selves. First, they frighten at the most common sights, then over time they move to a still while mumbling incoherent prayers and words, watching something which is out of this world. What is it? Nobody knows, but if it ever actually came to this world, it would be the beginning of the apocalypse. During their research, what noticed the doctors is that the personality of the nymph-eater give different results : A naive and pure adolescent who has been tricked into eating a nymph will have the first two lesser symptoms, while ambitious people looking for power and who thinks that they can overcome even Fate and Gods will often fall into the two latter, which are rarely good ending cases. Animals, having a knowledge of self to a much lesser extent, don't face as much that issue. Some of the smartest creatures might become enraged or act weirdly, but it's one case seen in thousands. One hypothesis which was raised that they either think too differently from nymphs or, on the reverse, think exactly like them which makes them more or less immune to these mind-altering illnesses. This is why people seldomly eat nymphs. They might become extremely powerful, but they know they will soon sell their souls to the devil, and might very well never come back from it... --- Note : The rare ones who manage to overcome this maddening act are often people of legends, being the bravest, wisest or cunniest people of all kingdoms, and capable of incredible feats. They are the heroes of humanity and its greatest symbols. [Answer] ## Taboo: No, get your mind out of the gutter. Make the natural human impulse to avoid cannibalism apply to nymphs. Anyone killing and eating a nymph should be characterized as the most brutal murderous Satanic hell-hound in existence. Since this kind of raw power is blatantly obvious, tainting their reputation should be simple. Once every proper Christian Knight realizes that to kill and eat a nymph is to take on an existence of pure evil, only the most wicked among them will follow suit. These folks are witches and in league with the Devil. Period. But don't say it's eating the nymph that gives power. Leave that part a mystery. Emphasize destroying nymph bodies (however that can be done) and that those who get power from nymphs do it by infernal means revealed by the darkest of evil means. Society would need to actively oppose such people. An army of people willing to do anything to stop pure evil would be able to make their lives hell at least. After all, to slit the throat of such a fiend in their sleep would be duty - to die opposing them would be martyrdom. This does have some problems. There are always vile people willing to do the most despicable things to get ahead. So a "good" knight would pretty much have three options: kill all nymphs on sight (the safe choice), help the nymph fulfill her quest by any means necessary, or imprison nymphs so they can't be eaten. The fact that essence of nymph is pure evil suggests there would be a kill (and destroy the corpse) first, ask questions about quests later policy. Temptation for power can be overwhelming. Does eating a little nymph give a little power? Perhaps a powerful church organization (call them crusaders?) would capture these nymphs and slowly siphon off their blood (and power) a little at a time until the nymphs were virtually drained. A nymph might even permit such a thing - as their destiny OR to return to nature. A few drops of blood mixed into communion wine would "bless" the special orders with divine power to fight the savage cannibals. Then these enhanced heroes would be sent to search and destroy both nymphs and those willing to consume them. [Answer] Religion and mysticism. These nymphs are mystical creatures with Supernatural abilities so it makes sense that especially for humans relate to them on terms of religion and mysticism. 1. The nymphs are holy and or gods . And even thinking about eating one can make you forfeit your place in the afterlife. 2. The nymphs are sacred sacrifice meant to only be eaten by that God emperor and his family. 3. Nymphs are scary vampire ghost creatures born from death if you even see one you will lose your soul. OK well how about for those who disobey 1. disinformation and censor. This would be a lot more effective in a pre industrial society if No one knows about how to take the powers of a nymph then probably wont discover it by accident. 2. Organize your own nymph enhanced kill squad. Either organize the nymph themselves ( Yes I know they're innocent and childlike but child soldiers are a thing) or Feed them to your elite Warriors whose job it is to hunt Law breakers who have eaten nymphs. [Answer] The criminals become the law, or the Law becomes the criminals. Or both. The nymph-eaters have power as individuals, but more so as a gang, a faction, an army. The government can have its thralls, fearing for their families, hunt down and dutifully turn over nymphs to their betters so that those betters can become ... much better. After a period of war, they come to some new organized structure - one which also believes a great deal in order and suppressing any new rivals, but now has the power to hold their position. [Answer] A mix of natural limitations and human laws plus information hiding. > > Nymphs are strong, aren't they? Is doesn't matter if they are pacifists or naive. I cannot imagine any life form without a sense for > peril. If they are strong, at least they can avoid danger by using > their special capabilities. They can detect danger very soon, and > quickly run from it. > > > But by say they can be eaten to acquire their capabilities, you are defining a mechanic that you want somebody to try to exploit at some > point. Why have the mechanic otherwise? > > > Let's say then, that they aren't impossible to catch. Just very difficult to catch. For example, some King may want to create a super > strong knight. Then he organizes a well equipped party, with > everything that is needed to attempt the catching of a Nymph. Let's > call them [Nymph Hunters]. > > > Our natural limitation, then, is that the catching of a Nymph is an issue that requires technical expertise. Not everyone with a katana, a > bow if you prefer that version, is a Samurai. > > > This required a modification due to the Nymph behavior being defined as very specific. And the expected cycle of their life being in the core of this worldbuilding, making it difficult to trade. While the act of catching a Nymph needs to lower its difficulty, the act of locating one may steel be a challenge. To accommodate to this, we exchange Nymph Hunters, for Nymph Trackers. The black market is always there to make the game more fun... for some. There are mercenaries too. Nymph ~~Hunters~~ Trackers can be hired by everyone with enough money. Then we have the need for artificial limitations too. The kings will try to make it illegal. They will actively punish offenders. The act of tracking itself isn't an offend. The act of catching is. Also, another accommodation with already existing worlbuilding (look at the series of question) is that the most common places where to find Nymphs may we well known. Battlefields, graveyards, etc. But worry not, our Trackers still have well secured jobs. Common places are expected to be under some form of surveillance, while uncommon ones aren't. Our Trackers can go to the uncommon ones, and in record time. Also, they have the knowledge and experience to correctly place their bets. > > Expend smart, hire your tracker > > > Some considerations Artificial limitations require constant dedication and sourcing. Laws are nothing if nobody is watching. If you want some degree of believability, and there is demand for a Nymph, at some point somebody will illegally catch one, for one reason or another. But that is actually... good. For woldbuilders at least. I don't know about the Nymph. Because you can have your conflicts, your drama, and your stories. Also consider, that if you will mix this with "information hiding" your laws have to be ambiguous. Otherwise you are leaking information. People may be tired at times, but they aren't stupid. They eventually find out. I would be very disappointed if they don't. Your laws has to say "don't hurt or attempt to hurt, a Nymph". You can go even more ambiguous to protect critical knowlegde by not saying Nymphs at all, "don't hurt or attempt to hurt any magical being". You don't say "Nymph", and you don't say "eat". Information hiding This may require to trade some aspects of this world, but let me try to sell you this one. Not everyone have to know about what happen when a Nymph is eaten. Information control worked better in middle ages than today. Some considerations Medieval societies had "Internet". Just a very slow one. There were cultural and economic interactions between kingdoms/countries. Both, market and military conquests, contributed to it. Knowledge will leak, eventually. Knights may become mercenaries. Scholars may go rogue, or change factions, for unforeseen circumstances. And before of that, both may, occasionally, leak knowledge without knowing. Disinformation A tactic to counteract the inevitable knowledge leaking. If you need to switch to this paradigm, then you already have a lot of knowledge leaking. Once in this scenario, you cannot go back. [Answer] Some of the other answers have touched on this in passing, but one key factor to consider is rarity / frequency. Let's consider a few possible variations and what they would lead to, before we go into "how to deal with them". Also, you're going to have to deal with a "human-centric" problem: you will get vastly different patterns depending on whether you consider "residual life" to be a property of simple biomass, or if consciousness (or at least complexity of intellect) weights it and if so how strongly. For the sake of breaking it down a bit, I'm going to assume that it is heavily biased toward "higher consciousness" resulting in stronger residuals. For a purely pragmatic storytelling driver: there's a reason that not many ghost stories are told about animals other than pets, and pretty much none about random rodents. Just recognize that this is a consideration that will impact how and where nymphs will spawn, because if humans are the high end of the scale, the fact that they cluster quite tightly compared to the total area available (and tend to keep many of the next-highest-rank of creatures within that same tight clustering) will have a noticeable impact. So, that said: 1. If all it takes is a medieval village's graveyard ("single to double digit sentient corpses") and the "residual life force" recharges itself somehow after spawning a nymph, they're going to be ridiculously common. Probably not what you're aiming for, from the descriptions, but something to think about. Also, anyone with a slaughterhouse would be spawning them almost faster than the humans could eat them. 2. If it takes a village graveyard but the life force doesn't recharge unless more things die / are buried there, then they'll be roughly on a par with the rarity of good metal weapons (but much, much more effective at enhancing the person who has the benefit). 3. If it takes a significant battlefield (hundreds of corpses) but recharges, you're looking at about the same rarity, but the locations will be much more concentrated, which has impacts on probable societal controls. 4. Same scale, but without recharging, and you're to the point that you're into high fantasy "find a powerful sword" tropes. Common enough that they're known to happen, but rare enough that you're talking about a handful of these existing across the entirety of Europe at any given moment. 5. Thousands to tens of thousands (with or without recharge), and they would be rare enough to associate with specific areas or historic events. With recharge, you're still probably talking about only a few dozen across the continent at any one moment; without, you're talking about one or two happening in an entire generation. Given that list: * If they're ridiculously common, eating one will be a rite of passage. It will also be necessary just to survive the number of enhanced predators around. "When everyone's super… nobody is." * If they're on a par with metal weapons, but more powerful, then you'll tend to see dynamics that would probably resemble "real" ones — they are rare enough (especially if focused in particular areas) that they are a controllable resource, but you have enough of them to be able to 'equip' a sizable enough force of loyalists who can take on rogues. At least until the rogues get smart and start organizing out in the wilds, but that's when you start calling them "the next kingdom over". Basically, they will be the domain of the nobility (if there is a strong enough centralization of governance), or about-one-per-village folk heroes if nobody has that good a grip on things. Also, those folks heroes will become the nobility fairly rapidly. * If they're in fantasy trope rarity, you have a lot of room to play with. The key thing that will probably decide it is how much enhancement helps you. Specifically, if "mere mortals" can still take someone like this down at a 10:1 or maybe even 20:1 ratio, the nobles can afford to enforce the death penalty on anyone who transgresses. Inconvenient but affordable and probably worth their while, since most folks won't transgress given the consequences. * If it is more like 50:1 or 100:1 then this isn't a winning proposition; it is just too expensive to try to enforce a death penalty (some may still try, of course). The more effective ones would use a combination of spreading the belief that terrible things would happen to you if you ate one but were not specifically trained/prepared/had a bloodline (whatever the local population's mythology supports) but also making a policy of paying out very well for someone who brings one in, or making very, very friendly with the stray youth who didn't know any better and using their naiveté to get a good handle on them. Definitely classic fantasy trope land here; anything consuming one is a Hero or a Monster, and most sane people don't actually want to be Heroes (especially if doing so without permission can get you on the bad side of the royals but bringing them in gets you favor, money, and power). * Rarer than that, and there just aren't enough of them to make a generalized case; if life force recharges, then areas which can spawn them at all reliably will have local customs for dealing with it that will vary wildly, and they'll still be far enough apart that any sitting ruler will probably never have to deal with more than one spawning in their reign. If there isn't any recharge, then they're going to be unique and linked to major historic events, and may actually be more predictable because the humans will have noticed that much dying; it is a non-trivial portion of the population, after all. [Answer] Consuming nymphs doesn't always go well... or at least that's what you want people to think. Spread storys about nymph eaters going crazy, if not sufficiently prepared by government supervised rituals. It doesn't happen in an instant. It's just that after cosnuming the nymph, your mind starts to rot away until you are no more than a wild beast. To strenghten your point you can always hunt and contain these people while using exessive force against them and any bystanders. Leave no witnesses and declare later that you had to contain yet another mindless "nymph hybrid" which massacred everyone in the area, while you were, very unfortunately of course, too late to rescue anyone. Since you should have some superpowered people at hand already, it is easy to devastate whole villages if neccessary and have the damage look like the result of mindless rage and the fight necessary to overwhelm the "beast". Most people will become too scared to dare coming anywhere near a nymph. And those who still try their luck and seem to be fine at first can either be "invited" to join your forces or just violently eliminated later. And those people who actually manage to hide their powers from you could, when they later get found out, be identified as people with a naturally high resistance to decay but who still, for their own safety and everyone else's, needs to join your forces and start using your rituals asap. You are the only one keeping these people alive and sane! ]
[Question] [ On Earth, while birds and reptiles can be quite brightly colored, it's rare for mammals to have any bright colors, and the rare times they do, it's either just slightly different (like with orangutans) or from outside sources (like symbiotic algae). There are several interlocking reasons for this - most mammals don't have good enough color vision for it to have real evolutionary value, there isn't enough bright color in most environments mammals live in, and melanin doesn't have brightly colored variations. I'd like an Earth-like planet, with overall near-identical flora and fauna, but where there's one mostly isolated ecosystem that has brightly colored mammals. How could I make an evolutionary pathway that leads to that happening? (I would preferably like for the environment with the brightly-colored mammals to be a temperate rainforest for unrelated worldbuilding reasons, but I'm fine with a different environment.) Thanks in advance. [Answer] Mating selectivity Color vision of mammals is good enough to appreciate things like a peacock's tail. And that's the possible mechanism. Female selectivity of male display. Mister Hopeful has colorful hair, maybe colorful skin markings. And he struts and displays them to attract the attention of Miss Prospective. The guy with the most colorful markings gets the girls. The girls with the most discernment get the most colorful guys, who in turn father the most colorful children. There is even some direct survival information. A bird (or gentleman) who can wander through the jungle with that huge colorful display, and not get eaten, that's a guy that has something special going on. He's either very alert and agile, or he's fast, or he's lucky. Whatever, he's got potential daddy genes. It becomes a positive-feedback. This is how such things as peacock and bird-of-paradise tails arose. The females select for colorful display. The males display selects for female discernment and sharpness of eye. And the overall process selects for whatever-it-is that lets the boys carry that display around in a predator filled environment. Edit: Paragraph added for emphasis. At the same time it pushes for colorful displays by males, it pushes for more critical viewing by females. And so pushes the vision of the species to become more sensitive to color and detail, and the brain power to be able to compare and contrast fine detail and composition. Other options might be that the color only shows up during the attract-a-mate season. And then it fades. Maybe he grows a really brightly colored beard and chest hair for six or eight weeks in the spring, then it all falls out. Or maybe he starts to grow blue-and-purple patches on easily-displayed portions of his anatomy. Then later, after he gets his girl, they turn grey or brown. It would only take minor adjustments to pigments to make the colors much more camouflage-like, much more like the shadows under the trees. [Answer] > > How could I make an evolutionary pathway that leads to that happening? > > > Sounds like you already answered your own question, right here: > > most mammals don't have good enough color vision for it to have real evolutionary value. > > > Mammals probably lost two of their four cone cell types waaaay back in the time of the dinosaurs, for as-yet unknown reasons, but seemed to cope OK. Primates [subsequently evolved trichromacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_color_vision_in_primates) and regained their colour vision. Some marsupials [also appear to have trichromacy](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1599861/), presumably independently. Keeping better colour vision from earlier in mammalian history, or re-evolving it (possibly multiple times) subsequently but at an earlier stage than primates, might allow for more complex colour signalling and camouflage patterning to arise. Most mammalian predators lack colour vision as good as ours, though how much of an edge it would given them in hunting is unclear to me. It certainly doesn't harm avian, reptilian or amphibian predators, that's for sure. Other things might include different kinds of diet. The bright red plumage of some [cardinal birds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_(bird)) and the pink of flamingoes is not caused by pigments that the birds express, but rather from things that they eat and some of the excess colours are laid down in feathers. Having the colours laid down in hair or fur, especially as a form of [aposematism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aposematism) (warning colouration often used by poisonous or venomous animals) is entire justifiable, and doesn't necessarily need any drastic evolutionary changes. Additionally, some colours may be incidental... the pigment [psittacofulvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psittacofulvin) gives parrots their bright yellow and red colours, but it turns out that feathers containing that pigment are more resistance to damage from bacteria like [Bacillus licheniformis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_licheniformis). Many humans change colour in the sun, as expressing greater levels of melanin in skin cells helps protect against damage from UV light, but perhaps other influences (such as problematic bacteria or fungi) in various species could be resisted by chemicals which just happen to be interesting colours. To finish though, I'll just leave a picture of a mandrill for you. Orange ain't the only colour! I'll spare you the pictures of baboons in heat though. [![Mandrill](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yqWbP.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yqWbP.jpg) (image by [Amit Patel](https://www.flickr.com/photos/amitp/40659934542), from flickr) [Answer] I guess the thing with non-colorful mammals is they typically don't have ways to escape easily like birds or insects from predators, so they have to rely more on sneaking and hiding, and this would be a natural reason to not be very distinguished with colored fur. Therefore ecosystems where mammals don't have to fear being eaten nor need to sneak to their prey could produce some more colorful species. P.S. Maybe look at skunk-like or zebra-like, they are quite distinct with their colors and patterns. [Answer] Well we humans are pretty much mammals and even thought it's not through (biological) evolution we started to dye our hair in different colors. Perhaps you are able to find an evolutionary reasoning in that? Like standing out to find a mate? Also an option would be a plant based one, certain sloths for example have a greenish appearance through moss growing in their fur. Adding a colorful (possibly parasitic) moss that attaches it to the fur of animals as a way of spreading could give them a colorful appearance. [Answer] I can see a few factors that would encourage that trait : * a lack of predators: without the need to run and hide from predators, animals can afford to have flashier colors that makes them easier to spot * Alternatively, perhaps the colors, while appearing flashy to us, blend in quite well with the equally colorful flora present. * Continuing the adaptation to flora, animals can change colors throughout the year. You almost certainly know of the chameleon, but mammals like the arctic fox or hare do change colors to snow white fur in winter for example and birds can do the same. Your creatures wouldn't then necessarily be brightly colored all year round, they'd adapt to the environment. * mating preferences: think peacock. Perhaps brighter colors are better at attracting potential mates, ensuring the genes spread. [Answer] Birds and Reptiles usually develop colorful displays for mating purposes. The general concept is that the colors denote exceptional health of the individual (usually the male). In some cases, like the Peacock, the display actually suits no functional evolution purpose other than showing off to the female that, in addition to being suited to live in it's environment, it can do so to egregious success. One thing to note is that in this evolution paradigm, it's usually the gender that is typically supposed to court the discerning other gender that is the more colorful member of the species (Compare the always male "Peacock" to the drabber always female "peahen" which is usually shades of brown. The gender neutral term for the species is "Peafowl", FYI). So your aliens would likely see vibrant color displays a sexy and attractive. Other elements are more enviornmental. Tigers, Cheetahs, Leapards, are considered quite colorful for wholly different reasons, namely, camouflage. Humans actually have very developed eyesight that mixes both trichromatic vision (our eyes are simulated by three colors, but all colors we are capable of seeing are combinations of various levels of those colors. It's like how computers use the RGB values to display color... only humans have a wider range of color discernation than computers are capable of producing.). There are some animals with four color vision (turtles) and some with better range (raptors (birds of prey, not dinosaurs... well... Jurrassic Park Dinosaurs...) can see up to two miles away, but have terrible short range vision.) and other animals have low levels of light of nocturnal vision. I say this, because much of hominid development was focused on becoming apex predators, and members of the Homo genus are uniquely the only predators that are ranged hunters on planet earth, which requires a rather unorthodox set of evolutionary developments to accomplish. Bipedalism was thought to be a means of attaining better height for vantages, our arms are developed for throwing (Our nearest evolutionary cousins throw at 1/5th our ability)... and of course our vision was developed to better assess the lay of the land and see things we should be, which is why we don't think of the tiger and zebra as all that hidden... because it counts on tricking animals with less developed sight... Even intelligence is thought to be a result of developing towards this hunting niche, take a look at the physics of throwing a thing, and remember the best hominids relied on understanding that skill. Other colors in the wild are based on consuming biological componants that the body cannot break down or dispose of easily. Flamingos, for example, eat shrimp almost exclusively and the material that makes shrimp pink isn't digested or excreted, so they grow pink overtime. There are conditions where humans can have this happen too. The biological compound known as Beta Carotine is responsible for a lot of fruits and vegitables we eat that have a red color. The protein isn't synthisized in animals, but does play some roles, even in humans. For example, it's used to make menolin, which blocks UV rays from damaging skin cells in humans... and if consumed in excess, humans can have an almost "orange" appearance, both in skin color and hair color, since it's usually digested for use in skin pigmentation, and not excreted in bulkier waste products (It typically will leave the body through dead skin). [Answer] Start with an discretionary omnivorous apex predator with good color vision and an instinctive appreciation for vibrant colors and contrast. If this predator was sentient, we would call its effect on the environment, "selective breeding", but since it is not sentient, this predator's preferences are comparable to the preferences of pollinating insects for bright colored and aromatic flowers; just a natural force. Now all you need is deep time. Insects didn't inspire flowers to become beautiful overnight. It took millions of years. Similar, this apex predator would inspire its environment by eating the bland prey animals, leaving the prettier ones around to multiply. Over the ages, bland colors would become an survival disadvantage and like most such disadvantages, it would succumb to the tides of evolution. [Answer] Other answers have described the various evolutionary reasons why coloration evolves such as sexual selection and aposematism. However, mammals already have these evolutionary pressures driving the evolution of dramatic appearances and many mammals do have highly conspicuous appearances. Why then do mammals not use bright colors to make their appearances even more remarkable? The answer to this is not that they lack the evolutionary motives or rationales but rather that they lack the ability. Practically all coloration in mammals comes from various forms of the pigment melanin which is limited to producing blacks, browns, greys, and whites. However much of the beautiful coloration in the animal world isn’t pigment-based at all. [Structural color](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_coloration) is responsible for nearly all of the bright blues and greens we see in the animal kingdom. Structural color is produced by microscopic structures, in the size range of light wavelengths themselves, which refract and reflect specific colors of light. A male peacock’s beautiful tail is, in fact, brown in pigment, but the feathers are coated in these nanostructures which give it it’s iridescent appearance. Structural coloration is responsible for much of the coloration seen in birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, and fish. So the simple answer to why mammals don’t have vibrant colors is because mammals never evolved the ability to produce structural coloration using their hair. The only instance of structural coloration existing in animal hair is the slight [iridescence of the Golden Mole](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2011.1168) which is completely blind. However at least one mammal does have structural coloration, just not in its hair. The best example of brilliant coloration in mammals, [the mandrill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrill#Coloration), actually uses structural coloration in the collagen fibers of its skin to produce the red and blue colors of its face. This example tells us that colorful ornamentation is useful to mammals but that mammals can’t produce it on their hair. Perhaps this is because mammalian hair is incompatible with structural coloration in some way. So, to produce mammals with bright coloration you could make them hairless, like humans, and produce colors on their skin like the mandrill, or have them utilize a distinctive form of hair that is capable of being structurally colored. [Answer] "Bright" is often not a good survival characteristic for land animals. Ideally you want lack of predators. Of course, some mammals are predators so you may need to prevent their evolution/arrival in that environment. [Fisherian Runaway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway) is a good way to explain the evolutionary process; in fact it is why peacocks evolved such ornate displays. The theory rests on an attribute that initially indicated a genetic advantage, but ends up in a vicious cycle of purely "aesthetic" selection. So why would being colourful (initially) indicate fitness? ### Toxic minerals There are trace amounts of toxic minerals in the environment which can be used to form pigments (lead, arsenic, cadmium) and displaying these pigments indicates a greater tolerance to them. ### Genetic association Albino animals generally have poor health and short lifespans. Solution? Don't mate with them. This doesn't quite explain why animals would prefer to mate with more colourful individuals. You either have albinism or you don't, right? So there needs to be a range of pigmentations. For some reason (retroviruses) all the mammals in this environment received a gene that conferred some advantage\, with a side effect being visible pigmentation. Initially the gene would not be expressed strongly. But the more this gene was expressed, the greater the advantage—and pigmentation. Naturally, pigmentation would become a desirable attribute. Eventually, animals would evolve other* pigments to stand out more, leading to Fisherian Runaway. \* an "invisible" advantage like more competitive sperm; something that would not be obvious from fighting one's way to alpha male ### Insect repellent In a rainforest environment you've got... insects. Insects such as mosquitoes are attracted to infra-red light because it indicates body heat. Darker materials absorb more light and emit more of it as infra-red. Brighter colours do the opposite. [Answer] My understanding of evolution on (this) Earth is that the mammals we see today, evolved from small, nocturnal animals, which had found success in a niche where they could hide from the dominant group: the dinosaurs, whereas birds are dinosaurs; the ones that survived the big meteor strike 65 million years ago. Going further back, what became the mammals separated from what became the dinosaurs, and were for a while dominant, but about 252 million years ago, another extinction event occurred, and the dinosaurs becam dominant (I'm borrowing heavily from Wikipedia here). The mammals were living a nocturnal life for a long time, and their colour vision was lost, since it wasn't useful, whereas the diurnal dinosaurs (and later birds) kept (or evolved) good colour vision, since that was advantageous. Having bright colours can be an advantage as a way of signaling good health, but only if your species can see the colours - hence birds tend to be brightly coloured and mammals tend to be relatively drab. So, from this you can see how it could have been different: if the mammal ancestors had become dominant and diurnal, they would (or could, at least) have become brightly coloured. [Answer] Evolution is a random and uncaring monster, nothing is inevitable and everything is possible, so it's entirely possible that vibrant colours could have evolved in mammals. The most obvious possible cause is [Amotz Zahavi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amotz_Zahavi)'s [Handicap Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle). It benefits neither prey nor predator species to be brightly coloured, but this handicap would be a costly [signal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory) that is difficult or impossible to fake. Consequently, other individuals, be they the same species or a potential predator, will evolve to recognise the relative strength of the signal, and respond appropriately. Predators won't try and eat the strongest looking prey, because they know it's not bluffing and will be hard to kill. Here evolutionary pressure is applied twice: first, that members of the same species look for the most beautiful (colourful) mates, and second, that predators will notice the less vibrant members as more accessible food. This is entirely possible so long as the common ancestor evolved using colour as a handicap. [Answer] If the things that prey on mammals have poor color vision, then color is not a major problem for the mammals to adopt. So make the top-tier predators be colorblind reptiles. Next, you need something to drive the color. Imagine if species had lots of recessive genes that we’re really bad to pair up, and imagine that those traits were correlated with color. In that case, it is an advantage for any blue female to pick a non-blue mate, and red female to pick a non-red mate. That would encourage more color diversity. [Answer] You cannot. There is no way an extraterrestrial creature to be classified as a mammal. [Answer] It may help to look at how animals are coloured here on earth. Many herbivorous mammals' coats are camouflage as a result of evolution. Think of a gazelle or a zebra, or insects, or even many small birds. If the Flora is brightly coloured, so would the Fauna that eat it. Another reason we see bright colours in real life are as a warning to stay away. Think of poison dart frogs, etc. Over time all the bright ones weren't eaten as they're obviously poison. The last I can think of is specifically with birds, where the males are often very colourful and flamboyant. If all the animals prefer brightly coloured mates, eventually they'll all be brightly coloured. [Answer] ## You need creatures that can see color. Mammals as a group are basically colorblind. Only some primates and monotremes can see a decent range of color, everything else is either dichromatic or monochromatic, which in humans we refer to as being colorblind. So your "mammals" need to be able to see color. for earth mammals green, red, yellow, and orange are the same color (see below), so why use them. Your creatures are not mammals, not unless the are descended from earth life humans shipped to the planet. mammals lost color vision due to a weird quirk in our evolutionary history and there is no reason for that to be true for your aliens. ## Since your "mammals" won't actually be mammals they will probably see color. On the left is what primates see, in hte middle and right is what the rest of mammals see, as you can tell bright display coloration is pointless in mammals since your mates can't see the color. this is why primates are the only mammals with a sexual coloration. and the only reason for a large animal to be brightly (stand out against the background) colored is for sexual selection. in fact your alien mammal like things will probably be able to see color we can't just like birds and reptiles today [can](https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/50/10/854/233996). [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uOuJF.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/uOuJF.jpg) ]
[Question] [ Closed. This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49). Closed 7 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/54779/edit) So, a soldier has manage to get into the back of a dragon and now the dragon is flying. He somehow gets to the dragon head while the dragon flying up to 45mph and at up to 35-60 meters in the air, and kills it, then the dragon will start to fall. My question is, is there any way the soldier can survive? Is opening a hole in the dragon skin and getting inside it flesh a good idea? ### Notes: * Medieval tech only. * The soldier has a leather and chain armor. * He also has a sword and a shield held in his back. * No water is near. * No buildings near. ### Edit: I changed altitude, may have exagerated with 100 meters. [Answer] # Clip it and kill it on the ground Surviving a 35-60 meter drop to the ground without any preparations? No, that cannot be done. Anything above 10 meters is next to certain death. Anything above 5 meters, at that speed, equals a big bunch of broken bones. So unless your hero came onto the beast with a parachute, yet still hopes to live after the feat, your hero has only one option and that it to injure the dragon such that it is forced to land, and then kill it on the ground. A punctured lung or two will probably fix that. Edit after question edit: Trying to get inside the dragon? The time it takes to fall 35-60 meters is less than 4 seconds. Trying to cut a hole through dragon skin; a hole so big your hero can get inside; then squeeze inside and get deep enough to be adequately cushioned to avoid going SPLAT, all in 4 seconds? No. Plus there is a lateral speed of 45 mph / 72 kph to deal with. So who knows how many compatriots will be flattened by this tumbling, falling bowling ball of a mass as it comes skidding across the battlefield. I stick with my answer: your hero needs to injure the dragon to force it to the ground, and then kill it. [Answer] Damage the wings in a way that reduces control For example, with birds you just need to remove the tips of one of their wings. Throw a knife through its wing - wings won't be as strong as they need to be light. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MscvI.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MscvI.jpg) This will result in a slow spiral back to the ground whilst the dragon is still conscious but unable to perform any complex manoeuvres to avoid handly placed archers to take it from below. Allowing you to finish it off closer to the ground, when it's more heavily wounded and where you can get off without dying. [Answer] It's possible, but it depends on how the dragon's body works. Some birds (albatrosses in particular; there may be others) have the ability to lock their wings outstretched. It doesn't then take any muscle strength to keep the wings extended. If the dragon has the same ability, then its dead body may still have wings extended. So the dragon's body won't plummet to the ground, it'll keep flying. It may also be possible to inflict some kind of spinal injury which would have the same effect, causing the wings to spasm into fully-locked position. You now have a barbarian hero flying a dragon-corpse hang-glider over a battlefield. At this point, your Rule of Cool meter has the needle buried at maximum, so do what the hell you want after that. [Answer] Actually, you can survive the fall, no matter from how high. In air, a human being has a maximum reachable velocity due to air friction. I am not 100% sure, but i think you already reach that if jumping from a 10-story-building or something like that. And impact to the ground with that velocity - can be survived. If you hit muddy, soft ground (NOT water). And have a sh\\ton of luck. Also, you should throw away your equipment, as having the heavy stuff on you will increase your chances of dying by a lot. In fact several skydivers have jumped out of airplanes, their parachutes malfunctioning, and survived the fall. (See this link: [Wikipedia Page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fall_survivors)) You will make your character a lucky good guy who survives by sheer luck instead of his own skills, but it is possible. So if he finds something that dampens the fall, or the dragon doesn't die immediately but is just fatally wounded or something, so he falls slower, you are well within reach of realistic events.... [Answer] Maybe strong whirlwind can helps him to survive. Like at `'Wizard of Oz'` book it can be put by the Hero on the ground in order to cushion his fall. [Answer] the mass of a dragon is large and thus your hero must crouch and jump up at the very last moment. this would increase the falling speed of the heavy dragon by only a fraction (which we do not care about anyways) and decrease your comparably light hero's falling speed by a much larger margin. [Answer] Let the dragon crash, with the hero still on the back, into a troop of pikemen (who shouldn't have a chance to run away in time). The natural, albeit desperate, reaction for these unlucky fellows will be to point their spears at the approaching monster. Many of the spears may break at the tough hide, some may penetrate it, and inevitably the dragon will eventually end up on the ground crushing the infantry regardless... but at any rate the poles, solidly backed against the ground, will provide a strong yet not instantaneous braking force, over a crumple zone of several meters. This cushions the impact considerably (at least from the hero's point of view). Now he just needs to be lucky enough to not get pierced by a spear that somehow made it through the entire dragon's body without breaking. [Answer] If he is smart enough he will kill the dragon when he is flying over the sea. Water will reduce the impact. EDIT : OK don't kill the dragon, instead incapacitate him with a fatal blow until it reaches the ground very wounded, and then finish it. Other method : If he's falling near a high tower, he could stick his dagger/sword and reduces his fall by friction while looking cool !!! ]
[Question] [ Certain creatures, like geckos with their detachable tails, are known to reduce weight at a moment's notice in response to attack from a predator. When I considered the opposite phenomenon⁠—increasing weight suddenly and at will⁠, perhaps for stability or a combat advantage—I immediately dismissed it impossible due to the conservation of mass, but then I realized that weight != mass, and perhaps some trickery involving buoyancy in the air or the water would be possible. Maybe certain Earth creatures that I'm unaware of already do this. What could be some theoretical biological mechanisms that might achieve this, whether instantly reversible (e.g. metabolically mediated gaseous phase changes) or needing time to recharge (e.g. gaseous production and release)? [Answer] To change your effective weight in Earth gravity and atmosphere, you need to add or reduce lift force. Mechanical lift is easiest to achieve, so the most realistic answer to your question is: birds! They "gain weight" when they land. For other kinds of lift you can design different kinds of animals, all of whom are very much fictional and less than practical. * Balloon animals. Creatures that are filled with a substance that's lighter than air; maybe hydrogen if they can do electrolysis in their own bodies. Once they have hydrogen in an internal bladder of sorts, they can reduce their weight by expanding that bladder - therefore displacing more air with lighter helium. Contracting it compresses helium down so it is no longer lighter than the atmosphere. But, you will need very large gas bladders to achieve any meaningful amount of lift, so these creatures will be quite round. * Magnetic animals. Take a beast with an electricity generating organ and an affinity for eating copper, wrap their digestive tract in a regular coil, and an organic electromagnet is forged! They could use this to float over any other magnetic substance in the world. A bit rare on our planet but maybe there's iron sheep on your world and the magnetic bowels are the ideal tool for a predator? * Creatures that can produce [negative mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass), which is an extremely theoretical substance that is repelled by gravity instead of being drawn to it. If you want a sci fi story about one particular divergence from conventional physics, keeping the rest realistic, such a creature could actually still be grounded if you just handwave an internal organ that produces negative mass. For thinking up forces to overcome gravity, the sky is the limit! [Answer] This is entirely possible for an aquatic or partially aquatic creature, by the simple expedient of ingesting a large volume of water, and is readily reversible by ejecting the ingested water. In fact, puffer-fish rely upon this mechanism to inflate their bodies and erect their defensive spines. Squids and octopi also rely upon this mechanism as a source of reaction mass for their 'jet' propulsion. So, this is not an outlandish idea at all, nor is it a new one. We can extend this concept to terrestrial creatures with a ready access to water, which may be able to ingest and store large amounts of water for whatever purpose they may evolve to fulfil. This could certainly include gaining mass in order to increase their stability in something like wrestling for dominance. A terrestrial creature might be able to gain a mass equal to its normal body mass, or more, depending on its size - smaller animals being more able to carry extra mass due to the workings of the square-cube law. [Answer] Compressed Air If you compress gas, its density increases and effectively increases the weight of a vessel containing it. For example, a filled scuba tank can weigh several pounds more than an empty one. So in terms of an organism, what you need is an organ for storing air (kind of like an air bladder in fish) with two properties: 1. rigid and sturdy enough to be filled with compressed air without expanding or bursting, and 2. an organ attached to it that can pump air into it at high pressures. [Answer] In addition to existing answers that mention venting swim bladders and compressing air to reduce buoyancy: The sperm whale's blunt head is filled with oil plus a network of blood vessels and nasal passages. The sperm whale uses this to vary its buoyancy, by passing cold water though the nasal passages to cool the oil when it wants to dive, and increasing the flow of warm blood whe it wants to rise. [Answer] Spoilers The spoiler on a racecar is designed for exactly the purpose you describe - the downward force of air hitting it it increases the apparent weight of the vehicle, increasing the amount of friction between the tires and the road, and allowing the car to take corners faster or more tightly. Since it only increases apparent but not actual weight, it has a benefit of providing more friction without requiring a larger force to accelerate more mass. I'm imagining an animal with some kind of natural spoiler on its back that can be adjusted to produce a down force in high winds. These animals would naturally live in windy environments, perhaps on coastal cliffs or on mountaintops. As the wind picks up, the animals use the down force from their spoilers to increase their apparent weight, allowing greater friction with the ground and improved stability. By adjusting the angle of attack, the amount of down force and apparent weight can be varied very rapidly. A spoiler is very much like an upside-down wing - instead of providing positive lift to counteract gravity, it provides negative lift to push things into the ground even harder. [Answer] Another option is "hiving": several creatures can emerge into a bigger thing (via glue-like skin coverage that is exposed as a reaction on dangerous situations). That naturally leads us to a condition the creatures are not lone wolfs and live by colonies/communities like sea gulls etc. [Answer] ## Swim bladders [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nrVRq.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nrVRq.png) Image via [Wikimedia commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fish_Swim_Bladder.svg) Many bony fish have [swim bladders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swim_bladder). These are gas-filled internal organs that help the fish maintain neutral buoyancy and rotational stability, so that they do not have to expend energy maintaining a constant depth or staying upright. The bladders are designed to extract gases from the bloodstream, which are in turn extracted from the water via the gills. In some species, the fish can also "gulp" air from the atmosphere to help fill their swim bladders. One could imagine a species that has evolved to be able to "vent" its swim bladder at will, leading to a sudden decrease in buoyancy and a corresponding increase in apparent weight. Imagining a way that a species could suddenly increase its buoyancy is trickier, but perhaps one could handwave an ultra-efficient gas-extraction mechanism in a particular species's swim bladder. [Answer] Two potential ideals: Absorb mass by sucking in: In a sand desert environment you could imagine an animal that sucks sand into a body cavity / 'sand bladder' This was already suggested by another answer. (Dry) sand has the advantage, that it can quickly be sucked up. Absorb Mass by chemical reactions: Looking at @FluxFlowFreq answer: Any oxydation, that doesn't expel exhaust gases will gain you mass There are exothermic (e.g. burning hydrogen) and endothermic (e.g. burning Nitrogen) oxydations. With a right mix you might avoid abrupt temperature changes. With oxydation the mass would be gained from the surrounding air (O2 or if you find a nice chemical reaction even the N2) If the creature could store considerable amounts of hydrogen (perhaps chemically bound) it could burn this hydrogen into water (steam if not being cooled down quickly) If that water is kept the creatures mass would increase. (Two H2 molecules can bind one O2 molecule) It would be that oxygen, from the air that is bound and attributing to the mass. This would mean, that a lot of gas surrounding the creature would disappear quickly, resulting in a bang, or an whirlwind or similiar. Generally speaking if a creature can provoke a chemical reaction that absorbs molecules from the air Oxygen is the one, that springs first into mind, but perhaps Nitrogen could also be absorbed especially with the energy produced by transforming H2 and O2 into water, then the mass could be increased. Problem is of course how to not burn die / because of overheating. You had to find chemical reactions, that are not too exothermic or that are compensated by parallel endothermic reactions, that don't release mass. The tricky parts are probably: * the energy balance (not too much overheating / freezing down). You'd need a mix of exothermic and endothermic reactions * controlling the speed of the reaction * ensuring, that all the 'burnt' material is not expelled. but kept in a bladder, body cavity, or being attached to the body * ensure, that the gained mass is big enough to make a difference. Burning steel wool for example is also a chemical reaction that gains mass (rust) In fact any oxydation, that does not expell exhaust gases like CO2 or CO will gain mass. [Answer] Your creature appears to be composed of mundane atomic/molecular matter. However, swimming around him are thousands or even millions of tons of exotic, weakly-interacting particles. When necessary, these particles can be caused to decay back into the regular sort of matter, and it results in an apparent (but not true) gain of mass. This process is reversible, and the extra mass can be converted back to weakly-interacting particles. The one caveat here is that sensitive scientific instruments might be able to detect the WIMPs via gravitation... they're invisible, but still there and weigh quite a bit. Basically, he can fart out the dark matter, but the stink lingers. [Answer] [Fugu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugu) fish can consume water and air quickly to become much bigger. During inflation process, fugu consumes water, and her mass gradually increases. Mainly because mass of water she consumed is added to her own mass. This is video showing fugu inflating to protect herself from fisherman <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8-IFdxXW4w> [Answer] I think this'll work: Theoretical biological mechanism - Spontaneous Osteogenic Response. Just a fictional mutation This mechanism could be defined as the abrupt growth of bone cells in response to outside stimuli which would explain the gaining of mass. (Osteo - bone, genic - growth). You could manipulate the wording to dictate that the creature have control over it (Instead of "Spontaneous" maybe use "Controlled" or "Dynamic"). Changing the type of cell created by using a different medical terminology prefix (instead of "Osteo-" for bone, you could use "Hemo-" for blood, "Myo-" for muscle, "Neuro-" for neuron, etc) could work too. A downside of the ability would be that it could be detectible through heat signature. The cell division (mitosis) uses energy and with it being a spontaneous reaction may cause the immediate area to heat up which would make the creature detectable via the infrared spectrum. Another downside would be that it the creature would have to consume a lot of mass (maybe by eating or assimilating organic matter in some type of absorption) in order to fuel this ability. [Answer] They can have jaws big enough to promptly consume a dozen of surrounding turf and elastic belly (like deep-water fishes) to accommodate it. Then, just eject the turf back if it's not required anymore. So, the idea is close to gators eating stones to adjust their weight/volume ratio. To be more realistic, that creatures may habit only places where the turf is soft enough for quick-swallowing actions (or rocks are small enough to fit into mouth etc). In addition, ejected turf may be poisoned by the creature's inner fluids so aggressors would take secondary damage from that. [Answer] While it is hard to gain weight, your creature could have something like momentum wheels ready to accelerate to high velocities. Momentum wheels rotating at high speed make the creature more resistant against angular momentum against its axis, which gives the benefit of better stabilization. A crude example of this effect is seen with bikes, at higher speeds they are more resistant against angular momentum and fall down slower, giving you more time to correct those movements. They At the moment, no creature on earth evolved with this ability, the closest we got are flies which only uses a dual function gyroscope for quick midair maneuvers [Answer] I am assuming a terrestial creature rather than one in water. The creature would either use compressed air, but that is a lengthy task, or it could simply have the stomach to eat whatever is nearby. Scoop up all the sand nearby and you just gained weight. Swallow some rocks, a heavy plant etc. Another option is to use claws to dig into something like a tree and let the force needed to get you off your spot work in your favor. Even grabbing on to some stubborn plant life can add several kilo's of effective force needed to lift them. ]
[Question] [ I have a bay of water containing several Krakens. One day, due to the efforts of a magical organization, all of the water disappears. The Kraken fall and die on the bed of salt that is left behind. Each are about 50 meters in length. Assuming the Kraken are preserved by the salt, how long could their carcasses survive intact, before they rot away and only the bones are left? My plot calls for them to survive a bit more than two millennia, but I'm not sure if this is realistic. [Answer] I'm going to assume that when you say "Kraken" you mean "giant octopus monster" meaning something biochemically identical to a modern octopus but huge. I'm also assuming that the water stays gone and the environment is perpetually dry. Given those assumptions the real world example of [seal carcasses in Antarctica's Dry Valleys](https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/the-mystery-of-the-centuries-old-seal-mummies-of-antarctica) should be educational. Those bodies are preserved by the dryness of the environment more than the chemical action of the salt in the air but both play a part, they remain relatively intact (as in you can still tell it's a seal) for at least as much as 2600 years, so your two millennia shouldn't be an implausible time period. Note that the only "bone" in a traditional Kraken would be the beak, possibly sucker hooks as well if they take more after giant squid. [Answer] Preserving organic materials or organisms in salt requires more than just laying on top of a salty layer. It requires complete coverage with salt and frequent renewal of the salt, to remove the salt saturated with the water extracted from the organism. Considering that your Kraken, whatever it is made of, is 50 meters long, I think only a very minor part of its body would be in contact with salt. Decomposition of the body would then be unavoidable. If you want to preserve the bodies in salt, they should have parts with low water content (if you dehydrate a jellyfish you will end up with nothing). A Kraken, being often depicted as a sort of cephalopod, has practically no hard parts. If you handwave this and somehow manage to properly prepare the body in salt (and I assume a magical organization capable of emptying a bay can also manage to stir some Krakens in salt) by completely covering it in salt, your best bet is to cover the whole volume with non permeable materials, like clay. If layers of clay preserved rock salt in the bottom of the sea, they can presumably protect your salted Krakens for a couple of millenia. [Answer] If "all of the water disappears" includes the water in the krakens and you could keep the bay dry, then you would likely end up with some shriveled kraken mummies that could easily last a couple thousand years. [Mummification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy) works best on desiccated corpses that are left in dry areas, which describes the krakens and your former bay perfectly. As you expected, salt would help preserve them by leeching extra moisture out from the carcasses. However, the key is keeping the bay dry: unless the wizards also dam up the entrance to the bay and ensure that it doesn't fill with rain water or humid air, then no amount of salt would help them and they would quickly rot. --- As a side note, if you wanted some natural kraken salt statues then the magical organization can regularly let water seep into the bay/krakens before removing it again. This cycle of seeping/evaporation will fill the kraken's cells with salt in a process called [permineralization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permineralization), the end result being [petrified](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrifaction) kraken corpses made entirely of salt with little to no organic material remaining. [Answer] Do you need to dry out the area? If it's about preservation of the carcasses maybe you could do other things to preserve them: You could turn the water in the bay super salty and turn their carcasses into salt, and maybe then remove the water after (or just not at all) ? <https://www.livescience.com/55904-crystal-bride-gown-photos.html> Also as mentioned before it could still rain which could possibly spoil the carcass, would it be possible to freeze the bay instead? Sorry if this feedback was not welcome, but I just wanted to throw this out there. ]
[Question] [ So I'm currently writing a story set in an Arabian-influenced medieval world. This society worships a mother goddess, and I was wondering if a matriarchal religion is culturally consistent for a culture that is also patriarchal in its family and political structures (and also pride themselves in having a strong military class). I tried to research empires in history that worshipped a central female goddess, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of information in regard to these societies' power structures, since many of them predate the popularization of Abrahamic religions. However, from what I've gathered I think men and women in these societies still followed heteronormative roles. Can anyone give their two cents in this subject, or point me to a few resources that could give me more information? [Answer] The Egyptians worshiped [Isis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis) as a mother sky goddess and [Bast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastet) as a hearth/home goddess as well as her role as a war goddess. The Celts were also highly patriarchal and worshiped [Brigid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigid) as a solar mother goddess and the "Dark Mother" [Morrígan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Morr%C3%ADgan) who has a lot of duality being both a destructive and nurturing power. Less sure but I understand [Kali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali) fills a similar dualistic role in Hinduism being worshipped as both a mother and a destroyer but I'm not sure how patriarchal Indian society is as a whole. [Answer] From my limited knowledge of anthropology, female gods are usually the first beings a forming civilizations worships, with masculine gods coming later. This is due to the "magic" or babies being associated women (ancient males didn't even think they had anything to do with the process in some locations). When males eventually come to power, which is usually assumed to be a result of male hunters "unionizing" against the usually female gathers, the new masculine gods are created to legitimize their authority. If your society is exceptionally old or particularly good at recording their own history, a mother-goddess might possibly still be worshiped. Even then, other masculine sub-deities might exist to legitimize the patriarchy. For example, the goddess is herself female, but the angels of war, knowledge, craftsmanship, and medicine happen to be male. Sorry I can't give any exact sources. I'm just remembering tidbits from a class I took in college. [Answer] If you want the patriarchy to be backed by the religion, maybe try this: The cardinal rule of family for anyone unmarried is to obey and respect your mother. Mothers, however, are to obey and respect their husband. Men are considered the Mother-goddess's most unearthly and divine creation, for her sons (male humans) are what provide her daughters (female humans) the ability to bear life as the goddess herself has. The Mother-goddess of course has no husband, for she is the original being, with the divine ability to create from herself. (As any member of the religion would scornfully inform someone who questioned why they worship a woman) Mothers are respected as the creators of life, but fathers are what give them that ability, straight from the Mother-goddess's hand. This is purely from my imagination, for the record. I have no historical examples to back this concept. [Answer] One possibility that has no example in our past (that I know of) is a division of power/labor. Simple put, women look after the soul and men look after the body. There is a nurturing and life giving Goddess with her priestesses. They take care of all things supernatural and have (on the surface, at least) authority over all worship related events. The men are responsible for the protection and expansion of the society. They rule, war, enforce laws, etc. For this to actually work, several aspects of the society have to be "just right." That's because eventually people will end up in power who want power and are loathe to share that power. So, how do we stabilize this situation. First, have it ingrained from childhood that the role of men is to take care of women and that women are the source of wisdom. Boys are trained to fight and women are taught how to read and write. This only works for the common classes though. Higher classes and those who are sociopaths won't care. Second, make a man's status depend not on what he owns but how well taken care of the women in his family are. If you wife walks around in a frock and your daughters are hungry, you are (or soon will be) at the lowest rung of society. This helps control the higher classes since to gain or maintain power, they have to show that they are worthy. Third, the women have to have have a monopoly on the knowledge of the society. Most religions got started because the priests/priestesses held some necessary knowledge like when to plant or when the Nile would flood. So, within the women's circle, an individual's contribution to the health (mental and physical) of the society would determine her status. Their stratification could be along the lines of academia. The more knowledge they know and share, the higher their status. Figuring out a way of breeding better wheat jumps your status over several levels, etc. This society has the chance to be stable. It also lends itself to some interesting counter culture characters with which you can explore the boundaries of the society. Obvious: The girl who wants to fight. The boy who wants to read. Darker: The girl who just wants to wear frilly dresses and knit all day. The boy who wants to gather wealth for himself. Dark: The woman who enjoys tearing people down, giving purposely bad advice, and making their lives miserable. The man who rapes or beats women. [Answer] There is no real issue. Most polytheistic religions had mother goddesses with very high status and their cults were very influential. Many of the most important temples were for female deities as well. As James mentioned this lives on in the Catholic and Orthodox faith with the importance given to "mother of God". Even the truly monotheistic and severely patriarchal religions such as Judaism and Islam have mystical forms that embrace the feminine aspects of divinity in a manner similar to the well known yin and yang duality. Basically since god created mankind in his image and mankind does not really work without having both men and women even a patriarchal society cannot fully remove the feminine aspects of divinity. God knows people have tried very hard in the real world for over two thousand years and as soon as society stopped actively oppressing women we have female clergy and talk about how assuming an omnipotent God is limited to single gender does not make sense. But from your wording you actually want divinity to be seen as single female entity in a gender swapped version of the Abrahamic God. This requires a specific evolution. Fortunately you can more or less copy from how monotheism happened. Just swap the gender of the deity. First, your goddess must be seen as the protector of the state and nation. This happens by the clergy of the Goddess making a strong and durable political alliance with the king and the nobility. Clerics serve as advisors and see to all important rituals. They have real authority. And while limited meritocracy is possible if scholarship is highly valued, the clergy is also linked to the nobility by ties of blood. They marry into nobility and are born from the nobility. A caste system where priest come from "a separate nobility" seen as equal or even superior to secular nobility is also possible. The important thing is that priest are inherently people of status in a way compatible with the power structure of the secular side. Note that if the society is heavily patriarchal this implies that the clergy of the Goddess are men. Probably "for real" and in the biological sense but women acting the male gender role in ritual and ceremonial mystical sense would probably work as well. Second, the clergy of the Goddess at some point decided to use their political influence to get rid of the competition. Competing clergies were assimilated as aspects of the Goddess, as cults of saints or angels serving the goddess or simply disbanded as obsolete or banned as heretical. Christianity offers lots of examples to copy. And as competition decreased the ability to achieve full on monopoly on religion will ultimately be achieved. You can stop at any point of this evolution that is convenient to your purposes. [Answer] One possibility is that the way people actually behave in daily life is different than a modern person might assume based on a description of their theology. So, they worship a goddess, and women should know their place. Some outsider asks, isn’t this contradictory? They say, no. She’s a goddess. That’s different. The way they explain how she got such a high station, though, might explain how they see women. Maybe women can inherit titles and property, as happened in many (but not all) patriarchal societies. So there might be a ruling queen who cites the goddess to justify her claim to power, but the society is still patriarchal. Maybe the goddess’ actions were as villainous as those of Zeus, but it’s okay when she does it, because she’s a goddess. Maybe the society has a stereotype of women as cheating, scheming, husband-killing, manipulative social climbers, and her legend says she’s the best at it. Maybe she’s special because she’s the great-grandmother with no father or husband to obey. Or you can look to how the Victorians idealized women: maybe she epitomizes female purity and self-sacrifice, so there’s a goddess women are supposed to venerate, but they do so by living up to the expectations of society (and are told their reward will follow). [Answer] I speak about this from the perspective of India. We have 3 major Indian goddesses: * Lakshmi goddess of wealth and prosperity * Saraswati goddess of learning and wisdom * Parvati goddess of strength and power Their powers varied in different regions and times, going up and down with the changes in society. Eventually they became consorts of the respective Trinity: * Vishnu * Brahma * Shiva In an agriculture based society, there are always female deities, but with evolution and the lesser dependence on the elements, their power reduced. Mothers are also supposed to be protectors - in nature it is so, hence goddesses are worshiped in many cultures. But when civilizations evolve the power equation changes and in almost all cultures, power has been shifted from the female to the male. This has been done in an organized legitimate manner, there were no sudden upheavals, but it has happened nonetheless. So what I am trying to say here is, most of the societies are evolved, it is an assimilation of many aspects, so it is very common to have patriarchal societies co-existing with mother goddesses, it is because of tradition that such practices go on, however it does not mean that women in that society are endowed with more power or are treated equally. When traditions persist, sometimes they are symbolical, but they do not translate into practices in the practical lives of the residents of that society. [Answer] If you want a good fictional example of a fictional society like this, check out NK Jemsin's Dreamblood books. The setting is a culture where women are "goddesses"... and therefore neglected and excluded from power in the name of protection or respect. The two things aren't contradictory in the minds of the people of this culture, as well as probably in the real world examples given in some of the other answers here. [Answer] comment: What constitutes Patriarchy is very subjective. --- --- Nevertheless, In india, worship of Durga etc deity in Bengal region is an exmaple of this. In the [Shaktism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaktism) sect of hinduism, which is most prevalent in West Bengal and Assam region of India, and also followed in many other parts of India; the goddess is supreme and she creates the trinity of male Gods. also see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Parashakti> . Shaktism exists even now, and is followed by millions of people even now. Shaktism is one of the three major sects of Hinduism(esp. the theist part of hinduism), if you go by classification on the basis of the main deity. (caution: there are scripturally valid, atheist sects of hinduism too). [Navratri](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaktism#Navratri), the Nine day festival of Goddess victory is celebrated and is the biggest festival in shaktism branch of Hinduism. During this festival atleast nine or more girls are invited in each household to feed them, and then only the prasada is taken by others. These small girls are visualized as living forms of devi during this festival. Boys have no role (as God, goddess) in this worship. Yet all the kingdoms and transfer of property(in Shakt households and Shakt prevalent regions and ancient Shakt kingdoms) is patrilineal , as elsewhere in India. Military class is justified in shaktism as Devi is considered energy. see Mahakali <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahakali> . She is goddess of time and death. She has lots of weapons. She is depicted as drinking dripping blood of demons. Biggest justification of 'the still existing existing military connection with female goddess' - is that War Cry of many indian regiments of current Indian military army is STILL in the name of supreme Goddess, see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regiments_of_the_Indian_Army#Infantry_Regiments>[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaktism) The war cries to feminine Goddess by the many current Indian army regiments are still following: * hail Goddess Kali, here come the Gorkhas * victory to Durga Naga * victory to Mother India * victory to Goddess Durga * victory to Goddess Jawala * victory to Goddess Kali Gory: Till date, animals are sacrificed for goddess , which is sanctified by Hindu Shakt scriptures. But animals are "not" sacrificed for Vishnu or Shiva oriented sects of Hinduism - where male Gods are supreme. So aggression is inbuilt part of Shaktism. Celebration of vagina and menstruation of Goddess: In Assam, there is a temple, where it is thought that "vagina" of the dead body of Goddess Sati (one of the avatars of supreme Goddess) dropped. Its called kamakhya temple <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamakhya_Temple> . So here vagina form of devi is worshipped. During each month few days temple is closed for male devotees, during these four days only women devotees are allowed inside temple , and it is thought that devi is having menstruation. Rest of the days, anybody can come inside temple. This temple is considered one of the prime pilgrimage centre of Shaktism. Newly added modern trends: As in Hinduism , you can create your own Gods - In modern times, India itself has been actually imagined as mother goddess, called Bharatmata. see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Mata> [Answer] One possible explanation might be the culture has moved into place in the relatively recent past. An examination of the P.I.E. religion suggests that although Deus Pater (the Sky Father) was the supreme god, many of the female deities were essentially "married" to the gods the Proto Indo Europeans worshipped as the P.I.E. people expanded their range. Having existing goddesses "married" to the P.I.E. gods provided legitimacy, and the newly conquered people would be less likely to revolt against their new ruling caste if they were allowed to worship their old gods, even in somewhat new roles. So while your ruling culture is militaristic and patriarchal (as the P.I.E. people were thought to be), the initial conquerors "married into" the old religion, so the subject population still worships the Mother Goddess in her new role as the wife of the Sky God. ]
[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/87034/edit). Closed 6 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/87034/edit) A society spanning galaxies that has lasted millennia and builds mega-structures for fun to quench the soul crushing boredom of near-immortal life-spans. This civilisation has detected most of the universe and is constantly surveying and cataloguing more, employing stations in the far reaches to keep check on activity. However society does not function without work and a group of biologists taught how to create and control life are stuck forbidden to mess in god-like affairs, instead they sit idle surveying the far-reaches through drones. Frustrated and lusting to use their powers of creation, a conspiracy arises to escape the society and play god on a world far away, now how do we remain undetected? Every inhabited world this society comes across has a dedicated team assigned to survey it, however such an inhabited world is what is what the 'Gods' wish to make A mega-structure is a structure spanning a solar system or bigger, a truly grand feat. --- * This society does have advanced FTL travel capable ships. * The plentiful far-reaching research centres are in contact with the Galactic Police. * Being caught would result in lifetime imprisonment [Answer] Starting with the proposition that every planet in the universe is under constant surveillance by teams of immortals and there is conspiracy of biologists who want to exercise their god-like skills and knowledge of life creation, but their chances of being caught are high enough for certainty. The answer is obvious: stay away from planets. Any half-way sensible biologist will tell you there is one form of life which is much loved by science-fiction afficiandos and which makes absolutely no sense at all (biologically, that is). While there are many forms of life that are much loved as science-fiction tropes, there is one form of alien life that is head and shoulders above all of them in terms of pure, simple impossibility. This is, of course, life in space. Not just in space, but not on planets, and in the depths of interplanetary and interstellar, and possibly even intergalactic space itself. If they wanted to go to the top of class in biological impossibilities and absurdities, they would use their god-like powers to create space-whales!!!! Perhaps the cabal of biotechnological deities might try to create virus particle like organisms first. The most probable organisms to exist in space will be similar to viruses. Because viruses are basically aggregations of macromolecules. Their metabolic processes will need to be catalyzed by ambient radiation. Matter for them to feed on in space is extremely exceptionally difficult to find, locate and acquire. There will be very, very long time periods between feeding on one tiny amount of molecules. Creating space-viroids would be their first step in creating an ecology in space so there can be viable biomes. It is absolutely necessary to have a fully developed deep space biosphere before there can be complex organisms living in space. By complex organisms this means something like the metazoans or multicellular lifeforms. If a full-scale biosphere can be established in space, possibly the biologists' cabal could turn their attention to creating actual space-whales. Why would they go to all this trouble? Because it's the biggest possible challenge any life-shaping biologist can face. Because it will take an incredibly long, long, long time to accomplish as well as taking the utmost of their skills and knowledge to carry out. But they're immortals, aren't they? Got a few trillion years to spare? Try creating a space-based biosphere with the ultimate objective of producing space-whales. This is a project that will take, almost, forever. What better challenge could immortal biologists try to accomplish? [Answer] ## Underground! Maybe not ideal, but a civilization capable of the feats you described could easily build a proper sub-surface biotope where they can do whatever they want. Those observing with drones can watch until their eyes fall out at a barren planet's surface while beneath the surface is where the action happens. Of course the thing has to be properly isolated from both heat and radiation in order to foil detectors. The only way of discovery that remains is when someone physically visits the place or something surfaces for whichever reason. [Answer] An alternative take on Hyfnae's idea: The OP says they may stay concealed for a few centuries; so use their God-like powers and that time to gut a gas giant (like Jupiter), and install a hidden Earth in its place that *looks* like the gas giant; but is a simulation. See [Here](https://www.universetoday.com/66647/how-much-bigger-is-jupiter-than-earth/) for a comparison of size. Presumably the excess mass (nearly all of it, Jupiter is approx 318 x Earth mass) could be easily concealed by feeding it into a star; which is still far more massive than Jupiter (our Sun is approx 1050 x Jupiter mass). Or as just gasses scattered in interstellar space; presumably the Master aliens are not tracking every gas molecule in the universe. At least what is not required for their construction efforts in creating a simulation of the Gas Giant. Using god-like technology presumably their Earth, hidden beneath the (simulated) atmosphere of the gas giant, could go for many millions of years evolving an intelligent race; and by simulation, complete with a holographic projection of the sky and stars that accurately represents what is "outside" their simulation shell. Until they are smart enough to figure that out, at least, but the Master race may always consider this a nondescript, dead system doing nothing at all worth visiting. [Answer] The easiest way to hide is in a crowd. In a lifetime measured in eons, I assume there would be much job churning. After spending 1,000 years in biology, someone might get bored want to play in astrophysics, chemistry, or culinary science. This is key to how we hide in the crowd. Phase One Identify a remote and uninteresting place for the experiment. This should be somewhere that is out of the way, in a unpopulated portion of the galaxy. Being so far from the action helps to ensure that nobody will stop by and discover the situation as it really is. For the first few eons, nothing interesting is going to happen which would cause the society to notice the experiment. This gives them time to work on phase two. Phase Two While the experiment is 'cooking' on the remote planet, other members of the conspiracy make strategic career moves, some even getting into the survey group. Phase Three When the civilization becomes known to the wider society, the conspiracy members are in management. They assign other conspirators to 'survey' the planet, whose reports are boring, run-of-the-mill normal. Phase Four Here is where we run into a problem. If the experiment grows too successfully, grows too powerful, the conspiracy will not be able to obfuscate the truth. The biologists must have a plan to cover up their fun times before getting into trouble. A device which triggers a supernova would work, although it may cause questions. This could be an interesting plot point, where the experiment are fighting for survival. [Answer] Distract If monitoring is done remotely through drones, would it be possible to manipulate the information so that the experimental planet looks normal ? Either by sending incorrect date by taking control of the drones, either by having a survey team part of the conspiracy ? Even better, wait for a new inhabited planet to be detected, but make if fall in the "non-inhabited planet" section, so that nobody will bother monitoring it. Simulate The civilization you describe can probably simulate complete words. These could be an alternative to a real world for experiment. If not fun enough, at least the simulation could be used to provide credible information for the precedent scenarios. Hide * basic : places on a planet are hard to monitor. Caves and underground cities, or simply underwater (life is usually abundant there). You can push this by thinking about lifeforms that are so different that they will not be spotted easily. A few examples : * lifeforms within lifeforms : parasites or symbiotic species like what you find even in a human body. * other dimensions : a lifeform in 5 dimensions could only be partially perceived if you only have access to 3 spatial dimension yourself * mini/macro scale : imagine life based on atomic forces rather than chemical ones. Such life could be located in highly unexpected locations, like the surface of a dead star. It would also evolve very quickly, very handy if its an experiment. On the other side, life based on gravity is left as an exercise :) Joker The ultimate hidden location: a black hole. While getting there is challenging, no information can come from it. [Answer] There are a couple ways you could do this: Option 1: Go far away Hyfnae's answer touched on this, but if you hide yourself well enough, and do so on a planet far enough away from this society (you said they only found most of the universe, after all), you can avoid detection for a long time. However, once the society's surveillance stations come your way, your activities will need to be downsized immediately. Even if you've hidden your labs well enough to avoid detection, if life on your planet starts evolving too fast or changing too rapidly you will draw more attention than you want. As a result, another option (my favorite) would be to . . . Option 2: Bring in more people What if your conspiracy included not only biologists, but some builders and surveyors as well? You could arrange to construct a surveillance station near the planet(s) you want to work with, and make sure that its leaders are fellow conspirators. Then, you would have nearly unlimited creative control on the planets around the station, as your planets can't be discovered by a society that thinks it already discovered them! Option 3: Change society The final option I can see would be to convince this society that "messing in god-like affairs" is not something to be banned, but embraced. After all, you aid that these immortals get bored of their immortal lifespans, so they build structures spanning entire solar systems. Your conspirators could simply pitch their activities as another way to ease the boredom. To make their case better, they could propose to use a lifeless planet and artificially terraform it. Where's the harm in messing with life that would never have existed in the first place? While this option, if successful, would be the best way to play God without fear of getting caught (society already knows about and agrees to your work) I can see how it would make for such an interesting story. However, I can see an interesting dynamic whereby most conspirators try to hide their activities and a few try to make it socially acceptable. These few would risk exposing the conspiracy, and might become the target of a space-age hitman. Hope this helps! [Answer] Creating life calls for patience, and cleverness. The issue here is one of punishment. If they are caught, they are punished. However, they can only be caught if it can be proven they did something which caused life. The solution is to start modifying the environment around you to encourage life to start on its own. Then there is no longer a causal chain linking the creation of life to them. Of course, the interesting part is that, with a near immortal lifetime, they would hopefully develop a very refined understanding of what "life" is. Currently, one of our biggest challenges in searching for extraterrestrial life is that we are bound by our lack of imagination -- we only have one example of what "life" looks like. It's built around a bunch of sugars that speak a language using A G C and T. This is quite a boring limited definition for an immortal species. Consider how hard it is to prove that our ideas aren't, themselves, alive. It sounds silly, until you try to disprove it. Then, suddenly, you start pondering because all of the arguments for why ideas aren't alive can be reframed to argue that we are not, in fact, alive. They even reproduce. There's even an approach called memetics which tries to explain how social and cultural structures form using evolutionary theories. They even explain why that blasted song gets stuck in your head! So perhaps the scientists need to play around with this. Perhaps they need to instill living ideas in people's heads which encourage them to bring more life to the universe. Spread this far enough, and you'll topple the high council, or whatever body is threatening to imprison you. Or perhaps one of those who fell in love with your idea will dare to risk imprisonment and start playing with those A's G's C's and T's. Honestly, if they do it right, nobody will mind. The best way to spread a living idea is to be kind to other people. Who would ever complain about someone being kind to them? The high council might even support it! Best yet, the results will be real life, not fake-wishy-washy-life. It wont be life that bends itself to your will simply because you programmed it that way. It will be the vast growing, changing, terrifying force that is life itself, influenced by the scientists' desires but never truly controlled. Be careful what you wish for! [Answer] Hide a planet or something even larger, not physically but bureaucratically, if you can suborn key members of the team monitoring a site, any site will do really, you can lose it in the paperwork, or just put in creative fictions in place of actual monitoring reports, and do what you like instead. In the Uplift Saga the persistent rumour is that someone or a group of someones did just this to Earth in order to allow human evolution. This would be even easier if you A. Terraformed an inhospitable rock or B. hide somewhere new and as yet uncharted controlling it from the get go or C. build something of your own somewhere poorly monitored, although the actual building might be spotted in other ways. Or some combination of the above. [Answer] ADDENDUM: In response to "This is great but doesn't answer the question – Mendeleev" Question. From OP: > > the 'Gods' wish to make A mega-structure is a structure spanning a solar system or bigger > > > Answer part A. The Gods identify existing entities which fit this bill. Answer part B. The Gods counterfeit these entities and substitute the counterfeits for the real thing, hiding or destroying the real thing. I am assuming that there exist things in the universe similar to what these Gods want to make. If they want to make some huge thing which is unique and never before seen then the only way to do that and not be detected is to do it far enough in the future or the past that the surveillance either has not begun yet or has ended. --- Banksy style. <http://mentalfloss.com/article/53298/banksy>’s-11-most-complicated-works [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WlChZ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WlChZ.jpg) These rebel artists would select existing megastructures / galactic features and then counterfeit them, quietly replacing the original with the forgery. Some might strive for perfection, artificially aging their creations so that even a knowledgable observer might not tell the difference. Some might go more Banksy and replace existing structures with new ones that differ in significant ways, but ways that might be overlooked or accepted by any other than the cognoscenti. [Answer] Seems obvious to me, have your story take place in a multiverse where they can either move the test world into an isolated dimension of our universe or move it/tweak a world in another Universe. Alternatively, if this team is responsible for area where this test world is located, could they falsify data sent from the automated drones? Another option is build a megastructure around the test world. If they frequently build on a solar system scale, building around a world should be relatively trivial. Closing this world off could hide or obfuscate it from drones and give your immortal tinkerers a way to move it around avoiding detection (either in normal space/time or again, phasing into a different dimension or universe altogether). ]
[Question] [ Lets say I have a person who can teleport to areas he knows well or has direct line of sight of. He is trying to travel a long distance without a vehicle of any type. He can teleport as far as he can see, reorient himself, then teleport again to rapidly cover distance. Assuming it takes about a second to reorient himself between teleports, during which time he is simply walking forward, what travel speed can he realistically manage? For now lets say he is traveling along a road like a highway. [Answer] # Geometry Man is here to save the day! [![Geometry Man](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MIaIBm.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MIaIBm.png) Fig 1. Geometry Man! (Does whatever a geometry can.) --- Although your question has sparked a few questions, you did actually specify a simple scenario that I believe makes your question relatively unambiguous: > > for now lets say he is traveling along a road like a highway. > > > Thus I'll add the following hopefully reasonable assumptions: * He's on a spherical planet with Earth-like diameter * It's a clear day with an Earth-like atmosphere * His eyesight is normal * The highway is "flat" (constant elevation, but of course follows planet's natural curvature) * The highway follows a [geodesic segment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic) (such as the equator), although unless he's very tall, this won't matter much. Given that, see Fig 1. We can boil down how far Geometry Man can see (and thus, how far he can teleport), into a simple formula. From algebra, you know $a^2 + b^2 = c^2$ (the Pythagorean theorem). Let the hypotenuse ($c$) be $r+h$ (see Fig 1). With a little simple algebra, we can get $d$, the distance Geometry Man can see, as follows: $$d^2 + r^2 = (r+h)^2$$ $$d = \sqrt{h^2 + 2rh}$$ $r$ is the radius of the planet. Earth's radius is 6,371,000 m. $h$ is Geometry Man's height—more specifically, how far his eyes are off the ground—probably about 1.6 m. Plug that all in, and you get $d = 4520\,m \approx 4.5\,km$, which is the maximum distance he can teleport over flat ground on an Earth-like planet under ideal conditions. # As a velocity Given he can teleport once per second, the conversion to a velocity is simple: Geometry Man can travel $d$ every second, so he can go 4520 m/sec, which is about 16272 km/h. Obviously, this is the ideal top speed using this method. The other answers of "look at a galaxy far far away!" are also interesting (and funny!), however you did specify a "highway" scenario, so hopefully I've given you the essential information here. [Answer] Look for the nearest hill, go to the peak, then go to the nearest mountain peak, then the 7-8km horizon distance is irrelevant. From the mountain you can see the whole highway laid out below you and jump to the end. So the answer to your question depends entirely on local topography. (Why would you follow a "highway" if you can teleport, it's like a petrol driven car carrying hay for the horse. As long as you can see the highway from the hill/mountain you can jump to any point along it.) [Answer] Is momentum and energy conserved? See Niven's article in either Playgrounds of the Mind or N-Space where he discusses the various ramifications. If you go east you arrive with an upward velocity relative to the surface and bounce into the air. Going west you are moving into the ground. Going north or south you arrive moving sideways. What if your destination is higher than you are? Where does the energy come from? If lower, where does it go? How much can he take with him? Does he arrive naked? Especially when learning? If energy is not conserved, Can he step into a lake, and teleport himself and the lake to much higher lake that supplies a mill? If he's fast can he teleport a large mass of water (or a big rock) above a castle and teleport back? If he knows a location and can visualize it precisely can he go there directly (aka Pern's dragons) What happens if there is something there when he arrives? E.g. it's raining? (You suddenly have raindrop sized chunks of you that have twice the density. Any idea how much energy is stored to compress water to twice it's density?) Is there a thunder clap when he leaves? What about the air when he arrives? Or does he just swap places with a volume at the destination? If so, can a non teleporter move in the counter direction to a teleporter by standing at his destination? If he can counterteleport, this gives him another way to fight. Go to the neighborhood of the enemy castle. Teleport into the air above the castle. Teleport into the wall. A statue of himself appears where he was. A several hundred pound statue of himself falls on the castle. Rinse and repeat. Suppose it takes longer to 'recharge' between jumps. Is there an advantage to building towers with shock absorbers that will allow him to take longer jumps? [Answer] ## Best Case senario He can go 7-8 kilometres a second, around 420-480 kilometres a minute So his hourly speed will be 25200-28800 kilometres an hour! ## The Reality The statistics above assume that the earth is flat which it is not. There are many details that will affect his speed depending on his route. * Oceans; I don't know how his ability will work with bodies of water either he will be teleported to the top of the water or the bottom, if the latter is true you can expect his speed to lower depending on the depth of the ocean. * Mountains; Obviously he will need around two extra seconds to get over the mountains, slightly lowering his speed. * Forests; Because of the trees he will only be able to move at the best of times a mile a second. * Jungles; In the jungles, his ability will be completely useless. Line of sight in jungles is barely 10 feet in front of you. [Answer] Not a fully descriptive answer, but if he/she could teleport to a point in the sky, that would have a very cool visual effect. He's standing on spotX, looks up and pahzwoesh he's 5km up. Then depending if some momentum gets carried with the teleport, he either continues a bit further upwards or fall about 10m, before flashing some distance forward (slightly upward to correct the 1 seconds gravity drops). "Hey, did I just see someo...? No apparently not." [Answer] The resulting discussions above give him too great a velocity for good storytelling. The process needs limits. I would suggest some combination * re-orienting process take longer. * the distance per hop is shorter. (He has to be able to see clearly that nothing is in his way. * it's tiring. Only a few hops per meal. A: How clearly must be be able see the destination? If his perception of the destination is fuzzy is he likely to come out in the air, or underground, or with grass running through his legs? B: Is it like running: A skill that requires endurence and attention to form. C: Better story if there are risks to using it. What happens if too tired. What happens when two people come in at the same time. D: Much as with transporter and replicator technology in the StarTrek universe, can someone who can teleport also transmute? Make bread from a stone? Water from sand? E: In Zenna Henderson's stories of The People, a distinction was made between lifting yourself, lifting living things, and living inanimate objects. Would this sort of thing apply to teleporting. E.g. Can I 'grok' a rock and teleport it to a position over someone's head. Or out from under their feet. Can I move YOU while I stay here? F: Can less gifted people teleport smaller objects. E.g. teleport a key from the other side of the door to this side? G: Combined with other gifts: can I fill a water jug from an underground aquifer, if I can sense the water? Can I teleport your heart somewhere else, leaving your body behind? Or teleport a large bubble of air into your veins, or teleport your brain. (Zombie teleporters....) --- In one of James Schmidt's stories the heroine is telekinetic -- but her maximum lift is a large paperclip. In one story this gets her a bobby pin to pick handcuffs. Larry Niven's stories of Gil Hamilton he has lost an arm, but has a psychic arm with the distance limitations of reach of an arm. But he can reach through a 2-way Televiewer. [Answer] The fastest possible speed between points would be the speed of light. The time needed to "energize" and reconstitute between jumps is not given, but if we follow the convention of Star Trek of 2-3 seconds for the actual conversion, the speed of light transportation between points and your one second to reorientate, then each "hop" will take 4-5 seconds max, plus whatever fraction of a second needed to travel between points (using the example of Earth, your maximum "line of sight" hop to the horizon is no more than about 5km). Things are a little more complicated if we take the "line of sight" at face value. The Moon is just a bit over a light second away, so teleporting from your front porch to the Sea of Tranquility will now take from 4-5 seconds (A second to orientate, 2-3 seconds for the mechanics of teleportation and then a second to transit to the Moon; rounding down to keep the numbers simple). Since many of the planets are visible in the night sky, there seems to be no reason you can't beam to Venus or Saturn, although you will now run into some pretty interesting travel times, which could run into hours depending on where the planets are in alignment to each other. (A quick trip to the Sun would take 8 minutes, for example). You really start running into difficulty if you can extend "line of sight" to the stars. For Alpha Centauri, you will take 2-3 seconds to convert to teleportation mode, and an additional 4 years (126,227,704 seconds) to get there (rounded again). If you plan to take a teleportation trip to the Andromeda Galaxy , pack a lunch, it is 2.5 million light years away.... [Answer] That depends on the road. On a long, straight one, extending until the horizon, a few kilometers in one second, some 8000 to 15000 kilometers/second. On a twisting road, teleport to the furthest visible point, reorient, teleport again, etc. Still faster than most vehicles (100 to 500 m/s). Longer distances mean less precision: from a 10 km distance or more, it's hard to see the road, and harder to pinpoint the exact place to arrive. Expect errors of tens of meters, just from involuntary [eye movements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement), with potentially catastrophic results (like merging with a tree). [Answer] Travel at the speed of light for even a microsecond and from your point of view you have reached the end of the universe and all space has contracted to nought. So you certainly could not be teleporting at the speed of light. ]
[Question] [ Imagine your scientists have found a way to increase the space of your empire, literally: They are able to create an artificial [inflaton field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflaton) which locally creates a "space bubble" connected with usual space by a wormhole. In other words, from outside it takes just the space of, say, a star, but it's [bigger on the inside.](https://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Bigger_on_the_Inside) OK, so you now can have some extra empty space. But now the emperor wants to know if this invention has an actual use, or if he just wasted his money on that research. So in short: Is there anything interesting (from the point of view of an empire) which you could do with such a space bubble? Edit: I want to emphasize that my empire is a space empire, and the space bubble is in space, not on earth. Although the mention of star-sized wormhole in principle already implies that, I notice that I was probably not clear enough about that point. [Answer] Make a Maze. A concept that comes up in a lot of fantasy novels is a sandbar maze outside of a harbor. This then lets you restrict access - outsiders don't know the patterns, and if they try to invade they ground their ships and you can then proceed to shoot them from a nice safe distance. Expanding space could be used in the same way to protect important installations or systems in your empire. There could be one "safe" path that uses regular space and takes the normal amount of time. But if you stray off course you're into the vastly expanded areas, messing up your navigation and keeping you from getting where you want to go. Depending on how fine-grained the extra space is, this could be used to separate enemy fleets as they each take different times to cover the same "regular" distance - divide and conquer. [Answer] Oh boy! A pocket dimension! What can't you use it for? Ok, you have a traversable wormhole to a big place. Call it a stellar-sized bag of holding. You can put all sorts of things inside it, perhaps even an entire solar system. The main problem with a solar system for an interstellar empire, especially one with enemies, is defending star systems. Put the important systems in a pocket dimension, and suddenly you don't have to spend as much defending the systems - rather than many cubic AUs of space, you suddenly have just one or less. You can hide all sorts of stuff in a pocket dimension too. Inconvenient prisoners, military research installations, battle fleets, and so on. Why hide a battle fleet in one, you ask? Well, just deflate the wormhole, tuck it aboard a harmless-looking freighter, then reinflate it somewhere inconvenient to your enemy, and presto! Instant fleet! You save on fuel too! To go with the freighter idea, you could tuck all sorts of heavy cargo into the pocket dimension, deflate the wormhole and load it onto a freighter just big enough to hold the requisite wormhole control gear, and reinflate it anywhere you want, all with a cheap tiny freighter that - with the pocket dimension - can hold more than a thousand of the biggest freighters you ever built. Hell, stuff a black hole into your pocket dimension and use the wormhole to sling the black hole at someone you don't like. This gives a whole new dimension (literally) to the saying "When faced with a stronger opponent, find a bigger rock". Don't like the Jivipts in that galaxy over there? Pinch the Super Massive Black Hole at the centre of their galaxy and watch their galaxy literally fall apart. Or alternatively, pinch the SMBHs at the centre of a few other galaxies that you don't care about, and chuck them at the Jivipts' galaxy's SMBH. With a few SMBHs worth of extra mass, you can collapse their galaxy, or at least make it a bit more compact. Ok, maybe this one is not so practical, unless you're taking a really long view, like millions of years... [Answer] Not touching on any science here, but, these are what came to mind. Transporting Cargo: If they are able to "Expand" an area of space to a larger volume but keep the outer dimensions unchanged, then the technology could be used to increase the cargo capacity of the empire's ships. This way, a small shuttle could contain the cargo of a massive freighter ( depending on the extent of the expansion ). Masking Military Movements: Another use would be for the military to encapsulate a fleet inside one of these bubbles, which may or may not hide the ships due to distortions in space. It could even be used in conjunction with the above example, hiding a fleet in that small shuttle. EDIT: If the bubble were the size of a star or even a planet, then that empire would never have to worry about overpopulation as they could just use these bubbles to expand their habitable areas. [Answer] Such technology would quickly put any space empire at the absolute top of the food chain. Depending on its limits, of course. ## Transportation If the field can be transported, a single high-speed transport would be able to move incredible amounts of materials. the size of the transport depends on how big the technology is to open and close (or 'inflate' and 'deflate', if you prefer) the space. If a 'container' can be inflated and deflated from any location, then the ship could be nanotech sized, as all it really needs is to be able to move really fast and be locatable by the right people. But never mind moving stuff and people. How about planets? Find a nice planet, stick an inflated field in its path, and once it goes in, zip it up and take it wherever you want! Make your own solar system! ## Defense Which leads me to the next point. As Dan Smolinske pointed out, you could create a maze of large and small spaces that would make it very difficult to find your home planet. But why stop there? First, find a very chaotic part of the universe - somewhere with supernovas, black holes, new stars being born, and as much dangerous stuff as you can think of scattered around. Take that solar system you created earlier and set it up somewhere in the middle, still inside its field. Now, not only do you have a needle in a haystack, but your haystack is exploding! All the time! To get in and out safely is a little tricky, which is why I came up with four possible scenarios: * Make a drawbridge with a long, tubular field (or multiple fields in close proximity). Extend the fields from inside your solar system (inside the maelstrom) to outside the maelstrom. When a ship wants to enter or exit, inflate the fields; this creates a thin path for the ship to follow, surrounded by a lot of empty space. Any harmful energy or particles will get bogged down in the outside of the "drawbridge", allowing the ship in the center to pass safely. * Make a ship in a bottle. The "bottle" is a field that surrounds the ship, protecting it from harmful energy or particles with very long distances. Similar to the drawbridge, except instead of a path, it's a point. * Make a gate. This would be the opposite of the drawbridge; part of the maelstrom would be inside an inflated chunk of space; deflating it would open a path. When the ship is safely through, re-inflate the gates and they slam shut. * Make a thin edge. This is the opposite of the ship in a bottle; instead of expanding the space around the ship, compress it, moving the ship from one side of the maelstrom to the other in a matter of seconds. When no ships need to pass through, the 'thin' spot can be inflated, stranding the system in the middle of a vast space. ## Weapons You can carry around an armada inside a baseball. Or a sun. Or black holes. That alone is enough to rule the universe, but there's still more; instead of destroying your enemies, you can take them hostage. Along with their homeworld. Or their home solar system. You don't even have to fire a shot. ## Defense Distance makes a great shield. If the technology is fast enough, a wearable suit (or a ship-sized net) could be designed that inflates space around the wearer when projectiles are detected; the projectile would simply travel past the wearer. ## Stealth If you can operate the technology inside the field, then your ships can shrink themselves down to a tiny point, as could operatives. Of course, you could also hide you planet like that. And stealing information (or anything else) is easy when you can hide planets in the palm of your hand. ## Living Space Of course, you'd have all the living space you'd want; find a nice habitable planet, put it in a bubble with a lovely sun, and away you go. More people? Not a problem! Just stick some bubbles in living areas! A house could be no more than a doorway into an enlarged space. If you can stack bubbles, it's even easier; rows of doors, behind yet more rows of doors. Of course, you'll need a lot of oxygen and other resources, but as long as you have somewhere to pull those from, you can make 'shortened space' jumps to deliver it exactly where it needs to be. In fact, if you make your spaces just so, you could literally step from one planet to another by shrinking the space between them in a small area. ## Boundless trouble Of course... none of this comes without risk. If it is the space that grows and shrinks, but not the objects inside, then a failed field could create an explosion as all the stuff inside is shoved into 'normal space'. On the other hand, if the things inside shrink and grow with the field, you may well end up with material that isn't the same size as it used to be. A number 12 bolt may go into a field just right, but come out a little bigger. Joe Smith may take the 8:05 to work and the 5:20 home, and end up growing taller every day. If the fields retain mass, then moving a planet around is going to be just as hard inside a field as outside, and probably harder - every time you shrink something big, you run the risk of making a tiny black hole. Or a not-so-tiny black hole, if you're shrinking solar systems. A maze may work a little too well; if you forget the way out, you're stuck. Communication will be almost impossible, unless you can invent something that doesn't interact with space itself. The ever-changing shape of 'space' near a field would distort radio signals, and a moving field would scramble radio signals into mush. If something with a larger area than a cross-section of the field hit the field, the object would be torn apart; the outside dimensions would stay the same, be the inside dimensions would grow. 4 units of material stretched across 4000 units of space isn't going to last long. And finally, great technology can put you far ahead of everyone else, but it can also make you a target. If you use this technology, weaponize it first, because everyone else is going to want to take it away from you. [Answer] In addition to great answers already present: ### 1. Ruin someone's retirement fund There is a common wisdom, that > > you should invest your money in real estate, because it's the only thing > we won't be able to make more > > > Let's not discuss here how much truth is in that statement, the important thing is that a lot of people believe in it and base their retirement plans on expected increase in value of the land they possess. Now that we have a way to actually mass produce new land in vast quantities, the prices plummet and a lot of people are left penniless. ### 2. Ruin your neighbour's economy Let's assume, that your empire has an agrarian society as an inconvenient neighbour. You can secretly dedicate that new land nobody knows about to grow vast amounts of food. Then you wait for a right moment, and you unleash your waves of cheap products overnight, ruining interspace food market. Or even better, you don't do it, you just show your stockpile of food to their ambassador and tell him something like "Well, well, didn't you mention some trade agreement, that would be super-convenient for my empire? And while we're at it, we need some military assistance in some other part of space..." ### 3. Create Space Vegas! With blackjack! And places of negotiable hospitality... Let's assume, that your empire has some very strict laws regarding morals and ethics. But everyone likes to party every once in a while, and nobody, nobody I tell you, can party like a government official who rides a moral high horse for a living. But since a pocket dimension is within the empire, but technically isn't, but it sort of is, and then isn't, you can create legal grey area, where those officials are still in power, but less convenient laws don't apply. ### 4. Create the biggest dumpster ever Ok, let's assume a worst case scenario: we have a huge, barely controlled, bubble of empty nothingness, where nothing can survive, nothing can be build, and whatever you put inside, can never be pulled out. Well, a huge empire like that probably creates a lot of waste. And when it comes to storing that waste, everyone and their garbageman are yelling "not in my backyard". Look there, now we have a place which is nobody's backyard. Let's put your waste there! And on a side note, it's a nice setup for an invasion: "We were putting our dump there for generations, and then the dump got intelligent and attacked us!" [Answer] # Land is power \usually\** In most cases, land is power. If a country doesn't have much space, it will not have enough resources to thrive. ## More people More space = more houses and more farms = more people you can support = more (and bigger) armies. ## More resources If the bubble comes with pre-made planets on the inside, you have lots more resources to mine. Otherwise, you can at least fit more planets inside if you can manage to buy/steal/permanently borrow them, or you can fit more fusion reactors to make some iron and carbon for manufacturing. ## More space to put stuff With more space, you can fit more factories, maybe entertainment to keep your people happy (depending on how nice you are), some farms so no one goes hungry, etc. # Another note With such a "pocket dimension", you don't have as much area to defend! The outside of your empire will have the same surface area, but it will have much more volume inside. Normally, increasing volume also increases the amount of surface area to defend. Note that this comes at a cost: You also have less space to transport goods in and out of your empire. (This is like how diffusion works in a cell and the reason there are no 50-foot cells. They would not have enough supplies.) [Answer] Further research into the laws of physics by creating universes with different parameters for the laws of physics. A civilization that has found, studied and controlled inflatons has access to magic level tech compared to ours; we for whom the inflaton is still a hypothetical field. Still, let's assume they haven't been able to probe the multiverse, yet. Researchers at first assumed that the characteristics of the space bubbles needed to share the characteristics of our universe but they found this wasn't the case. Sure, you could make space pockets that mimic our own but that's boring. What happens if you tweak the laws of physics in a space bubble so that the laws of conservation of energy don't apply or entropy works in reverse leading towards ever increasing order instead of disorder? How about if the [Planck second](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time) is half as long or twice as long as Planck second? Researchers found they could create custom universes on the other end of the wormhole. More importantly, what happens when you bring mass or energy from the bubble back into our universe? Does the mass decompress in a giant explosion? Does time move faster or slower in the bubble? As a plot device, translating from our universe's physics into the bubble space's physics allows all kinds of crazy things to happen. Stasis bubbles, perfect armor, free energy, free mass. Example The Empire is looking for a new energy source and antimatter just isn't cutting it anymore. MOAR POWER was the constant cry. So the researchers found a way to create Big Bangs on command in bubble spaces then using wormholes, port some of that energy back to our universe. Big Bangs make convenient power sources because it is THE most powerful event in the history of our universe. ]
[Question] [ I'm writing a dystopia where the authoritarian state messes with people's biology, like in Brave New World. Can they do alter people biologically in some way that makes alcohol not a thing in society any more? Either people would be immune to its effects, or find it nauseating/unappealing. [This question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/82740/how-to-control-alcohol-consumption-in-my-country) is similar, and has some starting points, but the conditions of my world are different. It doesn't have to be a gene. A long-lasting pharmacological intervention would work for the plot, though a short-lasting one (a daily pill) would not. [Answer] There are numerous genetic qualities that cause this effect. One of them is called flushing. When eliminating alcohol from your body, one of the intermediate stages is to convert the alcohol to acetaldehyde. Your body quickly breaks that down, too, preventing it from accumulating. In some people, however, that second part doesn't work, so the acetaldehyde builds up in an uncomfortable manner. This genetic variation is relatively common in Asia, and is the chemical basis of the drug disulfiram, which was tried as a treatment for alcoholism for decades. Serious alcoholics would drink through the flushing, sometimes hospitalizing themselves. Another path would be to block alcohol's ability to release endorphin, or to block your ability to respond to endorphins while drinking. Endorphin is a shortcut to learning, teaching our body that excitement and exertion are beneficial to us. Alcohol simulates exertion and excitement, making us release endorphin, tricking us into thinking that alcohol is beneficial to us. This is the basis of using naltrexone and noloxone for the treatment of alcoholism and other opioid addictions. Initial attempts at taking advantage of this knowledge produced little benefit because, once you stopped taking the drug, the desire to drink rebounded. Later, with the development of The Sinclair Method, Pavlovian extinction was harnessed to reduce this specific cause of alcoholism. Thus, if you want a genetic shift that would eliminate the use of alcohol, you should have alcohol also release endorphin blockers that prevent Pavlovian conditioning from taking root in the first place. Either that, or heighten the neurotoxic side-effects like dizziness so that the drinker is driven to puke like a sea-sick land lubber before they get seriously drunk. [Answer] ### Alcohol intolerance induced by gene manipulation Knock down the gene encoding for aldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme, which clears acetaldehyde produced in alcohol metabolism. Reduction in its activity leads to [alcohol intolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_intolerance), a condition in which alcohol causes unpleasant hangover-like symptoms immediately after ingestion. For inducing alcohol intolerance by gene manipulation, you need an inactivation construct for the gene, packaged into a viral vector (a carrier virus) that targets hepatocytes (liver cells) with high efficiency, and a means to deliver it into the bloodstream. Delivery could present a problem as it most likely would have to be intravenous, but your dystopian authorities can probably just order people to go through the procedure. Or maybe they manage to develop a vector that can be administered with an injection that could be secretly added to the general vaccination program. It would be anything but safe, and a lot of people would die of hepatitis caused by the side effects of infecting liver cells with the virus, but a totalitarian regime would hardly care. [Answer] In addition to the genetic changes mentioned by the other responses, there are mutations that will make alcohol just taste extremely bad. This may be less universal in the sense that some people may be willing to drink because they love getting drunk more than they hate the taste. These also will definitely have the side effect of causing some other foods to taste better or worse, so you could have a justification for your dystopia having different popular foods. On the plus side, changing taste perception is less likely to accidentally injure or kill anyone than the alcohol intolerance approach, which could be lethal for someone who keeps drinking heavily after the change. If you need to talk about specific mutations, here's a study showing several that reduce alcohol intake in mice by changing flavor perception: <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4408608/> [Answer] Yes. Some mushrooms (Coprinopsis atramentaria) make coprine which have a disulfiram-like effect. So, they have a gene for producing that. The mushrooms are edible, but you don't want to have a beer with such a dinner. These dystopic authorities could force gene therapy on people, introducing this gene. They would then produce some amount of coprine as part of normal metabolism, and be unable to drink alcohol. ]
[Question] [ In my world, there is a certain group of 'scavengers' — people who go around and pick out valuable (and salvageable, of course) objects from ships that have crashed [onto the surface of a moon/planet], had fatal errors, been sabotaged/physically attacked or otherwise rendered unusable and derelict. These 'objects' might be tech, resources from the actual ship itself, freight it was carrying, or even information in the form of physical drives (data storage) and the like (there are strict rules about not viewing other people's info). Another reason for scavenging is to clean up debris from densely [at least by space’s standards] populated areas where it could be a danger. They can either be independent or paid by a recycling company, so costs wouldn't be a super big issue. Scavenging also doubles as a bit of a search-and-rescue at the same time as it can include rescuing people and supplying others with resources, so it's seen as relatively important. My issue is that I have no idea how these scavengers would be able to detect that a ship has crashed. The world has pretty decent inter-planetary radio (though this can be changed), although it has some delay. I've thought of things such as the scavenging ship picking up distress signals, or having the ships being reported by colonies (however, there are not colonies everywhere). *Also note this is interplanetary* scavenging, interstellar travel still takes ages in this word, so there would be pretty much no ships hanging out in deep space. Probably even more so, it is scavenging between moons orbiting the same planet. There is no FTL. Conclusion/super-simplified version: how could one ship know that another one has crashed, even if it's a very long way away (if it's even possible)? Does anyone here have any ideas? If there's anything I need to clarify, please tell me; I'm pretty new. [Answer] It's all about being in the know** Even today, oceanic salvage isn't about detecting the existence of a derelict ship. It's about knowing that a ship didn't make port. Why? Because the ocean is big. Really, really, really big, and when ships crash... they tend to sink, making them really hard to detect. Space is, of course, really, really, really big. Big in a way that makes finding something in our ocean a lot more like finding your left sock in your bedroom. Worse (and this is important), unless you have something like faster-than-light transportation and/or communication, nothing about the crash will travel faster than the speed of light. In other words, if the derelict lost one light-year from any inhabited planet had a transponder (and if it were working), you wouldn't know where the ship was (in the worst case) until years later when the signal had arrived at not one, but two populated planets (triangulation...). The idea of using something like radar (using any wavelength along the EM spectrum) is even worse. If you had enough power to pump the signal out constantly (say, one massive, cook-everyone-in-the-system pulse daily), you would be at least one year waiting to detect the ship, and at worst two (remember, the example derelict is 1 LY away). That's a lot of wishful thinking On the other hand, if you knew every trade ship's schedule and knew when one didn't make port as scheduled, you'd not only know there was an opportunity, you'd also have a better-than-average idea of where to look. So, as usual, knowledge is king. And knowing where things should have been is half the battle when it comes to knowing where they are. But, just as a frame challenge, would it be practical to have interstellar salvage? I've been working on the assumption that salvage could occur anywhere. That's actually a really bad assumption. Space isn't just really, really big. It's unimaginably humongous. Without some really convenient things (like a continuously operating transponder and generations worth of time), the time to get there plus the cost to get there and back would never be worth the effort. And that assumes you can find it once you get there. If you had to travel a year to get to the last guaranteed-known location, that ship will have moved, possibly a lot, before you could arrive. But what if we make some practical assumptions? 1. No matter what Hollywood things, even if you have FTL, pirates won't operate in deep space. Even the idea of a shipping lane is a volume of space so ridiculously large that by the time pirates detected a victim's passing, they couldn't get to it before it was out of their control. Besides, there's no support in the middle of the void, and piracy needs support (at least someone to fence the goods to!). That suggests pirates will act at known stopping point like gas giants used for refueling or within star systems that require ships to pause for navigational changes or where there's inhabited planets so ships would be coming and going. So, place to find salvage #1: star systems where there's a reason for shipping to stop or pass through. 2. Deep space stations used for research or waypoints or just because you need a reason in your story to let ships stop would also work. 3. Battlefields... but this is most likely also to be local to a star system or other "fixed point in space" (if that phrase can be used in regard to space). I personally suspect space battles will never take place in the void. Why would they? Unless the two sides agreed to meet at some lonely spot, there'd never be a reason to even be there. And you'd never know someone was there thanks to information being limited to the speed of light (unless you allow FTL). In other words, salvage shouldn't be assumed to be just anywhere. Oh, it could be... ships go off course. Mysterious wormholes appear out of nowhere... But 99% of salvage will occur in predictable locations, and that means things like Radar suddenly have some value. Rather than waiting for years to find a needle in a massive haystack, you're waiting hours (and hoping the derelict isn't so close to the sun as to interfere with the signal...). And you need to consider what it means to become a derelict What causes a ship to become derelict? The Apollo 13 moon mission demonstrates the theoretical possibility of a ship being primarily intact even though everyone one it could be dead. So you have the case of a broken resource (like oxygen) leaving the ship intact. But piracy? A battle? A meteor impact? I'll be honest with you. I'd avoid reality when it comes to what makes a ship derelict, because IMO most causes would leave chunks-too-small-to-be-worth-salvaging spinning off into many directions that, with every passing second, are getting too far apart to effectively salvage. Although that does bring up a point... until they start getting affected by another force (like a star's gravity), all you'd need to do is find two such chunks and trace their route and you'd find the source of the accident and, therefore, be able to predict where other chunks might have gone... Hm.... But, to be fair, that wasn't your question. [Answer] # Easily, from intrasystem scans. Voyager is around 18 billion kilometers away. It produces about as much energy as your fridge lamp. [It was still easy to spot by a single telescope.](https://txchnologist.com/post/61492589701/did-you-know-we-can-still-spot-voyager-1#_=_) So, just have a telescope scanning the solar system. When people burn huge amounts of fuel to move at massive speeds, you can note where they are, and the red hot engines will tell you where they are for a while after that. From the energy you should easily be able to tell exactly where they are going, and at what speed. If they fail to do a counterburn to slow down you can tell they'll either fly into deep space past a planet or crash into it. [Answer] Sentient wind jellyfish [![wind jellyfish](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wwhu9.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Wwhu9.jpg) <https://the-scp.foundation/object/scp-312> This planet has aliens. They drift in the upper atmosphere and maybe higher. They come to ground sometimes, for their own reasons. They communicate with each other and they know what is going on. They are pretty mysterious, these things. But not entirely inscrutable. They can communicate with your scavengers. One (usually one of a recurring few, which the scavengers have named) will show up with news of something. The wind jellyfish generally understand what sort of things the scavengers are interested in, but might also tell them other things they are not interested in, or can barely understand. The jellyfish have their own system of coordinates which your scavengers understand, mostly. There are things the wind jellyfish want and which the scavengers can provide so there is a quid pro quo. This serves your purpose of getting the news to the scavengers. It also introduces a story element you can use to move things along. The wind jellyfish perspective on things will be interesting in its own right and maybe these creatures have something else going on which will turn out to be relevant. [Answer] "I've thought of things such as the scavenging ship picking up distress signals, or having the ships being reported by colonies." I think this would be one of the things to focus on - sniffing out where wrecks might be, whether through distress signals, or picking up on coms from some government system, like the equivalent of an air traffic control, or coms from a battle. Something else I'd point to is the idea of a "graveyard orbit." Today, when a satellite in a high orbit of earth has lived its life, it is moved to a graveyard orbit where it won't get in the way of anything. As time goes on you might find not just graveyard orbits, but graveyard asteroids. This could be a source of wreckage to look at. I'll note however that advancements in mission extension technologies, satellite buses, etc, will reduce as time goes on the likelihood of a ship or a satellite being simply abandoned. [Answer] ## AIS and ADS-B in Space Airplanes and ocean-going vessels regularly transmit their location, speed, size, and intended destination through systems like AIS and ADS-B. It's a safety measure, that I would expect to come with us to space. The messages are very short (think like 150 characters) and generally go out at short intervals like 30 seconds. It's cheap, valuable, and easy for the authorities to keep track of and fine violators. Scavengers would collect and mine this data, and look for anomalies. Things that might catch their eye include: * Ship Stops Reporting - if the transmitter goes offline, either there's a problem like a crash or equipment failure, or the ship is hiding something. * Missed the Exit - If a ship fails to turn or maneuver when it should, say it didn't do a burn when the gravity slingshot was needed to keep them on route to their reported destination. Could indicate that the crew is incapacitated. * Detection without Reporting - If scavengers see a RADAR/IR/LIDAR/whatever return, but no associated AIS/ADS-B transmission, it's either a wreck or a criminal. There are other potential anomalies, depending on what is normal, what is reported, and what scavengers might be able to guess from that data. Note that a lot of the things that indicate "potential wreck" could also be indications of "pirates or smugglers." This could be an interesting plot point. [Answer] With advances with various methods of detection, such as optical, RADAR, etc. finding wreckage in odd or unstable trajectories may be easier in the future, but detecting small object, such as ships will still be somewhat difficult. What you can look for is the debris field such a collision would cause. Over time, object broken free of the ship will drift around, making the debris field larger, but will more or less stay fairly close to the wreckage due to minute gravitational attractions and a shared trajectory. This debris field, being made of metals and other composites, will look differently on scanners in various EM wavelengths so you can differentiate a ship wreckage from a dust cloud, smashed asteroid or comet. With some filters on your sensors and a trained eye of a observer, they can detect such wreckage easily at great distances. Scavengers may keep a suite of sensors, optics and arrays to look for wreckage to salvage. [Answer] Today we can detect the gravitational waves of colliding black holes. With some significant advancement in the detection capabilities, we will be able to detect the collision of much smaller masses, like two spaceships hitting each other head front (traffic lights keep being neglected even in space apparently). Considering that the information of the collision would propagate at the speed of light, it's natural to think that "exclusive zones" would emerge, were only one company is practically capable of operating, due to the close proximity. The borders between these zones would see some interesting "debate" on who is entitled to the recovery. [Answer] You didn't mention if you are considering FTL travel/communication, but to make any of what you are asking reasonable it probably is a necessity. Intercepting information about spaceship having trouble can be done on several levels - capturing the communication about the ship problems and getting information directly from the ship owning company being the primary two sources. Currently in transportation there are similar ways of signaling issues and I would imagine something similar will exist for space travel once solidly established, especially with FTL communication. Based on the flight plan and pure calculation one should be able to find more or less accurate position of the wreck. The more accurate the more chances of actual help. If it is less accurate, search is more complicated (and here a bit of luck and experience can help, combined with finding traces like already mentioned in other answers debris fields), meaning something really valuable needs to be salvageable ot someone has to actually be nearby and have some trace helping to find the wreck. Finally, ships can be equipped in something resembling black boxes of today airplanes. While the primary goal of the black box is to keep record of the last period of the flight, for it to be valuable it has to be found. So all black boxes are equipped with a beacon that emits specific radio signal to help find it. Something similar could be on board of spaceships - of course with different scale and beacon emission time (the black box one emits signal for roughly 1 month only). If you assume no FTL communication means, the distance alone means that the chances of any rescue mission is close to zero and the scavengers will get the information about the ship after significant amount of time and will be able to reach there after similar or longer period. Even distance between near two stars is counted in light years, 2 ly apart means the scavengers get information after two years and will need at least another 2 years (in practice more) to get there. So without the FTL the same principles for "where do they know from" remain but you are limited to recovering transport only (and only most valuable one probably will be worth salvaging). [Answer] Because a fair bit of your business model involves operating as a "Roadside Assistance" company. In modern-day America, if you have car troubles that make your car inoperable along the side of the freeway you'll typically need to call a tow-truck. However, knowing all the local tow-companies' phone numbers and service areas is a pain (not to mention negotiating price, etc.) so a lot of folks tend to subscribe to a service like AAA so that they only have to call one number and that company will arrange everything as quickly and painlessly as possible. In your locally-space-faring future, people are likely to have similar "car troubles" that leave them stranded mid-route and in need of rescue. By operating as a "Roadside Assistance" company you will essentially be the first-call for anyone\* stranded along any of the main routes. \(Other than maybe bigger shipping firms who operate their own internal tow-fleets.) This business model means that, yeah, you'll have to spend some resources on a customer-service call-center, and possibly have a number of smaller fast-rescue ships constantly deployed, but it'll also mean that you're first on the scene and likely the first to lay claim to the salvage. Heck, as a service you could even let customers install a "black box" device that automatically calls you in event of a catastrophic failure (which you could advertise as life-saving because it lets crew prioritize getting to escape pods before calling a tow company). And, while this means that most of your day-to-day business will be taxiing stranded motorists to the nearest port while arranging the nearest tow, it also means that you will have first bid when it comes to offering up a price on "total loss" wrecks, and you (assuming the "black box" subscription) will also likely be first to lay full legal claim on any "no survivors" wrecks. (You will have to be top-knotch about not letting people die, though, as doing that would tank the entire front-end of your business, and all the good leads it provides, if word [or rumor] got out.) [Answer] ## Dangerous to Go Alone You basically have the right setup already, with distress beacons or something similar being the most common way of finding damaged ships. The problem is that a distress beacon is also a big red sign for bandits or other nefarious entities so an injured ship is going to want to make sure they can be found but only by people who know where to look. I would imagine that distress beacons are high powered but (relatively) low ranged. That way anyone who is close enough to help will be able to follow the signal, without blasting it over the entire sector or whatever to cut down on bad guys hearing it. Of course that means that your salvage crew is going to need some way to know the general area of any ships in distress. The simplest way would be for them to be hired by whoever is sitting around waiting for their shipment to show up. Assume that the injured ship's full route is known by someone at either end of the trip. One of those people can then hire your salvage crew and say "look somewhere between Alpha Centauri II and Beta Kerotine IV". Once the crew gets close enough the distress beacon is found and away they go. When the crew doesn't have a good lead or is not on a job, they can do some basic traveling along common routes where people get into trouble. That should be a last resort though since there is no guarantee of a return on investment of time/fuel. [Answer] ### Salvage Most salvage operations do not involve retrieving sunken wreckage from the deep. Those wrecks are hard to find, so looking for them is expensive. In most cases it simply isn't worth the effort to dig them up, unless they are of historical significance. No, most salvage operations at sea involve someone saying "please come and rescue us". The owner (or captain) of the vessel in distress has to ask for it, and commonly they'll sign a contract or at least verbally accept the terms of the rescue, which is typically between 10% and 25% of the value of vessel and cargo. So I think your instincts of these people looking for distress signals is exactly right. The scavenger is guaranteed to get a return on their investment of time, money, fuel and whatever else, which they would be unlikely to get by scrounging off crashed and fully destroyed ships. [Answer] ## Radio transponders work just fine on this scale Just like in real life, all legitimate ships will be regularly transmitting their positions (and distress messages as necessary) using their radio. So, you simply need to know if a radio signal can cross a solar system fast enough to provide data that is recent enough to be useful, and you need to know if a ship can transmit a signal powerful enough to be picked up over those distances. The entire diameter of our Solar System is only about 8.3 light hours across; however, nothing farther out than some of Saturn's moons really looks that worth colonizing; so, my guess is that it will be very rare for you to need to transmit this distance. Worst case likely scenario, you will need to send a message between Saturn and Jupiter while they are at opposite sides of the solar system which is a distance of about 70 light minutes. So, whenever a disaster happens, (either the transmission unexpectedly ends, or they send a distress signal), nearly every scavenger in the solar system will be able to notice this within an hour. In the grand scheme of things, this not not a very long delay. Figuring out if you can transmit and receive a signal that is powerful enough is a bit more complicated. Basically, your signal just has to be more powerful than the background noise of space which is on average about 4e-23 W/Hz/m^2. With a total distance to cover of 1.259e+12 m we can determine the surface area of an omni-directional transmission at that range to be about 2e25m^2; so, if you are using a 1 square meter radio reciever, you can pick up that signal as long as it is being transmitted at something greater than 800 W/Hz. Since transponders don't need to transmit complex data, you can use very low frequency signals. Using an alternating current transmitter, you can reduce this signal down to arbitrarily low frequencies so your actual transmission may just be a Morris Code like 0.5 Hz being transmitted from a 400 W emitter. This is about the same amount of power that a typical fighter jet needs for its onboard radar system; so, I think it is safe to say you could fit something this powerful on just about any spaceship worth salvaging. [Answer] The ship drive is easily detectable* Those spaceships leave a very conspicuous trace when they enter and exit hyper drive, the light speed version of the sonic boom, but not constant as the sonic boom. The scavengers check all the signals and when a signal comes from an unknown location far from any spaceport they check it carefully. However ship hitting a rock at high speed would be completely destroyed, scavenging that would not be credible. More credible would be ships stopped by a failure in their drive and maybe later falling on a planet or on an asteroid. [Answer] Quantum Internet! If your world was based on ours just x years in the future then it's not unlikely they will of mastered quantum internet in some form or another as it is a science we are beginning understand and are trying to develop right now. So what is 'Quantum Internet'? I will preface this with I have no formal education in quantum physics, just an interest and a hope of working in the field one day! Here's the Wikipedia article:<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_network> TL:DR using quantum entanglement to transfer data instantaneously across infinite distances. Sounds crazy and very bs? yeah, welcome to quantum physics. So how can I use it for a salvage ship? If the ship get's shut down the qbit becomes un-entangled and the other end knows the ship has some form of problem. We can use it to actually communicate between quantum computers in the present day, maybe they could send an actual distress signal or maybe it just sounds an alarm when the 'beacon' goes offline(a qbit pair collapses). Currently we would need a central hub(Like 1 single server or a small network of servers) to have this kind of system work but I don't doubt someone somewhere is working on that problem, meaning a traditional internet like setup is would be possible. Notice a ship goes down and get a move on! Might need some small repairs or might be lovely salvage! Hope this idea helps or is at least interesting. It's one of the more science fiction sounding but actually(mostly) real in the present day ideas out there for FTL communication. I know you said no FTL but this is physically possible and it's being proven all the time. ]
[Question] [ Story Background I have an alien that travels from ~100 light years away to Earth. He can make this trip in a matter of years though. He doesn't reveal how as he doesn't trust Earthlings since he has just come across new intelligent life. Now, I have a guy that has created a telescope that is stationary on Earth able see in nearly perfect detail at vast distances into space. This alien now approaches my guy and gives him the coordinates to his home planet. The alien wants to show Earth his planet and people and technology they use using this "super" telescope that can look onto the surface of his planet as if we were looking look out a second story window at them. Question What I have read is that the sun is 93 million miles from Earth and that it takes ~8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to Earth. So we are basically seeing the Sun from Earth 8 minutes in the past. (Which blows my mind if you ask me) Now when the man and the alien finally look into the telescope to see his home planet, will the alien be unpleasantly surprised to see his home planet the way it was 100 years ago? (Will he see his newborn grandma?) Or does the ability to focus (zoom in?) on something so close with the telescope fix that issue and they will see the planet as basically when he left. [Answer] Will he see the past? Yes! Light emitted from stuff on the alien planet (in the form of photons) will take time to get to Earth. If you "beat it" to the Earth and look back, you will be able to receive the photons and see what was emitted. Will the Alien Be Surprised? Unlikely, but possible. This alien just travelled to the earth using technology far beyond what we mere humans can imagine. He will probably have a firm grasp of the speed of light and all it entails. On the other hand, he may have no idea how his own technology actually works, so it's possible he will be surprised by the time-lag. Will he be able to actually zoom in on his planet? No. Here is where things are weird. The maximum distance and detail you can get with a telescope is governed by the amount of light the telescope receives from the target. To view a planet 100 ly away (assuming similar luminosity to the Earth) with enough detail to look at people on the surface, you would need a MASSIVE telescope. [This reddit page](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qvna6/eli5_if_i_am_on_a_planet_100_light_years_away/) explains it rather well, but needless to say, such a telescope does not, and basically cannot exist. [Answer] It should be noted you never are actually seeing an object, you always, technically, see light reflected off the planet. This is similar to how if you get a letter in the mail you aren't getting the letter as it's being written, you're getting a few-day instance of it in the past. Magnifying an image with a telescope does not 'speed up' the light or any such, so the reflected light would still be just as old as if it wasn't magnified. A reflected source of light 100 light years away would, indeed, take 100 years to reach the point of observation (Earth) no matter what you do. Assuming his telescope is that amazingly powerful to notice detail on the surface of the planet, the planet will look like it did 100 years ago, yes. [Answer] Everything absorbs, and more importantly reflects light to a certain degree. When reflection occurs light rays are bounced back from that object in a certain pattern, and with certain colours filtered out. So when you're looking through the telescope, and want to see the other planet what you're really looking at is the light reflected off of that planet, and light needs time to get to us. Hence "looking into the past". Now just imagine what it must take for you to "see" the alien planet's surface: * Light travels down through their atmosphere * Light hits and object, and is reflected * That reflected light travels up through the atmosphere again (and is distorted by it) * That reflected light must now travel 100 light years in the correct direction (during this time the rays of light are distorted by gas clouds they may pass through, etc.) * The reflection is finally captured by your telescope :-) Do you see how wildly unlikely that chain of events is? Furthermore, this doesn't change the fact that said reflection needed 100 years to get to you. When you zoom in you're not somehow reaching out to the stars, and closing the distance. You're simply focusing the reflection in a different way, so that you may perceive more detail. [Answer] If it takes light 100 years to travel from the alien planet to Earth then an observer on the earth will see the alien planet as it was 100 years ago. that doesn't change if you are looking at a continent or able to 'zoom in' and read a newspaper in the hands of an alien sat on their front porch. [Answer] Time only exists where you are. The rung of time does not speed up or slow down because you move on the same earth spinning around. Image you are standing on a merry go round and keep facing one direction, you do not move your feet do. [Answer] It depends on how much "artistic license" you're taking with physics... you already have an alien traveling faster than light... Maybe your telescope isn't a simple optical telescope and either somehow "sucks" the light from the alien planet (to get around MozerShmozer's huge telescope problem) faster than c, or uses technology similar to what the alien used to get here to send information from there to here faster than light. Perhaps the telescope can detect tachyons (hypothetical super-light-speed particles) coming from the planet or something... ]
[Question] [ Can a galaxy be destroyed by a single but well-accelerated particle, like electron or neutrino? For instance, one shoots a very high-energy electron in the direction of the galaxy. It collides with other interstellar particles, and due to very high energy a lot of new particles produced in such collisions, so a beam appears. As the beam approaches the galaxy in question, it grows and grows so to include now a lot of new particles, like an avalanche. These particles are still so energetic that they crush all planets and stars on their way. Is this possible? [Answer] What you're talking about here is basically the same thing as a [cosmic ray air shower](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_shower_%28physics%29), except that it would have to take place in intergalactic space instead of in the atmosphere, and the amount of energy involved would have to be unimaginably higher. There are two factors that make this event rather different from an air shower: 1. There are fewer particles to hit in intergalactic space 2. This would require the energy released from the formation of an entire galaxy to somehow be concentrated in a single particle Reason #2 is enough, on its own, that this would never happen in practice. But since the premise of the question appears to be that, somehow, that reason has been bypassed, let me go through the relevant calculations. First of all, the amount of energy in the particle needs to be enough to cancel out the binding energy of the galaxy and all the stars and planets inside it. From [this presentation](http://www.phys.virginia.edu/Announcements/Seminars/Slides/S2062.pdf), slide 10, suppose the galaxy's gravitational binding energy is $M(10^{-3}c)^2$, which works out to roughly $10^{53}\text{ J}$ [assuming $M \approx 10^{12}M\_\odot$](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way#Size_and_mass). This would be the amount of energy required to separate the galaxy into individual stars. Then, let's approximate the amount of energy required to separate all the stars, planets, etc. into atoms as $10^{42}\text{ J}$ per solar mass, which gives another $10^{54}\text{ J}$ total. So the incoming particle will have to have $10^{54}\text{ J} \approx 10^{73}\text{ eV}$ in the galaxy's rest frame. (Actually a little more because it needs to transfer some energy to the remnants of the galaxy as kinetic energy, but this excess is something like a factor of $10^{-6}$ smaller and thus negligible.) So suppose we have a particle of energy $10^{73}\text{ eV}$ somehow propagating through the universe. Now, we know nothing about how a particle with such a tremendous amount of energy would actually interact with ordinary matter. Such a high energy is firmly into the domain of (beyond-)nstandard-model physics. For purposes of a science fiction story, you could make it do all sorts of weird things. But, sticking to the current science for the sake of argument, let's say you naively extrapolate the known behavior of high-energy scattering to this $10^{73}\text{ eV}$ cosmic ray. The next thing to figure out is the probability of the cosmic ray scattering off the particles it meets. And the relevant parameter to characterize this is the squared center-of-mass energy, $s$. For a collision between a massive particle in motion, with mass $m\_1$ and energy $E\_1 = \gamma\_1 m\_1 c^2$, and a massive particle at rest, with mass $m\_2$ and energy $E\_2 = m\_2 c^2$, this is $$s = m\_1^2 c^4 + m\_2^2 c^4 + 2E\_1 E\_2$$ Alternatively, for the same massive particle and a photon which has energy $E\_2$ and is approaching the moving particle at angle $\theta$ (with $\theta = 0$ being a head-on collision), assuming $E\_1 \gg E\_2$, the CM energy is $$s = m\_1^2 c^4\biggl(1 - \frac{E\_2}{E\_1}\cos\theta\biggr) + 2(1 + \cos\theta)E\_1 E\_2 + \text{negligible terms}$$ So $s$ for an interaction between the cosmic ray and a massive particle is a fixed, very large value. Interactions of this sort generally get less likely as $s$ increases, so a particle with $10^{73}\text{ eV}$ is basically going to pass right through matter as if it doesn't exist. But for an interaction between the ray and a photon, $s$ varies depending on the angle. It goes as low as $s = (m\_1 c^2)^2$, when $\theta = \pi$ (the photon and the cosmic ray are traveling in the same direction), and goes all the way up to more than $4E\_1 E\_2 \approx 10^{89}\,\mathrm{eV}^2$. This is important because the interaction between two particles is most likely at a resonance, a center-of-mass energy which corresponds to the mass of some intermediate particle. For example, the [delta baryon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_baryon) has a mass of $1232\,\mathrm{MeV}/c^2$, and therefore interactions between charged particles and photons are particularly likely when $s = (1232\,\mathrm{MeV})^2$. The [cosmic microwave background](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background) (CMB) provides an ample supply of photons traveling in all directions, and thus any charged particle with enough energy to achieve $s \ge (1232\,\mathrm{MeV})^2$ in a collision with a CMB photon will be very likely to do so quickly. Particles with such high energy simply do not propagate very far through space. This effect is known as the [GZK limit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greisen%E2%80%93Zatsepin%E2%80%93Kuzmin_limit), and the associated energy cutoff is on the order of $10^{19}\text{ eV}$ (in the rest frame of the CMB). The exact order of magnitude varies by the type of particle involved, but regardless of what type of particle it is, anything that has $10^{73}\text{ eV}$ will be well over it. In fact, a high-energy cosmic ray with enough energy to destroy a galaxy will hit not only the delta resonance, but the resonances of every particle in the standard model, and any unknown particles that may exist with higher masses up to a very high threshold. (Higher than the Planck mass, thus underscoring the need for a theory beyond the standard model to explain what happens.) Anyway, the gist is that a particle with this huge amount of energy will pretty much immediately produce a [shower](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_shower) of other particles of all sorts, with energies rapidly dropping as the shower progresses. This is actually perfect for your scenario, because it spreads out the immense amount of energy from one particle (which, as I mentioned, passes right through matter) to a broad swath of particles which is rather well distributed for galaxy destruction. One might then consider the question of how close to the galaxy you have to produce the highly energetic particle in order to make this work. The answer to that depends on the characteristic length scale of the shower, which in turn depends on the scattering cross section and some complicated math that I don't want to get into now. If I figure it out later, I'll come back and add details, but for now, my conclusion is that if you ignore the main reason this could never happen, it actually seems quite plausible. [Answer] No. At these speeds, we have to take special relativity into account. The [relativistic kinetic energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy#Relativistic_kinetic_energy_of_rigid_bodies) formula is $$KE\_r=mc^2 \left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{1-v^2/c^2}}-1 \right)$$ Taking the limit as $v \to c$, we see that the kinetic energy becomes infinite. So, actually, I was wrong before - there is no limit to how much kinetic energy a particle can have! However, a particle would have to have a lot of energy to destroy even one star in the manner you described. It would need to have a kinetic energy upon impact of the star's [gravitational binding energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_binding_energy): $$U=\frac{3GM^2}{5R^2}$$ where $M$ is the mass of the star and $R$ is the star's radius. For a star like our [Sun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun), with $M=1.989 \times 10^{30}$ and $R \approx 696342000$, the gravitational binding energy would be $$U=\frac{3 \times 6.676 \times 10^{-11} \times (1.989 \times 10^{30})^2}{696342000} \approx 1.38 \times 10^{42} \text{ Joules}$$ Which means it would have a velocity of . . . something very large. The relativistic kinetic energy formula gives me something extremely close to $c$. If you want to really shake things up, you have to rip the constituent quarks out of each proton and neutron - which is also impossible. The vast majority of [the proton's rest mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton#Quarks_and_the_mass_of_the_proton) is due not to the rest mass of the quarks, but to their energy. However, the strong nuclear force is a real - uh, tough opponent, so put it one way, and it's the strongest of all the fundamental forces. You can't really beat it, though you can try it. Now do that for all of the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, as well as all the other bodies in the galaxy. However, all of this is still possible - you'd just need a lot of energy. [Answer] No, for all the reasons everyone else has said, plus you'd tear the particle apart and everything around it long before you poured the necessary energy into it. Here's some limits to the energy you can put into a particle. 2 x 10^12 K is the [Hagedorn Temperature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagedorn_temperature) where hadrons (protons, neutrons, electrons) melt into quarks and gluons. So you can't use a proton, it has to be something smaller and more fundamental like a quark. And you have to hope that quarks don't break down into something else. The LHC regularly achieves these energies and no galaxies have yet to be blown apart. 1.41 x 10^32 K is the [Planck Temperature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_temperature) above which our current physical theories break down. At TP the wavelength of the object is the [Planck Length](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length) and we don't know what happens then. Since the energy needed to tear apart a single star is 1.38×10^42 Joules, and you're dealing with a miniscule amount of mass, and you want to tear apart billions of stars in a galaxy, it's fair to say you'll hit the Planck Temperature before you can get enough energy into your particle. Though it would be interesting to see someone do the math. Since you'd need to accelerate your particle to very, very, very close to the speed of light, there's practical issues with how you'd accomplish that acceleration once it's in the 0.9999c region. Simply put, your particle will outrun your attempts to pour more energy into it. It has so much energy that curving its trajectory in a particle accelerator would prove unfeasible. You'd have to make a cosmic railgun on a galactic scale. Again, it would be interesting to see someone run the numbers on this. And pumping too much energy into too small a space has [an annoying tendency to form a black hole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelblitz_%28astrophysics%29). VSauce has a nice video about "absolute hot" called [How Hot Can It Get](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fuHzC9aTik) with many sources in the description. [Answer] No. Any particle at such speed will very heavily interact with anything in the universe, from CMB photons and protons from distant stars to gravitons of gravitation waves, all these particles will be hugely [spectrum-shifted](https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.space.com%2F25732-redshift-blueshift.html&ei=0UayVJjoEM7naLvagKAF&usg=AFQjCNFbfO53LK9HWBvQYrffaVrNRHJ13A&sig2=JIHSNGv-JmiL3FGcHjG95w&bvm=bv.83339334,d.d2s) for the propagating particle. Note that there is a lot of CMB photons around us (they are the most common particles in the universe), but we do not notice them because they have very small energy. The smaller energy, the more photons there is. So the cosmic vacuum as we see it will be a very dense medium from the particle's point of view at such speed. Even passing any particle without direct collision will produce substantial gravitation waves. This means the fired particle will be slowed down, lose its energy to radiation (both photonic and gravitational) and produce a lot of new particles. The interaction will start shortly after the particle leaves the gun, may be some meters apart from it. This will produce a huge explosion with creation of a lot of matter-antimatter pairs and radiation. Some of it will be radiated away into every direction, not necessarily the same as the original one, the rest will produce a huge plasma fireball. This fireball after travelling some thousands years towards the target galaxy will cool down and slow down. And inside it proto-stars, planetoids and may be, black holes will appear. Upon reaching the target galaxy the result will be like a collision of a young galaxy with an older one. Even if the total energy of this bullet would be enough to desintegrate the target galaxy, by the time it reaches the target the most energy will be either radiated away or in the form of stellar bodies, stars, planets and gas, moving at quite moderate speeds. They rather will merge with the target than disintegrate it. [Answer] No, a galaxy is too big and too low-density Consider what you're trying to do. You're trying to disrupt an entire galaxy! (As a note: I am assuming you will not consider "moved the galaxy 4in to the left" to be destroyed. You want to see structural changes) You obviously need to impart kinetic energy into the galaxy. You can only really consider movement which is fast enough to cause serious damage. If your particles get too slow, they wont be disruptive enough to do any real effect to the structures held in place by gravity. As a first attempt, lets try to play a game of billiards. Lets try to hit a planet, so we can send it careening into a sun, and try to make the sun a billiard ball. Right away, we see a huge problem: acceleration. Imparting all of your particle's energy into a planet is not easy. Consider a particle going just shy of the speed of light (rounded up to $c$ just to keep things simple). If that planet were Earth, the particle would go from one side of the earth to the other in 42 milliseconds. To do any real damage with our new billiard ball, it needs to be going pretty darn fast. Lets say we want to make the sun travel 1km/s in a direction of our choosing by hitting it with the Earth. For perspective, that's not even fast enough to escape the moon's gravitational pull, but we'll use these little numbers for now. The sun is 330k times more massive than the earth, so the earth is going to have to be going roughly 330k times faster than our final speed of the sun. We need to impact the earth to make it go 330km/s. This should raise some eyebrows, because that's faster than the speed of light. The only way to add 1km/s to the velocity of the sun requires accelerating the Earth to relativistic speeds (where the kinetic energy effectively adds mass). Now we see the real problem. Lets pretend we were okay with accelerating the earth to JUST 100km/s. No biggie. We only had 42 milliseconds between particle hitting the earth and passing through. That corresponds to 243 kilo-G's of acceleration on the earth. This is an unimaginably high number, and the very imaginable outcome will occur: the particle will break through the Earth, rather than taking the mass with it. This problem occurs whenever we need to accelerate a mass to a very high speed (such as 20% the speed of light). Whenever we try to do this, we need to do it slow. Doing it fast will just cause the moon/planet/sun to shatter, distributing your energy in all directions, bleeding off your momentum. This will occur whether you hit your moon/planet/sun with a particle or another planet. Whenever you need to accelerate other particles to relativistic speeds, you'll find you just bust straight through them. And this is what makes a galaxy invincible to such activity. Until you start sending high velocity black holes through, the galaxy wont even notice. And even they won't have the massive galaxy-shattering effects you are looking for. Consider we believe we have a black hole in the center of our galaxy, and its a reasonable sized one! --- Now what if you really wanted to make this work. What if you were a god which knew where every particle was at all times, so you could cast your relativistic proton like a pool shark, and clear the table? Your best bet would be to start millions of light years away, if not further. Line up your shot to collide with a bunch of intersteller hydrogen. But don't hit each one head on. Your goal should be to create a pressure wave of hydrogen moving forward. You want each collision to perfectly impart half of its momentum to the next particle to build the chain reaction. Take your time, and make sure to chalk the tip of your cue first. Eventually you could create a wave which would act like a tsunami when it finally hit the galaxy, tossing it around like a crab ship in a stormy sea. Of course, this was assuming you could predict everything. If you could do that, you could always just play the lottery. I hear the Betelgeuse pick-70 lottery has a really strong payout! [Answer] Yes. There is no limit to the amount of energy you can put into a mass-bearing particle by accelerating it. No matter how much energy you put in, the particle still won't reach the speed of light, so you can still add more energy. Assuming it will take a finite amount of energy to destroy your target galaxy, this means your idea is theoretically possible. But practically, where would you get all the energy to put into your particle? Of course you can get energy from matter that exists in the universe. But I imagine you would need to consume the matter from very many galaxies in order to get the energy to destroy just one [citation needed]. In which case, it might just be easier to use your existing galaxy-consuming technology instead of the extravagant single-particle method. [Answer] No. It might do some damage initially, but it can't keep doing damage indefinitely. On the first collision, no matter how fast the particle is moving, it will impart energy to the other particles. To break the bonds holding planets and stars together, it will need to convert their potential energy (stored in the bonds) to kinetic energy. Keep in mind that total energy must stay the same, meaning that both particles will now be moving slower than the original particle's speed. This means that your "particle avalanche" will be continuously slowing down as more and more matter is added, and it must slow down rapidly to get other particles moving fast enough to escape a high amount of potential energy (in the bonds). This means that the destructive power of the particles will decrease accordingly, since individual particles will not have enough kinetic energy to continue destroying bonds. Additionally, such high energy collisions tend to do things other than just smash stuff apart. Consider fusion: high energy collisions of hydrogen atoms results in conversion of some matter to light (releasing photons on a wide range of the spectrum) and actually overcoming the necessary energy boundaries to form a nuclear bond. This actually reduces the overall kinetic energy of the matter by converting a lot of the energy into photons and potential energy. So the speed of the particles will not stay high enough to cause that level of destruction on a galactic scale. Even if it were possible, it would be ridiculously impractical. Our galaxy is over 100,000 lightyears across. This means that it would take well over 100,000 years for the damage to propagate across, and probably longer for things to actually settle down. I imagine that natural processes would just begin anew in that time, with new nebulae and stars and planets forming eventually (though not within 100,000 years). And this is one of the smaller galaxies out there. By the time it was done, the inhabitants of the galaxy would have plenty of time to react or possibly retaliate (assuming practical space travel). They might even find a way to stop it. This also ignores the feat of imparting that much energy to a single particle in the first place without blowing yourself up first, which is far less practical than firing off a large number of very high energy particles. [Answer] (Incorrect ideas from kinetic energy formulae edited out. Thanks to comments from HDE 226868 and BartekChom. Remainder applies, however.) I would say that even if you had something with extremely high energy that would hit interstellar dust, it won't create a "beam", because the dust will 1) be destroyed and 2) still have its original velocity component, and go sideways, and so spread out. Moreover, by conservation of energy, I wouldn't think this would add any energy to your attack, though it would spread it out, making it more likely that some of it would hit something. Which pertains to another difficulty: even if you did have a particle that somehow had crazy-high momentum, you might need to somehow aim it very carefully, or it might most likely just cruise through a galaxy without contacting any significant body. Even if you do hit a large star with a ridiculous amount of focused kinetic energy, I know I don't know what that would do. Maybe a good theoretical question for a physicist. Even if you cause some sort of high-energy supernova of the star you hit, I don't know if that would result in a star's worth of also-super-powerful matter flying outwards, or what. Finally, I think the main reason this probably would never happen would have to do with mechanics of how this much energy could be put into one particle, whether the particle wouldn't just change into something else during the process, or decay to something else along the way, and on top of that, how you would ever get that much energy in the first place. ]
[Question] [ In my universe, there is a species from the Homo genus named Homo haematophagus (which means hematophagous human) (they are still humans, just not Homo sapiens) (their scientific name is a reference to the fact that they traditionally have a blood drinking ritual after sacrificing animals, and in a war, they often drank the blood coming from their rivals' wounds). They are commonly called vampires. A weird thing about vampires is that they traditionally live in a patrilinear but matriarchal, unitary, absolute but elective monarchy. They reproduce by having babies, just like anatomically modern humans. In the real world, the vast majority of human societies are both patrilinear and patriarchal. This is the case for the United States of America, the United-Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Fifth French Republic, and Italy. Most (all?) matrilinear and matriarchal human societies are now restricted to some isolated tribes. However, there are human societies that are patriarchal but matrilinear, Jews (any Jewish diaspora, such as Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahi), and Romani people are two famous examples (in the case of Jews, this is because traditionally, only men could be kohanim, and rabbis, but Jewish blood status is determined by the mother). I have never heard about a matriarchal, but patrilinear human society (I however think that pre-colonial Madagascar could be a semi-example: there have been six Monarchs of Madagascar, the two thirds were queens, the other two were kings). So, I wonder how a human society could be matriarchal but patrilinear (men inherit property and titles, but do not actually control it)? [Answer] # Women have religious authority, men have financial authority. Women are seen as more in touch with the gods, and more intelligent and able to make decisions. As such, they tend to rule society and have formal titles and power. It is seen as a sign of extreme poverty for a woman to dirty her hands with work. Women lead the bloodletting rites and the blood drinking rituals and scry the future from the flow of blood. Men are seen as better workers, with their superior physical strength. They manage properties and wealth. It is seen as an action of great desperation to have a man make decisions for the community, because they are not blessed by the gods. As such, properties, and management of properties is controlled by men, but major decisions outside the maintenance of property are by done by women. This is enforced because the religion has a very effective tradition of cold reading people and gossip, and men have long established trades of manufacturing goods. Women have very effective knowledge of what is going on and can read men very well, and so their religious predictions tend to be accurate. Men have a great deal of knowledge of trades from long apprenticeships so any woman who attempts to manage a property will appear incompetent. [Answer] # Because Hybrids from Vampire women are considered Vampires: For functional use, I am assuming you mean women control wealth and power, but the actual ownership of the wealth passes via sons to the control of the son's wife. Mixing subspecies results in the Vampire genes predominating and causing a Vampire phenotype. At the very least, hybrids are considered to be vampires even if hybrids are difficult to distinguish from humans. In that case, the only sure way to know if a child is vampire or not is if the mother was a vampire. So why does this logically mean they inherit patrilineal? Because Vampire women can marry whomever they choose. Vampire men are only allowed to marry Vampires. If a woman marries a rich or noble human, their children (of her body) will be vampires and inherit their estate. With patrilineal inheritance, the vampires can gradually marry into human families and acquire human property and titles. Since the human societies are also patrilineal, there isn't a dispute about inheritance from human families. The vampires can gradually absorb wealth and titles by intermarrying humans. But since vampire men are only allowed to marry vampire women, any inheriting vampire child will be born of a vampire woman. Any potential children resulting from a non-vampire giving birth are then by definition illegitimate and can't inherit. So you would never have the risk of vampire assets passing to a child that might have been sired by a non-vampire. It means that all those inheriting hybrid males are breeding back into vampire stock and will be increasingly vampiric genetically. Further, the inheriting males will be deeper into vampiric culture (having vampiric parents on both sides). * This also means that every inheriting vampire will be raised by a vampire woman and indoctrinated into vampiric culture and traditions. If a woman dies (like in childbirth), care of her children should pass to her mother or siblings. * This also means that functional wealth can be handed around amongst different clans of vampires through arranged marriage. A powerful maternal clan can absorb and unify strength via arranged marriages to allow a woman and her daughters to dynamically move control of wealth around. * Given the risks of childbirth in primitive cultures, strong women might forgo childbirth to prevent risking their lives. But with all inheritance going to the children of vampire women, their opportunities to keep and expand influence via marriage depend on their daughters and at least one son. This incentivizes having children. * Since vampire women can only control wealth by marriage, they must prove themselves to a Matriarch to receive permission to marry the Matriarch's son (whom the Matriarch controls). Strong, driven women can thus be upwardly mobile and gain rank by showing talent and by pleasing their future mother-in-laws. * Logically, a Matriarch should control wealth to be inherited by her son until HER death, not her husband's. This way, a woman isn't going to lose her power and wealth simply because a MAN died. This also keeps daughter-in-laws under one's influence, so an ambitious daughter-in-law isn't going to take the Matriarch's wealth and dump the old woman the moment the Matriarch's husband dies. # Genetics: Sex-based genetic basis would make sense if the vampires can be XY, Xx and XX (where X=vampiric and x=non-vampiric). If the Homozygous females and males suffered some kind of intelligence deficit (semi-monstrous, less intelligent & hyper-aggressive, for example) then XX females would be obvious and XY males always affected. The xY males would not be vampires. Then the logic would be that Xx females are the "functional" vampires, but don't visibly look like vampires, while the XY and XX are more like animalistic predators. You want a system that gives you Xx females, but visible means are not reliable. A male can only have vampire female children (and non-vampire male children), while Xx vampiresses can mate with humans and potentially have XX, Xx, XY or xY (human) offspring. Only human-vampire female hybrids would be both vampires and normal intelligence. Non-vampire males would not be vampires and thus obviously wouldn't inherit in their society. So only the female human-appearing children of a male vampire could be both assured to be vampiric AND fully functional. * If vampires can't reproduce with humans, then the "X" could be a marker that defines possession of vampiric powers. So "non-vampiric" (xx and xY) members of the species can't inherit, while "true vampiric" members can (but only the functional Xx ones can inherit since they are normal-functioning). [Answer] First, a clearing up of terms. Patrilineality / matrilineality is about tracing ancestral descent and blood-kin relations, not necessarily inheritance, though because of the importance of blood-kinship and ancestry in many human cultures it was extremely common for property rights and inheritance to be based on claims of ancestry and kinship. By contrast, patriarchy is the convention where men (fathers, typically) run their household, with everybody living under their roof deferring to them. This is scaled up, so that all those households led by men defer to other men of higher status and greater power, whose metaphorical "household" is the country in which they live. So if vampire society is patrilineal yet matriarchal, it suggests that blood kinship is not important to their system of government. This means there is some other criteria for selecting a monarch besides ancestry, since vampires prefer male ancestry yet select female rulers exclusively. It could be a cultural bias. A pervasive belief that women are better suited to the role, or that men must be kept away from it. It could also be supernatural, involving some magic rite that only women can accomplish, or magic artifacts that only work for women. Probably the simplest reason is that female vampires are much more powerful than male ones, and thus better able lead from a position of strength. This would create the question of why the male bloodline is considered important, however. That could also be solved with supernatural reasons, like the male bloodline determining the strength of female descendants. You need to answer these two questions: 1. What qualities do women possess (or vampires believe them to possess) that makes them the de facto rulers of this society? 2. Why is the male bloodline favored over the female bloodline in this society, if men are excluded from leadership by default? What other qualities exist in the male bloodline, or are believed to exist, that make it the primary determiner of kinship in this society? Consider the full range of options you have to answer these questions, including that they could be the arbitrary result of a single powerful character's decisions. It helps to get away from abstract ideas and consider things from the context of your story. Rather than treating the patrilineal matriarchy as a kind of puzzle in a vacuum, start explaining it by inventing history for it. Then it stops being "matriarchy" and starts being "the reign of queen \_\_\_\_\_" and its impact on all subsequent rulers and how other characters responded to it. [Answer] Only female vampires have that glamour: they can hypnotize humans with their eyes (no make-up needed!). However if they mate with a non-vampire male, the child is not a vampire. If male vampires mate with either vampire or non-vampire women, the child is a vampire. Female vampires mating with male homo sapiens will result in a homo sapiens child. Widescale DNA testing has shown that previous urban legends about inheritance of vampireness were false with the unpleasant results of a large rise in divorce rates due to infidelity. Divorce courts also take a very dim view of constant glamouring of marital partners, generally considering it non-consensual violence. Sex education in our society has extensive lessons in consent, kink and what sort of safe words can be used when your mouth is full of someone else's neck. The sex chromosome of Homo haematophagus is different from that of homo sapiens. Due to convention, the X chromosome of Homo haematophagus is denoted by the letter V instead; thus male vampires have VY for their sex chromosomes and female vampires have VV for their sex chromosomes. Some component of the sperm (or perhaps a different reproductive fluid) converts X chromosomes to V chromosomes. Studies are still ongoing to try to understand this chromosomal change. \| Father \| Mother \| Possibility 1 \| Poss. 2 \| \| --- \| --- \| --- \| --- \| \| XY (HS) \| XX (HS) \| XY (HS) \| XX (HS) \| \| XY (HS) \| VV (HV) \| XY (HS) \| XX (HS) \| \| VY (HV) \| XX (HS) \| VY (HV) \| VV (HV) \| \| VY (HV) \| VV (HV) \| VY (HV) \| VV (HV) \| The patrilineality is a result of genetics: an offspring is a vampire if and only if the father is a vampire. Vampireness is not spread via biting, that's an urban legend. But hey, if getting bit is your kink, far be it from me to kink shame anyone. [Answer] There have been matrilineal societies in humans. There are those in which inheritance goes from a man to his son-in-law. And there are those in which it goes from a man to his nephews. (Which overlap, there are those in which, for instance, property goes to your son-in-law but your nephews inherit your position as some kind of wise man.) Likewise, in your culture, the women inherit from their aunts or their mothers-in-law. Perhaps the culture is to keep your family line strong by choosing good wives to rule it well. They brag that since the queen is chosen by the last queen, they are not subject to the problems of unsuitable heirs. Perhaps the culture is to bind the society together by having your heir be raised by your brother and his wife. And, of course, if different things are inherited differently, they can do both at once. [Answer] ## Dowry systems work both ways Many Western Civilizations have practiced dowry systems where a significant part of the a household's wealth, social status, and lands comes from the father of the bride, even though she has no actual authority over those resources. It is given to the groom on marriage as a way of attracting appropriate suitors, and as a way that the father can ensure that his daughter is well taken care of. Because woman can not own their own estates in most cases of dowry, giving wealth and authority to her husband is the closest thing you can do to giving it to her. This same system could just as easily apply to a matriarchal society. So in your case, the household's lands, title, and belongings all come from the mother of the groom as a way to attract a good bride. The bride accepts this as payment to marry the male, and manages over it as the head of household. [Answer] Tracing inheritance by father's like (patrilinearity) is thought to have emerged with farming, so quite early; there are some exemptions, but still. My suggestion would be to shift the meaning of ruling – i.e., to have a patrilinear society with matriarchy for some reason, not the the matriarchial society with patrilinearity for some reason. With this said... # Women rule behind the scenes The society might be patrilinear, with surnames, inheritance and so on. But the real decision makers are women. Even in the mostly patriarchal social constructs, such as sultan's harem in Ottoman Turkey, the "queen mother" had quite a lot to say. Most of the "inner works" at sultan's court are thought to be the fight of the wives under the carpet for the succession rights of their sons. So, think of stereotypical Italian mothers or stereotypical Asian housewives and exaggerate that a bit. (In a sense it is inverse to another answer here:) All the financial control and the inner decision making do the women. The public front and traditional linage of inheritance is done by men. Basically, in that society the two most important and influential people in man's life are his mother and his wife. I think it's not quite hard to do the usual interpolations from real life. ]

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