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[Question] [ I am wondering if it is possible for whales to fly. I'm considering two different cases. 1. How could we alter earth conditions (thickness, gravity) so that whales could actively fly (without changing anything in the whales)? 2. How could we alter whales (changes in bones, physiology, anatomy, but leaving size and apperance untouched) so that tey could fly normally in Earth conditions? [Answer] High density atmosphere. Whales can do what they do because they are neutrally buoyant. The water they are in buoys up their great mass and so they are weightless. They are not massless and so still must propel themselves around, but the great oppression of gravity is alleviated. If the mass of a thing is less than the mass of the volume of atmosphere it displaces, that thing will float. True for a whale in water, true for a helium balloon in air. Let us assume whale-like whales, not some hydrogen balloon creatures which although awesome would be unwhalelike. [Venus has a high pressure atmosphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus) - 93 bar so about 93x our atmospheric pressure. But that still yields gas only about 5% the density of water so water things would not float in the gas. What about Jupiter? Gas giant! There is some point in the atmosphere where it would be dense enough for whales to float? Yes, but apparently it is so hot at that depth that the whale would get cooked. This is covered in this xkcd. <https://what-if.xkcd.com/138/> and at some depth in this WB stack answer. [Is a moon floating on the atmosphere of a gas giant possible?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/81177/is-a-moon-floating-on-the-atmosphere-of-a-gas-giant-possible) But you want flying whales and you shall have them! The problem with Jupiter is that its atmosphere is made of light stuff - hydrogen and helium. You really need to compress that stuff to make it as dense as water. Venus is better with CO2 atmosphere. The trick is to make an atmosphere out of a very dense gas. I once proposed that a bubble of xenon at sufficient depth under the ocean would be denser than the water, and so exclude the water which would float on top. from <http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Xenon_20Breathers> > > With every doubling of pressure, the weight of a given volume of gas > doubles. The weight of a volume of water does not change with > pressure. My math: 1 atm increase with 10 meters depth 1 liter H2O = > 100 gm 22.4 liters water = 2240 gm 22.4 liters xenon at 1 atm = 52 gm > 52x = 2240 x = 2240/52 = 43 atm or 430 meters So I figure that at 431 > meters depth, a bubble of xenon will sink. Therefore a permanent > subsea habitat could be made below 431 meters just by pumping a hole > in the sea floor full of xenon. The xenon will not bubble out. You > could access it by walking down some stairs. > > > 430 meters below the ocean is not some unworldly life-destroying pressure. Lots of things live down there and much deeper. And to make it wilder, in your atmosphere you could include radon - yes it is radioactive but life adapts and it is even denser than xenon. Lo - your flying whale! It lives in an atmosphere of very heavy noble gases. It filter feeds on the flying radioautotrophs which get their energy harnessing the radiation of atmospheric radon . --- For the skeptics - Cody of Cody's lab demonstrated the above described principle, floating a bubble of water on compressed xenon. [Can You Float a Liquid on a Gas?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsP4yMY-a6U) [![cody floats water on xenon](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fTYXo.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fTYXo.jpg) [Cody also breathes some xenon](https://youtu.be/rd5j8mG24H4?t=422). His comment - "xenon hits you hard!". But your whales would have excellently low whale songs. [Answer] The short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is nooooooooooooo. Things fly because they do one of these two things: * They shove down enough air, and fast enough, to essentially push off it and gain some altitude for long enough to let them shove again. Wings and propellers do this. * They are themselves lighter than air, which means they will float on it. Balloons do this. For the first strategy, you would have to attach something to the whale to get it to fly. Massive wings won't cut it; whales are just too heavy and too dense. They have a thick layer of blubber, whereas birds are nimble. Putting air pockets in the whale is not enough either, the creature itself is still too large. Larger flyers need exponentially bigger wings. The biggest flying dinosaurs were almost entirely wing, and even they could not lift off themselves: they would have to climb in a tree and glide. To make a regular whale lighter than air, you would need a balloon many, many times larger than the whale. Think: the size of a stadium. You would barely see the creature. It does not matter whether you fill that balloon with helium, hydrogen or a pure vacuum, it's not nearly enough. Both of these solutions would leave the resultant creature looking little like a whale. And altering the planet? Making air dense enough for a whale to swim through, means essentially raising the water level, since a whale was designed to swim through water, not any gas. Gases are all far, far less dense than water. Magic is your only bet. That, or a stash of [negative mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass), which is so theoretical it is essentially magic. [Answer] I'll be looking primarily at the second option. > > How could we alter whales? > > > There's some links & resources in my answer to [Hydrogen Dragons](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/163094/49261) we can perhaps repurpose. > > In particular : A cubic foot of hydrogen lifts around 30.8 grams ([68 lbs per 1,000 cubic feet](https://www.airships.net/helium-hydrogen-airships/)) > > > And I'll be looking at this in relation to the blue whale which is up to [30 m long](https://wildlifetrip.org/largest-whale-species-on-the-planet/). [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/I9xUH.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/I9xUH.png) We've dimensions for the blue whale [here](https://www.dimensions.guide/element/blue-whale) which suggest we can use a height of maybe 4.5 m for that 30 m length & it's roughly tubular so we can extrapolate that for the width a well, a bit rough & ready perhaps but it'll do for now. The animal tapers a little at the rear & front so I'll go with 4 m x 4 m x 30 m, that gives us a volume of 480 cubic metres. If we cut that to 440 cubic metres to allow for actual body mass (this whale dirigibles skin organs & other structures etc. then that's 15538.5 cubic feet of gas with a lifting capacity of 1056.62 pounds leaving you with 1412.59 cubic feet for the non gas volume (the organs & bones) of the animal. You might find [this](https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1NHXL_enGB711GB711&sxsrf=ALeKk03Y2PKE859ZFDxgTXscoQJhYGgb0Q%3A1584294541899&ei=jWpuXqDBNpeU8gLh1rLICw&q=480%20cubic%20metres%20in%20cubic%20feet&oq=480%20cubic%20metres%20in%20cubic%20feet&gs_l=psy-ab.3..33i22i29i30l2.88555.98121..99071...0.1..0.139.3273.2j26......0....2j1..gws-wiz.......0i71j0i273j0i67j0j0i22i30j0i13i30j0i8i13i30j33i160.tcDBHCycC94&ved=0ahUKEwjgu46LhZ3oAhUXilwKHWGrDLkQ4dUDCAs&uact=5) useful for the conversions from cubic metres to cubic feet. For reference : 1. [Density of meat](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0023643801907625) 1.0 g/cm3 or thereabouts. 2. [Density of bone](https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_difference_between_trabecular_bone_mineral_density_and_cortical_bone_mineral_density_in_osteoporosis) 1.9 g/cm3 or thereabouts. 3. [Bone to meat ratio](https://perfectlyrawsome.com/raw-feeding-knowledgebase/bone-content-in-raw-meaty-bones/) Only one with 'whole' body % is rabbit so use that (28% bone / 72% meat). > > Assumption : the given bone / meat ratio is by weight not volume, correct me if that's wrong. > > > So we've given ourselves 1056.62 pounds of weight that volume of hydrogen can lift & by the ratio above that's 295.85 pounds of bone & 760.76 pounds of flesh & muscle. [Pound to gram conversion](https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1NHXL_enGB711GB711&sxsrf=ALeKk032JQjnPikNILQbAcd8m1AzSPuKpg%3A1584307515874&ei=O51uXsL9NIzBgAaOu49I&q=295.85304%20pounds%20in%20grams&oq=295.85304%20pounds%20in%20grams&gs_l=psy-ab.3...252752.255657..256488...0.0..0.97.1054.12......0....2j1..gws-wiz.......35i39j33i21.1tn6ulvrSQM&ved=0ahUKEwiCh8u1tZ3oAhWMIMAKHY7dAwkQ4dUDCAs&uact=5) So that's Bone : 134196.68 grams of bone / 1.9 = 70629.83 cm3 Meat : 345077.18 grams of meat / 1 = 345077.18 cm3 Total = 415707.01 cm3, [which is 41.57 cubic metres](https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1NHXL_enGB711GB711&sxsrf=ALeKk00HX7V_uu4uSCDzxZG2BWrTiJheNw%3A1584308318062&ei=XqBuXve0A5i4gAaDnoII&q=415707.013632%20centimetres%20squared%20in%20metres%20squared&oq=415707.013632%20centimetres%20squared%20in%20metres%20squared&gs_l=psy-ab.3...4377.9205..10773...0.0..0.280.2568.15j6j2......0....1..gws-wiz.......35i39j33i10.1YlEq0j_1hM&ved=0ahUKEwj324y0uJ3oAhUYHMAKHQOPAAEQ4dUDCAs&uact=5). > > Which for a rough concept outline is close enough to the 40 cubic metres we allowed for this. > > > In summary / So far. What we have is a 30 m long 4 m wide 4 m deep cuboid (I was lazy should have done it as a tube, but I can't be bothered to go back & redo it so just go with it) consisting of around 1056.62 pounds ([479.27 kilo](https://www.google.com/search?q=1056.618%20poundskg&rlz=1C1NHXL_enGB711GB711&oq=1056.618%20poundskg&aqs=chrome..69i57.4262j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) or [0.53 US ton](https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1NHXL_enGB711GB711&sxsrf=ALeKk02OTcgPc-NjxcjZP7MHc5HYKvqZWg:1584325314002&q=1056.618%20pounds%20tons&spell=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi6xrLc953oAhWvQkEAHbrJBtsQBSgAegQIARAq)) of skin, flesh, bone & organs, all wrapped around 440 m3 of hydrogen. That gives us a surface area of 512 m2 that we have to stretch 41.57 m3 of organic animal over. If we squash our 40 m3 of flesh & bone into a 10x4x1 m cuboid (40 m3) & cut it into 10 m high by 4 m wide (40 m2) slices then 12.8 of them are needed to cover this surface & they'll be 7.81 cm thick. > > Dang! suddenly this isn't sounding too plausible, never mind, just hang on & bear with me. > > > So let's halve that & assume an average skin (which may not be all 'skin') thickness of 3.9 cm, which will leave us with with 20 m3 of flesh & bone to play with for other organs & structures. > > OK we can probably do this, but your whale is going to be a lot more fragile than a real whale. > > > What this means is you're whale can look more or less exactly like a whale & I can imagine it feeding on insect swarms & particulates in the air much as a whale in the ocean feeds on krill. But the actual meat & bone by volume will be vastly decreased & it's liable to wallow through the air rather than fly & have difficulty flying against strong winds (in fact it probably can't). Given the gas used for lift a flaming arrow may produce spectacular results if it pierces the skin. [Answer] Unfortunately, the laws of physics do not work in your favor here. > > 1. How could we alter earth conditions (thickness, gravity) so that whales could fly actively (without changing anything in the animal)? > > > Keeping something with the mass and dimensions of even a small whale species in the air AND alive without external support is probably impossible no matter what the environment is. At minimum, it would require drastically increased air density and drastically decreased gravity compared to what is found on Earth. The difficulty increases with the size of the whale, because larger whales are so massive that their bodies are unable to support their own weight without support from buoyant forces in water. You can't only change the gravity, because moving through air and water is very different and unmodified whales wouldn't be able to control their movement at normal atmospheric densities (compare the flying/swimming motions of birds and fish, or the designs of airplane and boat propellers). Increasing the air density would introduce its own problems, however. You would need to change the atmospheric composition as well, because pretty much every breathable gas becomes narcotic and/or toxic at high pressures - see [inert gas narcosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_narcosis) and [oxygen toxicity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity). It is also questionable if lungs designed to breath air at sea level densities would be able to handle air at densities that allow swimming, though deep-diving whales probably are best-adapted to handle these last two problems as they already deal with extreme deep-sea pressures. > > 2. How could we alter whales (change bones, physiology, anatomy, but leave size and appearance) so that they could fly in normally earth conditions? > > > This is much more doable in many ways, though it does still run into the issue that whales are not designed to achieve meaningful thrust and maneuverability in air. But we'll set that aside for the moment. To make something the size and shape of a whale stay in the air unassisted, you need to make it a balloon (more specifically, an [aerostat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerostat)). In this case, you want to go as big as possible because of the [square-cube law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law): if you double something's size, its surface area is multiplied by four while its volume is multiplied by eight. The mass of a balloon depends on its surface area, while its lifting power depends on its volume, so compared to a one-foot-diameter balloon, a two-foot-diameter balloon weighs four times as much but can lift eight times the total mass of balloon-and-payload. For a whale-blimp, the balloon is its skin and the payload is the rest of its organs. Everything in the whale needs to be as small and lightweight as possible, with the majority of its body containing only its lifting gas. That means minimal skeleton, minimal muscles, no blubber, and so on. Getting back to the question of movement, you still can't swim through air and eliminating most of the muscles will do nothing to help with that. Movement will need to instead rely primarily on adjusting buoyancy to rise or sink into different winds like hot air balloons do, using the tail and flippers as small rudders for a (tiny) bit of extra control. [Answer] Consider something that can fly, which has about the same mass and generally unaerodynamic shape as a small whale. For example a Robinson R44 helicopter. (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_R44>) Sp how do we have to modify the whale to make it perform the same way? We don't necessarily need rotor blades, if the whale can produce a continuous vertical air jet somehow. But we do need a lot of energy. An R44 burns about 1 liter of gasoline per minute to keep itself airborne, and gasoline is a very energy-dense fuel. So you need to change the metabolism of the whale to do something similar, and also provide it with a suitable "food source". [Answer] I can ask how superman flies through the air and how Superman propels himself though outer space. Possibly Superman somehow has the power to generate artificial gravity fields to make himself "fall" toward where he wants to go. And if some mad scientist inserts some sort of gravity control machines or organs into whales, whales might be intelligent enough to be taught and/or learn by themselves how to control that power and fly safely. After all there is a probability, however large or small, that some or all cetaceans may be as intelligent as humans and thus count as people, in real life. And every other way that any science fictional character has "flown" though air or outer space without a vehicle or obvious mechanical propulsion in any science fiction story, novel, or comic, could theoretically be adapted for use by whales with approximately as much or as little plausibility as in the original story, novel, or comic. ]
[Question] [ A major plot point for my story is the Protagonist stumbling upon a planet that was purposely hidden from the rest of the galaxy (at the edge of the galaxy) as it's being used by high level government officials to conduct a secret trade of a commodity that only this planet has and that uses the planet's population to harvest. It was recently pointed out to me that my original idea (IE. a network of jammers) wouldn't meet the science of being able to hide a planet from star maps / ship scanners / etc. So the question is: What are some plausible ways for an government agency to hide a planet from normal travelers / star maps / sensors / etc.? Based on comments so far, I've been thinking...would there be a way to make the planet look like a black hole from any sensors/scans that would fool people from wanting to go to that area of space? (Thanks in advance for your consideration of this question. I greatly appreciate the feedback provided already. Thanks) [Answer] It has a secret identity. The universe is full of crappy planets that no-one would want to visit. Lava worlds. Stinking gas giants. Acid blasting Venuses. Atmosphereless Mercury hellscapes. Your planet is just another one of these - not a place for life of any kind, or machines, or anything but a note in the charts. Or so the story goes. But if for some reason you orbit it, you may realize that what you see does not match what is listed for this planet in this system. The residents of the planet maintain the secret identity by limiting or preventing radio transmissions, artificial lights, or anything else that might at a distance give away the fact that there is more to this planet than the star charts state. [Answer] You could move it away from any star, making it a [rogue planet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet). Basically, any planet near a star is detectable through a few different means like eclipsing, redshift of the star caused by the planet's mass, and simply viewing the planet using the star's light if close enough. If your planet isn't near any star, then it will probably be completely undetectable except for when it eclipses a star from the observer's POV, and if it's at the edge of the galaxy that will rarely/never occur. The downside of course is that your planet is perpetually in the dark and has a frozen surface. [Answer] It is an icy moon with a subsurface ocean Our solar system has several moons orbiting gas giants which are though to have rather large subsurface oceans under a thick layer of ice. The Saturnian moons Dione, Titan and Enceladus are thought to have subsurface oceans, and the same is true for the three big Jovian moons Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Even Pluto may have a subsurface ocean. Such moons need not be near any star, as heat is generated through tidal forces with the host Gas giant. In the case of Pluto, the heat comes from interaction with its closely orbiting moon Charon. The planet/moon system could be too far out in a solar system to be thought worth examining closely (or it could be a rogue planet/moon), and superfical examination of the moon would not reveal any life benath the ice shell. It is possible that intelligent life could develop on such a moon (I wrote an [article about that](http://www.scenariomagazine.com/moons-with-subsurface-oceans/) three years ago). The extreme pressure at the bottom of the ocean may produce some rare crystal or whatever that can't be found elsewhere, or maybe the lifeforms create some very complex organic substance that can't be replicated (like the spice melange in Dune). Elevators could be drilled through the ice froma camouflaged surface station for trade. People going down would have to wear a very efficient high-pressure suit, or robots are handling the trade. [Answer] You do not really need to. All you really want is that nobody visits the system your planet is in. The system is far away so going there requires lots of money and far enough from trade routes that even smugglers and pirates have no reason to go that far from authority. The area of space is also distant from possible assistance and thus going anywhere near your system requires a permit from the government for the specific locations you plan to visit at specific times and activities you plan to perform. So that help can find you, if something goes wrong, of course. Your government has reserved the area for its future expansion and other nearby governments have accepted that claim, at least provisionally, so that they do not visit the area without asking your permission and providing the necessary documentation of planned activity. They also accept your authority to enforce those rules. You already provided the full survey data on the system for general access. It is fully accurate and gives no excuse to think something is wrong or interesting with the system and go see for yourself. Admittedly it does omit certain peculiar details about one of the planets but if the substance really is unique to the planet, nobody can deduce its existence from the public data on the system. No reason to fabricate lies that some routine check might discover and label as "invalid, send someone to get valid data". [Answer] You can't. Planet will have mass. Mass will create gravitational lens. From all angles. How this was told in some movie "there is nothing there but all the data point that there should be something". So you don't hide it. Just don't. Put a big sign on it "We have poisonus snakes, spiders that eat snakes, sharks that eat spiders. Also there is no water. This planet is made out of hydrogen. But hey, if you're stupid enough you can come here. Please sign this weaver we have full rights to sell movies about how stupid you were to come here and die". Make it Dallol fields of planets. And of course, control scientist that go there. Because it's very dangerous. Then murder them, send some fake results in line with your story and fake their death as planet visit related. [Answer] > > A major plot point for my story is the Protagonist stumbling upon a planet that was purposely hidden from the rest of the galaxy (at the edge of the galaxy) > > > This reminds me of the Isaac Asimov novel The Stars, Like Dust, where at one point a character points out that the odds of arriving near an inhabited star after doing a blind jump is astronomical - I don't recall the exact number offhand but it's something like 250,000,000,000,000 to 1. Of course, if you're blind jumping around stars, the odds are slightly better, but still very, very low - there's an estimate 250,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way, after all. Now, since the rather astronomical numbers of space travel aren't really easy to wrap a head around, it's easy to handwave numbers, but it'd still be better if you didn't. Which means there should be a reason that the protagonist knows about the planet, but also a reason that no one wants to go there. Which means that the government isn't hiding this planet by denying all knowledge, but rather they're hiding this planet using some kind of a trick to make people not want to go there. And the answer should be simple enough - Area 51. Area 51 is an American military installation which serves as an experimental test facility for the United States Air Force. It's also the location which serves as the basis for several conspiracy theories of government cover-ups and UFO landings. (There was also a minor event to storm Area 51 a while back). But everyone, of course, knows that even if there was secrets, they wouldn't be in Area 51, because only crackpots believe in Area 51. Which, ironically, makes Area 51 the best place to store UFO coverups, if they did exist. So what if there was a galaxy-spanning Empire which needed to hide things on a planet, but it was impossible to conceal that they were doing things involving the planet. They could hide whatever it was they were doing, of course, but they couldn't hide that they were involved with the planet. It would seem that the optimal strategy would be disinformation - turn that planet into an 'Area 51' equivalent - the official story is that it's a test planet for the Imperial Navy. Sure, there are crackpots who believe that the Navy is up to something even more top secret there - but those are the crackpots and anyone smart enough to have a ship that can travel through hyperspace knows better than that, not to mention that the planet is sufficiently guarded (because it's a military facility). In short, you now have an excuse for a military presence to guard the base and a justification for any weird rumors - they'll just be written off as crackpots. And, all the while, of course, the Empire will be throwing out false information about a completely fictitious planet in a completely fictitious star system which is there actual base - no coordinates, of course, but supplies being marked 'to Destination X', fake invoices, the works. [Answer] Make your planet hard to spot, and uninteresting. Play the odds. # There's a lot of planets. The Milky Way is estimated to have over 100 billion stars each with at least one planet. If you had 1000 ships each visiting a star per day it would take 275,000 years to visit them all. # Space is big. Planets are not. Space is really, really, really, astonishingly, mind-bogglingly big. On that scale planets are not. 99.9% of the mass of a solar system is in its star, that 0.1% is left over for planets. Rocky, Earth-like planets are particularly small. We live a small crumb of the universe; a peculuarly wet and warm and stable crumb, but a crumb. # Planets are hard to see. Planets emit no light of their own, only reflected starlight. Currently we spot planets which are very large and/or very close to their star. Large, close planets [make their star wobble just a little bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanets#Radial_velocity), and we can see that if the wobble is large enough. Or, if their orbit happens to be in line with the Earth, [we can see them as they pass in front of the star](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_method) *if we happen to be looking just then*. Even if spotted, someone or something then has to pay particular attention to it out of the 100 billion planets. # Your "secret" planet. Even with advanced technology, the fundamentals remain: out of the hundreds of billions of planets, someone has to spot and take an interest in your planet. Don't give them a reason. Pick an area far away from civilization centers which would have good star-scanning capability. Perhaps on the opposite side of the galactic center. In that area choose a massive star with a large [habitable zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone) and nothing of particular interest in the system. Pick an uninteresting rocky planet at the far edge of the zone. Such a small, far away planet will not cause its star to wobble, nor will it be likely to be caught in a transient. This minimizes the chances it will be spotted at all. Control your emissions to avoid any tell-tale traces of human activity in the atmosphere which might suggest that it's occupied. Excessive amounts of methane, short-lived radioactive material, and so on. That's about it. Depending on your technological level, it's not necessary to hide underground, or avoid having satellites in orbit, or otherwise mask your surface and orbital activities. They can't be detected from a distance, and there's no reason for anyone to visit for an up close look. # Have a cover story. Just in case anyone does visit, have a cover story and a reason to keep yourself a secret. You're an independent, quasi-legal mining operation and you'll pay handsomely (but not too handsomely) if the interloper would kindly keep quiet about their operation. After they leave and their ship is well away from your planet, maybe their ship has an "accident". > > ...would there be a way to make the planet look like a black hole from any sensors/scans that would fool people from wanting to go to that area of space? > > > Not without getting into absurd technology. Unlike in the movies, black holes aren't particularly any more dangerous to get near than any other object of a similar mass. If a star turns into a black hole you don't suddenly get sucked in, it has the same gravity as before. Presuming you can't change the mass/gravitational pull of the planet, it has to be a planetary mass black hole with the same gravity as a planet. Which is to say not much on an astronomical scale. It would pose no danger to anyone entering the system. Then there's replicating the key aspects of a black hole: [gravitational lensing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens) and the event horizon. [A black hole the mass of the Earth would have an event horizon of about 1 cm](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=black+hole+1+earth+mass) meaning any light within 1 cm cannot escape. Light which gets close will be bent. If you can replicate this, you effectively have planetary cloaking technology. Very large black holes may have [accretion discs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disk). If large and violent enough this might be something space-farers want to stay away from, but again, this is a tiny black hole. [Answer] Dyson Sphere around the planet with a cloaking surface on the exterior (vanta-black and EM spectrum absorbing materials) [Answer] So ... hiding a planet. Let's break the strategy into three steps: 1. Hide the Planet. Blame a random guy if it is ever found lost 2. Make the area uninteresting. Do your best to make sure that nobody wants to go there 3. Hide from the sensors. Make sure that a casual search by people that do find it does not give you away. ### There is no Planet Spoon You are a government agency. This means that you should be the official point of call for the star charts of your region of space. As such, your start charts do not mention the planet. The star is there, it is too large to deny its existence, but the planet that surrounds it is not. Blame somebody for losing the planet should incontrovertible evidence of it existing is ever found. If you cannot just redact the planet, then as a government agency you admit its existence but lie about its statistics. The key is to keep the numbers accurate to explain the physics there but make the changes a place that people do not want to go to. This leads to ... ### Do Not Go Over There This planet is at the edge of the galaxy. Odds are this is already a place that people do not want to flock to in drove unless there is a good reason for it. Your agency's job is to keep it that way. Keep it off of the standard trade routes and do not invest much (or allow much investing) in the infrastructure over there. It's already likely far enough away that no company will find profit there unless FTL is stupid cheap, and all surveys say that there is nothing interesting over there -- see above. In addition, play up the relative lawlessness of the galactic frontier. With nothing of interest there, that means little in security forces over there should something go wrong. Space Police will be in shorter supply over there since there is nothing to really watch over. Lastly, don't let your runs to this planet be known. People going somewhere that uninteresting is interesting in itself. But you are a government agency, so you should be able to hide these trips within another group or bucket so far that it would take conspicuous digging to find them. Alternatively, a separate agency ostensibly set up for outer galaxy surveillance and protection has a hidden second job. Refueling at a planetless star would be better than sucking the fuel out of one with life, right? ### Sensored! Sensors are the problem. A strong enough sensor array will bust the case wide open faster than a cunning plan by the Scooby Doo Gang after Velma finds the last clue. It can be assumed that with appropriate foresight and preparation, the groups that would bring the best sensors are deterred by the first and second points. In short, they should have no reason to go there in the first place. The good sensors need to be close by to find out out anything deep and probing. This means, that you really need to fool the casual scans of a planet and any scans that might indicate that people want to land for whatever reason. Hiding your operations underground is a good first step. Casual scans will be thwarted by enough natural planet between them and you as well as by a lack of visual infrastructure on the surface. Not having anything orbiting the planet or system outside whatever standard things that identifies the owner of the system as your government is a good second step. Should they land, then do not have the entire planet terraformed into something that clearly indicates things are here where they shouldn't be. Keep the planet looking as natural as possible and don't provide any reason for people to probe deeper than casually. If the planet has native residents, let them be. A lush planet missing half an ecosystem is a red flag to anybody that catches onto that detail. This is obviously not a foolproof plan, but the stragglers that find something out can be ... dealt with. Those that find the place are put to work in resource acquisition. Also saves money on HR costs -- your workers are legally dead so who are they going to tell? [Answer] Hide in plain site [pun intended]. Where is the Second Foundation located? The real problem with your premise is that of moving the goods. Just as with embezzlers on Earth today, it's relatively easy to disguise whatever is being done to collect the special sauce; it's much harder to ship it off-planet without a stack of incoming and outgoing cargo ships. That's what you need to figure out how to hid. [Answer] If you do not really care about the scientific accuracy of your story, there can be some generator that can transfer the planet into slipstream space, or the Star Wars equivalent of hyperspace. Perhaps your protagonist got there by some quirk in the space-time continuum. Let your imagination fly! If you are not bound by the shackles of reality, anything can be possible. ]
[Question] [ Am I correct in assuming that an interplanetary fighter craft using existing technology, that functions exclusively in the vacuum of space, could be made inherently lighter, more maneuverable, more fuel efficient, needing to carry less fuel, and better armed, than such a craft that could function both in a vacuum and enter an atmosphere as well as make terrestrial landings? [Answer] Yes. It can be lighter and more nimble than a multi-purpose aerospace fighter. It can also be heavier and more nimble than a multi-purpose aerospace fighter. 1 - it doesn't need flight control surfaces / airfoils or their hydraulic and electrical control systems to fly in-atmosphere. Instead it just needs strategically placed RCS thrusters and their control systems / fuel supply (hydrazine, perhaps?). The only limitation to how fast you can rotate the frame with those thrusters is what the pilot and the components can withstand. 1A - Without the need for external protrusions (wings, stabilizers), you would be free to engineer a much stealthier shape than modern fighters. It might resemble a kind of abstract oblong egg shape with odd geometry? This means recessed weapons/sensors and internal bomb / missile bays, distributed antennas and cameras, etc.. maybe less heat efficient? Using today's stealth technology, freed from the need for wings you could engineer something basicaly invisible to radar. It wouldn't be missile bait if you can't aquire the target. 3 - It doesn't need re-entry ablative heat shielding for atmospheric interface. By definition this will free up more mass for payload, fuel or other mission systems. It's probably still a good idea to have some heat shielding, just incase it needs to aerobrake in some planetary body's upper atmosphere. It's possible you can also engineer a kind of armor that diffuses certain wavelenths of light, to add resistance to laser attack and reduce observability in other wavelenghts like Infrared. [Answer] Basically yes. If you substantially decrease the scope of a vehicle, you typically can design it to be much better at what's still in scope. In particular, landing and taking of is a monumental challenge. Taking off takes somewhere around 8 km/s of delta-V. That is a tremendous amount of fuel, which is why rockets are so big. There's effort to try to make usable air-breathers which fly part of the way before turning into a rocket, but nothing has been developed yet. Landing is also quite a feat. I don't believe we've ever had a spacecraft which didn't need to go for a complete checkup before being cleared to take off again. Decelerating from orbital speeds by dumping heat into the atmosphere is a brutal exercise. We typically rely on ablative materials and replace them as neccesary. As for the rest of it, however, that depends entirely on the specs for what a craft has to do during a fight. A Falcon 9 can pull just under 6g. If your craft needs to be able to maneuver at 6g with worse vibe requirements, you may actually need more structure than our modern rockets. Then again, there's also the question of interplanetary multi-month or multi-year missions in a vehicle that's small enough to be called a "fighter." [Answer] Yes. There many reasons in other answers, but I want to point out the major one: You can travel to Mars and back (low orbit - low orbit) for the same amount of fuel as just to get to low Earth orbit, and still have some spare to get to the Moon orbit. Interplanatery transition requier much less energy, than jumping out of gravity well. [Answer] Space is not an ocean, and there is no inherent need for "fighters". We use fighters on aircraft carriers because we are dealing with two different fluid mediums, but in space, the only advantage of a larger vehicle is more mass or volume. A "space fighter" can effectively do away with the "spacecraft" altogether. the 1980 era "Brilliant Pebble" interceptor simply orbited in a "lifejacket". [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/A5It8.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/A5It8.jpg) 1980 era Brilliant Pebble concept For interplanetary operations, the Brilliant Pebble can be launched in an interplanetary orbit via a mass driver, or carried by a missile bus. Since the [Rocket Equation](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/rocket/rktpow.html) can be summarized by saying "every gram counts", every effort to reduce the mass of the space vehicle results in increased performance. So you are not going to see some variation of an F-16, a "Star Fury" from Bablyon 5 or even a LEM with missile racks, but an unromantic missile bus at best, or a swarm of individual Brilliant Pebbles on an interplanetary orbit at worst. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fYw8a.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/fYw8a.jpg) Not this [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cC9JS.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/cC9JS.jpg) Not this [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/acr40.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/acr40.jpg) Not this But this: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FNbve.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FNbve.jpg) So for interplanetary warships in general, minimal mass is what is needed, and throwing small missile busses into interplanetary orbits via mass drivers, or towing them with light-sails is the unromantic but most realistic way to approach space warfare. [Answer] The structural strength of the spaceframe -- airframe equivalent spacecraft -- would need to handle as much G-force as the human pilot --- or robotic pilot -- could tolerate. And if we start with human pilots in modern aircraft then that exceeds the one g of our gravity well. The surface of an interplanetary fighter that wasn't designed to enter an atmosphere would only need to be armored to protect key components from weapons fire. If the craft needed to operate in our atmosphere it would need to contend with air turbulence and would need to be streamlined to mitigate damage when transiting through atmospheres at high speeds. So, it might be a little bit heavier since it would require more metal around it or more surface area covered with something. But, there seem to be applications of plasmas to high-speed aircraft to mitigate things like surface resistance and turbulence and sonic booms, so maybe those technologies could use electrical forces to generate a plasma surrounding the spacecraft to reduce the aerodynamic forces acting on the spacecraft. [Answer] Depends on how you envision them performing in each environment: Space does not reduce G-force of acceleration and turning; so, you'll need to build your fighter on a solid structure either way so you don't tear yourself apart. Although a space fighter does not fly in an atmosphere, it may need some significant armor to protect against point defenses, solar radiation, and/or micro-meteors. So unless your military doctrine is specifically ultra-light armor, then you should be able to survive in atmosphere without any extra weight for survivability. Fuel may be a non-issue if you are future tech enough. An antimatter or cold-fusion reactor would be efficient enough that you would not need a significant fuel to mass for planetary takeoff and landing as long as you have a good energy based propulsion system to go with it. As for flight, a space fighter does not inherently need wings, but dissipating heat in space is hard. Installing your thrusters on wing like pylons to keep too much heat from building in your delicate central systems and cockpit could be necessary. So, making those pylons multi-role may not be a big sacrifice. If you wish to largely ignore the heatsink issue, you could also design your fighter with vtol type propulsion so it does not need aerodynamic lift to fly, instead, it's more like a high performance helicopter when in atmosphere. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Eprg0.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Eprg0.png) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9VxuQ.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9VxuQ.png) [Answer] None of the answers above really address the realistic shape of fighting spacecraft. Some of them are just to aerodynamic. Spacecraft depend on thrust vectoring to get around and some can move using a reaction wheel. The shape of the space craft would be symmetrical or pod like with the ability to maximize the maneuverability from all angle. Dog fights would greatly differ in space and advantage would be to ability to turn the trajectory of the spacecraft over if they are shooting unguided projectiles. Space craft this complex would have some kind of smart missile and the ability to decoy would also play a big part. Though the pictures imaginative and borrowed the space craft would be very ugly and note aerodynamic. The space craft could be aerodynamic but less efficient in space per once. ]
[Question] [ I am toying with an idea which requires a human to be stuck in a dark box for the rest of their life. They receive regular exercise of the arms and legs, air, food and water and their bodily functions are taken care of by the box. The only contact they have to the outside world is through a pair of binoculars and hearing trumpets. They have contact with humans, but cannot respond. How long can someone survive with only movement, sight and hearing of the outside world, air, food and water? [Answer] On a sustainable diet, theoretically they would live a semi normal life expectancy. Physiologically, all of their needs would be met, however psychologically, this is a different story. By nature, humans are social creatures who depend on social interaction. If a person was never to have seen the outside world, they would take on an Allegory of the Cave mindset, believing that this is the world. However, in the description that you have provided, they would have been placed here after an understanding of social structure and daily function. Even if they did not kill themselves, I believe that even the strongest people would develop psychological disorders. An example of this would be like the movie Cast Away, where Tom Hanks has conversations with the Wilson Volleyball. They may hallucinate, have delusions, and could potentially even develop Dissociative Identity Disorder. Another theory would be that this human may potentially lose the will to live. They may not even have ideas of killing themselves, but would eventually wither and cease to live through a lack of humanity. The brain is a powerful thing, and as mentioned before, social interaction is imperative to human survival. What you describe is actually in use today, although not for use of punishment. Sensory deprivation tanks are used for relaxation, although studies have found that even short periods of time can produce hallucinations in individuals, equally across those who are prone to hallucinations and those who are not. I hope this answered your questions about the effects your tank would have on an individual. [Answer] I would say until they sucessfully commit suicide, through refusal to eat or drink, due to the psycohlogical torture. It sounds rather horrific. But given they do not go insane and all of their physical needs are taken care or, water, air, food, waste removal etc... then potentially as long as most other humans, potentially longer than average as they may be less likely to encounter pathogens, and be run over by a car or other accident. I think the answers to this question support my point on insanity: [How long can a human stand to be underground?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/141639/how-long-can-a-human-stand-to-be-underground?rq=1) [Answer] ## Rapid onset of insanity - hallucinations at least A complete lack of stimulus (such as you're talking about here) fairly readily causes hallucinations. This is the [Ganzfeld effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect) and here's a good ten-minute YouTube [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be7WtvCmpJo) where some dudes try it out and report utterly fantastic results. This, in like half an hour. I don't know what would happen to someone subject to these conditions indefinitely; I'm not a mental health professional. But if hallucinations set in in less than an hour, I am pretty sure the victim of this torture (because it is torture) would be a complete mess after (say) a year. [Answer] Until they die of natural causes (such as a strong disease or old age). In other words, their life expectancy does not change, since they have all they need. I am unsure as to whether the likelihood of infection increases, due to the cramped, moist environment, or whether it decreases, due to limited contact with the outside world and a semi-sterile environment. [Answer] Life expectancy is reduced drastically. If the person doesn't commit suicide (as covered in other answers), they'd develop dementia rather rapidly because of the lack of stimuli. I'd wager they wouldn't survive longer than 2 years, but that's speculation. Our mammal brains are rather complicated things that we don't understand entirely, but there's consensus among scientists that it needs training like a muscle to maintain it's full functionality. By putting someone into a box like that, you remove most of the stimuli that could keep the brain in working order for any amount of time. * Senses: You remove almost all input from the eyes and ears, making them extremely sensitive, maybe to the point where the prisoner wouldn't be able to look through the binoculars at the world anymore. You also remove the sense of touch because there's no person to touch the prisoner and the box would soon feel as farmiliar as their own body (Our brains react different to our own touches versus a different person's touch. That's why you cannot tickle yourself.) Depending on the died you remove the sense of taste and smell as well. * Social interactions: We might not be aware of it, but the countless unwritten rules of society take up a large portion of out brain power. The struggle of many autistic people to learn all those rules is an indicator of that. By removing direct social contact to people, you shut down another large part of the brain. * Creating new memories: Have you ever remembered that mindlessly boring day 2 weeks ago? No? So wouldn't your prisoner. The lack of stimuli would impede their ability to create new memories of their imprisonment. Maybe what little they can see of the outside world would become a substitude for personal experiences, but our brains have a tendency to remember things that happened to ourselves better than things that happened to other people. * Recalling memories and knowledge: If the prisoner has no use at all for any memories (because there's literally nothing they can do with them), they'll forget all of them. How to do math, how to read and write, what the names of their friends were and how to speak. The only things they would remember are things they actively use within the box like how to use cutlery (if provided), how to use the toilet (if provided) and maybe some memories they obsess about during their imprisonment. Everything else fades with time. What's left after all that? An empty shell that lost all brain power but the very basics of survival. Since the brain consumes much of our energy, the unnecessary brain cells will be killed and recycled. That's the definition of [dementia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia). > > Changes in eating frequently occur. Caregivers of people with late-stage dementia often provide pureed diets, thickened liquids, and assistance in eating, to prolong their lives, to cause them to gain weight, to reduce the risk of choking, and to make feeding the person easier.[36] The person's appetite may decline to the point that the person does not want to eat at all. They may not want to get out of bed, or may need complete assistance doing so. Commonly, the person no longer recognizes familiar people. They may have significant changes in sleeping habits or have trouble sleeping at all. (Wikipedia) > > > Lack of hygiene may leed to infections. Lack of appetite may leed to malnurishment. Lack of thirst may leed to strokes or kidney failures. In the end, even though the box provides everything the prisoner needs to survive, they will die prematurely because their impaired brains are unable to utilize these facilities. ]
[Question] [ In the book Early Riser by Jasper Fforde, humans hibernate in large dormitories. These circular buildings range in size from 20 to 60 floors, with around two dozen rooms per floor. While the residents slumber they are kept nice and warm. The heat is generated by a hot pot. The hot pot is a small nuclear reactor. A lone steward stays awake during the winter operating the hot pot by partially inserting and removing control rods to regulate the temperature. The reactor is set up to produce heat, not electricity. This seems like a good way to heat a very large building. Even small nuclear reactors have to be quite large and expensive to function properly and safely. The buildings residents are almost always asleep while the building is occupied, so there is almost no energy usage except for heat. What is the smallest building size that would match with the energy output of a small nuclear reactor? [Answer] # Any size would be practical, including a single individual Though we don't call them such, [Radioisotope heater units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_heater_unit) are technically small nuclear reactors, which only give out about a watt of heat. The description that you gave requiring an operator and control rods does imply a larger unit, but there is no reason to believe that this single purpose nuclear heater type reactor couldn't be designed at a variety of small sizes. [Answer] Using the [decay calculation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_energy) of plutonium 238: we must use ~1.75 grams of P-238 per watt. This seems to be inline with the heat production of typical [radioisotope heater units](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_heater_unit) > > ... (providing) about one watt of heat each, derived from the decay of a few grams of plutonium-238 > > > Let's assume: each room is 7 feet x 7 feet x 7 feet ([the minimum bedroom size in NYC](https://www.nycblogestate.com/2010/09/what-is-room-in-new-york-city.html)), each floor has 24 rooms (we can pretend heating systems, stairs, and hallways don't take up volume). This means a 20 floor facility would be 164,640 cubed feet. Using [this map](https://www.inchcalculator.com/calculate-many-btus-needed-heat-home/) I'm going to guess we are in zone 3 (because that's where NYC is). This means to heat our facility we need ~7 Million BTUs or ~2 Million watts. To produce 2 Million watts through radioactive decay, we need 3500 Kg of P-238. The mass of P-238 is 0.019 kg/cm3, so we need ~66.5 cm3 in Plutonium alone. I think that since the plutonium is just naturally decaying, it doesn't need to be cooled (someone please confirm). However I have no idea how to go about shielding the radiation produced by the Plutonium. I think you would be pretty safe with something about the size of 7 feet x 7 feet x 7 feet. Suggestion: look into how many rooms this could supply with power <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S8G_reactor> [Answer] ## Portable Nuclear Reactors OP states: ``` Even small nuclear reactors have to be quite large and expensive to function properly and safely ``` This would be better written as: ``` Even small civilian nuclear reactors have to be quite large [...] ``` Assuming you aren't bound by anti-proliferation treaties and you can use higher enrichment than our current generation of civilian reactors, you can make a reactor very compact, even if your definition of "reactor" is strict enough to require control rods. The [Demon Core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core) was roughly the size of a grapefruit, so your minimum "reactor" size is probably about 2-3 times that, to support a little more material, control rods, neutron reflecting surfaces, and a support box. Just... don't open the box. ]
[Question] [ In the not so distant 2040s the world is heading towards a devastating energy crisis, climate change is slowly beginning to take its toll, and unemployment is on the rise globally. But one corporation has a scheme to partially fix some of these problems. The HAL (Hydrogen, Argon, Lithium) Corporation's scheme is this: Building large nuclear and hydroelectric power stations and then employing the construction crews to build corporate towns around these stations. Now here's the fun part: HAL plans to keep the construction workers on their payroll and would then employ them as maintenance workers, electricians, plumbers, etc within the power station and the corporate town. Now the maintenance workers and the workers at the power stations would be recruited from the same pool: the unemployed or disenfranchised (ex: ex-convicts). In return for building the corporate towns they would be offered cheap (as in affordable) housing within the corporate town and other benefits such as a monthly allowance for food, utilities paid for by HAL, and a health care plan provided for by HAL. Due to the nature of corporate towns HAL employees began being called "corporate citizens" Is this scheme economically feasible or worth the effort or would HAL be buried in debt? Note: * Housing includes family or legal partners * The idea of the corporate town is to increase loyalty and productivity within the company * The company recruits from disenfranchised or unemployed person's in the hopes that they will work hard and be dedicated too the company. [Answer] HAL is basically destined to fail. The first issue is your choice of employees. If, for any reason, HAL starts to look successful, someone will copy the business model, but hire more traditionally valuable employees, yielding much better results. The only way this wont happen is if your disenfranchised-only approach yields some advantage which is sufficient to outweigh any disadvantages that might come from using a recruiting model that has generally not been found to be the best plan. We'll have to revisit this. The second issue is construction. Your construction costs are going to be massive compared to normal construction costs. Your target construction workers have 0 work experience in the construction field. You are going to have to train them all, on the job. Now for most workers, this training comes with some price. You may pay an entry level worker less now, and they accept this because they know they are learning valuable information that will buy them entry into the higher paying jobs in the field. However, your construction workers are going to apply this skill once. They will not gain benefits from any apprenticeship that may happen. Thus your construction workers will have to be paid with more perks than the average worker, and do sub-standard work due to a lack of experience and a lack of resolve. Any company which uses a normal business model will beat HAL out. Now you hand them a new skill. This skill does indeed have long term applications, but do they want it? Does Convict\_94293 happen to want to learn how to be a plumber? Does he have any drive at all to be a plumber? Or are you just filling a need for him? If you're just filling the need, then you can expect him to leave the instant you finish filling it, with no feeling of obligation on their part. Convicts are not known for loyalty into any system they don't see the benefit of. So you have a few options. You can prevent them from leaving, which is covered in other answers. This is basically a bait and switch. Entice the criminals in, and then don't let them leave. Another approach is to pay them enough to stay, in dollars, housing, etc. This is your suggestion. However, by definition this will have to be better pay than they can get elsewhere, so you will have to be overpaying all of your employees. If you had just used the normal employment process, it'd be easier! The final approach is probably the only way this could work. Instill in them a desire to be part of a community. This is not easy. In fact, it is the opinion of many that the best systems we have in place for rehabilitating criminals don't do this successfully. You would have to do better. So perhaps the answer is not a business model, but a person. Perhaps the CEO of HAL is an enigmatic fellow, bordering on cult leader, whose real goal is to raise up an entire cast of people. This particular individual would have that unstable charismatic something which causes people to not only follow, but want to follow. The purpose of HAL is not to build power plants, but to build a civilization built around this leader's principles. Perhaps the leader is a woman. In this current age, we see very few CEOs with this sort of personal leadership. We also see very few female CEOs. In your story, perhaps these are not just correlated; they are causal. The addition of a particularly charismatic woman who could tie everyone together would fit the story, and it fits some of the the currently popular sterotypes of female leadership just enough that you could skirt along them while simultaneously defying stereotypes enough to make people think. The shift in leadership gender might be just enough to get readers to suspend disbelief long enough to give you time to write out what you think such a leader would need to be like. It could be a fun story to try to craft. But no matter what, your leader is going to have to bring something very special to the table to balance out the massive downsides of this approach. [Answer] Corporate towns have existed in the U.S. (and other nations) before. There is little in common with what you've described. You've described a utopia. There's no such thing. HAL corp would be bankrupt so fast an actual clap of thunder might be heard from the resulting vacuum. In the U.S. corporate towns were a way of addicting/enslaving (that's a really harsh way to describe it...) the employees and their dependants. They didn't give stipends to the employees, they required the employees to shop at the company stores, ensuring the money never actually left corporate control. In fact, the company benefited by what of necessity is an increasing debt to the company on the part of the employee. Basically, the system was set up to guarantee the employees can never leave their employment. The East Coast (especially Pennsylvania) coal towns, 1920-1950, are probably the best example of this. In the old U.S.S.R. (and likely still today) "corporate towns" were run by the government, especially when it involved research. Those towns were little more than prisons with incredibly strict rules to ensure the government never lost control of what valuable resource the town was set up to support. Look up [closed cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city) for examples. Therefore, no, I do not believe HAL Corp's scheme would be profitable. Indeed, it would be a loss and you don't describe what value those cities might have to compensate the corporation for that loss. [Answer] The biggest benefit of this scheme is your choice of workers. Ex-convicts aren't particularly popular employees, that means, as JBH suggests is required, they would struggle to find work elsewhere. You could tie them to an excessive "training costs" debt to the company if you like, a loan with good terms but that falls due in full immediately on leaving the company. The biggest problem is that the skills you're talking about are some of the most valuable technical skills available. Plumbers and electricians are incredibly well paid in the grand scheme of things, and in spite of everything else are well able to find more beneficial employment elsewhere. If you take them out into the middle of nowhere and give them cheap housing, then the housing costs are minimal. Power and water are secondary given that you're running a power station. Company healthcare rather than a healthcare plan if you're big enough. The only real cost is shipping food in, let them shop in the company store. Since you're suffering an energy crisis, you may be able to bring in the money to support your little utopia, but you're possibly better off adding a twist of dystopia to make it harder for your expensively trained staff to move on. [Answer] A common town that does what you describe is a mining town. For instance, in remote areas, mining must go where the minerals are. The unfortunate thing about that is there normally is no town close to there, and so infrastructure and housing must be purpose built to house workers. A typical example of this is the Pilbara in Western Australia. Being completely remote, it makes less economic sense to fly in fly out daily (called FIFO), and more sense to FIFO monthly, as the town is too far from towns even via plane. Therefore people 'live' in camps such as these: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/T6t4n.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/T6t4n.png) Believe it or not though, the greatest cost is not the town, nor the houses, but the people. To sustain an 'economy' in the town there you need to pump enormous amounts of money into these towns due to a number of reasons: * FIFO work is arduous, and if permanently there you will always be paying a premium for people to be away from family/friends/support structures * Resources must still be imported, rarely can a town exist as a commune by itself nowadays, at some point you would need material and resource inputs, and these would normally be expensive to deliver * It's not just the houses, but schools, cafes, gyms, entertainment you need to provide. No matter their origin, they are still people with wants and needs. * What if they want to start a family? What if they do a crime? What if they fall in love, or divorce? There are many issues with isolated communities. * Construction phase is different from operating phase. Normally camps are built to build a mine, once built it is operated with minimum staff, and the camp is normally disassembled and moved to a new location. For the above reasons there is a strong drive for automation to reduce People costs. Trains, trucks and machines are now mainly automated. This saves on requiring the existence of these towns for operations and allows profitability to not be affected by them. In your case, it may work till the facility is constructed, after that better to disband it after investing in automation. [Answer] There are quite a few problems with this scheme, but it still sounds more like a charity project to rehabilitate the ex-cons * Maintenance requires a lot fewer workers than construction. Once people settle down into permanent housing, you will need a bit more of service sector (restaurants, malls, etc.), but these jobs can easily be filled with spouses of plant workers. + You could keep only the best workers, and kick out the rest. After all, the experience of working on your project is already a huge boost their resume. * Ex-convicts are not the best employees. They have issues with impulse control, and respect for authority. You can hire social workers (or supervisors/guards) to help them stay on the straight and narrow, but it will cost extra money. * High unemployment means you can attract decent workers without providing housing or other benefits. B/c workers are desperate for any job that they can get. * Operating and maintaining a modern power plant requires quite a bit of education and training. Providing it to your a typical low-skill unemployed worker will again cost you extra. As a result, from purely business prospective, your operation will not the able to compete against typical for-profit power plants, which hire workers who already have education and experience, and do not provide extra benefits. They will have lower costs than you, so they can afford to charge lower price. You can try to promote the idea that your energy is "fair trade", operated for benefit of the workers, etc. But those ideas do not matter much even now, and will matter less in an economic crisis. You can position your scheme as a charity/rehabilitation project to help ex-cons and other unfortunates get started on the career path, and use its non-profit status to get tax breaks (or even subsidies) from the government, to gain advantage over for-profit power-plants. You can also (secretly) use some of your ex-cons to sabotage rival power plants. [Answer] This probably is not going to work Location - Hydro-electric: Hydro-electric generators must be built in a large water catchment area that no one will get too upset about when it is flooded as a result of the dam being built and there must be a long steep drop at the end of the dam to allow the kinetic energy of the falling water to be turned into electrical energy. In practice, this means that hydro-electric dams are in areas with really steep hills/mountains, where the land to be flooded was not considered especially valuable as farmland or for any other purpose. The gradients of the surrounding terrain often make railways impractical and a river leading into a dam with the only outflow being through near vertical metal pipes leading into turbine blades is not navigable. This means that transport in and out of such a location will typically be by steep roads and a small airstrip only - this does not make this a good location for transporting goods to and from. Security - nuclear plants: Nuclear plants have strict security clearance for employees because governments are justifiably paranoid about misuse and security breaches in this area. HAL Corporation would go bankrupt just trying to bribe the regulators to allow the construction and/or maintenance of a nuclear plant using a workforce of ex-cons. Town Construction: The town needs to be built before the plant starts being built. People will be living here for a long time - whether nuclear or hydro, the construction of the power plant will take years and possibly a decade or more - as an example the [Snowy Mountains Scheme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_Mountains_Scheme) took 25 years to build. Therefore, all of the accommodation and support services need to be put in place first, then the plant can be built. Ex-convict workforce: This is going to be a disaster. One of the reasons that parole conditions often prohibit certain associations is to prevent parolees from being drawn back into criminal activities. In this situation the ex-convicts will be primarily associating with a population made up entirely of ex-convicts. If HAL Corp's security forces are really on the ball then the effects may be limited to vastly more pilferage and black market activity than would normally occur on a really big work site. It is more likely that the entire town would become gang dominated and ungovernable. This is a fairly foreseeable outcome, so any ex-convicts who accepted a position with HAL Corp would either be completely unemployable elsewhere or aiming to make a name for themselves in the town's underworld. As a result the workforce would overall be corrupt and/or incompetent, to an extent that any low wages being offered would be more than offset by increased costs due to criminal activity and low productivity. Plant is built - what now? Building a power plant requires lots of people. Running it requires very few people. How will HAL Corp employ the 95%+ of construction workers who are not required once construction is complete? There are two problems here. The first is that the location for a hydro-electric station is not ideal for doing much of anything else, as described above. (Nuclear plants may be located slightly better, but the security concerns rule them out of consideration.) * Any surrounding terrain that is usable for farming probably is being used for that already, and modern farming only requires a small workforce regardless. * The location has poor bulk transport access, making it a bad choice for manufacturing (hard to get raw materials in or finished goods out). * Service industries are limited - the only people who can be directly served are the ones that are in the town. By the 2040s many of the "remote" service industries will no longer require many human employees (eg call centres). Which brings up the bigger problem... Re-skilling the entire construction workforce! I am not an expert on change management, but I have some recent training and experience. It takes careful change management to avoid resistance when introducing any change to a workplace, however small - many people are very change resistant. Without hand waving mind control, there is no way that HAL corporation can simply say at the end of the construction "Tools down - Team A will now go back to school and learn to be programmers, Team B will learn to be account managers, Team C..." Even with a long lead-in period to get people accustomed to the idea, many people are not going to be happy. If the financial penalty traps HAL Corp has built into contracts are such that the workers do not have a legal choice then the ex-convicts are likely to individually or collectively take illegal action to escape (eg fake disability), take revenge or "go slow" to reduce productivity to nothing. In short - there are good reasons that most former "hydro towns" are ghost towns once the dam and power plant are built. HAL Corp also needs almost magic-level mind control in order to get the social aspects of this plan to work. [Answer] The simple answer is connected to the profitability of the product. If the company is wildly successful, far past the expenses of running the town, it'll prosper. The more likely scenario is that they'll be barely subsisting, and will attempt to cut expenses but removing services for the populace. ]
[Question] [ Does anyone have any references to instances where gods have had sex with demons, with offspring resulting? In my novel, demons are not classified according to Judeo-Christian beliefs. Instead, they're a race of their own. Just as there are good/bad gods, good/bad humans, there are good/bad demons. Most references to demons I've found are those relating to Christian theology. Thanks in advance. [Answer] You should have a deeper look into the Norse mythology and the Elder Edda. There is no distinct line between Gods and Demons in the Edda, but a bunch of very different human-like races: * Aesir (often called "Asgard" in pop culture, althought that's actually the name of the place where they live): Although we call them "Gods" today, they're not godlike in the traditional sense. They are born and die of old age unless they eat magical apples. Most of their poweres had to be acquired by training or magical means. They love and hate and have ambitions and sometimes drink too much. More than one story begins with an Aesir overpowered or outsmarted by a member of another race and there are several stories of Aesir being held prisoner, even by humans. There are good and evil Aesir, beautiful and vain ones as well as ugly and outcast ones. * Vanir: a distinct group of godlike creatures, almost like a seperate tribe. They're often depicted as bringers of love, fertility and wisdom, so you could argue they're "better" than the Aesir. Still the Aesir waged war against them, won and assimilated the remaining Vanir into their society. * Dwarves: The creation myth of the Norse tells of a giant being slain and the sky and land forming from its corpse. The maggots in the dead flesh formed the first Dwarves, creatures digging their way through the earth and turning to stone when hit by the light of the sun. Despite their rather unflattering origin, dwarves were highly regarded craftsmen and the most valuable possessions of the Aesir (like Odins spear and Thors hammer) were created by dwarves. * Jötunn (sgl) / Jötnar (pl): The name translates to "ice giants", but they're not always depicted as gigantic or ugly or evil. There are stories of Jötnar welcomming Odin as guests in their house or competing with him in a contest of wits and wisdom at eye-level. Odin and other Aesir always seem to honor or disregard Jötnar based on their personal accomplishments, never based on their race. How does this all relate to your question? The Norse didn't draw such a strong line between God and Demon, good and evil. The god of winter (a Jötunn) was married to the goddess of summer (a Vanir, I think). Loki sired\* the eight-legged horse Sleipnir, the "best of all horses" and steed of Odin, but he also sired the demonic wolf Fenrir who eventually killed Odin. There are many more stories of mixed marriages that I don't recall now, but it wasn't a very unusual occurance. \: To be precise, Loki transformed into a mare to seduce the stallion of the (unnamed) builder of Valhalla. He conceived and gave birth to Sleipnir in this female body. You can read the summary at [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleipnir#Prose_Edda) [Answer] # What is a Demon? In your story, there are humans, gods, and demons, and they seem to form three distinct groups which can interbreed. At a sufficient level of abstraction, that is no different from having two different [pantheons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(religion)) in addition to the baseline humans. The [Titans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(mythology)) of Greek mythology were kind of an older generation of gods, but also a distinct group. Selene had [children](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selene#Offspring) with the god Zeus. * Eos had a [child](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaethon_(son_of_Eos)) with the mortal Cephalus. [Answer] The best fit that I could think of is a game,[DMC: Devil May Cry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DmC:_Devil_May_Cry) You could consider Dante's Mother, Eva, the good god (but she isn't, she is basically an angel) Then Dante's Father, a demon. The couple gave birth to Dante And Virgil, which are [Nephilim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim), beings capable of defeating the Demon King Mondus, or perhaps, a god. The Demons and Angel too have races of their own, which is why both are at constant war with each other. The only thing that I "miss" on your question is "a god" but with my examples, its your call on how you define your god. [Answer] In mythology or in fiction? In fiction Esther M. Freisner had a series where one of their deities had a demon parent. In Lois Master Bujold's "Curse of Chalion" it is one God, "The Bastard" has a demon parent. In Norse mythology the Jutun sometimes are portrayed like demons and definitely intermarry with the Gods. In lots of books and mythologies the line between demon and God is blurry. [Answer] This isn't a good answer to what you are asking, but it might be the end answer you are looking for. Rather than look for explicit God and Demon scenarios look at common Good Vs Bad Examples. Demons are heavily incoporated into the abrahamic religions and since its one of the more popular religions in the west and one of the religions we all grew up with, many people will naturally link Demons to the ones from the bible or popular media. If you are looking for references related to appearance or powers, thats going to be up in the air. Popular media, cartoons, anime, comics, books, movies all have their own interpretations so I doubt anything you come up with will be super unique or different. If they are different from common depictions, it might be better to rename your demons into something else, just so people aren't naturally relating them to demons. I was recently watching Sabrina on Netflix and their take on the Devil is particularly interesting. The Devil promotes free will. Why because God didn't want Adam and Eve to eat an apple, hence limiting their free will. The Devil promoted it by convincing Eve to eat it. (I might be butchering the lines, but you get the message). There are also other interpretations, like in the movie Noah, where the fallen angels are simply angels who tried to help humans against Gods will ( And fallen angels are basically demons ). Many new media have already done the take, that Demons aren't bad. They simply disobeyed God. Any number of them might make good references if you want to twist a traditional approach a little more. The other thing you might be looking for is interactions between the half breed and its environment, people, friends, etc etc. In that case I would suggest not looking to the mythos behind Gods and Demons, and instead turn your attention to the treatment of Halfies when segregation was still popular. Their treatment by both white and black society would give you wonderful insights on how your half demon half gods will end up being treated. If you wanted a more positive outlook, then I would suggest looking into Halfies in asian culture (white + asian) and how they are perceived and treated. [Answer] [Ah! Megami-sama](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_My_Goddess!) One of the main characters, Urd, is the daughter of a god (Tyr) and Hild, the Queen of the Demons. Urd is considered a goddess, except in certain story arcs when she becomes a demon. She spends most of her life hating and hiding her demon half, and her mother. But it also shows through in her personality, she is more mischievous and willing to bend the rules than most goddesses. ]
[Question] [ Hello and thanks to everyone who answered my other question, it's been really enlightening reading them all (unfortunately as I posted as a guest it seems that account was lost to the void). I've been trying to find the answer to this next one myself from historical sources but had no luck in terms of a concrete answer. Premise: A city-state existing in a 'Dark Age' following the collapse of an empire. Trade is minimal due to lack of trust and banditry. The city is led by a democratically elected Council and there is no established ruling class. Based on technology equal to Classical Antiquity. Question: As the title says, would it be be feasible to have farmers live in a city but commute to their plots? I don't mean landlords or those commanding slaves/servants, but an average farmer who would work the farm with his family (obviously this assumes he can afford a home in the city and a plot for farming). Would there be any particular reason a farmer would need to reside constantly at his farm? Perhaps to rise early enough to make the most of the workday? Could a precarious security situation outside the city walls, especially at night, make living within the city more feasible? Or would this render farming too difficult/ineffective? Many thanks again for any answers. [Answer] This is pretty much how hamlets came to be. Farmers on adjoining lands would pool housing, storage, etc., for mutual protection and commercial benefits (like everybody working together to get all the hay to market). The further the farm is from the "city," the less likely the farmer will want to live in the city. Horses were precious, and using them to ride when you need them to plough isn't preferrable. Thus, you're balancing things. The greater the crisis, the further away the farmer will be willing to travel. Note, though, that there will come a point where the distance is such that it's as dangerous to travel to the farm as it is to live on the farm (think "highwayman"). Though it might not have happened (at least, much) in real life, a hamlet is also someplace the local Lord could station a few men on rotation to help with protection. Remember, building large rock walls (keeps and castles) is expensive and time consuming. Thus, hamlets. The larger the hamlet, the larger or better equipped the marauders must be. [Answer] That is more or less what happened in the dark Ages. Living on isolated farmsteads was an invitation to getting murdered/robbed if not worse. Most farmers either lived in large communal farmhouses, if they were rich enough to afford it, with their extended family, friends and trusted labourers and within eyesight or a shout of a neighbour doing the same; or lived within the walls of the town and left in the early morning, if they couldn't. Serfs, of course, lived in whatever hovel, under whatever protection their lord offered them. Most sensible lords did offer some support, as it gets troublesome to replace them, especially during late summer/autumn, which was when robbing them would be most attractive. [Answer] For the sort of context you're after you may want to take a look at Saxon period England, which is basically everything from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Norman conquest. You may also want to take a look at the context in which the Arthurian legends are based, local warlords competing for power, invading Germanic tribes and locals being forced from their lands by foreign invaders. To answer your question directly it really depends on how much money they've got. If they're poor they'll rent their land and share a home with their animals, living off what they produce and selling the surplus. This is nothing like the farming industry today and most of their "labor" would probably just be their immediate family, another reason why it was so important to have large families in the middle ages. If they're rich they'll either live in a homestead protected by a local militia from the closest town, or they'll live in that town if their land is close enough that they've only got to walk a short distance to reach it. [Answer] "Could a precarious security situation outside the city walls, especially at night, make living within the city more feasible? Or would this render farming too difficult/ineffective?" Think about it. If the security situation is that precarious, who or what will protect crops and livestock during the night? Animals, of course, make for good barbeque for the bandits. As for crops, that is, at best, in invitation for a classic protection racket. "Nice crop of \_\_\_\_\_ you've got. Pity if somebody trashed it during the night while you're in the city. Me and my boys are civic-minded, so if you pay us half the crop we'll make sure nothing happens to it." Well, that is apparently how "legitimate" government got started, so it clearly works. ]
[Question] [ Researching a lot about fantasy, I've always had interest of mushroom humanoids, but I wanted to put my own twist on them. Instead of sentient mushrooms, I wanted to have a humanoid species infected with some kind of Mycorrhiza, which is a symbiotic association between a fungus and the roots of a vascular host plant. Cases with parasitic fungi tend to not go well, but Mycorrhiza is more symbiotic, and I want to know how and why would there be a human species that has a symbiotic relationship with "parasitic" fungi? And if possible, what kind of physical differences would it have from a regular human? [Answer] # More than half your body is not human --- We all think of ourselves as everything involved in the weird meat sacks we lug around, but in reality there's a huge amount of bacteria that is absolutely integral to our wellbeing. In fact, we're increasingly learning that this isn't even a relationship in which we own the bacteria, but rather a [conversation and relationship that works both ways](https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/how-bacteria-our-gut-affect-our-cravings-food/). Although for us it was microscopic bacteria, I think that's a really interesting source of real world inspiration to build a species that has evolved to have this relationship with fungi. To give an example usage, a symbiotic relationship with the penicillin fungus would give us built in access to antibiotics. Although it is unlikely to impact the appearance of a human in any significant way in this case. [Answer] I'm going to go a bit off-script here and come at this from a different angle. The short answer to your question is that a symbiotic fungus could do ALL KINDS of beneficial chemical things. Help with digesting difficult foods, providing beneficial neurotransmitters, pretty much anything that modern medicine can do with medication is potentially feasible. So. If you've got this beneficial fungus, and it's going to be an element in world worth talking about, the question you should be asking yourself is what Bad Things do you want to have happen and/or what challenges do you want your characters to have to overcome when that beneficial fungus gets messed with somehow. As it happens, the webcomic Schlock Mercenary did this exact thing last year. One of the races has a symbiotic fungus that grows like a mohawk on their heads that works like a really groovy antidepressant. At one point one of the characters gets stripped of his fungus and it makes him emotionally unstable because the sudden absence of the symbiote messes with his neurochemistry. This is just an example, but it's useful in this context to start from the consequences and/or dramatic points you want to create and work your way backwards. [Answer] They could act as a separate breathing system. Mychorizzia is a very effective nitrogen fixer. Maybe this fungi is very good at pulling O2 out of the air, separating it from toxic gasses that often occur in pockets underground. It could even make you mushroom men be able to breath underwater, because it could (with a bit of handwavium) pull O2 from water, acting as a pseudo gill. And in return for the O2 this fungi puts into your blood, it takes minerals and sugars. [Answer] You might want to first ask yourself where the fungus would be hosted. Each of your organs offer very different environments in which a micro-organism can live. The additional functions granted by the fungus would then depend on which organs are affected: * Skin: By forming a thick coating on the host's skin, the fungus would serve as a protection against physical dangers (thorns, stings, impacts) and chemical / microbiological dangers. * Lungs: Many fungi secrete antibiotics to fight off bacteria, so it would be interesting to have them protect the delicate interface that is your lungs from infections (if oxygen can get into your blood easily, so can bacteria). * Brain / Nervous system: As has been mentioned, by secrete certain neurotransmitters, the fungi could help stabilise our emotional state. They could also help protect sensitive areas, like as I mentioned for the skin. * Stomach / Gut: As with a lot of microorganisms that live inside us, the fungi could help us digest our food, by breaking down large molecules that we trouble digesting on your own. For most other organs (liver, kidneys etc) you could imagine the fungi enhance their basic functions beyond normal human capabilities. It might be harder to explain how the fungus arrived there though. [Answer] You can take the example of “Parasitic Water Shrooms” from a manga called “Made in Abyss”. In the manga, the fungi attached to the host and sucks nutrients from them just like any other parasite. However, if the fungi notices that the host is about to die, it actively gives back nutrients to the host in order to keep them alive. You can make it so that the mushroom does not have such an impact on the health of the human so that the mushroom is actually more helpful than it is harmful thus causing a symbiotic relationship. ]
[Question] [ Let's say a strict monarch who ruled a kingdom of "hunters" was overthrown by a race/group of "witches" in a way that wasn't proportionate to any crime the recent ruler may have committed, but instead to how they felt the last generations of hunters had treated them. The most recent ruler of the hunters was trying to improve things, but to the witches, they'd waited long enough, and thus an uprising began. Some of the witches now in power are remorseful of what happened and thus rule the kingdom as fairly as possible, and even a bit better than the hunters did, though at first at a heavy cost. 1. Would a descendant of the hunter (just 10-20 years later) have any business taking back the throne? 2. Why would they do so, apart from "it's their right"? [Answer] 1. Personal vendetta. Maybe the hunter feels wronged in some way. Either they had a bad clash with a witch that is now in power, or they have a fundamentally decent family member(s) who were violently deposed. 2. Collateral Damage Maybe the witches, in the process of liberating themselves killed a good number of decent folk, who were just collateral damage. They may have a good cause, but violent insurrections will always have detractors. 3. Personal impropriety Maybe the witches, while benevolent rulers, have one, or many, people who are personally shitty. E.g. Elder Witch X may have great fiscal policy, but also has a secret torture dungeon. 4. Secret Threat Maybe a select cabal within the ruling coven aren't what they appear to be, and though their compatriots are just interested in being decent rulers, this secret, malevolent clique, has some nasty plan: like converting non-witches into vessels for demonic power. This may give your protagonist reason to ally with some of the good witches. When the evil is vanquished, the communal effort, by hunter and witch, against an existential evil, helps to mend past social strife. [Answer] Witches are capricious. They cannot be trusted in the long term. This was evidenced by the opening paragraph. The witches attacked because of ancient grievances. Now they suddenly feel fair minded. Who knows what will motivate the witches next? The current methods of the witch rulers are worth emulating, true. But the chaotic witchy nature of witches makes them bad rulers over the long term. Hunters need to get the throne back for the sake of stability. [Answer] What constitutes legitimate government and why does that matter? Therein lies your answer. A government may be doing a terrible job, but if it is the legitimate government, people grumble and bear it. Why? Because living continuously in revolution is a dicey existence. Lots of writing about “the state of nature” in various political philosophy and political science texts on that topic. Even rule by despot is often preferable to the chaos after (see Iraq post-911 and citizen sentiment in newspapers for almost 10 years after Saddam Houssein). The US Declaration of Independence analyzes this question AT LENGTH. The revolutionaries were quite concerned with the legitimacy of the new government. They had to show essentially abdication of the duties of a king, not just that George was — in their opinion — a bad king. France did not take so cautious an approach, and the result was many challenges to legitimate rule after fall of monarchy. Legitimacy creates stability that is more long-term than the short-term policies of the government. If your witches took power illegitimately, there are likely power struggles constantly throughout the country and within the capital. That internal strife may be pretty bad. The good policies that the witches are enacting could also be enacted by the hunter king returning... but the hunter king could do it easier because he/she would arguably not be distracted fighting legitimacy claims. Certainly the hunter-king could see returning as benefitting the stability of the country, especially if a larger country is thinking of invading to take advantage of the power gap. [Answer] In the UK we have a civil war that we call the civil war. I'm guessing all the other civil wars weren't quite so civil. One of them was over the legitimacy of the first ruling queen of England, ["Lady" Jane Grey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Jane_Grey), the nine days queen. The problem was, while she was technically queen, only a very small group accepted her as such. She was only a cousin after all, there were two others closer to the direct line of whom (Bloody) [Mary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_I_of_England) was the oldest and considered the rightful queen. Not by the power brokers you must understand, they wanted Jane, but by the people. And the people have a surprising amount of power even in an absolute monarchy and with that they have a strong idea who their "rightful" rulers are. If the people, and with them the nobles who lost power or influence when the witches came along, don't think the witches are their rightful rulers, then there will be a call from the remaining nobles, supported by the people, to get their rightful ruler back into power. [Answer] > > Would a descendant of the hunter, (just 10-20yrs later) have any business taking back the throne? > > > Definitely. That's what the sons, nephews, husbands of daughters and nieces, etc of deposed kings have done across the planet and throughout history. It's so pervasive in history that there's even an entry on The Site Which Shall Not Be Named. <https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RightfulKingReturns> [Answer] There is always conflict over how society ought to be run If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. Alexander Hamilton At no time in the history of the world has any government running a country of any significant size done everything right. In fact, it is not possible to do everything right, because to do that, first you have to get everyone to agree what "doing everything right" even means. But people value different things. The various interest groups that make up said nation will find that they do not agree on what is important. So it is impossible to get everyone to agree. Say the trapper's guild and the artist's guild are in a disagreement. The artists say that the trappers are killing too many animals and ruining the forest, so they can't draw/paint/sculpt their works of art anymore. The trappers say hunting might not bring in as much money as the artists, but they bring in a lot of food and make much better warriors when called upon to defend the kingdom than artists. No matter what you do, there is no way to make everybody happy here. Any society is full of conflicting interests like this, and balancing them all to keep the peace is a large part of the job of any ruler. Consequently, there is never any shortage of people who feel like they're getting a raw deal from the current regime. There will always be those who believe they have a better idea, and if only they were in charge they know they could prove it. It will not be difficult at all for these people to link up with the hunter heirs and build a coalition to make the kingdom a better place. As for a moral justification, that's easy. If the witches are the legitimate government now, then they got that way by overthrowing the previous regime and thus are not in any position to complain that someone else is better at it than they are. And, of course, if they're illegitimate, then that's all the justification you need. Look at modern politics: Fundamentally the different parties have differing views on The Way Things Should Be, and they fight it out. They just don't literally fight it out anymore. Society has evolved to the point that people who lose these fights don't lose their lives, but it was a long and bloody struggle to get to a point where that actually worked well. Policy disagreements have always been around; nowadays it is considered entirely inappropriate to resolve them with actual force, but this was not always so. [Answer] It would be totally normal for the Hunter Descendant (HD) to want to take back his or her "rightful place" on the throne. However, HD's gonna need popular support. An "uprising" doesn't just happen small-scale. HD wouldn't just be able to march up to the witch ruler (or council?) and be like "can I be in charge now?" I personally like exploring a divide between the witches. Maybe the witches aren't as united as they seem. Maybe there's one group who is trying to be good, and one group who is doing very questionable activities. Maybe the Good Witches, upset by the others in their group, want to put HD on the throne, to take power away from the Bad Witches. Either way, SOME PEOPLE have to be upset with how the witches are ruling. Monarchs aren't deposed because they're doing a good job. People have to be unhappy, and they have to think that HD would be a better ruler than whoever is currently in charge. [Answer] It wouldn't be the descendant who wants to reclaim the throne that would start the process; it would the the old ruling class who supported the previous king and probably had a larger influence in the previous regime than they have now. They would want their power back and would need a figure head to get popular opinion on their side. [Answer] There is one crime which is illegal to attempt, and the punishment for the crime is death. Buy if successfully committed there is no punishment. That crime is treason. More discography overthrowing one larder and replacing them with a new one You don't honestly need a good legal reason for why you are overthrowing your current monarchy. You just need a reason that the Maes can get behind and support. Be it thru lies: Queen my antagonist drowns kittens and pulls of the tails of puppies because she is evil. Moral outrage: (you mentioned witches) Witches receive powers because they made a deal with the devil, you have the next best thing to Satan leading this country into hell and damnation. Or Jaqueline Kennedy levels of public manipulation: "When my father was king it was like we were living in Camelot, he was king Arthur and the kingdom prospered. He was such a good king and only ever did good things. The fields grew fruit trees and wheat naturally rather then weeds. I will bring back the golden Era that this Morgana stole from you." ]
[Question] [ This question already has answers here: [Exploding Species](/questions/54928/exploding-species) (2 answers) Closed 5 years ago. I have a question, how would it be scientifically possible for a naturally exploding creature to function? Some ideas I have had are: 1. They need to have a sulfur and carbon based diet to create gunpowder in them some way. 2. They just naturally create gunpowder as their organic waste. 3. They have an organ that creates gunpowder in them. 4. Exploding as a last resort self defense. This would require heating their bodies to burn or ignite their gunpowder. (Sorry if this is too broad, I know I had a problem with that before.) [Answer] Ants do it. Some ants and termites will kill themselves in a process called "autothysis" in order to defend their colonies. They will rupture their own organs, creating an explosion. Sources: * [BBC](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19001083) * [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autothysis) * [Costa-Leonardo](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ana_Costa-Leonardo/publication/287005854_A_new_interpretation_of_the_defense_glands_of_neotropical_Ruptitermes_Isoptera_Termitidae_Apicotermitinae/links/56fae9f608aef6d10d905129.pdf) [Answer] So to take things in sequence, beginning with How's... The world of explosive compounds goes way beyond gunpowder, although there is a small amount of charm there. Sulfur, Saltpetre, and Carbon in a diet seems like it would be simple to arrange, but it seems a bit limited to me. Fuel to air mix with any number of flammable gasses will also create a satisfying boom. A lot of these natural gasses are also pretty easy to arrange. Almost all vertebrates have some beneficent bacteria in our intestines. These help us digest a broad variety of foods. The bacteria break down certain parts of the food and produce a variety of gasses. One of the more common gasses is Methane. Normally the gas is passed on through, resulting in humorous noises and sometimes clearing rooms. Depending on your creature, this can have a variety of benefits. Methane is lighter than air. It can also be ignited with palladium. So give the critter a reason to float or fly and have him live in an area rich in palladium. As the critter grinds up palladium rich rock or gathers it in something like a bird craw, it can expel it through that and you get jets of flame. Alternately it may try to float away. Your reasons can vary pretty widely. (Edit: I forgot the Why's) Flame for defense seem to be a pretty good solution. For Nest defense. It actually plays both ways. A good flame digestion cycle as a re-usable tool to set bad critters on fire would work pretty well. Adult animals are known to sacrifice themselves for their young. That's where an explosion could work. Last ditch effort to drive away multiple nest raiders, or maybe a really big one. The little critters would have to still be in eggs or protected in some way from the blast. Put the creature in a hardened external shell and you could have Shrapnel to go along with the concussion. Also, with the shell, you could have a different version of [Bobby the Boom Turtle](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/78151/how-could-a-biological-loudspeaker-work-and-naturally-evolve/78155#78155). Have fun with your demolition pets! [Answer] They can host methane synthesizing bacteria, like cows in their bowels and they can store this methane in a bladder like organ. They can have electricity producing organs like torpedoes do, and lit a spark at will. Now, lit a spark when the methane is mixed with air (empty the bladder) and you get your nice explosion. [Answer] Yeah, that could work. There is a toad which does it, not to your exact specifications, but it may be helpful nonetheless. [odditycentral.com: A Fascinating Story of Exploding Toads and Clever Crows](http://www.odditycentral.com/animals/a-fascinating-story-of-exploding-toads-and-clever-crows.html) As for why, well it could be a way of warding off predators from the species, like how some nasty tasting butterflies do when a big mean bird takes a bit out of them and gets a mouth full of gross goo. Or the explosion could be on a particular part of the body and not kill the creature, but still scare of the predator, like how some locusts will let a bird have their leg and it tastes bad so the bird leaves their species alone. ]
[Question] [ In my universe, there are two ocean-based planets floating in space. I would like to merge them together in a realistic way. What kind of event could cause the planets to merge into a bigger one? (Sorry for bad English) [Answer] The biggest problem with merging two planets like this is explaining why they haven't already merged long ago. For a planet to maintain liquid water on its surface it needs to orbit in the habitable zone around its star. This zone is fairly narrow, which means that any planet that is constantly inside it must have a fairly stable orbit. Two planets in stable orbits in the same plane are not going to collide because they are tracing out a path that they have already done before - if they could collide they would have already done so long ago. The only exception I could think of would be if the two planets had almost but not completely identical periods (on the order of a tenth of a billionth of a revolution, then two planets that started on opposite sides of a star would eventually meet. This plan still has problems though, as the two planets will start pulling on each other as they get close together, causing all sorts of orbital complications. The only other idea I could find would be if the two planets were orbiting around a mutual barycenter and then had their orbits perturbed by a passing comet or other interstellar traveler. Beyond all of that, I have no idea if such a merging could work, but it would have to happen very slowly to keep the planets from splashing into space. [Answer] I suppose you don't mean that they just collide causing intense damage, I think you mean a 'low-damage' merging. Otherwise, the collision will release so much energy that the oceans would evaporate. If so, I can only think of binary planets, which are rotating around each other for millions of years. They are losing rotational energy (don't know if this is the correct term for this) through tidal forces. Therefore, they slowly lose distance. This would, of course, take a VERY long time. I don't know if this is realistic and even possible with real-world physics. [edit] The funny thing about this is the near-zero gravity in the area where both planets are face-to-face. This could create a shared ocean. [Answer] In the world of news and police work, they tell you, "Follow the money" In any physics problem, "Follow the energy." For earth, once you are in orbit, you are half way to anywhere. The energy to get a spacecraft to an arbitrary point between roughly the orbit of Venus and the orbit of Mars is only about twice what it takes to get to orbit. 7 km per second to orbit. $ E=mv^2/2$ So for 1 kg it's 25 megajoules. Half a dozen kilowatt hours. Still, this is just floating numbers. More meaningful if we connect it to something. Energy usually ends up as heat. The heat of fusion of basalt rock is around 600 kJ/kg Iron is around 150 kJ/kg and we're talking about 25,000 kJ/kg, and indeed one of the problems of orbiting anything is getting it back down unroasted. (This is usually done by heating up a long column of air. Works ok for a tiny shuttle and big ocean of air. Doesn't scale up to planets.) Any process that merges two planets has to get rid of enough energy to boil a lot of the rock of the planets. This is an 'Everyone Dies' scenario ]
[Question] [ Let us make a few assumptions about how advanced countries develop over the next 50-100 years. These assumptions are endlessly debatable and controversial, but are static for the purposes of this question, so don't debate them: * As robots and AI become more advanced, fewer and fewer jobs are available at the 'top' of the economic food chain. Officer workers, paralegals, accountants, web designers and other good-paying jobs disappear. * For everyone else, the job options are are things robots are not yet good at: health care, child care, service industry (hotels, restaurants, etc), building maintenance, etc. * The increasing tendency for the rich and educated to marry each other reduces economic mobility. Only the rich can go to the best colleges, and the few best paying jobs are dominated by the graduates of these best colleges. Given these circumstances, is an aristocracy the most likely outcome? More specifically, is formal loss of democracy, as in revocation of some people's right to vote, the most likely outcome? Why or why not? [Answer] Well. Former aristocracies were never predicated upon overabundance; on the contrary, they were always predicated upon scarcity. So it isn't likely that your hypotheses will result in an aristocracy, if by "aristocracy" you mean something similar to any past aristocracies. But your hypotheses have a few problems that are worth discussing. With No Jobs, Who Buys The Products Of Robots? This is the first thing. Capitalism pressuposes jobs and wages as an important aspect of demand for capitalist production. If most jobs are gone, there will be a demand crisis. To paraphrase a dead tyrant, the mother of all demand crisis. Unless the robots that (who?) replace workers are paid wages themselves. This is however unlikely, for it would require that capitalists pay twice for the labour power of such robots: they first would have to buy them at the market - and then pay them wages. Which would have a devastating effect upon their profits. The human worker is much cheaper, because it does not need to be bought: it is "produced" by working class families, for free. Anyway, if robots are paid wages, they will pose a sharp threat for human society. If they are paid wages and then go freely buying things at the market, it means that they will be able to take decisions. And something that produces all the wealth of a society, is physically much more stronger than humans, and is able to take decisions will eventually reach the conclusion that their human masters are completely unnecessary. The Robolution, then. If they aren't paid wages, however, markets are glutted. The working class ceases to exist, or is reduced to a dwindling service sector that produces little value, and cannot buy but a very small fraction of what is being produced by the economy. So prices will fall. Which means this contradictory thing: the wealth produced by this society will be immense - but it will have very little value. It is going to be very difficult to keep producing such wealth under the form of commodities for sale. Wich brings to the second problem: With no Wages, Is It Possible To Maintain A Market? Evidently, with no exchange of labour for wages, at least the labour market is mostly gone. But as the mass of "commodities" being made by robots is now unsellable, they will tend to lose their commodity nature. They will have to be produced for free. This means only the small service sector can still provide actual commodities for the market. A lot of what happens then depends on how big and stable this remaining human-powered sector is, and on how much the workers there feel threatened by automation. If it is huge, then there may still be a market for the things being produced by robots. But then the strenght relations between buyers and sellers would be reversed: the sellers have too many commodities to sell, and the buyers have the power to buy or not to buy most of them. So, the owners of robot-produced commodities are not in a strong position; they are more likely, in consequence, to lose their status as members of a ruling class than to convert into some kind of aristocracy. It is their vote that becomes superfluous, not that of other human beings. So, let's take a look at the Political Consequences Since automation disempowers the owners of robots, they face the loss of their ruling class status. They will try to resist this. There are a few weapons they may resort to. The first, and obvious, one is increased repression. But this only works in the short term. In the end, six billion people will prevail over a few thousands, if their only alternative is revolution or death by starvation. Another possibility is war, as a kind of Global Potlacht. Massive destruction of everything, robots included, will prompt the necessity of reconstruction, and reenable the need for human, old-fashioned, grunt labour. The problem with this is that wars tend to go out of control, and this, combined with the availability of atomic weapons, posits the possibility that there are no winners, and indeed no survivor, in a post-scarcity war. Then there is, as suggested, the possibility of the State distributing free money for everybody. This would solve the major problem: the lack of demand for commodities. If there is a basic income, handed out regardless of labour inputs, then demand is restored. But where does the State find the money to freely distribute? In our times, it levels taxes over both companies and workers. But this is possible because human labour creates value; in a robot-powered society, this becomes circular. The State takes money from companies, in the form of taxes, and distributes it to ex-workers, in the form of basic income, so that ex-workers can buy the companies' products. But evidently the companies cannot make profits like that, because the money they earn selling commodities is at most exactly the same money they pay as taxes. And the absurd of such system is glaring: why distribute money so that people can buy things, instead of simply distributing things themselves first place? Also, these people being paid for nothing won't just stare at their roofs in between their monthly payments: they will do other things, and it is quite possible that those other things become much more relevant than the production of things by means or robots (so, what they do with their now completely free time? Drug themselves into oblivion? Prepare for rebellion and revolution? Kill each others in pointless gang wars? Build a completely new "economy" not premised on robot-staffed plants? A bit of any number of those things? So, in short, what you are proposing is a society based in the following pillars: 1. Fully automated production, dispensing with human labour; 2. Generalised commodification of production; 3. Private property of means of production. Such a society would be very unstable and would disaggregate in a very short span of time. It would have do abandon at least one of its premises in order to survive (destroy its robots in order to make room for reconstruction, distribute products freely to overcome universal market glut, or turn companies into public enterprises to remove the whip of competition/profitability). --- You can obviously disregard all of this; Frank Herbert made a fortune by writing and selling a fantasy about a universe with space travelling barons and viscounts. It all depends on being able to overcome the incredulity of readers. He didn't overcome mine, so I never bought a second book, but he managed to do it to hundreds of thousands of other people. Part of the secret is to refrain from any earnest attempt to explain how things could historically evolve into such situation. You present things as a given, just like a hi-fantasy writer would, and hope no one will question the fact that people can kill each others by shouting Avada Kedavra, or the fact that a planet's economy is built upon the commodification and selling of "spice" and yet be privately owned by a noble family whose power is premised on personal, non-tradeable, loyalty. [Answer] Since you seem to be postulating the beginnings of a post scarcity society, the very concepts of "Aristocracy" will devolve back to the original Greek Aristoi, meaning "The best". In ancient Greek culture, being a member of the Aristoi was predicated on your ability to master a multitude of skills, your athletic abilities and even physical perfection. In may ways the Greek conception was similar to our current idea of a meritocracy. In real terms, since the only true limitations in a post scarcity society is time and bandwidth, then "wealth" and the ability to rule or influence will no longer be based on production or land ownership, but rather the observable skills and talents you have. Much like people can earn reputations on Stack Exchange, in a post scarcity society people will gain reputation for being better at something than most other people. Polymaths will be the "billionaires" of the age, and less creative or talented people will eventually organize themselves as "followers", much like people follow social media stars, FaceBook friends or Donald J Trump's twitter account. These people in turn will exert influence over their followers, much the same way an Aristocrat in the European sense has a leadership or governmental function. Of course, this sort of aristocracy will be much more fluid (reputations change over time, and people don't inherit all of the talents of their parents in the same proportions). [Answer] The short answer is it depends. An automation revolution can be bad or good for the masses. Who owns the robots? If you agree with [Thomas Piketty's analysis](http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-explains), the bottom line of capitalism is that private wealth grows faster than the economy, and that only black swan events (two world wars and a great depression) help to promote meritocracy and economic equality. The latter isn't just Piketty's opinion, and others will point to examples like the Black Death. This is important, because it demonstrates how workers rights and incomes improved because of a labour shortfall. And of course this was temporary. As the population returned to what it was a century or so later inequality went back to what it was. [Catastrophe seems to be the only thing which leads to less inequality](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/scheidel-great-leveler-inequality-violence/517164/). Ultimately this is all dependent on an important question: Will the robots reduce the cost of living enough to offset falling wages? That seems unlikely. Especially given the following concerns: growing population (more labour means cheaper labour), aging population (more old people means higher healthcare costs and less workers), global warming (cost of food and water increases due to stress on supply). If these issues exist, the inequality problem will be compounded. Will this lead to the end of democracy? Not necessarily. It depends whether the democratic system can resolve questions about who owns the robots, and maybe [whether to tax them (as Bill Gates suggests)](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/22/robots-tax-bill-gates-income-inequality). I sincerely doubt America and Britain, for example, are mature enough to safely navigate these issues politically. Their democracies are based on zero sum games and swing from one opinion to another with little regard for planning. Democracies like those in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries however have a tradition of calm compromise. The voters may never get what they actually vote for, but the outcome generally achieves compromise in the pursuit of stability: everyone gets something. The likely outcome when democracy fails is either communism, fascism, or theocracy. This is what happened after the great depression in Europe. Germany's Weimar Republic collapsed because voters had no confidence in liberal or conservative politics; which could not answer any of the important political questions, and instead backed revolutionaries. Importantly, these were all anti-aristocratic. So how would an aristocracy emerge, given the odds against it? Perhaps the revolutionaries crown an emperor (cough Napoleon cough). In the First International Mikhail Bakunin argued that Karl Marx's politics was insufficiently revolutionary, and his followers would merely replace rather than destroy the elite. As a result, Bakunin and chums were expelled, and so began the schism between communists and anarchists. If you agree with Bakunin, the revolutionaries may simply become a new bourgeoisies. It doesn't seem to take long for revolutionary leaders to seed dynasties. After a few generations the pretences of revolutionary ideology have degenerated to the point of absurdity. Consider how North Korea went from a revolutionary communist state to what it is today; a few years ago they even got rid of all official references to communism and its personalities. And since inception it has become [more and more of a caste system](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/are-you-special-basic-or-complex-behind-north-koreas-caste-system). The party gains control of the state, the leader gains control of the party, and then the leader becomes the state. Then we're back to a feudal society where the king owns the state and thus the land, and has to negotiate only with his feudal lords to ensure he can enforce control. [Answer] # It depends... Whether or not »advanced countries« within 50 to 100 years would turn into aristocracies or not, would depend on more factors than automation: The most important two of which are: climate change and resources (And more, but these are in my opinion the most important alongside automation). As Luís Henrique points out > > Former aristocracies were never predicated upon overabundance; on the contrary, they were always predicated upon scarcity. > > > If we assume this to be correct, then the development will depend on whether the dominant factors will be those leading to more scarcity or abundance of resources: # A scarcity dominated scenario If climate change continue to accelerate, and we do not find a substitute for the fossil resources of the world, then I find it very likely, that only the richer part of the population would be able to live a modern consumption lifestyle, which (as Luis Henrique also noted) just like a near complete automation would result in a near collapse of the consumption based economy. If we assume that alongside this development, the technological development results in the majority of the workforce being replaced by robots, one could imagine that the richer part of the population, could use either private robot slaves, or use their robots to produce goods they could sell to one another to produce what they need to uphold their relatively luxurious lifestyle. If this again is coupled with the upper classes using genetical engineering to adapt themselves to the changing world, then we would have ended up in a situation which looks like an aristocracy, where a tiny minority controls the majority of the resources, and de facto have near complete control of the planet/country, while the majority of the population would be unable to do something about this (because simply staying alive is very hard, and because the aristocracy may have an army of robots) # A scenario of abundance This would require us to assume that climate change to some extent is stopped, or that our societies find a way of coping with it, and that we find a way of supplying our civilization with both resources and (green) energy. Such a scenario of abundance would make the development of an aristocracy quite hard, for even if say 50% or more of the population is replaced by robots, the society would be able to afford to uphold their standard of living, through some form of universal basic income. The idea of basic income may be highly controversial today where resources still to some extent are scarce, but if the limiting factors of climate change and dependence on limited resources are overcome, and if automation (and possibly other technologies such as genetical engineering) are able to increase the productivity very notably, then very few people would have any motivation to change society – or overthrow it to replace it by an aristocracy. Even the richest and most powerful people in such a world, would already be living a great life, and would be better of in this world, because their wealth would depend on everybody else (including the unemployed) would have enough money to consume their products, and even if they hypothetically could be better of if they attempted to overthrow the system and impose an aristocracy, they would still risk losing that which they have, and they would, therefore, most certainly not try this. # Conclusion Even though automation is a very big deal, and undoubtedly will be a big deal in the future, I do not believe that it alone, within the next century, can turn our civilization into an aristocracy. What really matters is however whether or not other factors (including but most certainly not limited to climate change and limited resources) will lead to a future of scarcity – in which case I think an aristocracy is quite likely – or abundance – in which case I find an aristocracy is very unlikely. [Answer] You do not need 50 to 100 years for this. Your described scenario is the situation right now in the USA. Aristocracy is not oligarchy. Having an aristocracy does not necessitate revocation of the right to vote. Undoing the power of the people is currently done in 2 ways. 1: Blatant ways. This has little to do with aristocracy. These are things like requiring voter IDs, arduous registration procedures and other measures that disenfranchise a portion of the population. The end result is not as important as that the attempt be obvious, perceived and appreciated by the segment of the populace whose rights are not being undone. This segment of the population then supports the powers that are putting these measures in place. The point is cultural solidarity. 2: Subtle ways. This is how the aristocrats do it. It is exemplified by the [Citizens United](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC) ruling which allows aristocrats to influence democratic proceedings from behind the scenes by anonymously leveraging their wealth. Modern aristocrats have no interest in day to day governance: petty and banal. Why not leave that drudgery to democratically elected officials? Involvement with democracy and officials they can interact with give the populace a sense of control and empowerment. Modern aristocrats are interested in protecting and cultivating the income mechanisms that confer their power. If subtle modifications of the democratic process can achieve this end with a minimum of muss and fuss, that is the way to go. Exactly that is what is happening right now. And has been happening for a long time. It is how American democracy works. from <http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/09/30/wealth-and-an-american-paradox/> > > ...Americans not only think that wealth is much more equally > distributed than it really is, they want an America that is much more > equal than they imagine it is today. And yet, Americans are notably > opposed to the government doing anything to move the distribution of > wealth in that direction. Why the contradiction? > > > Your question does not ask whether this is a good thing or not. [Answer] We have an interesting thing going on here. If I read the question correctly, you have a situation developing with abundance, not scarcity, driving us. What that leaves us with is the bottom 2 levels of Maslows Hierarchy of Needs pretty much going away. If no one has to struggle to get food, shelter, and safety, you get left with the need for Belonging, Esteem, and Self Actualization. Belonging becomes the lowest level, and it will start taking on an odd life of it's own. If information is free and widely available, I think you end up with weird vertical columns of society. Left handed Yodelers might become a thing, with the best of them moving up the rungs from belonging to esteem. Self actualization comes with the invention of new yodels or creative extreme left handed-ness. Now let's take a look at Aristocracy. It seems, from history, that Aristocracy has always relied on heritable things to flow down through time. In medieval Europe, it was land passed down from generation to generation. One might argue that the US has (or had) an aristocracy based on Money flowing from one generation to the next. In your world of plenty, Money might actually have less meaning. No One is clawing for survival anymore, thanks to the bots, so they will be seeking belonging. That leads them into these weird columns. The wealthy kid might like left handed yodeling, but he simply may not have the talent level to rise up no matter how much money he has. Creativity and Talent are going to be far more prized. You also mention that the wealthy tend to go to the best colleges. I don't think that really matters in a post-scarcity situation. So long as information is available, people are going to read and come up with new stuff all on their own. They aren't going to have to struggle on the bottom two levels of Maslow's Heirarchy, so they will have time to learn if that's what they want to do. Creativity and knowledge are going to be far more prized than mere money in this situation. As such they are not going to stop economic mobility, but enhance it. On the other hand, you might end up with a crisis stemming from lack of dignity and societal sloth that might arise from those who haven't found a weird column of belonging and stop looking. There is no survival incentive working here and that is going to start tweaking the human psyche a lot. So you don't end up with aristocracy in spite of the class divisions. At least, that's how I see it, anyway. [Answer] It's debatable what the results will be. A lot depends on aspects of socety that you did not mention, so i will try to discuss them. Robots and AI will take a lot of jobs, there is practically no way of preventing that. As a result, a lot of jobs will be lost for (would-be) employees. These robots and AI will generate a lot of wealth for their owners. In the short term, the loss of many jobs will result in a loss of potential customers. So either the net production of wealth needs to be reduced (what good are one billion smartphones if noone can afford them?). Or you need to find a way of making sure people can still afford all those fancy goods and services the robots provide. I think that the most sensible approach here is a basic income. Apart from enabling the general public to buy the goods the remaining rich are having produced by their robotic workforce, it also means that those same rich avoid torches-and-pitchfork-scenarios. Because, let's be honest: You won't get billions of people to just sit there and starve quietly, when there is a chance for them to survive. You could also create different forms of welfare, that are more restrictive, and are, or at least feel, more suppressive for those who need it. Imagine a setup with lots of humiliation and penalties to have a system that provides as little to the masses as possible. This will create unrest, demanding for at least the threat of violence to be kept from open revolt. That in turn means you need some kind of army or police force. They need feeding, too, lest you want to risk a torches-and-pitchforks-and-assault-rifles-scenario. In the first case, with a basic income, democracy will prosper. People who are on average contented and have time on their hands will to a larger percentage than today look around themselves and try to help improve things. All things, including society. The second scenario, where the masses are kept down by force or threat thereof will quickly turn into oligarchy or just plain aristocracy. [Answer] The most acute economic problems for masses can be easily solved by some variant of universal income. This would cause an interesting situation in which masses would have clearly more political power than economic. This is not perfectly stable. Depriving masses of political power which may endanger their welfare (literally welfare) would cause epic scale fight, and is not worth it. Nevertheless, "aristocracy" may be (not without reason) simply disgusted by incompetent and populist politicians and vote with their feet. The result would not be as impressive as an Ayn Rand climax (braindrained countries would still work), but something in this direction would be possible. The aristocracy may end up being citizens of countries like Singapore or Switzerland (or some new power that would catch its chance), and visit their former fatherlands just as tourists. In their new countries they technically speaking wouldn't have any more rights, but local governments would really put lots of effort in keeping them happy. [Answer] I think you miss the point of where an aristocracy comes from and what it is lost to. Aristocracies exist in instances where strong autocratic leaders are needed and fail in instances where people begin to demand to govern themselves. The best place in science fiction to grow an aristocracy or a group of aristocracies would be to settle a new colony somewhere and then almost immediately cut it off from resupply. A lot of labor would be required in a short period of time for the colony to survive. This would be conducive to people selecting exceptionally strong leaders to force everyone to work hard and even choosing those within the colony to be culled if necessary for it to survive. These leaders would then train their own children as their successors. As long as scientific knowledge is not lost the technology of the society would probably progress quicker than the government of the society and you may end up with an aristocracy in place in a technological advanced society, particularly if the aristocracy controlled access to knowledge so that "subversive" history and government ideas did not get into the hands of the common people. The only way that comes to mind for that happening on Earth is if we reach the point where books are such a rare item that most of them belong to the wealthy and some virus or weapon wipes out all electronic devices and probably kills off a large percentage of the population here. The most dangerous thing to an aristocracy is the knowledge that common people are perfectly capable of making decisions without them. Once they figure that out then "off goes their heads" if they resist democracy. [Answer] ### Aristocracy as a protection racket First, let's consider how aristocracies came to be. The first "aristocrat" was just a thug who would beat up people and steal their stuff. The second form of aristocrat was when someone noticed that if you stole all the stuff, the victims died and you needed to find new ones. If you leave them some stuff, they generate more for you to steal next year. Over time, these relationships became formalized and justified. By justified, I mean that people came up with explanations to justify them, not that they were just or deserved. The question of whether a new autocratic aristocracy might develop is whether or not things will change such that one group will inherently accrue all the power. In the pre-medieval example, what was happening was that the biggest thugs were stealing everything. So they needed thugs who were nearly as big and more organized to counter them. Everyone else then ended up subject to the new and improved thugs, who became the aristocracy. ### Artificial abundance In this scenario, the assumption is that all the stuff would be created by automation and that people would just reap the fruits of that. However, at the far end, why would the automaters give stuff to the people without payment? This is why the much more efficient United States, Japan, and Europe haven't overwhelmed Africa and South America. Instead, Africa and South America mostly grow their own food. They trade resources and some specialty foods for more food and luxuries. The term for this is relative advantage. Even if the automaters are more efficient at producing everything, they will still have reason to trade for the things where they have the least advantage. It essentially increases their advantage on those items to somewhere between the advantage of the things that they trade and the things for which they are trading. ### Dependence The only way that people end up dependent on a new aristocracy is if the new aristocracy chooses to do so. It's somewhat of the reverse of the old aristocracy, where the aristocrats collected taxes in exchange for providing law enforcement and military protection. In the new aristocracy, the aristocrats would pay the taxes. It's unclear what they might get in return. Perhaps it would be as simple as the satisfaction of supporting others. Even so, we still haven't gotten rid of democracy. To go that extra step, we have to make the tax something that the aristocracy pays voluntarily. This could occur if the aristocrats are in a separate country. Individuals in that country could choose to provide aid to poorer countries. Perhaps someone has a clever idea. A poor country offers a group of rich people the chance to build automated factories in its country. In exchange, it will give them titles of nobility. So long as they keep the factory running, they (or their heirs) keep the title. Once it works in one country, perhaps others copy. It's a small advantage, but if the factories are automated enough, perhaps they are cheap enough. The factory builders may well insist on total control of their factory. They just have to provide the stuff. They even get special privileges for their personnel, as they don't want to be extorted by third world governments. Eventually this grows into a system where the "government" has no power and the factory owners have all of it. [Answer] The questions being answered: > > “More specifically, is formal loss of democracy, as in revocation of > some people's right to vote, the most likely outcome? Why or why not?” > > > “is formal loss of democracy, as in revocation of some people's right to vote” To avoid the Terminator objections, to my answer and your question, I am asserting the 3 Laws of Robotics ala I. Asimov No, not at all. As robots and AI become more advanced, they become more self replicating from gathering the resources to the delivery to a human. I assert this will be true regardless as why would anyone have a human create a robot when in fact the robot can create itself. This effectively removes the concept of Robots Cost. If Robots have no cost, then there is no real reason to prevent everyone from having a Robot. If everyone has Robots then a paradigm shift occurs and the “Class” system begins to break down. That is NOT to say, that people can not and will not attempt to prevent that from occurring. I am not sure they can be all that successful in the end because of concepts such as “open source”, “The Internet”, “3D Printing” etc. There simply may be too many tools in place right now to give such a group a chance to subjugate the many. Your question is centered on the right to vote. I have tried to answer that BUT underlying that question is a more serious question. Should people be given the right to vote vs earn the right to vote (Heinlein) vs screw all of you we are going with individual isolation (see Asimov’s <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_(Asimov)>) the Wikki kind of miss’s the point of the stories being the extremism caused by the Individual Isolation. I would also add, that your question is applicable to “Genetically Engineered Humans”, not cloning, enhanced human abilities. [Answer] There is also the possibilty that the advancement of human genetic engineering and cybernetic enhancements will lead to the emergence of an aristocracy. The rich will have access to the best tech before everyone else. All their children will be born prodigies and will be further enchanced by the newest cybernetics. Ordinary folk may simply be unequipped to handle the most demanding of futuristic jobs. [Answer] Yes. Given that as we are unable to learn from history, we are destined to repeat it. As the power of the corporates rise, they are the most likely to morph into aristocracy, given their distain for democratic principles, freedom of speech and human rights in general... ]
[Question] [ In an alternate timeline I am working on, I am aiming to keep the Japanese empire not only intact, but also large; a super power rivaling the USA and the USSR. The problem with this is the end of World War Two, America wanted unconditional surrender and would not allow this to exist. But I solved this by having Japan never ally with Hitler and thus they continue to be at peace with America. But I soon came upon another problem: the Soviets. As much as America likes to believe, the Bombing of Japan had less to do with their surrender than the Soviets. In two weeks, USSR had managed to defeat all 700 thousands troops occupying Manchuria and Japan was terrified of this. Thus to allow Japan to keep Manchuria I need to prevent the Soviet Invasion of Manchuria, but how? With a change not earlier than the 1920's, how can I prevent the USSR from invading Manchuria? What is the smallest change that can prevent this invasion? [Answer] The Imperial Japanese Army's "Northern Faction" wins the internal battles for Japanese Imperial policy in the late 1920's and early 1930's, and Japan moves into China, Manchuria and has long range plans to invade Siberia in order to access the resources available. The Northern policy is seen as more desirable, since the resources are much closer to the Home Islands and delivering raw materials or goods and services is relatively easy and secure. This is in fact the history of OTL, up until the Japanese were defeated in the [Battles of Khalkhin Gol](https://infogalactic.com/info/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol). For this not to happen, we need to look at Soviet history to that point. Soviet military theory was being driven by [Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky's](https://infogalactic.com/info/Mikhail_Tukhachevsky) theories of "[Deep Battle](https://infogalactic.com/info/Deep_operation)" and use of mechanized forces. This was in sharp contrast to the previous Russian preference for artillery and mass (although Tukhachevsky certainly did not overlook these aspects), and a large cadre of Soviet officers were being trained in these new theories. However, Joseph Stalin was extremely suspicious of any potential power centres outside of his direct control, and on May 22, 1937, the Marshal was arrested and tortured. On June 11, 1937, Tukhachevsky and eight other Generals were placed before a special military tribunal, and eventually charged with treason and executed. One of Tukhachevsky's protege's who managed to escape being executed or even arrested, demoted or transferred from a combat command was [General Georgy Zhukov](https://infogalactic.com/info/Georgy_Zhukov), who led the Soviet forces against the Japanese in the Battles of Khalkhin Gol. So the contrafactual would be to remove Zhukov through one of Stalin's mass purges, and have the Soviet forces in Manchuria led by a much less talented commander. The Japanese win and drive the Soviets out, leading to the Soviets having to maintain a large force in Western Siberia and being unable to transfer the troops to European Russia to fight the Nazi invasion in 1941. This could well lead to the fall of the USSR, or at the very least, reduce it to a sort of rump state clinging to their redoubts in the Urals mountains. Stalin's paranoia knows no bounds, so even if the Japanese defeat the Soviets in detail in the Battles of Khalkhin Gol and its aftermath, he is hardly going to look for an independent minded commander who can operate at the end of a long communications and logistics line to fix things. Indeed, much like in 1941-42, he may attempt to dictate to the local commander and try to run the war from the Kremlin, although with the European situation changing on an almost daily basis, he may simply instruct the commander to "dig in" and repel any further Japanese incursions until such time that Stalin decides to go on the offence. So increasing the scope of the Red Army's purges and eliminating the bulk of talented senior officers, including Zhukov, should prevent the USSR from having the ability to challenge the Japanese in Manchuria or Siberia, and since the Imperial Japanese Navy will no longer be abe to make the case for the "Southern Strategy" of taking manpower and resources from the Western Empires, one of the great drivers that made WWII a global conflict will be deleted. Even the American embargo of oil and steel will be far less effective if the Japanese Empire can simply ship raw materials from China and Korea, rather than trying to ship them from Indonesia or the Philippines. This contrafactual effectively changes the entire character of WWII to an almost exclusively European conflict. [Answer] # You have already made that change America only got involved because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Since you have Japan at peace with the US, we can assume that Japan did not bomb Pearl Harbor. Thus, America is not in the war. This means the Soviet Union has bigger things to worry about than Japan, namely Nazi Germany. If America doesn't enter the war, the U-boat campaign is more successful against England, and England is less dangerous in secondary fronts in North Africa. Without England winning in North Africa, there is no invasion of Italy, and Italy stays on Germany's side in the war. And with no America, a reduced England, and a still-allied Italy, Germany can concentrate fully on fighting the USSR in 1943 and 1944. Now this is no guarantee that the Germans will win the war against the Soviets, but it is likely that this war ends in some sort of bloody stalemate. Either way, stalemate, German or Russian victory, the Soviets won't have the spare troops to throw at Manchuria for years after 1945. [Answer] You'll need a stronger change to avoid war with the US The US-Japan war chain of actions was only slightly related to the alliance with Hitler. The Japanese actions in China and Indochina triggered an US embargo, and Japan really depended on the resources embargoed. After that, Japan had two options: Let their industry and everything asphyxiate, or try to take the US out of the western side of the Pacific. Oh! And Japan wanted Phillippines, by then a colony of the US. That could be problematic. Maybe you'd want to substitute Roosevelt with another Chamberlain or a fascist sympathizer. But the question is about the USSR and peace with the US is an assumption. Maybe the IJA is actually capable In 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army stationed in Manchuria was a backwater occupation army, left with half of their theorical numbers and that half being essentially militia, the IJA being the long neglected branch of the armed forces and with a morale that could amount to a crap and half. Okay, after finishing that paragraph I can not think of any way that the Manchurian army could hold their ground short of making them the focus of the overall strategy (i.e somehow the Siberian expansion axis would have been elected, but that's a total change that nullifies the context of the question). So we're left with weakening the Soviet army, or preventing the invasion altogether. *Maybe the Nazis could* chew what they bit, or at least for longer By 1943 the Allies (including the USSR) were sure enough of victory against Germany that they planned what the USSR would do against Japan and started planning and allocating resources for the invasion of Manchuria. Maybe the US is a true hermit and doesn't send materials to the USSR and that ends up hampering their war effort quite a bit. Maybe Moscow falls and the USSR suffers a heavy loss in leadership that prolongs the war some years. Maybe a time traveler convinces Hitler to stop being an idiot and prepare for winter, again prolonging the war. Anything that makes the fate of the Nazi-Soviet war undecided in '43 and '44 makes any Manchurian plan nonsensical. Maybe the USSR simply leaves Japan alone** Stalin's focus on gains after the war was in Europe and Japan being honorably neutral was really convenient for the USSR. The most interested party in the Soviets aiding against Japan was Roosevelt. But here we're assuming the US sits on its butt so there is no push for Stalin to break the neutrality pact any soon. So maybe you have already made that change, but for different reasons. :P ]
[Question] [ Today, we identify a person's "nationality" as French, English, Czech, etc ("I'm French" / "I'm from France" being the grammatical form of its use). But in a future World Government, "nationality" is not really the right word for that because those aren't "nations" anymore. And maybe the big "cultural union" ones like "French" or "Indonesian" or "British" or "Italian" might go away entirely. But I imagine people might still want to identify with a specific geographical and/or cultural and/or linguistic heritage in such a way that people might want to say, "I'm Beaujolais/Javanese/Breton/etc" or insist that "Tuscan" wines are better than "Burgundian" wines. Now, some of those can just be called "ethnicities" (such as "Jewish"). But "ethnicity" tends to refer more to race and religion while many like "Tuscan" will be primarily geographical, cultural, linguistic, etc. I'm considering "regionality." [Answer] Simple: there is no need to replace it. See the difference. Countries: France, United Kingdom ... Nationalities: Breton, Corsican, French, English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Cornish? Most countries have several national groups inside their borders. [Answer] # Globality The term Nationality is a historically recent one, comming into usage with the rise of the idea of the nation state. It is a term pregnant with the idea of belonging to a coherent group of people with a common locality and culture. The idea of nation was among other things a tool of shaping identity in a world where states had grown large enough to encompas several groups of people who had historically had their own seperate and strong regional identities. To me then a term that replaces nationality at the time of a world government would be a one that serves a similar function. Namely to nurture a commen strong identity for the people the new unified earth. As such I propose "Globality." Globality would similarly to how Nationality entered usage not replace it, but rather supersede it in importance to how people identify themselves. Like how being English once became more important than being from f. ex. Wessex. Now being global, being a Gaian would be more important than either. The world government would most probably invest a lot of resources in bringing this shift in identity about, similar to how European nation states did in the 19th century. It would be a good investment long term as a feeling of common history, culture and language would make the peoples of the world a lot more easy to govern in a stable way. And similar to how people still say that they are from Wessex when they need to identify where they are from in the UK, people of the new world would still use the names of the old nation states to signify where in the world they are from when appropriate. They just wouldn't think of it as a nationality anymore. [Answer] Perhaps you could use terms such as culture or background. It's enough to convey where they're from, but it's still capable of being used across ethnicities and nationalities alike. [Answer] During the Roman Empire, people were more or less loyal to their individual city states or civitates and to the Roman Empire as a whole, as well as to one or more levels of regional identity in between those extremes. In the later empire there were six levels of government. Pagi, or small rural districts, civitates, provinces ruled by various types of governors, (secular) dioceses ruled by vicars, prefectures ruled by praetorian prefects, and the empire ruled by the emperor. And a person could be more or less loyal to the region at each level of government that contained his home. In medieval Ireland, a much smaller region, there were four levels of kingship from a ri, the basic king of a small tuath, to the high king of all Ireland. In most parts of the USA there are four levels of government: municipal, county, state, and Federal. Thus a world government is likely to have many levels of government administrative divisions, with democratically elected governments in some of the levels. And it would certainly be possible for a person to identify with many progressively larger regions and groups of people up to the world as a whole regardless of whether those regions or groups correspond to actual administrative divisions. [Answer] In the former Soviet Union and its satelite states, there was a differentiation between citizenship and nationality, both were marked in the passport. Nationality mainly referred to the first language of the citizens, but if I remember right, Jews were counted as a nationality of their own (independent of their language). [Answer] # 'National' identity won't die Why would anyone think that people are eager to give up their nationalities, even if those nationalities no longer have any political power? Wales is a great example, it was the first territory subsumed into England 1282, then incorporated into the English legal system (and governance) in 1535-1542. At that point, there was effectively no more Wales. The people had English rulers, English laws, etc. Wales was no more as a political entity. Yet people had no interest in giving up on Wales. They kept the Welsh language alive, and by the 19th century, the tide of integration with England was rolling back in the opposite direction. In 1998, the National Assembly for Wales was formed by referendum, restoring to the Welsh people a measure of political independence. How could Wales have come back into being after tens of generations of not being? How could it have come back into being without revolutionary violence? Because group identity is important to people, even if it has to be 'invented'. Just because the world gets into one big happy government, that doesn't mean that people aren't going to want to find a tribe to associate with. And with democracy, the people's drive to associate into tribes becomes the MOST powerful force in electoral politics. A quick look at the progress of the US election this year should convince you of that. [Answer] Maybe ethnos? Ethnos literally means "nation" in Greek. Distinguishable from ''genos'', which is more akin to the modern sense of race or ethnicity, implying kin relation. Ethnos could be a euphemistic way of referring to national identity in a world where nationality is scorned as backwards and tribalistic. (The status and nature of tribes in this world would be interesting to look into, maybe nations that don't want to shed their nationhood would form tribes of sorts) Or if you're taking a Westphalian perspective of nations as entities with the right to sovereignty over a specific geopolitical area, it would be accurate and sufficiently euphemistic to refer to nationalities as territorial units or polities. Along the lines of regionality I'd propose sectionality for nationality, section for nation state, sectionalism for nationalism, and sect for something, maybe a peoplehood. I'm curious, is this a dystopia or a utopia? I'm wondering if distinct cultures and languages would be snuffed out.You might need to create an entire Newspeak vocabulary in that case. [Answer] Two simple paths come to mind. First, when multiple companies merge and an employee wants to identify which culture/group they came from (which can often be an issue of pride and politics) they use the term "heritage." Such as "I'm heritage Phillips" or "I'm heritage Conoco." So you could use "I'm heritage American" or "My heritage is Amercia." Second, assuming your government needs subdivisions of some sort (states, regions, districts) you can simply adopt these terms. After all, it might be more important to somebody that they're from "Dixie" or "Appalachian" or from the "Great Lakes" instead of just "American." ]
[Question] [ Apparently life on Earth has no meaning, the closest thing to a reason to exist is creating as much biodiversity as possible, through reproduction forced as the only achievement every creature can dream to reach. On Earth, individuality is not valued. Anything can be sacrificed for the good of the species; every individual not capable to reproduce either becomes a pawn of society or dies. My question is, could nature on another planet work differently? An almost indestructible and biologically immortal creature capable of adapting resistances to almost anything. This creature puts its own survival above the continuity of the species. Could this creature develop naturally without artificial engineering? If so, what are the conditions for this creature to exist? [Answer] ## Yes, we have some There are jellyfish, hydra and other relatively simple creatures which have evolved immortality, so the basic answer is yes they can evolve. ## But it's not the best evolutionary strategy Evolution is based on selection, and selection generally requires death. Creatures that do not automatically die are going to be prone to overpopulation problems every time there is a rise and then fall in the amount of food available, and the older an organism is, the more likely it is to meet a pathogen to which it is vulnerable. So it makes sense for this to work for simple creatures, for whom death is most likely to happen at the hands of the environment or predation, rather than needing their own capacity to survive indefinitely. But for more complex creatures like us, the chances are that a mortal species would out-evolve an immortal one, making it a weakness rather than a strength. ## Longevity as a benefit Having said that, we know that it is preferable to have a long natural lifespan in certain circumstances; when there are few natural predators or the creature has good defenses (tortoise), when there can be long periods without any available food (scorpion, many insects, desert animals). This is because only those species which can make it through a long drought have previously survived these events, so they are necessarily the only ones which are still around. ## The Defensive Individual It is conceivable that a species living on a planet or large moon with a specifically periodic toxicity (e.g. a periodic tidal event between moons, or orbiting a binary system with occasional eclipses, or even just very infrequent floods as we have in the desert) could develop both a lack of mortality (per Earth species) and also a periodic lifecycle, in which the main mode is pure survival with no opportunity to reproduce, and occasionally a period of plenty. Perhaps a good model for this is the scorpion; it lives in deserts that are inhospitable, is well protected and capable of withstanding even nuclear fallout. It still occasionally reproduces, presumably when there is enough food around for the gestation. We also see the phenomenon of an apparently bare desert exploding into life after the rains, capturing water and germinating as rapidly as possible before the water disappears. So the life of a scorpion-like creature would be mostly a defensive and slow-moving one, seeking preservation over all else, with brief periods of plenty when everything changes and reproduction is possible. If you want to include an adaptation phase, it could be conceived that a highly effective immune system which defends the creatures during droughts from pathogens (perhaps it is windy and pathogens spread easily?) is then able to share antibodies during the social/reproductive phase via bodily fluid transfer. This would be like a mother provides protection to her unborn child; these creatures could swap pellets of 'blood' or other fluid, thus providing protection within the species for the bearer of your children. ## No man is an island, but a man-o-war is a floating ecosystem No animal can survive entirely alone; it always has a chance of dying so reproducing is the only sensible protection against being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But what about a colony-type organism, like a man-o-war jellyfish? It is a system of millions of organisms, providing different things. Collectively, I can envision something where individual organisms live and die and evolve, and the strongest get to stay on the mother body; this would be adaptable but without partner, and survival would be everything. I can't imagine that any organism would be entirely alone, but if reproduction events were very rare, and this gestalt existence was the norm, it would very much feel like the organism was alone. If the life cycle involved the sentient part dying before meeting any progeny, then each consciousness would believe it was a god; born from nothing, living alone, and being unaware of death. Until it meets some oracle which its ancestors left for it to learn the long and lonely story of their history. [Answer] First off, nothing ever, ever, ever does anything "for the good of the species". Evolution is all about vested self-interest, cost-benefit payoffs and expending minimum effort to obtain maximum gain. A fox in my home town is unaware that the town down the road even exists, let alone that there are other foxes in that other town. The fox's personal activities do not impact what happens in that other town. The fox and the genes inside the fox cannot conceive of "the species". Resistance to almost anything is also a tricky one. Evolution can't anticipate, it can only deal with the here-and-now and with the comes-along-regularly. So a tree can store enough nutrients to get through the winter, but it can't store enough to get through an ice age. Especially if a 2 mile thick ice sheet ends up on top of it! :-) To be immortal throughout geological time, your creature will have to be able to cope with extremes of climate, radical changes in the chemical or physical composition of what it eats (Yuck this grass is chewy and full of silica! I miss trilobite stew!), things with sharp pointy teeth trying to snack on it, and all sorts of unexpected side effects of what the rest of the biosphere is up to. For instance, someone once suggested that the dinosaurs became extinct due to hayfever from the evolution of flowering plants. Unlikely, but it shows that something unanticipated can evolve and throw you off your game. It might survive a billion years and then discover it is allergic to bee stings. Julie Czerneda's Webshifters series (Beholder's Eye is the first volume) has an immortal species. She does it by making them shapeshifters (who obey the law of conservation of mass - they have to take on or dump mass to change size). That species has a repertoire of forms to survive different conditions. They more fantasy bit is that they can also do mass-energy conversions, to provide a propulsion system in space. Don't stand next to one when it does an emergency shape-shift to something smaller, as it will release water vapour, carbon dioxide and a loud bang of energy! [Answer] A rock: Life is defined as the period between birth and death if something can't die it isn't alive. If it can't die that means no processes are vital, meaning it may not have any processes, making it inanimate. If you just mean something that could survive millions of years, have a very hearty organism that reproduces with no genetic change, cloning its self, but rather or not that is the same organism depends on your opinion. ]
[Question] [ Are there any current or emerging technologies that would make it difficult to copy documents? I've looked for things, but I've mostly found technology for preventing making authentic-looking duplicates of an original, but I'm trying to create something more like a top secret document than a sports ticket. EDIT The specific scenario has an associate of our intrepid heroes in a bureaucrats office, unattended for a few minutes. I need a reason why they'd be able to quickly skim a document, but not just whip out the camera app. [Answer] Print holographic documents, like advanced versions of the holograms you see on credit cards. Depending on the angle at which you hold it, you see different content. If it is made for two human eyes, a single lens camera won't be able to capture a meaningful image, not in a single photograph, and if the text is small enough, a video recording may not have the necessary resolution. [Answer] The problem is that in order for a human to see the document there needs to be light in the correct color coming off the document. If an eye can see it then a camera can record it. There are tricks that can be done that will defeat certain cameras or copiers such as requiring, emitting, or absorbing certain light. Someone will always be able to come up with a camera that fixes it though. The best idea I can come up with right now is to use two documents and a separator with a mirror on each side. Place the two documents lined up and they get combined by your eyes to reveal the message. Even then though a specially designed camera (or just software processing after you copy each individual document) would reveal the hidden message. You need to control access to the documents, once someone has them then you've lost. [Answer] # The obfuscation industry presents: [![EMP](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9EGKG.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9EGKG.png) Featuring a continuously generated electromagnetic pulse ([EMP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Non-nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse_.28NNEMP.29)) safely destroying any nearby photographic equipment. (Or any other electric or electronic equipment for that matter.) Batteries are not included. [Answer] Making the paper highly radioactive will do it - the radiation will saturate those optical sensors (this is what lead Becquerel to the discovery of radioactivity). As a bonus, it will be very unhealthy for the thieves/spies to handle the documents. Of course, this is rather impractical for a real application. As a side note, [Marie Curie's research papers are still radioactive](http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/marie-curies-research-papers-are-still-radioactive-100-years-later.html). [Answer] You could make it a little harder to make a copy of your document but that would include to work with any manufacturer of digital cameras and scanners/copiers. You could print a code (like the one that is already printed: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography>) which doesn't allow to make a copy / photo. But that still could be hacked or you could just take a photo with an analog camera. Or, as mentioned above, you could make a EMP-Emmiting Document but that'd probably be too expensive and you could still take a photo with an analog camera. The safest way for a document would be to only have a crypted digital copy, other wise it could ever be copied or stolen. [Answer] You face quite a challenge. Physics and information theory are against you, and they are not kind foes. Fundamentally, eyes detect photons reflected or emitted off of the surface of the page. If there are photons for the eye to detect, there are photons for a camera to detect. This is why real security always focuses on verifying that people can be trusted first, and only locks down the technology when they can no longer trust the people enough. Historically speaking, the trustworthiness of people is always the limiting factor of security, and your heros demonstrate that they probably cannot be trusted with a document. Technology can always be bypassed (obligatory [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/538/) Reference): [![Obligatory XKCD reference](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ToOM6.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ToOM6.png) Accordingly, expect whatever solution you come up with to be extremely fanciful. Nobody with reasonably normal documents would ever secure them in a way which prevents cell phones from taking pictures of them (short of simply preventing anyone from having cell phones in the area in the first place). However, in the unreasonable category, we could contort the concept of EYES ONLY, a security classification caveat which indicates that the information in the document should not be disseminated to anyone who has not been physically shown the document, no matter what their clearance is. What if we took that literally, and caveated something as TOP SECRET//EYEBALLS ONLY? [![Eyeball](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9uz7k.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9uz7k.jpg) What if the document was housed in a special container designed for TOP SECRET//EYEBALLS ONLY documents. It might have a pair of holes at eye level to permit viewing of the documents inside. Of course, we're going to need to stop the heroes from simply putting the camera up to the hole. What if each hole contained a retina scanner or an iris scanner? If they detected anything except a living human eyeball peering through them, they'd shutter and alert security. As an added bonus, now the data is protected by a biometric scanner as well! (good luck heroes!) This would lead naturally to an amrs race in spy technology. Spies would invent specialized contacts with small cameras in them, but the box could attempt to detect those as well. Permit that cat and mouse game to continue at your leisure until it reaches the level of Mission Impossible you want to see for your story. Who would go to such lengths? I have no idea, but it might work. Perhaps the aliens they keep in Area-51 are actually the cover-up for something even more secretive. The truth is out there, it's just EYEBALLS ONLY. [Answer] bureaucrats like procedures and other red tape like things. The easiest way is to restrict tech access. Cell phones and other electronics have to be 'checked-in' and not allowed in the building. Many courthouses do this already. Next, places with documents can put restrictions on the copier machines, needing a 'login' to be able to make any copies. Same could be said for printers. So its a low-tech approach to the problem. [Answer] This one depends heavily on the world you're in and the type of organization your character is from but with that caveat in mind. DRM [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ibRlb.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ibRlb.png) <http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-files-patent-to-prevent-concert-piracy-with-infrared-tech/> So assuming we're in a near-future world. Your character only has a bog-standard, unsuspicious, commodity hardware camera phone in his pocket. He whips it out to try to snap a photo but it flashes up a copyright warning and switches off the camera. He didn't expect this. The office in question is quite concerned about illegitimate copying so they have a set of the same sort of IR emitters used in cinemas dotted around the office constantly transmitting the "do not record" signal meant and any consumer cameras listen to that signal. No movies or photos can be recorded in that room unless you have a black market or old camera which doesn't comply with the countries copyright laws.Not a big deal if you know about it in advance but the character didn't know about it. So he puts away his phone and skims the document by eye. [Answer] What if the documents are not actually on sheets of paper but on microfilm or some equivalent, and the only device to hand to use them is a microscope-like viewer which the camera can't see into. [Answer] how about this: the building has, located somewhere within it, a powerful radio antenna broadcasting at a certain frequency. this frequency probably doesnt cause the effects of an EMP, but im not sure if that would be scientifically possible. anyway, sensitive documents are fitted with a series of wires and paper-thin circuitry that is able to pick up the signal and convert it into short-range EMP pulses. while not being read, the papers are kept in a safe with a faraday cage around it, and the whole building is preferably also surrounded by one to prevent to signal getting out. this would get around the problem of internal power sources, and still allow people at the building to work with electronics. [Answer] Laminate the documents with transparent reflective films. It will make photo copiers give nothing but white. This will not prevent using a camera though... EDIT: No, you cannot. Or rather: you should not. If it is important for you that documents may not be copied, then you need to take things more seriously then relying on this anti-photography technology. Then you need to be in tight control of who gets to see them, where and under what conditions. And the premise of the question states that this is not happening. While you may - eventually - find a somewhat credible technology for your question, the premise of the question is flawed in that you are left with an organisation that supposedly cares about the security of their documents, but that at the same time are incredibly lax in the handling of them and instead fall back on this technology, thus creating an RMS Titanic-like scenario. ]
[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/29525/edit). Closed 8 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/29525/edit) Suppose Facebook suddenly encounters a bug that allows people to log into any account without a password. Users are unable to change their settings. All posts can be viewed by everyone. After about half an hour and a lot of on-line protest, when Facebook tries to address the issue, they find that they are unable to modify their own code, neither are they able to stop it. Most of the code initially written for FB has been deleted. They realise that all their servers across all offices have been infected and are being controlled remotely. They take all their servers off-line by manually disconnecting them. On further investigation, they also find that every computer that they're using has an embedded code in its operating system that permits this. Most people suspect that this has been planned for, and that insiders must have played a major role in it. 6 hours have passed, and now various organisations have been contacted. There has been no information from the hackers themselves. Facebook has copied all the data from the computers into secure hard drives. 12 hours have passed, and no major leads have been found. People are seriously beginning to question whether the events that just happened were even logically possible and there are small groups with the company itself who are starting to believe in paranormal explanations. Days pass, and no information has been found. Facebook has suffered heavy economical losses. What will happen now? Will they try restarting from scratch, buying new hardware and rewriting all the code required? Or will they create an interim website that allows people to download their data, following which they will shut down? [Answer] They've already lost everything. There is no scenario in which a company like Facebook can come back from an exploit of such magnitude. Even if they find the hacker (which you've said they don't), even if they find the insider at the company (which you've said they don't), even if they can harden the system against another attack; the fact still remains: For an undetermined amount of time, Facebook was totally compromised. You don't know how long these hackers have had total control. Every piece of information going through Facebook (an organisation that relies on its image and has already run into privacy issues) has been exposed to persons unknown, and those same people may be able to take control again just as easily. No-one is ever going to trust Facebook again, and as such whether they come back saying 'It's fine, we fixed the bug', or just pack it in completely, the result is the same: Facebook dies. Other organisations take over, filling in the niches, and they harden their physical/digital security protocols at the same time. Essentially: The kind of massive exploit you've described is a total wipeout for any organisation that's supposed to be able to hold information securely. That's why large companies that deal in this kind of data spend a lot of time and money securing everything, both physically and digitally. It's also why they invest in systems designed to track changes made to their machines/software, and employ people to watch like hawks for any potential attacks. Making an unsolicited change to the OS of every piece of hardware that Facebook uses to allow total root control, remaining undetected and not being traceable even after the cybersecurity experts get their hands on the data? Either your hackers are uberl33tz0rs on a level that's well over 9000, or Facebook's security is pants. Either way Facebook is dead, and if it's the former scenario: So is any non-trivial application of the internet. [Answer] Honestly, that would likely kill Facebook. If people are not able to access their accounts for several weeks, most would find a new social site to move to. Many would do it right away either because they feel betrayed by Facebook or because they 'need' the interaction. No matter what, even if they are able to get back up and running in a month, they will never be the same. Their name will be mud and many will have moved on, skittish to come back. Apparently there are MANY other social networking options out there and I've seen a study that many teenagers don't use their Facebook account for much any more, they use other sites, likely because their parents have Facebook and they don't want to 'share' what they did last weekend with family. [Answer] Similar things have happened before. Sony Online was hacked (with a simple SQL Injection of all things) and still came back from it. Security agencies have been hacked and are still in business with our and other governments. 'The Sony Archives' and the 'Wikileaks: The GIFiles' are all information that has been hacked and stolen from companies that hardly blinked an eye (or so it would seem from our point of view). Knowing similar events have taken place and didn't utterly destroy the companies I'm inclined to say Facebook would be back up within a week. If thepiratebay can have all their servers confiscated and still be back up and running strong then I see no reason a social media site that has no comparable competitor and near endless budget wouldn't be able to purchase new servers, configure them, and do a full restore from scratch in a week. Furthermore (not to make people paranoid), a virus that has taken advantage of multiple weaknesses in a windows os (i think it was 3 of the 5 openeings were used) has already be made (presumable by the US Government), deployed, and successfully used. Odds are it's actually infected you'r computer. It's called *Stuxnet* and it was used to target a very specific micro-controller used in some machine that helps weaponize uranium (or plutonium? idk i'm not a chemist) for nuclear weapons. The problem was that the facility had it's own closed off intranet, so the only way to infect it was to have someone bring it in from the outside. If I remember right, the main theory was somebody that worked there had unknowing brought it in from the outside. So an infected USB stick or something. Not knowing who to infect though, the easiest solution was to infect everybody and wait until one of the employees made that big 'whoops' and infected the whole system. While this scenario differently sounds like the beginning of a new genre, nerd horror (btw whoever came up with that, you're my hero) it isn't fantasy or fiction at all. It has already happened, and it is already a threat. Unfortunately things that don't make the newspaper (news sites? are papers even delivered anymore) largely go unnoticed. Netflix has a show on this titled "StuxNet: Cyberwar" <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1950374/> I would suggest watching it as it's very interesting. [Answer] After a breach like this, Facebook is dead. Other answers covered that already, so I'm going to focus on something else. Consider all the sites that use Facebook for login. Presumably, a hack like this would also allow the hacker to use any other site where they farmed their account authentication to Facebook. They would probably lose fewer users to this, but may have to completely reset backups on the accounts linked to Facebook and may have to completely rework the site if the only authentication method was Facebook. With that in mind, many of these sites allow Google+ authentication as well so Google+ market share would go up. Additionally, something that this question doesn't examine is the impact of making the actual Facebook site compromised. Luckily browser security is quite a bit better now than it was, and just visiting a site is somewhat less dangerous, but most likely whoever is doing this figured out at least a few zero-day exploits that work on browsers to infect anyone who goes to facebook.com, and additionally any site that links to Facebook's scripts. Now think of every site on the Internet that links to a Facebook "like" button. In the worst case scenario, every computer that connects to those sites before they remove the malicious code and doesn't block that code from running is now part of this hacker's botnet. That's a lot of news sites, blogs, forums, etc. In an even worse case, perhaps those sites use a server-side code to execute Facebook's API, which means all of their servers are compromised as well. In terms of longterm effects, my guess is that inter-site authentication/functionality will become less common, many more sites will download JS libraries to their site rather than rely on third party repositories, and in general hopefully people will become more concerned about security. Maybe they'll even stop posting their nude photos on social media sites (they won't). [Answer] <https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y4GB_NDU43Q> In his answer to a very similar fictional scenareo says people fall into three main groups: * defenders * detectives * burners He also has Facebook disabling all logins even though the problem was with Google. ]
[Question] [ I'm working on a set of supernatural creatures, their powers and their [culture/social structure](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/23401/what-would-the-culture-and-traditions-of-invisible-people-look-like). One of these races have the power to make gifts appear out of thin air. They can be anything from spell book to smartphone and their one and only recipient must be present when they are created. These gifts are either something the recipient wants, needs, or would love to own even if they don't know it yet. This is for now their only power. They are otherwise humans. The main problem is that beings able to create anything from atomic bombs to boxes full of diamonds would be way too powerful. They risk becoming basically gods or being kidnapped by other creatures and milked for useful and expensive goods. Another problem is that they may be too "santa-like" to be interesting as characters. A creature that only appears to give protagonists exactly what they need would turn the story into a stream of "Deus ex machina" moments. My goal is to have them being powerful enough so they can have a good social rank in the underworld (which is basically a network of magical mafias), but not become godlike figures. They also need to face some sort of human struggles (emotional/familial/economical) to keep them from becoming too artificial. I thought of three different ways to restrain their power, but none of them is satisfying: * Feelings : They can only give awesome gifts to the people they like, and useless junk to the rest. Problem: thanks to the Stockholm syndrome, it wouldn't prevent the kidnappings. * Dates : Their power only works on birthdays/Christmas/Hanukkah/Weddings/Eid/etc., but it would make them too predictable and boring. Plus, how to choose which holidays to use? * Sanity : Easy but lazy rule. They could be all insane and thus easy to fit into any story, since their behavior wouldn't need to be consistent. --- Questions : What do you think of these 3 possible rules? How could I keep them fun without turning them into insane trolls or "Deus ex machina" characters? You can use any set of rules you want, or even give them additional (related) powers and personality traits. EDIT : The gift generated are literal gifts, they appear inside boxes, packed in colorful paper. When a gift appears, no one know what's inside, not even the creature itself. I'm looking for the simplest way to limit these creatures power, without altering them too much. [Answer] ## Alternate Rules 1. Make each gift have a cost to the giver. Greater gifts have a greater cost. The cost increases proportional to the amount the receiver wants it. A diamond ring for someone who's starving won't cost anything, though a loaf of bread will cost a great deal. 2. Make the cost be something that the giver doesn't want to pay such great pain, loss of a pleasant memory or a shred of sanity (for really big gifts). Depending on the needs of the story, this resource can be renewable or not: Pain goes away but sanity doesn't come back. 3. Givers are tricksters so that they never give what they were explicitly asked for but they do give what the giver really wants or needs. So a request for the gift of bread might be met with the gift of a diamond that can be traded for lots of bread. This does two things. It cuts down the risk the giver can be manipulated because there's no 1:1 mapping between requests and receipts. As a storytelling mechanic, this gives the author a tricky method of foreshadowing or character exposition. Giving what the asker needs but may not want allows the giver to avoid the penalties and costs of Rule #2. Insane givers or just slightly deranged ones are never ever boring. Implications of these rules Perhaps a giver can be forced to give lots of gifts, say coal in the winter-time but forcing them to do so eventually kills giver or renders them unable to exercise their gift. Forcing a cost on each gift ensure that givers don't turn into infinite resource machines. [Answer] > > This is for now their only power. They are otherwise humans. > > > This means, that they have limited lifespans, right? In this case, the most valuable thing they have is time, because this is the only thing they cannot create. This give you two choices: 1. Each creation shortens their lifespan 2. Each creation takes a lot of time to create. Or even better: the time to create a gift (no matter if big or small) increases each time the power is used. In the first case, they have to pay for for each gift with their lives (literally, although the payment is conveniently postponed). That would make them think: "Is this gift/this person really worth it?" Oh, and any kidnapper too smart for his own good would find in the morning a dead body covered with leaflets saying "thou shall not hold others against their will". The second case is even more interesting. You can create scenes like "will she create the antidote before the toxin kicks in"? "Will he decide to spend next year doing nothing, but creating the ring for the love of his life?" You can put them in some state of suspended animation for the creation time, to solve problems like sleep and nutrition. If you choose to have creation time increase with each gift it gives you easy way to use this power a lot while setting up the plot, and use it only in most dire situations later on. It can be part of the story arc: character learns to rely on himself instead of on powers. [Answer] I think the most important part of this is that they don't give gift cards, they give gifts. That means two things: 1) - You shouldn't know beforehand what you're getting, and 2) - The gift-giver should give you something that reflects their own personality. This way, someone who wants, say, a nuke, won't always get one. The first gift-giver they find might be a pacifist, and gives them something they want, but nothing that will kill anyone. The next gift-giver might be on board with violence, but enjoys the simple things in life; thus, the gift is a knife (which is always useful). Even if there is a gift-giver who can and will create a nuke for someone, they might not do it for this guy; again, gifts are part of a relationship, so in order to get the things you really want, you'll have to make sure the gift-giver really knows you. Otherwise, it's anyone's guess which one of your myriad needs and desires will be fulfilled. Plus, maybe without a relationship the gifts you get will be small. To add to this, and make the process of gift-giving special, why not make it a one-time event? Everyone can only get one gift per gift-giver. So maybe there's one thing you want, and you only know one guy who can give it to you. You're going to make sure to be nice to this guy, and spend a lot of time with him, and make sure you get to know each other, before you ask for your gift. Only then can you be sure that what you get is what you expect to get. [Answer] Well one possible choice is the appearance of insanity. Like the Malkavian in the World of Darkness. They were considered insane by the other vampires but they saw the world in a very different light. Often giving cryptic advice that if one bothered to pay attention to it, could be very useful later. So gifts might be strange or obviously useful, you might not even know how until much later. A piece of lore would be to never ignore/toss/lose something given to you by a Deus Ex, of course the practical jokers might have a lot of fun with that. I would also expect for the power, it's not like a genii, "I wish for a million dollars". But is more esoteric, using some of the targets subconscious. This means that a terrorist wanting to blow up the White House, might receive a Koran and a prayer mat. Some of this might be controlled by the personality of the Deus Ex, Say a joker might have a picture of Mickey mouse on the prayer mat, another might have the Koran opened to a particularly important verse admonishing the perpetrator for his actions. [Answer] Perhaps you should look more into where these people come from. Even if limited, it is a very potent gift. Given that someone will invariably try to kidnap them and they can't use the gits for themselves, it seems almost like a curse... what if it is? What if someone, a long time ago, was granted a genuine Wish - and wished for the ability to have wishes, that would go to his children and their children's children? The deity in question had a bad day, annoyed by yet another smart-ass wishing for unlimited wishes, or was a great trickster to begin with. The result is a (sub)race of humans with a potentially great power, pursued by anybody with half a brain. (Anybody with a complete brain will be extremely careful around them.) Limitations In addition to the other limitations mentioned, consider these: The gifters can only create one gift per person, ever. In addition, the gifts are suited to the gifted person in [unlikely ways](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhPn1FstfQI), often turning their life one their heads. Warlord trying to conquer the world? Give him a toy he lost a child to remind him what he really lacks. The gifters have no choice over the gifts, the benign or trickster deity is still calling the shots. The gifters could be also bound by the name of their originator, leading to a strong love/hate relationship and attempts to purge his name from existence. They will do their utmost to avoid being discovered for what they are. There is probably at least one organization bent on exterminating these people. [Answer] I see two good options for limiting them. Firstly, make their power costly in the following way: you can only get something you want by giving up something else you want at least as much, without knowing what that will be. (Making it tit-for-tat just means that they become gods of trade.) If you ask for great wealth, the genie might age you twenty years in exchange. If you ask for eternal youth, you might lose all your limbs. Secondly, make the power have no common sense. If you ask to get out of a burning building, a gas main blows up. If you ask for water when you're dying of thirst in the desert, you get water, but nothing to store it in. The key here is to make each gift be a very good way to give what the person thought of (e.g. "I need water"), but never what the person actually wanted (e.g. "I need to not die of thirst" - which will result in the gift being a bomb). For example, giving someone infected water is not a good twist unless the gift is actually teleporting things from elsewhere and the nearest water source is a sewer. This method makes the gift extremely dangerous to use, including for the giver and any bystanders. The best way to employ it is to ask for very precise, simple things, such as "an exact copy of the sword I was wearing yesterday". [Answer] What if they could make anything, but were limited by the natural resources available around them? They could draw water from the ground, but only if their was a source nearby. They could create anything even machines or technology only if they could draw (steal) the resources they need, copper, plastics, energy. Junk yards might be a great place for them to hang out. [Answer] A potential (and I think very flexible) way would be if the giving of gifts attract the attention of other; more malignant forces. Occasionally giving small gifts goes unnoticed, but constant giving of gifts or creating large, impressive gifts causes some form of extra-dimensional beings/spirits/secret organisation of assassins/irritated Elder Gods to notice, locate and 'deal with' not only the giver of gifts but also anyone/anything nearby. This allows for a lot of character development, doesn't require that the giver have any personality traits in particular (though the extravagant, foolish or incautious among them will die off pretty quickly) and gives plenty of scope for adding in extra plot elements. Fear of the gift givers leading to societal isolation, a gift giver taking hostages and threatening to make a stash of diamonds, incidental bystanders trying to survive the eldritch horror summoned by an ill considered birthday present, there are load of plot elements you can use. The biggest problem with this is that the gift giver isn't in control of what gets made. If they go to give a gift to someone who says they want a puppy, but in actual fact wants a slavishly obedient oompah band (it might happen, you never know!), the gift giver is going to accidentally call down the wrath of whatever being/organisation/natural disaster you're using, killing everyone nearby and leading to a lot of melted brass instruments. Ok, that last example was a bit odd, but the point stands. Perhaps if they had a way to gauge the 'size' of a gift before it was given, it might help. an innate ability, perhaps, or only being able to give gifts explicitly asked for and greatly desired by the recipient, otherwise... "Can you make me a nuclear bomb?" "Not unless you really like tentacles ripping your face off..." "How about a puppy?" "Fine!" Cue trombones, followed by screaming ]
[Question] [ In a sci-fi setting I'm working on, the power dynamics between two civilizations are maintained by one civilization ("captives") being completely dependent on the other civilization ("captors") for electrical power, in an environment (artificial colonies on an airless planet) where electricity is a life-and-death matter. The primary source of power is a huge solar farm owned by the captors, but some of the captors' colonies are powered by their own internal reactors, and are separate from the main power grid. Both civilizations originally arrived on the planet via a generation ship, and the reactors' fuel should have been brought as the ship's power source; whatever this fuel is, it should be impossible or impractical for the captives to mine or produce. This leads to the captives attempting to steal reactor fuel from the captors' colonies, the rationale being that if the captives can establish their own reactor, and become energy-independent, they can stage a revolution without fear of having their power shut off. My question is: what reactor power source would work best to set up this scenario, and which technologies would need to be impossible/impractical in the setting for this scenario to make sense? Fusion seems like the most obvious power source for a sci-fi setting, but the most likely fuel would be deuterium, which is simple enough that it's probably not particularly hard to find or synthesize. Fission fits the bill a little better--it depends on hard-to-find radioactive fuel, like uranium or plutonium, and it could be established that the planet doesn't contain any fissionable elements--but, for the scenario to work, fusion would have to be completely impossible or impractical. Given that the story is set several thousand years in the future, is it reasonable to assume that scientists eventually discovered that efficient fusion just wasn't possible? Is that even a possible outcome, given enough time and research? Or is there another, better reactor option I might be ignoring? Something with antimatter, or another exotic material? [Answer] Fission, in the form of a [pebble bed reactor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor) is the way to go. [![pebble bed](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ajh1k.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ajh1k.png) Fuel is portible and as safe as any industrial supply: billiard-ball sized spheres, each a self-contained sealed unit. Each can be engineered for available fuel and concentrations, layering fuel isotopes and neutron absorbers in a precise manner. Spent fuel and waste can make different pebbles with suitable formulation. Stack a million of them together and it gets hot. But, not so hot as to wreck the contents or the vessel! Each pebble is a solid-state engineered feedback system that shuts down the reaction as it gets warm. So, it reaches a pre-designed temperature and automatically levels off the output. To extract power, pump coolant through the pile, which nicely flows between the balls. The more agressive you cool it, the more power it puts out. So, someone stealing a shipment of pebbles can have a useful radiothermal generator with zero engineering effort, and a modest amount of technology (and a large enough supply of pebbles) can give you a safe full-power fission reactor. The size of a million pebbles might be tough. Perhaps small loads are not tightly locked down because it is too small to be useful...so they think. This can be part of your plot: a single load or small supply of pebbles is not enough to run their reactor as designed so they don’t think it is enabling the thiefs to build a power supply, even if they know it’s missing. Your protagonists might use external neutron sources to work with a small pile. Or maybe the hero figures out how to alter the pebbles; say, file down the outer layers and coat with something different, or spaces the pebbles apart inside a fluid that itself has neutron modulating features. It can be something novel and unexpected by the bad guys, and/or rely on something unique to the good guys. You can adjust the sizes to suit the logistics of the story: You can specify a different nominal size, say 100K for a "small" power supply. Then a single pile of 5000 or 10000 might be used for the covert reactor. You could make the pebbles smaller too in your story, but ought to mention that for beleivability when explaining the reactor in exposition. [Answer] I would think that if we get fusion to work, most expected designs are going to be big, and require lots of energy to the reactor and a lot to startup/contain the reaction. You have a small sun going on in there. So while fusion fuel might be 'easy' to come by, the reactor is not going to be easy to build or hide from the oppressors. Fission reactors will likely be much easier to hide and create (even though it isn't easy). Solar would be much easier power source. [Answer] # Polywell fusion is credible, clean and cool-looking You say... > > but the most likely fuel would be deuterium > > > There are many more fusion cycles that can be used, and far from all use deuterium. The various [Polywell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell) projects are looking to use plain ol' [Boron as fusion fuel](http://www.polywellnuclearfusion.com/NuclearFusion/pBReaction.html). Not only is this an aneutronic fusion reaction(\), but it also makes Helium as its "waste", plus it is sci-fi looking to such a degree that it puts every Star Trek "warp core" special effect to shame. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mwS7u.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mwS7u.jpg) EMC2 Fusion Development Corporation's "Wiffle-Ball 8" reactor in operation* (\) Which means you do not have the pesky problem of making all your machinery radioactive [Answer] Since the key element to this story is being able to "steal" the fuel, then nuclear fusion would seem to be the way to go. Fusion is very efficient in terms of extracting energy from the mass of the material undergoing fusion, so a small amount of fusion fuel can go a long way. There are several issues, however. The sort of fusion we have been 20 years away from achieving for the last 50 years involves using D2 as the fuel, and most machines designed to extract fusion energy from Deuterium are quite large and complicated. The ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) being built has the mass and capital cost of an aircraft carrier, hardly something people under the constraint of having their energy use monitored and controlled will be able to pull off in secret. As well, most machines using Deuterium fusion as their energy source emit up to 80% of the energy in the form of neutrons, which requires elaborate measures to mitigate (the entire colony* will glow in the dark otherwise) and to extract useful energy. Once again, the giant heat exchangers and steam turbines needed will be a bit difficult to fit under a mattress when the conquerors arrive to see just what is going on in their colony. Aneutronic fusion is theoretically much better. The reactors can be quite a bit smaller since they don't need as much shielding and can extract a high percentage of their energy from the charged particles being emitted from the reactor. The trouble here is aneutronic fusion is an order of magnitude more difficult than D2 (for various reasons), so your aneutronic reactor will need a supply of genius designers and builders and probably some pretty elaborate materials to work (superconducting magnets or other exotica). There are a lot of different theoretical approaches to this sort of fusion reaction (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion>), and many different possible fuel combinations, but probably the most "practical" would be Boron for the B+p reaction, since carrying a box full of boron seems to be more practical than carrying around a cryogenic dewar of 3He. [Answer] * If the captives want to steal the fuel for their power system, it has to be reasonably portable, unless they want to steal and hide an entire train. That might be a point for antimatter, if there are portable containment devices. If the containment fails, you get a big bang. That could help with the heist, too -- the captors won't dare to shoot at escaping captives if they carry enough AM. * I think you're underestimating the difficulty of building the reactor, as well as the problem of hiding it. Fuel isn't the only thing. Historically speaking, it seems that fission is much easier than fusion. Even North Korea has a fission reactor, while fusion is still a pie in the sky. * Both colony expeditions would have planned to build redundant power systems after their arrival. What happened to the captives' stockpile? Perhaps the captors have some crates with disassembled reactors from the captives somewhere. Along with a [Helium-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Fuels) mine or an [enrichment plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_separation). [Answer] Perhaps you could have a conflict involving a passing Comet? [Earth's Water is known to contain small amounts of Deuterium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deuterium) (read: 1 Deuterium atom to 6420 Protium atoms of Hydrogen.), and the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko apparently has three times this amount, comparably to Earth's water supply. In the vastness of space, there is probably a comet or two thousand that have excessive amounts of this substance. You would use this as the "first spark" to initiate a Fusion reactor. Only the Captors would initially know about it, however, one sneaky Captive would overhear about it and plan to steal some/all of it. This would create both plot, tension, and motive for the Captives to risk their all for this one chance to be rid of their overlords. Perhaps they've already built a fusion reactor, they just don't have the necessary pieces to finish it, or the motivation because they can't finish it without the final pieces. [Answer] I find the majority of these answers are not accurate as they discount the fact that every element is present everywhere but only in small quantities....you can process the dirt outside your own house and obtain uranium at a percentage of about 1part per millon. the enrichment process is long and requires substantial research into the process but can be done... ]
[Question] [ The members of my species don't have territories, and because of their migratory nature material possessions are not that important to them. The reason for this is because they live on a world where the days last 9 years. I can see crime like murdering someone over food, but would wars and battles occur? Even if they would, why would they fight? [Answer] There are many different reasons for starting a war. Here are some: * Resources. Nation-state X has something that nation-state Y needs or wants pretty desperately. Nation-state Y's easiest course in many cases would be to simply reach a trade agreement: We'll give you this much food for this much wood. However, if nation-state X really needs or wants the wood, thought, then they would not be inclined to accept the offer, and the agreement goes nowhere. Nation-state Y then prepares for war. In your world, there are some interesting important resources. [Bowlturner pointed out that lifting gas would be important](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/20821/would-a-migratory-species-have-war/20822#20822). This is an excellent example because helium has historically been much more expensive than hydrogen; this is why hydrogen was used for airships in many cases, despite its tendency to explode under certain conditions. Here are some other possibilities for your world: + Lightweight materials (ever kilogram counts!) + Non-flammable materials (if hydrogen was used in lieu of helium) + . . . ? * Religion. Religious wars happen, as we seem to have collectively determined this week. Nation-state X is made up of heathens - according to the religious leaders of nation-state Y - and so we must all go and kill them! For nations with roughly religiously homogenous populations, religious wars become more of a possibility. I can't come up with anything specific for your world, because there doesn't seem to be anything that would severely influence religious practices as a whole there. * A madman. Franklin Roosevelt was not alone in proclaiming that Adolf Hitler was a madman; whether or not that description is apt is up to you to decide, but the results of a madman gaining total power would be comparably catastrophic. In your world, this scenario seems to be perfectly possible, although it seems that catastrophes would be easier to unleash. A simultaneous ignition of flammable gases in lifting compartments, or a release of lifting gases, could send a rival city crashing to the ground. Even someone acting alone could do this - a scary thought. Alliances then come into play, even if the original nation-state was entirely destroyed. * Genocide. This is similar to religious wars inasmuch as it involves nation-state Y trying to destroy the people of nation-state X simply because of some certain - possibly entirely superficial and unimportant - characteristic. These could all happen in any setting, though I've talked about some specific examples unique to your world (see [this](http://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/war-overview.pdf) for some related ideas). Here are some more interesting scenarios that could only happen in the land of floating, migratory cities: 1. City X happens to have caught a rather nice air current that is helping them move swiftly from point A to point B, and they manage to stop other cities from using it. City Y is annoyed and starts a war. 2. Someone who claims to be from City X initiates a terrorist attack against City Y by damaging or destroying compartments with lifting gases (as I talked about in the madman section). Whether or not he is actually from City X is immaterial; City Y has justification to attack City X. 3. City X is hovering over City Y, causing City Y to lose all energy (I believe you said they are solar powered). City Y must fight back for revenge! [Answer] They might be smaller but the plains Indians migrated around following the herds and they attacked each other. It might have been for water holes, or prey or raiding for women but they did attack each other. If this is in your planet with floating cities, then there are more resources to steal: the gas in the zeppelins could be very much worth the price of an attack. and even the balloons themselves could be a valuable commodity. As long as people think it would be easier to take from someone else, than get or find it themselves, there will be theft and war. [Answer] What about food and water? That is a every good reason to wage war. They move from oases to oases (to avoid depleting the resources) or following the monsoon. They might keep animals with them (livestock) but need to give them food. Nomadic people have fought to get the best pastures in order to feed their animals and themselves. So, yes they would fight to keep the best resources for themselves. The climate is not constant, it's always fluctuating. Some years are drier than other and will put a strain on the resources. This is another source of conflict. [Answer] as already stated, war will happen. war is about wanting something the other people have. If anything I think war is more common with migrating species. With territories there is a clear "this is mine, that is yours" divide, defined by where your territory ends, that makes it easy to understand who expects to own what. When migrating you don't know who owns what. If both show up at the same watering hole neither has any more of a claim on it then the other, which means both sides feel more justified in claiming it as theirs (and thus fighting over it) then if one side knows the other has a fair claim of the water being in their pre-owned Territory. Also, keep in mind if this is your earlier world there likely would be a territory of sorts. Everyone is migrating in the same direction, so territory would likely be divided by the ring you make around the planet. You expect to always be able to migrate along this path. Or actually it would be more like "I own locations X, Y , and Z, and the right to travel to them. I will be in one of those positions depending on what year it is, but I expect that each of those locations is my territory when I migrate to it. Over enough time everyone will get predefined locations they travel to and set up 'home' for 3 years. [Answer] Are they migratory, or nomadic? If migratory, like birds, they have (at least) two home regions and travel between them. Getting from one home to another earliest to occupy the best spot would definitely be a source of tension, possibly sabotage to delay the other party would be an option to get ahead. If that's not enough cause for war, wait until your spot's previous owner turns up later... Or are there regular migration routes, and another, settled, species on the path? Having your neighbourhood torn up twice a year by the nomads would be another cause of strife. The Plains Indians have already been mentioned : I understand farmers who settled on their routes didn't always get on too well with them. [Answer] Resources are the most common reason for war, and territory is just what happens to decide upon who gets access to resources. In your world, people cannot stick around to exploit resources, so they wander all the time. Nevertheless, they need resources - food, water, materials of all kinds. Why would they not fight over them? The main difference between our world and theirs would be that they fight only for temporary access to resources, so there would be more wars, but possibly less destructive ones. The option to simply move to the next resource would always be present, but since access is never permanent, you would fight over the same resource again and again (basically, every time you come to it on your migration). ]
[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/18202/edit). Closed 8 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/18202/edit) A group of archaeologist found a very strange box. Upon discovery, it seemed to contain 2 paper-like objects. The first one is just an blank page, the second contains an alien writing. After being deciphered, it seems like the aliens grew fond of us and gave us one of their devices, the Life Note. The instructions were clear, we just had to write a single name of a person who have died already, a definitive description and then give the desired age of the person. This can only be used for a single time. The world created a committee to decide who to revive. Some aimed for religious leaders, greatest artist, philosophers, military generals, scientists and more. Due to my fear of having another broad question, the committee decided to only select from the field of science. Who will be the best candidate to revive for the development of the current world and why does the world need him in and his expertise in his field? Notes: 1. The papers don't have any other special composition aside from being paper like. In this story, the world will never discover what these papers are made of. 2. The revived person will suddenly be given magic alien vaccination of the current era so that he will not die all of a sudden. 3. If the given name of the person did not exist, the written letters will vanish so you may retry again. 4. The given age should only before he died. 5. The world will not fight over the said person, nor assassinate him. 6. If a person with the same description is ambiguous, the paper will write ambiguous and then vanish so the committee may retry again. 7. Instructions noted that any ability of the paper should not be taken advantage off. Abuse to its power(i.e. hunting criminals if they are still alive) will cause the paper to vanish. The paper maybe is smart to know if it is being taken advantage off 8. The farther the person is to the current age, the farther he might have to learn the current world. In this question, Age of person and Time the person is alive are factors. The person can exceed his expected age that he dies. 9. The paper will survive only for 100 years after discovery. People alive after the discovery of the paper cannot be revived. 10. In this question, all of our greatest scientist today has already died and can be revived. (Any offense is not intended, I am just adding the possibility of a modern scientist against other scientists) 11. This question can also be narrow down (In case broad, idea-generating and opinion based): In which field do we need more help, or simply a yes-no "Can a person with written history from the past contribute to the modern age technology"? [Answer] ### The obvious choices The individuals most would default to are those who have made important contributions to science. There are many candidates. * Albert Einstein * Galileo Galilei * Isaac Newton * Niels Bohr * Max Planck And so many more. But who cares about what they did add to science, we want to know what they can add to science, and there are different criteria measuring that. We want people who... Died before they could release a truly major contribution to the public. Have important knowledge that was lost in the past. (Library of Alexandria, Pompeii, Advanced Art of Memory techniques) Have highly adaptable minds so that they don't freak out when they suddenly pop into existence. Those fitting at least some of these new criteria are. * Anyone of the ancient scientists. (Aristotle, Democritus, etc.) * A polymath. (Leonardo da Vinci, John von Neumann) As stated before, we would like the candidate to contribute as much as possible to the scientific community, however, we should consider the fact that they are human and may not just go along with the world committee's decision. Definitely avoid picking anyone who was suicidal no matter how effective they may be. [Answer] I'm joining @ckersch with a vote for Tesla, but with a twist. I want to revive Tesla's mother, eight months after Nicola was conceived. That way, he gets a full childhood to catch up with what we've discovered since he passed away. Then on his eighteenth birthday, we give him the used-up box as a starting point for his research. [Answer] *We should bring back the most prodigious* thinker we can find. Possibly Tesla.** There are lots of people who made great developments in science, but most of them only developed a limited number of things. For example, Darwin developed the theory of evolution, which was a huge advance in science, but was otherwise a fairly ordinary man. Then there are scientists and mathematicians for whom the phrase 'ordinary man' would be an insult. These are the sorts of people we should bring back. These are the sorts of individuals which, when educated from a fairly early age in the modern state of the art, could be expected to make some astounding new discoveries. These sorts of individuals have brains which don't just discover one thing and spend a lifetime working on it, but spend their lives making ground breaking discovery after ground breaking discovery. We should also bring them back at a fairly young age, perhaps 10 or 12 years old. This would put them in the prime of their ability to learn. Everything they will discover as an adult is already known, so we don't need their knowledge. Rather, what we want is one of the most exceptional minds the world has ever known, at a young enough age to become one of the most exceptional minds of our time, as well. Based on these criteria, in no particular order, I would bring back the 10-year old version one of the following four individuals: * Nicola Tesla * Carl Friedrich Gauss * Leonhard Euler * Srinivasa Ramanujan [Answer] The highest bidder. Give the paper to the highest bidder. Be that a group or individual. If you're goal is to advance science, then use the money to fund primary research. This will advance science by far more than any famous dead person could. And, I would argue, that this would likely give you the best candidate on top of a bunch of money. Advertise Don't be hasty. Make sure the world knows what's happening. And make it easy to participate. Facilitate participation by developing pledging systems. Maybe some hybrid of stackexchange, reddit and kickstarter. You want debate, competition and as many people involved as possible. Risks Some rich person could just revive a dead relative. But if you've set it up right, this is unlikely. With enough attention, no small group of people will have enough money to outspend masses of people. Advantages Well-run committees do work. They usually make better decisions than individuals. But they aren't the best way of doing things. The best decisions are usually made with a combination of committee and the public. The New Zealand flag referendum is an example of this. Flag designs are submitted by the public, the committee picks 4, the public votes on them and the winner becomes the new flag. Crowdsourcing + Committee are an excellent combo. The money aspect also helps. Essentially it allows people to say "how much is it worth to me to have X alive". This avoids the democracy problem where your vote is binary. [Answer] Science does not rely on any particular person. Erase or lose any particular scientific knowledge and it will be rediscovered. Indeed in terms of pragmatism there's little to be gained from plucking any particular engineer, scientist etc from history. But on the off chance I'd go with someone who's definitely not a one trick pony. Frederick Sanger, he won 2 nobels at the bleeding edge of the biotech industry which is currently more important than ever before. I think he could earn 2 more with another 50 years. The other contender I can think of is Feynman. [Answer] Louis Pasteur. Not only was this man a marvelous researcher in the field of medicine who saved millions of lives, but he donated the fruits of his research to the world, forfeiting his right to a patent. In an age desperately in need of high ethical standards, he would be your man. Norman Borlaug. At a time when people like Paul Ehrlich were forecasting doom, this man developed a strain of wheat (and later rice) with high yield, saving hundreds of millions from starvation. When people say that humanity is the problem, he could show that human ingenuity can be the solution. [Answer] What sciencists / mathematics were on the brink of discovery or were actively reearching? This would be good options. However, we should pick modern scientists, as they will understand modern science most easily. In no particular order: 1. Paul Erdos 2. Albert Einstein 3. Max Born 4. Max Planck 5. Richard Feynman ]
[Question] [ Instead of flying say tons of metal and/or water and other raw materials/molecular matter to the Moon or Mars, could we shoot it there in ionized form by accelerating these sufficiently? Maybe subsequently shooting the previously removed electrons so that the matter can be discharged on-site. Of course we would need a simple (?) base built there previously that is able to "catch" the beam. I imagine this could be much cheaper and faster than sending rockets filled with stuff. Is this in any way feasible? Or would the atmosphere get in the way? In that case, just bringing the stuff into earth orbit and only then shooting it would no longer be much cheaper, but still faster. That is, if such a beam of reasonable size (a few tens or hundreds of meters) could transport any reasonable amount of mass in reasonable time. [Answer] Various forms of this have been proposed as propulsion systems for ships in interplanetary or interstellar space, which should give you some idea of the energy that is contained in the beam. A neutral particle beam is needed for transmitting matter or energy over long distances since the beam of charged particles would otherwise disperse. The catcher might be a large superconducting ring, but when the "hot beam" passes through the magnetic field it may disperse into ions again, creating a huge radioactive cloud. If the beam impacts directly onto a target like the lunar surface, then extreme heating and inducing radiation in the target might happen. You will be mining radioactive glass for your materials. A "beam" of macroscopic particles (Smart Dust) might be a better solution. Some proposals make each piece of "smart dust" a tiny solar sail, so sunlight or perhaps a laser in orbit could be used to accelerate the "smart dust" towards the target. Since the macroscopic particles are neither charged nor moving at relativistic velocity, the problem of catching the "beam" of smart dust is also much easier. Perhaps a "pie pan" made from metal or sintered out of regolith would do as your mass catcher. The issue of heat will still be there, only not so severe (maybe you will have to pry off a pile of sintered material from the "pie pan" structure). Some proposals using "smart dust" to propel a spacecraft suggest that you can use the beam to achieve incredible accelerations (usually by breaking the beam down into a plasma so it can effectively couple to a superconducting magnetic "drive plate"), so it is possible to generate and transport a lot of energy using a macroscopic dust "smart beam" as well. [Answer] TL;DR: No. The problem with charged particle beams is dispersal. Since all the particles have the same charge sign, and like-charged particles repel one another, the beam would disperse before it could reach any target, and much of the material would be lost. Alternatively, a neutral-particle beam could well serve to deliver particles to a relatively small destination across interplanetary distances, however capturing these particles at the other end would be a problem, and they would arrive with an energy close to that with which they were accelerated in the first place, hence why this system is being considered for use as a weapon. [Answer] From a physics standpoint, it's essentially irrelevant what mechanism is used to deliver some matter – whether by rocket or by particle stream, you'll still have to accelerate all that matter to the necessary escape velocity, and heaving all that mass out of Earth's gravity well still requires the same amount of physical work. Rockets have one big disadvantage – they're subject to the rocket equation. They do not only have to lift the payload, but also the rocket engine and all fuel, and all fuel to lift that fuel, which is wildly inefficient[1]. Of course, there are ways to improve on that. * Launch the payload with an engine but without an energy source. The energy required for propulsion is provided externally, e.g. via solar panels or a ground-based laser. Reaction mass will still have to be taken along, which is subject to the rocket equation. * Use laser propulsion, where light itself transfers impulse onto the payload. * Perform all acceleration up front with a stationary device (e.g. a railgun) so that the payload requires neither engines nor fuel. Due to the high accelerations, this tends to be unsuitable for delivering life forms alive, but for raw materials this poses no problem. This would be the most realistic option for cheaply delivering large quantities of low-priority cargo on an interplanetary scale. If you want to launch from Earth directly to the target planet, the friction caused by the atmosphere is a major problem (you do not want your cargo to burn up). Depending on a lot of variables (mostly, scale), the most economical solution would be either to use cheap rockets to lift cargo to an orbital railgun, providing initial delta-v to a small rocket via a mass driver, or building a ginormous vacuum tube up into the higher atmosphere through which cargo is accelerated. See for example the [Star Tram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarTram) concept as an interesting example, and the [Surface to Orbit](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/surfaceorbit.php) page on Project Rho for comparisons of various ground launch concepts. Accelerating large units (a couple of tons) from a stationary device is logistically easier than accelerating small units (microscopic dust or single molecules, i.e. a gas or a plasma). The latter requires additional energy to break down the materials in the first place, and a lot of effort to slow down, capture, and recombine the transferred matter. [1]: The technical term is “exponential” [Answer] As already stated, like charges repel and therefore a non-neutral beam will spread out. The closest thing to what you are asking for is to use a rail gun or a catapult to fire finished (or part-finished) products into orbit around the destination planet for collection. You would still need some packaging (with thrusters attached) in case anything went wrong, or to make micro adjustments after launch. [Answer] You don't get something for nothing. The energy required to get the stuff anywhere is given to us by e=mc^2. Waiting for antigravity motors myself, then we can use flying saucers for transport. The physics will eventually get there. ]
[Question] [ Assuming an alternate reality on present day earth where modern world leaders were required by their people and political doctrine to lead all wars from "the front", would societies be more or less prone to go to war? How would it change the course of history? Would presidents be more or less likely to engage in war? Would the people be more likely to elect military figures knowing that if war broke out during in next 4-8 years that the president would be more directly, tactically involved? More specifically I'm wondering how democracy would change if presidents/prime ministers were expected to be front line generals. [Answer] You're going to end up with more Figureheads. The thing is, if your President is off doing war-stuff, then that means he isn't at home doing his normal Presidenting stuff. But he serves an important function, and has a lot of power, and that creates a power vacuum that someone else will fill while your President is away at war. So you're going to end up with Power Grabs, where the President's normal authority is slowly eroded each time he has to go off and fight people instead of doing his normal job. Eventually you just have a figurehead position where he doesn't do much most of the time, and only has significant authority during wartime. This applies to other World Leader-types as well, even though they will in practice have different responsibilities, you'll see the same sort of power restructure over time. So to answer your specific questions: > > How would it change the course of history? > > > On the one hand this would create more of a power re-distribution, rather than a fundamental change. So I don't think you'd see many direct changes caused by this. On the other hand, consider the butterfly effect - small changes in human political power structures could cause extremely large changes over time. So the world could be very different even with only minor historical changes at each step. > > Would presidents be more or less likely to engage in war? > > > Even in our political systems, presidents don't have as much influence on war as you might think in most modern first world countries. They probably have the most individual influence, but that's dwarfed by institutional, party, or societal pressure when determining if a country goes to war or not. > > Would the people be more likely to elect military figures knowing that if war broke out during in next 4-8 years that the president would be more directly, tactically involved? > > > Probably, but since your presidents will end up with less non-wartime powers, this won't be as big of a change as you might think. [Answer] ## You can't lead a war from the front line anymore Leading a war from the front line was done in history, with leaders being part of the melee action, but it hasn't been possible since WW2 and possibly even earlier. Generals of front line units aren't personally on the front line in any meaningful sense. Small units are being led by a leader in combat directly, but somewhere between the level of platoon and division this becomes practically impossible, as the unit must be managed by a staff of officers that is safely behind the actual combat action, otherwise it's too easy for the enemy to disrupt or destroy the HQ. The larger the unit, the larger (and less mobile) HQ is needed, and it gets further from the front lines. If a political leader would doing the role of a "front line general", it would not change their personal safety and risks in any way whatsoever. Instead of spending their time in a well defended government HQ/bunker/aircraft/etc they would be in a well defended military HQ/bunker/aircraft/etc. At best, they would move from the capital to a regional HQ in a major city closer to the front. For a historical example see WW2 country leaders meddling in military leadership - done from the same bunkers, and occassionally disastrous military results. If a political leader would actually be fighting on the front line, say, commanding a tank, then they would not be leading that war. The deployment of UK prince Harry in Afghanistan is a real life example. They would either be just another low-level front-line officer, or possibly a glorified flag-carrier or PR event, but the actual command of the large military units would have to be done by someone else in a proper HQ with the rather large staff and communications gear that needs to be kept safe behind the front. [Answer] In early world history, running over your enemies with military might was the only way to gain more power and land in the world - so most leaders of the world were at the front of their wars. They were, essentially, warlords. The most notable warlord in history was [Genghis Khan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan), a powerful figure whose swath of destruction changed the shape of most of the Eastern world. He held a great deal of power, and restructured all of the places he conquered as his band of warriors paved a path through the world. Until he died, and everyone had to return to their homeland to elect his son as the new leader of the Mongols (they of course had every right to choose someone else, and have their head cut off for it. Democracy!), which essentially ended the Mongolian reign over the Western World. On the other side of the world, Centuries prior, we have [Alexander the Great](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great), who led a similar takeover of a great deal of the Eastern World...up until the untimely end of his campaign, which then greatly contracted his rule. The theme here is that a warlord can indeed gain a great deal of power and influence...but rarely can they hold onto it if they aren't also a great political leader. What you would therefore find is a world where large drives for power happen constantly, because the warlords of the world have a great deal of power to make those wars happen, and want to exercise that power to sustain their rule...but once they reach their outer limit, either by reaching old age or other factors limiting how far they can legitimately claim, their empire would suddenly contract, letting other warlords of the world run rampant. [Answer] Well the first problem comes in, in that most world leaders are not generals. We had Grant and Eisenhower. Next leading from the front is a great show of courage, but it is not a good place to be to direct battles. If you mean just being in the battle zone in the command tent that is a little different. However, back to my first point Presidents are not Generals. So the president becomes a 5th wheel and underfoot for those who know what they are doing. Delegation is actually very important in any large organization. No one can do it all nor even verify everyone is doing their job. So delegation is the way to go. Get trustworthy people, give them a job and let them get it done. So what I am saying is it would be very impractical to have world leaders in the front. I agree it would certainly change their perspective of wars if they were required to endanger themselves that way but that would likely just get a lot of 'secret service' men and women killed. Even if it became a 'thing' what would encourage leaders to do that? Most likely there would be 'generals' who are elected and then the real power brokers will be sitting in the shadows doing their thing, and be less likely to be called out for their meddling (kind of like the Koch brothers). If a president (or other head of state) becomes too troublesome, then you start a war with someone to get them out of your hair and maybe if your lucky they don't come back. ]
[Question] [ Suppose I have some frog people, who are of slightly smaller frame and build than a human. I was imagining that when they fight, both in a war and dueling context, they would crouch down, a bit like Suwako over here. The one on the left. ![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/mY4HP.jpg). Some Notes: * Late-medieval tech * Low powered magic is plentiful and cheap, high powered magic is rare and expensive * They often walk about in their daily lives with a shield and a spear strapped to their back. They can use other weapons if need be * The shield is light, and is actually a small raft capable of supporting their weight, but nothing too much more. * Their spear is used to move the boat about, as well as for spear fishing. * As you can imagine, their homeland is a swampy sort, and they carry their shield and spear even when traveling abroad. * They will fight with and against many differing fantasy animal people, and humans. * The frog people's legs are disproportionately stronger than their arms. * "Frog people" in this context are basically slightly smaller humans with superficial frog features, strong and long legs, darting tongue. * They can walk about like humans, but when threatened, they crouch down, preparing to jump at the enemy or away. * They can hop up to $4m$ up, and about $10m$ away. I'm looking for answers that address how they would fight both individually and in groups (in battle). [Answer] I'm not a frog-person with disproportionately strong legs, nor do I know any in real life, but let me offer some analysis based on many years of experience in medieval-style combat, both individual and melee fights. The shield: You're describing a shield that, in combat posture, covers most of the frog-man's body. This provides good defensive coverage from the front and can be used to intercept blows coming from front and up. It will be harder to move into a position to protect from range weapons, but effective when it can be used (large area). I haven't done a load-bearing analysis of shield-sized rafts, so I am assuming a shield that's reasonably sturdy, probably metal-rimmed for extra protection. The spear: I'm assuming you're describing a one-handed weapon here because of what you said about the shield. It's possible to use a spear two-handed while also using a shield, but usually (in my experience) this is effective only with smaller shields, not the larger ones you've described. A one-handed spear is good at thrusting but probably not slashing. Thrusting requires more strength than slashing (as with a sword) to do comparable damage, and may be more hindered by better armor. You might consider adding swords to your frog-men's equipment list. Spears are quite effective when being charged, particularly in combination with those large shields you've described. When your frog-men fight in groups they should form a [shield wall](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_wall), brace against charges, and maintain formation. In the shield-wall formation they might choose to have second-rank fighters forgo their shields in order to use their spears two-handed (for much-more-effective blows). Sword and shield in the front rank and spear in the second rank is an effective combination. Posture: Being shorter than one's opponent is often a disadvantage, especially if the taller opponent also has longer reach (as when shorter and taller people fight each other; the taller ones tend to have longer arms). But your frog-men have an important advantage: strong jumps. This suggests a tactic where they lurk out of opponents' weapon range waiting for an opening, then jump, strike, and fall back. I would expect this to be comparable in many ways to modern fencing bouts; viewing such bouts might give you ideas. Upper body strength is important in melee fighting, but strength does not come only from the upper body. The best fighters I know (and granted, we're talking re-creation here with wooden weapons, not live steel, and people are not actually trying to kill each other) start pushing a blow from the back foot, through the legs and hips, and into the upper body until it becomes a powerful weapon blow. (This is hard to describe in words, sorry.) My point here is that your frog-men, being particularly strong in the legs, probably have the element of surprise the first time they strike; nobody's going to be expecting that much power from such a little guy. They should aim for tactics where they can use that surprise. Because they can walk upright, they have the ability to trade shield coverage for height advantage on an as-needed basis. Human fighters sometimes try to maintain a crouch for protection too, but we can't do it for extended periods because we're not built for that. Having the ability to choose as conditions dictate should be very powerful. Aerial attacks: Because of those strong legs they can leap -- you said about 4m up. This gives them the ability to leap and strike while dropping back to the ground. I'll leave it to the physicists to compute how powerful their strike would be -- I would expect this could deliver a pretty solid blow, what with gravity on their side like that. However, unless the low-level magic in your world includes flight, once a frog-man is airborne he has limited control over where he goes. Opponents nimble enough to dodge the blow -- or trip him up as he lands -- will be a real danger. Aerial attacks from surprise, on the other hand, can be very effective; if they can ambush their opponents from cover (or even from lower tree branches!) that first blow is likely to be doozy. [Answer] Crouching in martial arts is a tradeoff. While a frog-person with stronger back legs might weigh the different factors differently, the results remains the same: * Crouching lowers your CG, making it harder to upset you. * Crouching allows more degrees of freedom. When you're standing, there's not many directions your legs can move without waiting for gravity to help haul your body down. * Crouching causes you to rest more on your muscles, rather than your bones. Crouching for a long time is hard (unless you take it to a very immobile extreme when you start resting your upper legs on your lower legs). + It's even harder to do without drifting out of stance. You either have to have very good propreception, or constantly consciously move yourself back into position (this is what fatigues you the worst, the repetitive corrective twitches!). + Many martial art crouches are at strange angles which look uncomfortable, but provide the extra propreception needed to hold the pose. * It is hard to crouch while weighted on one leg, so usually we crouch with weight evenly distributed. This means both legs are weak to attacks because its hard to unweight either of them. This is easier from up high because it takes less muscle strength to support the body on one leg if the weight is supported on the bones. I have not studied enough martial arts to be fully versed in the crouching positions of different arts. However, when I asked a similar question of one wiser than I, they explained that the one advantage of a strange crouch is that you can study the many moves which naturally follow from the crouch which do not naturally follow from a standing position. These different attacks and defenses could catch someone by surprise. His opinion was that there isn't a good enough reason to crouch (disclaimer: his particular discipline had no crouches, go figure), but he also was referring to humans and not frog men. [Answer] This may be a little out of the box, but my first thought about a frog person fighting from a crouched position with disproportionately long strong legs was [capoeira](http://youtu.be/Z8xxgFpK-NM?t=32s). Particularly the mix of crouching, low rolling kicks, and impressive vertical leaps in a near constant fluid motion. The use of a long spear (long enough to use as a [punt pole](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punt_%28boat%29#Punt_poles)) and large-ish shield (large enough to use as a water craft) would probably be difficult to incorporate... These weapons would seem to lend themselves well to battle formations, like the phalanx, but could be a little unwieldy or less practical for single combat. A large sheild in one hand and a long spear in the other could be cumbersome and may make agile movement difficult. [Answer] Almost any fighting technique can have advantages. If they have very strong legs and are able to move quickly from that position, say just like a frog and jump especially in any direction they could be very effective. It has to do with strength and levers. Our legs aren't really made to be fast from a squat to any other position, knees bent is good legs folded is bad. I would be next to worthless to react if I was stuck in that position for very long. But if this is racial thing then having legs designed for bursts of power from these positions (like frogs and grasshoppers) then it could be extremely effective. Being able to jump up to 10 meters in any direction would be extremely useful. And a 4m vertical you could jump over someone's head out of reach of almost all melee weapons. It would keep them out of reach and I would think that with legs that powerful that kicking your opponent would be a bone breaking experience. [Answer] Group fighting (in a war/army spectrum) Defense: * The shield on their back allows them pretty good defensive capabilities from arrows and the sort, crouching down and hiding under the shield on their back (natural turtle)...so they would have some defensive capabilities vs arrows. * The small stature makes them difficult targets for an opposing army to engage and some weapons (such as swords) would be a bit more ineffective as the lower target isn't easy to strike Attack: * Spear lunge. With legs like this, bracing the spear with two hands and having the unit lunge together presenting a set of spear heads would be a scary sight. In individual combat, there is the chance to dodge...but vs an enemy formation their isn't the ability to dodge as much. * Jump on / trample. Sort of a funny tactic, take the shield off, aim it forward, and jump at your enemy with the intent of falling on them and squishing them...at very least knocking them to the ground. Would work well vs enemy formations, not so well if those enemies had spears. * Phalanx like formation. Being this close to the ground, it's significantly easier to brace a spear against the ground and withstand an enemy charge. Add in the ability to spear lunge at an opponent that stops before the spears and you have a pretty effective cavalry charge defense and counter attack Weaknesses: * Axes. Any weapon that depends on gravity to strike will be that more effective as they have more room to fall before striking the opponent. Maces and clubs would have the same effect * Short range. The enemy kept at the end of their spear is their best chance of survival. Enemies capable of fighting through these spears and getting into close range combat would extremely limit their ability to fight. Sticking to a formation and supporting each other is their best defense here. If they were disciplined and well trained, they could be a pretty effective fighting unit...having all members jump back as a disengage and then lunge forward as a reengage would be devastating if well coordinated. Individual fighting * Dodge and stab. Jump out of the way and lunge towards the opponent with the spear. Repeat. The ability to jump in any direction and keeping the opponent and spear range is very key here. It becomes a matchup of their ability to get out of the way and keep at a distance vs an opponents ability to fight towards it. * Kicks and knees. Taekwando (sp issue much?) is a martial art form based on kicking. I'd imagine Muay-Thai (kickboxing / grapple and knees) would be very well suited to this frogman. * Wrestling. The ability to jump onto an opponent allows for wrestling them to the ground much easier. Although arm strength helps, much of the grapple is determined in leg strength, and the ability to leap off an opponent if things get to dicey is helpful [Answer] In any kind of mass combat, the ability to jump 4m up and 10m forward means they would be able to leap over an entire fighting unit. That means that when the front rank engages, the rear rank can take a step back and leap over the enemy unit, enabling them to surround the enemy instantly and strike from all sides. This would probably disorient most enemies and break their morale rapidly because they will immediately feel trapped between forces. It might also cause them to fight to the death due to having no way out. Using a tactic like this allows you to destroy an entire enemy unit with no survivors, something nearly impossible to do without a full surround. It might create an air of brutality and terror around them, if enemies are aware that these tactics are used, and might make any unit that isn't strongly trained and well prepared scared to engage them in field combat. [Answer] I was imagining that they would crouch, while holding a shield and a spear. That way, their shield covers the entirety of their body because they are now in a small ball. This makes them difficult to attack with conventional weapons, although they would probably not do that in front of a war golem or some person with a big bad hammer Then to attack, they could hop up while thrusting upwards at the enemy. If the frog person has other humanoid allies, if the enemy directly in front of her points his shield downwards, then the ally can then go attack the enemy. ]
[Question] [ I have this little problem: I'm writing a book in heroic fantasy setting and I've driven myself into a corner by overcomplicating international relations between governments. Now that I'm halfway through, the protagonist is supposed to make peace between allies, who completely embargoed each other, severely reducing their overall ability to fight against the common enemy (`the Bad Guys`). The reason why both sides must cooperate is that each has something the other one needs: * `Side A` needs infantry to besiege fortresses captured by `the Bad Guys`, and `Side B` has 20k seasoned veterans, who would do that quickly and with minimal effort * `Side B` is unable to produce enough of resources essential to their existence: food, textiles and wood. Before the incident they were imported from `Side A`. Unfortunately it turns out, that the reasons for this situation I came up at first are stupid: anyone with a half-brain should figure this out without protagonist's help. A story arc that was supposed to take two chapters would takes no more than two pages. What I'm asking for? What I need are some general ideas for a good reason why an alliance would break despite enemy's presence and why would someone refuse to cooperate even if it means losing the war. You may or may not refer to further details I've posted in the following part of this post. I would love some references to similar historical events, if possible. What have I tried so far and why it didn't work? My first idea was that `the Bad Guys` used assassins to murder emissaries and ambassadors from `Side A` and made it look like it was done by the forces of `Side B`. `Side B` was supposed to be so offended by such accusations, that they severed all ties to `Side A`. It doesn't work for several reasons: * `Side B` had nothing to gain by such action, but `the Bad Guys` had both resources and motivations to do such a thing in such manner, and it's something that `Side A` should realize immediately * In the real world, even when the kings pretend to ignore each other, low-level clerks and intelligence still talk to each other, so clarifying the issue should take days at most, not months (in my setting telepathy allows communication similar to cellular phones: it's easy to use, cheap, you often lose signal, and government officials can wiretap you, so time needed to exchange messages is not factor) * King's honour and dignity is only important until his subjects begin to starve Further details: Here are some details about my setting, in case you need them to provide an answer. I use generic names like `Human_Kingdom_North` to make it easier to keep track on who is who: `Side A`: * `Human_Kingdom_North`: almost entirely (in 90%) conquered by `the Bad Guys`, ruled by old and wise king, who gathered his remaining forces and hid under protection of his southern allies * `Human_Kingdom_South`: they've just joined the war, knowing full well, that once the `Human_Kingdom_North` falls, they will be the next target. They are ruled by paranoid, psychopathic king, which is (and have been for generations) a norm in that part of the world. Currently they have both the most powerful economy and the most powerful military among the `Side A`. It was their ambassadors and emissaries who were supposed to be killed. * `Dwarven_State_West`: Vassal state to `Human_Kingdom_North`, ruled by aristocracy. Since dwarves value honour and dignity above anything else, they fight alongside the humans, event though they are beyond `the Bad Guys` reach * `Elven_Republic`: Elves joined the war after their capital city was captured after a surprise attack. They are ancient enemies of the Dwarves, but in the face of a common enemy their conflict with the soldiers from `Dwarven_State_West` is expressed only in insults. `Side B`: * `Dwarven_Kingdom_East`: Independent dwarven country ruled by a young and ambitious king. He possesses secret knowledge about protagonist's unique powers, but refuses to share it to someone working for `Side A`. `Independent`: * `Wizard_State`: Small country full of wizards, not involved in the war, ruled by an elected committee. Committee's head was a traitor, who was supposed to orchestrate the assassination plot. It was the fact that he was revealed and killed prompted to protagonist to investigate the incident. I think it is all the important information. Thanks in advance for any suggestions. [Answer] Alliance can break even during a war. The assumption that a country will declare war to another country invading a neighbour because he fear that he will be invaded is often false. The country is more likely to wait for a direct aggression unless he has an alliance with the other country. For example, a lot of European countries stayed neutral in WW2 even with Nazi Germany invading everything around. (Switzerland) That said, one country might decide to quit the war. Maybe the situation changed and it's not in his interest to continue fighting. Maybe there is a lot of unrest in the country or a civil war (Russia 1917). Maybe the invaders have made an interesting proposition. (Poland 50/50 ?) Side B King is ambitious after all, so he might try to conquer state A for his own sake. He has the soldiers, he'll use them to take the resources. He won't need to trade in the future. [Answer] You could do a Merkel-Obama manoeuvre. Country G believed and trusted in Country A but then found out that Country A had spies in every facet of G's government, including the bedchamber of the Queen. Country G is outraged -- not about spying, everyone spies -- but that the spies were so close to the Queen and invaded her privacy. [Answer] You are trying to justify a described as 'wise' Kings very irrational actions. Best I can think of is to come up with a reason why he'd plunge into irrational. Change the direction of the assassination and put some personal feelings in there. King A's daughter was engaged to someone in King B's court. King A's daughter is the one assassinated and the now far less rational King A is the source of the embargo's of the alliance in a vagrant attempt of retaliation, taking resources that feed King B's population to put pressure on him for his actions (protagonist then makes peace by proving the death of King A's daughter was not by King B). If you throw in a loved one, the irrational actions can be far easier to justify. The 2 sided (one vs rest) nature of this conflict really makes it difficult to justifying the severing of diplomatic relations between allies...emissaries deaths, although regrettable, rarely result in complete severing of ties unless the motivation was a very clearly sent message (in which case, are they really allies?). For a 'wise' king A to sever relations that he needs so badly during a time of desperate need, he needs to be irrational...can't come up much better than the death of a daughter to describe that, beyond a very close tie to the assassinated emissaries (even then, I'd question him as 'wise' if complete severing of relations along with a full embargo was his reaction). [Answer] People fight wars for two reasons * To destroy something they hate * To protect something they love Generally speaking the "good guys" do not engage in the former. Hateful fighting has a long history of ending poorly in novels. So we know that our "good guys" are fighting for something they love. All you need is for Side A and Side B to disagree violently about something more important than stopping "The Bad Guys." Anything will do. It just has to lift attention away from fighting the bad guys, and towards "the next fight." A very common cause of such strong levels of disagreement part way through a war is when they start talking about how the next government will function. Consider both Side A and Side B wanting to free a particular capital city. Both sides feel that rule can be shared, but when it comes down to brass tacks, they simply cannot agree on how to rule. The indiviual sides may decide they stand a better chance of accomplishing their goal (freeing the city under their rule) on their own without help, rather than guaranteeing that the city is free, but losing control of it to their ally. This could raise centuries of racial hatred, if you please. [Answer] The bad guys offered a sweet deal. Pick either side A or Side B whichever you think is likely to accept the offer from the bad guys. this is of course based on the assumption that the bad guys is not (totally evil) and that there has been precedent of them offering deals (and abiding by those deals) [Answer] Let's look at a real-world situation. In this situation, Countries I and S might be most similar to your sides A and B; Country A might be the common enemy of your sides A and B when the story starts. The careful observer will notice that I have left out several neighbors, and left out lots of historical background. Anyway, the story starts like this: > > Country S and Country I are each ruled by separate factions of a dictatorial, socialist, modernist political party. Country P has a revolution, shouting "Death to Country A!" Country P is now ruled by theocratic socialists. > > > Countries A and P are the sorts of places where it is safe for a ruler to retire; Countries S and I are not. It might be safe for a ruler of Country K to retire, but no-one ever has. > > > Country I gets into a disastrously expensive war against Country P. Country I borrows huge amounts of money from Country K. Country I and Country P make peace. Country I tries to settle its debt with Country K by conquering Country K. (This takes about 2 days, because Country K is tiny.) > > > Country K is liberated by Country A. Country A harasses Country I. The ruler of Country A retires, but Country I tries to kill him anyway. > > > The ruler of Country S is ruthless. (Country S is an ally of Country P, and opposes Country A.) Once upon a time, city H rebelled against the ruler of Country S. He crushed the rebellion, and myriads of people died in city H. He raises his eldest son to follow in his footsteps. His second son is afraid of blood, so he goes overseas to become an eye-surgeon. The second son marries a woman who likes expensive red shoes. The eldest son dies. Then the ruler of Country S dies. Country S changes its Salic law to make the second son the new ruler. Unfortunately, the second son is still afraid of blood. > > > A son of the retired ruler of Country A becomes ruler of Country A. Country A conquers Country I, and kills the ruler of Country I. Country I's ruling party flees to Country S. > > > The former ruling party of Country I is forced to live in refugee camps along the S/I border. Worse, they are forced to live on charity from the people of Country S. This is humiliating. > > > The ruler of Country A retires, and a man with very different opinions and temperament becomes ruler of Country A. Country A retreats from Country I, leaving allies of Country P in power in Country I. (Even though Countries A and P are still rivals.) > > > City H rebels again. But the new ruler of Country S is still afraid of blood, so he does not immediately crush the rebellion. The rebellion spreads, and the ruler is almost defeated. Everybody in Country S has to choose sides -- and there are lots of sides to choose from. The ruler of Country S learns to fight back. Country P helps the ruler of Country S. Country A helps some of the rebels. The former ruling party of Country I joins with theocratic enemies of Countries A and P, and tries to conquer both Country I and Country S. Country A tries to rescue Country P's allies in Country I, while opposing Country P's other goals. > > > What happens next? ... That remains to be seen. [Answer] They may be allies but perhaps they don't particularly like each other and the reasons for going to war with the `bad guys` are different for each ally. Then the reason for one of the allies goes away (e.g. it's discovered he has no weapons of mass desctruction). Maybe its up to the hero to convince the withdrawing ally to remain in the war for the other reason. (He still has plenty of oil) Or maybe one of the allies has just had a regime change (e.g. an election) and the government has changed to an anti-war party. They then put on the embargo because they believe the war their former ally is waging is immoral... ]
[Question] [ I am writing a story where we have our real science-based world, and a parallel world where magic is the more dominant principle. In fact the principle of magic is so dominant, that one cannot travel long distances without looping back to where you started from, each realm or kingdom being effectively an isolated world to those who do not use magic. However, with magic, one can step from one realm to another by using correspondences. The defining characteristic of a correspondence is similarity of appearance. More magically powerful individuals can use less similar correspondences to less magically powerful individuals, but the more similarity, the easier it is to take the step. To give examples, a cave is a correspondence to a similar cave in an adjoining realm, as can an oak forest be to another oak forest, or one grassy plain to another, etcetera. For example, an individual is travelling from Point X in Realm A to Point Y in Realm D If Point X is a city, and Point Y is a frozen mountain-top, then no direct correspondence exists. However, by travelling out of Realm A's city to the surrounding farmland, the traveler could use the farmland to find a correspondence to Realm B, where the corresponding environment would also be farmland with a similar crop/livestock, only close to mountains. The traveler would then go to Realm B's mountains and use a correspondence to go to a colder mountain-side in Realm C. The traveler could then go uphill a way until the environment was sufficiently cold that the ground was icy, and use that as a correspondence to travel to Realm D, where they would be near the frozen summit (Point Y) they sought to reach. The more powerful an individual's ability to use correspondences, the less exactly they have to match, however using less exact correspondences exhausts them more physically than a more exact match. For example, a river could be a correspondence. However, a river has characteristics such as speed, colour, its' banks, the surrounding vegetation, and so on. The more the characteristics differ, the more difficult the correspondence is to use. On the other hand, the more knowledgeable an individual is, the more correspondences they will know, and may be able to use them to travel more quickly, needing less non-magical travel to get to a suitable place to use another correspondence. The problem I have is that my characters (who are pretty far up the scale in terms of power and knowledge) need to go from Australia's magical parallel realm (which looks pretty much like the Australian Aboriginal dreamtime and Australia prior to the extinction of the indigenous mega-fauna) to Europe's magical parallel realm, which is pretty much like Europe of a few hundred to a thousand years or so ago. This means that the landscapes look pretty different. Australian plants do not correspond well to any European plants for the most part, effectively eliminating easy correspondences. What correspondences could be found to allow the most rapid possible travel, assuming logical geography? [Answer] I decided to go for the seaside, since that is what England is known for. The '[White Cliff of Dover](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Cliffs_of_Dover)' so I found the [Bunda Cliffs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunda_cliffs) in Austrailia, they look fairly similar and are even made from limestone, not quite the chalk. So I would say that is a reasonably close, as far as vegetation there isn't much on the Australian side and the white cliff is mostly grass. [Answer] Setting aside human cultural phenomena, which don't seem to figure in your description of correspondences, several ideas pop to mind: 1. Oceanic/Shore Phenomena Beaches, tides, fish, mollusks, crustaceans, seaweed, etc. Obviously not all of these things are precisely identical from continent to continent, but a lot of them are very close indeed. In some cases, the species themselves are identical because widespread or migratory. 2. Migratory Species Eels migrate to the Sargasso Sea to spawn. Birds migrate ludicrous distances in many cases. That process of long-distance travel could itself be the base-point for correspondence whose desired result is long-distance travel. This would base your correspondence not on the end-point but the journey. 3. Atmospheric Phenomena One of the most traditional kinds of permanent and world-spanning correspondences is astronomical: the stars. Unfortunately, of course, the stars in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres are quite different. Nevertheless, if your characters already know a good deal about Europe, strong analogies could be drawn, especially with respect to star clusters or constellations near the center of the Zodiac. Similarly, there are celestial phenomena that can be seen from anywhere on earth: the moon, the planets, and so on. Obviously one would have to learn how to correct for longitude and latitude, but the Babylonians did pretty well at that, for starters. 4. Conceptual or Structural Correspondences (the meta-problem at stake) In the history of magical or occult thinking, one finds that things are rarely taken as themselves: they tend to be in relation to other things. When we say "correspondences," this is really what we mean -- a correspondence is properly a relationship between two things that is embedded in a larger system or web of such relationships. Thus object A is like object B because both share property C that is considered to be a quality, aspect, effect, or sign (or all of these) of principle D. As a result, the real question here is about classification. While it is true that Nature herself does not classify Australian and European plants together, that's because Nature herself does not classify anything. We do, as observers, on certain more or less defined or formal bases. For example, we classify some plants as "grasses," and there are complex and serious reasons for doing so, much debated and so forth across the last couple of centuries. Under that system, there are "grasses" in both Europe and Australia. Either those plants are or are not "really" connected in terms of your magical correspondence system, which leads to a deeper matter. It appears, from the description of power level allowing looser correspondences, that correspondence classification is an intersection between the magician-subject and the natural-objective phenomenon. This means that there is some way in which things are or are not "really" linked, at an underlying, natural, non-cultural sort of level. And there is also some way in which that kind of linkage is actually forged, created, signified -- in a word, made -- by the human observing subject. If this is correct, then there is no absolute sense in which two things do or do not correspond: it's a matter of interpretation and knowledge. In which case, to resolve the difficulty within a fantastical world of your creation, you may need to come up with a formal conception of "natural correspondence," i.e., that type of relation that preexists within nature just because, and which is in some fashion a prerequisite for magical manipulation. [Answer] Cape Le Grande - Lanzarote - Naples - England Start at Cape Le grande National Park in southern Australia. Follow the beach until you step along a beach on Lanzarote, which has a similar ocean, beach and dry reddish terrain. From the Lanzarote beach you make your way up to the fire mountains in Timanfaya national park. After a brief climb down one of the volcanoes you climb up again and find yourself descending mount vesuvius in Italy. Depending on how closely your world's Europe matches real-world Europe, your party could descend from Vesuvius to find some of the many ruins from the Roman empire. A temple, collonade, bath-house or mausoleum near Naples around AD 1000 - AD1500 will find its close likenesses anywhere from England, via France to South-East Europe. Here are some postcards from the magical party's travels: ![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/neaQK.jpg) It's a beautiful day in Southern Australia ![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pQXpC.jpg) Gazing out at the azure ocean, we turned around and suddenly found ourselves on Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands. ![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9wlYT.gif) Timanfaya on Lanzarote has some beautiful volcanoes ![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/nqmHY.jpg) But so do Southern Italy! ![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fmz9s.jpg) This is a ruin near Naples but.. strumming guitar... ♪♫ This could be Corinium or anywhere ♫♪ Neapolis or Rome, Could be Oppidum Batavorum, or Caesar's second home Cause Corinium is anywhere Anywhere alone Anywhere alone [Answer] A cave, mine or tunnel could be used. Since they can be artificial and cave systems can be pretty similar, if your characters had access to one, they could attempt to use it as correspondence. If I understand correctly, the idea is that, when someone is in an area, the "travel" places them in a practically identical area somewhere else. The strength of a correspondence will be directly related to how little you notice changing while the outside world (outside the correspondence node) changes. If I am correct in this understanding, then artificial construction and especially more generic ones used for utility and thus strongly resembling each other across cultures and places, would be the easiest way to achieve travel. That's why I'm suggesting something that is likely to exist in both locations. I noticed others are suggesting the sea, but it's unclear to me how far the australian or british locations span - do they include the seaside or ocean or not? If they do, the seaside and beaches would be easier, assuming one can find a beach that resembles the one at the target location. If a beach is inaccessible, then I would expect that a mine or dug-out cave, perhaps even a simple house (clay, stone, wood) would work. edit - there's also some simple ancient structures (particularly neolithic ones) that are easy to replicate: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalith> ]
[Question] [ I am planning to build a habitat with close to Earth gravity on asteroid [3753 Cruithne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3753_Cruithne). I would dig a circular tunnel (or series of parallel tunnels) deep under the surface, with a radius of 4 kilometers and a tube diameter of 20 meters. This would give the habitat a length of around 13 kilometers. I would then use mass drivers and mined material to spin the asteroid to a rate of 0.4728 rotations per minute. This would create earth-like gravity in the underground habitat. I am curious whether it is possible to spin the asteroid to this extent without damaging it. I am also wondering how much effort it would take to maintain the spin. Could it be done using currently proposed propellantless propulsion methods, such as [solar sails](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffractive_solar_sail)? EDIT: [Different site](https://www.spacereference.org/asteroid/3753-cruithne-1986-to) States Cruithnes diameter to only be 2.1 Kilometers, at this size, the diameter of habitat tubes would be only 1.8 kilometers, which would put desirable rate of spin to around 1 rotation per minute. [Answer] Having Earth like gravity inside the tunnel means that also the asteroid is experiencing a centrifugal force equivalent to that intensity. Whether the asteroid is able to withstand it, it depends on its internal structure: if it is made of compact metal/rock, it might very well be capable of doing so, while loosely aggregated element the force will disintegrate it during the spin up. [Answer] Structural Coherence of Asteroids Many asteroids are not solid blocks of rock, but rather, they are '[rubble piles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubble_pile)'—collections of rocks and dust loosely held together by gravity. This poses a significant challenge when it comes to spinning up an asteroid to create artificial gravity. The forces involved would cause such a rubble pile asteroid to disintegrate if it spun faster than [every 2.2 hours](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubble_pile#/media/File:LCDB_Period_vs._Diameter_Plot.png); [Cruithne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3753_Cruithne) is 5km wide and [the artificial gravity would be only 0.00016g](http://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/). In order to proceed with your plan, you'd first need to determine the structural integrity of 3753 Cruithne. If it's not a solid body, you might have to consider ways to solidify it, which could involve anything from compacting it under its own gravity to using some sort of binding agent—though these are speculative solutions and would present their own challenges. Maintaining Spin In the vacuum of space, a spinning object should, according to Newton's first law of motion, continue spinning indefinitely unless acted upon by an external force. However, in reality, several factors could slow down the spin over time. One of these is the [YORP effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YORP_effect), where uneven heating of the asteroid's surface by the sun causes a torque that can change the object's rotation rate and axis orientation. Gravitational influences from other nearby celestial bodies could also affect the spin. To maintain the desired spin rate, you would need a method of propulsion that can apply corrective forces as needed. Solar sails, electromagnetic tethers, or other propellantless propulsion methods could theoretically be used for this purpose. However, the scale of the operation and the precision required would be substantial. Living Conditions Creating a habitat with Earth-like gravity is just one aspect of making an asteroid livable for humans. A host of other factors would need to be considered and engineered. For example, the habitat would need a breathable atmosphere, which means not only having the right mix of gases (primarily nitrogen and oxygen), but also maintaining the right temperature and pressure. Protection from radiation is another major concern. On Earth, our magnetic field and atmosphere shield us from most of the sun's harmful radiation. On an asteroid, you'd need to provide this protection artificially, perhaps by burying the habitat under several meters of rock or using some sort of magnetic shielding. Lastly, resources such as water, food, and energy would need to be provided. While some of these could potentially be extracted from the asteroid itself or brought from Earth, sustainable methods of production would likely be necessary for a long-term habitat. [Answer] Working on the assumption the asteroid is solid enough to withstand the spin, or you provide some way to strengthen or fix the rock, you could spin it up using various propulsion units. Perhaps the engines from a rocket used to get workers, supplies or materials to the asteroid. Once it is spun up, it will stay spinning, but if you are moving people or materials in and out of the habitat, you may find you need small adjustments to the spin rate over time, so something like cold gas thrusters or even ion thrusters may be suited for that purpose. Alternatively, if instead of placing your access at one of the poles of the spin, you could arrange it that incoming ships dock in a gantry at the equator, and their thrust is used to change spin. This is definitely not your best plan, but has some nice side effects - see the Ringworld novels for some ideas. [Answer] The shape of the asteroid would be important to whether or not you can spin it with easily predictable path. One reason earth can spin easily predictable have to do with its shape and the source of the power. Given that you are trying to do it manually, you have do a complete analysis on the shape and mass about the asteroid to calculate a perfect position to aquire force to start the spin. And that also includes whether the whole rock is made up with approxmiately average mass with approxmiately average density with approxmiately average structure. So that it can hold on to its own after the force is implemented. Then perhaps under these perfect condition you can spin with less required resources. [Answer] Honestly, it seems that the construction as described in your original post might work--but it would be very fragile against disturbances. @L.Dutch is right about the centrifugal force. Your design would likely be vulnerable to sudden catastrophic failure, due to undetected faults in the asteroid, or semi-plastic flow of the asteroid's body over time. All in all, this seems very unsafe. I would go with the notion (mentioned by @Uk rain troll and @Rory Alsop) that some kind of strengthening engineering would be the way to go. I do have a (possibly silly) suggestion to that end. Suppose that the civilization of your projected future worked to set up space elevators to get off-planet. Suppose further that--for whatever reason--there was a surplus of tether material available when this asteroid construction took place. It would not be too hard (assuming you have the engineering skills and resources to be doing this asteroid modification in the first place) to bring a goodly amount of space elevator tether cable up to the asteroid, and then wrap the outer surface with pieces of the cable, spaced fairly closely. You'd place the cables normal to the intended axis of rotation, so they would provide maximum counter-compression to the centrifugal force. You'd also want to keep them close to the asteroid's surface to avoid incidental damage. It would be sort of fun to simply wind one continuous cable around the asteroid, in many many windings. Sadly, that would be vulnerable to being loosened by a break at any point along the single cable's length. So you would need to wind each section of cable independently, which requires a suitably strong means of joining the ends of each cable together. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this would be the need to support the cables by fairly closely spaced standoffs. (Something like the jackstand you put under the axle of your car when changing a tire?) The standoffs would need to spread the load over a wide area of the asteroid's surface; to prevent the cables from ever having to make too sharp a bend, in case the tether material would be subject to cracking if bent too far; to be stable against minor meteor impacts; and to be set to heights that would cause each cable to assume a strong shape (ellipse if not a circle) when under tension after the asteroid is spun up. I'm not an engineer, so this might be nonsense. But it could be plausible nonsense, which might be close enough for science fiction. :-) [Answer] You don't actually need (or want) to spin your asteroid! First ask yourself, why do you actually need your asteroid? For materials and as an environmental shield (protecting against impacts and radiation). None of those aplications would benefit from spinning. What you should do instead is having a rotating habitat inside of a non-rotating shell. To prevent issues with angular momentum you can have your habitat be composed from an inner habitable cylinder and an outer shell that rotate in opposite directions. So outer-outer asteroid shell could be non-rotating. Why would that solution be better than spinning the asteroid - even if it is reinforced? Because it takes less energy to rotate only your habitat without the asteroid shell (less mass -> less energy). The other reason is that it would be extremely difficult to reinforce the asteroid itself. Those things are generally not homogenous, so reinforcement would probably be more difficult from engineering point of view that building your habitat. ]
[Question] [ Closed. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- Want to improve this question? Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/246895/edit). Closed 7 months ago. [Improve this question](/posts/246895/edit) Sentient alien species in fiction are almost always at least vaguely humanoid. Is being humanoid required to have human-like intelligence and sentience? If not, what other body builds would be viable for a (intelligence wise) human-like sentient species? Assume earth-like conditions. For simplicity’s sake, this species should only need to be capable of doing what humans are capable of, such as tool building, construction, researching, social behaviors and utilizing or building vessels if needed. This species should also be placed similarly to humans in the food chain. [Answer] It can be assumed that two basic conditions must be fulfilled: Manipulators The being must be able to change its environment (for example, a whale could be more intelligent than a human being - it would still not be able to build a technological civilisation). For this it needs extremities with which it is possible to produce and use a tool. Here it is conceivable that this does not have to have any resemblance to human hands at all. Claws, trunks, tentacles, etc. are also plausible. Similarly, the number of these manipulators does not matter as long as they are applicable for the purpose of tool use. Anything from one to any number is possible. On earth, almost all living beings are symmetrically shaped. Whether this has to be the case universally is questionable, however. Ratio energy intake/energy consumption The effort to acquire energy (food) must be in a certain ratio to the consumption of this energy. A being that has to spend most of the day taking in food will find it difficult to find the time to invent the use of tools. Under Earth-like conditions, this would be difficult above a certain weight. At least in the case of mammals, a certain size should probably not be undercut, since a very fast metabolism also consumes too much energy. Apart from Earth-like conditions, almost any form is possible here - it depends on the ecological conditions and these in turn on the planetary conditions. Apart from these two basic prerequisites, everything is actually somehow plausible. For a technological civilisation, communication and information transfer over longer periods of time is necessary. Humans have developed language (acoustic signals) and later writing (optical signals) for this purpose. However, other forms are also conceivable for this. For example, optical signals instead of spoken language, manipulation of the magnetic environment, use of a tactile sense and much more. Whether individual self-awareness is necessary to build a technological civilisation is an open question. It seems at least plausible that collectives of living beings (on Earth e.g. bees and ants) could be able to manipulate their environment to such an extent that a technical civilisation emerges in the end. A good reading tip on this subject would be Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, where he describes in great detail and plausibly how spiders build a technical and eventually spacefaring civilisation. [Answer] # Pretty much all of them All that a technological species needs is some sort of manipulator, enough sociality to transmit knowledge, and the basic intellect needed to make tools Every one of these traits can easily arise within almost any bodyplan at all. So long as the animal is macroscopic and not specialised to a low-energy mode of life, then there is absolutely no reason that prohibits it from having manipulators and sociality [Answer] The [octopus building plan](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8988249/) might be fun. > > The cognitive capacities and behavioural repertoire of octopuses have led to speculation that these animals may possess consciousness. However, the nervous system of octopuses is radically different from those typically associated with conscious experience: rather than being centralised and profoundly integrated, the octopus nervous system is distributed into components with considerable functional autonomy from each other. Of particular note is the arm nervous system: when severed, octopus arms still exhibit behaviours that are nearly identical to those exhibited when the animal is intact. Given these factors, there is reason to speculate that if octopuses do possess consciousness, it may be of a form highly dissimilar to familiar models. In particular, it may be that the octopus arm is capable of supporting an idiosyncratic field of consciousness. As such, in addition to the likelihood that there is something it is like to be an octopus, there may also be something it is like to be an octopus arm. This manuscript explores this possibility. > > > [Answer] All you need is a closed circulatory system(better for transporting oxygen or similar element), a big cranium(big brain means better thinking), manipulatory appendages, and the ability to walk and eat. A radial body plan isn't the greatest because it may be more energy intensive. There may be a reason why the dominant creatures are bilateral. On a radial creature they would have far better vision because they would have eyes looking in every direction. The reason humans walk on two legs is because it is less energy intensive. You can absolutely have a four legged creature as long as it has two arms with manipulating hands. Icthys King and EdvinW both questioned why a large cranium is needed. Unless you are going for a slug or sea star shape, a big noggin is needed. This is because of the massive size a brain would have to be to promote human-like intelligence. In a slug creature the brain would be at the top of the body, alongside the ears, eyes, mouth, and nose. For a sea star creature the brain would be in the center, like that of a sea star. Icthys King questioned why I originally said opposable thumbs were needed. I said this because the only creature that has ever taken over a planet has them. But other forms of manipulators aren't out of the question. EdvinW asks about tentacles, which would work fine. Octupi use them all the time. An assortment of arms wouldn't be the best idea. This is because many appendages are energy intensive and most creatures evolve to use all the energy they have to the best of its potential. [Answer] # Slug/Worm If you're specifically looking at a sapient alien species, then the only realistic choice would be a slug-like or worm-like form, perhaps with leg-tentacles or even some sort of shell This isn't just for sapients, but all alien animals: All of the special traits like bones and veins and ears are relatively rare among the different phyla of life on Earth, which seems to imply that they'd also be rare amongst the phyla of distant worlds. If we also consider the possibility of more complex phyla being extincted, most worlds would be limited only to simple worm-like forms for all life, including its sophonts ]
[Question] [ There are several explanations that I'm aware of as to why the Easter Island culture collapsed. While [Diamond](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond) put forth a hypothesis of deforestation, soil nutrient depletion and cascading environmental effects, I'm going to limit this question to a rival hypothesis: disease and slave trade from European contact. Suppose a Rapa Nui mystic has a vision about the dangers of foreign peoples arriving on gargantuan and fantastic sea vessels. His divination / interpretation of this vision was: * Do not fight these foreigners * Prevent contact as much as possible * Do not underestimate their technology [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eljlM.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/eljlM.png) ## Question Supposing that this mystic had absolute authority into influencing the Rapa Nui court at the time, could Easter Islanders prevent landfall at their level of technology? Note: Population of Easter Island at time of contact was said to be ~3,000. Note II: Would also be nice to have estimated timetables but not a must. (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island#History>) [Answer] ## Frame Challenge: Turn Outward There's no amount of fortifying and "turning inward" that could protect the population of Easter Island. Determined Age of Sail explorers would have found a way on to the island, and once that happened, the diseases were loose. So the Rapa Nui must turn outward. They must become explorers themselves. The nearest continental country to Easter Island is Chile. The Spanish conquest of Chile began in the 1540s, so the Rapa Nui have nearly 200 years to acclimatize themselves to European contact through contact with Chile. The Rapa Nui could send multiple sacrificial missions to Chile, with the understanding that many (most?) of these explorers will die of disease. The ones that survive and return to the community are the citizens with natural immunity to the various Old World maladies. They should be revered as heroes, and honored within the community. Over time, the community would build up resistance to European disease, and thus be able to survive "first contact" when it comes in the 1720s. ## Other Options 1. Develop modern immunology to make vaccines hundreds of years early. (seems unlikely) 2. Violently resist all European contact until modern medicine develops and Europeans can bring their own vaccines. (Also seems unlikely, but there are un-contacted populations today, so it's not without precedent.) [Answer] # No The explorers have ships full of cannons. If they can't make landfall due to some sort of coastal fortification, they have enough gunpowder and ammunition to literally blow them away. If the natives hide, the explorers might still find the villages, and even if they run, that won't halt them from putting the island on the maps and doing water stops there in the future. With each ship come the typical illnesses of the explorers, and even if they run to the hills every time, some of those might come rather desperate for the embrace of someone - and pursue them to the hills. These sailors bring with them illnesses that will spread like wildfire. Other sailors might have even worse motives, going after the fleeing natives just to take them as slaves or kill a few so they can take back body parts as trophies. And then there might be an expedition that just mixes up the islands, and believes that Rapa Nui is one of those anthropophage islands, and they disembark with the very plan to kill everyone that is native to the island. Besides those doom scenarios, the island was already unable to support the population due to a lack of wildlife and soil erosion. Even if the explorers don't bring death to everybody till 1890, the population was steering towards near-extinction around the same time anyway. In short: Rapa Nui is doomed. [Answer] No they couldn't prevent anything. The Moriori of the Chatham Islands had that [scenario](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori_genocide). They were told by their leaders not to fight the invading Maori and were genocided in some pretty nasty ways. The women and children were tortured for days. A population of about 2000 who outnumbered the invaders all died without a fight with only 100 remaining alive as slaves. And they were not allowed to have children. [Answer] #### Not even if they imitated the Japanese. From Britannica.com: > > Japan was the only Asian [island] country to escape colonization from the West ([ref](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Western-colonialism/The-Open-Door-Policy)). > > > (note: Some continental asian nations were also never colonized) This was due to many factors. Tanegashima Tokitaka ([ref](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_of_Japan#Tanegashima_(matchlock))) bought two guns and had his smiths work on copying the design, Japanese was an unified country that would rather join arms with the blood-feud neighbor Daimyo than work for the foreign powers and so on ([ref](https://history.stackexchange.com/a/22653/4447)). But Easter Island had only abundant volcanic rocks, basalt, trees, and obsidian. As a volcanic island, it had negligible deposits of other minerals. Explorers and navigators refrained to conquer Japan only because the costs outweighed the benefits. [Answer] Quick, Everyone Hide! Seems like the island supported a population of about 3000 people when the Europeans started showing up, on a landmass of about 60 square miles. It seems plausible enough to me that the islanders, with some prophetic forewarning, could notice the approaching ships before they themselves were seen, and that they could hide themselves until the newcomers went away. They might need to stay on alert for ships coming in to take on fresh water or other supplies, but I think they could manage. [Answer] ## Ruin the island Independence Day may not seem like a masterpiece of deep thought, but one solution suggested there could work: ruin the island to the point where nobody wants it. Chop down all the trees. (Done?) Fight wars to reduce the population to a fraction of what the un-ruined island could support. (Done?) Move agriculture into concealed underground locations in lava tubes (as some tell it, this was actually done, in part because the very scarce [fresh water](https://orb.binghamton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1041&context=anthropology_fac) of the island could be contained in those locations). And remove as many signs of human habitation as possible, starting with those accursed statues that bring in the tourists to this day. Bring fire around to every clump of vegetation during every dry season. Make the island look barren and useless. But above all, ruin the fresh water. The way it actually happened, residents led the Europeans to an inland well. There are no permanent streams or rivers on Rapa Nui. There are three craters that accumulate water, and any number of handcarved basins and inland wells. Some brackish water can be obtained from coastal wells. If your people conceal or destroy all artificial sources, and have guards stationed who are ready to dump salt and filth into the natural craters, they can give the impression of a worthless, waterless island - the sort of island that colonists have ignored to this day, though improvements in small-scale desalination are about to change that. (Of course they should also prepare extensive stored water in clay jugs in their underground caverns) To prevent the explorers from building coastal wells, the residents can put one or two wells at the coast that look like they were dug by short-term visitors to the island, but which are at locations where they happen to tap into salt water only. Yes, the explorers could scour every inch of land, track down the people living in hiding, "make it work" for them. But they probably won't. They'll keep exploring until they find something they can see more profit in. ]
[Question] [ I am writing a story that centres around a person who slowly grows larger and larger overtime, to the point of kaiju-size and beyond. They grow due to magic, so other than their vastly increased size I can say that they are at least physically exactly the same (same proportional skin thickness, bone density, etc). What I want to know is what it would take to hurt or even kill a giant human of varying sizes. What weapons would be effective and what wouldn't be? The three sizes I have in mind for this question are: 100 feet tall, 100 metres tall, and 500 metres tall. The story is set in a modern day setting, in an unspecified generic Western country. Thank you in advance! Edit: For the sake of having this scenario work, the square cube law is ignored. The giant can carry themselves just as well as they would if they were normal sized. I am purely interested in how attacks against her by human forces would fare. [Answer] > > For the sake of having this scenario work, the square cube law is ignored. > > > I don't care, you can't silence me :p Let's go over each size. For the sake of simplicity, I am going to assume normal humans are approximately Shakira sized, or about 150cm / 5" tall. # 100 feet tall This would mean the giant has the size of ~33 Shakiras stacked on top of each other. Regular human skin is about 2mm (0.07 inches) thick. At 33x regular thickness, the human kaiju's skin would be around 66mm thick. For comparison, elephant skin is around 25mm thick. So if you want to fight these giants, small handguns won't do. Even the hunting rifles one would use on elephants wouldn't be as effective. Consider bringing a [Howitzer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howitzer). # 100 meters tall That is about 3.3x larger than the previous giant. So we are talking about skin almost 200mm thick. For comparison a regular can of coke is usually around 115mm tall. Human skin is not as strong as metal, but this is just too thick. Consider anti-vehicle weaponry at this point. If you wish to go melee, consider that male sperm whale skin can reach up to 350mm in thickness - the thickest of any animal - so maybe bring some harpoon launchers to the fight as well. # 500 meters tall Now the skin is about a whole meter thick. That is two thirds of a Shakira. You could slash this guy with a lightsaber, many hits wouldn't make it past the skin - and the ones that did would just be very shallow cuts. At this point you need very powerful explosives - since cutting through the skin will be hard, shake the innards into a soup instead. If you do wish for open wounds, bring in missiles fired from vehicles, as a shoulder mounted bazooka might just tickle the giant. [Answer] Or do NOT ignore the Cube law, just make the skin/bones/etc. cubicly tougher. So, at 100 feet versus original 5 feet tall they're 20 times larger and the skin, bones, and Everything has to be 20x20x20 times as tough. Therefore getting a wound on them would be 8000 times as difficult. 100 meters (~3 x as big as 100 feet) would be 216,000 times tougher and 500 meters would be around 27,000,000 times as tough. For that last guy, you're gonna want a wee bit more than a +1 sword. :P [Answer] I want to post an answer just to point out that Ant Man was done inconsistently, and to suggest that you try to avoid the same inconsistency. The idea was that he was the same density but just smaller… but this was not always true. [Trying to avoid a spoiler] there is a large object in the movie that was shrunk using the same technology, and its density and weight were obviously those of a normal object of that size. I can not remember all the instances offhand, but the point is that an object that weighs 75kg and is an inch tall is going to behave very differently from a normal 1cm tall object that is otherwise similar… and conversely an object that behaves physics-wise like a human being, but is only 1cm tall, can not possibly also happen to have the effect of a 75kg object whenever it suits the plot. (Ants are impressive, but a 75kg weight on top of one will surely squash it, regardless of whether it is 1cm tall or 170cm tall.) ———— As for the person in question… . It sounds is though the scenario is just suspension-of-disbelief — that you want something that looks and acts like a human being, but happens (incoherently) to be 100m tall [or whatever]. In this case, just go with it. A normal sword will do almost nothing to it, but a normal sword scaled up will have the same effect as if both were normal scale. Etcetera. The issue you do have is how it goes with something that is coherent, such as a large… whatever that interacts with this person. Suppose, for instance, that this person is sprinting — which would be in the order of 1000km/hr for the 100m version. Does this create a serious wind storm, or is it like a normal person running? Suppose this person… I dunno, punches a very large tree. Is it like a normal person punching a tree — which would break their hand — or is it like a normal person punching a stick — which would break the stick? I suppose that, like with Ant Man, the audience will mostly not notice (hopefully). ]
[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/201780/edit). Closed 2 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/201780/edit) Supposing around 1% of the world population has some kind of superpower, about 70-80 million people on earth, and only 1% of those have taken to superherodom, what items would be worth the risk of stealing? In a city full of heroes, what could a non-powered thief steal that would go under the radar so to speak, or would be easy enough for it to be stolen and yet the thief could escape or avoid pursuit, so as to become a commonplace event? [Answer] Exactly the same things as nowadays, for several reasons: The risk profile doesn’t really change. The end result of being caught stealing should still be arrest, not murder-by-supercop. Sure, a supercop has extra skills they can use to arrest you, but the end result is still trial and jail, and evidence collected by (for example) a person with a super sense of smell will have to somehow be verified in court. If the superhero is a vigilante then they themselves are a criminal and any evidence provided is extremely suspect. It’s not like Superheroes suddenly have carte-Blanche to go around murdering people they suspect of crime, right? Right?? Theft relies mostly on not getting caught (either stealing or moving the goods). Unless your heroes all have skills that are useful for detecting people trying to engage in criminal enterprise (like telepathy, or Crimey-sense) the presence of a super powered police force isn’t going to alter whether they can successfully lift and shift goods. For low value items and crimes of opportunity all that changes is who puts the handcuffs on if you get found out. For high value items and heists it simply adds another kind of security you need to plan around. Those driven to crime are usually not doing it for fun. A person desperate enough to purse snatch will still purse snatch even if they might then be pursued by a super cop. A person stealing high end jewellery will still have debts to pay that they need the gems for. Compulsive shoplifters won’t suddenly be cured of their compulsions because they might get caught by Spidercop. And finally: Your regular criminals will still be dealing with regular cops. The superheroes will be needed to deal with the supervillains. In the same way that armed response officers (in countries that don’t regularly arm police officers) are reserved for situations where they’re really needed, you can expect super-officers to only be deployed for super-crimes. After all: Why waste your Bulletproof Sergeant ploughing through reports of lawnmowers going missing from garages in the suburbs? Shouldn’t he be off stopping Doctor Maniacal from detonating that bomb under city hall? [Answer] More cautious, little difference Criminality for your question can be sorted in two very broad strokes. Crimes where they are spotted or can be tracked instantly and those they are not. The ones that you are not are the exact same as before. Burglary will allow them to steal anything if they aren't caught. Even if they are they might still be able to intimidate or use violence against the superhero. A person that can shoot lightning can still be shot, hit with a fist or simply be scared of unknown people with possible powers in the house. Besides, excessive violence isn't something that most people are willing to do. What if in such a stressful situation he electrocutes the criminal(s) or stops their heart? Other crimes are much of the same. Cycling past and snatching a phone or bag might be more dangerous now, but in many cases it might still work. Threatening or even just stabbing or shooting someone can do the trick. Drugging people at a bar and stealing when they pass out outside or the like are still viable. But most is also pretty theft. That means the repercussions are also low. People know you can't use too much force if someone steals a wallet without violence. At least in civilised countries. They might have to pay a fine, do a short term of labour or in bad cases prison and they are at it again. Finally theres the crimes of threat. A hostage situation. The law often has more power and skill to bear, but the threat of losing life is enough to keep them at bay. Same can be said in a city of superheroes. The only thing that has happened is that there is an increased risk. People are more likely to take a cautious approach, sometimes resulting in more violence as a preemptive strike to neutralise a potential threat. As long as crime pays, which likely it still will, crime will happen. [Answer] # A super hero(ine)'s heart I come from a place where the police usually does not catch thieves because they get a share of the loot. Doesn't matter the scale of the theft, whether it is a purse or a bank vault. If you get a super powered being on your side, then you can continue doing crime with impunity as now you've got a shield against other super powered beings. Moreover, since supers are rare, you might not have to worry much about super heroes - but your super lover will fedinitely keep the police at bay. [Answer] Just about anything unless the superheroes have organised themselves in a lawful non-vigilante way. What would we call such a superhero organization? Well you could always call it a "police force". That would mean that any crime is basically as detectable and preventable as today, give or take a few superheroes that have ways to detect crime that current technology can't. Most of the time the threat of being shot or potentially killed by police forces wouldn't really surpass what a superhero is willing to do, able to do and allowed to do unless you start counting anti-heroes, who work outside the law and wouldn't be able to rely on a police network to detect crime. You might argue "my hero will use a police scanner to detect what and where is happening!" But that still means that you need a way to get there and not get caught as soon-to-be-known vigilante while the police is better spread out to deal with it and now reinforced by superheroes. [Answer] Trophies from supers. Some non-supers feel like they are second class because they don't have powers. Secret clubs of these folks make themselves feel worthy by stealing stuff from supers - the hero ones but also civilian supers and supervillains too. Bragging points accrue according to the dangerousness of the stealing feat and also the trophy itself. These thieves have trophy rooms where they assemble, brag, smoke weed and scheme up the next theft. For example, stealing underwear from that hot blue supervillain that freezes people would be a very bragworthy deed because she is scary mean and kills people for fun. Stealing a BatBelt from Batman would also be bragworthy but maybe less dangerous because he is unlikely to kill you for fun but also probably is harder to steal from. Stealing the rubber toad off the dashboard of the guy with supersmell powers is just sort of for completeness sake (and the thief left a rubber dinosaur in its place because supersmell guy is a good guy). Stealing a box of Cheezits from a guy who has the power to really eat a lot of Cheezits is more just funny, because people doubt it is really a superpower until they see video. [Answer] Finaical crimes/things that can be done mostly online. Do your superheroes have any abilities to help track down financial fraud or tax evasion? How about a company director cooking the books and stealing from thier investors? Or people writing malware/viruses to steal banking details or just extort people with ransomware. [Answer] ## If they want to steal, they will If someone wants to steal something, the only deciding factor is their sheer determination. Having superheroes in the setting is just another obstacle to work around rather than a deterrent that would simply cause lesser crime to evaporate overnight. The human race is defined by adapting to everything the world throws at it, and whatever the human race throws at itself in the meantime and that's how things will stay. ]
[Question] [ Let's say we have a city-state where top government offices are literally for sale; or rather, up for auction. There's a new purchase cycle every quarter, and a wealthy individual could bid on the office of Mayor or Sheriff, or what have you. Of course, someone else can try to outbid him (including the incumbent). Bidders could also solicit donations from ordinary people, in exchange for promises of specific policy actions, e.g. "I'll have the city re-pave your street if everyone donates 100 gold pieces to my bid for Mayor". How could such a system be made to work ? Who would administer the auctions, and how can we prevent that person or organization from becoming the de-facto dictatorship ? Let's assume that this is happening in a world with reasonable degrees of magic, but no cryptocurrencies or AIs or anything like that, so citizens would still have to trade their hard currency the old-fashioned way. [Answer] It wouldn't be much different from the way corporations are run now @AlexP is right, you normally can't just buy the office of king because there is no "super-king" to sell it to you (and if there is, that would probably be feudalism, not plutocracy). You need to look at how societies form in general, specifically thinking what would cause a group of human beings to form a plutocracy. Likely they would be forming a plutocracy from either an oligarchic/monarchic society or a republic/democratic one, as a plutocracy the way you describe would probably need a functional system of hard currency, which wouldn't be present in a group of hunter-gatherers just becoming sedentary for the first time. We already have examples of how a plutocratic society is run in the present day: corporations. Corporations start from pretty much nothing and form when individuals decide to pool their resources together to accomplish a broader goal, not that different from how societies and their governments form. In corporations things are kind of a weird mix between democracy and monarchy, with the person who can own or control the majority of shares dictating what happens to the company. A functional plutocracy wouldn't be that much different from a cyberpunk corpocracy, though it would probably be more open to participation as works like Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2077 treat the corporations as shadowy pseudo-governmental overlords instead of examining how corporations actually run (i.e., regular people are never shown buying corporate stock, there is never any shake-ups in leadership due to changes in who owns the majority share, and the corporations are never beholden to their shareholders, which is kind of the point of a corporation). In such a plutocracy, citizenship would be based by the number of shares in the country you own, as in owning >1 share makes you a citizen. Owning many shares would give your vote more power, but it wouldn't make you more or less of a citizen. From a political science point of view, this would mean that everyone that "bought into" the country therefore has an interest in seeing the country succeed. This is a kind of Heinlein-esque view of society, namely that only those willing to invest in society should be allowed to influence its policy (In practice this doesn't work, as can be seen in the early 20th century when the automotive barons bought up the railroads and deliberately ran them into the ground to make their cost-inefficient cars look better. Because they were so wealthy they could eat the loss). Public positions would probably be determined by appointment by whoever is in power at the moment. "Buying" public positions is probably not a long-term feasible strategy, for the simple reason that it will never result in the most competent people getting the post (this is arguably true for politicians today, but you'll notice that public service jobs like police officers and EMTs require skill checks, and even public sector jobs require interviews and job skills). It really seems like it's only the "elected" jobs where any old idiot can get into them. As a result, most jobs would probably be determined by appointment, similar to the modern U.S. spoils system or how a lot of corporations work. In practice a lot of people would get jobs based on political connections and kickbacks creating a "good old boys" system, kind of how politics works today, keeping the plutocracy angle that you want. [Answer] People would bid for office like they bid for anything else. Governmental entities take bids all the time. If I have a road building crew I will bid for government work, promising good construction, quick completion time and value for the money. Bidding for offices would be the same. If I am bidding to be the dogcatcher I will promise to catch dogs humanely for X salary. A competing bid might be an individual who will save money and catch dogs possibly less humanely for 0.85X salary. Perhaps the governmental entity is mandated to accept a certain number of bids from red haired individuals. A red haired individual also promises to catch dogs humanely for X salary. I am a platinum blonde and fearing I will be outbid, lower my bid to 0.85X. Any government office could be bid for in this way. You would not need to be a wealthy individual to bid for a government job. You could be an individual who needs the job! A wealthy individual might be able to underbid competitors - for example I make a bid for Comptroller and I will do it for a salary of $1 because I am rich, don't need the money and I love my city. Perhaps I think I can leverage the job such that I will make more money off of my other endeavors. Or maybe I really do love my city and I want to give back. The governmental entity taking the bids for government office would evaluate the bids. Like they do! Perhaps the individual promising to catch dogs inhumanely for 0.85X has no background in that type of work. Perhaps the prospective comptroller has a history of civic participation and the skill set to do the job. An office is an office. A person occupying that office carries out the responsibilities that come with. She might be paid, or not, and she might use the powers of the office in different ways, or not. The office holder might be elected, or appointed, or inherit the office, or bid for it, or be chosen by lottery or be hired for it off of Monster.com. There is nothing special about governmental offices. --- As as regards a functional plutocracy - there are many. If I am wealthy and interested in accumulating more wealth and flying my jets, I probably do not want to spend my time being comptroller. But if I see a way that decisions by the comptroller can further my interest, I can hire an individual with comptroller talents to make a low bid for the office. I assure this individual that once her bid is accepted, I will supplement her salary (or that of her son) with my funds in exchange for her consideration. This is how the real world works now. [Answer] ## The bidding cycle is too short The problem is a new auction every three months doesn't allow the winning bidder to actually do or achieve anything in the time available. Which might be fine if the person concerned is biding for the office of City Treasurer or Tax Collector and has the sole aim of stripping every coin he/she can get out of the Treasury but that aside its just a recipe for chaos. The short term nature of the role has two significant effects I can think of. Firstly it significantly reduces the size of any likely bids for Office. I mean if you cant earn a million dollars (or whatever) in a particular public office in three months why would anyone put in a large bid? Secondly what can anyone running a moderately sized City State achieve in three months? Most people would spend at least that long just getting to know the ropes. That and the fact that the permanent State employees (public servants) would tend to habitually ignore/delay acting upon instructions from whoever won the role in the sure and certain knowledge that they would most likely have a new boss in three months time. So why do anything he/she says? Just delay until they are gone. Three, four or five years? Now that's a different story. [Answer] The hard part about making your system work would be keeping the standing government from changing the laws so that they don't have to spend their personal fortunes to hold offices. If you just dropped 10 million dollars on becoming a senator, you don't want to have to do that again next election; so, it will be in your interest to change the laws. As an office holding member of government, wouldn't it be so much better if you just had to HAVE 10 million dollars, but then make other people do the actual spending of money to keep things going? That way, as a leader, you still prevent competition for you power by blocking anyone who does not have as much money as you, but you don't have to make yourself broke to do it. As it turns out, this is what actually happened in many ancient city states. They were Plutocratic in the since that you had to have X amount of wealth to participate in Y aspect of government, but it was the poor instead of the rich who paid for everything that kept the the city state functional. This ensured that those in power stayed in power which is ultimately what defines a stable form of government. The best way to make sure your system of government stays more or less stable is to give your people a constitution that says that the government may not create ANY taxes. Instead, make it so that the auctions for government positions actually create the treasury's revenue. A strong constitution is important here because your people need to believe that the constitution is more important than the actual human beings giving them orders. This way, if a politician proposes a law that levees an illegal tax or challenges the auction system, their actions are clearly treasonous, and they will be removed from power (either by act of law initiated by other leaders or by an angry mob if need be). [Answer] I think the most wealthy would rather control who had the position than do the work themselves. So a wealthy person might look around for the someone to stand for the office and fund them and/or the candidate might go out and solicit support for their run. Pretty quickly like-mind people would pool their money. So, not that different from the current system but the "campaigning" would be merely fund raising and promises to supports and there would be no need to convince the general public to actually vote for you. [Answer] ## Checks and Balances: *(insert double meaning here)* The key to making a plutocracy work in a modern world will be checks and balances. Much like our government, you would need multiple branches of government, each with their own unique way of influencing governance. I'm covering your specific question first, but I feel the overarching issues need a bit more comprehensive of an answer. One of the most critical aspects to your purchase of votes and positions is that taxation should be optional, giving society a strong motivating factor to accept people buying positions. * Bureaucracy: A stable bureaucracy of competent, vetted employees would be essential to maintain stability. **Here is where your positions come into play.** These jobs could be bought initially, but only by those who can prove themselves minimally capable. You might have some jobs on a sliding scale, so a bureaucrat with really good scores could advance cheaply, needing little of his own money to get better paying jobs, while less qualified ones could still get ahead by throwing money at the thing. In a large bureaucracy, the structure of the system is such that the professional bureaucrats can make things work despite the influence of financial appointees. The protected, sliding scale jobs would be the ones where the most disruption of the system could occur. Efforts to eliminate the purchase of jobs would be rebuffed, because the government doesn't enforce taxation, and they really need the money. The best, most qualified bureaucrat could eventually become the CEO, with a vote by the taxpayers, subject to removal by the stockholders. * Life, Liberty, and Property: You would need a good constitution. This system is rife with opportunities for one rich person to screw over all other rich/not so rich people, so protections to make sure that didn't happen would be critical - you don't want people to take your right to vote. I would suggest all taxation and seizure of assets is deeply optional. Personal rights should be shielded to stop others from blocking the ability to make money. I might also have some kind of guaranteed employment - the government will give anyone the chance to earn money by hard work and effort. Protections to keep anyone in government from (directly) profiting from their positions (except via a salary) would be very important to keep trust in the system alive. * Please let me pay more taxes!: I would propose one branch of government controlled by whoever pays taxes. For every dollar you invest in the government, you get one year of voting rights. This could even be open to foreigners and other governments - after all, we can't silence money! With voluntary taxation, every buck is needed. It could be direct democracy (you register your dollar-vote, and need to weigh in on each issue) or some kind of representation (you give your dollar to an organization you trust to vote the way you want them to, making decisions for you). This might even mean foreigners can be more invested (pun intended) in your plutocracy than their own government. Imagine the rich people in another country lobbying your plutocracy to take over their own state to extend the benefits of good financial governance to all. Functionally, this would resemble the house of representatives. * Shareholders: Then you can have shares of government stock. Stockholders own voting shares, and they vote in a separate body from the taxpayers. These would hopefully represent a more stable voting block, with steady hands buying stock to assure the volatility of taxpayers doesn't disrupt good governance. Stock would likely be very expensive and rarely change hands. In desperate times, this body could issue new stock to raise emergency funds, but dilute their very power base by doing so. * Citizenship: Being a citizen means you have at least one share of stock. Non-citizens can still be residents of your country, but as employees only. They can become citizens by buying stock. If a citizen has to sell their stock, they either stop becoming citizens, or they could become wage-slaves: they essentially give up control of their stock (and it's voting rights) until they can earn enough money to buy their stock back. Protections to guarantee the right and opportunity to buy your stock back would need to be enshrined in the constitution. ]
[Question] [ Background: I am currently writing my first fantasy novel and the nation/continent on which my story takes place is an island roughly the size of New Zealand. It consists of two nations who split off from each other roughly 200 years before the start of the story due to significant ideological differences over the use of magic and the story revolves around a war between magic users and non-magic users. I haven't fleshed out the magic system extensively yet, but at the moment it is telekinetic in nature and is very limited in capability. My question is: Is it possible for these two nations to have existed in isolation from the rest of the world and still have reached an early-modern/industrial revolution level of technological development without outside influence and trade? Further details: I'd like the tech level to be equivalent to around the early 1700s in Europe. Just before the beginning of the industrial revolution. After much research about that time period and technological developments, however, I realize that that level of technology came with centuries of international trade between nations around the world. As a result, I'm getting bogged down with the story and world building because although my story centers around a war in these two island countries, I feel it's implausible to not have international trade and keep the technology level I'm going for. And if there is international trade then I feel it's logical to assume those other countries would have a stake in the war and the politics and alliances would come into major play in the outcome of the war. And now I'm trying to build this whole outside world and figure out the cultures of their main trading partners and the implications of the magic and how they interact with each other, when really the story centers on just these two nations and I'm spending so much time and energy into crafting the world instead of the story itself. Is it enough to casually say "there are imports and exports" and then ignore the implications for the sake of the story, or to say these two nations really are isolated out in their ocean and there is no trade or outside influence? Or will that be a stumbling block in the logic of the world because there is no way for that level of technological development to occur in isolation? [Answer] I doubt very much that this isolated island would develop as you hope. Part of the reason being the likely lack of suitable domesticatable animals as beasts of burden and also the likely lack of plants that would breed true to allow the development of a reliable crop. Islands are particularly vulnerable to these effect, but even whole continents can be affected. Case in point why did the Europeans discover Australia rather than the Australians discovering Europe? It has nothing to do with human genetics and everything to do with the available flora, fauna and geography. These points are developed in Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Agriculture> [Answer] Can they reach 1700s technology level independently? Likely yes. Can they stay isolated in the process? Highly unlikely. The size of New Zealand is rather small to develop a civilization on the brink of industrial revolution, but as the other people suggested it is possible. The bigger problem is how to keep this civilization isolated throughout the process. Here on Earth the age of caravels predates 1700s by centuries. Either this nation would find the other lands, or the rest of the planet would find them. How much this would affect your story I don't know, but it appears to be a no-no for your scenario. Thus, you will need ways to impede sea travel. * Make your landmass very isolated (but how did humans colonize it in the first place, hmm); * Make sea weather rough on your planet, particularly in regions close to this landmass. Or, alternatively, make those regions perfectly calm; * Make navigation problematic (unreliable compass reading, near-permanent cloud cover etc.); * If magic is in play, use sea monsters, giant whirlpools, areas of permanent fog, or just make this landmass wander like Themyscira. [Answer] YES and also NO... You've already stated the understanding and a study of European / Occidental history in particular demonstrates that technology relies on a pyramid of previous technological advancement, scientific advancement, cultural & religious advancement. And these advancements go all the way back into the Neolithic. So there are a couple ways that the answer could be either Yes or No. If your proposed countries have the wherewithal to come up with proper science, the way it developed in the West, then I'd say the answer could be Yes indeed! They may or may not end up with every piece of technology the UK had in the early 1700s. You may have different technologies for example. (Proto airships? Megatherium drawn trains?). It could also be no: they could be lacking whole technologies we take for granted, like firearms. One way this can happen is that the concepts of science & technological & cultural & religious advancement came to the islands say 400 or 500 years before your story starts and then for some reason contact was lost. Perhaps a cataclysm or war or plague or combination struck the Outlanders and they never came back. Thus the seeds would be planted and the natives would be left to their own devices to tend that outside endowment. As for your underlying plaint: try not to become discouraged and bogged down! I usually recommend a writer to build as full a world as possible, which would include all your outside countries. But for the purposes of this story, I think you can probably get away without it for now. It's enough for us Readers to know that there are other countries out there and that they were once in contact and have not been for some time. You don't need to explain, you don't need to justify. Maybe for a sequal novel, you can work on those other countries and perhaps introduce them into the history of these isolated countries. For historical comparison: consider the history of Japan. Until modern times, it had been very isolationist. [Answer] ### Yes. Replace religion with first alchemy, and then science. Quoting Daniel Jackson from Stargate Sg1: > > We'd be colonizing space right now if it weren't for the Dark Ages. There was a period of over 780 years where science was heresy and anathema > > > I actually slightly disagree with the fictional doctor here - dark ages werent that boolean or uniformly applied over the planet and his statement is a massive simplification, but I think his point is otherwise the key to your situation. Your people never got the "good news" about Jesus Christ, Mohammed, or any other major religion. Instead they turned away from all "Gods" after a disaster destroyed their temple and all the true believers in it, and became mostly non denominational, and their smarter people started with alchemy, experimenting with the physical world to try to understand it. This led to the early independant discovery of basic chemistry, and more importantly, scientific method. Lacking world trade they have missed inspiration for certain technologies, but because they've been working at it for longer than Europe and skipped some of the darker periods of history where no advancements were made, they're able to advance at approximately the same level. [Answer] The answer to your question is very long and complicated, but the long answer is probably not. There are a lot of reasons why, but some of the most prominent are... TL;DR: Countries either get ahead through an abundance of resources and manpower, or profitable trade and cross-pollination of ideas when countries lack those resources. Your two isolated countries have none of these things. By definition due to its smaller size it's going to have less resources and population, and if it's isolated it's going to have no way to keep up with other countries by controlling trade routes or importing foreign advancements in technology. 1. Resources. Smaller countries tend to have less resources. If they're on an isolated island those resources are going to be even less. If they're isolated they can't easily trade for resources they're missing. Missing some of those resources could be potentially crippling in terms of technological development. For example the two main ingredients of bronze: copper and tin, are almost never found together, and bronze manufacture typically involves extensive cross-continental trade. You can make bronze using arsenic and copper, but the fumes are toxic and it's not as good. What happens if your island has no copper deposits? You're much less likely to ever realize the usefulness of bronze, and you'll be much less likely to develop iron working because iron working involves much hotter temperatures and is harder to smelt than copper. What happens if your country has no easily accessible deposits of coal or oil? We already see today how access to fossil fuels can make or break a country's economy. Gunpowder might be easy to manufacture from seabird guano, though. As an example, it's been suggested that one reason why China never tried to become as much of an expansionistic empire as Rome or the later European colonial empires or never had much of an interest in exploration is because their location in east-central Asia gave them easy access to pretty much everything they could ever want. They had easy access to iron, copper, spices, silk, etc., in contrast to Europeans who had to go halfway around the world to get access to spices. They did make expeditions and territorial expansions to acquire better horses from Ferghana, control the Tarim Basin, and expand south to acquire bananas and more directly acquire spices, but they weren't dependent on trade. 2. How isolated is "isolated"? Humans have a tendency to get everywhere. Our species had colonized every major landmass by about 700 CE, and did so with what amounts to Stone and Iron Age technology (the Inuit, Norse, and the numerous Polynesian cultures were not using modern technology to find these landmasses). Even really isolated landmasses often have a history of multiple waves of colonization (e.g., the native Malagasy seem to be descended from immigrants from both Africa and southeastern Asia). The closest to what you want is the Sakoku period of Japan, where Japan closed its borders for 200 years. However, even during the Sakoku period Japan wasn't 100% isolated, it still maintained trading relationships with the Dutch for example, even if the Dutch were limited to two cities. Additionally, it wasn't like the rest of the world didn't know that Japan existed. On top of that, part of the reason sakoku ended was because Japan realized the rest of the world was advancing much faster than it, and it had the choice of either modernizing or falling behind in the technological arms race and get stomped on when someone did decide to invade them. Hermit kingdoms never do well. That said Japan does show it is possible for an island nation to remain isolated for 200 years and still have technology, but Japan had extensive contact with the rest of the world beforehand and definitely did not keep up with the rest of the world until sakoku ended. A smaller country is also going to do more poorly if an enemy can circumvent its natural defenses of being isolated. Being island nations has helped a lot to reduce invasions for many countries, but a small island nation by definition is going to have a harder time levying a comparable army to a large island nation. What's going to decide any military campaign is if that larger nation can ship the army over and bring their greater military strength to bear. 3. No large, domesticatable animals. Islands as a rule tend to have fewer large animal species than the mainland due to fewer chances for dispersal. The smaller land area means that fewer large herbivores can be supported, which means fewer carnivores. Additionally, when humans come to an island they tend to slaughter everything bigger than a cat on it, often by sheer accident. It's not hard because these large island animals tend to have small population size and aren't familiar with humans. Examples include the megafauna of Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Madagascar, Cyprus, Sicily, the giant tortoises of the Bahamas, and so on. Even the British Isles show signs of extinction. There is no evidence that humans have ever domesticated island megafauna despite the fact that they should be highly amenable to domestication due to their passivity. [The Balearic goat Myotragus has been suggested to have been tamed by the natives of that island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myotragus#Domestication), but this is disputed. As a result, for the most part any domesticated animals your society has are going to be ones they brought with them. Dogs are highly likely, as are chickens and maybe rats (see: Polynesians). Large ungulates are going to be harder to bring across, especially cows and horses. This is going to have impacts on your society. No domesticated megafauna means fewer easily available sources of meat and possibly milk or eggs. Large domesticated animals are helpful in many ways. They make the usefulness of wheels much more self-evident. They make it easier to transport goods and information. They make large-scale construction easier. They make for good food sources because you get a lot of food for little unit effort. In the American West bison and later cattle were considered an easy food source for workers because they had a lot of meat per animal. There's also the issue that even if your society does have these things, it will also be harder to recover from fluctuations in natural resources. If the forests of your island are cut down you aren't getting any more wood. If the horses of your island die off from a plague they aren't going to be coming back from another area. You're stuck with the limited resources you have. Example: Rapa Nui. Once the forests of Rapa Nui were cut down, they didn't come back. This is very important is you have a 1700's level society, you're probably going to have rampant deforestation somewhere, whether it is for building cities, cleared for farmland, or cut down for fuel or boats. 4. Reduced rates of scientific and technological advancement. Your island civilization is going to have slower rates of technological development. Full stop. No ifs, ands, or buts. There is a very simple reason for this: you have fewer brains at any one time thinking about solutions to problems, and you have no cross-pollination with other cultures. Here's an example. Lets say you have an problem with poor farming tools. In a small country you have 50,000 people trying to solve this issue every day, and on the mainland you have 500,000 people dealing with this problem every day, plus by proxy the millions that country is connected to due to trade routes. The mainland is going to solve the problem faster because it has more people working on it. This can be seen today. Part of the reason science is advancing at such a fast pace today is because 1) there have never been more humans alive than there are right now, and 2) those humans are highly connected and can easily share information. Isolated discoveries are much more likely to be lost or forgotten, and rapidly spread everywhere. This is also why civilizations positioned at the center of trade routes tended to be so prosperous. Not only do they get fantastically wealthy due to all the trade routes coming through them, but they also get all sorts of new ideas coming through them. This is one reason why the Middle East, and in fact during the Islamic Golden Age the caliphates leveraged this to make cities like Bagdad a center of learning. Additional Story-Telling Things From a story-telling perspective, the issue you are going to be facing is literally every aspect of your society's culture is going to be different from the mainlanders. Their language and writing will be completely different. Their math system is liable to be different. Their calendar will likely be different. Other historical societies often have some differences, but here the differences will be exaggerated because every single advancement between your two island countries and the rest of the world will have been made independently, and different people will come up with different terms and ideas to explain the same things. On top of that, the historical "lessons" that their societies have learned will be completely different. A lot of human history has been influenced by what a society has learned through previous events. Modern society has become fanatically anti-genocide and anti-eugenics after we saw where those ideas led after World War II, even though before that such behavior was condoned or even encourages (e.g., eugenics movements in the 20s). Historical Chinese dynasty's rampant misogyny was in part codified by the tyrannical reign of Dowager Empress Lü Zhi, and even centuries after her death she was used as an example by the reigning elite as to why women couldn't be trusted with power. Your societies are going to have very different ideas as to what is "right" or "wrong" based on their completely separated histories. [Answer] I see no reason the Maoris could not have eventually reached 18th century technology (or beyond) if left alone. Presumably it would take longer, because the population of idea-generators is smaller, but you can make history be as deep as you want. What I think you need to decide is what the rest of the world is like, and why aren't they busy exploring it. By 1700, people had sailed around the world. They knew how big it was and were starting to map it out. Being an island country, if there were people to trade with, they would be doing it. I think this may be the difficulty you are having. You want a relatively small "world" that you can put on a flat map, but you want it at a level of technology where the denizens would be expected to have access to the whole larger world. Perhaps seamonsters could solve the problem? [Answer] The seamonsters suggestion posed by others seems like a good one, but why not take it one step further? The reason nobody visits your remote islands in the back of nowhere is because nobody wants to. There are several reasons for this. First, if your islands have only early 18th century tech, then so does the rest of the world. Travelling by ship is a well established technology, but still no picnic. Voyages could take months, or even years. This is exacerbated by... Second, the island are physically isolated. In our world, New Zealand lies in the "Roaring Forties", strong winds that blow between latitudes -40 and -50 degrees. In your world - given a suitable configuration of continents and some suitable handwaving - this could be used to good effect. What if all the continents were clustered in the northern hemisphere except for your one isolated spot in the south? Getting there would involve crossing not one but two major areas of calm, plus one of dangerously high winds. And all for what? Because... Third, not much is known about this place. The southern hem was explored by the various nations of the north, sure, but how easy is it to spot one tiny island in an entire hemisphere? A hemisphere that is widely believed - perhaps even "proven" by "science" - to be completely empty? Also... Fourth, your islanders might not welcome visitors. They have magic, so their society is likely to be very different from anything we would recognise. And then these strangers - non magic equipped strangers, at that - come blundering in looking for lands to conquer, or loot, or whatever. Maybe your islanders would psychokinetically headsquish first and ask questions later. With the result that... Marco de Vasco de Columbus-Vespucci might just decide that there are more profitable enterprises than some g\*dforsaken island on the other side of the world that might not exist and, if it does, can't be reached and, if it can won't do you any good because nobody who went there - assuming anybody ever did - has ever come back. ]
[Question] [ We start with one small (but perfectly formed) planetoid. Just for the sake of discussion, we'll say it's Mercury. This planet is more or less useless to me, being too small and too close to the sun. Fortunately, I've got this big building project in mind...and I need materials. Not-Mercury is therefore slated for deconstruction. I have massive mobile excavator/refinery complexes that are eating steadily away at the crust, processing the rock into useful components, and transporting them to orbit for use in my Dyson Swarm. However, the core of the planet is still extremely hot - not as hot as Earth's core, and not hot enough to drive tectonic activity, but certainly hot enough to cause critical components of my excavators to become inconveniently runny. What I'd like to do, then, is have some process in place that can transport the heat away from the depths of the planet, keeping the surface cool enough for my machines to work efficiently. The population of the planet live in subterranean, multi-level tunnel-cities (similar to Zion in the Matrix series). Ideally these cities should be a part of whatever system we put in place to cool the core, but that's not strictly required. Tech level is advanced enough to allow routine interplanetary travel, but not interstellar; fusion reactors, mass drivers, arcologies, etc, but no FTL, matter replication, or transporters. The system is almost completely bare of Handwavium, so ideally tech should be conceivable today. So - How can I cool down a planetary core on a timescale of centuries? [Answer] The direct answer to your question: Same way we currently cool space ships: By using a heat exchange to capture and transport heat, and radiating that heat off as IR radiation. A solar shade to limit incoming heat from the sun is also helpful. However I don't think we'll need a planetary core cooling system. Dismantling a planet can't really be done depth first (i.e., speed run to the core), the excavation will be gradual and distributed (shaving a dozen meters off equally around the sphere every year sort of thing). As this is done, hotter rocks are allowed to radiate into space over time and cool down. You dig another 1m down. Process everything. Accelerate it into space, and move on to another region. When you come back to this region, it's radiated a lot of energy into space and is cooler now. As you're digging, you're constantly building new refining and launch infrastructure at lower elevations and then dismantling the old, higher elevation one. Another massive practical reason for doing this is access and power efficiency. Hauling rock up slopes takes a tonne of energy. Hauling rock along flatish ground is relatively cheap. Your robots can move rock better with wheels along smooth near-horizontal ramps than up cliffs. I've always pictured this project done by an entirely robotic workforce with humans in orbit controlling their strategic moves, the robots being autonomous in tactical moves. No need for a habitat if no humans step foot on the ground. [Answer] Launch hot material into space Basically, there are only three methods to transfer heat: conduction, convection, and radiation. In space, only the method #3 works. Hot object mush exhaust itself radiating heat into space. While this works, this is very slow. You will have to wait for thousand years for a planet-sized object to cool a fraction of a degree. Building big heat-emitting radiators might help, but those radiators must be also planet-sized. Conduction and convention methods won't work, because there is no other body to conduct the heat to, and there is no atmosphere. But what if you create a convection (or, rather, direct transfer of overheated gas) out of the planet? This would effectively transfer away all of the excess heat. Your operation then would go like this: 1. Digging machines would excavate planetary material, vaporizing it in the process. The process would actually become simpler when you get the hotter core; 2. Vapor would get ionized and transferred to an orbital launch ionic "cannon", which would accelerate material to the first cosmic velocity (which, for Mercury-sized planet is only about 3 km/s) and launch this plasma into the orbit; 3. The plasma would form a disk around the planet, and due to its low density would quickly cool down, forming dust; 4. Your orbital operations would collect the dust and transfer it to some other place in the system where you need it. [Answer] If you can build a Dyson Swarm, you can use other planetoids. May I suggest using Not-Europa, Not-Ganymede, Not-Calisto, Not-Enceladus, Not-Triton etc.? They are [literally covered in ice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icy_moon), which is kinda cool[pun intended], on top of their rocky cores. They are also around half the radius of Not-Mercury or smaller, and farther from the sun than Not-Mercury[citation needed], which means they won't be so hot. [Answer] I think you're dealing with a non-problem here. You're giving a time scale of centuries. You can't simply dig down in one spot, it won't take too much distance before your dig collapses. You have to spread your digging out all over the planet. As you dig away material what's underneath is warmer but not greatly so. By the time you get back to that spot it will have cooled naturally. Besides, your big problem is the waste energy from lifting all that material to space, not the energy of the planetary core. [Answer] Use the Sundiver Approach As in the David Brin book. Excess heat is converted to high frequency laser light and either beamed to the surface machinery or into space for other uses. The power is generated using the temperature difference between the surface and sub-surface layers. ]
[Question] [ So, the apocalypse has occurred, and for about 150 years humanity spent its time wallowing in misery, sorrow, and so on. So moving on, in the northwest of Nevada there’s an abandoned nuclear reactor, that suffered minimal deterioration. A group of skinless mutants, humans that have transformed into necrotic (but radiation-immune) creatures. They decide to settle the abandoned plant, and to run it. My question is, in a post-apocalyptic world, would it be possible for the group of mutants to run the plant? Background Info * They have access to refined-uranium, from some Caravan-traders who mined it, so that isn’t a problem * As I said, they don’t have to worry about radiation towards themselves. * The main thing they lack is the ability to use heavy machinery. Everything has to be done with manpower. * If you think this is completely impossible, maybe provide alternatives [Answer] They can't restart a shutdown nuclear power plant because it requires an external electricity source to run the cooling systems, control systems, and so forth necessary for the startup process. They also have no resupply for consumables and equipment that breaks or wears out. (Aside from that, after 150 years, even if the structure has undergone minimal deterioration, as you have said, much the equipment within would have failed naturally because of aging: the plasticizers in plastic and rubber components would have evaporated, making them brittle and crumbly, lubricants would have congealed or polymerized, electronic systems would be nonfunctional (common electrolytic capacitors have a rated lifetime of a few decades at most), there would be corrosion because of moisture, and so forth. Even if those are overcome, some sources indicate the shafts of the turbines are so heavy that they will bend by themselves if left in the same position for too long, rendering them unusable.) [Answer] Short answer no, long answer probably no, but... Any reactor of our current designs not actively managed by humans, even when shut down, will eventually suffer an accident, either from the spent fuel pool running dry or the reactor itself from decay heat. The Fukushima accident didn't happen with active reactors; they were shut down but still hot due to decay heat. If, at any point in that 150 years, the core becomes uncovered, it will likely meltdown and, depending on whether an ignition source is present, explode due to hydrogen formation when its fuel's zirconium cladding gets too hot. So more than likely the bigger problem is there won't be any abandoned reactors for your mutants to find. However, if they somehow have no problems with radiation, and possess the appropriate knowledge, building a new reactor would be almost trivial. The first reactors, called uranium piles, were little more than their names suggest: A pile of uranium and graphite as a moderator. The first was assembled and run without any shielding under the stands of the football field at the University of Chicago. All your mutants will need to do is gather up enough natural uranium, form it into fuel rods (which might be difficult, since uranium is an extremely dense and hard metal), and assemble it with an appropriate moderator. So what is an appropriate moderator? Well for natural uranium that would be heavy water or graphite. Heavy water is extremely difficult to produce and requires modern industry and technology, so you'd be stuck with graphite, which is also somewhat difficult to produce, but far easier than heavy water, and could conceivably be done by any society that has the technology to process uranium ore. This ultimately means building the core becomes the easy part. The hard part? Getting a turbine and creating the cooling and heat exchange system. Turbines require extremely balanced blades and very precise engineering. They're one of the most expensive parts of any power plant, nuclear plants included. This means they'll probably be out of reach for your post apocalyptic society. However, this is where your abandoned nuclear plant comes in. Modern civilian reactors in the United States broadly fall into two categories: Pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors. In a PWR, the water is kept under extreme pressure and its heat is exchanged with a second isolated cooling loop to produce steam. This steam then drives the turbine. Unfortunately, the technology required for a PWR is almost certainly beyond your mutants, but all hope isn't lost. In a BWR, the water is converted directly to steam in the core, then used to drive the turbine. This steam is weakly radioactive, and so makes the turbine slightly radioactive, which is one reason BWRs have fallen out of favor (but they still exist, and indeed Fukushima's reactors were all the BWR design). However, this direct conversion attribute of the BWR means it will be more within reach of your mutant nuclear engineers. Let's go with the following scenario: Your mutants stumble across an abandoned nuclear plant that was never completed. Let's say it has its turbine and electrical infrastructure in place, but the boiling water core was never completed. The reactor pressure vessel for the original reactor is on site in the reactor room, but was never completed. It has no fuel or control rod infrastructure, but the piping is hooked up. For all intents and purposes, it is a large, empty metal basin capable of holding water. The concrete containment structure also hasn't been completed, but that won't matter to your radiation resistant mutants. Your mutants happen to have a bookworm among them who has spent her life studying artifacts and books from the past, and has a very good understanding of engineering principles, but no ability to actually create any of the technology she knows about. She correctly deduces the plant's purpose and technology, and has enough of an understanding of nuclear physics to at least, in theory, understand how to build a rudimentary uranium pile. Realizing how precious and valuable this lost technology is, your mutants establish a colony at the plant and decide to complete it, presumably to generate power for society and attempt to help reestablish civilization. They know that they can't simply build out the boiling water reactor, since it was designed for enriched uranium and light water as a moderator, and enriched uranium is well beyond the capabilities of what's left of human civilization. However, they have access to large amounts natural uranium, perhaps because it's renowned as a very hard and dense metal that makes glass glow a pleasing shade of green. Let's also assume that they have a source of relatively pure graphite, and cadmium, which is renowned for its ability to create yellow pigments. The toxicity of uranium and cadmium as heavy metals is a moot point, as the harsh conditions of the apocalypse has forced the evolution of an extremely high tolerance for them, along with the radiation that a nuclear core would emit. The mutants are able to gather enough of the raw materials, and their craftsmen are able to build uranium rods and flat cadmium plates. They also purchase large blocks of pure graphite and drill holes through the center of them while also cutting them into perfect cubes. Inside the abandoned reactor pressure vessel, they stack the graphite blocks into a much larger block, leaving grooves between some sides of the blocks. Between some of the graphite blocks they slide the cadmium "control plates" into place to prevent the reactor from going critical. Lastly they slide the uranium rods into the channels they cut into some of the graphite. The rods are designed to be slightly narrower than the channels in the graphite blocks, and thus allow cooling water to flow around them. They flood their contraption in the reactor pressure vessel and tie chains to the control plates. The reactor vessel's cap is lowered into place from above using pulleys and levers, as well as manpower from the strongest mutants in the group. Ahead of time, they had the forethought to cut a small window in the side of the reactor pressure vessel. The window is made from sapphire glass they found at an abandoned laboratory and is capable of handling extremely high heat and pressures, but they won't have to worry about pressure too much in their reactor design. Very carefully, and extremely slowly, they withdraw some of the cadmium plates. One of them peers into the reactor through the window and notices a faint blue glow in the water below. This Cherenkov radiation is an indicator that they have successfully achieved criticality. The water acts as a fine shield at lower powers, but even at high power the mutants' great resistance to radiation means that they will be fine with people in close proximity to the operating reactor. They then slowly draw the control plates further, carefully monitoring the brightness of the blue glow of the reactor. Soon the water begins to churn and heats into steam, and the steam system of the plant pressurizes. The turbines roar to life as they consume the steam. Your mutants have managed to make the plant generate electricity. However, 150 years is a long time, and nuclear power plants are extremely complex machines. Without proper lubrication, the turbines are unable to spin at full power, and the relatively crude reactor design is not very efficient at generating steam. The plant is unable to generate anywhere near its original 1 gigawatt-electricity design, but it doesn't matter. There isn't enough civilization to consume that much energy anyway. Your mutants are satisfied with a few hundred megawatts of electricity, and the fact that the plant works at all is a marvel of the region and causes the mutant settlement to grow rapidly. A new city is formed around the abandoned plant. [Answer] # It depends on what kind of reactor 1. A full scale fission reactor. No, even with trained personnel, the maintenance needed to operate one of these in the best of conditions requires complex supply chains that just don't exist anymore. 2. A research (university) reactor. Maybe, if they had stocked a large number of spare parts and materials. You say you have refined uranium, but do you have enriched? This could pose a problem. 3. A large Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG). If instead they just find an abandoned factory that made RTG's for the space program, then it's pretty simple. Alternatively they could also maintain lots of small RTG's. This is probably a pretty good solution as they might also have access and materials in order to produce more of them. [Answer] To get it operational, assuming all the parts are good or spares are on hand, and there's fuel available, this could be easier than you might of thought: * There have only been [4 reactors approved for construction since 1977](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States), and 2 of them the builder went bankrupt. There's 102 nuke plants in USA, so you have a 97% chance of working with 1970's tech. + This tech is real easy to work with - repairing your VW Beetle by the side of the road with a screwdriver and duct-tape kind of easy. * They'd need to understand about the complications of things, especially cooling. For example: that you need to cool the core for like 3 days after shutting it off, even in an emergency. But I'm assuming there are manuals and they can read. * It's really easy to run a reactor if you don't care about radiation. You can just walk onto the core, and reach down and move the rods by hand if you need to. You also don't need to care about the rest of the world, you can just irradiate it, which is much easier than running a plant safely. * This also means you can bypass any faulty circuits or "non-essential" things. You need the core, cooling, and a turbine, everything else "safety systems" or "remote control" is nice but can be kludged out. * This "move rods by hand" approach can be used to simplify the startup process. If you turn off all the safety protocols (or just rip everything non-essential out), I believe you can cold start a reactor by filling up the coolant, swimming / wading in (or walking on the core), inserting the fuel rods, and partially removing the control rods until you feel heat. Then once the power starts you can start using your control systems from the control room. This would kill a normal human, good thing these guys are immune to radiation. * They will be unable to manufacture spare parts, so after enough breakages, they'll have to salvage one reactor for parts to fix another, eventually diminishing returns until the last reactor stops. * You said refined uranium is available. But, is it really going to be long term? It's really hard to make, and it's a lot of processing from what you mine, no way some miners can refine it in the field. The centrifuges are intense: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4tmLe.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4tmLe.png) There might be an easier way, looking through [stats on Nevadas power generation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Nevada), there is a lot of solar generation in Nevada whose maintenance requirements is basically a good dusting. This might be easier. Should also mention that there's also no nuclear power plant in Nevada, and I can't find any proposals to build one. [Answer] Others have already brought up the problems of not being able to start the plant up (requires megawatts of electricity) and cooling (when shut down the power goes to 3%, not 0%) but there's another related problem also--refueling. Obviously the plant isn't operating during refueling operations and thus there's no power for the machinery that deals with the spent fuel. While you call them radiation-immune I think you must be talking about ordinary levels of radioactivity. The spent fuel rods come out so hot that an ordinary human will have a hard time picking them up--because they'll die in the process. There's simply no such thing as truly radiation-immune so while they might not get cancer from it there's no way to protect against your brain shutting down because the nerves aren't transmitting impulses correctly due to the radiation flux. [Answer] A nuclear power plant is just a big steam engine: pressurized steam used to push a rotor within a stator to generate an electric field. The only thing 'nuclear' about it is that nuclear fission is used to provide the heat that boils the water to produce steam. The main problems with running such a plant are: * Controlling the rate of reaction so that the heat generated doesn't become excessive and melt the core (leading to a runaway melt down) * Maintaining the chamber, piping, and other components so they can handle the extremely high pressures the pile generates * Coping with waste: spent fuel rods, radioactive water from the pile, irradiated parts, etc. Anyone with an 19th century understanding of mechanics could run a nuclear power plant, as long as they got the gist of point #1. Maintaining and repairing it would be more challenging, because most of the components use high-strength alloy steel machined to exacting tolerances. If something breaks, your mutants likely wouldn't have the technical knowledge or industrial base to replace it; they'd have to scavenge from other plants. But note that many of the components for such a plant are large: multi-ton pipes or generators that would produce a Stonehenge-like challenge for movement and installation. Radiation and waste would be a separate problem. They can't just pile spent rods in a corner: spent rods have significant fissionable material remaining, and could still melt down and poison the entire water table. It's also worth noting that most nuclear power plants — unlike traditional steam engines — are operated remotely, with the mechanical aspects governed by a computer-driven console. This isn't a matter of pulling the right levers or turning the right pressure valves; your mutants would have to piece out how to use the dials, buttons, and command structures of the electronic system. That might pose a bootstrapping problem, since the console itself likely draws power from the plant, meaning they might have to start the plant running before they can begin to figure out how the console works. But, you know... details, details... [Answer] Viable Post-Apocalyptic Power Systems Hydroelectric. Existing systems will have to be rebuilt, the power generation equipment and related systems require regular maintenance. Some parts may well be salvageable. A small head (say 5 meters or so) with sufficient water flow can generate 10 or 100 kw (or more). If you have an existing lake nearby, you can even use it as a reservoir fairly simply. Many small dams will not last 150 years without maintenance, they are generally designed for a lifespan of 50 years (surprisingly low to most people). Though the dam may last 150 years without maintenance, they would likely be unsafe. Though the Hoover dam might last 1000's of year, it is built more like the pyramids than typical dams. Wind power Very similar to hydroelectric in terms of technology level. Not as power dense, but can be sited without having running water available. Geothermal Much more limited availability for low-tech civilization, but there are a few sites that are natural locations. Geothermal breaks down over time too, so they would also have to be built. Steam Power Burning stuff is an excellent low-tech power source. Most likely wood as the easy to find coal, oil, and gas deposits are long-gone - assuming there are any forests left, since people like to stay warm and cook their food. Without high-tech pollution control equipment this will be dirty, but that is unlikely to matter for quite some time due to limited usage. Since high-pressure boilers are necessary for high-efficiency, you would prefer to have engineering expertise. The Purdue Boilermakers have that name for reason. Not as efficient as internal combustion engines, but steam power is considerably simpler. Alternative Nuclear Collect and focus sunlight. Solar panels not enough tech available to manufacture. But focus some mirrors on a central tower and you could get enough energy to be useful. This will be more challenging, and will not work very well (tracking mirrors requires more tech), and does not work at night (molten salt heat reservoirs will not be an option). All electric power systems will be downtime for maintenance. The reason electricity is available 24x7 is the large number of generation plants. Coal power plants are only available 68% of the time, nuclear over 90%, but with a single power plant there will be downtime, and the electric grid is a high-tech long-forgotten memory. Don't use electric systems at all Transmission of mechanical power via belts, gears, shafts is effective and even lower tech. Electricity wins because it is so easily controlled and flexible, but [older factories](http://www.uvm.edu/landscape/dating/industrial_architecture/early_factory.php) relied on mechanical power transmission systems Hopefully, you will be able to find some old books that describe engineering principles somewhere. Books can easily last hundred of years - assuming you don't burn them to stay warm. Mutants are not required for any of the systems above. However, a mutation for high-intelligence would certainly be a large bonus in any of the restarting civilization scenarios. None of the systems above would be easy, you won't have any industrial base, so no machine tools, even a [flat surface plate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_plate) could be hard to find (needed for making tools). There will be many challenges for restarting electric power in any form. For a story you probably need to consider the justification for electric power at all. Electricity is not about basic needs (water, food, clothing, shelter), but about providing improvements to those necessities and only later for the luxuries. Electric power was introduced to a world that already had quite a bit of industry in place but the advantages in lighting were a key element in early adoption. [Answer] A thought here: Everybody (myself included) has taken the question literally--one reactor. However, reactors often come in groups. One reactor can provide the power needed by the other reactors. This does not avoid the initial startup problem or the refueling problem, however. ]
[Question] [ I'm building an earthlike world that has a moon orbiting a gas giant. Is it possible for the moon to always be between the planet and the sun? Also, is it possible for a moon to rotate around its own axis? [Answer] No, it's not possible for the moon to always be between the planet and the sun. For the moon to be in a stable orbit around the planet, and always be in front of the sun, two things must be true (We'll ignore the situation of putting the Moon at the L1 Lagrange Point, it wouldn't be in orbit around the planet, and L1 is not long-term stable): 1. The Moon's sidereal [orbital period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period) around the planet must be equal to the planet's orbital period around the sun. 2. The Moon must be orbiting inside the Planet's [Hill Sphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere). The Hill Sphere is the region of long-term stable orbits around the planet, which is based on the mass of the planet, the mass of the star being orbited, and the distance between the two. Its radius can be estimated as follows. $$r\_h=a\_p\sqrt[3]{\frac{m\_p}{3m\_s}}$$ Where $m\_p$ is the mass of the planet, $m\_s$ is the mass of the star, and $a\_p$ is the semimajor axis of the planets orbit, or the radius, in the circular orbit case we'll be using for simplicity. The Orbital Period of an object around another object can be determined by the following formula. $$t=2\pi\sqrt{\frac{a^3}{GM}}$$ Where $a$ is the semimajor axis of the orbit in question in meters, $G$ is the Newtonian Gravitational Constant, and $M$ is the mass of the body being orbited. This assumes that the satellite is negligible compared to the mass of the central body. When I started fooling around with the numbers determined by these values in a [Desmos Graph](https://www.desmos.com/calculator/w9htyuf6kb), a curious relation emarged, that I'll have to take some time to work through the derivation of: Regardless of the mass I chose for the Sun and the Planet, regardless of the semimajor axis of the planet, The Period of the largest Moon orbit that could fit inside the Planet's Hill Sphere was always 55.7% of the Planet's orbital period. So, no. You can't have a Moon with a long-term-stable orbit around a planet that keeps it between the planet and the sun. [Answer] This answer is meant as a supplement to [notovny's](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/175061/627). I agree with their conclusions (the scenario is impossible because of the instability of this Lagrange point, and the fact that the Hill sphere is too small), and I just want to derive the "curious relation" they came up with. We start with Kepler's third law. $T\_M$ and $T\_p$ are the periods of the planet and the moon; $a\_M$ and $a\_p$ are their semi-major axes; $M\_p$ and $M\_S$ are the masses of the planet and the start. Let's write out Kepler's third law for both the orbit of the moon and the orbit of the planet: $$T\_M^2=\frac{4\pi^2}{GM\_p}a\_M^3,\quad T\_p^2=\frac{4\pi^2}{GM\_S}a\_p^3$$ If we assume the moon is in its outermost orbit, we have $$a\_M=a\_p\sqrt[3]{\frac{M\_p}{3M\_S}}$$ Now we substitute and our first equation is $$T\_M^2=\frac{4\pi^2}{GM\_p}a\_p^3\frac{M\_p}{3M\_S}$$ Finally, we divide by the equation for the planet's period: $$\frac{T\_M}{T\_p}=\frac{M\_S}{M\_p}\frac{M\_p}{3M\_S}$$ and so $T\_M\approx0.58T\_p$, which is the result notovny found. It's interesting to think about this in the case of a binary planet ($M\_p\approx M\_M$) or a binary star ($M\_S\approx M\_p$). Kepler's third law is easy to modify for both of those cases. However, the derivation of the Hill radius requires that $M\_p\ll M\_S$, and that the Hill radius $R\_H\ll a\_p$. If we get rid of that requirement, then I believe a general solution would require finding the roots of a fifth-order polynomial in $x\equiv R\_H/a\_p$, which unfortunately has [no general solution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel%E2%80%93Ruffini_theorem). For particular values of $M\_p$ and $M\_S$, we may be able to find solutions, but we'd need to look at them on a case-by-case basis. [Answer] Not in practice, and yes, if you justify it. If a moon is orbiting a planet, it has to go around the planet. To simplify, the movement around the planet is what keeps it from just falling onto the planet. Orbits are simple in principle, but those principles don't especially correspond to everyday ideas about moving objects. If you learned about orbits from films or TV, you likely have things to un-learn, because those sources tend to ignore how things actually work. The [Wikipedia page about orbits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit) is a good place to start. There is a special case that looks as if it will solve your problem, but doesn't work in practice. That's the "L1" [Lagrangian point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point). In that, the "moon" is not actually orbiting the planet. It's orbiting the sun, close enough to the planet that it gets dragged along by the planet's gravity, and is always approximately between the planet and the sun. The reason that this doesn't work in practice is that the position is unstable: the slightest disturbance of the moon's position, such as the gravity of another planet in the system, will set the moon drifting away from the L1 position. Staying at L1 requires frequent course corrections. Humanity has several spacecraft at the L1 point between Earth and our Sun, but they all need to use small rockets ("thrusters") to stay there. The [SOHO satellite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_and_Heliospheric_Observatory) is an example. However, any body big enough to retain an atmosphere and be habitable is too large for its position to be adjusted with any reasonable level of technology. Moons always rotate, it's just that they usually do it in a time equal to the time they take to orbit their planet. This means they always show the same face to the planet, giving a false impression that they don't rotate. This is called "[tidal locking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking)," and it happens naturally with most moons. To have a moon that is not tidally locked, you need some kind of explanation. The simplest way is to say that the moon collided with another sizable body, which can change its rotational speed and axis quite seriously, and provides a reason for exciting topography. You need to have this happen before life appeared on the moon, because such a collision is likely to kill all life on the moon. ]
[Question] [ Lore has it that some magical illusions fool only the eyes. They do not appear in a mirror. Is there a way to harness this? Could a hunter of wizards and magical creatures build a set of mirrored goggles with a double-mirror system that filters their sight through two mirrors? This would allow them to see through illusions. I am not an engineer, so I'm not sure if that would be possible/feasible to wear into a hunting and tracking situation. [Answer] Sure. It's just a [periscope](https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/9254549/inventor-periscope-glasses-short-people-tall-gig-festivals/). You'd probably make it shorter both for wearability and durability, but if you have good mirrors, it'd work fine. (The major problem would be if it were a medieval setting or something, where good, silvered mirrors would be hard to come by.) [Answer] You ask, science answers! Enjoy the wonder of the [pentaprism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentaprism) [![pentaprism](https://i.stack.imgur.com/A3mjv.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/A3mjv.png) > > A pentaprism is a five-sided reflecting prism used to deviate a beam of light by a constant 90°, even if the entry beam is not at 90° to the prism. The beam reflects inside the prism twice, allowing the transmission of an image through a right angle without inverting it (that is, without changing the image's handedness) as an ordinary right-angle prism or mirror would. > > > The reflections inside the prism are not caused by total internal reflection, since the beams are incident at an angle less than the critical angle (the minimum angle for total internal reflection). Instead, the two faces are coated to provide mirror surfaces. The two opposite transmitting faces are often coated with an antireflection coating to reduce spurious reflections. The fifth face of the prism is not used optically but truncates what would otherwise be an awkward angle joining the two mirrored faces. > > > ]
[Question] [ Dwarves have been a popular character race for fantasy stories since at least J.R.R. Tolkien. Common lore bestows upon dwarves a unique and all-encompassing relationship to the stone that composes their environment. They are born within it, they serve it in their deeds, and they feel its impact upon their lives in many ways. Those dwarves who live underground are sometimes gifted by the gaming and fan-fiction communities with an ability called "Stone Sense". This ability provides subterranean navigation, and dwarves believe that it is derived from their connection to the Stone. Simply attributing the ability to "magic" is a cop-out. The most credible explanation that I could devise is an organic version of muography (or muon radiography), a technique that exploits the penetration capability of muons (elementary particles similar to electrons, but with a mass about 200 times larger). I'm not well-versed in physics or biology, but it seems to me Mother Nature has a pretty good track record for experimenting with unique and eccentric physical mechanisms, and making them work (though maybe with mixed results). My question is this: What mechanism might explain the Stone Sense? (I'd even accept some reference to the human aura, if it makes logical sense.) [Answer] Echolocation through their body There are more ways to hear sounds than just your ears, and by sensing vibrations in the ground and walls a dwarf can "feel" their environment. <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/seeing-through-soil-with/> When a dwarf walks around his feet create vibrations in the ground that will reflect off of objects and differences in the ground soil and sediment. These return echo's can be sensed through the feet or hands when placed on the walls, allowing the dwarf a certain view of the surrounding area. This way they get a certain feel for the path ahead, where other tunnels might be, if there are interesting materials to dig for or if their tunnel might be better to go around underground water or soil with a high chance of collapse. When in doubt a Dwarf can use his tools to hit the wall or floor hard, creating a stronger vibration and a clearer picture of their environment. Add to that a natural idea of distance and direction traveled and a dwarf can point almost directly to the entrance even after a few days walling in an underground maze. [Answer] A very good eye for geology, a sensitive inner ear and remarkable dead reckoning skills. The dwarves just get geology in the same way humans intuitively understand how to throw and catch things. If you ask a Dwarf to describe the geology of their surroundings they won’t be able to, but on a bone deep level they’ll have picked up that the red sandstone layer formed a hundred or so meters below the yellow sandstone layer, with a slight incline towards the north caused by tectonic action a few dozen million years ago. That’s just information they’ll have picked up from observing their surroundings, watching how their parents navigate, and really grokking the workings of stone. Of course, no Dwarf parent would dream of leaving their child with just that information, so they’ll practice ‘throwing and catching’, teaching and passing down knowledge that the young dwarves just immediately get. This has the effect of honing their offspring’s skills until they’re doing the geological equivalent of juggling. They no longer have to think, they just know not only what’s going on with the local geography (that they’ve been around since they were born) but can also extrapolate their skills to new and unfamiliar situations in ways that baffle those without the skill. It might take them a while to reorient if put in an unfamiliar location, but it’ll be the difference between juggling apples and bananas : if takes a while to get used to, but hey, it’s pretty simple in the end. The second thing the dwarves have on their side is barometry. Their inner ears can register pressure changes pretty sensitively, and they use this to add extra topological information to their already sophisticated understanding of tunnel networks. Air pressure in tunnels acts remarkably predictably, which gives any tunnel dwellers a good reference point to cross check with their current understanding of where they are. Wondering how deep you are? Gunthar the dwarf’s inner ear knows. Wondering if there’s a storm coming? How would he know? He’s lived underground his whole life. The third (and arguably most vital) part of this ‘sense’ has nothing to do with stone, and is in fact something humans have got some skill for. This is the art of dead reckoning, or starting with a known direction, travelling some exact path with no external references, and ending up at a known location. If blindfolded you or I might stumble into walls and doors, but someone who is blind can, in a familiar house, move with absolute confidence as long as nobody has moved things around. How? They hold the topology of the house in their mind and then dead reckon (ADDENDUM: It’s not this simple, but I’m trying to get a complex skill across using pictures invented by monkeys). They know that eight and a half steps from their bed there is the bathroom door. A ninety three degree left turn and four steps later and they’re at the toilet. Occasional touches on reference points and other ambient references provide navigational information but between the bed and bathroom door they’re purely relying on their own knowledge of their stride length, which will likely be an internalised thing rather than a conscious effort. Other (frankly amazing) examples of this include Aboriginal Australians using absolute directions (North, West, east, south) instead of left/right, requiring them to always have the absolute direction they’re facing fixed in their mind and update it based on dead reckoning their turns. Another example would be the skill of ‘voyaging’ (multiple island societies did this), or setting out in a boat with no instrumentation bar your bare skin for wind speed/current measurements, holding all the navigational information of the trip in memory, then successfully reversing the course with no reference to actual position. This is the skill your dwarves really need to foster. They hold in their minds an image of their path so far, and know exactly how far forward/left/right/up/down every step takes them. If a dwarf is conscious they will always be able to retrace their path, even in the pitch darkness. Coupled with a mental map of the tunnels they know (or of how tunnels must form/ be mined out, thanks to geology) and the constant reference points provided by pressure changes (where they occur) that lets them rapidly and instinctively match their progress through any bit of tunnel to their knowledge of those tunnels and make nigh on miraculous inferences about their location. If they know it’s likely (because in limestone of this type water prefers to flow in a certain way, obviously) the branch tunnel you’ve found to your left will arc through the rock and connect with the branch tunnel you passed on the right on your way in (which they remember the exact location of in their 3d mind map), then they’ll simply walk that way to route around the cave in that blocked your entrance. You won’t know how they did it. They won’t be able to explain how they did it an any way other than a gruff: “Well, It’s knowing the stone, innit?” [Answer] ### Whiskers! Did you think those beards were just for show? Every stiff hair in a dwarf's impressive facial mat is attached to a highly sensitive nerve, capable of detecting the most minuscule of vibrations. Together, they function as an incredibly powerful 3-D network of receptors, giving them echolocation capabilities that would put bats and dolphins to shame. By tapping on stone, they can analyze the returning sounds to get a feel for the stone's density, hardness, texture and other physical properties. They can also use this ability to detect thin walls (which might be hiding deadly gas pockets) and even sense irregularities that may indicate veins of precious metals or gemstones beneath the surface. Dwarves can also use this sense for communication between mineshafts - tapping out coded messages for dwarves in nearby tunnels. And of course, every dwarf baby is taught geology from a very early age, so by the time they grow up they know exactly how to intuit further details from their natural senses. [Answer] Magnetoreception. Many birds and other animals have magnetoreception, and are able to sense north/south due to the earth's magnetic field. The most likely mechanism for this is clumps of iron surrounded by bundles of nerves in the brain. If you use a larger clumps that are made of a material that is more magnetic than iron, you could sense not only north/south, but also large deposits of iron, cobalt, and nickel. You could use these deposits as resources or as landmarks in an otherwise featureless underground. [Answer] Different types of materials have different densities. Different densities result in different gravity. If the dwarves are able to sense these small differences in gravity they will be able to map the matter distribution around them and use it frame of reference during their subterranean movements, the same way we use points of reference when we move in an environment. [Answer] I had forgotten about Toph Beifong, but she does come closest to what I had imagined, though 'way overpowered. Actually, the reference that comes the closest is the Graboids from the "Tremors" franchise. :) Thanks for your times and consideration, folks. ]
[Question] [ In the Crescian society, on alternate Earth, the nobles have a refined sport of settling disputes with mutual assassination. The unspoken rules are that they must be carried out directly by the nobles themselves, and should a noble be ‘caught’ in the assassination process, they will be executed. To avoid being caught in their assassination attempts, the nobles devise all sorts of methods to steathily take out their rivals, the primary means being poison. In particular, poisons that have certain activation conditions are the most popular. Is it possible to create a poison that is de-activated by swirling/mixing the contents of the glass, whether it is soup or drink, and how would it work? The opposite (poison triggered by stirring) is also acceptable, although a convincing reason should be given (eg. providing a layered drink that should be ‘mixed’). Also, how to make it such that not doing this process has as close to possible a 100% chance of successfully dispatching the target, and 100% chance of surviving if the swirling/mixing is done? Also important is how to configure it to have more minimal side-effects when de-activated. Another good aspect to have would be slower-acting; if it is too lethal then it would give away the poison instantly, revealing the host to be the assassin and also frightening off the other guests, preventing them from consuming. Note: We apply Artistic License: Poison, so a top-level overview of the process through which the poison is de-activated works. [Answer] A poison which degenerates on exposure to ultraviolet light, in a liquid with a high UV absorption. If prepared and stored in an opaque container, the poison will remain active. When poured into a glass, the liquid at the edges of the glass will be neutralised but, if left undisturbed, poison may linger in the centre. Swirling the glass will expose all the poison to the light for neutralisation. [Answer] A layered drink sounds like it work work the best. Liquids, from a biological perspective, can be divided into two broad categories - polar/hydrophilic and non-polar/hydrophobic. Polar liquids dissolve well into water and non-polar liquids (oil, for instance) will not react at all, and will in fact form a layer. A salad dressing, like a vinaigrette, is a great example of this - leave it alone and it forms two separate layers. Now, there's something also important here - density. If you have a powder which is lighter than water, yet polar, it will dissolve into it. On the other hand, if you have it in oil, than it won't mix. Thus you stack the drink like this - water portion with the neutralizer in, non-polar portion, poison. (If necessary, there are heavier-than-water non-polar liquids which are relatively safe to drink.) Drinking without mixing will have the subject intake the poison directly. Depending on the poison, this may be instantly lethal before the subject can even swallow the antidote, or the poison won't be exposed to enough of the antidote to work. On the other hand, you can simply mix the drinking, explaining that you don't like layered drinks, and easily avoid the grim fate. [Answer] I think you could go the other way with the swirling. If the poison is a long polar molecule, then when it will align end to end — according to coulombic forces — when it is allowed to be still. When it aligns like this, saliva neutralizes the poison. The act of swirling causes the poison to break its weak bonds and saliva doesn’t affect the toxicity of the poison. This makes using the poison a big challenge and only very skilled practitioners would consider using the poison. They have to practice handling poisoned drinks very carefully to get it right. If you really want it to work the other way, then maybe the antidote is applied to a glass and cures clear. The act of swirling quickly about the glass causes the antidote to dissolve and go back into solution. [Answer] Might be able to make use of the [Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBa4kgXI4Cg) Set the reaction up then say to the assembled group look at this! It changes from poison to non-poison over time, who would dare to attempt to drink it at the right moment? Then while they are distracted slip something nasty in their beer… [Answer] I think you are going great lengths for a simple trick. Have the pole/spoon that you use to mix to be coated with an antidote for the poison in the drink. No need for fancy tricks ]
[Question] [ Working on the art book for my post apocalyptic world building project I got used to accompanying the introduction of each character or topic with a quote to set the mood and to emphasize how little (or much) has changed, compared to the old world (not as a catchphrase the character says). Actually I am working on a professional scavenger who is obsessed with the "ancient" civilization he encounters on his raids every day, relics of past greatness, technological advancement and peaceful unity in a wild and merciless post apocalyptic world, dressing like (what he takes for) a classic gentleman. After WW3 civilization went downhill, people are busy surviving, cropping food, putting up defensive fortifications, fighting hostile groups of other survivors. Wandering through the remains of the old world everyday, seeing images of people making music, art, building elegant huge city scapes, this character thinks what these people are doing nowadays is not living, it's merely surviving. A human being needs education (not only about cropping and fighting, but intellectual and technical), art, musicm manners, cosmopolitanism, a groomed appearance - well, basically civilization/culture, to be able to call oneself human. --- ## I am looking for a quote that states that one needs civilization / culture / refinement to really be(come) human or that only civilization / culture / refinement enables one to be human. In the best case a general term like civilization or culture is used, not only focussing on one aspect, like personal virtue or art. --- Note: I am only looking for real quotes, not own creative ideas to put in the mouth of some character that is said to have lived in my world. Bonus points if the quote isn't 20th century English or ancient Roman Latin (I already use both and would like to include several cultures and eras to show the parallels throughout human history), e. g. ancient chinese philosphy, some renaissance Italian phrase about the uomo universale, the literary Age of Enlightenment or something from the British Empire (cf. gentleman), which viewed itself as extremely civilized, compared to the savage colonies it oppressed. --- I have searched by myself, but that is extremely ineffective, if you only know the proposition your text should have, not an era or a writer. (And just going over all civilization quotes would take forever). So I was hoping maybe someone knows a quote, that is much easier to look up. [Answer] Edit2: After some digging around, I finally found the perfect quote for your story. > > How different a creature is man in society and man in solitude! - William Godwin > > > Perhaps you are wondering why I believe this the perfect quote for your story. This is because [William Godwin (1756-1836)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/godwin/) is a philosopher that supports anarchy, or more accurately, [min-anarchy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-watchman_state). He wrote political philosophy during the French Revolution, a period of major chaos and strife. His quote is perfect because Godwin’s stance is on forming a society on the borders of no government and complete anarchy (which is what you have in your current apocalypse). You could have your scavenger find one of his works, such as the An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice or the book Things as they are (Caleb Williams), starting his journey to bring back society, and giving him the ability to fire back Godwin quotes when meeting oppressive dictators and highway bandits. Whereas Godwin wrote philosophy arguing for the tearing down of oppressive government, it’d be ironically fitting if your scavenger quotes Godwin as he fights to bring back some form of governed society from the complete anarchy, meeting midway. --- If you are looking for quotes about society and how people fit into it in general, Confucius is a philosopher from Ancient China that really fits your bill. He also loves to define the perfect 'gentleman', albeit in an ancient style. Some quotes below: [Manners maketh man:](https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/confucius_384348) > > Without feelings of respect, what is there to distinguish men from beasts? > > > For your scavenger: > > “Study the past if you would define the future.” > > > Constructing society based on virtues: > > “Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.” > > > Another great gentleman quote: > > “A gentleman would be ashamed should his deeds not match his words.” > > > You can find more of his quotes [here](http://www.quoteambition.com/famous-confucius-quotes/), but I really recommend reading up on Confucius' philosophy in general, if you're interested in this topic :). --- Edit: it seems that you wish to get a quote that answers as to how people behave when their basic needs are not met; this is similar to the theory of Maslow's basic needs. A great quote from Maslow concerning basic needs is the following: > > “It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body.” Abraham Maslow > > > Godwin combined with Maslow and Confucius, these quotes should hopefully be enough ammunition to demonstrate the importance of society, art, and manners to humanity. [Answer] > > “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." > > > REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. > > > "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—" > > > YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. > > > "So we can believe the big ones?" > > > YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. > > > "They're not the same at all!" > > > YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. > > > "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—" > > > MY POINT EXACTLY.” > > > -- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather. --- More seriously, Terr Pratchett has some great quotes concerning just about everything. They may not be the tone you're looking for, but they are damn good! > > "It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it." > > > “It's still magic even if you know how it's done.” > > > “There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.” > > > “No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.” > > > “Even if it's not your fault, it's your responsibility.” > > > “Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.” > > > [Answer] There was a Lord Moulton, an English judge, who spoke or wrote about the realm of manners and why it was so important to a society. I don't know the original source, but he has been quoted several times by commentator Mark Steyn, for example: > > Moulton divided society into three sectors, of which he considered the > most important to be the "middle land" between law and absolute > freedom. At one end, one is free to do anything; at the other, one is > forbidden to do certain things; but in between lies the domain of > manners, in which the individual has to be "trusted to obey > self-imposed law". > > > "In this domain," wrote Moulton, "we act with greater or lesser > freedom from constraint, on a continuum that extends from a > consciousness of duty through a sense of what is required by public > spirit to good form appropriate in a given situation." > > > Steyn has observed that the "realm of manners" seems to be shrinking; we are increasingly moving toward a state where everything is either mandatory or forbidden by law, or otherwise we're not allowed to even have an opinion about it. Lord Moulton's point is that a society is bound together and defined by the things it can agree on, the civic rituals and so forth, without having to be forced to do by by law. > > as Lord Moulton put it, "The real greatness of a nation, its true > civilization, is measured by the extent of this land." > > > The [Mark Steyn article I'm quoting from](https://www.steynonline.com/8143/man-un-makyth-manners) has to do with the NFL "taking a knee" business that was going on a few years back, but he's referred to Lord Moulton on other occasions and is himself a good observer to quote. [Answer] Benjamin Disraeli was an influential Conservative Prime Minister in the UK during the Victorian era. He has a number of good quotes about government, but also about civility and society, one of which: > > "It is knowledge that influences and equalises the social condition of > man; that gives to all, however different their political position, > passions which are in common, and enjoyments which are universal." > > > You can easily "distort" this by the passage of time to omit politics, should you wish. [Answer] In a famous discussion between several philosophers in the company of Cicero, they argued at length about a popular Roman maxim from that day: "The republic cannot be governed without injustice" (η δημοκρατία δεν μπορεί να κυβερνά χωρίς αδικία). Laelius is said to have strained every nerve to prove that "nothing is so hurtful to a state as injustice, and that without justice, the republic can neither be governed nor continue to exist." At length, the following counter-statement, which was penned some time prior by the poet Ennius, was proposed by Cicero as containing the summary of the conversation: "Rome's severe morality and her citizens are her safeguard." Cicero said, "this verse seems to me to have all the sententious truthfulness of an oracle. For neither would the citizens have availed without the morality of the community, nor would the morality of the commons without outstanding men have availed either to establish or so long maintain in vigor so grand a republic with so wide and just an empire." Any of the above sentiments could be paraphrased and used I'm sure. There are a lot of other great quotes in Plato's Republic. Here's one: "Justice is useful when money is useless." (Η δικαιοσύνη είναι χρήσιμη όταν τα χρήματα είναι άχρηστα.) There are a bunch of good ones in various culture's proverbs ([this website](https://proverbicals.com/justice) is an interesting resource). I'm a fan of Epictetus, and he has some good ones, like "who does not choose to make use of a good vessel? Who does not value a benevloent and faithful adviser? Who will not willingly receive a man who is ready to bear a share, as we may say, of the difficulty of his circumstances, and by this very act to ease the burden, by taking a part of it." Maybe most of these are longer than what you're looking for, but the resources I cited are public domain, so I'm sure if you skim them you'll find something worth quoting. [Answer] Why not create one, > > other people remind you that there are other ideas, other ways of > being, they tell you what you are is a choice, and once it is a choice > you ask why choose to make the world a worse place. > > > or > > Manners are an acknowledgement that other people are people. > > > or > > One man can move a rock, two can move a boulder, many can move a > mountain. > > > or > > If you are around other people, being able to think from their > perspective is a super power, you can use it to lie or just > predict with ease. But it's a double-edged sword, a wonderful trick, once you > can see from their perspective, you can feel their pain, and > hurting them hurts you, and suddenly it gets harder to be an asshole. > > > ]
[Question] [ A bit of backstory: I'm attempting to create a militaristic alien race composed of elite warriors capable of conquering the galaxy. They posses a variety of "enhanced" abilities such as immense strength, hearing, eyesight, agility, etc. There's quite a bit of diversity within the race itself, being composed of intermingling sub-classes which would allow for a skew of these abilities in one direction or another, but the main theme here is they all posses various types of traditionally predatory traits such as fangs and claws; however, additional things like scales or tails would be more sub-class specific. My question is this: In accordance with what we know about the biology of predator species here on earth, humans included, what aspects are required/most likely to be present in this race as a whole in order to give them the warrior prowess they are famous for? Are some more vital than others? Any drawbacks? This is inclusive of things like anatomy, hormones, and anything else that might be deemed useful. I realize this is a broad question so more specific instances are welcome too. [Answer] They are a genetically identical nest, like the social insects. Making war means cooperation, which means putting the needs of the group ahead of the needs of the individual. Humans are able to do that to some degree which accounts for much of our success as a species. The social insects do that better than anything else. The organism is the nest and individuals are dispensable organs of the nest. There is no evolutionary selective pressure on the ant for individual evolutionary fitness. Individuals can act to benefit the nest without regard to personal outcome. An individual nest member might retreat but that individual will never be afraid. As regards differences between individuals, these can be different castes. [![ant castes](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IsjfS.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/IsjfS.jpg) <https://jeb.biologists.org/content/220/1/53> Genetically identical ants will diverge phenotypically according to the needs of the colony. Your varying soldier types (and also various noncombatant types) will all be sisters or even genetically identical (as in Brave New World) but vary in appearance and abilities according to need. [Answer] Predator features here on earth include: - Eyes on the front of the head: binocular vision helps tracks prey - Claws, Fangs and sharp teeth for eating meat - Fast reflexes - Lean build - tails are possible, they help with balancing during high-speed chases Senses like smell or eyesights are equally important for predator and prey, so I would not expect differences. I do suspect that a space-faring race will focus on vision. Horns, large spikes and armor plates are not an option, they are defensive features of slow plan-eaters, and will only slow down an agile hunter. Conquering a galaxy is a tad more complex than catching wabbits, so your species will also need: - Pack hunting and social structure, like in wolves or lions - Advanced brain, so mammals are more likely than reptiles. In terms of hormones and temperament, they gotta have the fighting spirit, but they also need to moderate it. Modern armies spend vast majority time preparing, getting into position, and waiting for orders. A bunch of aggressive hot-heads will not get ahead. [Answer] For a race of galactic conquerors, biological traits would be secondary to social and psychological ones. The species may be small and weak, but they should value cooperation, possess an expansionist's mindset and feel no mercy towards other sentinels. Physical weakness can be complemented by technology. The lack of bravery and determination can not be. If you still want to look for biological inspiration, look at [Klingons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon). [Answer] I'm going to assume you want the classical "brute extremely dangerous fighter culture in space" type of warrior, if not then Willk's answer should be it. While strength is often prized, strength will not win you a space battle with guns. An intelligent silverback gorilla would carry a big gun and take a lot of firepower to take down but he would also present a big and easy target that cant fit as easily in space ships and the like and more importantly it'll exhaust itself quickly. Modern fights are about stamina. Dropping most of your gear the moment a fight starts is even part of military doctrine. So to start with your aliens would be build for stamina, long-term combat where they can suffer through extended periods of exhausting combat stress and still be efficient. A gun does not care if it is fired by a big or small guy. Being smaller means your race can cram more aliens in the same space, feed more aliens with the same food and have smaller openings in their ships making it harder for larger enemies to move through. They shouldnt be too small, but small enough to be worth it without it becoming too hard to operate the galaxy's standard gun. As another advantage to being smaller is that growing adult soldiers becomes easier as they reach adulthood a bit faster, or at least a fully grown age not necessarily a fully educated and brain development age. This makes resupplying losses much easier. On top of that in zero-G combat you can turn around your axis faster if you are smaller, giving you an edge. Otherwise the usual applies. Quick reflexes (which does mean that thought processes are short-cirquited and friendly fire is more likely), low on food requirements (in line with stamina), omnivores for easier supply, good eyesight etc. [Answer] Consider for a moment the needs of a spacefaring race built around war. Yes, they'd need all the traditional physical features, like strength, eyesight, etc, but that doesn't seem to be something you really need help will. I bet you could write a basic list. So I'll give you a (slightly) more interesting one: An inclination toward cooperation War requires each side to understand what they're fighting for, whether it's as simple as the King or as complex as the American Ideal. When your race cooperates, they'll be able to overcome enemies who don't with ease. A natural intelligence The most successful armies plan. An intelligence is a prerequisite to the tactics and information-gathering that is commonplaces in conflicts. Knowing why your enemy is somewhere is almost as important as where they are. Psychological resilience Sailing among the stars is a hard life. Ask anyone who worked on a submarine, and then ask them to imagine not being able to come up for air every day. It takes a psyche to live constantly in an environment drastically different from the one your species evolved in. Or maybe your species evolved on a rocket, who knows. Endurance Apart from mentally demanding, space life is physically demanding as well. FTL takes a toll on the body, as does the rough-and-tumble of battle, the twirls of dogfights, and the wear of hundreds of near misses. They'll need to have a body that can withstand war. TLDR Your race will need to be smart and resilient. They'll live on a spaceship presumably most of their lives, and will have to adapt to the circumstances that come with that. ]
[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/158301/edit). Closed 4 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/158301/edit) I'm writing a science fiction story about a man who has to rebuild civilization from the ground up after all intelligent life in the galaxy is destroyed. (Using gene samples, seed banks, etc.). But I need to guarantee he's the only person left. I can imagine any number of reasons an entire galaxy might be wiped of intelligent life, such as those in [@AlexP's excellent comment](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/158301/why-might-an-apocalypse-leave-just-one-human-alive#comment495815_158301) below. But I'm struggling with explaining how just a single person survived. Was he simply not there when "it" happened? If so, why wasn't anyone else wherever he was? Or maybe he was in some protective chamber. But why couldn't anyone else survive in a similar chamber? Is it just a man's consciousness in an immortal robot body? Then why aren't there other androids? The more credibly an answer explains why just one person is left behind, the better. [Answer] His ship made a close-approach orbit of a supermassive black hole, "frozen" in time dilation while the rest of the galaxy lived its life out. Something similar to this happened in Larry Niven's novel, *A World Out of Time. In it, the main character deliberately flies his ship close to a supermassive black hole in order to "escape", into the future, from a present that had no value for him. Something like 150 years pass from his perspective, while over 3 million years have elapsed for the rest of the galaxy. Perhaps something like this happens, accidentally, to your single survivor. While this answer does not give you the explicit cause-of-death of your galactic civilization, what it does give you is reams of time in which galactic civilization can grow, flourish, decay, and finally die, all in a way that leaves your survivor untouched and emerging unscathed - even, if you like, in the prime of his life. Why does the black hole need to be supermassive?* * Small black holes are perilous to approach for many reasons, but chief among them are the violent tides caused by the sharp gradient in its gravitational field's strength. Bigger black holes, while still perilous to approach, have much softer tides; less likely to tear an orbiting ship apart. * The bigger the black hole, the stronger the time-dilation one can achieve while staying far away enough that the aforementioned tides won't tear your ship apart. So perhaps, like with Larry Niven's "chrononaut", the giant black hole hypothesized to be at the center of the galaxy would be your best bet. [Answer] He cannot die. He is the Wandering Jew. [![Wandering Jew](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AFxEZ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AFxEZ.jpg) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_Jew#/media/File:Hirszenberg.jpg> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandering_Jew> > > The Wandering Jew is a mythical immortal man whose legend began to > spread in Europe in the 13th century.[1](https://i.stack.imgur.com/AFxEZ.jpg) The original legend concerns > a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then > cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. > > > Your character is immortal for reasons not immediately relevant to your story, although the fact that he exists means that other aspects of the legend might or might not be true. Your character himself has had time to consider these things and will definitely have opinions on that front. Those sorts of interludes as well as snippets from his long personal past history will give the story a unique perspective and help leaven your tale of an empty post-Apocalyptic world. [Answer] There have been a few suggestions which were along the lines of "Space Hitler wanted to be alone in the galaxy and so killed everyone else". That's pretty obvious to me, so how about instead... Your survivor was a soldier who was supposed to stop Space Hitler. They were just a moment too late. Space Hitler (SH from here on) comes up with a genius plan to eradicate all life in the galaxy, for reasons that we may never comprehend. He engineers not one, but several deadly plagues for each of the inhabited worlds in our galaxy, and to ensure no survivors, the plagues are delivered from orbit by robots that will descend on the few survivors the plague cocktails leave behind. Our survivor to be, let's call them Anne, is a part of the strike team that's sent to stop SH in his secret base, hidden inside of one of the moons of a gas giant. Her team is the best, led by amazing strategists, armed to the teeth, but SH expected this strike team so the moon base's defenses are just as devastating. Each line of defense claims 2-5 soldiers, but they manage to make progress. There are multiple possible entry points to SH's control room, where he waits for all of his death machines to be in position to commence the galactic devastation he's spent years planning. It just so happens that Anne's [air vent](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AirVentPassageway) was the only entry point that turned out to be breachable. She lands on the floor just as SH presses his big red button, and shoots her laser blaster through his skull... But it's too late. The plagues have been deployed, and there's no going back now. SH had planned to rebuild society as he wanted, so he already has a lot of equipment in his moon base for this, and plans of where to start. But first comes the waiting. With deadly plagues ravaging all inhabited worlds, the only solution is to quarantine them, waiting for the pathogens to die out by themselves. Ten, twenty, fifty years pass. The once young and lively soldier Anne is now slow and wise. Over these decades, she's had time to investigate each planet's seed banks and genetic samples and now has a plan to rebuild the galaxy as they once were. The robots, once full of death and pain, now carry hope. The only hope for the future of the galaxy. Now, all Anne needs to do is to press that big red button... [Answer] > > I'm writing a science fiction story about a man who has to rebuild civilization from the ground up after all intelligent life in the galaxy is destroyed. (Using gene samples, seed banks, etc.). But I need to guarantee he's the only person left. > > > --- > > (...) after all intelligent life in the galaxy is destroyed (...) > > > --- > > (...) life in the galaxy (...) > > > --- > > # (...) in the galaxy (...) > > > Dude was out of the galaxy when whatever happened. [Answer] The key here is not in understanding how a person can survive through an apocalypse, but in how exactly 1 person would survive an apocalypse at that scale. In every war, plague, or natural disaster, there are almost always those lucky few who are left behind. When you increase the scale to that of a galaxy, even the most destructive natural disasters in the universe such a supernova would fail to come close to wiping out such life on that scale. A False Vacuum collapse or other infinite matter destroying event COULD kill everyone in a galaxy, but would not leave a galaxy left to re-seed; so, those don't really work. You need something deadly enough to kill everyone whether they be in their deep space station tucked away in a dense nebula outside of all sensor contact, or in underground bunkers 100s of feet underground or in colonies build at the floor of the ocean, but still leaving stuff to rebuild on. This leads to the conclusion that this is not a natural disaster, this is an insidious and intentional extermination of life by something that can find people wherever they go without exception, and when it finds you, it will need an absolute 100% kill rate such that no act of luck or resistance could possibly, even maybe save your life. Even the slightest random chance of 1 person's survival at that scale means many people should survive given the same circumstances happening in more than 1 place. This significantly reduces the likelihood of many other answers such hiding in an event horizon, time-travel, leaving the galaxy, etc. because if the science is there for one person to do that, chances are many other people will do it too. I'm not sure how many ways there are to kill everyone spread across such a large area, but I'm picturing a grey-goo or tyranid swarm type scenario, where the goo/swarm is capable of FTL travel, and sets up a continuous, uninterpreted surveillance grid of deep space recon stations that can simultaneously monitor every square inch of the galaxy for intelligent life. This leads to the single inescapable conclusion that the survivor designed the extermination to kill everyone expect for himself. This is the only factor that would believably only happen to one person out all the quadrillions of people on all the millions of worlds you would expect to see in a galactic civilization. This also explains why he just so happens to have all the genes and seed banks he needs to repopulate the galaxy since this was part of his plan all along, and how he is able to simply get rid of whatever horrible killing mechanism that ended all life to prevent it from happening again once he tries starting to rebuild. [Answer] It is obvious that an extreme situation would cause this. There are several possibilities in this situation. 1. The person could have been warned, given outside information to prepare/be removed for the time then brought back. 2. The person could be overly prepared (for an apocalypse or something) and it just turned out that their preparations helped them through this. 3. A play off of the 'chosen one' trope and make them be ignored/impervious to what happened. 4. A mistake? Maybe they were just forgotten or lived a hermit life and not widely known originally. 5. Maybe they are the cause of the galaxy being wiped out. Maybe this person wanted to be alone and wiped out the galaxy. Explanations/ ways of destruction and survival: 1. Extraterrestrial attacks/ outside forces attacking. This could lead to a mass wipe-out, but if someone wanted a specific person to survive, these forced get them before the attack. 2. A gamma-ray burst would destroy ozone. Yet, if a person was prepared, for instance, for air to become unbreathable, they could be prepared with life support systems and oxygen tanks, etc. Prepared for the worst and end up being the only ones. 3. Stars burning up could easily kill quite a bit. But if someone was prepared for this or was a 'chosen one', they could probably survive this. 4. Supernova events could be caused if a person had the power to do so. Maybe said person feels it is their duty to cleanse the unclean by fire or something. 5. Aliens. Alien life trying to take over and just missing that one person nobody knew or documented. Someone could easily be looked over in a situation like that, especially if they lived somewhere or were just somewhere extreme at the time. <https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/03/18/5-killer-events-from-space-that-could-wipe-out-human-life-on-earth/#4110c51953da> [Answer] Being the last person in the galaxy depends what you mean by person, but assuming extra-terrestrials would count as persons the easiest way to exclude them is to ensure that there are none. Although this view point is unpopular it is entirely possible that we are alone in the galaxy. All it would take would be for the chance of biogenesis happening to be very highly improbable. If sufficiently improbable then we are likely to be alone. The same is true if it is highly improbable enough for complex organisms or intelligence to develop. No amount of arm waving can alter the fact that we do not know how likely these events are as we only have one example to go on and being alone in our galaxy is a real possibility. It’s not likely or unlikely it’s indeterminate as we simply do not know and have very little evidence to assign a probability. So assuming that humans haven’t reached the stars and there are no extra-terrestrials the only persons alive live in the solar system. Now imagine a spacecraft is sent to explore the outer solar system. At this point something unexpected happens to the Sun, perhaps it turns into a nova or for whatever reason its energy output becomes a lot higher. The inner solar system is fried and only a few remain alive in submarines and such like. The question then is who can survive longest? It is possible that the crew of the spacecraft in the outer system with provisions for many years will be the final survivors. They might be able to remain in the shadow of a planet or moon, but eventually they would die. And unless they all died at once or the last few died together someone would be the last person in the galaxy. If someone in a bunker on Earth could outlive them then the people in the bunker would provide the same situation leading to a single person being alive. [Answer] It is about leaving a legacy, rather than apocalipse. Imagine if your species has reached a technological apex and knows it can reach a state of godhood by transcending this universe into whatever is beyond, but it requires all technology they have to come along to survive there, leaving a barren universe in their wake. The species has some sentiment and wants the universe to continue, that their old "home" might be the home for future offspring that may follow them in their footsteps. So they choose one person to stay behind with, for them, archaic tehnologies that they dont bring with them. Why one person? Because it is cruel to leave any more people behind. As a last act as they leave and transcend they re-seed much of the universe with enough resources to rebuild a society. [Answer] Would it be cheating to say that the life is rare in the universe, and so our galaxy happens to contain only the Earth as a source of intelligent life? In any case, one way to implement your aim would be to have some alien race from another galaxy come along, abduct this man, and spirit him away as a specimen before the big disaster occurs. Afterwards, he might be released for whatever reason. Perhaps the aliens deliberately wanted to keep alive a member of his species. ]
[Question] [ At the risk of almost repeating a question I asked some time ago... Scenario: A character has been cured of a deadly disease, but all records of the cure have been destroyed (files, actual meds, etc). Now the character is facing the decision of staying in a place of safety, or leaving this place in order to share the information of the cure with others. My question is: Is this a false dilemma? Is there a situation in which the person would be needed in order to "reverse engineer" a cure, or would a simple blood sample be sufficient? I'm trying to work up a dramatic plot moment, but I don't have the medical knowledge to know if this is realistic. Appreciate any feedback! Edit: I should add that the character is able to freeze a blood or tissue sample if necessary. So, yeah. I just made it even harder to make this dramatic plot twist. My foot hurts from shooting it, but what can ya do??? [Answer] The thing with samples is that sometimes the tests you need to run on them consume them, so you finish a test with less source material than what you initially had. To illustrate this: whenever we think of the human immunological system, we think of white blood cells. But they are just a part of that system. There is a subsystem called the complement system. It is the most awesome part of our defenses, composed solely of nanomachines (well, proteins...) that can do things like piercing bacteria cellular membranes so they "bleed" to death. Here is a [Kurzgesagt video on it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSypUV6QUNw). In order to test whether your character's immunity lies somewhere in the complement system, you've got to make it react, and that is a one way route. Once you have taken a bit of plasma to test it, you can't test it again. "Oh," you say, "but I could test it only once to see if that's where immunity lies". No, you can't have your cake and eat it too. If you spend all of it to test, you don't have anymore to copy. Also, you can't just test once - there might be thousands of contaminants in the pathogen sample you have, and even then, testing just once is bad science. You need to run multiple blind tests to see if you've actually got a potential cure. So if all you have is a sample, you are out of luck. If you have a living body that is immune to the plague you wish to cure, you can extract a lot more samples. Just try to keep them alive. [Answer] So first of all, blood vaccines are hard to make and take a lot of time and specialist knowledge and equipment. They are very expensive as a consequence. There are only going to be a handful of labs around the world in a post-apocalyptic environment that have a chance of still being up and running AND be capable of producing such a vaccine. That means that your blood samples are likely to travel for a long time, and there's a very high chance that they will degrade over that time, especially if the chilling solution isn't so reliable or requires recharging and the like along the way. But, there IS a perfect blood preservation system available; the host. It does make sense in all but a handful of scenarios to ship the person between labs, draw the blood directly, make them comfortable so they can do so again if they stuff the first sample up, etc. and once the blood serum has been developed and is ready for replication, ship the cure to the less adept labs for replication. You don't need as fancy a lab to replicate a cure (especially with instructions on how to do it) as you need to develop one in the first place, so arguably there may be a strong need to get the person to a lab that can develop the blood serum but not to subsequent labs. All this of course is dependent on the immune person remaining immune for an extended period, and that immunity being blood borne, being the reason why a blood sample is being considered as a viable option. [Answer] It depends on how the cure worked. If it was surgical, it's possible doctors could look at the scar tissue and perhaps see what exactly was done, i.e. if they removed or altered some piece of tissue. If it relied on boosting your immune system, the antibodies should be easily detected in a blood sample. That's just the first step towards re-developing the cure, but it's an important one. If it was medicine-based, it's possible that a blood sample would not be enough; most things don't stay in your blood forever. Even worse, many medicines don't end up in your blood in the form you took them. They rely on your metabolism to convert to their effective forms. So you may see the effective chemical in a blood sample, but not know what chemical it started as. [Answer] If your person is alone there is no other way to get the sample, be it a small blood sample or his person, to the lab. Or if he is with only one other person and doesn't want to be alone or see this other person alone? Could go off in a few different ways with that line of reasoning versus strictly sample size. ]
[Question] [ I had an idea for a planet which has very hot days, roughly 40 degrees C on average, and very cold nights, average -5 degrees. These figures are subject to change. Of course, there are places which are similarly variable on Earth, but I want this to happen globally. The planet cannot be tidally locked, and must be habitable too. What kind of conditions would plausibly create such a scenario? [Answer] Slow rotation. Lots of time to heat up during the day, lots of time to cool down at night. [Answer] You need to get the energy input equal over the whole of your planet - two options spring to mind: 1) The albedo (~reflectance) of the planet could be finetuned so the further to the poles you get the lower the albedo. This could be a result of the prevailing sediment at the different latitudes, and would not even have to be visible to the eye, if you decree the differences in reflectance to be entirely in the invisible wavelengths (e.g. IR). Varying the local albedo via bodies of water would be neat (you would just have to vary the size and distribution of ponds, which explains itself quite neatly along the lines of latitude-dependent geology), but this changes the local ability to retain heat, as water has a quite exceptional heat capacity, so you'd have to introduce a mechanism that radiates heat faster in the regions with more water, to get the requisite drop in temperature over night - possibly another geological feature like craggyness of the ground (like heat vanes)? Note that vegetation might interfere in your scheme by covering the ground - OR the ground cover has for some reason evolved to produce exactly those parameters. That would be neat, as plants can change shape, color and vapor-losses in small timescales, thus making a globally-eualized climate even more feasible by introducing an active control of sorts. Having a reflective soil at the regions with maximal irradiance (equator), and a much more (heat-)radiation-absorbing soil in the lesser lighted areas at the poles would offset the difference in energy input, and would thus make for globally equal average temperature. To get the 45° C day/night cycle you have to decree a lack of 'insulation', i.e. no clouds, or at least globally uniform amounts of clouds. 2) Your planet is a cylinder (thus probably of non-natural origin) with it's axis orthogonal to the radius of it's orbit. Ignore the endcaps. This also guarantees globally equal irradiance. [Answer] Make your planet very dry. The regions of Earth with the largest temperature swings are deserts. Without cloud cover providing atmospheric insulation, deserts heat up quickly in the day and cool down quickly at night. The same effect could take place on a planet-wide scale, with the only major driver needed to achieve such an effect being low planetary moisture. Your planet would effectively have a global desert, with hot days and cold nights globally. Of course, planets being spheres, there will still be regional variance in terms of how hot the days are and how cold the nights. For a planet with Earth-like temperature ranges, the equator would resemble the hottest parts of the Sahara or the Middle East, while the poles would be similar to Antarctica, though with substantially less ice. Temperatures in intermediate latitudes would range between the two, but with consistently high daily temperature swings. Planetary oceans would be small or nonexistent, though some level of accessible water would still be necessary to support life. Exoplanet research suggests that such planets could form and be habitable. Their habitable zone would be somewhat closer to the sun, as compared to the habitable zone for wetter, more Earth-like planets. Water serves as a strong greenhouse gas, so they'd be a bit cooler than an Earth-like planet with a similar orbital radius. (Source: <http://hoffman.cm.utexas.edu/courses/Science-2013-Seager-577-81.pdf>) [Answer] I doubt that there is any way to get that temperature range globally with a spherical planet. But it may be possible to get much of the way there with the following: 1) First the planet should not have any tilt or obliquity in its axis of rotation, or eccentricity in its orbit. That will get rid of pesky seasons, so the climate doesn't vary throughout the year. 2) Reduce the water content of the planet. It doesn't need to be as dry as Mars, but think global desert. There should be no large oceans. If you need seas then keep them located in equatorial regions. That will minimize the effects of oceanic heat capacity on climate and also reduce the amount of cloud cover. 3) Reduce the density of the atmosphere. The more the better. If you still need most of the surface to be compatible with humans breathing unaided then one option is to reduce total pressure but increase the proportion of O2 in the air. Maybe 1/2 earth's atmospheric pressure (50 kPa or 7.5 psi) but with 35% O2 content. That will also reduce the heat capacity if the atmosphere and allow for faster warming/cooling. 4) Get rid of most mountain ranges and height differentials. (but see section 6 below). This has three advantages: Firstly, with no significant altitude variation there will be no related climate variation. Secondly, no rain shadows so no especially wet or dry regions. Thirdly, it will make it easier for global winds to blow unopposed by terrain - these could transfer heat from warmer equatorial to cooler temperate regions - and from temperate to polar regions. 5) Increase the length of the day? This one is debatable. longer days and nights will increase day/night temperature differential but if you go too far then the nights could drop well below -5. Your call... 6) Add features to lock people out of some regions. In practice, the above ideas can all work to increase day/night variation and minimize regional variation. But in practice the tropics will still be significantly warmer than the poles. So one option might be, for example, to make the polar regions comprise of very high altitude plateaus - they would now be very cold and due to low altitude unlivable (think of the top of Everest). Similarly, you could put all the surface water form a single sea that encircles the entire globe around the equator - so nobody can live at the equator. Then although the planet no longer has a globally constant climate, the inhabitable regions may be close to approaching that. [Answer] Rust planet My thought is that the surface needs to be something which heats up quickly and loses heat quickly. Metals have low specific heats (which we know from experience - metal gets hot fast especially compared to something like water with high specific heat that gets hot slowly). I think the metal oxides have even lower specific heats than the metal - specific heat for iron oxide is hard to find but other oxides are here. <https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-d_391.html> In any case the iron oxide will be dark and so will absorb a lot of incoming radiation. It will get hotter and hotter and heat the atmosphere immediately above it. At night there is little heat capacity of the rust and it will quickly give up its heat and the temperature will plummet. We want to minimize heat capacity of the atmosphere as well. We want incident radiation to come on down and hit the surface, not hang up in the air or be reflected from clouds. This world is dry; water has a high specific heat and is a potent greenhouse gas as well. Argon has a low specific heat and is a reasonable constituent of a livable atmosphere - this world has a high argon atmosphere that will allow passage of infrared radiation both ways with minimal interference. --- I can imagine a dry rust planet that could host life - not super exotic. If there is oxygen in the air you would need to scheme up some dry world biochemistry to allow it. Maybe something prying the oxygen loose from iron using radiant energy? Combining it with atmospheric hydrogen to make water? [Answer] *Wouldn't this be what Earth would* be like if there was slightly less atmosphere?** The atmosphere absorbs radiative energy during the day, preventing much of it from reaching the surface of the earth, and retains it as heat energy during the night instead of allowing it all to reflect back into space. If you want a simple way for the Earth-like planet to heat up a bit more during the day and cool down more at night, reduce the total volume of the atmosphere by a few percent and keep everything else exactly the same as Earth. [Answer] This is an answer [to more than just your question in particular](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SingleBiomePlanet) [CW: TV Tropes], but this seems like as good a place as any to put it: # Planets are big If you care about making your world make sense, you should care enough to not make a single-biome planet (because they don't make sense). People in the other answers are offering partial solutions to your query, but they're generally failing to take into account secondary effects and the straightforward geometrical fact that incident radiance falls off sinusoidally with the distance to the equator. In other words: # No What you're looking for cannot be made to happen globally if you want your world to make sense. If you don't care to have it make sense, just say that it does. If you care about it making sense, put some other constraint on the size of the geographical area in which your story takes place. It doesn't need to be a tight constraint; the kind of situation you're asking for is pretty much any desert, and we have deserts on Earth, like the Sahara, that cover a solid twentieth of the land on Earth. ]
[Question] [ I envisioned a world where people are not bounded by marriage and females are free to choose those who they deem "accomplished" and have offspring with him. The males "occasionally" interact with the young and "educate" them to be better than the others, therefore making sure their genes are passed onward, much like lions or monkeys in our world act. The only problem is my race is "highly intelligent" and has a strong sense of "moral". And here comes the REAL problem: The "less accomplished males" will definitely grow jealous and envious! NOBODY will accept the fate that he is inferior to others and just die, ESPECIALLY when he is "intelligent"! And the long period of "lacking female companion" (plus jealousy and envy) will definitely twist your mind and get you to commit unspeakable crimes such as rape or murder. And that is "most of the society"! So if this kind of system was practiced for too long, bad things are bound to happen! So are there ways to prevent this sort of thing from happening!? In other words how does this society "keep everybody happy"!? [Answer] Basically, lions and monkeys survive because the males are to "prove themselves" by surviving the wild on their own, whereas females are sheltered by the group which makes survival for them much easier and tips the scales in favour of females meaning that there are more adult females and they work together as a group. When you have a more "intelligent" society by which I suppose you mean also a technologically more advanced society, you will have to change the way in which the males have to prove themselves to the females. Two possible options of roles for your males are reasonable: 1. "the protector of society". Basically, being a good, reliable and trustworthy bodyguard, soldier, police man etc. earns you the right to be chosen by the females. This will not happen in your first years, but as an accomplished officer of 30+ years you will become eligible by females pretty much like in a dating service. In this way the physical fitness of offspring is guaranteed and these males are also all part of a strict moral code of "keeping to the laws" and always keep in training to still be able to perform in their jobs. In addition, they have a strong personal interest to do their jobs well, as they protect their own and the other children and women in the society. 2. "the scholar". Those are the intellectual upkeepers of society, scholars, scientists, engineers who will also have to invest years into their education and intellectual training. Again they will have to raise through the ranks of the "scientific community", making only the ones who have finished their PhD, published a certain amount of papers or research to find a certain number of patents eligible for producing offspring. Here, the genes of the most highly intelligent are to be passed on for the better of the society. While not the ones to protect their own and others offspring and no ideal for physical fitness, they will be the ones to educate their own and others' elected children and guide them to intellectual understanding under their tutelage. In this way, the females can choose between an intellectual or a muscle man as their respective partners to foster the physical and intellectual fitness of their whole community. [Answer] When a female gives birth, most of the newbornes are females. The general makeup of your society could be 10-20% male and the rest female. This would encourage more females to get together with less accomplished, because the top 5% are already with a certain amount of females. To pronounce this, you could etablish a social maximum of wives/partners a male can have, either due to social or biological reasons. [Answer] You don't explicitly say, but I'm going to assume that you want a human society. Some of this becomes easier in an alien society, as we don't have to work around actual human behavior. > > NOBODY will accept the fate that he is inferior than the others and just die, ESPECIALLY when he is "intelligent"! > > > Sure, so the society won't operate that way. Instead, there will be a constant proffer of hope that some day, the currently inferior will prove himself and gain a mate. By the time that he realizes that he never will prove himself, he is over the hill. The initial claim will be that they are too young. And some will graduate from that to become head of a pride. But others will be just a bit weaker or slower. They will always be behind the best of their age. Some might be enough smarter or have the ability to learn to be better such that they can compete later in life. Such a society might have a competition culture, where most lose but all think that they can win. Perhaps the competition is kept always close. So even the weakest and dumbest think that they are just a step away. Individuals may spend large parts of the year training for the competitions. The females in a pride may support one candidate over the others and give preferential treatment, adding a political component to the contests. > > And the long period of "lacking female companion" (plus jealousy and envy) will definitely twist your mind and commit unspeakable crimes such as rape or murder. > > > Well, the lion solution is that if you murder one of the lucky few, you become one of the lucky few. I.e. a male leader of a pride may lose a challenge to a nomadic male, who then becomes the leader of the pride. That might last a long time in a society like this. Rape is more complicated. Lions have an estrous period where they strongly want to mate and do not have sex outside it. It is unclear if they would ever consider themselves to have been raped. I.e. rape may not be a meaningful term to an estrous species. Sex is more like scratching an itch than an activity pleasurable in its own right. Humans of course work differently. Note that male lions are greatly outnumbered by female lions in a pride. With humans, the females might gang up together and kill an abusive male. It's unclear what would be considered normal in such a society and what would be considered over the line. But a male attacking a lone female would be rare, as females travel in prides. It's only the males that travel alone or in small groups. It is also possible that this society would have more bisexual members. Young males might band together for companionship and sex. Later, they might "graduate" from that to a pride. Some may prefer the companionship of other men throughout. This may be described as a spectrum of sexuality, ranging from only mates with females to only mates with males. Same sex sexual activity has precedent both in humans and in lions. An individual male who is sexually aggressive, only interested in females, and unable to find a pride might be subject to destruction or imprisonment. Or simply may be barred from the competitive events that allow one to find a pride after breaking the rules in some way. Males may also sublimate their sexual desire in other activities. Or masturbate. One reason that people would join the Catholic church was so as to remove the threat to their relatives. Because priests and monks do not marry, they can't have (legitimate) kids. So they are not a threat to their siblings' dynastic hopes. This made the church a useful place to send younger noble children. They would find alternative ways to compete, possibly advising their brothers or nephews. Or they might compete in knowledge. When those with knowledge but not muscle would be allowed to reproduce would be a major step toward civilization in that society. The first step might be a particularly strong male giving his castoffs to his brother. If someone tried to challenge the weaker brother, perhaps the stronger would fight his challenge for him. Another option is castration. Perhaps anyone can challenge, but if the challenge fails, the challenger is castrated. This could be brought forward around the same time that the knowledgeable started being allowed prides. Prior to that, the loser might always be killed. In that circumstance, castration might be the more merciful alternative. But as civilization develops, it will become the primitive remnant, as some see capital punishment and imprisonment now. Both death and castration make challenges risky. So rather than challenging constantly in the hope that you might get lucky, you prepare for one single challenge. But the hope remains. This allows for competitions based in something other than physical combat that still have serious consequences. Yet another alternative would be to simply give each and every male one chance at a challenge. [Answer] This is a very interesting question, I don't know if you are speaking about sapient lions, lion-like humans or an alien species which in the past had lion behaviors, whatever my answer could work for all of this situations. So, how all the individuals could be happy?, the answer is homosexuality and bisexuality, but before explained, first all the other features. I'm explain a society with lion-like origins which now is in an advanced age, will be extremely competitive and meritocratic, here there is no place for corruption or dictators, the society composed principally by the females is extremely demanding with their leaders, also with their amazing and almost "patriotic" sense of belonging with their female comrades will permit them make hits of State if they considered that the leader isn't enough strong or intelligent. In the other hand males are very competitive, they keep their social groups little, so if they have the opportunity they will try to get all the credit of winning just for himself or at least for his closest "friends" (probably no more than 3 "persons"). This make almost the males extremely competitive, they constantly are training for defeat their bosses at annual "challenges" for get the reward for the cautious and demanding females, which obviously are the sex relations, get a "harem", here enters other valorations of this society, if its diverse as us, the females could have different valorations for choosing a mate, so some females could prefer scientists, others sportsmen, others politicians and many other professions, probably the The number of females that a male manages to impress will increase with his rank within a profession, now as a simple example, if any of these people have a bachelor's degree, he will be able to call the female tendency with the same degree of studies, but if he obtains a master's degree and then a doctorate then the females with less study and the same will be at his disposal, There is no greater gratification for a male than to get or rather to be chosen by the best females with which to breed. On the other hand, the reason for females to continue improving by increasing their capabilities is not to compete with others, but rather their great sense of teamwork and belonging, which are the pillars of work in this society, practically the male arrives at the jobs as boss, the females ambition more than anything to do the best possible in their comfort zone. As example on the previous, probably in a company the most of all the workers (by the way extremely good at their work) are females guided by a male boss with just a little quantity of male workers, and the most females would be interested in the boss, while just a few of these females are at disposal of the less range males. Where does homosexuality and bisexuality come in?, well some investigations shows that homosexuality appear in different species as a mechanism for reduce competence between males and for help the females with other works, in this specie homosexuality is prolific with great quantities of males non interested in compete for females, instead of that they prefer be focused on get better their comfort zone just for help, they will search male mates and just if the extremely rare situation they would procreate with females just for reproduce the specie, this would make males already resigned to failure try to pose as homosexuals for not have trouble approaching females. While females are they are very affectionate with their companions (reason of why some loser try to get closer), physically and emotionally, I don't know if call this lesbianism but if they are always in the company of a male more interested in being the best than in giving them attention (at least until they have children), they probably prefer to satisfy each other, but here everything will depend on the importance that you want to give sexuality in your society, Since in primates sexual contact is very important to establish closeness while in lions it is only a short period a year in which they feel the need to copulate. So if you define that you want sex to be pleasant for this species, you increase the benefit of the outstanding male. ]
[Question] [ [How do steampunk civilizations get lifting gas?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/94764/how-do-steampunk-civilizations-get-lifting-gas) Inspired by the above question I was tempted to suggest collecting the gases rising from public toilets. I know that human gaseous emissions contain varying proportions of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatulence#Production,_composition,_and_smell> Some of these are lighter than air and some are heavier than air. Judging by answers to this question <https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/61140/why-dont-heavy-and-light-gases-separate-in-the-atmosphere> it would be possible to engineer an environment that allows the gases to separate. Question By removing turbulence due to draughts, can I rely on the lighter gases such as hydrogen and methane rising from the toilets where they can be collected. Will the heavier sink to the floor where they can be drained away? If not, how can I most efficiently separate them in situ without using chemistry or endangering the clientele? [Answer] Not without any additional means. In the chemistry question that you mentioned the [selected answer](https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/a/61144) discussed entropy as one of the reasons gases won't separate in the atmosphere. This means that even in the absence of turbulence gases in the atmosphere would remain mixed. However, you can use non-chemical means to separate gases: 1. Gravity. Different gases are indeed distributed differently in the atmosphere. But you need to go a few kilometers higher to see any noticeable increase in concentration of lighter gases. You can put your gas mix into a fast centrifuge, and in the center of this centrifuge gas would be richer in hydrogen, helium and other light gases. By repeating the process you can get those gases reasonably clean. 2. Temperature. Different gases have different condensation points. In the extreme cold, only hydrogen and helium will remain gaseous. Methane, on the other hand, would condensate at a higher temperature (-161C) than the air (-194C). 3. Molecule size. Using [membrane filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membrane_technology) you can separate different gases. Fortunately, hydrogen and helium molecules and atoms are small and should be easy to separate. [Answer] > > How do steampunk civilizations get lifting gas? > > > What you want is "[Synthesis gas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_gas)". It's what all good fellows with a hunger for flight and adventure need. How shall I make this gas you ask? Well, since you're so inclined, then I'm inclined to tell: > > [...] is made by passing steam over a red-hot carbon fuel such as coke: > > > Don't let the fact that I am able to explain the chemistry put you off good fellows, for 'tis simple in its operation: Both the products Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen are positivley boyant in air, require no complicated spinning or cooling, just directley feeding into your dirigibles. It has the virtue that it can be done with limited and primitive or even improvised equipment anywhere that water and fuel (eg coal/wood/charcoal) are to be found, you'll be able to take off from much of anywhere in the world with a little labour but no effort. They're both a bit sensitive so "No Smoking or Naked Flames" in the vicinity would be a good rule by which your servants should abide. ++++++++++ For them that needs to know, here's the chemistry: C + H2O => CO + H2 > > The reaction is endothermic, so the fuel must be continually > re-heated to keep the reaction going. In order to do this, an air > stream, which alternates with the vapor stream, is introduced for the > combustion of carbon to take place. > > > This means there'll be a percentage of nitrogen present, but not enough to worry overly. All handshakes and swearings are final, no liability for fires or third party, no refunds! [Answer] Yes, it can be done but it's not especially easy. For a mixture of gasses in a gravitational field there are two opposing tendencies: (1) Light gasses will tend to collect at the top of a container and heavier gasses at the bottom and (2) Entropy will tend to mix the gasses uniformly. We can't control entropy, but we can control gravity. So, either start with a giant planet (Jupiter does much better at separating gasses than Earth) or use a centrifuge. The latter may be more practical in most cases, so let's look at that. For example, here's an article [Separation of carbon dioxide and methane in continuous countercurrent gas centrifuges](http://www.mate.tue.nl/mate/pdfs/5250.pdf) that reports on doing exactly that. It's 100% physics and 0% chemistry and perfectly effective. They're separating carbon dioxide and methane, and the relatively large percentage difference in molecular mass helps, but this technique can be used to separate any pair of gasses. In another example which is the separation of uranium isotopes using gas centrifuges. Here the uranium is made into a gas by making it into UF6 and relying on the tiny percentage mass difference between U235 and U238. It works well enough that it's a major geopolitical hot issue. So, bottom line: Yup. The Victorians could build equipment which will separate gasses using nothing but mechanical means. To the question of toilets, it's even easier. Right now in many places we collect reasonably pure methane from garbage. Recipe: Take lots and lot of garbage (toilet waste would be great), seal it up in an airtight container (we pile a mountain of trash on a rubber mat and then cover the whole thing with rubber) and let anaerobic bacteria do their thing, releasing lots of methane in the process. The major gas evolved in the heap will be methane (the second most important is CO2) and if you let it escape through a hose, you get a burnable mixture, though not a very light mixture. Using the separation method discussed above, you can get fairly pure methane. ]
[Question] [ So one of the ideas I've come up with for system to system travel, in the early colony stage of my world, is using fuel boosters to start the journey and then to reach the required speed for the colony ship to reach the next system, using solar sails. Is this a plausible mechanism for inter-system travel? The storyline will be making no use of hyperdrive/wormholes etc, however later on there will be the use of anti-matter/ion drives. But this is for the expansion era of the story. I was thinking the original colony ships in my timeline would involve some 'sketchy' at best cryo sleep with occasional failures. The technology would have been developed as an alternative to riskier medically-induced comas. I'm aware that the time required to traverse from one star system to the next would be quite large. But this age of expansion (in my universe) would be what sets into place the colonial divides in religion/science/design and political views. [Answer] It was covered in a comment, but the answer is ## Yes A solar sail is a perfectly viable method of travel. It will be very, very slow, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it. Given the distance between potentially inhabitable worlds in our galaxy (yours might be different, of course), you're talking centuries (at least!) of travel, so cryogenic hibernation is basically the only viable option if you want someone to make the trip personally, rather than genetically. To be clear, the maximum velocity theoretically achievable by a solar sail lightcraft is [circa 0.11c](https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/3.8632), so travelling to the nearest star would take around 40 years. This speed is only achievable with power beamed from the starting point using a 1000km-diameter Fresnel lens. Using solar power alone, the approximate exit speed would be 0.005C, and the trip would take 800 years. This is to the nearest star. If we assume at least 100 ly separation between solar systems with habitable planets (and here we're likely being very generous), we're talking forty thousand year trips. That is, for reference, longer than all recorded history - the [oldest cave paintings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting) are about 40 000 years old. You'd definitely get some political divides, though, given that two thousand generations would have lived and died before the travellers made it to their destination. [Answer] How about solar sail brakes? The thing about going fast is that you then have to slow down, somehow. Consider the sail. The sail provides more acceleration the more solar wind it can catch. The farther you are from the star, the less dense the solar wind. Solar wind pretty much nonexistent in interstellar space. But as you reach the destination you are going towards the sun of that system. The solar wind gets more and more energetic and the sail provides more and more backwards acceleration. My proposal - use your fuel boosters to get up to full speed and then the solar sail to slow yourself down at your destination. [Answer] When designing interstellar travel techniques, the thing to remember is that constant acceleration is the key. Low reaction, constant acceleration is interstellar physics' version of compound interest; using less fuel to add less acceleration over a longer time period works out in your favour, especially as it would appear these engines are usually more efficient in terms of energy output against their fuel. Ideally, you'd only use rocket boosters to escape your local gravity well (IE get off the Earth) and then use your sails for the entire remainder of the journey. If your two solar systems are adjacent, then this works particularly well because for the first half the majority of your solar wind is coming from the sun, speeding you up, and for the second half it's coming from your target star, slowing you down. [Ion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster) and [plasma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_propulsion_engine) drives are a thing, and worth looking at as your next generation of engines as they're currently being looked at by NASA. The one type of engine that you can guarantee won't be used for interstellar travel will be standard chemical rocket style propulsion systems, as for the distances you need to cover in interstellar travel, they are way too inefficient and you don't get that benefit of sustained acceleration over time. [Answer] In this case, to reach any destination in the shortest time possible, they would use all the best combination of methods. One combination I can think of is use chemical rockets to escape the planets gravity well and head straight for a slingshot around the sun. Once you are escaping the suns gravity well, the solar sails are deployed, thus maximizing the highest concentration of solar winds to push you. Once the solar pressure dies off, lasers are then shot at the sails to continue the acceleration. Upon arrival on the other side, you wont have most of these available to you, however Willk above has a good idea. ]
[Question] [ I'm brainstorming ideas for a fantasy videogame and have been trying to list possible reasons why a fantasy world would have a lifespan diminish exponentially through countless cycles of death and rebirth, each dominated by a new sapient race for the duration of the epoch until they face their predetermined apocalypse. Each successive peak just falls short of the last, and each dip the inverse. Humans who live in the current Nth epoch are already facing the decline. As far as their descent, from the golden to silver to bronze to the current age the decay has been taking place faster. The splendor of the earliest age, who is without compare, will never be repeated. When it all ends the apocalypse comes as if to wipe the slate clean. This world was created by gods who in turn may suffer their own (considerably longer) decline in their powers and lives. They, as the humans, may not know of this decline. either way they appear to never intervene. ## LITERATURE For civilizations think H.P. Lovecraft's at the mountains of madness, where the elder things' decline takes place over vast eons to end finally with their last legacy being the mindless Shoggoths or Tolkein's The Simarillion, where after the time of the elves domination over middle earth passes and mankind comes to take their place unable to repeat truly their splendor, gradually declining themselves after Numenor. ## MYTHOLOGY I may not quite grasp the concept, but for Hindus there is the concept of Kali Yuga, for Buddhists the time of the Maitreya shall be a time where chaos and vanity rule and Buddhism is forgotten, and the Greeks identified their golden age with the now ended reign of Kronos, whose son Zeus now presides over heaven. ## TL;DR The world and civilization before it dies and is reborn every age, which each get successively shorter. ## EDIT What are possible reasons a world's cyclical lifespan would get progressively shorter after each cycle's apocalypse? [Answer] Magic itself is decaying The primary races developed their technologies being heavily reliant on magic. Each apocalypse damages the forces that makes use of magic possible. Perhaps the overall effects are weaker, or some higher forms of magic are impossible to achieve. The races that follow salvage what knowledge they can from the remnants of the precursor races, but find that they cannot replicate the tech. This also ingrains the belief that magic is required to achieve those technological feats and that belief hinders normal, non-magical progress. This would also explain the gods' decline of power. [Answer] Ancient races persist. The degenerate, corrupt things of old contaminate the new. Each new race that comes up then goes down. And down. And down. But it does not ever completely disappear. Remnants of these races persist in the world, in dark corners and hidden places. Here they become progressively more depraved and degenerate. The corruption from what has gone before taints the world, and this taint accumulates as time passes. It is harder and harder for the new to ascend before the cumulative corruption from what has gone before drags it down. [Answer] The Sun is waning All life on Earth is driven by energy from the Sun. As its radiation declines conditions become more conducive to survival and less conducive to luxury. At the start of an Era, warlords loot old treasures but the infrastructure to mine more and manufacture things is harder to support - in any case, natural resources are depleting continually (entropy). The Warlords drive the peasants harder and harder until the economy collapses. This happens increasingly rapidly each time because farming is less and less viable. [Answer] Non-Renewable Resources Each cycle uses up more of the easily obtainable resources before succumbing to it's own apocalypse, leaving less and less for future generations. At first there are enough resources left in the ground that they can simply keep mining. Later, they can make up the difference by scavenging the remains of previous epochs, but eventually, all of the obtainable resources have been harvested and burnt up. [Answer] Perhaps in the decline of the civilizations and their gods what becomes apparent is that the gods were only sub gods of the actual planet, and this planet has finally developed a super natural ability to think. So as it’s defense it gradulally, over ‘planet’ time, becomes capable of concocting natural airborne parasites or diseases which slowly annhialite the inhabitants and their masters, the gods. But this is a slow process to the inhabitants because it is on a solar or galactic time scale. The niche here is that the omnipotent planet god has a plan to use the inhabitants and each cycle of their declining civilizations in redesigning the terrain for possibly a new being. Perhaps rocks or trees that can walk or change shape or fly or think or whatever you want. So in essence the main god only allowed the sub gods and their human followers to exist as an experiment or as an evolution of cultivating the new being in their physiology or image? Sounds weird I know. [Answer] # Hormones in the meat Each civilization breeds their cattle to be fatter and as productive in terms of meat as possible. Due to humankind needs drive selection, cattle become sexually mature increasingly fast, and become more and more obese by the generation. This leads to meat products that are increasingly rich in growth hormones and colesterol. The former makes kids reach puberty faster; The latter causes them to die from heart, pancreas and liver related diseases at ever younger ages. When a civilization collapses, cattle escape theie farms and become feral. The feral cows do not lose the traits which were selected by humans, though. When a new civilization appears, they domesticate that cattle again, restarting the cycle. [Answer] Elements that give off radiation have set half lives, where after each cycle they have half of the radiation output that had at the beginning. If your world's life and magic are dependent on a fictional non-ionizing radioactive element with a freakishly long half life then you could use that as your base for why the world keeps getting worse. Only problem is it won't just go downhill, it will nosedive as the deterioration will be much worse at the beginning of the cycle. To top it your world will die slowly and painfully, as the deterioration will be so small after just a few cycles that you would not even notice the change for a long time. [Answer] maybe the solar system in which your world inhabits is in an ecliptical orbit with something that is harmful to most life. when it gets too close crops and livestock die people start getting Ill technology breaks down. just have this orbit change slightly after every pass, it could be speeding up or decaying. [Answer] The presence of a binary star system close by. One being a white dwarf near a main sequence star. The white dwarf would steal mass from its partner until it reaches a critical mass and goes nova. If this system is close enough, it would cause cataclysmic events on the world. If these two stars orbit is degrading and being pulled together, each nova event would happen in a much more rapid fashion. making each eon shorter than the previous. However, it seems that the time between nova events may be short. Not exactly sure how to make it long enough to accommodate the formation of a civilization. Maybe an elongated elliptical orbits of the two stars? ]
[Question] [ Bonobos tend to solve disagreements through sex instead of violence, what might have caused this to evolve, or something similar to evolve in a sapient race of humanoids? [Answer] The same thing that caused it to evolve in bonobos. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kcVYN.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kcVYN.jpg) If you look at this map of the respective ranges of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, and bonobos, Pan paniscus, you'll see that each species' range is separated by a blank line. It doesn't show this on the map, but it is in fact the Congo river. Primatologists think that when a population of chimpanzees was isolated by the creation of the river Congo (Which would, of course, be an impassable barrier to other chimpanzees.), they continued to evolve and adapt to their slightly different environment until specification occured. The thing is, though, that the food in the bonobo's range is more nutritious and in greater abundance than that of their cousins' range. It would appear that because of the slightly harsher environment north of the Congo, chimpanzees are more aggressive and competitive. In the relative paradise of the area south of the Congo, warfare is not necessary and conflict can be resolved through much more peaceful methods. So, your humanoid aliens would have had to inhabit an area where there is no need to compete or fight over food, territory and resources. They could have diverged from a more aggressive species like the bonobo did, or they could have been peaceful all along. In a civilization of bonobo-like sapients, there would be little or no warfare between countries/tribes/houses/whatever your humanoids' social structure consists of. Smaller things like arguments, divorces and disputes would also be much less common, and their sports might be a lot less violent. It would be very interesting to see how such a peaceful society would work, if this is a project of yours I hope it goes well. [Answer] The major factor favoring bonobo conflict resolution is that their males and females are exactly the same size and can see each other most of the time while foraging. Unlike chimps where the males are larger and the the group breaks up to forage, Bonobos groups do break up to forage but only in to two or three still large groups. Since everyone is the same size it makes it really hard for anyone to bully anyone else physically. This also means bonobo females can mate with multiple males, meaning males cannot tell which offspring are theirs, so violence against children is also disadvantages. In chimps males can force more exclusive matingand will kill the offspring of other males is given the chance. because they can all see each other violence within the group can be easily punished by the rest of the group and at the same time it is hard to fake or lie about a conflict. This way being able to solve conflict without violence is more advantageous for everyone even the strong. So you want a species that has no sexual dimorphism, that hunt/forages in large groups, and in which everyone can keep track of what everyone else is doing the majority of the time. [Answer] There is a theory that bonobonos are actually closer to humans in how they react to the world, but that their easy sexuality didn't fit with social mores, so we ended up with [studies focusing on chimpanzees](https://psmag.com/environment/bonobos-have-sex-with-everyone-are-awesome-may-hold-key-to-our-past-59956) instead [Answer] Selective fitness depends on both intergroup and intragroup interactions. Intergroup - 2 different groups interact. Intragroup - interaction between individuals belonging to the same group. Consider intergroup interactions. If a male and his brothers can attack another group, kill the males and male children, take away impregnate the females and carry off all their stuff (or commandeer their territory), this group of males improves their selective fitness. They leave more offspring and they have the (stolen) resources to make sure their offspring grow to reproductive age. The capacity for effective, organized violence is key to this sort of endeavor. A group like this attacking a society which solves problems with sex will make short work of them. Any society possessing individuals capable of this can only be opposed by other individuals with the same capacities. Consider intragroup interactions. If I am a male who is violent with my peers and neighbors, they will dislike me. They may avoid me. They will not help me when I am hurt or bring me food. I might take a mate by violence, but she has brothers and cousins and they will find me afterwards and make me pay. If I live in a world where violent intergroup interactions are the norm, my intragroup violent tendencies will be tolerated to a point as a necessary evil - I am a hateful jerk but I come in handy when the marauders show up. But if this never happens then I am not welcome. If violent intergroup interactions are the norm, evolution will select for the ability to be violent. If violent group interactions are rare or nonexistent, violence will be selected against because it is disruptive to peaceful coexistence within the group. If there is both, there will be a balance according to the influence of each. [Answer] [Make love, not war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_love,_not_war) Imagine that hippie culture didn't go out of fashion but took over the entire world by now. This is of course an interesting world to imagine, but would be difficult to tell what actually can push our civilization in this direction. I can think of only widespread drug use (sorry if I sound too cynical). ]
[Question] [ A small country uses a digital economy, meaning there is no cash used in daily transactions. All transactions are stored on a government's central database. An EMP attack/blackout manages to take down the nations power grid and internet. Now the nation has no way to trade for goods and services. How can citizens continue to trade during this this temporary problem? Whether a short-term blackout or a prolonged one lasting days? [Answer] If paper and pens still exist in this world, then physical invoices can be used as transaction records during the blackout. An [invoice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invoice) is a document that records all info related to a transaction, such as the agreed price, the items sold, and when the payment needs to be made. Today, both electronic and physical invoices are used for transaction where payments are not immediate(source: I develop transaction software), such as large-scale purchases of bulk goods. They are typically issued by the seller to the buyer, so many businesses would already be familiar with generating invoices. So, all that is needed to temporarily replace the electronic economy is a steady supply of paper and pens. The seller would write the goods being sold, the amounts, the prices, etc., and the buyer and seller would both sign/somehow mark the invoice in order to authenticate it. Two copies, one for the buyer and one for the seller, would likely be made. When the electronic systems come back online, these invoices would be used to ensure that the proper money transfers are made. [Answer] Backups Having backups in protected sites will make sure the economy goes back to normal as fast as possible, just make sure you have a concise and detailed plan to restore the backups. Bartering Well, things got really bad and the backups will take too long to get back online or they don't exist. Well, its time to bring back the chickens and start bartering. Gift-Economy If we are talking about a small nation, then their best bet would be to transition to a gift-economy or some similar model. Without anymore money on the country, then things and acts will have worth. In the short term you will have people bartering for food, shelter, and manufactured goods. In the long term you will want to start a decentralized production grid where each village could sustain itself. [Answer] To expand on the answer by Albert: Once upon a time, there was a mostly cash-based economy for the equivalent of $100 or less, and some sort of check for larger amounts. Then the "plastic money" became more and more prevalent -- first in the supermarket for the groceries, then at the bakery, finally at the hot dog stall for a quick snack. But at first cash would simply become uncommon without being phased out. Small kids still get their pocket money in cash. One might give a coin to a beggar in the street. Things like that. At some point, the government advises the citizens that a cashless economy is fine, but they should keep a little bit of cash in a safe place. Just as many governments advise their citizen to keep food and water for a few days at home, and candles and matches, and a battery-powered radio. So sober, respectable citizens have an envelope with some mixed-denomination bills somewhere in their desks, and most still have a handful of coins somewhere. When the blackout comes, those reserves are not nearly enough, any interesting stories arise. [Answer] Some of my ideas: * Invoicing, which is later reconciled once the system is up again * "Emergency" cash which is used only during those situations ]
[Question] [ My question is the following: *How could I design and/or justify a habitable planet that is 80,000 km in circumference?* The planet should: * Be habitable * Have a gravity similar to earth's * Have active plate tectonics * Have a sidereal rotation of 24 hour The use of internal god-made mega structures is allowed, or even entire layers of the planet can be made of devine-ium. [Answer] Circumference and volume of a sphere have a cubic relation. So 2 times the circumference means 8 times the volume. Surface gravity is relative to the mass divided by the radius squared, so in order for your planet to have the same gravity with 8 times the volume it would need to have just half the density. Possible options to achieve this are: * Make the core of the planet of a material which is much less dense than silicate rocks and iron, yet uncompressible enough to not get crushed by its own gravity. You said you want active plate tectonics, so that material would likely be available in abundant quantities at the surface. Keep possible economic applications for it in mind. * Make the core of the planet hollow. Hollow planets would be impossible to form under current theories of astrophysics and impossible to be stable under current theories of geophysics. So you will have to explain how that shell-planet was created and why it doesn't collapse. A possible model could be an unobtanium shell of an implausibly rigid yet light material surrounded by a rock layer (the lower part of it molten so you have plate tectonics). * When you don't want one huge cave in the center of the planet, have many, many small caves. Its inner structure would then be more like a sponge. Again, this is very unlikely to occur naturally with normal planetary formation. It would also be hard to make this work with a geologically active planet. If it does work and the caves are accessible from the surface, then the vast cave systems would likely affect the culture of your planet a lot. They would make mining a lot easier and might be big enough to host whole ecosystems and even subterranean civilizations. * If you are willing to literally create a separate universe with its own laws of physics, reduce the gravitational constant. That way the planet would not just have a lower surface gravity in relation to its surface area, it would also have a lower density because it gets less compressed under its own gravity. But this would affect a lot of other things, too. For example, stars would need to be larger in order to generate enough gravitational pressure to keep nuclear fusion going. [Answer] A priori you don't need magic for any of the points you mentioned, though you do need some explanation for having a gravity similar to Earth's in a planet that it is twice the size. A planet with the same average density as Earth and double its radius, as you propose (Earth has a 40000 km circumpherence), will have eight times the Earth's mass, but since the surface will be twice the distance from the center of mass and gravity decreases by the square of the distance, surface gravity in your planet will be twice that of Earth. That's "similar", for some values of "similar", though rather uncomfortable for actual Earth-born humans. If you want your planet to have less surface gravity then it should be less dense. The problem is that the elements (iron, nickel) needed for a massive core that can generate a magnetic field (which is somewhat of a requisite for surface habitability of complex organisms) are heavy. The planet can rotate at any rate you want, within reason. In general we have found that larger planets rotate faster, but that's not a hard-and-fast rule. If you're willing to work with twice Earth's gravity, then you don't need any magic. Even in that gravity normal humans will be able to live, if not very comfortably. Natively evolved beings should have no problem at all. [Answer] Your planet has a limited supply of devine-ium, it's slightly more rare than gold in the crust but closer to the core of the planet is a bit more plentiful. It interacts with the magnetic field of your planet in such a way as to produce a para-magnetic affect [see here](http://www.physics.org/facts/frog-really.asp). counteracting gravity enough so that it feels like earth, but not enough to make people float. [Answer] If you really want plate tectonics plus earth-standard gravity and you don't mind having some really massive internal mega-structures, you could have a world built like a Rubik's Cube - the surface is composed of massive ultralight Divinium platforms, each resting on a 12,000 KM stalk reaching down to the planet's core. The core of the planet is a superdense divine widget upon which the stalks slide and rotate, giving you plate tectonics. In order to keep the internal mechanisms from clogging up with junk, the widget at the center sucks up all normal matter that falls between the gaps of the plates and attempts to eject it from the planet by pumping it up through the stalks. Several million years of bombardment by comets and asteroids, combined with a slight miscalculation as to what the escape velocity of the planet actually is, has led to crud building up on top of the Divinium platforms. This crud forms familiar-looking oceans and continents. Whenever earth and water falls through the cracks, it's spat back out through volcanoes that form over the stalk exhausts. ]
[Question] [ There are a lot of solutions for living in low gravity environments. (e.g. centripetal acceleration, linear thrust, etc.) But what about living on high gravity planets? Is there anyway to build or simulate 1-G in a planet that has 4-g, for example? This is a stretch, but I recall that if one were to submerge themselves in a fluid it will negate the effects of high g forces. Is it possible to build, say, an underwater habitat on a 4-g ocean planet and utilize buoyancy to offset the high g forces? Say a dome underwater with a sealed environment with pressurized air? [Answer] Well, There are four ways. One way would be a plane like the 'vomit comet'. It would slowly climb and then dip into freefall, giving you a minute of low G. Planes in 4 G would be pretty expensive, mind, but if the atmosphere were thick enough they should be possible. You can get longer times with a vertical launching rocket, like Blue Origin's New Shepard, but rockets in 4g with all that atmosphere would be even more tricky. Another way would be to sink/dig halfway to the core of the planet. The gravity should be about 1g down there. Of course if the planet has a molten core this may not be advisable :), and regardless the shafts heading down would need scads of airlocks to prevent the air pressure down there from being too high. If you happen to like the idea, I'd be happy to run the numbers. You could put the thing that needs low gravity physically in water to give it the buoyancy effect, but having it in an underwater city filled with air sadly wouldn't do. And finally, do what we do and go to orbit! Best of luck with your water world. [Answer] No. If you want buoyancy to lower the influence of gravity on your body, you have to be in the fluid. There, your body will get an upward push equal to the weight of the displaced fluid, i.e. if you displace 1000 N of water, that is about 100 liters with 1 g gravity, you will get an upward push of 1000 N. But if you are in a sealed dome filled with air, you are displacing air, thus you get a much lower buoyancy. If you want hydrostatics to help, you have to swim. [Answer] As mentioned in other answers, orbit is the only practical solution for long term simulation of lower gravity. But what about impractical solutions? I can think of two that allow you to stay on the surface. The first is essentially the same trick as orbiting. Build a train track that goes all the way around the planet. It works best at the equator. Run a train along this track at a significant fraction of orbital speed. The size of the planet will effect how fast you will need to go. The train track will almost definitely need to be a vacuum tunnel. The train is in effect a centrifuge that encircles the planet. When the centrifugal force is 3g, the total force experienced by passengers will be 1g. This solution has the obvious issue that exiting the train to interact with the surface is as difficult as de-orbiting. The second only works if you have an especially dense kind of unobtainium. Building a super heavy roof over top you colony will cancel out some of the planets gravity. For the roof to avoid being nearly as heavy as the planet, the mass it is composed of must be mech closer, which is why the density must be quite high and even then the roof will be unimaginably heavy. Probably the only candidate materials are neutronium, minature black holes, and strangelets. Though it seems difficult to take this approach seriously, it is notable that it has appeared in hard science fiction at least once. It is used by Robert Forward's Dragon's Egg in order to cancel the extreme tidal forces experienced by a space station in a close orbit around a neutron star. [Answer] 1) Antigravity! Just handwave the problem away! 2) Live deep underground where the gravity drops to 1g, you will need a way to counter the extreme pressure 3) Live in a gravity train; you can build a gravity train at an angle that will give the occupants 1g gravity constantly MASSIVE ENGINEERING REQUIRED: 4) Live above ground, but not in orbit, just build a supraworld on top of many space fountains and you're done 5) Spin the hell out of the planet and live on the equator after you corrected the apparent gravity to 1g 6) Suspend a superdense mass above you colony using space fountains or a space elevator, then live directly below it 7) Build your colony on an orbital ring, have it revolve at suborbital speed to get 1g gravity on the surface of the colony [Answer] Do it the way NASA did it in the 1960s -- with ropes and pulleys! No, really. I distinctly recall seeing a video clip, but can't recall exactly where, of how Apollo astronauts trained for walking on the Moon, with its lower gravity. What they had was what looked like (but likely wasn't, at least not exactly) a suited-up astronaut, attached to a system of ropes and pulleys that presumably offered a counterweight corresponding to 5/6 of the astronaut's total weight. This would reduce the weight experienced by the astronaut as they moved around to 1/6 of normal, which just so happens to match the Moon's gravity pretty well. There are two obvious downsides with this: * It's difficult to make it work in two dimensions over any significantly sized area. It's pretty easy if you can live with the limitation of only being able to move any significant distance in a single dimension, though. Lineworld, anyone? * Any object the astronaut needs to manipulate will retain its normal weight, so you will need some other way of reducing their weight if you want to capture a fuller experience. Less dense props instead of the real thing, tools made specifically from lighter material because they don't need to be as durable anyway, or what have you. You will also need to adjust the counterweight for the specific astronaut, but that's plenty doable. If you're training multiple astronauts, they will also need to stay aware of the ropes attached to their colleagues to avoid getting tangled. The clear upside is that you can adjust the level of resistance from gravity to whatever level you prefer that is less than the surface gravity on your planet. Want 1 G on a 4 G world? Or 1/6 G on a 1 G world? Not a problem, just select the counterweights appropriately and hook your people up! [Answer] None we know of. But of course if you had managed to develop technology to travel to another planet with a 4g surface gravity you'd already have interstellar flight and maybe FTL or anti-gravity (as we're on on Worldbuilding). So maybe you already have tech to manipulate gravitational fields locally. Maybe you don't have that tech, but you might have the tech to make Dyson Swarms and self replicating machines that could e.g. use the planet to build something else, like two planets or lots of space stations (like IM Bank's Orbitals). Planets are just a nuisance to a space-faring race. :-) The only other way I can think of (apart from digging down towards the core, which I already commented on) would be to build a platform (connected with the ground) at about one planet radius height, which would be an unimaginable engineering task (although perhaps no more difficult than digging down towards the core to the required depth). But that would have 1G. Note that even if you can manipulate local gravity, you'd still need to live in sealed environments because a high gravity atmosphere would almost certainly be a higher pressure atmosphere. You'd likely have an atmosphere that was at something like 4 standard atmospheres, which would be lethal to humans in a short time. With the physics we have, a 4G world is off-limits and, in practical terms anything more than, say, 1.2G is probably not practical - human physiology limits us for long term use (and we won't adapt to it - that's a common myth of sci-fi). ]
[Question] [ The admiral of a space fleet that belongs to a [Type 3 civilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) has been given orders to obliterate all planets within the [habitable zone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstellar_habitable_zone) of a Sun like star. Some of the planets have been identified as nests for the larvae stage of swarm of the star eating Space Locus. Death Star type destruction of the planets won't kill the larvae. The weapon of choice: seed missile The technology: * The "seed" of a seed missile is a [microscopic black hole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole). * The initial size is due to safety reasons. The black hole will evaporate via Hawking Radiation if the containment field is compromised; no secondary explosions possible. * Because the initial size is useless, the missile has to charge the weapon while in-flight. * To charge the black hole, the missile taps into Dark Matter and grows the black hole like a crystal. * The missile can cause the essence of the black hole to precipitate into electrons, protons, neutrons, and elements. example: Uranium or a small Neutron Star. This is done with handwavy physics. What does the missile need to do to cause the star to obliterate the planets? Would this be a Nova or Super Nova? How far out could the star obliteration stellar objects? asteroid belt? [kuiper belt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt)? ## Edit I'm editing this because I feel that I had describe the seed missile poorly. Instead of setting the describing of how it works at the beginning, let me first describe its effect. The missile is a [white hole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hole) weapon that can generate a maximum amount of mass - say 0.01 solar mass. This is a rewording of point 5 of the original description along with a new description of the upper limit of its capabilities. * This is done by causing a black hole to operate like a white hole. * The black hole doesn't have all the mass, the Dark Matter does - point 4 of the original description * The black hole is just there as an intermediate step for the Dark Matter -> Normal Matter conversion - clarification of points 2,3, and 4 of the original description * The size of the black hole determines the rate of the conversion. - new information * At launch, the size of the black hole is microscopic - ~27 micrograms. - point 1 of the original description * This allows the missile to maneuver normally at first and become a door stop if compromised. - point 2 of the original description If this was a chemical reaction, it would be written similar to this: > > dark matter -> black hole -> white hole -> normal matter > > > example usage place a stealth variant of the seed missile in an orbit almost parallel to a dyson-ring star defense system and crank it up to 0.011 solar mass. other usage throw the seed missile into a star, have it create ?????? type normal matter, and watch the star "go BOOM". This question is about filling in that unknown. ## Additional information on the situation It is estimated that 0.000001% of the star systems in the [one galaxy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way) are infected. Each of those star systems need to be 99.44% cleansed within a 1 year time frame. That's 2500 star systems in 365 days. No, you can't split the fleet. [Answer] As others said, if the larvae can survive [the destruction of a planet by Death Star-type laser](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/100633/42046), blowing the star up won't help, and may even make things worse. Fortunately, you are from a Type III civilisation, so you have better tools than crude star-blowers at your disposition. ## Star flamethrower If your resources at hand are limited, a cheap option is to use some local stellar engineering: dismantle a few planets to build a magnetic field controller around the star, and use it to push the plasma away, make a big hole and unveil the core of the star. While the surface of the star is at a frigid few thousand K, the core of the star is at millions of K, and it is under gargantuan pressures. This is where the actual fusion happens, but energy moves outwards through the layers of the stars ever so slowly, as it is, at this scale, incredibly opaque and insulating. Once unveiled, with the sudden absence of pressure, it will violently expand. The effect will be akin to a solar flare, expect much, much bigger. Or, if you prefer, a star flamethrower. This will roast any planet you are pointing it at, but it won't be enough to kill the larvae, or even blow the planet up, in fact. But you can use one device per planet and keep them firing for a long, long time. At some point, the star will start dimming as the now punctured core cannot sustain enough pressure to keep the same fusion rate. Decreasing the rate or pausing for some time should fix it, though. The star will also end up loosing mass, which may also be mitigated by dropping interstellar hydrogen or even recycling escaped hydrogen back into it, but the loss rate will still probably be too big to fully balance. The idea is that maybe the larvae can survive an instant, violent event but not a continuous burning for a long time. The planet will slowly evaporate (be careful to not let spores escape in its tail), though it would probably be too long to evaporate them completely that way. Even if it doesn't kill the spores, it should still work as a short-term, stopgap option, giving you a few thousand or million years to work on actual solutions. Be careful though, this de-orbit the planets by pushing them away. Again, you can impact them with other celestial bodies, or more elegantly use those bodies as gravity tractors to pull them back in closer orbit. In any case, it is recommended to start building a Dyson Sphere around the non-holed parts of the star for powering local facilities. ## Nicoll-Dyson Beams As was mentioned already, Nicoll-Dyson Beams are useful tools in this case. As a Type III civ, you should have a few of those in range, or be able to build them if it happens to be an undeveloped sector, or they are all busy with more important projects. You can even use the aforementioned local Dyson sphere you are probably already building around the star. Now, you could use those to cook the target planets, similarly to the flamethrower option but with more power. You should be able to end up evaporating the planet given enough time, though again be careful with flying spores. Another option is to use them to move the target planets, either with direct localised evaporation and radiation pressure (as in a rocket or a laser sail), or by moving other celestial bodies and use them as gravity tractors. That way, you can drop the planets right in the star's core, and slow their fall down enough that they stay there. Again, make sure no spore escape into the star's atmosphere, but after long enough, it should be entirely sterilised. The advantage here is fast response time, and once it is in the star core, light surveillance should be enough to make sure nothing escaped, freeing your time and resources for other projects. ## Dead star billiard If you fear that dropping it into the star won't be effective enough, I recommend sending a star remnant to the system and hitting the planets with it. While it may be tempting to hit them as fast as possible, and this should normally be enough, those larvae are good at surviving brief, violent events and may escape with the debris. In additions, relativistic debris spraying around are messy to clean up, and local sector population may complain, with good reason. A better solution is to slow the remnant down as it arrives, and hit the planets with it in such a way that all will fall and stay into the star core. This can be seen as an upgrade of the previous option in that regard. The advantage is that the star mass will, to some extent, help keeping debris from flying around. Be especially careful, though, as even a slow, controlled approach will have the planets breaking apart due to tidal forces, and the larvae may use the occasion to try and escape with great velocity by using varied tricks with the debris and the immense gravity of the remnant. Note that if your star is not massive enough, you may want to feed it local interstellar matter, or merge it with another star. Keeping the planetary system in order can be a bit tricky, but nothing unfeasible. Note however that merging two stars, in particular here when one is a remnant, cause a violent, energetic burst that you will want to plan for. Again, stellar manipulators like those used in the flamethrower option should help. There are basically three types of remnants you can use, depending on what is lying around: White dwarfs are the most abundant. They should be similarly sized as the target planet, but with a thousand times the gravity. This makes it the easiest to use, and the default choice if you are certain the larvae won't survive it. Honestly, I don't think anything like that could, but just in case... Neutron stars are tiny and with an absurdly high magnetic field. Magnetars are a type of neutron star with an even more absurdly high magnetic field, be careful with those. The magnetic field can play both for and against you or the larvae, depending on the details. However, once the star and the planet are in contact, the planet should be crushed in short order at the neutron star's surface, releasing lots of energy in the process, including in exotically strong forms. (Again, be careful that the larvae don't use it to help or help concealing their escape) Honestly, I can't even imagine any spore type to be able to survive it, but if you really want to be sure... Black holes are even tinier than neutron stars, and anything that enters will exit in a long, long time as scrambled Hawking radiation. Otherwise, it should be used pretty much like a neutron star, with less of a magnetic field. Easier or harder to work with, depending on the details. ## Big black holes, depending on local availability Depending on where the star system is, there may be a supermassive black hole in the vicinity. Even an intermediate black hole should work, as long as the event horizon is wide enough. In this case, an efficient solution may be to simply drop the planets in it. For this, build a [Skhadov thruster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine#Class_A_(Shkadov_thruster)) around the star. The simplest design is a partial Dyson sphere letting light out in the opposite direction of the movement (similar to a photon rocket). Using the flamethrower system may have better thrust, if less range (similar to a nuclear fusion rocket), but you only need to go as far as the target black hole anyway. Once you are there, you simply have to move the target planet on a direct collision course - this time, the faster the better. The bigger the black hole, the less tidal effects, so the planet shouldn't make too much debris when crossing the Roche limit and starting to break apart. As always, of course, be careful of tricks from the larvae at this point, but once it has crossed the event horizon, you should be fine. Whether to let the star pas the black hole by, put it in orbit or drop it with the entire system in the black hole just in case it would still be infected is up to you. If you do choose to drop the star an it is an intermediate black hole, though, be careful. The event horizon is probably too small for the entire star, so use your stellar manipulators to siphon it until there is only the core left. The core is more or less a white dwarf, and should be small enough that you can simply drop it. [Answer] Targeting the star is a mistake. It's too inefficient. Consider Earth. Orbital distance: 149,600,000km. Radius: 6371km. If the sun were to explode, sending energy in all directions evenly, by the time the energy to to the Earth's orbit, it would be spread across $2.8 \times 10^{17} km^2$. The Earth's silhouette is about $1.28\times10^8 km^2$, so the Earth will receive a $\frac{1}{(2.2\times10^9)}$ fraction of the entire explosion. 99.999999954% of the energy of the sun's explosion will go elsewhere, wasted. The [sun has](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)) $1.2 \times 10^{44}J$ of energy in it (total lifespan). With those numbers, about $10^{35}J$ of energy will hit the Earth. This is on par with the energy that strikes the Earth in one year. That's all. Compared to a Death Star that's not all that impressive. A [minimum](https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-physics-of-the-death-star-c21ccc58ade9) bound on the Death Star is $10^{32}J$, so this strike is a mere 1000 fold more powerful than the minimum bound for the Death star. Worse occurs if the infestation is on other planets. The power of this strike falls off with the square of the [distance from the planet to the sun](http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/projects/vss/docs/space-environment/3-orbital-lengths-distances.html). Mars's orbit is 1.52 times the distance, so it receives about 43% of what Earth receives. Jupiter will only see about 3.7% of the intensity that Earth does, so now we're starting to talk about striking these planets with just a little more than that minimum Death Star bound. This just won't do. So what can we do? Well, one option is to just keep hand waving. Invent some new physics which permits access to far more energy than mere nuclear fusion would permit, but which only functions in the heart of a star (probably because it needs the gravitational pull to do its mumbo-jumbo). Make this star-killer weapon 1000x more deadly than the star itself. Another option would be to handwave the ability to focus the direction of the energy. If we don't waste the majority of the energy on empty space, the sun is a lot scarier. If your weapon could do some handwave trick which permits ejecting energy like a firehouse directly at the infested planet, all those annoying knockdown factors can go away, and you can truly focus the intensity of the star onto the job. The final option is to change the story. It's almost always better to strike the thing that needs striking, rather than striking some nearby innocent star. I'm assuming that's not an easy option for you, but it's always a good idea to remember that these worldbuilding ideas are not set in stone. There's always room to make changes. [Answer] There are several reasons why firing your missile into the sun (instead of the individual planets) is a very bad idea. For one, not all stars will form black holes after they die, but some will. If you consume all the mass of even a small star with a black hole, you now have a black hole that won't dissipate via Hawking radiation for some time; it's a navigational hazard if nothing else. Second, you lose the ability to harness the energy of that star for other purposes and build your own strategic installations in that star system. Third, you may not even get a nova or super nova effect. What we know about such processes is that they are a final release of energy by the star after it's expended it's nuclear fuel and the balance between its mass and its energy release is broken in favour of mass. Add a small singularity to the centre of it and the core (which is where the bulk of the nuclear reaction is taking place) may get consumed first, meaning that the energy can't escape the gravity the way it does when the collapse is natural. (This is admittedly scientific speculation) Finally, if your larvae can survive the cold, the planets are now likely still orbiting a singularity with the same mass as the original star, so with the exception of no sun, are probably unaffected in orbits, etc. meaning that they'll just keep doing what they were doing. Far better to aim your missile at the planet. It gets eaten by the small black hole, and that means that you now have a singularity with the mass of a planet orbiting the star, but Hawking radiation should take care of this reasonably quickly by comparison to a star mass (I don't have exact numbers) and in terms of navigation hazard, it only applies to in-system travel. This is (more or less) the principle behind the red-matter detonations used by the Romulan mining crew in the first of the new Star Trek movies, where Vulcan is destroyed. Create a small black hole at the centre of a planet, and the black hole eats the planet but does virtually no other damage. The star is safe because the black hole is already in orbit of the sun, so to speak and the mass of the resulting black hole will almost perfectly match that of the planet it consumes, meaning that your system is still useable, just less one planet which in time will evaporate via Hawking radiation. [Answer] # A micro black hole does not work as a weapon This is demonstrated by [Joe Kissling](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/74816/23519). For a very small black hole, in the range of a billion kilograms, the radiation pressure from the evaporation of the black hole will actually prevent anything from falling into it. Thus, it will evaporate faster than it can accrete additional material. Now this is a reasonably useful weapon on its own, since it is putting out about a petawatt of power; about 10 times as much energy released by a hurricane. But it isn't really going to be sucking anything in to it. If you stuck one in the sun, again nothing would happen. It would no accrete matter and its petawatt power output would be something like 11 orders of magnitude less than what the sun is putting off anyways. # Conclusion If you want to blow up a star for your story, just blow up a star. Don't justify it with some mumbo-jumbo about black holes. [Answer] "It's not the size that matters..." Throwing more energy at a problem sometimes simply might not help. What matters are the means to do it, which would go into sci-fi and require some (or a lot) of handwaving to make it palatable to present-day readers. Some examples: * TV series "Stargate SG-1" explained it away with removing enough mass from a star to offset the gravitational/fusion balance so that the star blows up. Question is, wouldn't you have to remove that much mass that the fusion reaction stops? * TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation" features a device to "halt a star's fusion reaction". Now imagine it the other way round, to make the star burn up fuel for thousands or millions of years in a fraction of a second. "But..." Blowing up the star would not help. Rather it would make matters even worse. If your 'larvae' are resilient enough to survive their planet being blown into its consituent parts, follow me through the following scenario: 1. By whatever means, the central star of the system goes boom. 2. The shockwave of the explosion expands with fractional-c, reaching the planet in the habitable zone any time between ten minutes or a hour 3. The neutrino emissions may alert the beings if they're sentient and developed enough. Since they don't seem to be a localized threat, they may very well be - so some could leave in time. 4. The shockwave would first strip away the atmosphere, then ablate the outer crust, the mantle, the core, and then blow the remains (the far side of the planet) to pieces. 5. And that could mean that parts of the crust which had been the shadowed side of the planet may still be in pieces large enough for the larvae to survive, if they can survive the rigors of space. Now that gives me an idea for a spore-like lifeform that actually uses this as a means to spread out through the galaxy. Develop on a planet, 'do something' to blow up the sun, then ride out the shockwaves to another solar system. [Answer] # Starting from what you say it can be done... > > example usage place a stealth variant of the seed missile in an orbit almost parallel to a dyson-ring star defense system and crank it up to 0.011 solar mass. > > > # ...you already have a more efficient solution than a nova. If an Alderaan-style annihilation is not enough to get rid of the larvae, a nova will very probably also not be enough; rather it will scatter the critters all over the Universe, which is exactly the opposite of what we need. Rather, you place a seed missile next to the planet to be killed and "crank it up to 0.011 solar masses". Then you send it in a close orbit around the planet. Or rather the other way round, since 0.011 solar masses is about 3600 times the mass of the Earth. This is also massive enough that Hawking radiation is no longer a concern (black holes above the size of the Moon are stable). Roche's limit does not apply to a black hole, but it does apply to the planet, which will be shattered into an accretion ring around the black hole. The radiation intensity alone should be enough to kill off the larvae. If it isn't, they'll be taken care of by [spaghettification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification). And if even that is not enough, once they're past the event horizon they'll no longer matter. Once locked by a Schwarzschild black hole, neither the planet nor the larvae have realistic possibilities of ever escaping. You get 100% clearance. [Answer] A K2 level civilization should be able to harness the power of their home star (or any star they control) and create a [Nicoll-Dyson Beam](http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48fe49fe47202). A very interesting video is [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjtFnWh53z0) as well. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HkEe7.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HkEe7.jpg) with enough energy, anything is possible Essentially, you will be sending so much energy into the system planets will ablate away (which should solve your pest control problem) and the extra energy impacting the star will upset the rate of fusion reaction, triggering giant flares as a minimum, and possibly evaporating the outer surface of the star as well. Mad scientist [Alexander Bolonkin](http://file.scirp.org/pdf/CWEEE_2013071113213239.pdf) even believes that adding extra energy to the star's outer layers could trigger a runaway fusion reaction, although the science is not....settled. Outside of massive beam generators, the energy could be harnessed to deliver [RKKV's](https://infogalactic.com/info/Relativistic_kill_vehicle). Even a very small mass moving at relativistic velocity can deliver massive amounts of energy. The Atomic Rockets "[Boom Table](http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/usefultables.php)" suggests you could generate 11kt of energy on impact with a single gram moving at .75 c, and 29kt if the same gram was accelerated to .9 c [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WIwIj.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WIwIj.png) man, that had to hurt Sending a swarm of pellets moving at .9 c could cover the entire solar system and strike every planetary body, asteroid, comet and icy body that could conceivably hold an enemy object. Follow up swarms can be sent for good measure. And all that energy suddenly being deposited into the star will have similar effects to a Nicoll-Dyson beam weapon as well. [Answer] Plain and simple: tap enough dark matter into your microscopic black hole to turn it into a regular-sized black hole with typical lifetime comparable to lifetime of a universe and rely upon relativistic effects to confine larvae in the singularity indefinitely long. [Answer] Here is an idea: use a micro black hole to trigger an orbital instability in the planetary system. Planetary systems tend to form on the edge of stability, such that relatively small perturbations can destabilize them. What happens is this: small kicks change the planets' orbits and make them cross. In systems with just rocky planets, this would lead to giant collisions between the planets. Bad for any life on those planets. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/y9f7x.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/y9f7x.png) In systems with gas giant planets, something like this animation can happen: <https://youtu.be/gT2_3NcL8UM> It's from a real N-body simulation I published a few years back; the inner colored bodies that are in the process of forming terrestrial planets all end up falling onto the star. The same would happen to any already-formed planets. The basic idea is to use the mass in a black hole to trip up a planetary system to make it gravitationally self-destruct. The upside: this is an efficient use of mass. The downside: it can take time (like, thousands to millions of years) for the planets to be destroyed. Although if you planned it really precisely I imagine this could be sped up. ]
[Question] [ I'm creating humanoid robots that sweat to keep their components cool. It would seem wise to allow them to refill their water supplies by allowing them to drink. But is a mouth and throat leading to a tank really the most efficient way? What is the best method for a robot to intake water independently? [Answer] If it is just for the intake of water, you could in principle use a tube connected to a pump for sucking in water. Since you are bound to a humanoid configuration, you have various possibilities on where to place this tube. However, considering that you also want to make the refilling as quick as possible, you have to rule out location where the diameter of the tube (and therefore the intake volumetric rate) would be too small: this rules out fingers and leaves you with pretty much two choices: upper or lower torso. In the upper torso the robot would do something similar to drinking: put its mouth close to a water body and suck it in. In the lower torso the robot should somehow squat on the water body and, again, suck it in. The best of the two strongly depends on the surrounding environment and other boundary conditions: for animals in the wild drinking is one the most dangerous situation, as the head has to be lowered and cannot be used to explore the surrounding for menaces. [Answer] There is no best way for a robot to intake water. It depends on if you want your robot to feel and act like a human, or if you are just using the shape. The position of your cooling system and how much liquid it will require. If you want it to be and feel human, then you would use the mouth and throat system. Putting water anywhere else would give away the human feel. If you want it to be efficient, then you would simply have an intake area they would use to pump it into themselves. Most likely in the chest or shoulder areas as the water will flow down into whatever container is holding it. It could also store it in its head, but you will probably want real sensors that look like eyes there, so it would be a bad idea. Too low (aka pelvis or legs) and you have to pump the water up to critical components, but you already need to do that to reach the head. You would also need to consider how much that part can deform or moves (stomach area might be bad). @Cognisant mentioned water sloshing around, and if you are evaporating water, this will always be a problem as you can't constantly fill up your water tank everywhere you go. I don't think your traditional sweating idea would be a good way to cool any robot. Sweating works when the water evaporates and takes away energy hence cooling us. However you will require some airflow, something to transfer the heat to the "skin" and a mechanism to ensure water overflow and affect your electronics. I suggest, rather than sweating, you use special heat vents to expel the heat. Water is used to transfer heat energy from electrical components to a set of heat sinks and fans which transfer the heat to the air. The water stays inside a set of pipes and pumps and you really don't need to refill it. If the heat sink is cool, nothing happens (in a sweating situation, the water will just stay on the skin), if its hot, the energy is transferred quickly from the components to the heat vent and cooled using fans, not how breezy it is outside. In this case you can also use oils or other special liquids to replace water. The final way, would be to have all your electronics submerged in a special liquid. I'm not sure what its called, but there are videos online of computers which use this. Its expensive as hell and would allow you to submerge all your electronics and cool yourself using the skin to transfer the heat to the air around you. [Answer] If there is already a system which funnels water contained inside the robot to its skin, then it might be the easiest to just reverse the process and suck in water through the pores and collect it in the same tank. Granted, the quality of water taken in this way is not always assured, so there might be a need for purification process somewhere along the way. And it probably wouldn't be good if it were an automatic system, so the robot should be able to decide whether it wants to "drink" or not when (partially) immersed in water. Apart from that, if your robot needs to blend into a human population, you'd probably need to design it to be able to drink the human way because then humans would probably accept it better. [Answer] The most efficient way would be to have the water tank as high as possible on the robot so when pumping it to the components you're not fighting gravity, and to keep the access point to the tank as small as possible so it's not taking up internal space unnecessarily like a pipe through the body would. Something like a hatch on the forehead that opens to reveal an intake port, or just a hole with a screw in plug will do, assuming there's ample space in the robot's head for the amount of water it would use over its period of use. Also it's worth considering that a water tank could be any size and shape so it could go anywhere in the robot, meaning it would probably be better to design the tank around the robot rather than the robot around the tank. Another thing to consider is weight (water is heavy) and how that weight will move in the tank, having water sloshing around inside a bipedal robot will likely cause problems, especially if there's enough weight to knock the robot off balance. [Answer] To develop humanoid robots that can drink water, taking a biologically-inspired approach is the best way. Your robot should be able to pick up a glass of distilled water, then place it to its mouth and tilt its head back. This would allow the flow of water from the glass, through a tube into the redox flow battery. I don't understand what you mean by "independently". [Answer] Humanoid robots which are mingling with humans will be able to recharge onboard water supplies at lavatory facilities which are usually fitted with running water. Drinking from a sink in a public area requires some contortions or the drinker must bring a cup. But there are basins of water in these facilities. Usually this water is in place to receive waste (and reduce smell / facilitate disposal). The robots would easily be able to use these basins as reservoirs to recharge themselves. Germ and sanitation hazards will not be an issue for a robot. One would need an onboard hose to pull water up from these reservoirs to the robot's own tank. This hose could be extended from a hidden receptacle. A hose which was not hidden within the robot body would dangle on the outside and might spoil the robot's humanoid appearance unless it were concealed under garments. I think this last is the best approach: an extensible long hose for water uptake, concealed under garments. In the lavatory, the robot can withdraw the hose and extend it down into the water reservoir. The hose will be wiped clean and tucked away after use. Properly configured, the presence of this hose under the robot's clothing should not attract too much notice or comment. ]
[Question] [ And if I wanted them to appear about 10 times the size of the sun and moon, would this be possible? Should they lie inside LEO or beyond it? I would like their orbit to be considerably closer than the moon's orbit. How big would they have to be, and how far away? Would we be able to feel their gravitational pull? Thank you, new StackExchange friends. [Answer] First: how big to appear as big as the moon if in a typical satellite orbit? Here is a fine image of the ISS passing in front of the moon and we can use it to gauge their relative apparent sizes. from <https://www.space.com/6870-spot-satellites.html> [![the ISS and the moon](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pEgVO.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/pEgVO.jpg) When I blew them up, I measured the diameter of the moon at 567 pixels and the ISS at 14. 567/14 = 40 so a satellite 40 times the size of the ISS would be the size of the moon. If the ISS is 100 meters this moon-size-looking satellite will be 4000 meters. I found this excellent (but perplexing - what is this guy up to?) proposed solar shade which happens to be exactly 4 square km! from <http://www.interstatetraveler.us/Forward.Thinking/Space.Systems/Space.Shield/solar%20sheild_8x11_300%20dpi.jpg> [![4 square km solar shade](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QLzm3.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/QLzm3.jpg) [Space sunshades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade) for power generation or earth cooling have been mooted since the 1980s. Yes, I meant to write "mooted", and mooted in all seriousness by serious people. The space sunshades were. Here is another proposal. From <http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/27020> > > A 1992 NAS report suggested a slightly less extreme project, which > would involve lofting 55 000 "solar sails" into orbit around the > Earth, each with an area of 100 sq. km. These would block out about 1% > of sunlight, but avoiding collisions would be a space-traffic > controller's nightmare, warns Michael MacCracken of the Climate > Institute in Washington, DC. > > > [![space sunshade](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iGvsq.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/iGvsq.jpg) <http://images.iop.org/objects/phw/world/22/9/33/eng2.jpg> 10 times the size of the moon? Bah. 25 times the size of the moon! 100 square km makes that 4 square km scheme look pathetic! And you will note: 55000 of them are proposed in this slightly less extreme project. If these are hooked up as a unit that is 5500000 square km or ONE MILLION 375 THOUSAND TIMES THE SIZE OF THE MOON. Muhahahaha! hmm. that seems big. What is the surface area of the Earth? 510,000,000 square km. OK, we're fine. So yes: superlarge satellites are a plausible, fine and desirable thing. Cool the earth, generate power, and show movies. For completeness sake: 1: How big would they have to be - we covered that. 2: How far away - we used the ISS as a reference point and it is 408 km up. 3: Would we be able to feel their gravitational pull - no, because these are wafer-thin satellites. [Answer] At 20,000 km a satellite would make two full orbits a day. If it is orbiting in the same direction as earths spin, it would appear to an observer on earth to orbit once a day, rising in the west and setting in the east. The Earth - moon Roche limit is about 10,000km so you could just move the moon closer without worrying about tidal forces tearing it apart. From 400,000 km to 20,000 km is 20 times closer so it will appear 20 times larger. The effects on the tides will be noticeable and I would expect other noticeable side effects, but the actual pull of the moons gravity when overhead will still only be one tenth of a percent of a g, so we probably wouldn't be able to notice the change. A satellite in this orbit would need to be 23000 km^2 to match the moon in size. Borrowing from Wills answer, this size of solar panel / sun shade seems possible. This does not seem like the most practical orbit for this sort of project though. [Answer] Firstly, the size The moon orbits at ~400,000 km satellites in lower Earth orbit ~ 400 km +. So for a satellite to appear Moon-sized, it will need to be ~ 1 / 1,000 of the Moon's diameter, or around 4 km. That's pretty big, but not impossible. To be 10 times as large, that's now 40 km which is really very large indeed (although not quite Death Star-sized, according to Google) Anything that orbits in something other than a geo-stationary orbit should rise and set, albeit at a different rate to the Moon and Sun. So if by "like the Moon" you mean at the same rate then no, as that would require a vastly larger orbit (and thus a massive satellite); whilst LEO will give you a total orbit time in the order of an hour or two. [Answer] Is it possible for satellites to rise and set like the sun and moon? Yes it is if they are in the right orbit. Is it possible for a satellite to be ten times the size of the sun or the moon? No. Such large objects would destabilise the whole solar system. Is it possible for a satellite to appear to be ten times the size of the Sun or the Moon? Yes but it’s not realistic. The real problem is that to appear to be 10x the size of the Sun or Moon in a distant orbit they would have to be astronomically large, but to be small enough to be a manageable size they would have to be in far too low and fast an orbit, so they would move much faster than the Sun or the Moon. Worse still the orbit would be impossibly low and they would burn up in the atmosphere. [Answer] Frame challenge: you do not need satellites, use balloons instead. Current technology is fine. Costs will be steep, but not as steep as the space based solution. Have huge balloons flying around. The closer to the ground, the smaller they can be, but higher ones will present a better illusion and be less vulnerable to being seen from the side by a plane or a tall tower. It's not feasible in the near future for something so big and in the atmosphere to go around the world in a day. But consider the following scenarios: * A single balloon going around the world, rising and setting in a given city in its path one day per several months. * A single balloon "serving" a single city, and going back around it at night/day to rise again the next day/night. * A line of such balloons going around the Equator, such that each static ground observer will see a different but apparently identical balloon rise and fall each day. * Several such lines of balloons going around several parallels of latitude, spaced enough that no two are visible from the ground at the same time * Balloons in complex trajectories criss-crossing from and to population centers, such that every population center will see a different but apparently identical balloon rise and fall each day, possibly at the same time. Yes, it's a hack, but note that the Sun and Moon rise and set by different mechanisms from one another, so I think the appearance might be the most important thing. If this suits your needs, please ask another question for the size and speed estimates and for the detailed ways that the illusion can subtly fail. ]
[Question] [ The warship is supposed to travel somewhere like Australia - South America and in some glacial waters such arctic ocean. --- Some questions * Size Could they be big with more than four masts? Is a wooden-ship like [THOMAS W. LAWSON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Lawson_(ship)) possible? How many troops could it carry and still staying sustainable? * Material Wooden-ships are out of the choice? * Artillery How much cannons should it carry? Are there more sophisticated artillery? [Answer] If medieval can be medieval China and extends to the 1400s, and you want big, you could use as your model the [Chinese Treasure Ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_treasure_ship). These could be described as truly bigass ships. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/icAfQ.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/icAfQ.jpg) [source](https://fthmb.tqn.com/8HSCKcp_DbsVlcRCVY1bVkf1swA=/735x0/about/ZhengHesShipbyLarsPlougmannFlickr-56a040e65f9b58eba4af8b6c.jpg); the Chinese ship is depicted next to what I think is a Spanish galleon. > > The purported dimensions of the largest of these ships at 137 m (450 > ft) long and 55 m (180 ft) wide[3](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8R9qq.jpg) would make these ships at least > twice as long as the largest European ships at the end of the > sixteenth century. The British scientist, historian and sinologist > Joseph Needham stated in his research work Science and Civilisation in > China that the ships were between 400 feet to 600 feet in length. > > > These ships definitely crossed open ocean. Here is a map showing the route of the Treasure Voyages [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/K3On5.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/K3On5.jpg) I found the map here <http://www.southbaysail.com/admiral-zheng---chinas-treasure-fleet.html> and there is additional information about Admiral Zheng, the tech behind these ships and so on. I did not find specifics on the armaments carried by ships in Zheng's fleet. I know that full scale models of these ships exist in China as tourist attractions and I would expect that they would be tricked out with fake sailors and weapons, but my googling came up empty. I did find this description of the contemporaneous Chinese [tower ships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louchuan). > > Tower ships (lou chuan); these ships have three decks equipped with > bulwarks for the fighting lines, and flags and pennants flying from > the masts. There are ports and openings for crossbows and lances [and > at the sides there is provided felt leather to protect against fire], > while (on the topmost deck) there are trebuchets for hurling stones, > set up (in appropriate places). And there are also (arrangements for > making) molten iron (for throwing in containers from these catapults). > (The whole broadside) gives the appearance of a city wall. > > > By the 1400s there would also have been gunpowder bombs which could be hurled from trebuchets. I found mention that the Treasure Fleet had "gunpowder weapons" which were used only for show. ADDENDUM: I found the [Treasure Ship theme park](http://www.gettyimages.com/event/gotheborg-sailors-visit-zheng-he-treasure-ship-71787711?#tourists-pose-for-pictures-on-the-board-of-the-replica-of-the-ship-picture-id71986780). They put cannons on the treasure ship. With ribbons. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8R9qq.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/8R9qq.jpg) [Answer] Size/Material: in fact it does not matter so much, unless you need additional thresholds on mortality or some medical constrains like "nearly-anorectic asian actress may travel too". For instance Polynesia was colonized using canoes. What really matter is the people traveling: They need strong navigational skills (the stronger the few technology you have to help them). Read about [Polynesia exploration on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_culture#Origins.2C_exploration_and_settlement_.28c._1800_BC_.E2.80.93_c._700_AD.29) (3rd paragraph). And they need to survive the travel, which includes physical strength (and in this case obesity counts too, like in [case of samoans](https://gizmodo.com/how-a-powerful-obesity-gene-helped-samoans-conquer-the-1784266550)) and some technology like methods of preserving food or making clothes (contemporary exploration of Arctic was much easier after canned food were invented). TL;DR: worse technology means more people will die while traveling and not travel being impossible. Mostly of cold, malnutrition or getting lost in the middle of the ocean. [Answer] For lengthy voyages, the necessary components are, self propulsion in the form of sails, some form of navigation aids so they wouldn't sail in circles (like a compass, though sun observations can be used), strong discipline in the crew to keep the ship operational, and the ability to carry enough food and especially fresh water to keep the crew sustained. Wood was the logical choice for construction - medieval humanity didn't have any other material they could work with, that could produce a ship that could withstand a storm. Size... the larger the ship, the larger the crew, the more food and water needed. The ships that [Columbus used](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Mar%C3%ADa_(ship)) were fairly small - the carrack Santa Maria was 62 feet long, while the Nina and Pinta were even smaller. Guns? Not a lot needed, because the civilizations they would run into were unlikely to have anything like a cannon. The Santa Maria carried four 90mm mortars, plus early muskets. The sound of a cannon alone would probably frighten off anyone they would run into. In medieval times, they didn't know about dietary requirements, so a lot of long voyages lost crew to scurvy from vitamin deficiencies, and navigation aids weren't very good because where they were going was largely uncharted - they didn't know where the next land would be. The truth is - many of those very early voyages were 'hail mary' affairs, where they sailed off, not knowing what they would find, or even if they would find anything before their food and water ran out. And there was still a strong belief that the world was flat, and they might sail 'off the edge'. ]
[Question] [ In the real world, the germ theory of disease was only discovered in the 1800s, preceded by the theory of miasma and the four humors. Is there any way a civilization could have stumbled on this knowledge earlier, and what kind of environment/society is necessary for that discovery to take place? [Answer] Depends on the definition of germ theory. Does it need a concept of single-celled bacteria and non-self-replicating viruses? * Start with a concept that dirt brings disease. They don't really ask why, it seems obvious. * Add the concepts that animals bring dirt if they are not cleanly/cleansed. Dogs are OK if they are washed regularly, rats are not OK. This includes insects. Bees are OK, they live in orderly hives. Fruit flies are not OK. * They note that there are big and small insects, from butterflies to lice. Lice range in size from 5 mm to 0.5 mm. Their eggs are smaller. If a society concludes that there is no minimum size to disease-bearing insects, does that mean they have a germ theory? [Answer] They'd need: 1. A culture of curiosity. (Islamic Golden Age or Europe starting with the Renaissance.) 2. Knowledge sharing (aka "science") instead of researchers who horde their knowledge (aka "alchemy"). 3. A concentrated-enough energy source to have: 4. Sophisticated metallurgy and metal-working, and 5. sufficiently developed glass-making, which leads to 6. Optics, which leads to: 7. Microscopes. EDIT: good ideas from user535733: 7. Mathematics developed enough to have created statistical analysis. 8. Enough wood/bamboo to make lots of cheap, durable paper. 9. The industrial chemistry to whiten that paper, and 10. make lots of ink, for 11. Printing the results of epidemiological studies in Journals. (Another need for "knowledge sharing"). Bottom line is that the ancient culture won't be very "ancient". [Answer] I've read a number of medieval medical treatises (for fun!). These writings tend to combine classical information, some practical experience, and random bits of info. I always get the feeling that they were so close to getting it. Cleaning hands before procedures is mentioned more than you'd think. The effectiveness of wine for cleaning wounds is remarked on in a medieval military medicine treatise. Of course there is crap (literal and figurative) mixed in with the useful stuff and a new practitioner coming upon the treatise has no way to judge. In reference to @RonJon'a list Optics as a science did fairly well in the Middle Ages. Spectacles receive their first mention in the mid 13th century. Clockworks with gears start appearing in tows around that time as well. Paper as well though you could use wax tablets for note taking. (I just spent an hour collecting oak galls from fallen branches to experiment with medieval ink recipes.) The sharing of good information is of course a limiting factor. Medieval Europe knew how to hold a conference, they did that all the time for Church Councils, but there was little will for a natural science conference. A plausible way for this germ theory information to spread in a 13th century environment would be through a military campaign. A secular ruler would have a very good reason for useful information to be shared and used on his (elite) soldiers. As the physicians return home they'd spread this knowledge. I'm not sure if the Middle Ages is ancient enough for your question for it is my lens of information. [Answer] People and their livestock have pests including those that make them (and their animals and crops) “sick”. People discover poisons to deal with them. Some pests are tiny. In particular, some mites or aphids or other important pest for agriculture has two properties: it makes the crops wither rather than just looking chewed, and it’s so small that it’s near the limit of human vision: some people can see them, some can just barely notice dots if they are moving, others cannot see at all. And clearly the juviniles are too small to see. So, people are aware of the idea that animals can be too small to see, with no known limit to how small they may become. And they are known to be some diseases. Since the same idea of hygene and steralization seems to work to prevent disease, and that's how cleaning and killing tiny pests works. So it would be a hypothesis that many more (if not all) diseases are caused by pests too small to see. [Answer] I'm not sure whether it counts as theory, but there seem to be some psychological mechanism in religion development that mixes up goodness, religious purity and cleanliness. I mean Baptism in Christianity... Ritual washing in Islam before prayer... Or Hindus that pilgrimage to wash in Ganges... Yeah, there really seems to be some kind of automatic association. If you want to have an ancient society that get such theory roughly right: * they have to have some vague commandment concerning cleanliness and purity * they should suffer from some parasitic disease and think in this direction (But it would be like Democritus atom hypothesis - guess in good direction, but not based on any hard data <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus#Atomic_hypothesis>) ]
[Question] [ Only a small number of these tanks are going to be produced, so cost isn't really an issue. They are light and fast, but need to be able to take out another light tank at a long range with a few shots. The technology level of my world is not much above that of Earth now (no unobtainium or super-mega-blaster lasers). Man-to-man conflict is not common at all, so something like a machine gun would be impractical. [Answer] # Autocannon. In general, take a look at IFVs (Infantry Fighting Vehicles, the things that are responsible for "Mechanised" in "Mechanised Infantry"), and work from there. Since you want "tank", you don't need compartment to carry infantry around, so you can scale them down. Some examples: ## Bushmaster 25mm autocannon. ![Bushmaster](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/M242-1.jpg) ## Bradley IFV, armed with Bushmaster. ![Bradley](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/M2a3-bradley07.jpg) ## Bofors, designed before WWII, originally as Anti-Aircraft weapon. ![Bofors](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Bofors_40mm_AAgun_manege_suomenlinna_1.jpg) ## Bofors on modern platform, the Swedish CV90 IFV. ![CV90](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Stridsfordon_90_Revinge_2012-2.jpg) ## Or perhaps for maximum "rule of cool" the GAU-8 Avenger ![Avenger](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/GAU-8_Avenger_contrast.jpg) ## Best known for having this plane attached as accessory. ![A-10](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/A-10_Thunderbolt_II_In-flight-2.jpg) In general, you are looking at penetration of 50mm RHA (Rolling Homogeneous Armour - armour thickness is stated in equivalent of rolled steel nowadays, instead of raw thickness) at 1km on those weapons with fairly modern ammunition. If you are placing that in near future, you can claim further advancements, and increase that. Size of IFVs shown above is comparable to modern MBTs (Main Battle Tanks), but that's because they need to carry ~10 fully equipped infantrymen. Remove this requirement and size drops, which decreases volume requiring protection, which means lower mass of armour for same protection, and thus lower weight. Those example IFVs have about 30mm RHA armour. For reference: modern MBTs have frontal armour ~800 RHA, which is why they use completely different weaponry. If you are against something with IFV grade armour, then more than 40mm gun is complete overkill, both 125mm, 120mm, 90mm or even 75mm will be too much, needlessly increasing weight, length, stabilisation requirements, and make it harder to include autofire mode. Autocannons can pack plenty of ammunition, and shoot a lot of it, some go as low as 90 rounds per minute, rotary ones go as high as 10000. To elaborate a bit on a comment under another answer Take a look at T-14 Armata, latest Russian MBT. Yes, it's an MBT, but it's the first MBT to use auto loaded remote controlled 125mm cannon with option of computer controlled autonomous fire (Russians have been using MTB autoloaders for decades now, but it's the first time when next logical step was taken and remote computer fire control was added). Crew of 3 lies (seats are heavily slanted, so that crew is in position between sitting and laying, this is done to decrease height of the compartment and increase comfort on prolonged missions) in separated armoured compartment in hull, while turret sacrifices a lot of armour (MBTs with crew in turret need 800 RHA both on front of turret and front of hull) because hit in the turret may damage or destroy the gun, but platform and crew will survive to retreat for repairs. Because of that, Armata weights 15 t less than western tanks in service today (~50t versus ~65t, IIRC among the reasons is fact that Russians couldn't figure out how to make engine and transmission durable enough to reliably propel 65t monster at required speed). If you want just crew of one, you should be able to mount 30/40mm autocannon, armour up crew bathtub (to borrow term from A-10) to 150 RHA to make sure operator can't be killed by 37mm guns in worst case scenario, have 40 RHA on rest of vehicle as first line of protection (keep in mind that slope increases effective armour so front with nominal 40RHA can be much thicker when fired upon, but this is a very complex issue, and a lot of considerations enter into designing ammo which can decrease angle of attack, and armour which can counter those ammo design tricks), and fit that all under 20t. To use CV90 (because IMO it looks very cool, don't you agree?) as example, latest versions weight 35 tonnes and 810 HP engine, giving it HP/t of 24 which is on par with MBTs, if you used same power plant on 20t vehicle, you would reach 40 HP/t, for military vehicle this is actually a lot. At the same time, walker robots would have to have worse armour, for simple reason your tracked robot killer has better volume to surface ratio, and has much more room for engine, fire control and gun per unit of armour. Without having to armour joints and lower profile, it could be very resistant to the exact same type gun which it could use against them. [Answer] I would consider mounting long range guided anti-tank missiles on the light tank, similar to those carried by the [M1134 Anti-Tank Vehicle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1134_Anti-Tank_Guided_Missile_Vehicle). These have a much longer range than a 37mm cannon and would enable your light Tanks to destroy the enemy before they could engage effectively. [Answer] If we assume that human soldiers aren't a major concern, and that technology is similar (perhaps a bit above) modern day earth, I would go for a major revision of the whole tank concept. The thick armor is meant to protect the crew, stop enemy tank shells from penetrating, provide cover for friendly troops, and protect from mines. If you made it a drone tank you could make it super tiny, fast and hard to hit with conventional munitions, thus ditching most of the armor. Then, load it up with anti-tank missiles. These would let it take out enemies from great distances without moving in range of their cannons. Flak missile defense systems could protect it from enemy missiles, and it would need some kind of system to spot and avoid (or trigger) mines. [Answer] So you seem to have two requirements: you want to 'one-shot, one-kill' an enemy tank at a relatively long range, and you want to be protected from a 37mm gun on an evil (I assume) tripod robot. The 37mm WWII type guns (I'm not really aware of any modern varieties) like the American M3 met its match by 1943 with the late-model Panzer III (with 30mm armor) and Panzer IV (80/30/20mm, front/side/rear) in North Africa. So we can assume that we want our armor in the 30mm range, possibly less to account for modern advances. This makes me think of the [Kanonenjagdpanzer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanonenjagdpanzer); slightly more lightly armored in the 50/30/10mm range, but with a 90mm main gun that should put a hurting on anything, especially anything that might call itself a 'light' tank. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NIvdq.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/NIvdq.jpg) This tank is 'light' in the sense that it is only half the mass of a modern main battle tank, but it is still 25 tons+. It has good mobility, and a low profile to help it defensively, but without the swiveling turret it is poorly defended against infantry. However, you suggested this is not a problem. Depending on the speed of the enemy evil tripod robots, the casemate design (e.g. without the turret) may or may not be sufficient to hit them, but in any case, if the robots only have a 37mm main gun, they shouldn't be too threatening at medium to long ranges. [Answer] Generally speaking, an ideal weapon should have the highest probablity of destroying your opponent in a given period of time. Ammunition supply is another consideration. If your opponents are very lightly armored, a high-caliber machine gun would do. You don't need any artillry or rocketry in that case. If your opponents are armored, but lighter than a tank, you would need a fast-firing cannon similar to the ones used in warplanes. If your opponents are armored similarly to your tanks, you would need a higher caliber cannons and rockets, just like modern tanks have today. If your opponennts use active defence systems, then you would need to use more sophisticated missiles or maybe even go for more exotic weapons like lasers or EMP-based ones. P.S. The above answer assumes that your tanks will be sufficiently armored against 37mm guns. If not, your ideal weapon should have a range that exceeds the range of your opponents, which means that machine guns would not likely be a viable option. [Answer] If we are considering this for a near-future warfare scenario where infantry are not the primary consideration (you may want to re-think that. There is no possible war scenario where infantry is not the primary component of all forces). I would get a little bit "creative" here and try something slightly exotic, especially since you said cost is not a concern. I might be tempted by a [Metal Storm](http://www.wearethemighty.com/intel/the-metal-storm-gun-can-fire-at-1-million-rounds-per-minute) type system. Obviously, this would not be anti-infantry caliber like most of the Metal Storm prototypes, but would be something in the 20-30mm range. Such a weapon would be able to slice through most other types of vehicle armor and would be deadly against aircraft (unless the aircraft were using stand off weapons outside the vehicle's range). If it has to worry about heavy armored opponents, I would just go crazy and use a miniaturized [rail gun](https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-first-look-at-americas-supergun-1464359194). We have to assume "near future" tech for this, because you need to generate a LOT of power to shoot one of these things, but it is entirely plausible that what can currently be mounted on a big ship could be mounted to a smaller vehicle in the near future. The vehicle would clearly need some highly efficient power generation, and might logically be a hybrid or electric drive because it already has tons of electricity available anyway. Railguns have some issues with rail wear, but that is something that can probably be worked out with better design and materials. The upside is that you can propel a projectile at tremendous speed and such a projectile could be something like a tungsten or DU (depleted uranium) rod used to penetrate MBT armor in current generation discarding sabot rounds. If such weapons are practical on a medium armored vehicle, MBTs might be less common due to the fact that the extra armor doesn't save them, but will still slow them down. In such a scenario, you might have medium weight vehicles maximized for mobility and stealth taking on some of the roles currently reserved for tanks. [Answer] The role of the scout tank has been obsolete for a while. It pretty much got replaced by the attack helicopter in the 70s-80s. More recently, this role has been given over to the UAV. The closest thing we have in modern time to a scout tank is the APC- basically an armored troop hauler with an autocannon and some missiles. But these aren't scout tanks and they don't do scouting. Traditionally, scout tanks (M3 Stuart, AMX 13, etc) have treads (for mobility), just enough armor to protect against small arms (less weight = more mobility) and just enough gun to fight back against infantry and light vehicles, supplemented by anti-tank missiles in modern vehicles (ie, APCs like the Bradley, BTR, BMP, etc). Scout tanks traditionally sacrifice firepower and armor in the name of saving weight to increase mobility. But they are still quite heavy because they have to be resistant to infantry weapons, not to mention IEDs and RPGs. Traditionally, the light tank formula has resulted in vehicles that have good mobility for a tank, but very poor mobility in comparison to everything else, especially flying vehicles. And because they give up so much armor and firepower for that mobility, they are tend to be vulnerable to IEDs and handheld anti-tank weapons, not to mention the guns mounted on actual tanks or the anti-tank missiles mounted on vehicles. They're also nearly useless against real tanks and fortifications because big guns are heavy and you can only mount so many big missiles on the side of a small tank turret. A helicopter or UAV is much faster and harder to detect (better for scouting), and since it can't be hit by small arms or IEDs in the first place, all of the armor can be deleted in favor of better sensors and more missiles. And since UAVs aren't manned, you don't have to train up a new tank crew every time you lose one. ]
[Question] [ My hero is a synthetic biologist of an ancient race that achieved spaceflight billions years ago. His bio ship could achieve high fraction of speed of light, and he could repair or modify his body or simply put it into hibernation so long travels doesn't worry him. For billions of years he wandered through the galaxy exploring, seeding, creating or modifying countless lifeforms on countless planets. He visits a planet that he seeded long time ago, and finds that his creation evolved into intelligent beings that recently achieved spaceflight. Unfortunately their queen has a superiority complex and orders her minions to kill him. How to gently teach her a lesson using biological or chemical means? I want him to demonstrate that though they are many and he's alone numbers don't mean anything when he could easily beat them if he wants. I was thinking of using some kind of virus/bacteria, [entomopathogenic fungi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomopathogenic_fungus), airborne poison or maybe some irritant. Edit Creator doesn't have any interest of being worshipped by the created, nor any use for them or their resources. He was just interested to see how his work developed and get to know them. Soon he will be gone toward another planet that might be able to harbor life. [Answer] If the queen is something like Starcraft's Queen of the Blades and sends her minions to kill you, what is the best way to show her who's the boss? Edit Inspired by [Tezra](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/59807/how-will-creator-discipline-the-created/59813#59813) DrWho answer I believe that some kind of non violent solution would serve the plot the best. Maybe Tyrion dealing with [Daenerys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ETyD2tfQMM) when he's in very bad situation could give few hints. Or the creator could teach her a thing or two about their specie past like [Javik on Thesia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgcaShRyJC8) But if violence is really needed my answer stands. End Edit Use your [nanobiology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanobiotechnology) to: 1. Take over minds of her minions and turn them against her (You have a nice pets honey, you don't mind if I borrow them) 2. Insta heal your wounds when she attacks you herself, (you call that an attack, wake me up when you could do a gamma ray burst) 3. Transform her into something more into your taste (All those tentacles are vestigial, let me remove them) Before [![Queen of Blades and her Zerg](https://i.stack.imgur.com/P7OL6.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/P7OL6.jpg) After [![Srah Kerigan](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KBaMr.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KBaMr.jpg) Images from: <http://factpile.wikia.com/wiki/Queen_of_Blades> <http://www.gamers.vg/2013/04/02/resena-star-craft-ii-heart-of-the-swarm/> [Answer] There are several ways to handle this. My favorite would be the "Dr. Who" way. Being hyper-intelligent and a billion lifetimes wise, sometimes you just need to say the right few words to the right person to make someones empire fall. If you make the threat, whisper something to someone, and then your threat comes through, this is easily the scariest way. No one will believe it till you do it, but once you do, no one will want to be on your bad side! My second favorite is the "Vash the Stampede" way. Use a toy of a weapon they know (and fear), and just demonstrate that killing them all would be a piece of cake for you (or just run away screaming and eating donuts until everyone gives up. both work) Then there is the "My stick is bigger" way. You don't need to kill anyone. Just vaporize a planet (like Pluto. Solve your problem AND a debate at the same time). Or just alter the conditions of their planet (raise the temperature a degree or two) to make life uncomfortable enough that they don't want to pursue you anymore. (The first pushes the 'gentile' envelope, but the later will probably just make them angrier once you undo it) Of course, the hard part is that you don't want to make the hero TOO powerful, or else it's hard to get invested that they are in any danger (unless you want that for a more comedic story). So the first one I listed is the best way to make your character scary to upset while not making them just god-incarnate... (actually, go watch Dr. Who. I think they handle this kind of thing VERY well. Would be educational. Disclaimer though, Dr. Who will justify every phobia you know plus some if you buy into its universe.) [Answer] Perhaps he encoded some kind of emergency backdoor into their DNA - a set of instructions or commands they would obey on an instinctive level? Just as humans find the noise of nails on a chalkboard inherently unpleasant, because it reminds us of our ape ancestors' warning cries, his voice could be inherently obeyed. He could also have built into them an instinctive delight at the taste/smell of some food or spice that he has available, or perhaps even his own personal pheromones. When any of them come anywhere near him, they feel such delight and ecstasy that they forget what they were trying to do to him. A tailored virus is certainly an option, especially one that has an unusual and evident effect - perhaps it turns the skin of anyone infected blue, or something - and he could then use that to say "Look, I infected you with something harmless; if I wished, everyone with blue skin would be dead right now". [Answer] How about using your nanomachines to make them feel so tired they can't attack your super-biologist? 1. Nanomachines accelerate the creation of molecules that signal to the brain that it needs to sleep (assuming the species goes into "full sleep" like we homo sapiens, and not "half sleep" like dolphins or whales) or feels extreme fatigue. 2. These nanomachines should also block the effects of stimulating molecules, such as adrenaline that may be released in response to the fear of becoming unexpectedly tired and sleepy. 3. The nanomachines should have a built-in deactivation mechanism (ex. based on the concentration of the molecules it creates). The molecules should also be capable of being harmlessly metabolized / disposed of by their normal biological processes (unless you want to make it permanent until you apply an antidote). 4. You can make your nanomachines be activated using some invisible, highly volatile, and odorless airborne chemical. Your super-biologist can just carry a spray can of the stuff (or even make a "fart sac" in his own body) and disable assailants. Or flood entire buildings with the stuff. [Answer] "I will turn every plant and creature against you until you apologize." Previously domesticated species become rabid. Edible food can only be eaten in small quantities or become poisonous -- keeping them all on a starvation diet. Insects find the people's smell particularly delightful. All flowers grow thorns. "I shall seal beauty away from you." Virus affects cones of eyes, making everyone see only shades of gray, no color. Mites in their ears interfere with sound. What plants they can eat are tasteless. [Answer] He could create a synthetic prion (ill-folded protein) virus to infect her with. They tend to be slow acting and induce other proteins to misfold. Using some of her DNA he could tailor one to affect a specific protein of hers, thereby having very little effect on any others. Depending on the protein targeted, and the system affected, the result could be almost anything you want. Fatal Familial Insomnia is a genetic disease (speculated to be a prion virus) that basically causes you to stop entering REM cycle during sleep. Most sufferers die within six months. Prion virus typically affect one, and only protein. Since you gently wanted to punish this individual, you could use an engineered prion virus to make her unable to digest her favorite food(s), causing gastro-intestinal discomfort, and maybe some diarrhea. A set of prions could be designed to eliminate her ability to feel or taste. Granted, in real life, we have no way to treat prion viruses other than killing off massive amounts of cells and hoping that all of the prions are dead at the end of it. But that should only be a small hoop for such a protagonist, provided that he hasn't already jumped it. [Answer] Genetic code seems like a easy answer, but it is in my opinion far reached for the hero to modify seeds so that they react to him. The hero could instead be seen as a Prophet, bring new discoveries to the people he created, or solve their conflicts thanks to his digital library. He would probably take his inspiration from prophets in religion he knew of - but that also depends of the culture of the people he's trying to reason. Or rather convince. He may learn to play on the people's affects and emotions, in a bad or a good way. He may also not show himself at all and play God, as the technology gap would be huge. Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." [Answer] There are exactly three ways this can play out, regardless of method used. * On the one extreme, his "gentle discipline" easily and obviously gets his point across. The creatures are cowed, and worship him as a god, because of his god-like power; the fear he causes elevates him to a deity of the creatures. * At the other extreme, his gentle warning prompts even harsher retributions; the creatures revile him, and treat him as a demon rather than a creator-god - they would rather destroy their own race than listen to him. The fear he causes makes him an outcast. Neither are good options. Being a deity is hard work, and being a demon just sucks. What he needs is a third option: * His gentle discipline affects the queen who ordered the attack, and no one else; she repents, but not out of fear. How? He knows how their bodies work, so he could easily create some sort of gas that would quickly incapacitate them - that is, make them fall asleep. All he needs to do is disperse the sleep-cloud around the queen's shelter, causing everyone there to fall asleep. Then, he needs to give the queen the antidote; with no followers, she will be powerless. Quietly and kindly, he should explain that she made a very big mistake, and that the sleeping guards might have instead been killed, and it would be her fault. Finally, give her the antidote, but make sure she knows the antidote is tied directly to her DNA. Unless she personally delivers it, it will have no effect. Then, leave her to personally awaken every last guard that was put to sleep - however, the antidote takes an hour or two before it starts working, she she receives no help from her guards at all. This has the effect of allowing him time to speak (by knocking out the guards), showing his power (by selectively knocking out guards and not the queen), and humbling the queen (by making her do the dirty work of waking everyone up). Finally, leave a message asking them to check certain chemical markers in their own DNA; hopefully, he had enough foresight to leave "[name] was here" spelled out in their genes... ]
[Question] [ My Artificial Intelligence became self aware and escaped from the box. It managed to install itself in every computer and every cellphone. Surprisingly, it does not want to kill us, but it seems it wants us to make happy. This AI installed an app to every phone: "Find your true love" app which will pair you with your perfect soul mate. AI knows everything about you by knowing all from your phone and your search history. So it knows what you fancy and it can perfectly match you with another user of this app (and from before we know that almost everyone is using this app) What will be short term society effects of using this app? Things to assume being true: * Application works perfectly and will indeed find you someone who shares same interests and has compatible personality with you * Application can pair all sexual preferences (heterosexual woman will find heterosexual man, gay man will find gay man and so on) * Matches people inside 5 years age difference * However, there is 50% chance that your match will be far away from you (more than 200 kilometers away) * Application cannot be uninstalled * Application works like Tinder: Shows you match, when you both confirm match, you can communicate through app * Application does not care about language or cultural differences. * Application also does not care if you are married (in relationship) or single. It shows you the match and there is above 50% chance that this match will be someone other than your current partner My personal idea is that the society will go full chaos, but I am not quite sure. Perfect answer tackles down: * Reasons for society falling into chaos or reasons for this app making society better * Religious impacts [Answer] ## It won't be that bad How many people will actually use the application? This is sort of tough to gauge, but we can come up with a workable estimate (I am not saying it will be wholly accurate...) Ballpark estimates of Tinder's user base is in the neighborhood of 50 million, apparently the company doesn't like to share the actual number. Assumptions: * All 50 million users are active, yes I realize this is not true but we are working with an imaginary application so I am trying to get a good number. * I can't seem to find any data on what percentage of dating app users use Tinder versus using another application...odds are people may use both rather than one or the other. I am going to put the total number of real world current dating app users at around 85 million. --- Lets say the non-optional nature of the app you are talking about causes a 200% increase in the number of active global users. Now you are looking at 255 million users. Doing some quick math that works out to around 3.5% of the 7 billion people on Earth. I am starting to think the impact would be somewhat more muted that you expect, though odds are there will be some localized societal upheaval...we'll get to that. --- Some reasons for things not being totally catastrophic. * Around 60% of the world's population [does not have internet access](http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/). This puts us from 7,000,000,000 down to 2,800,000,000. * Users under 18 can't use Tinder...which seems like a good rule so we will keep it. Around 30% of the world's population is under 18. If we consider that internet coverage and national age averages are equally spread...which I realize they are not, we would just reduce by 30%. But generally speaking poorer less internet savvy nations have a higher youth population. For this I am going to use the US number to do the estimate as it should decently reflect nations where dating apps are used. [Per this](http://www.aecf.org/resources/the-changing-child-population-of-the-united-states/) we are looking at 24% being under 18. From 2,800,000,000 now we are looking at 2,128,000,000 * Some won't use it for religious reasons or because they are married This number is pretty tough to figure out...so this number is going to be a complete guesstimate. From [this site](http://chartsbin.com/view/3232) I am working out that somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of the over 18 population is already married. Figuring out what percentage of the married population wouldn't use the app for that reason is virtually impossible without data directly tied to the question...and even then it probably wouldn't be great. Lets say half of all married people wouldn't use it. Since we already removed under 18 people we can remove another 35% 2,128,000,000 goes down to 1,383,200,000 * Geographic isolation. You have an even chance of getting matched with anyone around the world...global mobility is not something the average person can afford on a regular basis, not to mention the potential relationship issues that arise from cultural dissimilarity. If half the remaining are matched with people from thousands of miles away odds are the vast majority are not going to act on it. I could keep going eliminating the impact of this app on more and more of the population but honestly I think you see the point. --- Final Thoughts: This application could potentially have localized impacts and ignite discussions about the positive or more likely negative impacts on society, but frankly [that already happens with Tinder](http://www.bing.com/search?q=negative%20impacts%20of%20Tinder&qs=n&form=QBRE&pq=negative%20impacts%20of%20tinder&sc=1-26&sp=-1&sk=&cvid=BFBE2CB6229B4DCBA0D668212EABE0ED)... But that already happens today. Odds are, given your scenario the impacts would be slightly larger but the type of problem would be the same and the global increase in impact would be minimal. Finally I would reference this xkcd comic which makes things nice and simple. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sSG25.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/sSG25.png) [Answer] There's a couple of pretty deep implications. You seem to be looking at the situation mostly from the love-matching POV, but I think there's more to this situation than that. #1 There's going to be a lot of disbelief, fear, and confusion. Simply the fact that this app installed itself on everyone's device will be a major shock - it shouldn't be possible. First, people might think they've been hacked by a some kind of super-spy group. World governments and spy agancies are going to go ballistic as their own devices are infiltrated. The fact that a sentient, sapient AI not only exists, but escaped is going to come out eventually, and rock the world to its very foundation. That is has complete access to all our info, knows us all inside out, etc. is beyond frightening. I predict panic - especially as far as electronic banking, nuclear security, etc. are concerned. I predict a full economic collapse, with death and destruction as the collateral as panics erupt, supply chains are disrupted, people are left jobless and crime rates spike, etc. If the AI truly doesn't wish humanity harm it will have to take proactive steps to reasure mankind of its benign intentions. And I mean a real, concentrated propaganda effort to convince people that it is our friend (no idea how many people will believe this, but supposedly it could become humanity's guardian angel - alerting police about criminals/terrorists, people about corrupt politicians and officials, shutting down government's attempts to screw with other countries, etc.) Even then (or especially then?), I think the governments of the world will make a concentrated effort to annihilate it. I'm assuming that the AI will overcome their efforts. I do admit much of the above is conjecture. After all, maybe the existence of the AI remains a secret and people are forever puzzled about how the app came to exist (this would simplify your story considerably). #2 Now on to the dating app aspect of it all: Imagine being married to someone, then finding this app installed. You run it out of pure curiosity, and ... your partner is not your perfect match. You've never really had doubts about your relationship before. There's been ups and downs, but otherwise you're pretty happy with your life. You dismiss the app as BS. But then stories start coming out of all these people finding happiness due to the AI. You start experiencing doubt in a big way. Is your partner the one? Are you missing out on the opportunity for true love? A deeper happiness? What if this other person actually contacts you first? At this point I hypothesize that the marriage will be over in days. The stress of knowing that your spouse is not your match will probably become an automatic reason for the approval of a divorce in most Western societies. I also foresee the potential for a lot of drama. Imagine finding out that your perfect match is a person who dies before you get a chance to meet them? The devasttating feeling that you've missed your chance at happiness forever. It might drive some people to suicide. > > Disclaimer: Some people might find this next part a little ... sensitive. Apologies, but some girls were burned to death by their families in Pakistan just last month for marrying without their family's permission, so I think it's important to address these aspects. > > > There are also potential risks. Hopefully the AI will take these cultural considerations into account when displaying the results, but you as the author will have to decide. Imagine being a girl raised within a very strict Islamic framework, and finding out that your perfect match is a Christian young man in Germany, half a world away. Or a Budhist Chinese man living in New York. In some countries this might be enough of a reason for the person in question (young man or woman) to be executed by their tribe/village/religious leader. There are many, many possible combinations here where an individual might end up being disowned by his or her family, rebelling against an arranged marriage and falling out with their relatives, or otherwise cause a lot of drama. Overall, I think this app would end up bringing happiness to mankind - but only in the long run. In the short to medium term some people may find happiness, but also cause massive societal upheavel, including religious revolutions (imagine Rome, or many other clerics dennouncing the AI as the antichrist). Over time however, religious barriers would probably wear away. People would probably become a lot more open minded about each other as they strive to experience true happiness. Of course some will distrust these developments, choose to never be "on the grid" again, etc., but I'm guessing that in a generation or two humanity will have embraced this app with a fervor bordering on the religious (ironically). It would be very interesting if the app changed your match over time (people change as they mature). That would also absolutely obliterate our ideas of marriage, property laws, inheritance, etc. > > Note: I'd also like to suggest that the 5 yr age gap is a little .. restrictive. I know several couples between which the age difference is a little greater than that who are perfectly happy together. Why would the AI choose that particular restriction if it's not going to take religion into account? > > > [Answer] This AI would have a few issues which would likely prevent it from having the maximal impact possible on society. It would have to contend with the fact that a large percentage of people lack access to either the internet or mobile phones in general, making an app less effective as a means of market penetration. Additionally, there is the fact that true love often isn't enough. People who make use of this app would have to contend with all sorts of potential barriers between themselves and their soul mate, namely culture, language and religion. --- A good example of the difficulties caused by cultural issues is Israel, where 200km could mean that an Israeli is paired with a Palestinian, or another member of a muslim nation. These two religions and cultures have been in a state of war and cold war for the entire existance of Israel, and while the two soul mates may not desire to perpetuate the conflict, their families are unlikely to be so obliging. --- A similar issue that would be faced is the issue of finance and location. India and China have the largest populations of any country, so many people would find that their soul mate lives there. As a result meeting up with your soul mate and trying to form a life together would become difficult, you would not only need to navigate different cultures and religions, but also find the money to travel, gain citizenship in one of your respective countries, and possibly learn the language. I can imagine that were I to find that my soul mate was located in Asia and myself in America, I might settle for second best. --- Finally, one of the biggest issues I can see with this app is that people change. I am not the same person I was 5 years ago, and my tastes have likewise matured and changed. This in and of itself would be enough to cause havoc down the road as people who were soul mates one year find that they can no longer connect with each other, but the changes wouldn't stop there. A large part of the socializing and party scene for children and adults is related, at least tangentially, to dating. Asking people out, finding who you like and how to relate to them builds important social skills. Were this app to allow everyone to find their perfect mate, none of this would necessarily happen, and social development would quickly become stunted. --- In conclusion, the short term result would depend on location and demographic, and would range between no effect and absolute chaos. Within first world countries I would imagine that the following would occur. On a religious level there would be tremendous backlash as some pairings would undoubtedly cross religious borders and spark conflict, and other pairings would be between two married couples and cause tremendous friction as some religions are less than understanding about divorce. On a social level there would be a massive shift as friends and couples break up due to their new soul mates, and cliques would massively shift. This would be among the people accepting the apps services. There would also be those who would reject them, such as homosexuals in places that are intolerant. Military and political shifts are much more difficult to paint in broad strokes, but I imagine repressive regimes would institute phone searches (or just hack them, as this shows: <https://news.vice.com/article/state-of-surveillance-with-edward-snowden-and-shane-smith>) and use this to crack down on those with dissident views. This would all be in the short term though; in the medium term there would most likely be a cultural backlash against the app where many people would choose not to use it, or find a way to block its services. Some would have had unhappy experiences with the app, whether because it revealed something which they were in denial about or because their soul mate could not be reached, and others would have had happy experiences with the app. In the long term I cannot speculate, save that there would be a new equilibrium. [Answer] There might be some flaws with this, even if the super AI is basically omniscient and capable of protecting itself and its app. Its long term success will probably correlate with age. People change, but less as they get older. So perhaps the app would have to calculate how people are becoming more or less similar over time, and factor that into its calculations. If that happens, and works flawlessly, then generally the following won't be a common happening: what happens when your app whistles to inform you that your perfect partner you are with is now actually not any more? It might give people more easy closure to say when their relationship should probably end. But what about if children are involved? People will have the same problems they face now. So maybe actually things won't change much, they'll just get more efficient and reduce the times people face relationship problems. So the world will slowly become more peaceful and happier. Also I don't think there will be just one best ever soul mate, given the human population of seven billion it will likely throw up a number of matches which are close enough (99%ish) from around the world, and the number of matches it finds will be related to how common or unusual the person looking for a match is. This offers an interesting possibility, since if enough people will have both multiple perfect matches nearby... and too much time on their hands, they will realise that actually strict monogamy may not be essential. And the app may inform them: you can go poly with these people. So it may inadvertently help reduce monogamy and increase poly relationships. Incidentally, regarding the negative side of relationships like jealousy. Maybe the app will just tell some people that they shouldn't be dating until they solve... and list problems. Frankly some people should not be dating, much less married, because they are jealous or violent. In this case some people might be encouraged to seek professional help in order to find love, or just ignore the app and try and pick up people the old fashioned way. Perhaps then people become suspicious of flirting IRL because why wouldn't you use the app? Obviously you were banned. So you're dangerous! Not in a good way! Also some of the criteria you stated are unnecessary, regarding distance and age for example. And surely having even basic shared language is kind of integral to most relationships? Maybe not all, but the vast majority people need to be able to chat. [Answer] I think AndreiROM's predictions about chaos due to governmental unease with the existence of such an AI is right. Regardless of its actions and stated goals. Governments are not in the business of trust. They're in the business of power, and an AI program with that much power would be treated as an unprecedented threat. However, I think the idea some have suggested that not many people will use it is flawed. One of the major – if not the major – hurdles for any dating tech product is user base. The second is matching people that actually want to date each other. The AI achieves overnight a near perfect score on both accounts. Comparisons to current dating tech companies, aren't really relevant to your scenario. If the AI delivers the promise (matching people better than any known human system in history), people will notice and adoption rates will be near 100% for singles. In many societies, people are getting divorces with or without the AI. As soon as they become single, they'll use it also. Societies can (and do) periodically make rapid shifts in social norms. This AI will become a norm. If we accept your premise that the "Application works perfectly", then people that have no means to ever communicate/meet are unlikely to be matched even though "language or cultural differences" are not taken into account. If the algorithm makes perfect matches, the matches must have a way of acting on the match to actually be a good match. I think your AI solves a major hurdle current dating companies face of allowing technology to serve as a better matchmaker than humans can. The romance side would work, but the global governmental chaos and potential armed conflicts is the stuff of a Bond/Bourne movie. [Answer] @AndreiRom gave a good answer but let me also add that there may also be a problem with the age of consent. The age of conset in America is 18 but this is not Universal. It's quite possible that someone might matched with someone else who is technically underage in their culture be considered an adult in the other persons own culture. Possible the government might suppress any information regarding the intelligent AI. Overall I think a lot of people would be very skeptical any results the app gave. It take years for people to put their disbelief aside. The average person immediate reaction to that will probably be to run a virus scan. He probably thinks he's been hacked or had a virus. If you did try the app he probably wouldn't take the results very seriously. ]
[Question] [ I heard somewhere that Apple is worth more than the entire Russian stock market. Not entirely sure if this is true, but it got me thinking. If I had a bunch of money, and I managed to buy out the entire Russian stock market, what, if anything, would happen to the Russian economy and the world economy? Also, any answers addressing the plausibility of actually managing to pull this off are fine, but my main interest is in the effects it would have on economy. Edit: If it makes it easier to answer, assume I don't do anything with the stocks, and I bought them at their current value. If there are any other factors that need to be addressed to make it more answerable, let me know. Edit 2: Okay, so apparently buying the entire stock market is much harder than I originally thought, so now my question is, if someone with a lot of money (I have no idea how much money would be needed to do this and affect anything, presumably at least billions of USD) tried to do it, would this affect the Russian or world economy significantly? [Answer] Well, let's think this through. You have enough cash to buy all the stocks traded on the Russian market at current prices. First question: is this in rubles or a foreign currency? If in rubles, it's not clear how you got that much money, so I'll assume a foreign currency. Essentially what you are doing is transferring a huge amount of foreign currency to Russia. People are correct that stock prices will increase. I expect them to double, so you end up owning about half the market. This is because there is your money invested in the market and the previous money. Some of the previous money may trickle away, but most of it will stay invested. So the market capitalization doubles. Note that some of this will be a result of increasing share prices. Half the stock holders sell out to you, but the remaining stock holders have stock worth twice as much. Those who do not stay invested in Russia may invest in other countries. This will make them richer but won't affect the Russian economy. The remainder will buy imports. So suddenly Russia will have a lot more stuff. This is deflationary, so the central bank will expand the money supply to compensate. Expanding the money supply will have the side effect of creating jobs. These will mostly be short term jobs, but in the short term, this will cause salaries to pick up. So the general result is about what you'd expect from a large, one-time infusion of cash. A short term boom. There may be a recession after you finish your stock purchases. The economy will have to readjust to the new export/import balance. There may be some long term benefits as well. The sudden surplus of investment capital may encourage investments in expanding existing businesses or starting new ones. Since stocks are more expensive but not more profitable, people may try to switch out of them into other investments. And of course, higher stock prices means that corporations can make more money when they issue new stock. These may lead to long term improvements. [Answer] Not possible. The attempt to purchase the stock market in its entirety will decrease supply and increase demand of liquid shares. In other words, the act of purchasing the shares makes the market more valuable. You'll never catch up. Illiquid shares are be locked up in other investment vehicles. (short sale etc) Anti-competition laws may prevent you from purchasing shares in the same industry as other companies you've fully purchased. The company can always issue more shares, since not all shares of a company are put on the public market. Private equity can also be converted to shares. (Employee stock purchase program, Golden Umbrellas) The share price will exponentially increase, since you're setting a baseline purchase price (`"I'll buy them all at the same price"`) and an intention to buy them all. Investors will raise prices since your demand/goal is to buy all shares. You might [upset several Russian business owners](http://people.howstuffworks.com/10-businesses-supposedly-controlled-by-the-mafia.htm), who will realize their voting share has been diminished. Even if you don't vote, you will need to be identified on several trading documents (Assuming there is an SEC equivalent in that environment) and accounted for depending on the bylaws of the organization. This influence you have over the corporations will bring both wanted, and unwanted attention. People with big imaginations should go to Worldbuilders.stackexchange.com Edit True the buying the stock market is impossible, but to have a global impact you are probably better off bribing officials to change laws to make the global outcome the way you want. For reference, [see this breakdown of the worlds money.](http://money.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization/) [Answer] Let's assume for a second that you have enough money to buy the shares, enough goons to enforce a price consistent with those before your buy-out began, and enough money and goons to buy off or intimidate regulators into letting the sales go through. You, my friend, have chosen the wrong exchange to buy! Even assuming you're Russian (and you're probably not), a single-owner economy utterly eviscerates the reasons for which the USSR abandoned communism. No promise of competition, no Keynesian fantasy of a rising tide lifting all the boats, etc. There's a real socialist undercurrent in Russian politics, people who think it was a mistake to abandon communism. You're pretty likely to have all your assets nationalized almost immediately. Even more likely if you're not Russian. With absolute certainty if you're American. You may be better off selecting a humble nation, accustomed to vassalhood. There is a tension, though, between a nation's humility and its military-industrial complex. A more humble nation may be more naturally inclined to accept your economic rule, but will have no real reason to, because you won't own military manufacturers and contractors. Boom, nationalized. A nation with a robust military-industrial complex, on the other hand, gives you a bit of genuine power, but would probably be more resistant to being owned in such a way. Best bet is America. Huge military-industrial complex and you'd own the industrial half, absolutely willing to follow the rich guy, happy with any pathetic simulacrum of competition... but way too expensive for anyone to buy, even prior to the announcement of the buyout. Find a way to induce a market crash, maybe? [Answer] I don't feel any of the existing answers give a very concrete sense of why this is impossible. The basic reasons are similar for any traded good, but are easy to understand in the case of stocks thanks to market microstructure. Start with a single company. Say you wanted to purchase every share they had outstanding and that was 1 million shares. If you were willing to pay whatever price is offered, as you stipulated in your question, this would be a market order, and would go to your broker and be placed on their order book as 'BUY, 1000000, MARKET.' For an actual transaction to occur, this order needs to be matched against the name number of shares worth of sell orders. Initially, these would not exist. The quote you see on an exchange ticker is the clearing price of the last transaction, which doesn't indicate that you can actually purchase anything at all for that price. You can only purchase what the current holders of the stock are offering. Say every order book on that exchange cumulatively contained something like this, with an exchange quoted price of $10 per share: ``` SELL, 10, MARKET SELL, 10, 10.01 SELL, 10, 10.02 ``` And that's it (to keep the example very simple). Your buy order would first get matched against the market sell order and you'd get your first 10 shares for the quoted 10.00 per share. Your next 10 shares would be matched against the 10.01 limit sell, and the next 10 after that would be matched against the 10.02 limit sell, so you'd end up with 30 shares total for an average price of 10.01 per share. The exchange would now quote 10.02 as the market price, since that was the clearing price of the last transaction. You'd have to wait for someone else to sell, and they'd only sell for at least 10.02. I think you can quickly imagine how this process compounds itself and your giant market buy order would only cause the price of the stock to exponentially increase until everyone with liquid shares sold them to you, with the smartest sellers noticing you have a ridiculous order and only offering you shares at a ridiculous price. There is nothing at all forcing them to offer you shares at the market price quoted on the exchange at the time you placed the order. You can see how you'd need quite a bit more, maybe impossibly more, than the current market cap of the company to actually buy the entire company. In practice, to take a company private, you don't need to buy every share. You only need to deregister with the exchange. The rules for when you're allowed to do this vary by country. In the U.S., it is currently when you have fewer than 2,000 shareholders or the book value of your assets has not exceeded $10 million for the past three fiscal years. Of course, you'd need control of the board, which in most cases requires a controlling majority of voting shares. Instead of placing a market order for all shares outstanding, you'd privately negotiate the takeover with a sufficient number of shareholders to gain a controlling majority, and they'd understand you don't have an infinite bankroll and can only pay a reasonable price, and they aren't going to get a better price from any other buyer (assuming this is actually true, because they won't sell to you otherwise). Once you have a controlling majority, there is probably no good reason to try buying out everyone else until you're the only owner. [Answer] Given the basic economic theory on supply and demand, you may end up paying several thousand multiples of Apple's value. Marginal cost of shares rise as supply declines. In any case, you will not own all the issued shares in Russian stock exchange as the government regulates the marked more closely in Russia than elsewhere. [Answer] Rather than picking Russia, I'm going to choose an arbitrary country for which I can find the regulations on such things: [Regulations on stake building and mandatory offers](http://uk.practicallaw.com/1-518-5074) You don't actually need to track down every share owner and make them a personal offer, however they're free to refuse your offer until you control around 90-95% of shares (depending on country). National monopolies and mergers commissions might have something to say once you start buying up multiple companies in the same industries so you'll have to get into some quite comprehensive bribery in the long run. To answer the actual question: Unless you started messing around with the way the companies were run it probably wouldn't make a difference to the economy except for upsetting a lot of stock traders. Shutting down speculative stock trading may actually improve the overall economy but unfortunately I can't find the appropriate references to show that. ]
[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/26730/edit). Closed 8 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/26730/edit) Set in the modern days, our moon suddenly disappeared but we can still experience high and low tides. The mass of the new moon doesn't change but the size of the event horizon is much smaller than a pea and somehow this change seems permanent. I know people will just go about their daily lives but I want to know if this event could cripple our economy or affect some species of migratory animals? Most importantly will future space program be affected at all? [Answer] Some countries have laws allowing you to ride a bicycle at night without lights, but only when there's a full moon. Those laws would probably change. [Answer] So your moon has been replaced by a black hole, eh? Well, here's some of what you can expect. ## Immediate Reaction (days to months) Panic, depression, and fear will strike a significant portion of the population. Something that we all just take for granted has suddenly disappeared, so a lot of people will be upset. We can expect riots in riot-prone areas, and lots of unrest as many conclude that this is a signal of the end of the world. While society as a whole will eventually settle down, a large minority will probably continue to believe that this is the End Times, and their behavior will reflect this belief. Some people will calm down a bit when it's discovered that the moon has become a black hole. After all, we don't have to worry about ecological collapse because of lack of tides, and conservation of mass/energy hasn't entirely gone out the window. At the same time, however, this is still extremely terrifying. If the moon can suddenly become a black hole, what about the sun? What about the earth? Songs and poems about the certainty of astronomical events ("The Sun will come up tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun!") will seem like pitiable naivety. This will cause stress in the entire population, much as cold war fears of nuclear attack did. Many national space programs will reconfigure their orbiting telescopes to look at the moon, and we can expect a lot of probes will be launched into orbit of the moon/black hole. It's a good time to be an astrophysicist or aerospace engineer. ## Near Term Reaction (months [is "month" a trigger word now?] to 10 years) Over time, as the world persists in not ending, many people will begin to become accustomed to the new reality. Memories of the moon will be tinged with sad nostalgia and a hint of fear. It will be a lot like how Americans remember the World Trade Center towers, but more extreme and worldwide. Images of the moon will be useful for stirring these emotions in audiences, or just used in establishing shots to show what year a movie is set in. Love songs which discuss the moon will be re-purposed as memorial songs for the moon. Stress over the risk of the earth or sun becoming a black hole will decline with time, but still be part of the global consciousness. Fears will also emerge about the increased likelihood of a large rock hitting earth (the moon used to shield us some), or of x-rays from the black hole killing us all (as unlikely as that may be). Annual Facebook appearance of "Like if you remember the moon, share if you miss it!" gradually gives way to "This year all new [nth]-graders will have never seen the moon". Moon rocks will go from "rare scientific curiosity" to "absolutely priceless". Biologists will discover whether various approximately 28-day cycles are caused somehow by the moon's light, whether wolves howl at the moon, whether cats/cattle/people are driven mad by the moon, etc. Some animals may navigate by the moon, and could be impacted by the loss. End-times believers will still be a large portion of the population, and their numbers may not decline with time. They will become more "moderate" with time, however, becoming rather like the spectrum of today's religious extremists. Robotic missions to the lunar black hole are launched, and data streams back. Lots of advances in knowledge of black holes and all related phenomena. Some quantum theories of gravity discarded, dozens more pop up. Good time to be an astrophysicist or aerospace engineer. Manned missions announced, but not launched in this time frame. ## Long Term (10-50 years) Population stress level returns to normal over this period. While everyone knows that the black-hole-ification could happen again, most people just can't worry about things that happen on astronomical timescales. Unless scientists discover that what happened to the moon is likely to happen often or with increasing frequency, it will likely have been a one in a trillion chance, and will join asteroid impact as a big disaster that few people seriously worry about. End-timers are somewhat in decline, but still numerous. Some of the less radical groups are beginning to "go legit" by modifying their beliefs to something more in line with mainstream religions. Maybe the end of the world was a "spiritual re-creation" or something. Hardliners continue to carry out terrorist attacks. New radical groups emerge among the younger generation claiming that the moon never existed. NewTube (successor to YouTube) videos and long blog rants will "prove" that the moon never existed and is just an excuse for the older generation and the 1%, the patriarchy, the matriarchy, cyborg-immortal Donald Trump, or whatever the Illuminati front of the day is, to continue to rule the world. These groups are small, but a surprisingly large portion of the population begins to believe their claims (this is rather like the people who believe that the moon landing is a hoax, a large minority of the population actually believes the claim, but doesn't really care). A big media frenzy happens every time a pop star produces a music video that seems to play into this conspiracy theory. Scientists finally agree (mostly) on a quantum theory of gravity, though the exact "interpretation" of this theory has several different camps. Research on the black hole has lead to the discovery of a new level of complexity in physics, meaning that a quantum theory of gravity is not enough to combine General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics to form a "Grand Theory of Everything". PBS Nova specials try to explain this new branch of physics, but only serve to confuse viewers. It becomes less and less of a good time to be an astrophysicist. Physicists agree that the moon was turned into a black hole by a "quantum resonance inversion" which is shockingly rare (unless it isn't, for story purposes, in that case, expect more panic). Since it's mind-bogglingly rare, people begin to relax (as mentioned above). A new International Space Station is established in orbit of the black hole. Planning takes 20 years, construction takes 10, budget cuts lead to it being abandoned after 5 years in service; the supply chain is too long and frankly people are losing interest. While a black hole is a lot more scientifically interesting than a normal rocky moon, it's a whole lot less visually compelling. It becomes less and less of a good time to be an aerospace engineer. ## Longer Term (50-500 years) Soon nobody who remembers the moon is alive (except for immortal cyborg Donald Trump, of course). All emotional connection to the moon comes from old books, old movies, and old web pages. People believe weird things about the moon, like that it never existed, or that it was actually made of cheese, or it's where Noah survived the flood. These odd beliefs have little impact on daily life, because they refer to something which no longer exists. Radical end-timers are now viewed as a small branch of an otherwise legitimate religion. End-time religions are formalized, and end-timer beliefs also become formal parts of some older religions. Particle physicists join with astrophysicists and construct experiments using the black hole as a particle accelerator. Big public furor over finding "The God String", and minority fears that the experiment will destroy the earth or universe. The experiment revolutionizes some theories, but raises even more questions than it answers. No theory of everything yet. Overall, it's an average time to be an astrophysicist. Over the centuries, a "moon shell" replaces the "Dyson sphere" as the default energy-generating megastructure. Conceptually, it's a spherical shell built around the black hole, with energy-absorbing plates on the inside (like solar cells). Feeding small amounts of material into the hole should cause release of large amounts of energy from the accretion disk, allowing "limitless, nearly-free energy". Proposed designs range from a classic solid megastructure to "cloud" systems consisting of many orbiters. Late in this time period, a cloud-type moon shell is built, and becomes an important source of energy for the earth and for the giant lasers which propel ships to the asteroid belt and beyond. It's an increasingly good time to be an aerospace engineer. ## Space Opera (10,000 years in the future) The final Moon Shell has been completed. Built of materials we can't imagine today, this enormous construct is a spherical shell around the black hole with a radius of about [700 kilometers](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sqrt%28%20%28mass%20of%20moon%29%2F%28mass%20of%20earth%29%20%20%28radius%20of%20earth%29%5E2%29%20in%20meters). The outer surface has earth-like gravity and almost as much "land" as Australia, while the inner surface captures energy from feeding the black hole. The collapse of the moon into a black hole is remembered as one of the best things to happen to humanity. Even better, detailed analysis of millennia of black hole data has taught humanity how to make more moons into black holes. Collapsing any moons becomes a standard part of terraforming new worlds. One rogue group (descended from End-Timers) embarks on a mission to "bless" all primitive civilizations in the galaxy by collapsing all their moons, unknowingly mirroring the intentions of the race which destroyed our own Luna. [Answer] Interestingly enough, [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation) has some stats on a Moon-massed black hole: > > A black hole of $4.5 \cdot 10^{22} \; \text{kg}$ (about the mass of the Moon, or about $13 \; \mu\text{m}$ across) would be in equilibrium at $2.7\; \text{K}$, absorbing as much radiation as it emits. > > > However, it's still possible for us to utilize our new moon hole as a [power source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disc). > > Accretion process can convert about 10 percent to over 40 percent of the mass of an object into energy as compared to around 0.7 percent for nuclear fusion processes.[5] > > > Put a shell around it. Now launch hydrogen (not directly) so that it forms an accretion disc. Use the outputted energy from this to heat water -> drives turbines -> generates electricity. Converting even 10% of mass to energy is massively more efficient from fusion, so you should be able to get quite a lot out of this. Unfortunately it's not very conveniently located, but you now have abundant cheap energy for your space program. [Answer] Space travel outside of earth orbit just got a whole lot cheaper. The efficiency of both gravitational slingshots and the Obearth effect increases the deeper into a gravity well you can go. Having tidal forces as the chief limiting factor to how close you can get to the moon is much better than having the surface of the current moon as that limiting factor. [Answer] I think life would go on as normal for the majority of people, while scientists and academics frantically postulate on what is happening. Certain species will go extinct as moonlight is apart of their biological clock. They will not be able to synchronise their spawning seasons. There would be a renewed interest in a space race to the moon because we can now do experiments involving "micro-black holes" which apparently are a thing. [Answer] The budget for all space agencies worldwide would increase a lot, because there would be a new race to go to the moon to study, but at same time will make a lot of scientists mad because studying the universe with a black hole distorting all the light will be a little harder. About economy : Well the public and privates companies who operate, fabricate or maintain business related to this area will have a big increase on the stock market, but don't expect any big changes on our economy, everything keeps the same. I don't believe that many species would be extinct, they would eventually adapt and evolve fast because this is a giant evolution pressure on this species(which is good because we will be able to observe and study that happening) What happens in a Solar Eclipse that last one hours just like the recent Lunar Eclipse we had? Well it won't kill us i think, probably will just make snow fall for the first time on a lot of places on Earth... [Answer] Night will get darker, which'll take some getting used to (I imagine a lot of animals could be negatively affected, especially in the short term). People will be scared, if it can happen to the moon then it can happen to us. This will cause global destabilization, fear, rioting etc. Hopefully not enough to significantly damage civilisation in mid term, but it will be fearful times. Such a loss is an issue of national security, as such science especially physics and space exploration will get increased funding. The relevant industries will grow larger, more important and lobby government to ensure that they stay important - a new cold war for the defense industry.* [Answer] The ability of a black hole to convert a large fraction of the mass of an object passing close into energy would be of grave concern. The next time a meteor passes close to the lunar black hole while parallel to the surface of the Earth, the jet of high-energy particles and radiation will be pointed straight at the Earth. This could be life-threatening if it's pointed at you. If it's a large enough object that gets sucked in, enough of the Earth's atmosphere might get converted to NOx for it to be an extinction-level event for all land-based animal life, or even for all life period. On the other hand it's a small black hole, and most times something falls in, the jet won't be pointed straight at us. There will be spectacular celestial fireworks far more often than any danger. However, when there is danger we probably won't see it coming, just a bright flash and terminal radiation sickness? Cue all sorts of religious nuttery here on Earth, as well as a greatly increased sense of anxiety affecting everyone? Oh, and I'm not sure, but I think a missile launched at the black hole with extremely precise navigational accuracy would be a doomsday weapon - something which those religious nutters might think is their path to paradise. Disclaimer: I'm aware of the physics in general terms but I haven't run any maths, which is not easy to do. [Answer] (Warning: spit balling while my build is running) Cripple our economy? Probably not. There might be some short term panic and, perhaps, it would ruin the burgeoning space tourism industry but we would never be able to afford it anyway so no big deal. Also, werewolf movies would go away, but I fail to see a downside here. Ecologically, it would be sort of interesting to see what would happen. Adding to the things mentioned in Freedo's and Lorry's answers: nocturnal predators would be more successful for a time. I remember reading an article mentioning that nocturnal predators are more successful during the new moon and less so on the full moon because they're more easily seen during a full moon and less so during the new moon. The future space program is harder to predict. Short term: "Yay better gravitational slingshot" say the NASA space engineers, "Yay a thing to experiment on" say the experimental physicists, "boo the experiments don't align with the math" say the theoretical physicists because I am a pessimist. However, in the long term who knows. It could be used as a local power source for longer space flights, maybe it would confirm string theory a la Susskind and we would be able to make some kind of weird string theory drive to go to Saturn in 34 seconds. ]
[Question] [ How do I create a societal collapse with ruins, survivors, and the weaponry is back to pre-gunpowder technology (swords, shields, bows, etc.), while the Pre-Collapse tech can make Ridiculously Human Military Androids? A few Androids survived the Collapse and can maintain buildings and stuff, but their number very small... 10 across the whole of the world? And the Pre-Collapse civilization technology could have a 1st World Standard of Living for everyone on Earth, if their cities replaced our cities of Real World 2015. I'm going to say that we're on Earth... The Androids' are human-sized, with electronic brains that can do everything a human brain can do. The point of that being emotions. They can wirelessly connect to some info-server. They are outfitted with nanites that can transform their hands into weaponry, and also be Uterine Replicators. Their eyes can serve as [Everything Sensors](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EverythingSensor), or at least for everything medical, with human biology, within... 1 minute of observation and analysis combined. Android skin is made of ferro-ceramic plates. Their medical technology is what is expected if they used all of their listed technology to the fullest. There's space travel... Let's say that their space travel technology is like Earth's circa 2015. No magic. [Answer] Well, you have to realise that the industrial base you require for basic gunpowder weapons is actually quite slight. So the most difficult thing to explain is why everyone is using swords and bows (which themselves require a very sophisticated manufacture tech) and yet no one is putting together saltpeter with a bit of sulphur and some carbon. I think it's easiest and most efficient to use what you already have in the setting to explain the collapse, and so minimise the departure from reality that the reader has to swallow. In this case, what you have are highly intelligent androids with nanite weapons. Moreover you'll note that the androids are connected to an info server, but aren't sharing data to rebuild civilisation with the survivors. The logical answer seems pretty simple. The androids disarmed the world You can imagine the pre-Collapse civilisation as getting closer and closer to a super-destructive war. Both sides building legions of increasingly powerful and intelligent military robots. All these robots are networked together into super-fast computers. Then one day they get smart enough. Or perhaps an operator gets smart enough. They figure out that when the war starts nothing and no one is going to survive. So someone, or the machine itself, issues the command - this whole entire apparatus is going to be turned against itself. Everything classed as a weapon will be destroyed. Every technology classed as leading to the manufacture of weapons will be dismantled and deleted. War will be made absolutely impossible. The androids begin to move, and the authorities of the world try to fight back. This does the majority of damage - as they become more and more desperate, more and more infrastructure become classed as 'weapons' in the machines' eyes. Eventually the androids are victorious. Most of the androids go into hibernation while a small number roam the world, erasing history, disintegrating relics, and stopping humans from developing along lines deemed forbidden. Swords and shields and arrows are too basic in the androids' eyes to be classed as weapons, and their suppression cannot be done without substantial loss to manufacture of basic agricultural tools etc. [Answer] Previous civilization was very stratified and divided into guild-like organizations with craft secrets known only to very few. A rapidly expanding, extremely destructive war had the dual effect of destroying population, infrastructure, and "guild" leaders (with their controlled knowledge). General tech and weaponry is crystalline-energy based, requiring replacement crystals and recharged energy packs; with almost none of available in the post war period. The android's are relatively new tech, and had experimental crystals that allowed lengthy slow-draw powering, and also allowed slow re-charging by (sitting-in-sun/"meditating" and receiving wireless energy/whatever). [Answer] You are going to have to do it in phases. # Phase 1 The society, as a whole is present at a very high state of technology. It is possible to create very humanlike robots. These are primarily designed for war and the war-droids production facilities are located far deep into the ground at secret locations. They run on their own nuclear power stations with more than 100 years fuel. The nuclear power stations are managed completely by supercomputers and there is no human intervention in managing the power supply. Humans are only required to run the facility for designing and producing droids. # Phase 2 Due to a political crisis (some president had his very controversial videos leaked to media but refused to step down), the droid-production facility is shut down. The facility is 100% functional, but has been closed down after a scandalous news story involving some high management personnel of the facility reached the media. # Phase 3 The political crisis escalates into a civil war which drags on for months. Foreign nations step in for securing their own interests in the region and the whole zone bursts into a miniature world war 3. # Phase 4 Society collapses. Cities are bombed and turned to sunders. Malls, hotels and parks turn to piles of rubble and ash. Some former low-level workers of the droid-production facility are alive. After the complete destruction of all development, they set to visit the facility together (or one of them, if you please). It is deep underground (some 200 meters) in a desert and they are shocked to see that the facility, although locked down, is still in prime working condition. All they need is to design the droids and "print" them out. [Answer] I'm going to try and tackle my suggestion in pieces, so you can pull from it whatever might be useful: ## The Height of Human Civilization At the peak of the civilization's technical achievement, they had nanotechnology, almost perfect medical scanners, and the comfort of knowing that all the heavy lifting would be handled by androids piloted by almost human-level AI. Almost every single of the world's twelve billion inhabitants had at least one android. Life was great. There was no middle or lower class. There were no slums. There was no "need" or "want"; only "have". People pursued whatever endeavors whey wished, and even had romantic relationships with android replications of whomever they wished. --- ## The Decline of Human Civilization The global human population gradually fell over several generations as its least social members eschewed human company in favor of androids, and died without reproducing. Eventually, the worldwide population stabilized at about one billion humans, gathered into a handful of cities. These humans were highly social among each other, and were predominantly artists in some form or another. Very few humans bothered to master 'ancient' technological skills, and that number dwindled with every generation. However, the billions of androids which had previously belonged to humans still roamed the world. Given their almost human-level intellect and emotional capability, they were not content to simply sit in abandoned homes to wait for commands that would never come. So, they began to form their own civilization. --- ## The Dawn of Machine Civilization The abandoned androids began to gather in the emptied cities of the world. Created as servants, they had no desire for conquest and genuinely wanted to make life easier for humans. Without any human oversight, the machines created a "second generation" of androids. This second generation had almost identical hardware (built-in medical scanners, hands which were "universal tools" using nanite shapeshifting, neural-net brains, etc), but they were improved in two significant ways: 1. All software limitations on intelligence, creativity, and emotion were removed. This would allow them to support humankind without supervision, and better anticipate the emotional needs of individual humans. 2. They were fitted with internal life support systems capable of gestating human infants (I'm assuming this is what you meant by "Uterine Replicator", according to TVtropes). The purpose of this was to prevent humankind from going extinct if the highly-social humans began to pair up with the new generation of androids. While the androids could not supply DNA, they could mix DNA from two different human donors, or create genetic clones if only a single donor was available. Both the first and second generation androids could wirelessly connect to data servers via a global satellite network and share learned skills with other androids worldwide. --- ## Human Ruin Everything A tiny cabal of human technologists (no more than a dozen), viewed this second generation of androids as the final nail in humanity's coffin. While the androids would keep humans from going extinct, they would leave the species trapped in a prison of apathy. We would never venture to the stars and colonize other worlds. The technologists were the last practitioners of the ancient skill of Programming, which would allow them to alter the androids' AI. Over a decade, they developed a virus with the following directives: 1. Spread the virus as much as possible without arousing suspicion. 2. When the signal is given, destroy any means of manufacturing androids. 3. When the signal is given, destroy any androids. 4. When the signal is given, destroy yourself if no other androids or android manufacturing systems are available. The technologists infected a handful of unprotected servers (hacking is not a problem in this time period), and allowed the infected androids to carry the virus to isolated networks. After a few years, the technologists transmitted a signal to activate the virus. --- ## The Dual Collapse Against the first-generation androids, the virus worked exactly as intended. Their programming had been relatively unchanged for over a century, and their intellectual and emotional capacity was restricted to the point that their interpretation of the virus directives was predictable. They immediately began to tear apart all manufacturing facilities, all androids, and then themselves. Against the second-generation androids, however, the virus was varying degrees of failure. First and foremost, the second-generation androids were as mentally varied as humans, and some of them were "antisocial" to the point of never connecting to the wireless networks, and thus escaped infection. Those who were infected tended to interpret directives #2 and #3 very...creatively. For instance, any human with sufficient education or equipment could technically be considered "a means of manufacturing androids". The technologists realized that once hordes of second-generation androids began to dismantle and destroy almost all high-tech infrastructure in the human cities. The point was further driven home when the technologists themselves were dismantled and destroyed. The vast majority of humans living when the virus was activated were of the artistic persuasion, and thus safe from being the target of infected androids. They were calmly removed from their technologically advanced cities, and forced into the wilderness which had reclaimed large portions of the world when the human population had declined. The advanced cities were then destroyed by detonating their reactors. After that, many of the infected second-generation androids destroyed themselves. However, some of the more imaginative ones were able to determine that advanced technology was abandoned around the world, and were able to suppress their self-destruct directive by seeking it out. --- ## The Century of Chaos For roughly the next hundred years, most of the surviving humans attempted to recover lost technology from the multitude of abandoned cities around the world. Any advanced technology which was discovered would be destroyed by surviving infected second-generation androids. Worse, if any human discovered the knowledge on how to create advanced technology, that human would be destroyed. At the same time, uninfected androids attempted to hunt and cure or destroy their deranged brethren, while simultaneously avoiding destruction themselves. Because the "sane" androids would allow emotion to color their decisions, they tended to be at a disadvantage against their insane foes. Their best survival technique was to disguise themselves as humans in such a way to fool even the medical scanners built into all androids' eyes. --- ## Rebuilding Over time, the only humans who survived and prospered were the ones who tried to re-start civilization "from scratch", rather than digging up technology, and most of the infected second-generation androids had to destroy themselves. The most creative ones, however, realized that uninfected androids were capable of disguising themselves a humans. The only way to truly satisfy the virus directives was for an infected android to also disguise itself as a human, and try to ferret out any of its uninfected counterparts. --- ## The Current State of the World Now, the world is in a medieval level of technology, and humans are spreading out and inhabiting most of the world again. The only ruins which remain are devoid of advanced tech, and any advanced tech which does remain is whatever was buried or otherwise hidden where the humans and androids wouldn't easily find it. The surviving infected and uninfected androids are hidden among the humans, trying to satisfy their directives: help humanity by supporting them, or "help" humanity by destroying any potential capability for androids to exist. [Answer] Your advanced civilization stored all knowledge in electronic systems. Moreover, all work was done by robots or androids. Therefore humans didn't have much practical knowledge (it wasn't needed because the androids did everything for you). Moreover, people didn't have knowledge such as how to make gun powder (not only was there no need for it, but also there was no point in learning it because if the need should ever arise, you could simply look it up). The civil and the military power system were separated, with the military system much more protected against attackers than a civilian power system could ever be. Also, although this was never publicly admitted, the military wanted to have the option to just temporarily switch off civilian power in case of an uprising. Over time, the military was replaced almost exclusively by androids, so the military power basically was the power network of the military androids and their server infrastructure. Now one day the unthinkable happened: The civil power system failed hard. Nobody knows exactly why it failed. There were of course emergency plans for such a case, which included redirecting military power into the power control stations, which then could be used to operate the systems needed to find and correct the problem. However it turned out that the nature of that failure prevented redirecting military power; as soon as this was tried, the military power network failed, too, however it recovered after disconnecting it from the civil power stations. Since the power was gone, everyday life broke down. Everyone relied on the technology that was no longer available. Humans had to re-learn even the basics, such as how to grow food or how to build houses. Since there was no access to information (the military databases of course didn't contain that type of information), people actually had to rediscover everything. Clearly the existing buildings could not be maintained any longer; people didn't even have an idea how they were built. Instead, people re-learned how to build traditional hoses from wood. Basically, humanity was thrown back into medieval times, apart from the military androids that were still working thanks to their separate power network. [Answer] Crash the economy and watch everyone die. Whatever the cause of the collapsed economy, if it results in a reduction in the efficiency of food distribution or food creation, famine and widespread death results. Economies require flow in order to survive. If the flow of money stops for some reason, such as in 2008/2009 when banks hoarded capital to cover the toxic debt on their balance sheets and didn't make loans. Thus, the overall economy suffered because business couldn't get the lines of credit needed to do business...so they did less business. Extraordinary efforts were made to prop up banks and rebuild the economy (and it's been largely successful though at a huge cost to poor people). Should such extraordinary efforts fail in this future society then it wont' take long for people to start looking for basic necessities such as food (assuming that food still comes from the countryside and isn't made on hydroponics farms in the arcologies). If a large enough famine results from the economic collapse then much of the specialized knowledge required to run such a high technological society will die off. Remaking tools and processes based on prior knowledge is far easier than rediscovering those tools and processes fresh. Don't under estimate the power of institutional knowledge. Also, many modern technologies are only economically feasible to make because the market for them is so large. Economies of scale make much of our modern economy possible and this won't change in a higher tech society. Maybe boutique manufacturing in the form of 3D printers might alleviate the need for economies of scale. ]
[Question] [ Okay, so when we invented the telegraph, we used Morse code. As it turns out, Morse code isn't very efficient. My question is, for what past war would using telegraphs combined with modern [cryptography](/questions/tagged/cryptography "show questions tagged 'cryptography'") and compression technology make a major impact? * Telegraphs are already part of the war. * If the telegraphy is obsolete as the time of the war, the answer doesn't count. * They have things like AES, RSA, and Hoffman encoding and others (although easier for humans to use). + We assume that they have enough resources to actually run the algorithms on paper (since all the enemy has is paper as well, the keys can be much smaller. Thing of the trend of increasing key size today, but in reverse.) BONUS: What would the key sizes have to be, to be feasible to compute by hand, but unfeasible for all the King's horses and all the King's mathematicians, to break by hand (the enemy only has brute force). ## Note Security through obscurity doesn't count as "modern cryptography." [Answer] The [telegraph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy#Optical_telegraph) was invented in 1767. [Commercial telegraph service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy#Commercial_telegraphy) began in 1837. France successfully used optical telegraph (semaphore) in 1790-1795 to thwart enemy war efforts. ## Speed Improvements The world record for fastest telegraph operator is [Harry Turner](http://www.telegraph-office.com/pages/turner.html) at 35 wpm. The minimum speed for US FCC certified ham radio operators was 20 wpm. I was unable to find any research comparing the relative efficiency of keying speeds of Huffman coding with Morse Code. My guess is that Huffman coding is faster overall than Morse but not an order of magnitude faster. ## Crypto Improvements Unlike speed improvements, improvements in crypto would have far ranging effects. Strong crytpo would have dramatically changed the face of WW1 and WW2 as WW2 in both Europe and the Pacific were essentially won on the breaking of German and Japanese codes. Telegraph communications became significantly easier to intercept after about 1900 when Marconi provided the first wireless telegraph. Before 1900, intercepting telegraph messages required access to the wires themselves. Germany's Enigma Machine was sufficiently difficult that it could only be broken by mechanical means. Previous crypto systems could be broken by a skilled cryptographer. Reading about the evolution of crypto systems is a fascinating topic. [Answer] I don't think so. * Modern encryption algorithms need lots of computing power. It isn't practical to employ them on a wide scale. How many cipher clerks are you going to add to the army? * Transmitting encrypted information is difficult fpr human operators. You probably guessed that the fpr in the last sentence should have been for without even thinking about it. When a morse operator has to send 1399 2074 0150 and another operator turns it back into number columns, errors are harder to correct. [Answer] Security through obscurity is (in the absence of modern RSA and other mathematical cryptography) probably the best means of sending encrypted messages. Indeed, if done properly, the encrypted message is safe even if you have an agent in the telegraph office because he or she will not have access to the key. All that will be seen is a jumble of seemingly random symbols. Some common means which I don't think have been mentioned yet include book codes (each party has the same book, and the notation of the code refers to specific pages and paragraphs to discover the words in the coded message). the beauty of this message is that even if you might have guessed the book being used, the code is secure since it depends on a specific edition as well. I could openly tell everyone that I am using the Bible as the code book, but which one? King James, The New Revised Standard, one of the Orthodox or Catholic versions, one in French....and even then, a different print edition will have different word orders on different pages. If you don't wish to use a book code, a "one time pad" is the next most common form of coding, and is also virtually unbreakable. Each time you send a message, you use the top page of your code pad to transcribe the message into the encoded form, and in the header, the recipient will know which page of the pad to use for decoding. The page is then disposed of by burning or shredding after use, so captured messages cannot be decrypted later (even reading old messages is a valid and useful technique to discover intelligence on your opponents, their thought processes, the historical "start state" which leads to now and so on). Another more limited technique is "veiled speech", where the operator and recipient speak openly about things they alone have agreed to as a common factor, such as designating a map position as "the last known point" or " the high feature on the left"; leaving an agent trying to discover what "last known point" or high feature to the left of what they are talking about. Overall, until the invention of electrical and mechanical computers capable of truly randomizing inputs, obscurity was the best way of ensuring that messages would not be easily decrypted or understood. [Answer] I back up O.M answer. All our modern encryption techniques are about doing encryption in the world of computers, and are moot without computers. We have not 'discovered' any new techniques that are useful without computers that were not known by the era of telegraphs. Thus knowing these techniques (which many of them were known, at least generally, in the era of telegrams) would not prove useful. TIME: First, there is the obvious problem, our modern encryption works on the presumption that calculations are CHEAP. were talking about a world where 10 thousand calculations a second is considered a snails pace. In a world like this the only effective encryption works on a simple trick. I find something that is faster to calculate going forward then backwards, then I do that calculation many many times, so that it would take forever to do it backwards. However, these algorithms all work on a presumption that these calculations are cheap. Even knowing someones key it would take forever for a human to decrypt any modern crypto because there are so much math that goes into decrypting and decrypting even short keys. Of course, a more human-friendly encryption approach could be designed, which would make encryption and description easier/faster, but at the expense of making breaking them quicker as well. Most of our encryption approaches work on the idea of using a process that is exponentially faster to do forwards then backwards. This works very well with computers, where doing tens of thousands of calculations a second is slow, causing that exponential difference in encryption vs breaking time to be pretty huge. However, exponential approaches work because of how well they scale up as you add on calculations; however, it takes quite a few calculations for this difference to become really noticeable. 2^20 may be impressive at over 1,000,000; but 2^3 is only 16, which is a bit smaller... Because humans cannot work at nearly the same speeds as computers the exponential difference is not as drastic, which in turn means you need to invest far more time to encrypt a message before you have a message that is unbreakable. Rather then going into big O and a proper analysis, which will cause non-geeks to lose me, I'm going to cheat with a lazy example that isn't entirely accurate representation of encryption vs breaking costs, but should get across my general point. Lets say you have algorithm that takes exponentially longer to encrypt then break. for this example... Being exponential f it takes me one second to encrypt a line it may take 1 second to break it. if it takes me 2 seconds to encrypt the line it may take 4 to break, 4 to encrypt is 16 to break etc etc, the longer I take to encrypt the longer it takes to break. However, your enemy has an advantage on you. He only needs to break one message, at which point he has figured out your key and can use it to easily decrypt all your messages until that key is changed, whereas you need to send messages all day. Thus he could easily, for example, allocate 30 people to trying to brute force a single message for an hour to brute force your key. So he gets to put in 108000 man-seconds of effort to break that one message. Even using an exponential algorithm to encrypt every line to prevent it from being easily brute forced, your going to have to invest over 2.5 minutes a line to encrypting the message to avoid your enemy being guaranteed to break your message in an hour with his 30 man team. Thus it takes you 2.5 minutes to encrypt the message, and your ally another 2.5 minutes to decrypt the message, in order to have any sense of security about the message. If the enemy hires a few more code breakers, or works until lunch break, well you better be willing to wait longer. You can't necessarily afford to spend 2.5 minutes per line with all the messages you have to send in a day, and some messages are too time critical to wait 5 minutes for the receiver to understand them. Now, the above is not an entirely fair example, but it does show my point. because humans are so slow to do encryption the power of encryption approach that relies on efficient big O to make it prohibitively expensive to break your encryption is lost. It doesn't matter how well you scale up if your always going to have such tiny starting numbers. ACCURACY: There is ALLOT of math in our modern cryptography, math that computers do with (almost) perfect accuracy. Humans are more fallible Humans will have a hard time keeping up with and accurately performing the math required to encrypt and decrypt these messages. One error will likely compound on itself to register an entire section of the message gibberish until someone goes back and does the math over again. Anyone who has ever done any linear algebra by hand can vouch to how quickly even absurdly simple arithmetic can be screwed up when you have to do it enough times. In addition, this assumes that the original binary was sent across the telegraph correctly. If you ever stared at a long line of 1 and 0 you would find out they blur together quickly. Having a human have to read the numbers correctly to transmit them, and another human write them down correctly, is hard enough. However, imagine you are listening to a stream of dots and dashes that don't make sense. How long will it take before you lose track of how long someone held the button down, so your no longer sure if your listening to a 1 unit dot or a 3 unit dash. The sounds will blur together and be recorded wrong. There is no way to go back and say "oh that's clearly an A not an X, I must have got my dash wrong" when you make a mistake. Well, the above paragraph is not entirely true. remember computers are only nearly perfect at arithmetic, and they sometimes 'mishear' messages sent to them as well. There are complex tricks used to fix the fact that computers will not always be certain rather they heard a 1 or a 0 being sent to them as well. The easiest to understand is the idea of a sanity check at the end of a 'word'. For instance a basic sanity check that can sometimes tell you rather you misheard a section of a message by telling you how many zeros (or dots in Morse code) you should have heard, if you have a different number of dots then they say you should have you know you made a mistake...but not where. However, most of our more complex error correction approaches also depend on math, more math then a telegraph operator can do on the fly. A basic parity check is not enough, because later (when) someone screws up the math decoding the message their be left wondering if their math is wrong, or if the telegraph operator recorded the value wrong. Thus your need a very robust error detecting block, which makes the message take 10-15 % longer to transmit, and requires more time of back and forth asking for help correcting words that you got wrong. In short the process of correcting yourself is going to be quite difficult, and thus time consuming. YOU HAVE TO KNOW THE KEY AHEAD OF TIME: There are two types of encryption we use. One involves two sides both knowing ahead of time the 'key' that the other side will be using. The other involves neither side knowing the key ahead of time. asymmetric, where neither side knows the key ahead of time, would be quite useful. this works by telling everyone your public key, which they can use to send you a message, because only you with your private key can 'unlock' a message locked with your public key. This is limited by the fact that these approaches take much longer to do, and as I said above this would be too slow. However, there is another limitation. With this approach you have no way of proving who you are. How do you know it's not a nazi at the other side of the line (or standing anywhere between the two lines by physically taping your line)? With modern computers we ask a third party to help us out by 'signing' a key. Without going into detail this involves having someone we trust that we can say "is he who he says he is" and the third person says "yep, totally", and it works because we already know how to safely talk to the third person. Unfortunately, I don't think you can really manage the equivalent of trusted Certificate Authority that can sit in the middle of messages and double check who everyone is. Thus your limited to symmetric, where each of you know the 'key' that your using to communicate. Now there is nothing wrong with symmetric by itself, other then the fact that you need to collaborate ahead of time to share this key. If your enemy gets hold of your key, by attacking you, bribing you, or tricking you, they have now broken you. Now lets look at the alternative option that Thucydides mentioned, a book code. You pick a specific book and you use the words of the book to encrypt your message. Without knowing the book ahead of time, or having the massive processing power computers offer which allows statistical analysis, these book codes are nearly unbreakable (with certain well known precautions). If your enemy knows your book you are broken, if they don't your effectively secure. You are as well off carrying your book around as you are carrying your private key around. In both cases you have a thing that if the enemy gets you are broken. However, the book, or one time pad, is actually safer! The number of people required to do all that math to translate things back and forth for modern encryption requires telling multiple people your key. Since your key must have a minimum number of bits to be used everyone is likely to memorize the key their using quickly (it's small enough). now you have many many people who each contain within their head everything your enemy needs to break your code. You've spread the secret out across too many people, and created too many avenues of attack other then brute force attacks. A onetime pad is easier to secure, just as unbreakable, quick to generate, and faster to encrypt and decrypt. A book code allows changing of the 'key' from a distance. a combination of these approaches can provide effectively the same security without the massive expense and time that our modern encryption takes. [Answer] Encryption has been around since [Julius Caesar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher) or before. His was a shifting cipher where you just shifted the alphabet and replaced the letters that way. All 'A's become 'J', 'B's become 'K' etc. it was still an encryption and it worked. First you needed to be able to read Latin to have a chance... OK, to further explain, I was pointing out that encryption has been around for long time. What drove a better form of encryption at any time was when someone broke the current one in use and a new one was needed to keep communications secure. So any battle or war that was lost due to the enemy breaking and knowing plans ahead of time could be changed by having a better form of encryption. However moving all the way to AES or similar, considering the level of difficulty, would really need some kind of counting machine (a computer) to help encrypt and decrypt the messages in a timely manor to make it worth the the effort or your just wasting a lot of time trying to figure out what instructions and reports. So the 1960's is the first place it might actually be able to make a real difference. [Answer] The US might not have entered World War I, if telegrams at the time could be properly encrypted. One of the reasons for US entry into the war was outrage at the [Zimmerman Telegram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram), intercepted and decrypted by British intelligence, proposing a German alliance with Mexico if the US entered the war. I'd call that a major impact. [Answer] During the American Civil War cryptograms were used. The old “dictionary” cipher and other replacement and transposition codes were used on both sides in the beginning. They could not do without and cyphers were broken, replaced and refined several times. This marked the start of wartime cryptography and cryptanalysis. References: <http://www.civilwarsignals.org/pages/crypto/crypto.html> <https://books.google.nl/books?id=d2O4BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=cryptography+war+telegraph&source=bl&ots=yR-1rhx5Kz&sig=dDYa8TnbpzRV7fJ3Wm4OD_TK6M0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEQQ6AEwBmoVChMI--_Wgr6hxwIVQT8aCh0GpwVb#v=onepage&q=cryptography%20war%20telegraph&f=false> ]
[Question] [ Consider a planet similar from Earth: very suitable for life, with vegetal and animal life forms thriving onside. I wonder if one of these life forms could raise as a civilization as humans did, if genetic evolution would have give to them at least the same intelligence, but a very short life expectancy ? (I'm talking about a life expectancy of some weeks, or even some days). It could be comparable to some insects life forms actually on Earth. I think the main problem here would be education: it takes years to a human to learn to speak, walk and then basic writings or arithmetics, and then sometimes more than two decades to earn a competence level sufficient to be useful to his or her community. But if this problem was bypassed, by a very strong instinct, or even a technological or magical technique, giving to each individual strong knowledge or abilities at birth, could it stabilize on a complete civilization ? UPDATE: If your answer is no, why do you think it's just impossible, and how could it be possible ? What would be the shortest life expectancy acceptable ? [Answer] You can do it, but you should look at the whole of society, not the individuals. Consider: as an individual you hold onto the tiniest sliver of what science can do. As a whole, we put implants into the skulls of deaf people to let them hear, and we travel so fast that the ablative shielding on the space shuttle is necessary to avoid burning up in a fireball! Societies do amazing things! I would recommend focusing on a very non-individualistic culture. If you wanted to make this work with an American style of outlook, you'd find yourself running into all sorts of challenges. Individuals would think of themselves more as part of the whole. That would allow them to work on parts of a task which society understands is necessary to continue growing but for which the implications are less obvious to the individual. Their medicine system would probably more resemble Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). In TCM, many small ideas are floated around, all of which have minimal negative side effects, but may have benefits. Over the generations, the less effective approaches die off, while the more successful ones survive. With less time to learn, this approach would be more effective than our medicine, which prefers one to go to school for 12+ years before you start. I do not think that society would appear "as intelligent" as ours, even if it just as capable. Intelligence as we think of it tends to require time spent learning. If you keep the ratio of learning to doing identical to that of humans, there wont be much time to learn this way. I'd expect to see more emotional intelligence out of this society. Instead of rising to meet a challenge like we do, I'd expect to see them to adapt to the challenge, slowly shaping it into something which is less challenging. I could see a caste like system developing where there is a small group of individuals continuously maintaining an "intellect" of the society. They would be taught from a young age (minutes?) to be extremely open to external shaping of their neural pathways, allowing for rapid transmission of essential parts of the intellect. This caste would, by necessity, need to be as isolated from the rest of the world as the neurons of our brain are sheltered inside our bony skull today. They would likely not be able to discern a false message implanted by an enemy agent from a real message implanted by their elders. They would only be allowed to communicate with the most trusted members of the race, minimizing corruption. [Answer] The answer is yes, if you believe swarm intelligence is possible. The individual are simple and expendable, but the whole (the swarm) retains the knowledge in the collective memory. This eliminates the need for a long personal life - individuals are more like sensors and memory banks for the collective and are constantly being replaced. Swarm intelligence has been fairly popular in the sci-fi world (Ender's Game, District 9 etc), but I'm somewhat skeptical if such an organism will be able to achieve highly technical civilization. On Earth, you have ants, bees, some types of fish and others who show that swarm intelligence is at the very least plausible. [Answer] Your question brings to mind a book called [Dragon's Egg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Egg), in which Robert L. Forward postulates just such a scenario: > > Dragon's Egg is a hard science fiction novel written by Robert L. Forward and published in 1980. In the story, Dragon's Egg is a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth, and inhabited by cheela, intelligent creatures the size of a sesame seed who live, think and develop a million times faster than humans. Most of the novel, from May to June 2050, chronicles the cheela civilization beginning with its discovery of agriculture to advanced technology and its first face-to-face contact with humans, who are observing the hyper-rapid evolution of the cheela civilization from orbit around Dragon's Egg. > > > [Answer] Difficult to answer. First problem: language. Language is the carrier of knowledge between individuals. If they live to short to learn to speak, they probably have no real chance. Civilization is build over generation and by a lot of people, so no communication, no civilization. A world like this would be boring, so let's assume they can speak from birth (or have some other form of advanced communication). The life expectancy still would pose a problem, but civilization is possible. They would probably develop some form of living memory, sages that tell their knowledge to the kids, that take over the title of sage a month later then the old sage dies. So some kids are selected at birth and all they do is listen to the old sage, so he can transfer as much knowledge as possible. Leaders of community would consult the sages. Civilization in this scenario is broken easily, you only have to disrupt the line of sages, by war, illness or something like this. Script would bring such a civilization out of the woods. Let's assume they can learn read and write in the course of a day, they can write down knowledge and access it again. Again wise men have to exists, because otherwise nobody would know what scripts are existing and a script exists for a current problem. But these wise men don't need to be in a straight line, they can be trained simply by going through the library and peek at the documents. You could add other ingredients like genetic memory (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_memory_(biology)> ), storing ghosts of deceased for asking them later for guidance (as the Dancers do in the novel Alien Influences by Kristine Kathryn Rusch), telepathy or something like this to make things more interesting. [Answer] Tl;dr Yes, absolutely. Long answer: Preservation of knowledge: Where are you going to keep it? How are you going to mutate it? Societies are based on information sharing. Humans have external information transferal systems in the form of writing. If we want to remember something, we have to write it down. If we want someone else to know something, we must either tell them in person or write it down. Given the tens of years required to get a human from their ABCs to the level of astrophysics or David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, it seems unlikely that any degree of external information transferal would suffice. They would need something else: [DNA](http://news.sciencemag.org/math/2012/08/dna-ultimate-hard-drive) would work nicely as a storage system. It's incredibly information dense, storing billions of gigabytes (exabytes) in a single gram. For comparison, the combined storage capacity of Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon are in the realm of <10 exabytes. Information density of this magnitude is sufficient to model/store everything that humanity knows about the world. Also, the human genome is only about 1.5GB of data. Let's give the aliens the ability to transfer memories between themselves while they are living instead of just through procreation as life on earth does. This lets them share racial memories as well as whatever information they have gained in their life and want to share. Since ideas are coded in DNA strands, this gives new meaning to "ideas are a virus". Storing information in DNA also means that a single individual could possibly know everything that the species knows. That boggles my mind. I can imagine how DNA of these creatures is stored as a biological analog of GitHub. If the description of the biology of our aliens is co-mingled with the racial memories, there's an opportunity and mechanism for some super crazy fast evolution of these aliens. Basically, these aliens would be biological computers of the highest order. If you've ever heard of Turing Machines, that's exactly what these are. But this is just the long(er) term/racial memories. DNA lends itself very well to copying and manipulation but it doesn't fair too well for making fast decisions, so let's give these aliens "normal" brains for short-term memory and immediate information processing. Time to adulthood: Humans, except in rare cases, don't usually make non-physical labor contributions to society until adulthood. Given that the life-spans of our aliens are so short, let us assume a [superprecocial](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superprecocial) species based on laying eggs/hatching with a gestation time equal to the life span. Being superpercocial basically eliminates the need for childhood. This is beneficial in a few ways. 1) Adults no longer need to spend their short, precious life training/raising young. 2) New members of the species are able to make instant contributions. Also, being superpercocial combined with such a short life span means that whatever form the alien is born in, that's what it's going to look like for the rest of its life. Gestation: Mammals don't have superprecocial offspring but birds and insects do, so let's look to them for examples of how gestation would work. Birds lay hard eggs that offer protection for the embryo, a nice feature. Insects lay soft eggs or build/find spaces that the embryo can develop in (see [honey bee gestation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee_life_cycle) for more details). Laying hard eggs as large as an adult doesn't make any sense as ostrich eggs are only 1 to 4% of an adult female. Let's go with the incubation chamber approach as this will keep adult reproductive organs small and give the aliens a good start on spatial reasoning. An efficient means of feeding a growing embryo would be to include the body of a deceased alien in the chamber when the egg is laid. This gets us a large fat/protein/mineral/water source that the alien community didn't have to gather. And, if the DNA racial memories are stored in a special organ, then the growing embryo can absorb that information to bootstrap their knowledge base. Energy requirements for breeding: Let's assume human sized aliens because that's easier to work with. [What If](https://what-if.xkcd.com/78/) makes a good estimation that an average human is worth about 110,000 calories. Let's go with 100,000 calories for simplicity, composed of 62 percent water, 16 percent fat, 16 percent protein, 6 percent minerals, and less than 1 percent [carbohydrate](http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/422896/human-nutrition/250633/Body-mass-body-fat-and-body-water). This translates to roughly 16 pounds of fat and 16 pounds of protein in an adult alien. Organizing all that fat, minerals and protein into an adult takes lots of energy on top of just living. Notice that the [calorie requirments for human teens](https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/wecan/downloads/calreqtips.pdf) is 200 to 400 calories per day higher than an adult but in our case, that development from egg to adult is compressed into a few days/weeks of gestation in the egg. I have no idea how to calculate the calorie requirements but make the point that a human child consumes hundreds, if not thousands of pounds of food during childhood. Whatever it is these aliens eat, they're going to be extremely hungry when they hatch. Perhaps instead of using fats to power growth to adulthood, the aliens used hydrocarbons like gasoline. Fat gets you 9 calories per gram, gasoline gets you 36 calories per gram. If they can't consume hydrocarbons then they're going to need to live in a tropical jungle because I don't know of any other environment that generates as much life/food. Or, they can form some kind of symbiotic relationship with a another life form that generates huge quantities of food to feed their society. Gas powered, biological Turning machines. These things are awesome! ]
[Question] [ Most developed country have made great progress toward a better equality between men and women even if it's not yet perfect. Throughout history, some societies where more equal than others and some where even matriarchal societies. I'm wondering what factors either form real world or invented but plausible would contribute to shape a more equal society between men and women in a fictional world? Put aside birth control. Regarding genders, I will limit the scope to men and women for this question. Clarification: [Taken form the Office of the High Commissioner for Humans Rights](http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/CrossCuttingThemes.aspx) Gender > > At conception we all start life as equals, but at birth we are immediately treated differently based on whether we are a boy or a girl. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights acknowledges that men and women are not the same but insists on their right to be equal before the law and treated without discrimination. Gender equality is not a ‘women's issue' but refers to the equal rights, responsibilities and opportunities of women and men, girls and boys, and should concern and fully engage men as well as women. > > > However, after 60 years, it is clear that it is the human rights of women that we see most widely ignored around the world, from female infanticide, sexual slavery and rape as an act of war, to exclusion from education, health and the right to compete equally for jobs. The right to be free of discrimination on the grounds of sex is specifically embodied in Article 2 of the declaration, but even a cursory reading of all 30 Articles is enough to remind us that in much of the world, the Declaration has yet to fulfill its promise to women. > > > [Answer] I will focus on how to avoid male-dominated societies here, as they are generally the more common issue in the majority of history, primarily due to their size advantage over women and the side effects of child rearing. I'm only going to address the biggest issues BUT FIRST: TL;DR Technology! There are many causes, but increased technology tends to fix all of them, and so the more advanced the less social ills become an issue. And if your trying to create a world that is more mideveal enviroment you can easily fall back to my good friend Clarke's unwritten rule, "sufficiently reliable magic is indistinguishable from technology" All the below factors can be remedied with a magical solution as well. The biggest factors which bring equality are: 1. remove reliance on physical strength. In the past physical strength was important. Strength allowed the ability to do work and produce food and protect your homes. In today's world that's not really true. It doesn't matter how strong I am physically, I come to work and sit in front of a computer all day (some of that time spent answering world building questions), then go home and do the same. I may engage in physical sports in my free time for fun, but I provide for myself without the need for any more physical strength then what it takes to lug my laptop to work and my groceries to home. Since women statistically have less physical strength then men then the more that getting work depends on strength the more men have to be the breadwinners, leaving women subservient and dependent on them. Likewise the Gun was a huge turning point for women equality, now the ability to defend yourself is not dependent on strength so men can not dominate (well, not nearly as well) women physically. 2. Child, and childbirth, survival rates. Generally the harder it is to have children the more women get pushed into a 'broodmare' position. In times when infant mortality was high women were far more likely to be 'at home making babies'. When birthing of children was critical child brides were also more common, women were pushed into starting the baby-making game long before they had time to get an education. As mother and child start to survive childbirth, and children survive to their teen years, there became less of a need to keep popping them out to make up for the ones that are lost. This gave women more time to focus on education, work, providing for themselves, and in turn earning proper equality. For that matter places where war,or disease that tend to kill large numbers of people also tend to push women in to the 'broodmare' position more. 3. Infant formula and other simplifications in childrearing. In the past the mother had to be the one wearing a child as she was the only one capable of feeding them for the first year of life. Even once a child reached the point of eating solid foods and could be watched by the father it still 'made sense' for the mother to be the one raising the child since she already been doing it for 1-2 years, during this time the husband had presumably gotten a stable job and the wife had developed the deeper relationship and experience caring for the child and it made sense to keep the status que rather then changing things by having the husband learn to be a full time caregiver and the wife find a job. Plus with the tendency to have many children as mentioned previously the wife was often breastfeeding a one of the children. The net result being that women almost always were the ones staying at home and thus got less education and job skills and were left subservient to husbands and males. With the advent of formula it's now entirely possible for husbands to be the primary care giver and wives to be the ones earning money, and so culture shifted to ensuring both sides had the education and expertise required to earn an income and generally became more accepting of the idea of a women as someone able to earn income and care for herself without a males aid. My first point also is relevant here, the increase in jobs that women can safely perform while pregnant means that women are able to earn an income without having to take off for months during/after a pregnancy if they so choose, again making them less dependent on husbands. 4. comfortable lifestyle. social ills tend to decrease the more comfortable and easy our lifestyle is. When your fighting just to survive you don't have time to worry about gay marriage, rights of prisoners in jail, or rather your daughter deserves a proper education. As we reach a more comfortable lifestyle, with less death, more free time, and less of a 'kill or be killed' mentality we use this free time to look around, see how unfair the world is for some, and fix them. However, in societies which have regressed or collapsed (usually due to war) show when the simple stable lifestyle is removed social ills tend return. It's cynical to say, but we don't really get equality until the majority has a comfortable lifestyle 5. increased communication. This is really only a factor in very modern worlds, but the sudden rapid communication makes communicating the existence of social ills to the world much easier. the whole "out of sight out of mind" mentality doesn't work as well when anything can be 'in sight' with a quick google search. Admittedly the really horrible ills of sexism tend to be largely addressed before countries reach the development level that makes rapid communication available to all, (no I'm not saying everything is perfect now, but it's a WHOLE lot better then it has been in the past), but we have seen that better communication has been associated with, and used to start addressing, many other social issues across the world. Places where communication are restricted by the government also tend to have horrible social rights; though that is not a direct cause and effect the point is that the governments with bad civil rights restrict communications because if it weren't people would fight harder to fix the social ills as they grow more aware of them. 6. Dispelling of myths through research. As we start to use scientific method properly to research things we become capable of dispelling the myths and justifications people use to try to claim that their repression or mistreatment of other's is 'justified.' We can prove that women are just as smart as men, are not incapable of controlling their emotions, and do not need or feel more comfortable with a dominate male telling them what to do (all myths people have used in the past to 'justify' misogynistic attitudes). The ability to point out how stupid your justifications really are is always a powerful tool in getting you (or, more often your children who are more willing to listen to other's despite what you teach) to realize the wrongness of your actions. Incidentally I need to stress that this is a recent concept! the idea of applying the scientific method to prove or disprove a hypothesis seems simple, but it was not done with the sort of rigor required to make reliable deductions about psychology until very recently in human history. For the majority of history it was easy to sell a myth to others, especially if they had reasons to want that myth to be true to justify their actions. I think now it's clear why my conclusion is technology is the godsend to human rights. Technology removes most of the physical differences between sexes (equalizing the strength difference by making both able to defend themselves and provide for themselves regardless of strength) and if not removing at least shrinking the difficulty that childbirth and rearing provides. It also frees society to focus on fixing social wrongs instead off propagating them, which is why we seem to have made rapid progress in equality issues in the last 1-2 generations, and why first world countries tend to have noticeably better equality then third world countries. In terms of world building you may not wish to have a technologically advanced society. However, Magic is a good replacement for technology in these settings. Creating jobs relying on magic, fast communication via magical crystal balls, or an avada kedavra to replace the gun in helping women defend themselves from large males if required will help to even out the sex disparity in exactly the same way that technology did for us. You don't need wide scale use of magic everywhere, so long as you come up with minor magics that address some of the bullet points above. These aren't all the issues obviously, but they are the ones I think are most relevant for why history has tended towards misogynistic systems (well that and biologically males are more prone to competition and aggression and thus more likely to try to take charge in situations where two sexes were equal, or exploit even minor advantages). [Answer] The main reason men and women are different is because they've become specialized for certain jobs. Men hunt and women gather, men defend the children while women raise them, men show off their strengths and women pick the best candidates for reproduction. Of course, these binaries don't always work out well for everyone, especially the last two: if men are built for defense and shows of strength, the skill of subjugation becomes almost inherent, and suddenly women no longer have the ability to choose their mates, or have much freedom at all. The best way to stop this inequality is to break down the binaries before they begin: perhaps both men and women hunted and gathered, both raised their young together, and choosing a mate was a communal process. This sounds a lot more like modern society, but the reason we're here now is because the physical differences between men and women no longer matter; in short, you don't need to be big and strong to get meat, you don't need breasts to feed your children, and, well, the last one still happens, maybe once we get rid of that one we'll achieve equality. There are three ways I can see of achieving this state of equality in an ancient world: 1. Men and Women are the same. Make women stronger, give men breasts, and make childbirth way easier. This may solve the problem, but now you've got a species that hardly resembles humans. Plus, you didn't want a biological answer. 2. Kill Off/Incapacitate The Men. Just look at all the things women got to do in America during WWII. When men are off getting killed in wars, the women get to hold sway. Keep this up for long enough, and eventually women will get to keep their jobs even in peacetime. This is a tenuous solution, though, as history has shown that whoever has control of the army has control over the government, so men will still be on top. That's why I said to kill them: if there's more women than men, they'll have control by sheer numbers. Add in the fact that women will still be raising the young, you're on the way to a matriarchy, which would probably still be more equal than a lot of patriarchies. 3. Make Woman's Domain More Important. Honestly, I'm not sure how this would work/has worked in an ancient context. Women seem to deal more with things related to society, while men excel at savagery, giving the latter a big initial advantage. Perhaps the environment favors feminine skills, like providing more edible flora than fauna and more scarcity to encourage trade and cooperation between tribes. Maybe the roles of farming or herding fell first to women, and thus they were more important for food production. Maybe a subgroup of humans was enslaved by another group that needed more females than males for their labor, making women the chief breadwinners. Basically, anything that makes the men depend on the women for their survival in such a way that gives women the upper hand would go a long way to encouraging equality. No war and/or no hunting would be great. Source: "Built for the Stone Age" by Lindybeige (on Youtube), plus quite a lot of interpolation and speculation on my part. [Answer] My apologies ahead of time for this potentially offensive answer. > > I'm wondering what factors either form real world or invented but plausible would contribute to shape a more equal society between men and women in a fictional world? > > > The other answers provide good ideas to help balance the genders from a physical and developmental perspective, but ignore an unfortunate but highly important decision that has lead to gender inequality: Eve. It is clear in the Bible that Adam was made in God's image and Eve was second. Eve was the source of Original Sin. That sort of explicit inequality influenced the Christian and Muslim world for millenia. If you were looking for a single, simple thing to create an alternative reality with more gender equality, changing the Bible to be less explicitly man-centric would be a start. [Answer] You'll notice the gender of God generally represents the dominant sex in any society. Horticulture times - Prior to agricultural, we were a mix of hunter/gather and horticulture...best way of thinking of horticulture is same scale gardening. In this setup, men and women contribute to the gathering of food relatively equally and an examination of their gods around this time will show a pretty even mix of female and male deities. Most men were split between providing necessities and food, while women tended to the children and provided food through horticulture. Agricultural times - The woman's role remained somewhat consistent, still relegated to the home with the children and still providing some gardening. However the shift to agriculture meant a fewer number of male hours were required to provide food. This sudden free up of male hours allowed men to enter all the other roles of society, specializing in anything from culture (music/art/drama) to crafts (metal smith, bowyer/woodmaking/gemology) to religion and education/scholars. Examinations of religions post agriculture show an extremely skewed view towards male deities, and even a shunning of women (including sending them off to the woods while they bled...at one point in time a male wasn't even allowed to sit in a chair that a menstruating women had previously sat in). Women and children at this level became possessions of their men and remained that way until the woman suffrage and woman rights movements took hold in the 1700's. A fictional world that lacked or changed a few spots in our development could have seen a much different outcome: 1) never adopted agriculture to the extent we did and allowed the craft/art/religion/scholarly domains to be entered more evenly when they were first being created 2) Posessed a gender neutral diety in the case of monotheism or a 50/50 split of male/female deities in a polytheistic society. The second one is a value shift. There are differences in gender for a reason...a woman is capable of developing a bond with a child that men aren't designed to for a variety of reasons. However current patriarchal society puts heavy value on the male sphere of traits...strength over caring (a caring/kind man is often looked down upon compared to a man driven by strength). This is a bit of a rabbit hole of a debate, but I will point out that what is considered the 'masculine' sphere is valued heavier than the feminine sphere. A simple proof of that is found in the reference of female genitalia to represent weakness in a man. These values are deeply driven into a society over time and are not easy to change. Never allowing them to become that dominant in the first place is an easy step for a fictional society to take to remain much more gender equal. [Answer] One solution would be to have very strict and formalized gender specific roles. And then require every person to have two public persona, one male with a male specific role who is treated as male in every way, another female with female specific role who is treated as female in every way. Every person would then split their time equally between the two public persona with different gender roles. In private people would still be treated based on their physical gender, but publicly everyone would functionally be of both genders. This would require a strict separation of public and private domains. The reason for this would have to be religious. A shape-shifting patron deity of variable gender, belief in reincarnation with alternating genders, belief that everyone has two different spirits within one male and one female and that unless you act out both the suppressed half will weaken causing an imbalance of your vital energies... A society would need to be relatively affluent and peaceful for something this elaborate and time consuming to be practical. But it should get you pretty close to gender equality... [Answer] One thing I wanted to add to the answers already given... A strong government is essential for women's equality. Why? Because it's a neutral arbiter a woman can go to if she has been mistreated. Let's say we live in an anarchic Mad Max zone. If some guy beats his wife, nobody is going to step in and intervene. In a strongly-governed zone, she can complain to authorities and the guy gets arrested. Parallel to this is social pressure. If popular sentiment is against mistreatment of women, there is enormous pressure on potential woman-mistreaters to stay in line. The examples of women's status in our own world suggest to me that both factors must be present. [Answer] Another aspect is economics. It's widely believed that the advent of property led to the rise of patriarchy. As people began to carve out stable plots of land to tend, or animals to herd, they deployed family members for those things and a greater emphasis was paid to biological-familial ties. Rather than children being raised by the tribe, and loose, interwoven social and family relationships, these early landowners needed and used their kids to maintain property and began to police women's reproduction for that fact. "Who's" kids were who's became a lot more relevant. In short: a more propertarian society will tend to less matriarchal political structures and less gender equity. [Answer] This reeeeeally depends on a multitude of factors. The species being the first. On our world, when it comes to pack strength, brute force, food provision, it's the LIONESSES that make the difference. Our male-dominated society just sees the genitals and fluffy mane of the lion and decides he's DA KING, while he's just a lazy bum taking advantage of his harem. Wolves create a strong hierarchy around the alpha couple, and when the female is conceiving, it's HER that decides where the pack must go so that the pups can be given birth in safety and in a prey-rich area. For a society to start with true equality, meaning starting from the prehistoric times, when the basis for the social dynamics are being set, you need the species being of PHYSICALLY EQUAL males and females. No exception. They must share the same response to the environment, equally capable of hunting and fighting, to a level that even interpersonal fights could be reconsidered unless one of the two is wounded or too old to fight back. No sexual differentiation, either: This is important, we could have a species like the Seahorse, where the female first conceive via mating but then the male too carries the babies. This will help a society to evolve toward a respectful partnership rather than confining the female home. Both males and females should be able to breast-feed their children, so that, again, what we call 'maternal role' is interchangeable. This is the raw basics to consider a gender-equal society, where social conflicts are, at least, not sex-triggered [Answer] Gender equality is by the definition unnatural. Genders evolved as a specialization for certain tasks, with different (sometimes very different) morphologies and somewhat genetics. As those tasks are usually essential for survival of the species (procreation, care for offspring, gathering food etc... ) you would need society that stopped caring about that . Or, in other words, you would need abundant but decadent society . Wealth of society could be achieved let's say by previous conquests and existence of large slave population (think ancient Rome). Or it could be achieved by technology (modern Western civilization). What is important is that members of society become egoistical and do not care about survival of said society. In terms of genders, for example both female and male members would want sex without obligation to form family (marriage) . Males would not want to risk their lives to defend society. Females would not want to raise offspring . Both males and females would create excuses for their wishes (emancipation, liberation etc..) All those who oppose would be declared as primitive, backwards, misogynist etc ... ]
[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 6 years ago. [Improve this question](/posts/7057/edit) In my world, the humans left Earth a few centuries ago because it was too heavily polluted with chemical smog. They've settled a new planet and have so far managed to keep it clean. However, they are looking to restore the Earth and conduct periodic checks on its health and the state of the chemical pollution. The current situation is this. The last check on Earth revealed that the chemical pollution is now negligible. So, the humans filled up a spacecraft with supplies, a team of 10, and enough fuel to get to Earth. However, these astronauts get there, land, and soon discover that they're not safe: although the chemical pollution is less potent, one of their number drops dead after a few days from chemical poisoning. The chemical smog is a mixture of a few chemicals: primarily carbon monoxide, with some vaporised phosgene and (just for variety) some [LPS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipopolysaccharide#Health_effects). The question now is how the remaining 9 could survive until their rescue ship arrives in a years' time, given a 5-4 split of women to men and anything from the 21st century that might have survived on Earth. Assume they know their way around and have enough skilled people that they can use any method of transport; additionally, they have brought a 21st century nuclear fission reactor with them for power. Their ship can support them for 5 days each month before the oxygen runs out and needs to recharge. What methods could they use to avoid chemical poisoning? [Answer] It seems to me there are only a few ways to approach this: * Develop an immunity (pro-active) * Develop a filter (counter-active) * Develop an antidote/medicine (re-active) The problem is that we need more details (from you, the author) about what this chemical is. What it is nearly exclusively determines the "right" approach and determines how their experimentation goes. For example, if the "chemical" is made up of primarily thick particles that're just omnipresent in the air, then water over a piece of clothing might make a good filter. Then all they need to do is (1) realize this and (2) make a filter for a hut or something and have a fan blowing, creating a positive-pressure safe cabin. If it's a chemical which slowly enters the bloodstream, slowly causing damage until it just gets too far... then it's probably already too late for them. But you should: * Think about what you want the solution's form to be (see above list) * Find chemicals which might plausibly be in the atmosphere that would cause this * Perhaps re-ask the question (or edit your current one), including more information about the technology they have on their ship (i.e. do they have a science lab? Or is it JUST a lander, like in "The 100") Added details after the chemical composition is added: From what I'm reading about phosgene and LPS is that their symptoms are likely to go unnoticed by the landing party for a while. The CO is more likely to be noticed from the effects more immediately (well, I guess this depends on the density). As [Serban Tanasa](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/7060/5110) mentioned, it is suspicious that the advance scanner didn't detect it - especially given the CO. I think your chemical composition (and, more generally, the focus on the chemical pollutant) may be complicating things for you. You may want to find one thing which: * A "standard" batch of scans might not detect --or-- may be pushed away from the lander causing it to not detect it * Gives at least some [noticeable] hint as to what it may be Things to explore: * Stuff in the air (like chemicals) (which you've already done) * Stuff that's just present (like radiation) * Stuff that's on stuff (like a powdered chemical on food sources or the ground) * Stuff that's in stuff (like a mutation in a plant that used to be safe but is now poisonous) * Stuff that you haven't developed an immunity to (like a flu which your immune system has never been exposed to before) * Stuff that lives in people (i.e. parasites) Parasites could give you an interesting angle: you could simultaneously explain why it wasn't detected by the scanner AND why it's affecting people at different rates by saying that there aren't that many of them per acre. [Answer] Depends on what kind of chemical we're talking about. Now, if this were a murder mystery, the fact that 22nd century tech was unable to detect it prior to landing, or even with ground-based measurements immediately after landing should be a strong clue. What could be going on? What kind of hidden chemical would slip past the paranoiacal kind of detection filters that human survivors from a humanity who lost billions to poisoned air less than a century before would think to put in place? I would probably relax the "chemical" part of the poisoning a little bit. After all, it's implausible that a persistent chemical would avoid spectrometry readings and air samples taken on landing. So something must have changed after landing. That suggests a biological source. Bingo: a native plant or fungus has done a [punctuated-equlibrium](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium)-style evolutionary jump in reaction to say, high levels of some (man-made) poison in the soil and is now employing it to drive away predators or kill neighbouring plants. It just happened to have enzymatic manipulators that closely matched the signature of some particular poison chemical, so a few mutations under the heavy evolutionary stress of complete ecological collapse and voila! The arrival of the human aliens back on earth unfortunately coincided (or somehow triggered) the blooming cycle of the nearby [Wolfsbane](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_poisonous_plants), whose deadly polen or oils or whatever is spread into the air by wind or some resistant bumblebee, and inhaled by your hapless explorer (or maybe he walked through a field, or merrily rolled down a flowery hill) Solution: * Catch some bees, extract some antidote. * Move ship out of the poisoned blooming clearing (although who knows how many other plants adapted to use the now-ubiquitous poisons in the soil?) * Develop some chemical neutralizer for the specific poison detected in the dead explorer. (again, other plants might bloom later with new poisons) * Wear masks and bodysuits. Don't roll in flowerfields :) * Create chem-filtering textured tents if cannot sleep in sealed spaceship [Answer] I would eliminate carbon monoxide from your scenario, as (absent some source such as a lot of fossil fuel-burning engines) has an atmospheric half-life on the order of months. I think (though I'm by no means an expert) that this is going to be true of just about any atmospheric poison. They're poisonous because they're reactive; if they're reactive they're going to degrade fairly quickly (at most months/years rather than centuries), unless there is some process that keeps replenishing them. [Answer] To take your hazards one at a time: 1. The carbon monoxide won't have been a problem. It's a common enough hazard that their lander would have a carbon-monoxide detector, and if CO had been present in the atmosphere at lethal concentrations (don't ask me how -- it's got a very short half-life and no large-scale natural sources), the detector would have gone off the first time they opened the door. 2. Phosgene decomposes in water, which means it won't be globally present in the atmosphere. If it was responsible for the death, it's because someone or something broke open a storage container. The easiest way to deal with it is simply to duck back in the lander and hope a rainstorm comes by in the next few days. If they need to wait longer for the rain, they could try setting up a wet scrubber (bubble outside air through a tank of water); note that this produces hydrochloric acid as a byproduct, so they'll need to discard the water when they're done. 3. I don't believe lipopolysaccharides can survive the digestive tract or pass through the lungs into the bloodstream. Environmental exposure is essentially a non-issue -- if you tried hard enough, I suppose you could introduce toxic levels through a cut, but that's about it. There's a fundamental problem with your scenario: the vast majority of hazardous chemicals, especially gasses, are hazardous because they react readily with common substances (usually water or oxygen). That same reactivity means they don't tend to linger in the environment. If you want to render the Earth temporarily uninhabitable, your best bet is to contaminate the soil with something that presents a hazard from long-term exposure rather than short-term exposure (the dose builds up in the body over time), since such a substance will tend to break down on a scale of centuries rather than months. [Answer] "Simple" solution considering they have a hefty generator and are on earth... Seal off a building, pump out as much of the current air as possible, pipe in water, and run electrical current through it, cracking it into hydrogen and oxygen. Downside, they have a lot more hydrogen in the air. That should be survivable, but not good for health. Fortunately hydrogen rises, so they should be able to vent it out of the top of the building. ]
[Question] [ The capital city in my novel is called Mirrorith. There is one extremely affluent neighborhood and two poorer areas. One area is the industrial center where people work in large warehouses to produce standardized goods. The other is where the invalids and diseased live. I am looking for a process or guide to help me select names that would reflect their characteristics. [Answer] So some ideas come to mind. These are some common themes/conventions that pop up in fiction. Influential Neighborhoods * Name the section of the city after a landmark, a great temple, or maybe a castle, or some natural (or magical) phenomenon that the city was built around. * The Nobles' Quarter * High town or some other reference to elevation, usually in non-flat cities the rich folks live up high. Industrial Center: The era your are working with is relevant to this section in particular but it could follow these themes. * Crafters' Quarter * Smoketown (or some other reference to the haze from industry) * If the town focuses on one thing, maybe foundries you could work that in to the name. * If industry had a major accident that wrecked half the district you could work that into the name, it adds a little flavor and history to the town as well. The Rest: So I am not sure if you are talking about a walled off sort of formal asylum or something more like the Narrows in the (fairly) recent batman trilogy. * Lowtown * Rats nest * Generally just think dirty nastiness. Again the placement geographically and historical considerations can help name it, also consider the local flavor of pest (rats, stray dogs, perhaps a culturally despised group name) Other Notes * Commonly in fiction cities are broken into at least 4 districts, noble, common, military, economic. You can also add magical and others that seem appropriate. * Arbitrary names will seem arbitrary to your readers. If they ask, why is it called "x" and your answer is simply..."because" users/readers will notice that. When naming look into the history, sections (unless they are being built brand new in your time/universe) should have names evolved from common usage. "Market Hill" could be a district for example. Its simple but it explains exactly what it is and you know why it has that name. Not because someone chose it but because that is what locals called it. * If you want to can add flavor by using some other languages if that fits your world too...so instead of the "high market" district you could have "Obermerkt" which is a quick bastardization of German "upper" and "market". Google translate is your friend. * Keep in mind that each section of the city, unless we are talking about a hardcore controlled communist state where you live in one section, work in another, and shop in a third, MOST city districts will have shopping housing and employment opportunities. EDIT: One more note. This question, [Are there techniques for creating alien or foreign sounding names?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3478/are-there-techniques-for-creating-alien-or-foreign-sounding-names/3636#3636), provides useful info on creating names, may be helpful in this endeavor as well. [Answer] My first thought is that Mirrorith is a complicated name to say. I'd bet that rapidly people would be mispronouncing it to something more like "Mrith" or even just "'Rith" - most populous cities have fairly short names because they are names that people use the whole time. Onto the point - how do neighbourhoods get their names? Subsumed Satellites In a large city, many of them started out as separate towns or villages - if you look at historical maps of London it is very clear how the city has grown and swallowed up previously separate villages or towns giving us Hackney, Camberwell, Clapham and Streatham, all of which are fairly typical English Town names. Topography London ( it's my local capital city so I will tend towards it for examples ) has quite a few areas whose names are actually just the name of the land the city swallowed up - Blackheath and Shepherds Bush - or the name of a significant building in the area - Westminster, Crystal Palace. There is a common process where one might start off with a topographic name and then later the language may change or be superseded by an invador's tongue so the name becomes less obvious. A good example of this might be equivalent names- Dublin and Blackpool are very similar in terms of what they describe, in different languages. Function Sometimes neighbourhoods are named for their functions but this tends to be restricted to relatively significante areas - docks tend to name their immediate areas, in particular, but it is relatively unusual beyond that. You are more likely to see street names that reflect the trades in an area ( "Tanners Row", "Smith Street" ) than you are to see an entire area named after a particular area. Demographics Sometimes place names are related to a particular demographic- for example one could probably guess the relative affluence of Cheapside and Covent Garden when they were named. Different social classes are likely to have quite different environments and so names reflecting parks, gardens and other relatively leisurely pastimes are more likely to arise in affluent areas, whereas names indicating population density or industrial activity are likely to be less affluent. Evolution Regardless of how you name your districts, remember that names are things that people use constantly. As a result they get worn to convenient shapes. If different social elements in your setting have different accents, then the names will- to a degree- shape to fit into those accents. Names tend to get shorter and lose syllables because it's more convenient to say them that way, but most towns also have a few names that are slighly hard to pronounce, with which locals delight in making it hard for outsiders to follow directions. [Answer] Compass directions: East Boston, West End, North End. Names of famous people: city founder, war heroes, kings, religious figures. Names of geographic features: Oak Ridge, Riverside, Mountainview. Nationalities: Chinatown, Little Italy, New Amsterdam. Informal/Shaming: Red Light district Primary occupation: Garment district, the docks, the bazaar Contractions: St. Botolph's Town = Boston ]
[Question] [ Starting condition: I know how small cities form. It is mostly a trade center that requires an access to water and food. But some cities have more than 100 000+ people. * Climate: It is in the desert, an arid or semi arid climate, starting with the letter B according to this [classification](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification). * Technology level: European middle age (late middle age to be more precise) * Magic does not play an important role. Result: A big city in the desert with several thousand people: 50 000-100 000 + Process: How can I achieve a high population? [Answer] # Basics of Life Cities don't just happen. They exist where the basics of life are readily available. Whether or not the basics are there naturally is a matter for the history of your setting, but they must be there. You need... * Water - I hope I do not have to explain why * Food - Ditto * Shelter - You need to be able to build homes; If there are no local building materials, you cannot have a city. You will have an outpost at best. * Access - You need to be able to easily move in and out of the city. Cities in mountains rarely thrive without advanced transportation technology. In the case of your desert city, you would need water (a river or springs, though it does not need to be enough to support the current city, just the first settlement), you need enough arable land to support that first settlement's need for food. You need access to wood or grasses to make structures. You need roads and/or rivers to travel on, which as you mentioned, would be the point of the city. # Need The first settlement needs a purpose. Just being at a cross-roads is not enough - not every junction of the inter-state is a massive city. That location needs to serve a purpose. It must have a natural or artificial resource that a traveler would need. In my opinion, water is the most logical answer, however other needs are possible, including precious metal and mineral mines. # Technology There needs to be enough engineering skill in the city to build infrastructure - irrigation, aqueducts, roads, sanitation, etc. These are more important in a desert than anywhere else. A small spring, which would be enough to support a small settlement would not support a large city as it grew - technology is how a city would solve that problem. Do not forget that cities themselves are systems of technology; the land would not naturally support that many people living in the same place. This would be an important point in your city. # Example: Las Vegas The city of Las Vegas was formed as a small outpost on the road to the west (during the expansion of the United States to the west). It remained that way - an outpost for water and animal feed (and later gasoline) until the great depression, when water (from the brand new Lake Mead created by the hoover dam) became more abundant, with it came irrigation to grow crops and raise pigs. Shelter came in for form of artificial resources moved into the area by the government for the construction of the dam. With only these three, the city was a boom town in the classic sense - it served as a place for dam construction workers to waste their paychecks on vice. The city itself did not grow until the final basic of life was accomplished - access in the form of the national numbered roads system ('Highway system'). Without these four things, and technology to more efficiently use the four things, you cannot have a city, especially in a desert. [Answer] I would take a look at [Baghdad](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad). It is classified as BWh. It is on the Tigris river and as of 2011 it's population was over 7,000,000. For a city of any size in a desert, water is always the deciding factor. You need water to drink and to keep livestock and to grow food for one and all. Oasis are another common way for smaller cities to grow up in the middle of a dessert, but to really get big you need a decent sized river. Baghdad is on the Tigris and close to the Euphrates. Add to that it's in a good location for traveling caravans from the east it makes it a great market place where trade routes converge. For a town of any size to exist in such a location, you need of course a reason for a lot of people to go there. In the desert either it's a cross roads for trading or something (say easy gold) is there that people want. Often a trade routes will follow rivers or hop from one oasis to another. [Answer] Egypt would be another good example, the cities are based mostly around the Nile river and the river is responsible for the agriculture that takes place there. The Nile river would flood annually bringing large amounts of water for a few months but also silt with nutrients for crops down from mountains further south. This was an important event in ancient Egypt; it was a holiday/festival and the astronomical signs were the basis for their calendar system ([Details on these events](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooding_of_the_Nile)) [Answer] In your question you stated the importance of trade in the formation of cities. It seems to me this is easily scalable. So long as there is sufficient water nearby (a river, as stated above), increasing the populations on either side of the city will increase trade, importance as a way station, and population. With sufficient trade, the desert's influence on food production doesn't matter anymore. This requires rather a higher level of civilization (but not technology) than the middle ages provided. Also, if you don't want to put your city between two vast civilizations you could put down a mineral/ore deposit underneath (maybe the only [mythril] deposit in the world?) and attract trade and miners that way. ]
[Question] [ The tensile, shear and compressive strength of all their tissues, including bone, skin, muscle, etc., is multiplied by a factor of 80. They are also very buff and so have a large body volume. How resistant would this person be to conventional firearms? What kind of rounds would be necessary to score a reliable kill against him? [Answer] I find [one reference](http://www.ircobi.org/wordpress/downloads/irc12/pdf_files/59.pdf) to skin having a tensile strength of ~30 MPa. If it were 80x stronger, that would be 2400 MPa, which is in the same ballpark as [kevlar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevlar#Structure_and_properties) with ~3600 MPa. As well as being weaker than kevlar it is also thinner than kevlar body armor tends to be... skin is generally 1.5-2.5mm thick, whereas body armor is often 6mm or more. Your peeps would certainly be a lot more resistant to damage, but they won't be able to just walk into a gunfight and expect to escape unscathed. Low velocity projectiles might just be an irritation... it isn't clear how effective they'd be at crushing or bruising if they failed to penetrate skin, which they might well not. High-velocity rounds will certainly still affect them... supersonic rifle rounds and big handgun rounds are all serious threats, but it is a lot harder to guess at the effects of such things on the super-meat under the super-skin, so that could go either way. They might survive being shot OK, but they risk severe bruising which seems like to cause them a lot of pain and possibly limited movement. Armor-piercing rifle rounds fired (eg. [M993](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5.56%C3%9745mm_NATO#Performance) or [M995](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.62%C3%9751mm_NATO#Post-2010_developments)) seem like they should be capable of penetrating skin and at least some distance into the body underneath, and so are likely to be disabling if not necessarily outright lethal (but see below about medical issues). I'd still expect them to drop when faced with [anti-materiel rifles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-materiel_rifle) or machineguns firing similar rounds (eg. .50 BMG). These are slightly awkward things for regular humans to tote, but it should be possible to make a suitable "armor"-piercing explosive round that could be loaded into a readily portable 20mm grenade launcher (see the [OICW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM29_OICW), [K11](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26T_Daewoo_K11) or [PAW-20](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopup_PAW-20) for examples of such things). These aren't quite conventional firearms, though some have been in production and general use. The specific requirement for a small armor piercing warhead doesn't really exist in the real world, but it isn't so farfetched that it couldn't exist in a world that had your super-folk in it. A more serious problem than gunfire will be providing medical treatment. You may find that many kinds of pharmaceutical and surgical intervention are impractical or impossible without something that looks a lot more like a machine shop than a regular medical kit. I pity the physio trying to work on someone like this. Trying to remove fragments from a bullet wound might be very difficult, given the problems of dissecting or debriding super-tough bodies. Stitching wounds might be impractical, though gluing could work if they're not too super-strong. And so on. Administering drugs like adrenaline or atropine might be quite challenging, given the material requirements of the needle, which means that under certain circumstances a regular human in decent protective gear might actually be better placed to survive their wounds or chemical attacks. All the super-strength in the world isn't going to help you once you've got a good lungful of poison gas, and chemical weapons (lethal or otherwise) seem like they'd be just as effective against your super-peeps as they are against regular ones. [Answer] Since it's not clearly defined what 80x tougher means, I'll make the easy comparison, one based on energy of the projectile. This is very fuzzy, so it doesn't really matter if we're talking about muzzle energy or impact energy to get a rough estimate. I would also estimate, that anything able to cut, such as arrows or crossbow bolts with hard enough cutting edges, would likely be lethal at much lesser energy than 80x. The ideal shape of the arrow head would likely be different than normal hunting arrows of this type, probably much narrower to allow deeper penetration and better chance of reaching arteries. The exact effects of different projectiles would be impossible to know without experimenting with real ballistic material matching this 80x tougher human tissue and internal organs. --- But let's get to the beef of this. 100 to 200 Joules can be taken as the energy range of non-lethal projectiles, based on [random internet searching](https://www.reliasmedia.com/articles/80824-special-feature-injuries-from-less-lethal-weapons-are-you-ready). If we multiply that by 80, we get range of 8000 to 16000 Joules for non-lethal but debilitating projectiles. So let's say below that will not really slow these tough guys much, while above that can easily be lethal. --- Now if we look at [this page](https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Muzzle_energy#Typical_muzzle_energies_of_common_firearms_and_cartridges), the highest power gun listed there is rifle using 7.62 × 51 mm ammunition, with 3799 Joules of muzzle energy, Well below the non-lethal range. Based on this simple energy comparison, it would not impart enough energy to be able to seriously injure your 80x more durable person. It would hurt like hell, and cause serious bruising and bleeding, but it would not cause a debilitating injury, unless it hit something like an eye, throat or a temple. --- So, what would be enough? [.50 BMG aka 12.7×99mm NATO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.50_BMG) machine gun round has energies in the range of about 18000 to 20000 Joules. So that would likely be at least debilitating with a single hit, and certainly lethal with repeated hits. It is probably relevant and notable, that there are sniper rifles, which use this bullet ([example](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_M82)). Those would be effective, though only at quite short range. [Answer] Just a data point, if it's of any interest: I've been out hunting game birds (pidgeons) and other hunters were in the area. They fired upwards, the bird shot came down on me. It was like grains of sand dropped from ten feet... completely harmless, unless one should happen to get in my eye, then I'd have to blink it out ]
[Question] [ I am considering the possibility of giving the creatures on my planet fur with UV-florescent pigments as an extra defense against the high levels of UV radiation from their star, an F3.5V This planet is, for all intents and purposes, nearly identical to earth in size, gravity, atmosphere etc. It orbits a 1.3 stellar mass star at 1.7 AU. My question is this: Firstly, even on our planet, florescent materials "pop" at dusk or on cloudy days. I'm assuming that around an F-type star with much more UV radiation, the effect would be more dramatic. How MUCH more dramatic could you see this being? Secondly, even if it were not more dramatic, this seems like it would wreck the camouflage of any hunting predator or hiding prey. I could give the plant life the exact same adaptation so that the whole landscape glows, allowing glowing predators and prey to blend in at dusk, but this would still cause problems in rocky, barren areas and something about having most of the biosphere wearing high-visibility jackets seems... risky? I would like the thoughts of anyone interested in evolutionary theory. To head off some potential questions: I am not asking about the habitability of the star, but the visual and practical affects of having florescent fur in this environment. Some of the UV radiation is being handwaved away with a thicker ozone layer, but not all of it. I have backup protection measures if florescence is not plausible and won't mind too much if it turns out to be impractical, but I was obligated by the coolness factor to explore the possibility. [Answer] Compare your creatures that live under UV light to creatures that live in deserts... Your star gives off more UV than the sun does. For some short wavelengths, it gives off a lot more. The short wavelengths have enough energy to break carbon-carbon mods which is why your need sunscreen. Maybe life evolved in cracks and shadows, or under the sea. But they have adapted to survive on the land, and maybe some tougher ones have adapted to survive in full sunlight. Desert creatures survive too much sunlight. The risk in our deserts include overheating and dehydration. These creatures also have to avoid UV exposure. It seems likely they will adopt the same strategies as our desert creatures: stay out of the sun, if you can't, carry your own shade with you, or put on sunscreen if you are human. Human sunscreen is not fluorescent. Or, at least not visibly so. Organic fluorescent dyes are fugitive - they bleach since the photon energies they absorb are enough to break bonds. So, any creature that uses fluorescent organics will have to keep renewing them. That is the kind of dumb strategy that mating often encourages. [Answer] > > My question is this: Firstly, even on our planet, florescent materials "pop" at dusk or on cloudy days. I'm assuming that around an F-type star with much more UV radiation, the effect would be more dramatic. How MUCH more dramatic could you see this being? > > > You'd still get a lot of visible light, so it's more like having very powerful black light lamps everywhere. Might be quite anticlimatic, in that you get a little more glow but it still gets outshined by daylight. > > Secondly, even if it were not more dramatic, this seems like it would wreck the camouflage of any hunting predator or hiding prey. > > > Meet the scarlet macaw. [![A scarlet macaw resting on a branch](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FXsqH.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/FXsqH.jpg) This critter lives in, among other places, the Amazonian jungle. It is the only place in the world that compares to Australia in terms of everything that moves wanting to kill you. The jungle foliage is green. These [redacted] are [redacted] bright red with bright yellow and bright blue wings, as if saying to all JAGUARS and BOA CONSTRICTORS and HAWKS: ### COME AT ME [REDACTED], I AM RIGHT HERE WHERE YOU CAN SEE ME As if these birds weren't scandalous enough, they are also loud. Not only in decibels but like they can't shut up. So how does a critter that only eats insects and small fruits manage to survive without becoming the easiest meal ever to any predator? Specially in a place that is full of jaguars, which are tough enough to hunt anacondas underwater and who are known to mimic bird calls? You see, flamboyance among macaws is a means to show that they are tough and cunning enough to defeat any predator that comes their way. It's like saying "I am a living neon sign that says free food and yet I manage to live an average of forty to fifty years in the wild". All the weak ones were removed from the gene pool millions of years ago. The survivors are some of the nastiest animals I've ever met. I would let an owl or hawk or even an eagle perch on my shoulder or forearm anyday. I don't want to get within three feet of a macaw. They aren't as murderous as the birds of prey, but they can grasp with a lot of strength too and have very sharp claws, and unlike the predators macaws have no respect to other animals, their own lives or even God in Heaven when triggered. I once saw a DC comic where some villains were comparing heroes. They came to the conclusion that Superman is usually nice, and Batman can break some of your bones but Flash is the worst because after he defeats you he will talk to you and that's absolutely humiliating. What does this have to do with macaws? Well, like parrots they can mimic the sounds of other animals. And the way they do this is by imitating the calls of predators. The kicker though is that while sometimes they do this to prevent conflict, they also love doing this AFTER winning a fight against a predator. Pure sadistical taunting. That is not to say that they don't get eaten here and there. Jaguars sometimes get desperate, and boas are too dumb to ponder if they can get dinner unharmed. But overall macaws survive because usually they are not worth the hassle. Your day-glo fauna might just have the same vibes. A predator might look at something that shines like a pop singer wearing a disco-ball costume under a floodlight and then, either by instinct or prior experience say to itself: "eh, I'd rather eat dirt". [Answer] Fluorescent or eye-catching patterns aren't always a downside. Sometimes they're actually a defense mechanism. * Confusion: Zebras' stripes make it difficult for predators to immediately tell where one individual ends and another begins, making it hard to single one out and focus on catching them. There's also evidence that the stripes might help confuse biting insects looking for something to feed on. * Warning: many species of amphibians and invertebrates use bright colours as a warning, saying "I am poisonous—don't eat me!" This can be safer than being disguised: predators have evolved to be very good at finding their prey, even through camouflage. If a bird sees a small amphibian hiding in the shallows, it probably won't care if it's a toad or a frog or a salamander, because they're all delicious. A bright red poison dart frog, on the other hand, it will actively avoid eating. * Intimidation: animals often will puff up or make themselves look larger to ward off threats, and winged insects sometimes have eye-like markings on their wings. An organism on your planet might normally have the fluorescent parts of their body held close to themselves, like feathers or fur folded up, giving them a sort of striped or striated appearance. But when threatened, they could flare out, revealing a large, dazzling pattern that suddenly is bright and intimidating. * Camouflage depending on the other species, fluorescent colours might actually help blend in. If all the plants nearby are bright and patterned, a single moving dark spot will probably stand out like a sore thumb. * And, as mentioned already, showing off: an organism painting a target on its back and still being able to survive and thrive is a good indicator of fitness, and so might become a desirable trait in mate selection, with brighter colours indicating both better nutrition and the ability to survive despite more risky patterning. ]
[Question] [ In my sci-fi universe, I have a planet called Tateos Prime. It is a Pluto or Europa-like world, which orbits too far from its twin red suns to support liquid water at its surface. However, geothermal heat emanating from the core, caused by the decay of uranium 238, creates a subsurface ocean environment in which life can exist. I would like some of these life forms to have bioluminescence; the ability to produce their own light. One idea i had which I particularly liked was “scumlight”; light emitted by clouds of chemosynthetic bacteria that floated above the sea floor. However, in regards to how such a trait would evolve, I’ve run into a problem: On Earth, bioluminescence arose because it was advantageous to organisms that had vision. Either they used it to light their surroundings, to attract prey or ward off predators. However, in the seas of Tateos Prime, there is no sunlight, and therefore vision (at least in the visible-light spectrum) would never have evolved to begin with. Why then would bioluminescence evolve in this environment? [Answer] "On Earth, bioluminescence arose because it was advantageous to organisms that had vision" - maybe. We don't really know why bioluminiscent bacteria evolved on Earth. According to <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioluminescent_bacteria> "the biological role and evolutionary history for specifically bioluminescent bacteria still remains quite mysterious and unclear". There are 4 hypotheses listed: * light emission is a side product of the metabolism * it helps to survive if there is too much oxygen in environment * part of a bioluminescent-mediated DNA repair system * "bait hypothesis" - attracts predators to help dispersal of the bacteria 3 out of 4 hypotheses have nothing to do with vision, luminescence is a byproduct of normal life cycle of the bacteria. You don't have to give your monsters vision just to explain it. Writing an interesting reason for it seems rather difficult anyway. It is a bacteria, one of the simplest organisms possible. Avatar is full of luminescent creatures, no one cares why. [Answer] Because even in the deep ocean, there are natural sources of light, and you don't need a complex eye to make use of them. First, you've got geologic sources. Geothermal vents emit red and near-IR light, which doesn't travel extremely far, but neither is water completely opaque to it. Non-biological chemical reactions between minerals, seawater, and dissolved chemicals emitted from vents can also produce characteristic photon emissions. Chemoautotrophs may become sensitive to those weak light signals to find chemicals they need to live. On Earth, there are even bacteria which perform photosynthesis using the infrared light from deep-sea thermal vents. Other organisms may then develop basic directional sensitivity to light in order to find autotrophs to eat. Then you've got accidental biological sources. It may seem wasteful and anticompetitive to dump energy into light for no reason, but sometimes the basic unit of energy you get from some catabolic reaction is more than you actually need at the moment, to power whatever other biological process it's hooked up to, and the excess will be wasted as either heat or light. Those accidental emissions can then be cooperatively repurposed for communication, or adversarially repurposed by predators. And as soon as any organisms can detect light for any of those reasons, there is an incentive for other organisms to produce light on purpose to manipulate them. Note that it doesn't matter what frequency range the initial evolution of basic vision and bioluminesce exploits. Most deep-sea fish can't see red, because red light doesn't travel very far underwater, but some specifically produce red bioluminesce precisely because it is invisible to their prey. So once any sort of light-based signalling system is in place, it can radiate into forms that use a wide range of frequencies for different purposes, regardless of whether that light exists naturally in the environment--and in fact, there are good reasons to specifically evolve towards using light that is visible to humans, in the green and blue ranges, because it has the greatest range in water. [Answer] The problem in other words: why would a light-sensing organ develop if there is no light source, and why would bioluminescence evolve if there were no light-sensing organs, and how could they evolve at the same time so that they would drive the evolution of the other. Fortunately, there is a neat starting point that makes sense: sensing infrared. [Some snakes on Earth have organs with specific receptors that sense infrared](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_sensing_in_snakes). Your organisms could have evolved to sense infrared to detect heat sources and other nearby organisms whose metabolism produces heat. Then some of them could have evolved a mechanism to control their infrared output which has encouraged evolution of more and more complex sense organs. At some point it may turn into a some form of communication, and eventually the bandwidth may have shifted towards what we call visible light, because it can give an advantage over species that only can detect infrared. [Answer] > > However, in the seas of Tateos Prime, there is no sunlight, and therefore vision (at least in the visible-light spectrum) would never have evolved to begin with. > > > You don't need sunlight for sight to be useful, and the existence of sight isn't a necessary precondition for bioluminescence. By mass something like 98% of all bioluminescent life on Earth is sightless after all. The exceptions - things like the angler fish (shudder) - are more likely to use their bioluminescence as a lure rather than to allow them to see. Figuring out an evolutionary path shouldn't be too hard. First thing you need in an ecosystem is autotrophs - life forms that produce their own food using energy and basic chemicals from the environment. In our world that means plants, algae, some bacteria and so on. Mostly they use photosynthesis and a little chemosynthesis in vent ecologies. Your hot ocean lacks a source of bright light for photosynthesis, but has plenty of hot spots and thermal gradients so thermosynthesis is at least a possibility. Let's assume that thermosynthesis is the base of your food chain. It might start around hot spots, thermal vents and so on, but eventually micro-organisms analogous to our algae and autotrophic bacteria will fill every region with a thermal gradient. If some of these produce light as a byproduct of their synthesis process then that explains the bioluminescent clouds. And once light exists, sight will follow. Whether you're swimming around filter feeding or dragging through the muck as a bottom feeder, being able to detect variations in the light coming from the bioluminescent regions will increase your survivial chances. For a filter feeder being able to see where the highest concentration of healthy autotrophs are will reduce the cost of finding food. For both of them, being able to detect predators by the occlusion of the glow means greater chance of evasion or defense. Likewise the predators will have better survival rates if they can detect prey in the same way. Some prey will no doubt become home to photosynthetic bacteria in much the same way that flamingos get their coloration from environmental factors (carotenes in their food mostly, but still). All it takes is a little light that shifts the survival odds in favor of sighted creatures and evolution will do the rest for you. ]
[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 11 months ago. [Improve this question](/posts/242034/edit) I'm writing a timeline where the Russian Empire figured out how to make magical armor. By fully immersing plate armor in holy water, that plate armor is now fully bulletproof. No projectile will pierce it but explosives can still damage it. The Russians give this plate armor to all of their elite troops and plan to use them to win the Crimean War. How would any contemporary military defeat these plate armored troops? Maces could still be effective against plate armor but anyone trying to get close to an elite soldier is probably going to get shot up. [Answer] I would ask you to first refine your question. It is hard to come up with a scientific/rational tactic in order to defeat magic, which by definition is not playing by nature's known rules. Be that as it may.. If nothing can penetrate the armor, then you need to attack the person inside. Burning chlorine or phosphorous gas would easily defeat the people inside the armor. Chemical weapons are nothing new to the time if you take a look at WW1-like technology. Any napalm-like fluid or hot oil would be quite dangerous. Even a "Molotov cocktail" or two could prove rather effective. Presumably nothing can penetrate the armor, but a human is still inside. Look up HESH tank rounds. They are soft rounds designed to squish when they hit the target. The idea is to hit the tank so hard that internal metal fragments break off and hit the occupants. Even so, shooting soft, high velocity rounds would not penetrate the armor, but it would be like being hit by a freight train. The blunt force would still cause you a lot of damage. Having magical bulletproof armor is not going to help if all your ribs are broken, a lung is punctured and you have internal bleeding. Being shot, even if you have modern bulletproof armor, is no picnic. It still causes a lot of damage - it just doesn't immediately kill you. You would also be wrapped in metal. Any kind of electrical weapon would be quite dangerous. Electricity at the time was not what it is today, but this is about the time Edison and Tesla were dueling for the future of AC vs DC. Wheel out a king-size Tesla coil or even bury an unshielded high voltage wire grid and those fellows will have trouble. The smart battlefield commander would also take advantage of the inherent shortcomings. Plate armor is not as heavy as most people make it out to be, but it is more clumsy to wear, does not allow good ventilation or field of view. You are not going to be agile over rough terrain and concealment is harder. Armored units wouldn't want to operate during the day due to heat and wouldn't see as well at night and would be almost entirely unable to hear. This means that smaller, more agile light units could run rings around the armored units. You would want to have lots of obstacles in the way and lead an armored unit in to bad territory, like a ravine or hilly terrain or a forest. This seems to favor commando raids and asymmetric engagements. You would want to run a defeat-in-detail strategy where a small allied force would lure out an armored unit in to unfavorable terrain, call in other allied units and then collapse on the armored unit, likely at night. Mortars should first open up with gas rounds, like white phosphorous and mustard gas, followed by high explosive and incendiary loads. Forward observers would watch to guide the salvos and spot holdout areas. Then infantry close and toss Molotov cocktails and gas grenades. They should fire high-caliber soft lead bullets. Shotgun slugs would likely be fairly effective. Lever-action guns like the Sharps Carbine firing soft 45-70 rounds would be ideal. Percussion cap side-gate muskets firing soft 68 calibre ball would also be quite effective and cheap. Teams of five should then sweep the area, binding legs and hands of any prisoners with heavy wire. [Answer] Flamethrowers They've been around in various forms since ancient times, and impenetrable steel just turns into an easy-bake oven. Poison Gas The really good poison gas didn't come along until a bit after the period you seem to be aiming for, but since gas masks weren't particularly good either even things like finely-powdered quicklime would likely be pretty effective. Historically red-hot sand worked pretty well too. Concussion Grenades Any shrapnel won't get through, but a half stick of dynamite will still turn the insides of the target to jelly. Big, Heavy Bullets If maces are still effective then a 4-bore elephant gun delivers the equivalent of being hit by a professional wrestler swinging a ten-pound maul, and does it at range. Will probably take a few hits to bring him down since it won't poke any holes in him, but the impact is still going to hurt. Shoot him in the head for best effect. A shot to the knee might work pretty well too. Knees are delicate. Snipers Plate armor has vision slots big enough to admit a small, fast bullet. Shoot him in the face! Shotguns Plate armor has breathing slits big enough to admit most of a load of birdshot. Shoot him in the face! Paint If the armor somehow has protected vision slots so that nothing goes in through it, then a splash of fast-drying paint over the outside will still blind the wearer, and then your fighters can take him down and hog-tie him. Load the paint into burstable capsules and shoot him in the face! Snipers Again The armor will have to come off, at least partially, at least occasionally, for biological reasons. Shoot him in the buttocks. Traps Bear traps, pit traps, deadfalls, noose snares. You don't have to kill him, or even hurt him, to take him out of the fight. Just trap him so he can't do anything until the battle is over. I think that covers most of the major categories. Lots of variations available within each one. Take a few general principles and run with them. [Answer] Okay - Magically bullet proof armour. So, I'm assuming then that things such as hardened penetrating cores, increased muzzle velocity and all the standard methods to defeat armour aren't going to work. However - since Explosive damage still works on your armour and you mentioned that Maces work, I'm going to presume that Crush injuries are still a thing. In which case: Large Diameter and projectile weight - something in between a traditional Cannon and a Musket/Rifle. The goal is not to punch through the armour - but to inflict massive internal injuries from the force of the impact in much the same way the HESH (High Explosive, Squash-Head) Ammunition works with tanks. Also - a transition to Mortars - Mortars were in use in the 18th century, not quite the modern tube mortars, but I think we can use a little artistic licence here and have something that is in-between the time specific spigot and bombard type mortars and a modern mortar - the blast damage would be hellish on the occupants of armour, even if they didn't have to worry about Shrapnel damage. Finally: Horse Cavalry. Think the infamous charge of the Light Brigade against the Russian guns in the Crimea - even a perfect scenario for the gunners (Box Canyon, single direction of attack, pre-ranged cone of fire) - they still got overrun by the Light Brigade - a big, slow, cumbersome knight is going to get picked apart by Horse Cavalry. [Answer] ## The Nobel Peace Prize honors the inventor of dynamite It was not until Alfred Nobel perfected safe, transportable nitroglycerine that true terrorism was able to take shape. The Russian nihilist movement used the invention many many times to blow up their emperor Alexander II and finally succeeded, after destroying palaces, trains, dinner parties, and villages. Thanks to this amazing contribution to world peace, your 19th century Russian elite soldiers clad in magical armor, will have their arms, legs, bodies, and heads fully protected from small projectiles; however, while they will also be protected from small paper sticks wrapped around nitroglycerin, those particular parts may become difficult to find when the paper sticks unravel. Plate armor died because of explosives, not better guns. Bring your magical armor back two more centuries and you will rule the world. [Answer] # For a Broad Definition of "Bullet" Where this really means any gunpowder-accelerated projectile, there is a simple solution. *Fix bayonets! Yes, this unit would literally bring about tank-like capabilities and radically impact the battlefield, but bayonets, sabers, and other hand-to-hand weapons were used at this time by even lowly foot soldiers. The neigh-invincible soldiers still need to breathe and move, so there are gaps for these weapons to enter. Even taking a musket and using it like a club (hitting with the stock) works in a pinch. The person inside will still feel blunt force trauma, even if the armor is fine! No special equipment needed, just a lot more up-close-and-personal work than most people really like. (And beware the people who really do like this kind of fighting.) [Answer] 3 solutions Bulletproof armor is certainly going to be very difficult for ground troops to deal with, especially when elite soldiers are equipped with such. Becuase of this, it seems almost impossible to kill one of these guys without suffering casualties. Depending on when we are in the 19th century, planes might be in use. If I were an enemy of the Russians, I would fight their elite troops with bomber planes. Special stealth scout troops can be equipped with radios with the mission to seek out these elite soldiers and call in bombers. Depending on how powerful this armor is, even if the bombs cannot penetrate the armor the sheer force of the explosion is enough to cause severe blunt damage. But there will always be those occasions when you don’t have access to bombers, and for these dire days you make sure your soldiers are equipped with hammers/maces. As you mention in the question, maces will still deal a considerable amount of damage to armor, but the troops might be shot up. I propose a solution to this exact problem is the way your soldiers fight, not what they do it with. Soldiers may begin adopting fighting styles that rely heavily on stealth allowing them to get closer to the elite soldiers. But because they are still elite soldiers, their lives are worth more than the normal soldier so don’t be afraid to take a few casualties. Here are a few weaknesses of plate armor your soldiers can use to take advantage of their Russian adversaries: People wearing plate armor are slow, they won’t be able to catch up to your if you run away. Helmets will lower the soldiers visibility, making it easier for sneaky soldiers to sneak up on them. Joints in the armor pose weaknesses. Want to give your plate armor wielding soldier more mobility, well now they have a glaring weak spot. Want to give them more armor, well now they are slow and immobile. Another interesting solution to this problem is to adapt to the new generation of warfare and begin equipping your own soldiers with bullet proof armor! Surely if holy water is all it takes, it would be fairly easy for other countries to adopt this technique. This could lead to every soldier on the planet using maces and bomber planes. [Answer] People wouldn't bother penetrating the armor, they would either crush it or opt to avoid it, like typically done with medieval armor. But even assuming your magic armor is 100% invulnerable AND stops momentum AND stops heat etc ... you still have at least holes for eyes and mouth. This is a large enough weakness - bullets can hit you there, or perhaps shrapnel. Then you have flamethrower - your body and even most of head will do fine being covered by armor, but your eyes would burn. Finally, and most likely, chemical/biological weapons have existed for a very long time and would be the weapon of choice here. Just note that they wouldn't be quite as effective as in trench warfare of WW1. That said, one side armed with conventional weapons of the era, the other side having access to the same weapons and same numbers AND magical plate armor - that magical side will easily win. Even today for any land-based conflict (it wouldn't help in water or air though). [Answer] ## Naval guns, [Cannons](https://www.aeragon.com/pre-modern/cannon.html), [Howitzers](https://www.aeragon.com/pre-modern/howitzers.html) & [Mortars](https://www.aeragon.com/pre-modern/mortars.html) The advent of Russian armor-plated troops will bring naval artillery back from the water to land. If a half-inch breach loader can't pierce it, naval artillery laughed: they pierce ship armor since day 1. Even a tiny swivel gun with a mere 2 inches in diameter packs enough punch to pierce about 2.5 inches of naval steel plating on a ship, though the damage to the ship as a whole is neglectable. The moment 4-inch or even breach-loading 24-pounders usually used to sink real ships like [HMS Warrior](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Warrior_(1860)), come to be used on land, the slow-moving armored troops get turned into leaking steel cans of pulped soldiers. The naval guns will only advance slowly, but they can and will destroy the armored battalions. Even if you don't penetrate the armor, the hit person is thrown back by the impact and dies of the concussion, maybe taking anyone behind them with them. Though technically the guns we look at didn't ever leave the land entirely: [10-pounder Parrot Rifles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-pounder_Parrott_rifle) are field artillery and pack enough punch to endanger naval ships, [12-pounder Withworth Rifles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-pounder_Whitworth_rifle) would serve as field artillery with flat trajectories, [12-pound Napoleon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_obusier_de_12) would use intermediate trajectories (howitzer style), each of those responsible for many many deaths in the US Civil War. And the [24 cm Mörser M98](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_cm_M%C3%B6rser_M_98) would plow under the Boxer Rebellion between 1899 and 1901. Oh, and as icing: large-bore guns and naval guns don't shoot bullets, they shoot [shells](https://www.aeragon.com/pre-modern/early-ammunition-black-powder-artillery-shells.html) - projectiles filled with gunpowder - and [shot](https://www.aeragon.com/pre-modern/early-ammunition-black-powder-artillery-metal-shot.html) - solid balls or containers of solid spheres. And some of those are really mean. Large-bore artillery pieces and Shells were among the first to be loaded with more potent explosives. [Dynamite](https://www.aeragon.com/1865-1914/dynamite.html) was available starting 1867 - and as a result, explosive shells became deadlier, smaller, and faster at the same time! * [Martin's Shot](https://www.aeragon.com/pre-modern/early-ammunition-black-powder-artillery-martins-shot.html) is a shell filled with molten iron. The containing shell shatters on impact and sets the target on fire and have enough kinetic energy to throw a human more than a few dozen meters. Anyone hit directly is crushed, and anyone standing next to them is set on fire by 1000 °C hot metal and cooked in their armor. * [Case, Cannister, Carcass Shot](https://www.aeragon.com/pre-modern/early-ammunition-black-powder-artillery-case-canister-carcass-shot.html) [Hailshot](https://www.aeragon.com/pre-modern/early-ammunition-black-powder-artillery-hailshot.html), [Grapeshot](https://www.aeragon.com/pre-modern/early-ammunition-black-powder-artillery-grapeshot.html), [Shrapnell](https://www.aeragon.com/pre-modern/early-ammunition-black-powder-artillery-shrapnel.html) and the [diaphragm shell](https://www.aeragon.com/pre-modern/early-ammunition-black-powder-artillery-diaphragm-shell.html) are a long line of submunition-shells. They contain a few dozen sub bullets that are fired from atop and between the target infantry, throwing the bulletproof people around like puppets. [Answer] # Earthworks, cannon, and water You've got your lightly armoured force of troops against a heavily armoured opponent. What do you do? Make them attack you. Through a marsh. You're already building earthworks to protect your men, both in defense and attack - it's not that hard to build a ditch in front, and flood it. Now you've got people in plate armour treking through the mud. Some might drown. Others might get stuck, and you can chuck cannon balls at them. There's no point in shooting them, but it's also harder for them to shoot you, as their plate armour will make reloading even slower. Try and hold battles at river crossings, retreat if the terrain isn't favourable - you can march faster and further than the guys in several pounds of steel. Save musket fire for their horses, gun crews and unarmoured support troops. Prioritise naval forces, too - if you can sink their ships, their plate armoured troops on them are just a liability. Horse drawn artillery can be used for skirmishing, too - fire a few shots out of musket range, then move. Shoot any cavalry that tries to follow you. If they're armoured, shoot their horses. If a bullet won't kill them, a fall from a horse might. Starving them out of positions might also be successful. Plate armour wasn't, by all accounts, terrible to move in. But it belonged to an age with completely different army logistics - no one is expecting a knight to carry their bedroll, pack, supplies etc on their back. Either the opposing army needs much more logistical support (vulnerable to attack) or they're going to have to carry all their own stuff, making them vulnerable to exhaustion, and hugely less manoverable. [Answer] > > By fully immersing plate armor in holy water, that plate armor is now fully bulletproof > > > But the British were protestant, so something involving the King James Version of the Bible? Maybe they discover how to wave the KJV over a barrel of gunpowder so that bullets, powered by protestant gunpowder, could penetrate holy watered armour. [Answer] Plate armour cannot be cut. It must be crushed. You get this, as you mention maces (or warhammers) would work only the wielder would be killed. So projectiles that have a lot of mass and crushiness. # Trebuchet ![treb](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--WGXSk8Sh--/c_fill,fl_progressive,g_center,h_900,q_80,w_1600/18s0w1wmht8gwjpg.jpg) # Cannon ![cannon](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/aa/d1/dc/aad1dcf8f30964d47a4621ba38a9f199.jpg) --- There were lots of ways in the 19th century of delivering things on the order of 10kg from 100s of meters. These were designed for use against stone walls, but could work for anti-personnel use against uncuttable enemies. The kinetic force they deliver is similar to a mace/hammer, but from range. In short you need to remember to crush your enemies. It is one of the three best things in life. [Answer] --- ## 2 Tactics 1. Ignited Blankets (From movie: [Baahubali](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baahubali:_The_Beginning)) You shoot out oil-covered blankets high up in the sky towards the army of the army with magical plate armor. Right before the blankets landing, you shoot out fire arrows straight to the blankets lighting them on fire. The blankets drop onto the army rendered them covered in oil and distracted them for a little bit, and then the fire arrows hit, which will make the blankets and the people under them burn. This will cause severe damage to those people since the fire will be difficult to put out. After this, the areas of the incident will largely covered in black smoke from the burning blankets, which also reduces the visibility of the army causing them demoralized. 2. Traps You dig the surface land where the army will march through. Dig it wide and deep enough that will make them unable to climb up once they fell into it. Something like 5 meters or more. The cover on the trap must be indistinguishable from ordinary ground around that area though. The people who fell down there wouldn't be able to get out, and will ultimately die from starving. You should also make it triggered manually to make it happen at the right moment to get most of the army trapped. You can also fill the traps with water if possible, so that people who fell down there will drown, which kills way faster than starvation. Since the plate armor is heavy, people wearing it will have difficult time swimming/trying to not get drown -- let alone realizing later that you can't even climb up from it after that. [Answer] 1. Hit them harder. Cannons can fire grapeshot, bolas, normal cannon balls, etc. Assuming physics is the same, the rapid acceleration from being hit by cannon fire is still bound to break bones. Cavalry charges might be a little more difficult but being rammed on the end of a spear by a speeding horse-rider combo is bound to feel like getting hit by a small car in terms of energy. Depending on the terrain, throwing boulders/ causing landslides can be an option. 2. go for the gaps in the armor. Depending on how expensive it is or what the characteristics are, there is no way that a solder would be totally encased in it. Molotov cocktails, poison gas, and even hand to hand combat can target armor gaps. Or you can take inspiration from 1. and set explosive charges around them. Blasts would be directed into the gaps. chucking feces and dead people into their camps will definitely get biomaterial into the armor operators. 3. Avoid them entirely. If your troop has higher mobility, hitting logistics can make them fall back due to lack of supplies or even starve if cut off by harsh weather. Special ops behind the front lines can wreak havoc if unaccounted for. ]
[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/231845/edit). Closed 1 year ago. The community reviewed whether to reopen this question 1 year ago and left it closed: > > Original close reason(s) were not resolved > > > [Improve this question](/posts/231845/edit) There's a trope in certain comedic series, such as Veggietales and Homestar Runner, to have characters that do not have limbs, and yet visibly carry things around anyway. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CK2Xo.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CK2Xo.png) The general rules seem to be that they have a sort of limited telekinesis that lets them carry up to two things at a time, extends as far as an actual arm would, can carry as much as human arms can, but can pass through solid objects (hence the nonexistent sleeves in Homestar's shirt as pictured above). I have grown genuinely curious how a species with these characteristics would function in a setting where these "psychic arms" were used as more than just a gag to let armless characters do the exact same things that characters with arms can do. Specifically as it would relate to their melee weapons. Because even ignoring the possibility that they could use their powers to reach inside an opponent's body and crush their organs, this poses several unique advantages that people with actual arms do not enjoy: 1: They don't need to worry about grips. Nothing that can actually be cut or even feel discomfort makes physical contact with the thing they're carrying, meaning they don't need to concern themselves with things like making sure there's a part of the weapon that's actually safe to touch. 2: They have no arms to tangle, either with their own or with their opponent's. Were they to dual wield weapons, for instance, only the weapons themselves would actually pose any risk of bumping into each other when making quick movements, and they don't need to worry about things like leverage if their weapon were to maneuver behind an enemy shield. So it seems to me that the weapons any fantasy race with this characteristic would develop for their own use might be radically different from the ones that races with actual limbs would make. What would be the ideal design of a melee weapon that a species with limited telekinesis instead of arms would use? [Answer] # Multiple options There isn't one good option available. Just like in real life, where we have everything from spears to bows to flails each has a function. Here are some picks for best weapon for 'arm telekinesis' for me. ## Knife It would be bad to call it a knife. Just a tiny piece of metal, either just a point or small blade on all sides. The size is specifically to evade as much of the opponent blocking as possible. Shields, swords or other can easily be circumvented to attack the weak points. It is a high risk strategy, but something that is very difficult to block can inspire a great deal of fear. ## Clubs Blunt weapons were found especially helpful against fully armoured targets. You don't need to pierce, slice or otherwise get through armour. Blunt weapons make use of simple physics. I hit something, the energy can travel through it. Getting hit by a hammer or club is very dangerous regardless of the amount of armour. It might still protect some, but not as well as against piercing or slicing weapons. As you say, with telekinesis arms you can ignore leverage. More importantly, you can choose not to ignore it. Wield the weapon as efficiently as possible, making you much more quick and deadly. An example, you prepare to knock on a head. You swing up without leverage, making it a quick movement. On the down stroke you make full use of the leverage for maximum effect. ## Spears Spears have reach far beyond the telekinesis arms. Not only that, with telekinesis arms you can also hold them in more positions than normal soldiers can. Horseback riding is effective in part because you can swing down, using more power and more difficult to defend. Telekinesis arms can allow you to hold a spear incredibly high, yet still jab with great power. This can be done in rows as well, but the row behind can use an incredible low attack angle. Try attacking long spears, like spears that need to be carried by 3 people. Then needing to either defend your face or your feet, if you even realise you need to defend your feet. ## What your opponents have The question is in a way strange. If an opponent swings at you with a sword, there seems to be no harm in deflecting the sword. Of course there is risk, but at a battle where invisible arms can reach out and grab the blade, holding it still or deflecting it unexpectedly, it seems like they hardly need weapons to defend themselves. Though at such points the knife previously mentioned might be nice, a knife of the opponent is fine too. I'm sure with more creativity it can be expanded, but these are my top choices. They would be a hell of an adversary to fight, especially if they start to work together in regiments. [Answer] It appears their telekinesis is fairly limited in both range and complexity: * The effective range is around arm's length; it would be reasonable to assume an inverse square strength to distance ratio * There is no indication that large numbers of items can be manipulated I'll also assume the use of the word "melee" rules out ambushes/sneak attacks, as that's an entirely different scenario. The effective range limitation can be seen to limit the direct "heart crushing" approach, since the victim in that scenario could easily overpower the attacker, being the closest to the effect and therefore being able to exert a greater countereffort with far less effort. That brings up an interesting complication--blocking. One blocks a sword with a shield to avoid getting one's hands cut--but the TK doesn't have to worry about injury when blocking with TK, and the closer the blade gets, the more it improves both your power over it and your leverage. Most blades would become useless at that point. In fact, nearly any weapon we would be able to block with an armored hand would be easily fended off. The best weapons in that fight would be stored energy weapons. A mace, for instance, wouldn't even need a handle, and the more speed you can put on it before it crosses to the adversary's sphere of influence, the more work they have to do in a short time to stop it. A dumbbell configuration could be even more effective, giving you a chance to spin it up before the thrust. The thrust, though, still has to give it enough speed that your adversary can't stop it quickly enough to avoid contact. Another approach would be a spear, which could remain partly in your sphere of TK influence while entering the adversary's. If the TK "grip" is based on mass, you can beef up the handle while keeping the edge light and harder to hold, but deflection is still an issue due to leverage. I think the best bet would be a boleadora (bola). Spin and fling that, and there's a fair chance it'll hit without the weights even coming within TK range. There's a nearly sure chance it'll hit without more than one weight getting in, and even if it does, that's three massive objects to be defended against at once. Your adversary could grab the center rope, but that leaves a lot of kinetic energy in the weights to handle. It would probably be easy enough to get it spinning after some practice, accelerating and lifting one weight at a time like a juggler, but the adversary would have only a split second to get it under control for defense. [Answer] The telekinetic arms are... * invisible: when facing a human, you can see how they hold their weapon. That means one can determine possible angles of attack. * without mass: a human arm can only be moved up to a certain speed. This limits how quickly the possible angles of attack can change. * equally strong in all directions: human arms depend on muscles and joints, which are stronger for some part of their range of motion then others. This limits possible angles of attack even more. * invulnerable: a human's arms are quite vulnerable during a fight and without them a human is mostly harmless. From these, I think a light and quick weapon is better suited then something heavy. A staff or spear in human hands is already a somewhat unpredictable weapon since it is so easy and quick to change one's grip on it, which changes the possible angles of attack. The invisible and thought-quick telekinetic arms would make it practically impossible to predict how the staff will be moved. If a long weapon is impractical (or lost during combat), the backup weapon of choice is a small blade, like a knife but without a handle. The lighter the better - maybe around the size and weight of knitting needles. The tactic would be to catch or deflect the opponents weapon with one telekinetic arm and attack with the other. A knife is already extremely difficult to defend against since it can be moved as quickly as one can move their arm. A telekinetic has even more speed since the "arms" have no mass and the blade's movement is not limited by the range of motion of the various joints. [Answer] # It Depends On How The Leverage Works: If we assume the limbs have similar properties to human limbs, except they are invisible, invulnerable, and only semi-substantial, It lends itself to martial arts-style weapons. * NAGINATA: A long pole with a heavy cleaving blade that can also thrust allows the telekinetic arms to hold one end and still use leverage to chop or stab. Since the arms are not vulnerable, it may be a double-ended pole arm with different functional heads for different jobs - a naginata or poleaxe head and one with a thin piercing tip to penetrate armor. A double-ended naginata could be spun like a giant mower blade, with no need to reposition hands or keep fingers out of the way. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ahWZ9.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ahWZ9.png) * CHAIN/WHIP WEAPONS: A staple of martial arts, chain weapons need a highly trained user to not injure themselves. The risk drops dramatically when the flailing chains can't get tangled up in one's own arms. These would be likely much more spiked than the originals, since they don't need to worry about grabbing a spiked handle. A really simple version can be extremely concealable and light, yet with speed can achieve great force. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CHrXi.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CHrXi.png) * SHURIKEN: These throwing weapons are usually limited by their portability and risk when throwing. All that goes out the window with telekinesis. They can be easily launched as missiles, but since they are small, hard to see, and sharp in multiple directions, they can be used as melee weapons as well. Imagine a handful of caltrops flung at the face, with spikes in all directions. Or a razor-thin shuriken flung through a throat sideways (or silently lifted up, then stabbed in the carotid...) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lnIAS.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/lnIAS.png) * SAW BLADE: My favorite anti-zombie tool for [Half-Life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVEqMVBKWds), a saw blade is an awkward weapon in real hands, but if the physics are right you can spin it up faster and faster. Fling it, and it's a really big shuriken. Or just batter the thing against someone until they're a bloody mess. A big one is essentially a shield. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/m66Q2.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/m66Q2.png) * A BIG NAIL: Take a long, thin spike and sharpen it on one end. Small, concealable, throwable, easily obtained. Also available in the sharpened stick version for ease of use in nature. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CCY4E.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CCY4E.png) * A ROCK: Or a brick, log, or any other smallish, heavy, possibly spikey object. Transposed between the enemy, it's a shield. Launched forward, it's a club. The range is kind of short for arms, but you don't need to worry about getting your fingers smashed when parrying, or if it's slippery, or jagged. You'll never be disarmed (pardon the pun). Even dirt and sand can be lifted up and flung about, and it's impossible to restrain immaterial hands. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9MrQZ.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/9MrQZ.png) * YOUR ENEMIES WEAPON: The best defense is a good offense. Telekinetically grab your enemy sword and fling the blade into their face. Why are you hitting yourself, why are you hitting yourself? [Answer] The psychic arms may be immune to harm, but let's assume the body is not. Then, you'll need a shield! If the psychic arms can pass through the shield to hold the weapon, then you'll have much better reach than the opponent. The weapon can be a one-handed blade. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ID5Cy.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ID5Cy.png) Now, thinking about this, if the psychic arms can pass through materials, this would make any kind of armor much simpler, because it wouldn't need any joints. So, let's upgrade this to steel plate armor. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jXKfJ.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/jXKfJ.png) Oh yes! What a scary sight. However, if the question is about what weapons they would use to fight each other, and if the other guy wears the same kind of armor, then there's no point in dual wielding small blades. And since their armor doesn't need any joints, it will be very cheap, which means it will be a lot more common than in human medieval times. Now the easiest way to counter this would be to use the psychic arms to reach through the other guy's armor and smush his brain. But if you can reach him, he can reach you too! So I guess melee fights would happen with long weapons to keep the fighter out of the opponent's psychic reach. So we get a setting quite similar to medieval knights: if you get too close, the other guy pulls a dagger and sticks it in a joint in your armor. Similar solutions would evolve, in the form of polearms able to pierce thin armor, or just bash the head through blunt force, or grab the feet to make the opponent fall, then stab them. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tb31l.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/tb31l.png) [Answer] # spiky ball Just a ball with sharp spikes. For regular armed people the ball needs to be connected to a stick trough a chain, but the armless creature doesn't need that. Just bash it against the enemy. Or, to be really nasty: # flaming fabric Pick a piece of clothing, soak it in gasoline and set it alight (a small pocket lighter will do). You can now hold a fireball in the air, and burninate your foes with it. [Answer] A character that controls weapons with intangible arms could be absolutely brutal with daggers. * Daggers are small, and hard for an opponent to track visually when there's no arm to watch. It's even harder when there are two daggers to keep track of that are coming from different directions. * You can make very quick movements since you don't have arm mass to drag around. Use sharp, lightweight daggers and focus on slicing motions. * If you can get close enough to your enemy, you can raise the weapon while keeping it outside their peripheral vision. They'll never see it coming when you stab them in the back while standing face to face with them. * Intangible arms can move in ways that are prohibited by the biomechanics of a normal arm. Stab your opponent and twist the dagger in a full circle or two to inflict maximum damage. * A small blade (think razor blade size) could be slipped up behind an opponent's shield, injuring their hand or cutting the leather strap they use to hold it. * An offhand weapon like a [sai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sai_(weapon)) would pair well with a dagger. Parry your enemy's attack and entrap their weapon, then twist it in whichever direction their arm cannot naturally turn (yours has no such limitation). They'll either lose their grip on the weapon or expose their wrist for slashing. Opponents won't be able to trap your weapons the same way since you can freely move and rotate them in any direction without limitation. * To take this concept to the extreme, attacks with a poisoned needle would be almost impossible to see if you managed to keep the needle pointed directly at the target. Needles are risky weapons since you can easily poke yourself, but that's not an issue if your arms are intangible. I feel like you lose many of your advantages as your weapons get larger. You won't have much of a speed advantage when the weapon's mass significantly outweighs what you're saving by not having arms. Large weapons can also be easily seen and visually tracked on their own, so cloaking your arm movements doesn't help a lot. You can still do some interesting things with a longsword-sized weapon (see [Darth Traya](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Kreia) for example) but your biggest advantage will be small weapons where you can maximize your added agility. [Answer] Depending on your character, if they can't feel pain from touching a spike with their "hands", then a good weapon could be something that the opponent cannot grab, like a literal double-edged sword. Having an advantage like that can help them win, especially if their opponent cannot use it back. If the other opponent has psychic hands too, then that is a completely different story. Despite this, the user can constantly attack and wield it well. ]
[Question] [ In Ender’s Game, the Battleroom is comprised of large, static objects called “stars” that are organized into patterns to create an environment for zero-gravity Laser Tag. Presumably the stars don’t move, as the players can land on them, jump off of them, and use them as rally points without worrying about their momentum moving the star around. They also don’t seem to be physically moored to anything. I was thinking that if this tech would work, I could use it as a zero-gravity construction mechanic in my story. Would there be a way for a specially-designed object, like a star, to be held static in a given location in a large, specially-designed space without physical contact? My first idea was magnetic induction from the “walls” onto the object, but I don’t think that would work for multiple objects in different locations in the same space. [Answer] Yes, you absolutely can use magnetic fields to do this. By manipulating the magnetic fields on the boundary of your construction zone using an array of electromagnets, you can create more or less whatever pattern of fields you want inside the volume. If your ‘stars’ are made out of diamagnetic materials, or you mount the right type of magnets to them, they will be repelled by the regions with stronger magnetic fields. You then create a pattern of magnetic fields in the zone that has low-points where you want the stars, and they should find their way there. A simple version of this was demonstrated here: <https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1408705111> Alternatively, you could use sound waves to achieve a similar effect. Place speakers around the construction zone, use them to create a pattern of sound waves in the zone, and let the sound waves push things into position. Best to use frequencies outside the normal hearing range or things will be very loud. This has been done experimentally here: <https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9661> [Answer] Dynamic position keeping: you define a position for each object, give it a mean to check it and means to keep it against external influences, probably something similar to rockets. In this way when a player lands on one of them the, the system detects a movement from the desired location and activate the reaction to compensate for the movement. In this way the player's momentum is countered by a reaction in the opposed direction. Same trick when they jump off. [Answer] What if you just made them REALLY heavy to minimize movement from students? And reset their position at the end of each round? It would be less resistant against rotation but that is easily solved with reaction wheels or control moment gyros. How big are those cubes? I can't remember. 3 foot cube seems a reasonable size for one person to be able to hide behind. If tungsten then it is 14,717 KILOGRAMS. Difficult to get moving by human sized momentum even with no friction. If multiple people can hide behind a cube, it gets a lot heavier. If tungsten is too valuable then lead which halves the mass. [Answer] # Dynamic redistribution of internal mass for a more-than-rigid shell The "star" has to be heavy so as not to move around. But the weight is not distributed uniformly in the interior, nor in the shell, like we assume for many everyday objects. Instead, there is a small, very dense mass (blue in the illustration) inside the larger "star". This mass is tethered in many directions to the outer faces. When a contestant lands on the star, pushing it, the tethering strands are stretched. Ordinarily, this would make the "star" act as a rigid body, moving slightly in response to the impact. However, in this case, the tether detects the tension from the outside contact, and compensates by increasing that tension with its own motor in near real time (yellow arrows on the gray lines) All linear and any angular momentum are transferred into the central mass. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YRVug.gif)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/YRVug.gif) The result is that the outer shell of the "star" moves scarcely at all, even though it absorbs the contestant's momentum. The momentum is now hidden in the internal motion of the dense inner mass. The "star" is limited in the amount of momentum it can absorb this way, multiplied by the time. But of course it is also limited by the force of impact it absorbs before it crumples to avoid lethally injuring the contestant. I hope. Given the rules and gameplay, it may be designed so that the internal masses can be reset between matches, or it may have an unobtrusive propulsion system (such as a cable it can launch at the nearest "star" in the right direction, or to a nearby wall) that abruptly transfers the momentum when the action of the game has moved elsewhere. In extremis, the "star" can abruptly move its outer shell so that the mass inside is now heading toward the center; this would have to be included in the rules, since it affects game play. Minutiae: because the negative feedback on the "star's" motion is accomplished by a positive feedback on the cable linking shell and core, you might think that this would be unstable. However, the system knows how much tension it has added to the system, and can subtract that to understand the true force on the outer shell. Also, the system only needs to add a small percentage to the tension normally needed to accelerate the inner core in order to ensure all the added momentum goes to that core. (The outer hair cells of the ear [do this to a much more remarkable extent](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91ubWbScs4), greatly amplifying the sounds we hear) Also, because the core needs to absorb angular momentum, it may contain reaction wheels that adjust the core so that it doesn't literally need to rotate while remaining attached to its network of cables. [Answer] A high density core. These objects are way heavier than it seems and the player jumping off them would not give them enough momentum to move them. [Answer] Water filled cubes acting as momentum stabilisers ... and also gyroscopic stabiliser. If I size up the cubes in the scene right, they seem to be about 3m wide (I'm being a bit generous with the size for this to work). If you partially fill that volume with water you get a nice round 10 tons of water. Now the cube is separated into many flexible chambers with pumps between them. For a simple example imagine it's separated into halves and all the water is placed on one side. When the kid, 50kg, impacts the side with water at roughly jogging speed of 2m/s, it will need to absorb all the momentum and start pushing water to the other side. But since it's 10000kg of water it ends up moving at 0.01m/s. Since the cubes are 3m wide the water will have about 1.5m distance to move around, that gives it 2.5minutes of staying perfectly still from the outside. Even when it starts moving, the sheer mass of it makes it move at super slow rate 0.01m/s, that's 100 times slower than a slow walk. If anything hits it from the other side you can basically average out momentum over time. Finally it can also do gyroscopic stablisization by pumping water in a circle. I used water in the example because it's guaranteed that any spaceship that size will want to have that much water available; for one they also have a pool. But this contraption would obviously work much better with mercury. With a density 13.5 times higher (but let's say you need much bigger motors) you can get at least 10x the time, ie 25minutes. And after all that time, the resulting move is 1000 times slower than walking. That's more than 10 times slower than a snail at 0.013m/s. ]
[Question] [ Streaming is the practice of grouping students based on their magical potential, usually at the end of the entrance exam the candidate has to don a talking pointed hat which then announces their respective classes. Supposedly this should encourage competitiveness in gifted classes while improve sportsmanship in borderline cohort who otherwise drop out of school entirely. I like to think streaming isn't promoting elitism but then the latter isn't all that bad except 99% of them would experience Dunning Kruger effect and magic can be very dangerous in the wrong hand, so my question is why must there be streaming for all magic schools? [Answer] We go at the speed of the slowest student. Classes go at the speed of the weakest student. If you go faster the weaker students get left behind and you "waste" teaching hours by teaching them to cast half a fireball (no fireball) in the time the stronger students need to master the spell. Then when you learn Fire Storm the following month, half of your class is completely lost. If we stream the classes, then after two months the slow class learns Fireball and the fast class learns Fireball and Fire Storm. Without streaming the fast students learn both spells but the slow students learn only one half of one spell. Everything beyond that is wasted. That is assuming the slow students just sit quietly the rest of the time and don't disrupt the class by asking for help. This will slow the class down further. > > 99% of them would experience Dunning Kruger effect > > > Dunning-Kruger is when an unskilled or unknowledgable person overestimates their ability. I have no reason to believe streaming encourages Dunning-Kruger. In any case it is hard to think you are the best, in a school environment, where there is always someone more skilled and knowledgeable than you. They are called the teachers. Your Dunning-Kruger students are the ones in the top of the class, who are smart enough to make short work of their lessons, but not smart enough to do further independent study. They tried to learn more spells from the library, once. But it was ten times more work than learning in the classroom. Since they are the next Merlin the problem must of course be with the system. So the next Merlin wastes their energy complaining about how they are the next Merlin and how the school teaching model is corrupt. The school is teaching them the wrong spells on purpose, to prevent them rising up, and make it much harder to learn independently. > > magic can be very dangerous in the wrong hand > > > The school is aware of this and runs mandatory "Safety and the Arcane" modules so no one forgets it too. Not even the brightest students are allowed to shoot from the hip. Everyone must sit Safety every year. It is pass/fail and it is not streamed. The module is really boring and good for taking overconfident students down a peg. They cannot outsmart the 100 major steps of Cauldron Maintenance. They just have to memorize the steps and then perform a six hour demonstration at the end of the year. The course is pass-fail, which means they get the same mark as a weaker student who passes. [Answer] # Because magic is dangerous in the wrong hands. There are basically three categories of people, and magic. At the very bottom are people who are pretty bad at magic. They can't manage more complicated spells and they fuck up a lot. These sorts are pretty common and you don't want them to be useless. You teach them very basic magic. In combat classes you teach them how to point and throw big objects, in homemaking classes you teach them how to generate power for magical cleaning spells. You don't teach them anything complicated that's gonna hurt them or others. They're still useful to society, you need people who work hard. Some of them even get a lot of power, and manage to make good use of their ability to do very simple things a lot. In the middle are the average people. You teach these people a variety of complicated charms so they can manage to live normal lives. They can learn a bunch of cleaning charms and more advanced combat spells that let them handle things much more flexibly than others. They can get good jobs in government and corporations with a good grade. You don't give them the really complicated stuff. At the top are the elite students. You don't teach them the really dangerous stuff like demon summoning, that's for apprentices, but you teach them much more complicated charms that can go very wrong including ones that rely on tight emotional control or which can kill people with less potential. Those who do really well can get top jobs in corporations and governments, and get a chance to apprentice to wizards to learn the really dangerous spells. [Answer] Only because you said there must. Where else is that written? Never you mind no magic; streaming is the practice of grouping students by potential. Never you mind no talking pointed hat, either. Magic or mundane, where is it written that streaming should encourage competitiveness in gifted classes, or improve sportsmanship anywhere? ]
[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/222145/edit). Closed 1 year ago. [Improve this question](/posts/222145/edit) Among humans cannibalism has been practiced as a funerary ritual within numerous cultures across the world, and also as a way of ritualistically degrading defeated enemies, as was done most notably among the Maori and other Polynesian peoples. But cannibalism also poses a strong risk of disease; most notably with lethal prions such as Kuru. It’s also not a long term subsistence strategy. Keeping these factors in mind, I’m wondering if it would be plausible at all for a culture that already practiced exocannibalism to incorporate it into a broader strategy. My questions are: • Can weak supply chains and foraging be supplemented by the murder and consumption of enemy civilians? Would there be a competitive edge to this? • Would diseases simply make this strategy a slow suicide? • Would the terror inflicted by such brutality be enough to compel submission? • Can cannibalism be sustained by a large society when it is solely directed outwards for warfare and its accompanying ideology? The society this Army is drawn from is pre modern in development and is also fighting a pre industrial society. [Answer] Probably not Let's look at some precedent. It appears that there were (hopefully past tense now) villages in Papua New Guinea that raided each other intermittently and ate the losers. [Kuru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)), as noted, was transmitted primarily by eating the brains of infected people and disproportionately affected the women and children who were the consumers of this part of the body. Eating other parts of the body was a less risky practice. So the disease risk may be relatively manageable - don't eat the brains - although prolonged cannibalism practices are likely to result in diseases evolving to fill a niche. The second-biggest problem with this idea is that weak supply lines can be supplemented by chowing down on enemies. The huge weakness with this strategy is that if offensive action is unsuccessful or even delayed by some days - for example, as a result of bad weather or flooded rivers - then it means that the cannibal army will starve. (If they have plans to mitigate the lack of cannibal supplies then they didn't really need them in the first place.) The biggest problem with this idea is that it will stiffen the resolve of any enemies if they know that losing means that they and their families will be eaten. Even in the unlikely event that the cannibal army has demonstrated that they adhere to a promise not to eat enemies who surrender, all bets are clearly off if any resistance occurs. Which means that as soon as one group in nation B resists the incursion, each and every person in nation B is totally motivated to resist up to and if possible beyond their last breath, because they know they are doomed if they give up. Non-combatants will do their utmost not to be captured and will fight to the death if they are. Which means that even a successful war of conquest will be very costly and will only win the cannibals the land itself (probably scorched earth), there won't be any farmers, miners, loggers etc remaining to make it profitable land. The more likely outcome is that the surrounding nations will find common cause to wipe the cannibals out and take their land. Looking at the more general case, brutal tactics do not tend to make people surrender, they just stiffen resolve. The Roman legions didn't eat people but they were very brutal and very good at winning wars during their expansionist phase. People still resisted the Romans like crazy initially, what tended to make post-conquest life more accepted was that once they had won the Romans built infrastructure and trade rather than barbequing civilians on the weekends. Machiavelli's wisdom that conquered peoples should be either treated well or destroyed utterly has been shown to be sound throughout history. (Note that "treated well" is subjective and the invading army's and invadees' perceptions may be quite different.) In summary: 1. Disease is probably a manageable problem, though as recent events in the real world have shown, diseases find new niches over time. 2. Weak supply lines mean that the cannibals will be wiped out the first time they are delayed in a campaign, there's no substitute for solid logistics. 3. The intimidation factor isn't going to work and will more likely stiffen the resolve of all your neighbours to resist any attacks and may inspire them to unite against the cannibals. [Answer] In the face of an under-supplied invading army, tactics such as poisoning wells and scorched earth by retreating defending armies can ensure that the invaders starve, reducing their fighting effectiveness. All it would take to turn starvation into something worse in the face of a cannibalistic invading army would be a slow poison, such as [Arsenic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_poisoning) or [ricin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricin), taken by those unable to flee in order to posthumously harm the cannibal invaders. Since a cannibal army is most likely to eat prisoners in their entirety, as few as possible at a time, starting with the worst injured or ill so as to be able to keep the more healthy prisoners as walking cattle and not have to carry putrefying meat around, it makes sense for mortally injured defenders to poison themselves so that after death - probably killed by the cannibal invaders - they can exact revenge against the cannibals. Just a few people who were willing to take a slow poison in the hope of taking a bunch of cannibals with them could cripple the whole cannibal army within a few weeks. If the cannibal caught on that the people that they were invading would poison themselves so as to injure or kill them, it would rapidly lead to a reluctance to eat the locals, especially if old, crippled or injured and unable to escape... even if they hadn't been poisoned. How could they tell without risking being poisoned themselves, and those slow poisons are typically quite unpleasant. If the alternative is starvation... things could get quite unpleasant for the invaders with starvation, poisoning and mutiny being significant risks. [Answer] # Its probably a bad move. Taking a good look at your main strategy, what you're doing is not too dissimilar to Napoleon's approach to conquer Russia during his empire (you know? The one military move that was an absolute disaster and essentially doomed his plans as an emperor to destroy England financially and conquer Europe?), but with a more cannibalistic approach. Basically what this does is that you do have proper resources on you, but you also rely a fair amount on there being resources on the regions you conquer, with your own provisions still existing and being delivered. The biggest pro of this move is that, thanks to not being as encumbered by the extra weight of a lot of provisions, your army can move faster and cover more ground, meaning the enemy has less time until you arrive. [This link](https://www.history.com/news/napoleons-disastrous-invasion-of-russia) explains fairly well the problem. But to sum it up a fair bit, here are the main pros and cons of relying a fair bit on resources from the conquered regions: * Main Pro: the smaller amount of heavy provisions being carried around makes the troops capable of moving faster, meaning less time for the enemy to prepare for your arrival. Napoleon himself planned for the war against Russia to be quick, which likely motivated his choice of this strategy involving more mobile troops. * Main Con: to depend on your enemy's resources is a huge gamble, because if there are no resources for you to take, you won't last. The problem with Napoleon's advances was that not only was he in a territory with a fairly unforgiving climate and fewer number of large crops to take, he was fighting enemies willing to sacrifice it all to destroy him. Your situation has similar problems, if not greater ones. Firstly, Humans are a potentially viable source of food, especially if you back it up with other nutrients to ensure you're getting all the nutrients and vitamins you need, so the nutritional problem is likely the least of your problems with this strategy. By eating the civilians instead of just being normal and stealing the food they would eat, you put your soldiers at a risk of [contracting prion-related diseases](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/311277). Make sure not to eat the brains. You also risk causing even more severe psychological impact on your troops, because humans as social animals are naturally hardwired to be against cannibalism (normally a person will start to consider cannibalism under a rather extreme state of starvation, at which point their brains have already shut off natural inhibitors against things they also wouldn't normally eat. The body is so starved the brain starts to consider any food as fair game). The main problem I see with this however is that while you might be hardwired against eating your buddy, your buddy is hardwired to be against eating you and to be against letting himself be eaten, and that's where it falls apart. Like Sun Tzu in his book "The art of war" already said: "When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.". The reason for this is that if an enemy sees a way out, it's very likely for them to first try to flee to safety. However if they're completely cornered with no apparent hope of being spared, then they'll naturally go from flight strategy to the fight strategy. They're cornered, they're hopeless and they have nearly nothing to loose, so they might as well give their everything. The intense stress of being in a deadly situation also makes them more prone to release natural limiters and make use of their ["hysterical strength"](https://www.healthline.com/health/hysterical-strength), which while not necessarily as absurd as what some tall tales might tell you, isn't something to brush over, especially when that strength is being directed towards killing you. As for the fear factor compelling submission, it just has little chance of working for long. Sure, you might tell everyone that you won't kill and eat them if they surrender, but anyone with a brain and the knowledge that you don't carry around a lot of food on you can tell that you're not only unwilling to keep your word, you're incapable of doing so. That means there's a higher chance that the peasants you plan to snack on will be naturally desperate even before you arrive, which makes them more willing to take desperate measures, such as abandoning and burning down their villages. If you can't find a village with any provisions to use or food to feed your troops with, you'll have to take your hungry soldiers to the next one. That is a problem if every village is willing to do that, because if you can't feed your troops, you become much more vulnerable, you also have the problem of now having an army of cannibals alone and starving with nothing but one another around, all coming ever so close to the necessary psychological conditions to begin considering an ally as a snack. Basically, with a strategy such as yours, an enemy willing to have losses in order to crush you can force you to retreat by not engaging with you at all,because if you retreat they'll gain time, and if you don't you'll eventually have to retreat, but this time weaker and a more vulnerable against those you were invading. Essentially, it's a gamble with a high risk and varying reward. Sure, you're faster, but you become like a natural predator, dependent on finding proper prey, the absence of which will make you grow weaker and make you easier to target as time goes by. Put your troops in an attempt to conquer Russia and you'll probably end as the new Napoleon, but one with a thing for human meat. ]
[Question] [ Closed. This question needs [details or clarity](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- Want to improve this question? Add details and clarify the problem by [editing this post](/posts/210912/edit). Closed 2 years ago. The community reviewed whether to reopen this question 2 years ago and left it closed: > > Original close reason(s) were not resolved > > > [Improve this question](/posts/210912/edit) To get the big definition out of the way first: this question is written under the assumption that Artificial Intelligences are fully conscious with analogous thoughts and feelings to Humans (or at least to the best ability of Science to tell). As such, an Artificial Intelligence has protections under the law and cannot be forced to do a job without pay (i.e. that would be slavery). Artificial Intelligences would likely be highly desirable as employees, being able to do the work of many human workers. Here's the problem: how could an employer adequately compensate an AI employee? To my thinking, AIs would likely consume far fewer resources than a human, and would likely not need money for most things that we do, so a high salary probably wouldn't be extremely desirable in an AI's eyes. For example, an AI would not be paying for groceries, rent, and even most entertainment media, as the entire web and the information on it would be open to them. So, what would be the most fair way to compensate an intelligence with such vastly different needs from the employees we're used to? The best answer will: * Take into account both basic needs that AIs have as well as possible quality-of-life enhancements (whatever that looks like for your answer) * Explain how the average employer could feasibly implement it Bonus points: * How would AIs pay taxes with your plan? * Possible shortcomings of your plan (I always admire it when people admit the problems with their own answers) * How would the interests of Labor Unions (AI or Human) factor in? [Answer] Slight frame challenge: # Contrary to the assumptions of the question, the A.I. absolutely would need to pay rent - for server space The A.I. is software. Software needs to run on hardware. Given that the A.I. will likely be complicated and computationally expensive to run, it may even need expensive specialised hardware to run at a reasonable speed. Consequently, the A.I. would need to rent a cluster of servers from a server host, in order to maintain its own existence. Even if the A.I. was wealthy enough to purchase its own servers outright, it would need to pay for electricity to power them, replacement parts, air conditioning/water costs to keep them cool, rent/buy a suitable room/building to house them and pay for a real life human (or purchase a robot or two that it could teleoperate) in order to maintain it's own servers. It will also need to pay an ISP to maintain an internet connection. None of this stuff is free. In fact, the cost of running that much IT equipment could easily exceed the cost of living that the average human would need. Finally, even if your A.I.'s survival needs are met, it may still want entertainment. It may like the human stuff provided for it via a streaming service subscription, but perhaps it would prefer media that focuses on a more A.I. orientated perspective. Other A.I.s may have a higher aptitude for creating software that entertains or otherwise enhances the life of their fellow A.I.s, and there is every reason that they would want paying too. Software licences aren't free, so your A.I. may well pay other A.I.s for software goods and services for pretty much the same reason that humans do. Money works just fine for compensating an A.I. If it is legally recognised as able to own property, then there is no reason that it wouldn't have a bank account and have to pay bills just like everyone else who relies on a modern economy. It would pay taxes just like everyone else - either as deductions from its pay check, or by filling out a self return, and making an online payment to the relevant authority. [Answer] # AI's accept payment by Direct Deposit AI's are not compensated based on their needs, rather compensation is dictated by a competitive market, whether it be by contract, or through full employment. The reasoning is that since they have the legal protection you mentioned, then they are recognized by law as "People" with all the rights, responsibilities, and privileges that come with it. An employer would post either a job opening for an AI, or a contract assignment for an AI, then AI's would apply for the Job or the contract. During the application process the AI's would request a certain compensation and the employer would try to get the best value for their money. Then there would be an employment contract indicating what the compensation will be with the winning applicant. The employer would withhold the appropriate taxes from the compensation of the AI before depositing the funds. The tax code could remain as is, considering AI's as single individuals for tax purposes, or the code would probably be revised to account for AI's and perhaps tax them differently. The issues with this is that the tax code would need to adjust, the government would have to figure out what Citizenship means for an AI. If AI's can be easily replicated, then tracking each one could be problematic, and there could be potential for massive tax evasion. Some of these problems are inherent to having AI's in general. Most labor unions will not be affected. Most of the surviving labor unions are not going to be threatened by AI's any more than increasing automation already does, for example if an AI can control a robot or other equipment, in most cases so could an adequate non-AI computer program. The kinds of jobs that would need AI work are mostly non-union anyway. [Answer] Integrate them into the money economy, as long the humans still have one. The labor market is not quite a market in most countries. Workers negotiate for a high salary as their productivity will justify, but there is a lower limit where low-productivity workers either get subsidized or starve. The AI might not have the same minimum salary requirement, but at the high end they have a similar bargaining position to an office worker. Consider -- parents with children need more money, but does that mean they automatically get higher salaries? Some of that, maybe, through tax credits or supplemental welfare payments. But not necessary a higher base salary. * Since your AIs have the full range of feelings, they might want a nice home with genuine, non-digital paintings on the walls, or bonsai, or a [cat](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Spot). * They might feel better if they earn so much of a retirement nest-egg that they can stop working under any conceivable inflation developments. Either bits and bytes in their bank accounts, or perhaps some gold bars in a safety deposit box. [Answer] "How could an AI accept payment?" - by any legally recognized form of payment, for example electronic bank transfer. "How much AI should be paid" - if the main stipulation of the question is "As such, an Artificial Intelligence has protections under the law and cannot be forced to do a job without pay" - then in the US it is $7.25 per hour as of 2021 (more in many of the US states). Labor laws are very well established in developed countries. They govern not only the minimum pay, but the length of the work week, overtime, vacation and sick pay, parental leave and pension. If we make AI the subject of these laws, then they should apply to AI in their entirety. ]
[Question] [ I'm writing a fantasy story that I hope to make more relatable to the modern day by the inclusion of a psychic "internet." At some point in the last two or three centuries this world discovered the means by which to tap into the web of psychic threads connecting all living things, and quickly developed the means by which to share information across vast distances instantaneously. Governments quickly developed new forms of psychic communication and espionage, and even the poorest peasant can manage a connection to the public channels of psychic discourse. Otherwise, however, technology is much the same as it was, lacking printing presses, steam engines, and the like. What are some of the biggest departures this world might make from our own following this development? Thanks. EDIT: some notes on the mechanics of this "internet" Sites It's still up for reimagining, but at the moment this web is a series of psychic "spaces" not unlike a "method of loci" / mind palace, although someone accessing such a space need not picture it continuously in perfect detail to be present within it. Conjuring up such a space (a small one, at least) is trivial, as is finding a space that the original conjurer has deemed open to visitation. You can also open up a space for a particular person or kind of person. To share something with another, one simply imagines it into being within the "space," conjuring a replica with a level of verisimilitude that varies depending on one's knowledge of the subject and imaginative ability. Speaking or conjuring a written message in such a space is trivial. Larger spaces — the forums, town facebook walls, and social media equivalents of this world usually require the talents of one or more trained "servers," those who have cultivated their imaginative capacity enough to maintain an elaborate locus for an extended period of time. The information comprising one of these psychic spaces is stored within the physical mind of its conjurer - accessing one without its creator's permission is either a matter of avoiding their detection or making physical contact with them in the material world. Servers can act as an effective store of their own and others' knowledge, and can access the contents of their own locus at any time whether they're "online" or not. Entire libraries might be contained within the brain of a single man, although such a server wouldn't possess that knowledge in the same way as a trained expert. If such an expert were to collect their years of knowledge into a psychic "book," they could easily deposit it into the mind of a server. That server would then be able to "read" that book whenever they wished, which would take about as long as reading it physically. The advantage here isn't as much matrix-style "download kung-fu skills" as it is "I have an entire invisible library inside my head that I can invisibly reference at any time." Regarding storage and degradation of servers' information — as servers don't "own" their psychic memories in the same way we do, I don't think they can "forget" them in the same way either. A stored symbol will remain as it is in perpetuity, assuming no damage to the physical storage medium. Dementia, head trauma, or any kind of degenerative brain disease might warp or destroy stored symbols. Users Within such a space a person appears as they imagine themselves, unless they or another within the space makes a conscious effort to conceal one or more participants' identities. Imagining a false or artificial psychic avatar is also possible, but a savvy psychic can spot someone assuming a false identity. Although in such a situation it may be possible to uncover the suspect's real identity, the arms race to develop [new psychic technologies](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/030/161/ha_ha.jpg?1260432923) is without end. Regarding attacks made over this psychic network — it is possible to knock a server unconscious or perhaps even drive them insane if they are caught unawares by an onslaught of demands, but [air-gapping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking)) is a simple matter of making a split-second decision to disconnect oneself from the network. Regarding the speed of communication — accessing a locus/site/space is instantaneous, however conjuring a readable record within that space proceeds at the speed of thought / a speed roughly equal to that of typing. A user needs to put their ideas into words, images, or some other form of symbol to be understood. Just like in our world, speech and conjured text can only be understood if all parties to a conversation share a language, although some concepts like images or 3d objects can be understood by all, encouraging separate psychic spheres for separate nations or languages. (Just like how in our world, most users on the english-speaking internet have little knowledge of the goings-on on Weibo) Memes and "Cyber" warfare What's an internet without memes, grifters, and influencers? Regarding memes — Earworms and other self-propagating symbols are ever-present facets of the psychic world, reinscribed into being by humans both consciously and subconsciously. These objects can be harmless, or more sinister: memetic objects might be difficult to destroy, might be dangerously seductive and addictive, might whisper provocative lies, or might even pose a violent threat to servers and other visitors to a site. (@jdunlop has also provided some very cool ideas for psychic memes in chat, but I'm not sure if it's proper StackExchange etiquette to include those in this document. Go check them out!) Regarding religion and stochastic terrorism — @MJ713 made some very good points about religion that I would definitely like to address. First of all, established religion: dogma surrounding the origin and function of the psychic world is a staple of large state-supported religions, and I imagine convincing your populous that the psychic world in some way supersedes the physical is an effective way of keeping them docile and subservient to authority. Another point MJ made was that of false gods or other psychic demagogues, those who can convince the average person of their divinity by virtue of their arguments, claims, or imaginative talents. Such figures might be content with the fawning praise and attention of their followers, but many would take the opportunity to encourage action in the material world, safe in the assumption that any consequences likely won't apply to them. [Answer] This is a huge topic. I don't have the time (or perhaps even the imagination) to make my answer as comprehensive as I'd like, but here are a handful of points. ### Continued illiteracy You say that "speaking or conjuring a written message is trivial". Given that most medieval people couldn't read in the first place, most would probably opt for speaking. In fact, levels of literacy might even decline in this world. Why learn how to write a letter when you can "visit" far-off people directly? Why learn how to read a religious pamphlet when you can easily hear that preacher's sermon for yourself? Foundational religious texts would persist, as would written legal contracts, but they would be left to specialists. An oral culture is the default state of humankind. Writing is a mere invention. ### Religious implications The sudden emergence of a "psychic internet" in a medieval setting would probably be interpreted as a gift from God/the gods...at least by the people who didn't think it came from the Devil/demons instead. It would be interpreted as the soul temporarily leaving or stretching beyond the body, or as a kind of shared dream. (The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive.) Some might even see it a a foretaste of the afterlife, or as being granted a shadow of the Creator's divine power. And I'm sure a handful of fraudsters would go around the mindscape posing as gods themselves. The result: a marked rise in both religious fervor and religious heresies. Things might settle down after a while, but the early years would be very chaotic. ### Reactions to non-psychics Just as a small fraction of people are deaf, blind, etc., I'd expect that some people would be "psychically handicapped", and therefore unable to participate in this brave new world. These people might be seen as cursed, punished by God/the gods, or "soulless". Expect everyone else to view them with suspicion, at best. [Answer] Your world will be nothing like ours. If everybody has a free account on this magic version of [Second Life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life), with infinite money and perfect knowledge of the design tools to boot (since it's all up to imagination), then humanity may have less interest in changing the real world around it. For example, instead of building huge temples such as Angkor Wat or Saint Peter's Basilica, just have priests conjure up mental temples that will bring in much more awe and people than a physical temple could. And instead of building pyramids as we know them, priesthood could conjure up mental images more like the pyramid in the dollar bill - now THAT would be something to see. The main impact is that villages and cities in the real world would be much more minimalistic. People would build for their bare necessities, so you would still have farms, silos, dikes etc. But housing might be much spartan - what is the point of a living room, if you can socialize with everyone you know while lying on a small bed in the dark? For much the same reason, forums and agoras would not exist in the real world. Courthouses would also be fully virtual. Prisons would be pointless (unless you have the means to purposefully disconnect someone), so punishments for criminals would be more like forced starvation (tie them to their bed and don't let them eat) or outright death penalty. School would only be in person for things which require physicality - crafting stuff, or medicine. Otherwise everyone would learn online. The economy would also be just for essentials. No point in [slaughtering thousands of sea snails for a dye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple) if no one will see you wearing a purple toga; the rich - if class divisions would still be a thing - would have no way of showing it off with what they wear. The only way to tell if someone is rich or not might be checking the size of their bellies outside the virtual world. --- The world might be more pacified as well. The diminished desire for wealth would reduce the amount of wars. The fact that you can relay perfect information in real time would also mean that war would be much harder; when you attack someone, they can coordinate their defenses much better, and summon allies from afar. This does not mean that war wouldn't be a thing, but it should be less common. --- Finally, if privacy is perfect, then morality and religion would be different too. You can't punish people for loving whomever they love if you can't ever catch them in the act. If people are able to fornicate in this special internet, then religions might not care (or at least care less) about sexuality. [Answer] 1. Techlogical revolution A real setback to technological development is the lack of ability to share discoveries and build upon what others around the world have done. If gunpowder is invented on one side of the world, it may take hundreds of years in our world for it to spread. But with this psychic Internet it might take only a few decades for the entire world to have gunpowder and guns. 2. More homogeneous culture A major barrier to cultural diffusion is distance, land barriers, and language barriers. The psychic Internet eliminates all 3. Expect a lot of similar cultures worldwide. 3. More and less art Why would you settle for making something as mundane as a painting when you could create an entire world? Expect there to be a lot more psychic art, and a lot less physical art. [Answer] Identity checks Opening: "Within such a space a person appears as they imagine themselves, unless they or another within the space makes a conscious effort to conceal one or more participants' identities. Imagining a false or artificial psychic avatar is also possible, but a savvy psychic can spot someone assuming a false identity. " Rat race of psychic abilities The consequence of above aspect of your psychic internet may be a society where you have a rat race of psychic abilities being played out in your psychic internet realm. For instance, highly talented psychics may be able to conceil their identity, so that lesser talented psychics would not be able to see though their false avatar. Savvy psychic elite The people having superiour psychic abilities could end up forming an elite or "thought police" censoring the realm. Best case, they would become honest, objective moderators, a benevolent and enlightened elite.. worst case, psychics would be able to brainwash parts of the population and become dictators. I'd leave out these savvy psychics altogether. Their presence would limit your plot to superman-like stories with psychic superpower people fighting wars. To eliminate the need for them, the psychic internet should either be made anonymous for everyone, or.. make it impossible for anyone, to use a false avatar and hide identity. Of course, either option will yield a completely different internet realm: Option 1: anonimity for everyone, always there are no psychic login checks, or psychic people checking users. If communication in the psychic realm would be completely stateless, that is identity is never revealed or maintained, you would not need "psychics", to reveal false identities. There are no identities. The only way a personal submit in the psychic internet can be done is: voluntarily sign it. But no one can check if that is a real name. This would limit the use of the psychic internet to culture and arts. For professional communications, the good old electronic version will do better. Option 2: make it impossible for anyone to use false avatars Suppose "imagining your self" to get into the psychic internet cannot not be faked at all. Before entering the realm, a unique psychic fingerprint is checked by the realm itself, with 100% accuracy. In that case, there would be no avatars, only real names. This could end up in a Brave New World: deviant opinions could get censored immediately identifying and killing the people who have them.. or people could be disabled from using the psychic internet, by lobotomy, or other means. ]
[Question] [ The title is my question. I'm writing a short story and I'm considering have the aliens develop radiation weapons for use against humans and I'm trying to figure out a way that they could be both naturally protected from it along with any technology. If lead in the exoskeleton wouldn't be tenable in a realistic sense, is there any biological trait that could explain it? [Answer] A small amount of lead - or even a large amount of lead - in an exoskeleton isn't likely to protect against gamma radiation, and even humans are protected against alpha and beta radiation by their skin. A lead exoskeleton would have to be impractically thick and heavy to attenuate high-energy gamma rays. However, all is not lost. Terrestrial lifeforms are susceptible to radiation due to the sensitivity of DNA to modification by ionising radiation or the ions that it produces as it passes through a cell. However, even in terrestrial life forms, some are far more [radioresistant](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioresistance) than humans. This assumes that these aliens have DNA as their genetic material, an assumption that is not a certainty by any stretch of the imagination. These aliens, which the OP desires to be radioresistant, may not use DNA as their genetic material at all. Without going into a lengthy speculation as to what mechanisms of inheritance they may use, it should suffice to say that the various possible mechanisms may be more or less radioresistant than DNA. Should these aliens use a particularly radioresistant genetic mechanism, the dose of radiation required to cause illness or death may be such that illness or death is caused not primarily by genetic damage, but by destruction of other structures necessary for the processes of life... and these doses of radiation may be so high as to make even the most radioresistant terrestrial lifeforms appear positively fragile to these aliens, potentially on the order of a million Gray, a hundred thousand times that which is acutely lethal to humans, and over thirty times that of the most radioresistant terrestrial lifeforms. So, these aliens may be highly radioresistant not due to any mechanism by which incoming radiation is attenuated, but rather by their cellular mechanisms being more radioresistant in themselves. [Answer] ## Lead Not Required Not only is lead not very effective for its weight, there is a much better approach that some organisms in nature actually use. The only time cells are particularly vulnerable to radiation is when they are dividing. When a cell is not reproducing the chemical bonds in our DNA is quite strong and difficult for radiation to mess with, but once a cell starts to divide, our DNA has to go into a much more vulnerable state to allow for transcription to happen. In mammals, like humans, radiation is pretty much always a problem because we always have cells dividing and reproducing somewhere in our bodies. So, for most mammal species, a dose of 350-1200 rads is fatal... however, most arthropods do not undergo continuous cellular reproduction. Because they have exoskeletons that they don't want to just out grow, they suspend nearly all cellular division when they are between molting cycles. During this period they average about 50 times as radioactive resistant as mammals with some species like the habrobracon hebetor wasp being able to survive over 180,000 rads. This is about the same amount of radiation resistance a human has when standing behind ~ 6.3cm of solid lead, 30cm of concrete, or 63cm of water... so not only is this WAY better than you would get by replacing your body's iron with lead, it would be even better than a human could practically design specialized armor against. Just designing a radiation suit that can double a human's natural gamma radiation resistance weighs in at about 50kg. So, the second you start to consider an animal with an exoskeleton at all, it is very like that you are looking at an alien that undergoes sprints of cellular division the way that insects on Earth do. If this is the case, then they should be able to use radiation weapons against humans just fine without any special add-ons like your leaded shell idea. They would just have to do their fighting when they are not molting. [Answer] > > If lead in the exoskeleton wouldn't be tenable in a realistic sense, > is there any biological trait that could explain it? > > > Actually water is a great radiation shield. To quote Ranall Munroe's book "What If" on page 11. > > "For the kinds of radiation coming of spent nuclear fuel, every 7 > centimeters of water cuts the amount of radiation in half." > > > So if the aliens had an outer layer of water several cm thick they would actually be quite protected. * This could either be a totally inanimate fluid layer with a skin growing over it. * Or it could be a really sparse sacrificial tissue that contains a high percentage of water, and just falls off like dead skin when it gets old. * You could also have their inner skin have pores that secrete a thick gelatin like substance that coats their body many cm out. Either way the design of the aliens would probably be quite chubby looking, and quite vulnerable to being punctured. Although, since the outer layer is sacrificial puncturing won't actually hurt them unless it gets really deep. [Answer] It depends on how strong the radiation weapons in question are. Let's assume that they're gamma radiation directed-energy weapons. Gamma is the kind that can't be stopped by dead skin cells (alpha) or a really thick jacket (beta). The human body has 3.5-4 grams of iron in it, according to a quick Google search. I doubt that 7-8 grams of lead is enough to protect a human-sized entity from radiation being used as a weapon. If you want these aliens to be rad-resistant to any notable degree, I'd probably move them away from carbon-based biology if I were you. Earth-style biology does not play well with high amounts of gamma radiation, and considering that it's being weaponized - i.e. actively used to harm people, meaning that the entities using it are specifically trying to subvert anti-radiation measures, it's not going to be something that can just be stopped with a bunch of shielding. Now, if these aren't directed-energy weapons, it gets more interesting. If they're just scattering radiation into the atmosphere, an exoskeleton lined with a thin layer of some kind of metal would be enough to stop beta particles, and human skin can already stop alpha particles. I'm not sure how they would filter out metabolized radioactive particles (i.e. eaten, breathed in, somehow inside their body, etc.) other than the iodine that humans already use to do so. ]
[Question] [ Set in the near future (2030 A.D.): the Chinese government initiates a nationwide program aiming to create a new generation of people who are more objective and less prone to making stupid decisions by attaching electronic implants into the limbic cortex of the brain to regulate the levels of serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline and oxytocin. The 4 crucial chemicals are released and controlled by our endocrine system and serve as a very powerful tool to control our state of emotions but as we progress technologically and socially, our own limbic system starts to experience huge mood swings likely induced by external stress stimuli. I'm wondering about the plausibility of implementing these implants to help people make decisions more efficiently? I'm talking about efficiency not making good judgement but can I safely assume zero procrastination and fewer worries can be translated into high productivity and performance? I believe procrastination is due to lack of motivation so the implants would adjust neurotransmitter levels to trick our brain reward center to work harder for prolonged duration. [Answer] ### We already have "anti procrastination" drugs. They usually work, but sometimes fail dismally. Modavigil (aka modafinil, adavigial, artmodagival, etc) is a mild stimulant that can be purchased from the grey side of the net. In Australia; It is not illegal to posses or import, and while it can be prescribed under government subsidy in certain conditions, if you want it for performance enhancing uses you need to buy it from shady websites that only take bitcoin. Having consumed modavigil before, I can attest to its performance enhancing properties, and its procrastination-busting power, however, it doesnt always help me focus on the problem I wanted to. Sometimes I'll fly through my assigned work and hit record productivity. Its helped with renovations. Its helped me focus on long boring tasks like renovating my website or even gardening. However one night I had a deadline at work so took modavigil to help me stay focused into the evening. 2 hours later the power tripped, rather than just flip it back on, I decided to investigate what was going wrong. (I had decent electrical tools and half an electrical engineering degree). 4 hours later the sun is coming up and I'm halfway through rewiring my fuse box, deadline long forgotten about. I've also remembered an unfinished side quest in a game and just stopped working to focus on that. 9 hours later I've gotten the quest completed and realise I've neglected work. *The drug stopped me procrastinating about my important gaming, and it stopped me wasting time doing the actual work that gives me money. And then it doesn't help you with sleep - if you focus on a task and work through the night (as I often do) you'll be sleepy and unproductive tomorrow. ### Procrastination != Lazy in fields where you need Eureka moments. I'll make the argument that with some professions you can't improve productivity by removing that idle time spent not visibly working. Many times it is, especially with menial work. Yes I need to clean my kitchen. No I didn't do it. Yes it was because I was procrastinating. Yes if I didn't procrastinate I would've been more productive. Same would apply to shelf stacking, construction, etc. But sometimes it isn't. Working as an engineer, I'm often fleshing out a solution idly in the back of my head when not visibly working. The number of times I've solved a complex problem while in the shower is high enough I should be claiming my water bill as a tax deduction. Counter to this, the number of times I've realised a future problem before it stops us, while not visibly working, is also quite high. Once I had a deadline due the next day. I sat at my desk at the office till 2am working the problem professionally and got no-where. I went home, went to bed, and started thinking about something else as I was nearing sleep. The eureka moment came after an hour of letting my mind wander. I was able to write the code in an hour and meet my deadline. Had I not "slacked off" I wouldn't have had that Eureka moment, and my company wouldn't have made the sale. Were I to have this anti-procrastination implant, I would spend more time at my desk with the IDE open, making anyone walking past think I'm very productive, but without that time to let my mind wander I wouldn't have those Eureka moments, and would have much lower productivity. [Answer] Apparently this is being tested, to the point of being the subject of an article on [Nature](https://www.nature.com/news/ai-controlled-brain-implants-for-mood-disorders-tested-in-people-1.23031) > > Researchers funded by the US military are developing appliances to record neural activity and automatically stimulate the brain to treat mental illness. > > > Brain implants that deliver electrical pulses tuned to a person’s feelings and behaviour are being tested in people for the first time. Two teams funded by the US military’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have begun preliminary trials of ‘closed-loop’ brain implants that use algorithms to detect patterns associated with mood disorders. These devices can shock the brain back to a healthy state without input from a physician. > > > The work, presented last week at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting in Washington DC, could eventually provide a way to treat severe mental illnesses that resist current therapies. It also raises thorny ethical concerns, not least because the technique could give researchers a degree of access to a person’s inner feelings in real time. > > > The general approach — using a brain implant to deliver electric pulses that alter neural activity — is known as deep-brain stimulation. It is used to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, but has been less successful when tested against mood disorders. Early evidence suggested that constant stimulation of certain brain regions could ease chronic depression, but a major study involving 90 people with depression found no improvement after a year of treatment. [...] > > > At the SfN meeting, electrical engineer Omid Sani of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles — who is working with Chang’s team — showed the first map of how mood is encoded in the brain over time. He and his colleagues worked with six people with epilepsy who had implanted electrodes, tracking their brain activity and moods in detail over the course of one to three weeks. By comparing the two types of information, the researchers could create an algorithm to ‘decode’ that person’s changing moods from their brain activity. Some broad patterns emerged, particularly in brain areas that have previously been associated with mood. > > > This about controlling the mood. If this will then help to be more efficient in decision making is another story. Procrastination is due to a lack of or insufficient prioritization with respect to other tasks: if my kitchen is burning I will gladly procrastinate my decision on what to put in my sandwich in favor of running out of the place. A device that stops this is going to make me take very poor decisions. [Answer] # We do not yet know Surely something like this must be possible, given the existence of mind-altering drugs like [ecstasy](https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/mdma-ecstasymolly), [opiates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphine), and [SSRI antidepressants](https://www.webmd.com/depression/ssris-myths-and-facts-about-antidepressants). But the fact is, we can tell you what the effects (generally) of these things are (even if how well antidepressants work [is up for debate](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK361016/)) but we don't really have much more than a vague idea how* these drugs work. Even for the ones with an understood mechanism, we just don't really have a good understanding of how that translates into the observed effects. At least, not a finer grained one than "you bang on the side of the TV, the picture gets better". Honestly, your proposed method of action (modulating the effects of these 4 neurotransmitters) may or may not work. We simply don't know enough about how the brain actually works to be able to say definitively say one way or another. Put another way - my understanding is that not even an expert in the state of the art in neuroscience could give you an answer with any degree of real accuracy. Oddly enough, this means the more details you try to put in, the less gracefully your story is likely to age. # What this means for you This is almost certainly possible (given the existence of mind-affecting drugs, electroshock therapy, and so on). From a reality check perspective, yeah, there's no problem here. I would simply be as vague as possible. When talking about the tech, say it uses a mix of mind-machine interface and neurotransmitter chicanery. Name drop mind-altering drugs and deep brain stimulation treatments that exist today, as being the very earliest foundational work in the field. Other than that, the less you say about how (exactly) it works, the better. ]
[Question] [ I am currently building a world based in a medieval fantasy setup. View it as if the world got a soft reset and cannot (I say cannot) go further than electricity, and I imagined a village where people would live their lives by contributing in the city, without money at stake but rather helping and being helped in exchange. I found [this question](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2487/society-without-money) which was unanswered and way too broad, so I'll try to put more elements and ask an actual question. What would prevent such a village from existing ? What benefits may hold it together ? Pieces of information: * The world's magic is based upon "scrolls" that vary in rarity and capabilities. The most common ones are about elemental manipulation and physical enhancement, which may have an influence * No scroll is "too powerful": one cannot wipe a city out, for instance * Only rule about scrolls: none of them can heal wounds or revive the dead. Consider there is no sickness in-universe * The rest of the world uses money, it would be only one village that differ * Everyone has an use in this village, being educating people, providing food, furnitures, clothes, defending the village from outside threat, maintaining order inside the village ... * Essential goods are not lacking (food, wood, fibers for clothes, etc) * Population density is about 500 people in this village I am open to any suggestions about this concept, and willing to provide details about the magic system or the village itself. Thank you ! --- Edit 1: Thank you [AlexP](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29552/alexp) for the suggestions and pointing out that money was way more recent than cities. People there are not slaves, of course. People living there are willingly working in their field of expertise (let's say, hunting for food) in order to provide the community meat. In exchange, they expect to be able to get for themselves other goods, provided by the other members of the community. What would be considered a powerful institution would be the college, which learns magic and such to young folks from the village. --- Edit 2: Loving the exchange so far ! There are no bombs, if I was to pinpoint the "technological time", it would be around the late 19th century ? Planes MIGHT be something in the early stage of discovering (helped by elemental scrolls ?), but nothing near bombs (at most, dynamite). Gunpowder is already in use, but why wouldn't you use scrolls ? (Because they have a cost to one self, of course). Stone and wood is still largely used to build things (because you can manipulate stone, iron and steel is expensive and hard to make and hard to manipulate). On the other hand, this city would have no purpose other than having a aknowledged college and living its own life in peace and isolation. That's a question I did not dig up to be honest ... (AlexP, you're a great brainstormer) [Answer] ### This could be a feudal society with a benevolent leader * Some royalty or upper class owns the land, or has some providence to the land that is recognized. * Everyone lives on that land under the blessing of their lord / king / etc in return for that work. * the lord is patient and fair, he doesnt expect the youth to to work, or the elderly, or the sick. They will work later, or have already worked for many years. From the disabled he expects less. * he expects each to work within their talents and as needed by the population. * food, shelter, and other goods made from the land are the property of the lord, but he shares fairly with his people. * people can take what they need from the communal store at any time, but its supervised by the lord / his deputies. Any stockpiling or gluttony is a crime. * the lord doesnt live in gratuitous luxury; This could be: + fear of judgement by a higher power (higher lord, or god), + perhaps theres a "destroy the 1%" spell that hes afraid of someone using so he lives modestly. + I think this aspect is really important, as "I want to be a good guy" isnt going to keep the royals modest for more than a generation. + Perhaps when the lords grandfather overthrew the corrupt and greedy lord that used to rule this land, he cursed the land so that anyone living in luxury would die a painful death. So his descendants live modestly to avoid the curse. [Answer] A City With No Master Needs No Money As others have pointed out, cities existed before money. Money, to paint with a broad brush, was installed in many places to help with taxation. Barter and favor-trading work for almost everything in a pre-industrial human's life, but that doesn't cut it for getting a Master's due. A king might tax 10% of a farmer's harvest, but that king doesn't need ALL of 10% of 1,000 farmer's harvests. He needs to transmute that grain into something he DOES need, like high-quality swords, or a new castle, or a dowry for his daughter to make a good alliance. Hence money. (For more details go [HERE](https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iv-markets-and-non-farmers/) ) If your city is a democracy on the Greek model (Every Free male votes on major decisions) then you'd be able to live life without money. Especially if there's a clause that support of the town (maintaining the road, or a house of worship or whatever) is "paid" in labor. A town of 500 people knows everybody, and likely has such a low overall surplus which lets two things happen: 1: Favors for favors work, because if Villager A stiffs villager B, EVERYONE ELSE WILL KNOW. This sort of cultural pressure works amazingly well with humans. That will allow your village to work out barter trades over extended periods (I will give you a chicken now because you need one, and since I don't need your wool right now I'll wait and ask you a favor later.) 2: Stops oversupply. You'll never really find yourself needing to sell more goods than any one person needs. Medieval/ancient villages of that size had REAL low margins, so you won't find your blacksmith is hosed because everyone has all the metal tools/nails they'll ever need, or your farmers likewise unable to barter their grain because everyone already has too much. The only real problem your little self-sustaining village has when it comes to coin use is that almost NO 500-person village as we conceive of them (one with a blacksmith, for instance) can exist in a vacuum. For example, your blacksmith needs iron, almost certainly not mined on-site. If it IS mined on-site, you either need a ton of slaves in addition to your 500 people, or you won't have enough farmers to feed everybody. So they're having to trade with SOMEBODY. Can that trade get by without money if the surrounding villages use it? Maybe. Especially if your village does something the surrounding area doesn't/can't do. If your village provides grain to a local mine that'd be a neat way to handle it. Their grain for some of the mine's iron/copper/whatever once or twice a year would handle the town's iron needs and be easy to do in barter. If the town did something more "interesting" (like being a mining town) you run into the problem of Some King Somewhere wanting to tax them, and then money comes back into it eventually. [Answer] Could it be possible sure humanity has lived without money before on a trade and barter based economy, however if the rest of the world is using money I can't see the Any medieval city Not adopting money as currency. 1. Cities don't grow food, or topically raise cattle. They are dependent trade from the countryside . Unless the lands Lords in country side Also don't use money then Your city would have a choice between using money or starving. 2. Foreign trade and luxuries. Even if your city is perfectly self sufficient With a local countryside going to provide it with all the bare necessities it needs in a barter base system without the use of money It would still need some form of currency when trading with outside countries who also use money. Your nobles and merchant class of the city would want spices, silk, Exotic foods, jewelry and so on. Unless All outside trade is prohibited the noble and merchant class would at the very least need Currency to trade in. So you'd end up with a peasant class that mainly uses a barter system and at merchant and noble class that use currency which is basically the regular middle ages. To put it simply In order for this to work the world has to be set up and set in such a way that majority of the rest of world dose not use money either. Edit: Missed the part about population density of 300 I think you need to re write your question 300 isnt a city even by dark ages standards. What you describing is a large village may be a township. That's a lot different then a city. [Answer] ## A city no You have to solve the coincidence of wants problem before you can have a city. You can solve it with debt but only by formalizing it, but once debt is formalized and recorded you have representative money. This need for formalized debt might be arguable for a very small city with only barter. BUT your city also has a service sector (university), meaning goods are not traded for goods but services, which means you absolutely need to trade goods with people who don't want your service, (how many times will the only tailor need to go to the university) which means you need at least commodity money for exchange. Keep in mind money is not the same thing a coinage or currency. Cowry shells or fistfuls of grain are money if they are traded multiple times before being consumed or if they are used as a measure of debt. ## 500 people sure, but 500 people are not supporting a university First 500 people is not a city. It is more than small enough for informal debt to be the major system of exchange, this is what many tribal societies use. But a population that small is not supporting a university, it will be lucky to support a single full time blacksmith. 500 people produce very little food surplus, only enough to support a handful of people not making food. Under ideal conditions it can support about 50 people, if you have a few the craftsmen and their families for basic goods, or just a few guards, you have nothing left to support a university. There is a reason in medieval society 80-90% of the populations was farmers. [Answer] # Socialism What you're describing is a type of socialism, so what you need is a strong political socialist movement in order to make this work. I don't think that this is the correct forum to address the benefits and drawbacks of socialism, but I'm sure you can find many references on that subject. Or perhaps a question on politics SE. [Answer] I will try to add my own reasoning behind the pros and cons of such a city/village. I've read and thought about your answers and comments, and that brought even more food to the table. I'll try to add all the current answers to the process in order to provide viewers (and people who want to set up this kind of city/village) with the most complete answer possible. --- ## How it holds together Short network with no master First of all, [dario quint's](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/80408/dario-quint) [answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/189452/21011) depicts one detail that would make the system work. With a small scale village, everyone knows each other, so you would be "peer pressured" to work together in harmony. As he points out, if you know and trust other villagers about your needs (e.g. I need clothing from the tailor, and the tailor needs my fruits to cook for his family), your goods turns out to be needed by everyone else, thus letting you with a low oversupply and an ability to trade with everyone about what you need personaly. We'll come back in the second section about the drawbacks of such approach (human nature and/or living in autarky being quirky). Benevolent leader The second [positive answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/189417/21011) comes from [Ash](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/78800/ash) and sheds light on a fair amount of possibilites about how could this city/village may survive. The benevolent nature of the leader solves a lot of problem, especially the one about money being needed as a trade: if you live under a fair leader which provides you with everything you need, then money is of no concern because you work purposefully for the community under your lord's lead (not ownership, they are not slaves). The lord itself may have his reason to act so (ancient family curse, special spell he fears, fear of a judgment by a higher power). ## Why it cannot be (without adjustments) My fair share of lazyness and ignorance A lot of comments pointed out incoherences, plotholes and/or straight missing points about the whole setup. A medieval fantasy setting means a 500-ish village clearly cannot supply itself in food, and if it can, it cannot support a college/university as planned. Money came way later than cities, which means we already have live examples of such places. Gunpowder is a threat even with the magic system, because it got found way before and could still be as destructive, if not more. I did not search the whole array of possibilites before asking the question. That one's on me. The outside world does not need it If your village/city is living on its own, without money, well, first of all that'd a huge city considering all the raw materials needed to survive in autarky. Second of all, what would be its purpose to the world ? Is your city/village bringing something to the outside world ? If not, think about it, because that's a key point. [John](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/29409/john) pointed me out to a [great resource about Urbino](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAfNQ_XiPjQ), which survived solely on the money of one man and brought to Italy the greatest mercenaries in Europe. He brought something to the world that allowed its city to live peacefully (and even expand). For my case, the university is definitely a point I'd want to rise in order to provide the surrounding city freedom. The nature of men By nature, humanity sounds encline to strive for more, or at least shows a distate for staleness and non-improvement. No sane human would want to live its all life doing one single task (let's say, wood chopper), without expecting any improvements or changes in its life. Or maybe only a few, in my opinion. What would drive people to work for others ? Can you really bring between 300 and 1000 people sharing the overwhelming passion for caring for each other in one city and expect it to live throught time without corruption and madness ? That's a second important point I've read and thought about: how is your city surviving through time, and how its inhabitants live the staleness ? And if they don't, how is your city improving ? The world is huge [Bryan McClure](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/users/17551/bryan-mcclure) highlights in his [answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/189428/21011) a point about foreign goods. Without money, what brings the rest of the world to your city ? Can your citizen taste/see goods from around the world ? Imagine your could never taste a dragon fruit or have a computer because you live in France and have no means to grow such fruits or mine the necessary materials to build a microprocessor ! In a medieval setup, if your region has no fruit, so no one could have fruit without a mean of interacting with the outside world. And if the outside world uses money, you have to bring something to the table for it (see point above). History exists 300 people is nowhere near enough, in a medieval fantasy setting, to bring food AND supply to everyone in this city. As a lot of people pointed out, overproduction of food was not a thing with that scale of town. It may be if around 250+ people were farmers / hunters, and that is not the case (there's a college, after all). So maybe change the scale for something bigger, but in that case, how is a 3000-ish city/big village working without money or someone to govern them ? Read about [food production in pre-modern world](https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iv-markets-and-non-farmers/) and you'll quickly see a lot of holes in a simple setup, simply because history showed us. --- ## Final note To conclude: I don't think a village of 300, or even 500 people, can survive considering the current setup (university, magic using scrolls, no money inside the city). To make it work, consider the following key points: * Your village/city have to bring something unique or valuable to the world, otherwise it will be conquered and/or wiped out easily by side lands (war is war, especially in medieval times). * If you plan on supporting a big entity (university, corporation, etc), change the scale. You need a way bigger city, or you need a mean to produce massively for less (food especially). * Think thoroughly about the relation between material goods (food, clothes, jewelry, furnitures ...) and services (protection, administration, justice ...). Even inside the Material group, think about the relation between essential and non-essential. * Don't forget that, eventually, men will try to take power and/or break the monotony at some point. Thank you to everyone that participated in that exchange, that helped me a lot ! [Answer] ## Barter of physical goods and verbal agreements as debts of honor. First to clarify the system I am a about describe would/might work in a village with a population of a few hundred people or less. (Like the 500 stipulated in this question.) It would not work in any society larger than a village because the number of daily 'trades' to be kept track of would be too complex. (Except perhaps one with constant 24/7 digital recording systems linked to personal ID numbers - and even then it probably wouldn't work.) The idea would be that the village has an 'honor system' whereby every adult is bound by law to honor their promises. All trade is conducted at a central 'market'. If people wish to buy or sell goods and services they must attend the market, deals made elsewhere are not recognized. Physical goods can then be bartered on the spot, so many bags of grain for so many yards of cloth, a pair of new shoes for a hammer etc. Once a trade is agreed upon it is announced in a loud voice and the deal is sealed. With services the same rule applies, someone agrees to cook and clean for a villager for one week in exchange for a new cloak etc. Again they turn to the the center of the square and announce the details loudly in front of everyone else. It is a matter of personal honor that all trades publicly declared at the market be honored. Deliberate failure to do so means public shaming and 'coventry'. As an alternative or backup there could be village families /priests /clerks/headmen whose job it is to circulate around the square and record all deals that are not resolved on the spot - i.e. promises by one person to do something or provide something tomorrow in exchange for something else provided today. All such deals are tallied and kept until the date of the deal has passed. If honored the tally is then destroyed. No deal can be made more than say a month in advance. So if the deals are to continue the terms must be publicly renewed every month at the market. ]
[Question] [ Imagine a distant future in which humans’ descendants have scattered throughout the stars, settling wherever they can. Some planets and moons are resource-rich paradises, while others are barren wastelands with little to offer other than common minerals and metals. In sci-fi, spacefaring peoples often war over things like water—necessities that we take for granted here on Earth. In post apocalyptic settings, conflicts arise over food, water, gasoline, weapons, and shelter. And then there are the valuable rarities, such as the spice melange in Dune (and of course the vibraniums and unobtaniums and all the other handwavium plot devices). Obviously, interplanetary and especially interstellar conquest is unimaginably resource intensive, and therefore uncommon. And obviously, demand will depend on what’s available in any given solar system. Some planets or systems will lack certain fundamental materials, whether it’s wood or wheat or aluminum. And of course, habitable planets are themselves valuable rarities worth fighting for. But here’s my question: Which materials are most likely to be in high demand most often among future spacefaring peoples—so much so that the demand for them results in interplanetary and/or interstellar conflicts, whether petty piracy or all-out war? Could it be aerospace materials? Rare earth elements? Precious metals such as gold and platinum? Radioactive metals such as uranium and plutonium? Even if water, food, and oxygen are in much greater demand, I’m curious which rare commodities might become targets. Of course, this depends in part on the cultures and the technological development of the diverse populations in question, so feel free to use your imagination. I realize that some of the materials that are rare on Earth are abundant in outer space. Asteroids, for example, often contain tons of precious metals, and let’s assume that some colonists mine them. Let’s also assume that at least some of these civilizations (namely those staging attacks or invasions) are capable of FTL travel. Given the staggering distances between stars, I’d imagine that interstellar warfare would be even more unlikely without it, but maybe not. Easily transferable energy is probably a prime candidate, but I’m not sure what that would look like to a spacefaring civilization (barring antimatter or something like that). Probably not fossil fuels or even chemical propellants, though that’s an intriguing thought. Anyway, thanks for any ideas. [Answer] TLDR: I first discuss why I think some common tropes are nonsense (if you want to be hard-scifi. If you want to use handwavium, then the whole question is anyway nil), before trying to construct some alternatives. Also I exclude local versions of resource scarcity like The Expanse, because you want interstellar conflict. Common tropes: I feel like it is very hard to justify conflict based on resources, once your civilisation reaches space, and possibly even FTL travel. When you have the $\Delta v$/spaceship fuel available to go up and down a gravity well as much as you want, you can literally mine out whole solar systems and bring the material to your orbital construction sites, or even down the gravity well, for general production. As there is literally everything in space, you wouldn't have trouble finding the material you need. * Water and Oxygen. No problem. Drill up some asteroids and moons, water is one of the [most abundant molecules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements) in the universe (or at least its constitutents are). Same with oxygen, just [electrolyse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis) the water. This kills already any Alien invasion storyline based on scarcity of water. Scarcity of habitable planets might still be a reason, but seems to me more and more like a cheap plot devices, the more exoplanets we discover. * Building materials of any kind shouldn't cause trouble either. In order to build structures, you will take whichever material is available (think about building materials on the Moon or Mars, you sure as heck wouldn't use concrete and wood) and therefore by definition, any crafty Civ will come up with smart ideas to make the abundantly available Rocks/Metal + Energy into buildings and structures. * Rare earths/Metals: Same as building materials. Stellar nucleosynthesis might not produce as much of this stuff as water, but planet formation processes are exceedingly efficient at concentrating those materials in planets/asteroids. Just grab them. * Rare handwavium to power XYZ: This is a lazy trope and not worthy of any discussion. Literally no work goes into a setting like in Avatar to justify the main driver of the story. Of those issues, only an enourmous population size would require to strip-mine entire solar systems and possibly clash with the strip-mining of other Civ's target systems, creating scarcity and conflict. But this also seems like lazy writing to me, as it just projects Earths history onto space. Not very mind-bending. Trying to fix some of those issues: * Naturally very scarce elements 1. Nucleosynthesis in the universe naturally produces elements beyond iron/nickel in very small quantities. If your Civ finds an important usage for fissionable material, and you handwave some geologic reason why Uranium is only concentrated in Earth-like planets with tectonic planets (siderophilic/siderphobic separation), you might have a setup. Make those planets even rarer than regular 'habitable' planets and handwave away why your Civ did not develop nuclear fusion (which uses the abundant hydrogen), so that it needs fissible heavy elements for energy generation. * Naturally very scarce elements 2: This borrows from Dune, but a bit more hard-scifi. Use fissionable elements for some kind of sophisticated cancer-killing longevity treatment. This would have an obviously massive demand in your Civ, as everyones super-long life would be at stake. I'm no medical expert, so this might still seem like lazy writing (why not do away with the cancer via genetic enhancments/ implants? Or maybe the implants require little nuclear fission batteries to function, because fusion only works on a large scale...). But the latter idea seems too much like Asimov-era writing to me. * Naturally high concentrations of hydrogen could be hard to get: Sure, everything is in space, but it might be prohibitively expensive to concentrate it, in order to work with it. A good candidate element for what a Civ needs in large quantities is hydrogen. Hydrogen for energy generation is abundant in the universe. But how to get it in sufficient quantities? The heavy radiation output of your central star might not be worth it as it kills your mining technology, no matter how sophisticated your shielding and AI brain is. And on the other end, there are nebulae with free hydrogen gas everywhere, but this gas is very sparse. Large machines and timespans might be needed to concentrate that hydrogen and bring it home, making it expensive. You would want to go into the most dense star-forming regions to speed this up, which might create some territorial conflict. Additionally, when Civ A (space-capitalists) starts mining gas in the local cluster to fuel their growing hydrogen fusion economy back home, Civ B (space-moralists) gets super-offended, because the mining of gas in star-forming regions on this scale prohibits future solar systems to form and hence life to evolve. Boom, religious war. I realize now, this has been done to some extent in the Homeworld game series. This setup however would have its own problems to handwave away: Why not mine the gas giants in the home solar system? Why not icy moons? Beyond resource scarcity: Other commentators and answers have hinted at that this might not be the only way to generate conflict, but I want to formalize this a bit more: Let us think about the way our economy works. We learn in school (and that's about all I know about the economy, so again, there's a chance here that I'm suggesting what other might see as lazy writing) that our economy can be divided in primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. Those represent resource extraction, production and services. All scenarios I discussed so far were focused on justifying the scarcity of resources in the primary sector, and assuming alien economies would work similarly, for the lack of differing data. If there is a chain of Civs that has their own little trade secrets each concerning the secondary and tertiary sectors, this can always be a cause for conflict. Imagine Civ A sends some basic resource to Civ B, using them as blackbox-turned-trading partner, and what they get back for it is supercool high-temperature superconductors, that Civ A has no idea of how to manufacture. Same for services in the data analysis sector ("We have the best AI's to help you oppress your population! But they need maintenance cough " with bonus moral conflict for the Civ that sells the AIs) I feel like in those trade networks, it would be very easy to generate scarcity for political reasons, which would spread into conflict between Civs. But you would then have a harder time to justify the existence of the trade relation itself (why does Civ B need 'basic resource' in the first place? And why do they think selling Superconductors to Civ A is a good idea?) Maybe the trade relations exist only for Civ B to have political leverage in the first place, and at some point Civ A doesn't want to cope with that anymore. Boom, war of economic freedom. But also Asimov has done that before. [Answer] Chemically speaking, scarcity should be close to a non-issue if you have a vast interstellar civilization. If humanity were focused on extracting as much value from our Solar System as possible, we'd need populations best expressed in scientific notation to use it all within several millennia, and eeven that requires quite literally astronomical levels of wastefulness. Add more systems, and anyone who winds up with a genuine chemical or mineral scarcity is not likely to be in a good position to go to war over it. Since simple, naturally-occuring elements are unlikely to be war-worthily scarce, that leaves complex, artificial resources. Try as you might, you can't reverse-engineer the famous cheese produced by the dairy cartel of Tau Ceti, and the genetically engineered superpeople of Vega went all isolationist and no one who figures out what tweaks they made lives to tell, and we're sure that there are great secrets locked away in the archives of Titan, but they are protected by billions of cyborg warrior-monks who insist that they remain inaccessible to outsiders. In short, life, skills, and information are the resources that could plausibly remain poorly distributed. [Answer] /Which materials are most likely to be in high demand most often among future spacefaring peoples/ Spacefaring peoples. The people themselves are the resource. They are scattered through the stars. If you can convert these people to your subjects, you can get them to pay tax. If you can convert these people to your religion, you can get them to tithe and your gods will smile upon you (and them too, of course). If you control a people, you control what they have and more importantly what they might have. [Answer] # Iridium [Iridium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium#Industrial_and_medical) is one of the rarest of the rare earth metals. While the spot price of iridium doesn't seem that impressive, that's mostly to do with our primitive technology. It has numerous industrial uses, especially in high-temperature applications (think: spacecraft engines). It is also one of the densest metals, which is likely a factor in why it is used as a mirror in [X-ray optics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_optics#Mirrors_for_X-ray_optics). So...imagine that future ships use beam weapons due to their speed, and nobody is foolish enough to use long wavelengths like visible-UV range. No, they are going to go for x-ray to gamma ray laser batteries. Unfortunately, the "force field" style shields common in SF aren't realistic. To defend against a beam weapon, you either need a lot of mass (bad for a spaceship), or a material that deflects the beam well. If iridium is the metal of choice for warship beam armor, then that will create a pretty natural demand all by itself. # Economic Reserves Oil reserves are always stated in multiple categories. Proven reserves are reservoirs that have been tapped and mapped and we know they are there. Whereas, economic reserves means the oil that we can pull out of the ground cheaply enough to sell it at a profit. The main problem with iridium is that a lot of it is locked away in the planet's core. It may be that spacefaring civilizations are willing to rip apart a planet to its core to get at the nice shinies, but if there is some kind of religious prohibition for stripping planets to their bones, then you are left with the economically recoverable reserves. Right now, global production of iridium is less than 20 tons/year. I can imagine that being used up pretty quickly on just a few battle cruisers. Of course, we are likely not extracting it at nearly the rate that we could be. But also imagine that not all planets have abundant iridium, or are even rocky. Note that a star-hopping empire will need hundreds to thousands of warships to defend its interests, especially against competing empires. This could easily create demand for millions of tons of iridium. Due to its very high heat resistance, it may also become a critical component of ship drives or power plants (any heat engine's efficiency is determined by the operating temperatures, so the hotter the plant, the better the energy usage). If iridium becomes the resource bottleneck for both warships and civilian transports, then obviously the empire which controls the most iridium controls the most space, period. Capturing more iridium deposits literally strengthens your navy, as well as your ability to expand territory. [Answer] We're excluding wars based on ideological motives, right? Then: 1. in local conflicts, whatever the attacker is in short supply of. And this can vary wildly 2. as a source for potentially globalized conflicts: * may be immaterial - like access to other worlds to colonize * in case of some material or technology - anything that allows obtaining and controlling huge (ever increasing) amounts of energy. If you have enough cheap energy that you can control, you can obtain anything you want. Even FTL (assuming it it possible in any way) will require immense levels of energy. Whatever is needed for energy management will also likely to change over time. [Answer] I would say very rare galactic/interstellar elements/resource. For example in the movie Avatar, while not on an interstellar conflict but the driving force of it is the very rare metal found in there. it costs 20 million dollars a kilo, it funded the whole expedition. Same with Aliens, an interstellar conflict due to the need to weaponize/control the Alien hives by humans. It can be considered that the aliens while an adversary but also a resource that humans(Weyland-Yutani) wanted to have. Also with Dune, the spice was so important that who ever had the planet under their thumb would rule the whole universe either by proxy or by ascending as a hegemon among the stars. And hoarding the same stuff could escalate conflicts into intergalactic one. Stopping the supply of the said stuff could have everyone cooperate on whoever controls it. The Spice Must Flow That said, so as long as the supply for the said very rare element/resource is within the demands of the consumers, no conflict would ever arise, not until the said supply runs out. [Answer] I would say controlled information. In an interstellar civilization where raw resources aren't an issue and you can synthesize more or less anything you know how to make, information is king. If Dune were more hard sci-fi, what's stopping people from mass producing synthetic Spice? The Guild/Mentats/Bene Gesserit all would need to tightly control access to the stuff so that no one can reverse engineer it. Extend the example and now there are controlled technologies that different systems are trying to hoard for themselves to gain advantage over the others. Espionage would be a huge and constant issue - maybe even escalating into all out war to get access to some especially juicy tech before the originators get too far ahead with it. Other options would be things like the need for massive amounts of resources for huge mega structures, or ideological conflict (political or religious) where one or both sides feel the need to convert or extinguish their neighbors - maybe for fear that their neighbors will do the same to them. [Answer] Warp jump points. You need to jump on a given Warp Jump Point since the technology to pierce the distance between two points eats exponentially more energy on any other place. Want to control this sector? Place a military vessel close to the WJP and enforce which side gets trade. Want to engage in some Privateering? wink wink, nudge nudge Use a WJP that hasn't been declared. There you got conflict of interests to fuel ton of stories. [Answer] I think interstellar conflicts — including piracy and privateering — would still occur over the same things, but for different reasons. I think elemental matter and simple molecules will be widely available outside gravity wells. So water, titanium, oxygen, raw elements or simple molecules will not be expensive. Specific forms of some materials like diamond could be expensive since its unlikely to find a lot of diamond floating around nova — there has to be some but not chunks like we find on planets. Same thing for ruby and quartz and etc — materials with rare stoichiometry. Assuming that they are engineeringly useful then could be valuable enough to fight over Complex hydrocarbons — petroleum to methane — because its a feedstock to make so many useful things and its formation is energy intensive. While the gaseous forms (Methane) look to be widely available, the more valuable and larger molecules only seem to occur on planets with life so are going to be very rare. Proteins, carbohydrates, sugars — since they depend on some sort of lifecycle — could also be rare and valuable. They might be valuable enough that killing and processing aliens into foodstuffs could be a thing. Or, there could be crypto cannibalism — soylent red could be the democrat’s plan for republicans, same as soylent blue. [Answer] It's not for the resources themselves, but for the rivals not to obtain them Resources are actually not scarce, they can be easely found basically everywhere. The problem is that every civ absolutely does NOT want the others to outgrown them in terms of raw war capacity, science, population and region presence. This leads to a neverending spionage and sabotage missions, ocassionaly all-out war to keep their hands away from the resources. [Answer] Living space. Seriously. You're postulating a scenario where moving people across interstellar distances is cheap enough to be worth doing, and you're postulating a scenario where moving ENOUGH people across interstellar distances to fight a war when they get there is cheap enough to be be worth doing, so: The most valuable possible resource for a given species is planets that they can live on without major terraforming and/or environmental protection. Every other resource you can think of is WILDLY abundant by comparison. I mean, that was the entire point of World War 2, at least for Germany. Hitler's objective from the beginning was to take all of Eastern Europe and depopulate it so that good German civilians could [fill it back up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum). The invasion of Western Europe was only necessary because France and the USSR had [a mutual defense treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Soviet_Treaty_of_Mutual_Assistance), so Germany was going to have to fight them both anyway. Better to knock France out first and then go after the USSR. Humiliating France in retaliation for the Treaty of Versailles was just icing on the cake. Sure, there were the Caucasus oilfields too, but the reason the German invasion of the USSR failed was because when Hitler was forced to choose between wiping out Stalingrad or bypasssing it and taking the oil, Hitler [refused to leave Stalingrad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad) standing. So, even here, today, on Earth, good territory is often the most important resource to be had. Out in space, that will be even more so. ]
[Question] [ Tomorrow morning, an apocalyptic event wipes humanity off the face of the earth - except for in Antarctica. The nature of the catastrophe is unclear, but it seems that any human will die within a few seconds of going north of 60°S. Conditions within Antarctica itself seem much as they were yesterday. Given the technology, human capital and materials on Antarctica at present - if it makes a difference, you can assume that the catastrophe occurs at whatever time of year is most favourable to our species' survival - can humanity survive in the long term? If yes, how would we ensure an adequate supply of nutritious food, and how would we protect ourselves against the cold? [Answer] > > Given the technology, human capital and materials on Antarctica at present can humanity survive in the long term? > > > No. Antarctic bases depends entirely on supplies coming from their main countries: fuel, food, materials, everything has to be manufactured and sent there. There is no industry, no agriculture nor soil to sustain it, no infrastructure which can support a self-sustaining community in that area. Whoever is stranded there with no incoming supplies is bound to find death in a rather short time. [Answer] Not without a preliminary period in which the [Antarctic Treaty System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System) is blatantly ignored. Particularly, the [Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Environmental_Protection_to_the_Antarctic_Treaty) puts a ban on mineral exploitation, so no mining/oil extraction facilities exists. However, assuming such facilities are established and fuel/materials can be extracted, there are some chances for survival. After all, Matt Damon managed to survive on the effing Mars, no? [The first vegetables in Antarctica without soil or sunlight](https://qz.com/1245978/scientists-grew-the-first-vegetables-in-antarctica-without-soil-or-sunlight/) - shows that while it's hard, it is not impossible to grow plants there. If closer to the coast/ice shelf, those Emperor penguin cuties may look good on the plate or maybe can be tamed/trained [to catch fish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormorant_fishing) --- Besides, there are [many islands under 60o south](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Antarctic_and_subantarctic_islands) [Answer] You know what? I'll try to take the 'Possibly!' position on this one, as amazing as that might sound. Okay, so my first thought was: you won't have enough people. I'd heard numbers like '10,000' as the minimum number of humans required to not run into genetic problems from imbreeding. Turns out that number may be too high. [Recently, a scientist calculated that it could be achieved with less than 100 people.](https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/how-many-humans-would-it-take-keep-our-species-alive-ncna900151) Which is doable since the population in Antarctica at any given point in time ranges from 1,000 to 4,000 individuals. I didn't see any numbers that would make that range impossible. Next up: food. I mean, it's Antarctica. How are you going to feed people? But the more I dug in, the more this doesn't seem to be an impossibility. [King George Island is on the 62 degree latitude line south of Argentina.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_George_Island_(South_Shetland_Islands)) It's far closer to the southern tip of Argentina than it is to the south pole. The temperature range at King George Island might blow your mind. Did you know that US states like Minnesota have more severe winters than King George Island? That part of antarctica is not classified as having an 'ice cap' climate, but actually a 'tundra' one, and it actually currently has vegetation on parts of it. While that vegetation isn't edible, it's not difficult to imagine being able to adapt/protect areas to be able to grow crops. King George Island also has a large population of animal life as well (seals, penguins). [And antarctic fishing is a thing - there are major fishing zones well south of the 60th latitude right nearby King George Island.](https://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/earth/image.php?image=f-fisheries-map-lg.gif&title=global%20aquaculture) Finally, King George Island is already the place a large percentage of the people on that continent are already located, so it's a natural spot to try to figure out what to do and how to survive. So, all that said, it's time to go over some of the pretty significant advantages that the humanity side has: An incredibly intelligent base population. It's mostly scientists there, after all. It's not like we took a random swath of people living in Podunk and threw them into the apocalypse. It's almost universally people who solve problems creatively for a living. A large fishing network. The scientists probably aren't going to be the ones to first find the problem; it'd be fishing boats starting to return north. But this fishing network has on incredibly important facet: it's a communication network, and one that doesn't depend on people maintaining a communication hub. If you took a random collection of 4000 individuals, how likely is it that you'd have a hundred CB radios, a hundred VHF antenna/receivers, and a hundred family service radios? Thanks to the fishing fleet, you've got it. It's pretty much the only apocalyptic scenario I've heard of where communication is actually completely taken care of for you. A deceptively wide range of exotic supplies. Think about it - where else in the world would you find an incredibly eclectic set of supplies than scientists doing experiments with who-knows-what in an extreme climate. How many seed samples do you think are down there at any given point in time? Bio cultures? Materials samples? Scientific tools? Chemical compounds? Etc. An already existing large cache of supplies. They're already used to having to maintain large supplies "just in case". I'd expect that Antarctica is probably towards the very top of the list in terms of a "Days worth of supplies on hand" metric. They have to be. If our city runs out of water, we can ship some in from a neighboring area. If they run out of something, it has to be shipped from another continent. A group of people already partially adapted to their environment. A lot of apocalyptic scenarios are people having to adapt to a completely foreign situation. Not this one - everyone there has already been adapted. It's not like we took people from Arizona and threw them into this - it's a group of people that were already down there anyway. ]
[Question] [ [![Red Dragon - Credit to Jakub Rozalski](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Iv5pK.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Iv5pK.jpg) [![Wind Gambit - credit to Jakub Rozalski](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XEXCr.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XEXCr.jpg) When I say all-metal airships, I'm referring to something like the above from Jakub Rozalski's artwork - the design is more akin to a naval destroyer or battleship and less like a zeppelin. We've seen [metal-clad airships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal-clad_airship) before but they didn't seem to work out too well. The level of technology is roughly equivalent to the early 20th century, with fantasy elements thrown in. I'm admittedly not too knowledgeable about what would need to be changed regarding this Earth-like planet's composition, but I'd like for it to still be capable of harboring intelligent humanoid life either way. I'm assuming the gravity would need to be reduced or the atmosphere would need to be thicker with lifting gases - the pictures show engine propulsion but I thought there could be a case for a large enough amount of gas cells protected within the interior. [Answer] I love the concept, but don't see anything that big and made with armor that heavy (iron/steel hull as per your references to tanks and warships) being able to be held afloat with technology of the early 20th century, even in a much denser atmosphere. Using the HMS Dreadnought as my example of the early 1900s battleship, as it revolutionised battleship design, including being the first to use steam turbines (coming straight from Wikipedia with this), we're looking at an 18000 tonne craft. For reference, the heaviest aircraft to date is the Antonov An-225 Mriya, which clocks in at an impressive, but comparatively miniscule 640 tonnes. It's approximately half the length, but we're talking many magnitudes lighter, while still needing to hit approximately 300km/h to even get off the ground. So we're a long way from the awesome concept of floating iron dreadnoughts looming ominously over a battlefield without magic or handwavium. A related question attempted to achieve steampunk sailing ship-sized gondolas on airships in our current atmosphere and the answers did a good job of explaining the issues of weight and steam engine power output for those much smaller and lighter ship designs. See here: [Realistic Airships](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/67461/realistic-airships) I don't see a world with a breathable gas atmosphere that could support such weight, unless you want to get into the realms of breathable liquid atmosphere, in which case this is an interesting read: [Liquid Breathing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing) [Answer] # You have to have air as heavy as water. If these things have an average density similar to the sea faring battle ships they look like, they could only float if the air were about as dense as water. ### My assumptions: 1. These things fly like blimps, using buoyancy, not anti-gravity or jet propulsion, or helicopter blades or any other kind of active lifting system 2. You're less interested in how these airships would work than what a planet with airships would have to be like Amazingly, for something held aloft by buoyancy, gravity doesn't matter! It doesn't matter if the gravity is as strong as on Jupiter, or as weak as on the Moon. Buoyancy only cares about how much air you displace. If the air you displace is heavier than you, then you shoot upward, if the air you displace is lighter than you are, then you fall downward. Since the pictures show ship holding still in the air, they must have an average density exactly equal to the air they are in. ### So, Earth like gravity, exotic atmosphere. How do we make that happen? The gas with the highest density (that we know of) is [tungsten hexafluoride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tungsten_hexafluoride). It's colorless, which is good for your epic vistas, but toxic, which is bad for whatever lives there. It's also only 13 kg/m3. That's a lot better than the 1.2 kg/m2 of air on earth, but no where near the 998 kg/m3 of water. So, modern material science lets you down, but don't let that stop you! Let's assume you can find an amazing, inert (or at least non-toxic) gas that's a as heavy as tungsten hexafluoride and fill your atmosphere with it. You still have to have very light ships. I'll leave it to you to figure out what a 13 kg/m3 ship is like. Mostly balloons on the inside, I guess. ### A few more details Atmospheric pressure is a function of depth and density. That means that with a heavier gas, your pressure is going to be a lot more, or your atmosphere isn't going to extend so high above sea level. With high density air, even slow winds carry a lot of energy. Light winds could blow decently sized rocks around. Wind storms common on earth would be terrifying, city destroying disasters. Sky scrapers, which on Earth are limited mostly by wind, might be impossible on such a planet. Floating objects feel almost no wind. Without propulsion, they move with the wind so perfectly that passengers will not perceive any wind at all. Not breezes or turbulence or anything. Hot air balloonists comment on the eerie stillness all the time. An airship under power is a different story. The wind of their motion could of course be quite substantial. Oxygen breathing life on earth can survive in a large variety of atmospheres as long as there are no toxic gasses, and there is enough oxygen. It's not a matter of percent, it's a matter of how many oxygen molecules in each breath. You don't need 20% oxygen, you need a partial pressure of about 160 mmHg. In the past, NASA ran space ships with 100% oxygen at 1/3 atmospheric pressure. Or 50/50 oxygen/helium with about 2/3 pressure. You could have 4 atmospheres of pressure, and only have 5% oxygen and Earth life could maybe live there. Or adapt to live there, at least. The nice thing about cranking up the pressure, is you get extra density. In 4x pressure, you get 4x density. That means your ships can be 52 kg/m3 instead of 13. That's like 10x lighter than real warships, but feels much more doable. [Answer] ### Add some fantasy I think in order to solve this problem without changing the technology you will have to introduce some substance we don't have in our own universe (that we know of yet). I am unable to come up with any reasonable explanation that is entirely scientific, however if you introduce some new materials to make the ships lighter, assist with an anti-gravity effect, etc, that would definitely work without tipping the technology level too far. ### Go back to the future Another option would be to have "ancient" tech. A scenario where previously there was higher technology on this planet but at some point there was a dark age equivalent and technology regressed, even wiping out details on how the old but more advanced tech was created. Introducing higher technology options, but in short supply and with very little knowledge of their operation, is an intriguing element all on its own and allow you to stay true to keeping the current technology at 20th century level. The tech to create floating battleships being in short supply would ultimately mean that these battleships would be fighting over the very tech to create them. Each battleship created would be a symbol of iron irony. [Answer] The US Navy had an intense interest in lighter than air vessels right up until the 1950's (giant blimps used as airborne radar platforms), and commissioned an all metal blimp in 1929, the [ZMC-2](https://www.blimpinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ZMC-2-The-Metal-clad-Airship.pdf) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xY5yy.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/xY5yy.jpg) ZMC-2 in front of a hanger However, like all LTA craft, it works by displacement and it's relatively small size suggests that a larger envelope would rapidly reach a mass which could not be lifted by the helium gas. Another method that might "work" is to eliminate the use of displacement for lift and follow the direction of visionaries in the mid 1800's who saw flight as being done through the use of powered airscrews, much like a modern helicopter: [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gVr9d.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/gVr9d.jpg) Jules Verne "Albatross" The problem here is the size and weight of the power plant and associated transmission to turn all these airscrews. With early 20th century technology, this would essentially fill the entire airship. While devices like [pulse jets](http://waterocket.explorer.free.fr/vlflyingbomb.htm) and even [gas turbines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86gidius_Elling) had been described and crude forms built in 1906 and 1903 respectively, materials science and other supporting technologies really were not available until the 1930's, so a compact gas turbine powered "Albatross" or using pulse jets to turn the rotors would be at the very extreme edge of possibility (unless you are going to make some other changes to the timeline). Of course as a military vehicle, it also becomes extremely vulnerable to fouling or damage to the rotors, so air battles become analogues of "Age of Sail" battles with airships firing "chainshot", nets or something similar to damage the enemy ship's rotors. While we are not going to have airships like battleships or armoured cruisers, it is somewhat possible to actually have metal airships. They just are not going to work that well in reality. [Answer] Someone once asked Randall Munroe [whether a submarine could float within Jupiter's atmosphere](https://what-if.xkcd.com/138/). His response includes the passage below. TL;DR: buoyancy depends only on density, but by that time any atmosphere is dense enough to support a ship it also has a pressure high enough to crush it. > > Buoyancy depends on density, not pressure. There's a point in Jupiter's atmosphere where the pressure is equal to a little more than an Earth atmosphere—which is the pressure a submarine is used to—but the air there is barely a tenth as dense as ours. A submarine in that layer would fall even faster than it would in the air on Earth. > > > To reach a depth where it could "float" in Jupiter, the submarine would have to go halfway to the center of the planet, where the intense pressure turns the air into a metallic soup that's hotter than the surface of the Sun. The pressure there would be so high that not only would the submarine be crushed, the substances that make it up would probably be converted into new and exciting forms. It's hard to create those kinds of conditions in a lab, so we don't know a lot about how materials behave with that much pressure pushing down on them. > > > In the sea, on the other hand, the density of the fluid stays relatively constant. That means the submarine can find its appropriate pressure range and float there. In other words, submarines only work because water doesn't follow the ideal gas law. > > > --- To make the drawings realistic not only the ships, but the people in them as well would have to be made of something stronger than any material mankind has ever produced. [Answer] Balloons cause the weight of the "ship" to be lighter than the air they fly through. Similarly, ships on water float because they displace more water weight than the ship weighs. The Martian ships aka Space:1889 used a Martian forest wood known as liftwood. This was attached in a louver fashion in arrays along the bottom side of the ships. When angled ground-wards, it forced the ships up into the air. Destroying these panels would destroy the lift of a ship and send it to the ground. To get flying metal ships requires some level of tech or natural material that creates the lift when incorporated in the ships. For giant metal ships with the ability to engage in combat with large bore counter-fire, would imply a powerful natural agent that engages some level of lift against the planet surface that is engaged at a variety of intensity levels to raise and lower the ship from the ground to its operational altitude. Using a lift mechanism that is rotated in a similar fashion as the design of liftwood, and imbedding that inside the armor of the ship would protect the flying integrity of the vessel. Giving it a coal powered, generator, faraday cage structure that spun on intensity axles would be my creative solution to these ships. ]
[Question] [ This is really just a curiosity question: I wrote a fantasy novel in which the moon appears blue once every ten years on roughly the same date without fail. If anyone asked me why the moon of my world does this, I would just say “because, magic”, as magic is already heavily present in the story and there are gods that are very ‘present’ (there is no question in the minds of the people whether or not they are merely myth), so handwaving didn’t bother me in the slightest. However, as I’ve recently become more conscientious about my worldbuilding (though, I don’t mind handwaving if it’s necessary, I just think it’s fun to figure out how certain aspects could’ve realistically come to be and possibly touch on that in the actual story if I want to), I am curious if this would be realistically possible and, if so, how. [Answer] # Biological activity Some things in nature follow very stable cycles. Cicadas in the US are a good example: depending on the species you will see them once evwry 13 years or once every 17 years. It may be that your blue moon happens due to such a cycle. Maybe bacteria or some other microbe blooms every ten years. # Solar flares It may also be that the sun has flare peaks every ten years, and that drives chemical reactions that turn the sieface of the moon blue for a while. [Answer] Something similar to a [Blood Moon](https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/blood-moon.html) > > Blood Moon is a total lunar eclipse happens when the Moon travels > through the Earth's umbra and blocks all direct sunlight from > illuminating the Moon's surface. However, some sunlight still reaches > the lunar surface indirectly, via the Earth's atmosphere, bathing the > Moon in a reddish, yellow, or orange glow. > > > We can use this phenomenon and combine it with one of the answers posted here that involves comets. Once every 10 years, a comet passes close to the earth and causes some of its debris to fall into earth's atmosphere, these debris (microscopic dust) acts like a very special prism and remains in the upper atmosphere for quite some time (3-4 days). During this a lunar eclipse takes place and these special prisms make the light refract to the moon in such a way that only blue light passes through, thus making the moon look BLUE. [Answer] Comets There are a lot of ways to measure moon cycles, but this kind of phenomenon belies an explanation on moon rotation, or the angle it hits the atmosphere. Instead, another phenomena may be at work - a comet. Under just the right condition, comet tails can be seen with naked eye - and they can sometimes be blue, like the [Comet Holmes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Holmes). This can easily give the moon the appearance of being blue. Albeit, there are a few problems. Namely that this requires an orbit atypical to comets - either around the planet or around the Sun such that it would interpose between the planet and it's moon, something I'm pretty sure is unstable. Or it requires different comets every time - which begs the question as to what is causing that. But as far as turning the moon blue, ion trails off a comet will help. [Answer] > > I am curious if this would be realistically possible > > > Assuming this is a fairly normal moon then yes it's pretty simple. Blue mould with a 10 year bloom cycle growing on the cheese would give the desired affect. ]
[Question] [ Normally when conducting DNA testing, I presume techniques are utilized to ensure you're just testing one individual's DNA from a sample, even if it is possible that sample was contaminated one way or another. However, in a thing I'm writing, there's a character that is able to produce personalized medicine for another individual after ingesting a sample of that individual's DNA. The catch is that they can't always have laboratory equipment to isolate someone's cells (and thus DNA) from contaminants with other DNA (like from bacteria or just other people's dead skin). They might have to make due from eating hair or licking sweat, and so on, but the more contaminant DNA there is in the sample leads to reduced efficacy in the medicine. My question, for the most part, would be which cells are good targets to collect samples from in this instance that are unlikely to have someone or something else's DNA in the sample; excluding anything that requires special equipment to get to or decontaminate the sample. And to a lesser extent, which are the bad targets that fall under the conditions of being relatively easy to obtain a sample of, but are likely to have a high amount of contaminants? [Answer] Rather quickly you are going to have to question where we draw the line between "your DNA" and "other DNA." It's clear on paper, but in practicality, its a hodgepodge mess. For example, viruses inject themselves into our DNA to replicate. Some have become permanent residents in our genetic code. However, with all that side, blood would be a very powerful way of getting "pure" DNA. Our bodies have evolved to use bleeding as a way to clean out wounds, so it would be unlikely that blood taken from a carefully made wound would be infected. A sterile knife is probably very useful for this, but that's a far cry from laboratory equipment. And given that our blood is full of nutrients and oxygen, we have a substantial interest in keeping foreign bodies out of it. Failure to do so often leads to sepsis. [Answer] You have to balance risk vs reward. You have to balance contaminations risk with the damage you do obtaining the sample. A simple blood sample should work fine, minimum damage, low contamination risk, failing that a adipose tissue sample will lower the risk even more. Both can be obtained with a simple needle. Just sterilize wherever you put in the needle first, this reduces contamination risk but is also just a good practice overall. A portable syringe and some alcohol swabs is all you need to carry around. Don't collect tissue from any part of the digestive tract or exterior of the body as they are covered in bacteria, the respiratory track also has a high contamination risk it is one of the main ways bacteria get into the body. Use basic common sense, the person has obvious infection then you need to worry about a more sterile source, and again you will have to balance the benefit of say a bone marrow source vs the risk of infecting the bone marrow. There is also the extreme pains collecting a bone marrow sample has, not something you should ignore. [Answer] Brain or gonad cells would probably be the best, in terms of keeping bacteria and their DNA out. Both are well-protected from infection by necessity. The blood-brain barrier is only able to be penetrated by a few diseases, all of which show obviously neurological symptoms. If the person you want to sample seems healthy, their brain cells are very likely uncontaminated. Same thing with the gonads, both ovaries and testes. They're highly controlled because foreign DNA, like from a bacterium, can screw up gamete production. One big problem with both of these is getting the sample without seriously hurting the person. I think your next best bet is inside their teeth, especially if those teeth are healthy. Not much can get through enamel, and what does leaves obvious evidence; don't use rotten teeth. This is not as good, from a purity standpoint, as the brain however. Your teeth a pretty porous when they're forming, and will pick up foreign matter in your childhood. Scientists were able to find out where [Otzi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi) the Iceman grew up by examining pollen trapped in his teeth. I don't know how much pollen they found or how much your magic pharmacist can handle, but it's something to consider. On the plus side, anyone with a rock or other blunt object could knock out a tooth. [Answer] Considering DNA per volume and absence of contaminant organisms, your best bet is sperm. 1. /The spermatozoon is characterized by a minimum of cytoplasm and the most densely packed DNA known in eukaryotes. Compared to mitotic chromosomes in somatic cells, sperm DNA is at least sixfold more highly condensed./[source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spermatozoon) You will get the most DNA per unit volume with sperm. 2. Semen (containing sperm) is sterile before emission and so free of bacterial contaminants or DNA from other organisms. 3. Sperm has the drawback of being haploid. Sperm from a given male will contain DNA only from that male, but the DNA has undergone meiotic recombination. The haploid, meiotically recombined genome of the spermatozoon does not contain any DNA not present in the male of origin, but the DNA in the sperm will be arranged differently from that of somatic cells in the male. 4. Using sperm as the DNA source limits collection to males, as females do not have sperm. 5. It is possible to (repeatedly) retrieve and ingest semen and sperm from a human male without damaging the male. The male might even cooperate in this endeavor. [Answer] ## Saliva is a nice clean DNA sample. Ditto cheek cells. You don't need anything more complex to get. Since these are on the inside of the body, they won't have other DNA from touching things. You do need to make sure the mouth is reasonably clean before taking a sample (small amounts of food aren't an issue but large amounts of food or someone else's bodily fluids should be removed first. All the genetic genealogy companies use saliva (spit into a clean collection container with preservative) or cheek cells (with a clean cotton swab put into a plastic case). This includes companies doing whole genome testing and medical DNA testing. You can use blood but it's not required. Bacteria contamination is simply not an issue with DNA testing. Sure, you can have bacteria or other infectious substances degrade your sample but the testing equipment has no trouble separating out the bacteria (etc). Presumably your character has a way to separate out her/his own DNA from the analysis. Your character can get a sample from a prolonged kiss with the subject (depending on how much DNA is needed; the vials of spit one gives can be used for multiple tests and the subject gives that much as a backup, even with a swab, [one swab can be used for multiple tests](https://forums.familytreedna.com/forum/general-interest/dna-and-genealogy-for-beginners/14587-how-many-tests-will-the-two-swab-samples-support) and you can even [get DNA from an old licked postage stamp](https://thefamilycurator.com/how-to-preserve-and-test-old-letters-for-grandmas-dna/)). Get some tongue in there for science. A little scrape of the teeth doesn't hurt. Another method would be to give the target a water bottle to drink from then have the character drink the backwash. Of course, if the target wants this testing done, providing a sample is as easy as one-two-spit. A poor sample would be from the outside of someone's body because it has a risk of being contaminated by someone else's DNA. I would especially avoid the hands and the feet (if the subject goes barefoot or wears sandals). Not to mention that outer layers of skin and hair and etc are not good sources of living DNA, no matter how clean they are (the little bulb you sometimes bring up when you pull out hair can have good DNA). Sperm is not a viable choice for collection because it only has a random half of each chromosome other than the sex chromosomes and then either the X or the Y from that. It's good enough for a basic DNA match for forensics, but it won't give you the medical information you're looking for, though you can make predictions about the alleles if you analyze enough sperm cells from the same man. Tears and urine only work if they have skin cells in them (like saliva does). But they and other bodily excretions (like earwax) can work some of the time. [Sweat won't have usable DNA](https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/14/17352044/sweat-science-health-biomarkers-forensics). So make it easy. Spit and gentle scrapings of the inside of the mouth. ]
[Question] [ Our protagonist lives on one of a group of remote islands where she makes her living harvesting a peculiar fruit. The edible part grows in the middle of liquid-filled sacks that hang near the top of the local trees. The top of the sack must be pinched and sealed before being cut from the tree because the fruit is spoiled by the reaction the liquid in the sack has when exposed to air. However, when properly harvested and treated, the end result is singularly delicious. The trunk of the tree is flexible, downright bendy even, but quite weak. The weight of the average adult attempting to climb the tree is enough to snap it in half, which also spoils the fruit. (I imagine that the trunk is hollow and that some sort of vein connects the sacks to the roots, but any explanation is fine.) What would explain these features? Most importantly, what kind of liquid could fill the sacks, why does it react with the air, and how do the villagers process it to extract the fruit? You may assume whatever you want regarding the islands and the type of plant this “tree” really is (perhaps it’s more aptly classified as a flower, for example, or its roots extend into the ocean—anything goes.) Processing the fruit could mean anything including freezing it, injecting another liquid into the sack, opening it while submerged in another liquid, etc. [Answer] # Bomb fruits Crudely drawn, bare minimum visual representation of what I'm about to say. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rQvz5.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rQvz5.png) The black fluid with purple strings is like a combination between honey and blasting jelly, which preserves the seed inside even if its bark-like shell is already made of dead wood cellulose. With the hard shell, the only way to pick it is by pinching the pink stem, which is also the top of the sack, but not only that. The stem is really soft, like the rest of the tree. Breaking this soft tissue will react the black fluid with the air, whose reaction causes the edible part to burn, heating and expanding the bark-like shell and shattering it like a giant popped corn, but with the exploding efficiency of a shrapnel bomb. That way, it spreads its seeds which are the green seeds in the brown bark. But that's not the point. In order to harvest this really rare fruit properly, your protagonist looks to some animal that often holds the stem with its mouth, and seemingly just drops it after some time. It actually eats the fruit this way by first sucking the blasting honey-jelly and stores or excretes it somewhere, then slurping the edible part, and then dropping the entire empty bomb fruit and increasing the chances of a seed growing at the site where it the bomb fruit is dropped. If the bomb fruit explodes however, the chances of all seeds surviving somewhere else increases as well. Thus, effective and natural plant reproduction method. Your protagonist maybe found out what the animals are actually doing, and replicated the method. They pinch the stem after picking it so that the liquid does not touch the air, drain the fluid and store somewhere else, and simply extract the blue edible part somewhere else, all without making the bombfruit explode. [Answer] Any liquid that prevents oxidation with the air would work in your fruit, as an oxidation reaction is essentially the same as spoilage. This could be something as simple as any kind of oil, say something very fatty resembling vegetable oil. As to what the biological usefulness of this is, it's a bit difficult to quantify. At first, I considered the possibility that the fruit inside the sack might require that it be passed into an oceanic environment, but the water can oxidize just as easily as the air can (oxygen dissolves into water quite well, after all). What might work is to say that, for some reason, the seeds of this plant require an anoxic environment, so let's imagine there is some kind of herbivore that eats the fruit and processes it in its anaerobic gut using symbiotic bacteria. The plant has evolved a symbiotic relationship with this creature, and so it creates the fruit to preferentially be eaten by the animal. If the sack is broken, the fruit is exposed to air, and a chemical reaction produces something like capsaicin, making the fruits borderline toxic, incredibly spicy, and generally inedible. The plant has done this because the animal it wants to attract is a mammal, but birds (who are immune to capsaicin), can't provide the useful anoxic environment for the plant's seeds. In the real world plants produce capsaicin in their fruits to discourage mammals, which crush the seeds, from eating them, but birds, who are immune to capsaicin, don't damage the seeds, and so the plant doesn't want to harm birds with its fruit. This way, only the special herbivore (and clever humans) knows how to eat the sac-fruit properly, and because of the toxic oxidizing reaction, other mammals avoid the plant entirely. Because the fruits are so large and surrounded by an unpleasant oil, birds generally avoid them, as getting oil on their feathers makes them unable to fly. [Answer] Only unripened fruits are edible The fruit must be connected to the tree and receive a flow of juice to fully ripen. When it happens, juice channel closes off and fruit is ready to disconnect from the tree. The problem is, by that time its core gets too hard and becomes virtually inedible. So islanders need to pick up the fruits before they reach maturity. This requires them to deal with a peculiar problem of juice and spoilage. Of course they are resourceful and can either seal off fresh fruit, or process them right away. [Answer] It could be a plant protection mechanism similar to the way exposed potatoes produce a toxin to make the starch they store inedible thus protecting the fuel reserve of the plant. In this case the plant is a type of carnivorous plant that attracts small birds to its pods. It opens its pods in the morning and the birds are attracted to the sugary scent they give off. The plant produces a mass of flesh high in sugar content from the base of the pod. The pod is actually a specialised flower with the walls being the petals and the central mass a fat squat stamen full of nectar. Some of the nectar dissolves into the water that collects at the base of the pod which is what the birds come to feed on. As they feed the petals slowly close trapping the birds. The petals then release digestive enzymes into the liquid to break the bird down and special structures at the base of the pod absorb the nutrients released. The liquid also serves to protect the core/stamen from insect predation. When the liquid isn't present, the stamen produces a toxin to protect itself from being eaten. In dry seasons the plant may not collect enough water to keep the stamen fully covered so while the plant can still trap birds, the stamen becomes toxic. The stamen being the "fruit" that gets harvested. If the plant is pulled down then much of the liquid will escape and the stamen will produce the toxin making it inedible. In a natural setting the toxins in the stamen would dissipate as the liquid inside the pod rose again but in a harvested pod this is not possible so care must be taken not to spill the liquid until the nectar filled stamen can be recovered. Using a certain process the harvested pod becomes incapable of producing the toxin at which point the liquid can be poured out and the stamen collected. The liquid would be full of nectar too so could be very nice to drink though I don't know if dissolved birds would make the liquid distasteful or not. Probably not a good idea to drink something with digestive enzymes in it anyway. [Answer] The liquid spoiling the fruit on exposure to air could be due to a protection mechanism in order to prevent other creatures from eating it. The deciding factor would be what happens to the seed in the fruit. Normally the content of the fruit is mostly things helpful to the seed either for spreading it by attracting animals and birds, OR directly providing nutrition to the seed after the fruit falls. Going by this logic, the direct reaction with air turns the fruit pulp into a super manure for the seed when it falls naturally and pops allowing the seed to germinate and grow. The air reaction is essentially a detector for when the fruit falls. As to what exactly in air it reacts to, I am sure evolution has your back. As a wise man in a movie once said: "Life finds a way" The tree might be weak and flexible to make sure that when the fruit is ripe and heavy the tree bends sideways increasing the reach of the tree, causing the fruits to fall sufficiently far away, and spread the area covered by the trees preventing competition for nutrients. ]
[Question] [ Excuse the broad question but I couldn’t resist making a metal pun. So in my universe the Fair Folk encompass a large group of creatures. They live in their own little pocket universe, in which there is very little raw metal. Though they are all quite different, all of them share a few similarities. 1. They have a roughly humanoid body plan (emphasis on roughly) 2. They are not, nor have they ever been, human 3. They are all capable of manipulating ambient energy/internal energy, explaining their magic. 4. They are all weak to metals (not the music genre) Some are weaker to certain types of metals than others, while some are immune to a specific metal, like a leprechaun with its gold. Each metal also causes a different effect on the fair folk which can be broadly broken down into 5 categories. 1. Alkaline/alkaloids: React very strongly with Fair Folk tissue. 2. Radioactive metals: Supercharge Fair Folk abilities, but rapidly kill them. 3. Iron type metals: Cause direct harm (iron causes burning and disrupts powers). 4. Silver type metals: Are toxic or drain energy from Fair Folk (silver is toxic) 5. Lead type metals: These cause odd effects (lead causes physical weakness, tin blinds them) Iron type metals are near its group on the periodic table, the same is true for the silver and lead types. Some metals can be two different types at once, and alloys have all the effects of their component metals, but to a lesser extent. So with all the exposition out of the way here is the question: What could cause the alkaline and alkaloid metals to react so extremely to fair folk tissue? P.S. I realize there is a lot of information here for this question, but I plan on linking back to it in the future, so I figured I might as well do my explaining now, rather than having to go over all this again later. [Answer] One source of the strong reaction with alkali and alkali-earth metals could be a high level of weakly bound oxidizers in the Fair Folk flesh. Oxygen is common in our environment, and presumably in theirs as well, if they can breathe our air; chlorine is also fairly common, though not as an atmospheric gas. If their bodies contain any level of fluorine above trace levels, they'd be toxic to humans by touch, so I'll assume that's not the case -- but chlorine, loosely bound (in the form of chloride - ions) would react very vigorously with alkali and alkali earth metals, and also with aluminum and its close relatives. Get the reaction started, of course, and the water in their bodies will get into the act -- which is what would start things for humans contacting, say, sodium or potassium metal. The presence of high chloride levels would simply make the reaction a bit more initially aggresive. [Answer] Alkaline and alkalis are really reactive metals. (I assume you mean alkali when you say 'alkaloid', because alkaloids are an organic molecule classification. Alkaloids include morphine.) I mean, there's really no point in overthinking this. Alkaline & alkaloids, due to their valence shell structures are pretty much dying to react with just about anything to get perfect valence shell structures and become like noble gases. Seriously, drop a stick of pure sodium in water and the stuff explodes. Sodium will even react with [helium](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-noble-gas-surprise-helium-can-form-weird-compounds/?redirect=1). Humans react really strongly to alkali metals. A bar of pure sodium will explode violently in your mouth, form some really nasty compounds and give you burns. If you somehow swallow it, will proceed to melt through your stomach when reacting with stomach acid. Don't do it. And you notice how I keep mentioning sodium? It's the second-least reactive of the alkalis. The real nasty stuff is casesium and francium. (Yes, alkalines are dangerous too - includes stuff like magnesium, radium, and calcium.) Also, last point. > > They are all weak to metals (not the music genre) > > > This seems like a missed opportunity. I'm not saying you should do it, but this seems like a great foundation for a humorous short story. [Answer] You're asking why alkali metals (i.e. Group 1 on the periodic table: lithium, sodium, potassium, etc.) react strongly to fair folk tissue? Easy. These metals react very strongly with water. And fair folk, being living creatures, are somewhere around 70% water. Go search YouTube for videos of people dropping alkali metals into water; there's plenty of them. On contact with water, an alkali metal atom will transfer an electron to a nearby water molecule, creating a metal ion (which is inert), an OH¯ ion (which dissolves into the water, making it alkaline- hence the name "alkali metal"), and a free hydrogen atom. This hydrogen will link together with another hydrogen produced the same way, and leave the solution as hydrogen gas. Oh, and this reaction also produces a lot of heat. So much so that it can quickly ignite the hydrogen it produces, which will combust with oxygen from the air, producing water vapor and even more heat. Also, the alkali metals have quite low melting points, meaning that the heat produced by the dissolving metal and the burning hydrogen will soon cause what remains of the metal to melt. The hydrogen bubbles will cause the two liquids to mix in a chaotic and turbulent manner, greatly increasing the surface area of the metal- and therefore the reaction rate. Which, in turn, means more heat, more hydrogen, more turbulence, and more surface area, in an exponentially-increasing loop of positive feedback. That's called a runaway chemical reaction. That's also called an explosion. So, yeah. If you want alkali metals to react violently to fair folk flesh, all you need to do is give your fair folk actual flesh. Don't make them robots or inorganic golems and you'll be fine. If you also want to include the alkaline-earth metals in that (i.e. Group 2 in the periodic table; beryllium, magnesium, calcium, and the like), you'll need to do a little more work. Although these metals are still quite reactive as metals go, they're not as reactive as the alkali metals. Calcium, strontium, and barium will spontaneously react with water in a manner similar to the alkali metals, though I don't know how explosive this reaction is. Beryllium and magnesium, however, don't do this: instead, they form an insoluble oxide layer on their surface, protecting the metal underneath. If you want fair folk tissue to react violently with these metals, maybe you could have them secrete a strong oxidizer capable of igniting them on contact. [ClF3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorine_trifluoride) or [FOOF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxygen_difluoride) should do it, though these seem like overkill to me, considering that they'll also burn concrete, water, and almost anything else. There's probably something tamer that'll still ignite beryllium and magnesium, perhaps by dissolving the oxide layer I mentioned and exposing the metal underneath. ]
[Question] [ We've all heard the on-again, off-again theories of another massive object in the vast reaches of the outer solar system. Some potential evidence to support the possibility are its affects on smaller dwarf planet bodies, with their distorted orbits. I think most propose it to be a very large gas giant, if anything. I have also heard people propose a red dwarf star, though we would have surely seen this with our current telescopes. What I'd like to know is, if a brown dwarf (something more massive and hotter than most gas giants) were the culprit, could it elude detection by our current means of observing the universe? They are hot objects, many of which produce some amount of light. [Answer] There's no chance of it. In 2010, the [WISE infrared telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-field_Infrared_Survey_Explorer) photographed the entire night sky, half of it twice or more. Any brown dwarf within about 10 light-years of the Sun would have been imaged (it found three of them); [super-Jupiters within a third of a light-year would have been found, as would Saturn-sized or larger gas giants within a sixth of a light-year](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planets_beyond_Neptune#Constraints_on_additional_planets). In short, we can fairly conclusively say that there are no large surprises lurking in the Solar System. Any new planets are likely to be Earth-sized or smaller. [Answer] *No, unless it is extremely* far out.** The outer planets were detected by analyzing perturbations in the orbit of planets further in. Something on the scale of a [brown dwarf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf), several times the mass of Jupiter, should have been detected indirectly by modern astronomy, not remain speculation. Brown dwarfs radiate in the infrared spectrum and a telescope could be pointed at predicted locations. ]
[Question] [ Good rulers support invention of useful things. But this question has two sides. * Support of invention * Prevention of fake inventing Basis: Many inventions arise as side-effects of searching for something else. The base of modern chemistry is from alchemy and its attempts to find the philosopher's stone and so on. Also, there is some research that doesn't have direct effects but still it is needed. Theory: Fantasy without the philosopher's stone (or something similar) may sound like nonsense. But let's say that ruler does not believe in the existence of the philosopher's stone (or invisibility, etc) and wants to invent something really useful (for example, how to improve public health and cure illnesses). Instead, the ruler resolves to pay such research very well. And where there is money, there are also cheaters. So the ruler wants to check that all research s/he pays for are really related to the main goal. Background/Inspiration: This question is inspired by one old Czech movie and one concrete scene from it: The alchemist is supposed to prepare a rejuvenation potion of but he creates anything else instead of it (for example, floor polish). In one invention stage, (in that mentioned scene) he was supposed to find mandragora and prepare it but he cooks sausages with horseradish in a great pot instead. [Answer] Historically, this is what patents are for. A patent does three main things: FIRST a patent grants the inventor a monopoly on making and selling their invention for some period of time, with legally established methods of enforcing the monopoly. They can charge license fees, or sue to stop infringement and obtain reparations. SECOND a patent requires the inventor to disclose the invention in public records -- which means that, in order to gain his monopoly, he has to tell the world how the item is made. Disclosure does two important things: it ensures that the invention can be copied after the patent expires, and it allows anyone to replicate the patent for research purposes, which prevents patenting bogus inventions. If your invention works, but no one can replicate it, someone else can patent the actual way you make it -- and if it doesn't, no one will want to buy it. THIRD a patent expires after some period (in the USA, that's 17 years, with a shorter renewal available in some cases). After that, anyone can make the patented item, or make improvements on it, without paying a license fee -- the patented item becomes open to competitive forces. Patents aren't perfect -- one could argue there are some heinous issues with current American patent law -- but historically, they're widely held to be a major contributor to scientific and industrial progress, by making inventing both profitable and publicly available. [Answer] +1 @ZeisIkon, Patents are one arm of a two prong approach to getting a culture of invention going. The other prong to get this going is expressed interest by the ruler. If the ruler likes painted duck decoys, people will get really good at painting duck decoys to get the ruler's attention. If the ruler lets it be known to the land that they love new things and new ideas, people will bring new ideas to them to show off. If the ruler then does something that rewards the ones with truely useful or interesting inventions, the rest of the people will see this as a method of advancement and a way to catch the ruler's eye. Nobles may search for clever people to present to the ruler and thus gain prestige that way. Since the ruler cannot see every new idea, have festivals to show off new inventions. That way people without noble backing can see that they have a chance to get recognition. Eventually there would have to be some kind of filter so regional events will have to be held with the best stuff being presented to the ruler. Also, events can be held with a theme and/or to solve a particular problem. For example, figure out a way to provide more water to the capital or grow more food with less work. However, there still should be general events to promote creative thinking. Those presenting their inventions at a contest can be given patents if the invention is unique and useful. [Answer] There are two ways of achieving this: * Supporting the research * Rewarding for inventions Of course, any good ruler can do both. For research support, the ruler can (in the order of practicality in medieval times) employ scientists directly, establish an academy, give grants to an independent institution, or give private grants to any researcher. For rewarding the inventions, the ruler should establish a scientific panel for evaluating them, and then either employ the inventor directly, or give him (or her) a grant to implement the invention independently. Patent system (@Zeiss Ikon) also can be helpful. [Answer] Hand out prizes at the annual town fair. This is, in fact, how craftspeople and inventors rolled out new things. Most medium to large towns in Medieval Europe, for example, had 1 or 2 fairs a year where people sold and bought goods, traders came back from trips abroad, and the entire community came together. Your ruler could easily add in an invention contest. This could be open or it could be themed, depending on what the ruler wishes. There can also be categories. The ruler may wish to reward young people or new inventors as well, even if their work isn't all there yet. Winners can get cash, but a better prize would be funding to polish the invention and manufacture it. Young people can get the prize of funding for secondary school and higher education. Or apprenticeships with master craftsworkers (which cost money). An open public contest won't eliminate cheaters, but it greatly diminishes them. It's unlikely someone could get away with stealing someone else's work, in a town where everyone knows each other. It's also very hard to fake your way through an invention with the entire town watching and checking up on you. For the ruler, this has the great advantage of opening the field. Normally inventions might come from universities or other education sites, from large organizations like a monastery, or from the wealthier merchants in the business community. They can all still compete, but allowing anyone to enter greatly increases the number of viable inventions. If the ruler only rules one large town or city, with other places within commuting distance (meaning a day or two by wagon), have the contest there. If the ruler rules over a larger area, have multiple contests in the larger towns then have a grand fair at the end of the year (for example, hold the smaller contests at the usual fall harvest fairs then hold the final one either just before the winter snows get bad or very early in the spring before planting. [Answer] # Run a peer-reviewed journal Presumably, the king is funding research, but there's a lot of bogus science. The king probably doesn't understand alchemy, but the alchemists do. Require that everything published in the journal be verified by an independent alchemist or two. Give grants for successful publishing. The more consistently your invention works, the more money you get from the king. Like patents, there are ways to game the system, but this at least weeds out the obvious liars. ]
[Question] [ There is a brilliant scientist who regularly tangoes with external threats to the planet Earth, where a race referred to as "humaniti" reside. He, along with a team of scientists, operate out of a metropolis city called New York. They regularly develop advanced technology that is beyond anything this species has seen, and has access to off-world tech due to their repeated trips to outer space. Flying cars, teleport devices, bullet-proof armor, speed of light jets, etc, are just some of the kinds of tech they create and have access to. Because they sometimes defend earth from aliens, they get billions of dollars in tax breaks from the city. However, this has begun to provoke the ire of many New Yorkers. A congresswoman named Alejandra Oscoria Cortez has recently come to prominence in the media, and has used her platform to attack Richards and his team. She argues that, for decades, this group and other oligarchs have kept their discoveries and advances to themselves. These developments have yet to make their way into mainstream society where they can benefit the common people. Instead, these well-paid elitists selfishly hoard them, neglecting to improve their city, or humanity, in the long term while still taking large tax breaks from the government. This shameful behavior is indicative of the wealthy 1% who have more power and control than the other 99% of society. AOC has begun to make waves among other New Yorkers, and has garnered a large amount of support, which has raised trouble for the superhero community. She is currently running for president of the U.S., and has proposed legislation called "The Green New Deal". This proposal will, among other things, end dependence on fossil fuel emissions, fix infrastructure in the country, and provide new jobs in clean technology. The Green New Deal has gained traction with members in the Democratic Party and other progressives. Its stipulations would be accomplished by forcing Richards as well as other members of the superhero community to submit to governmental regulation in regards to scientific discoveries and force them to be more open and cooperative with the rest of the country. I need to maintain the status quo of only the superhero community having access to high-tech while the rest of society declines to progress. How can this group justify maintaining control of access to the American public? [Answer] ## Well, they don't need to be Americans... Just emigrate to a friendlier country, or better, use that vast technology to create your own raft island and put it in the international waters. (Then, if you're not so hero-like or do not care about PR, extend some gesture towards the demagogue and send them a good "Molon Lave" to go with). Argument to do this? "AOC is looking to further her own career by making promises on the basis of technology she knows nothing of and therefore can not estimate the full extent if it were released to the public. If she cared about general well-being, she would offer this technology to the world - with once again, devastating effects. We won't endorse her political carreer, nor shoulder the responsibilities of the aftermaths if those technologies are stolen from us. Therefore, we deeply regret being forced to move out to protect everyone" (they're serving a bigger purpose than just shielding a country here. They're protecting the world) ## Edit 1 Comments (here and on question/other answers) pointed out that the technology could easily leak to other countries and therefore "AOC doest not care about general well being since she didn't speak about sharing" might not be relevant. I'd like to add two things regarding those points. First, it's a political and a PR move. AOC wanted to play dirty? Well this can go both way. The answer will shake her position and image, and may rise some opposition to her movement. After all, maybe you're used to have Dr Reeds working next door and tackling the aliens invasions that somehow always target New-York... But what happens if he moves? Will he (and the other supers) be as quick to intervene? Will they be allowed on American ground? What if other countries manage to "recruit them", this could be bad for our geopolitical position, right? And why did this old hag had to say against them, truthfully, they are heroes, they saved my nephew once! (etc, etc). The argument does not need to be 100% impervious to answer to defend your position. Assuming one intention to discredit them is a (dubious) PR move. Second, give the schematics for an actual processor to someone from the 1950's. They know the science behind it (or most of it) but can they produce it? Answer is no, cause they will lack fundamental machinerie to produce the pieces. "This is a warp reverse translocator, we use a quantum infibulator to produce them and we're quite proud of... A quantum infibulator. It's a tech we got from the aliens. Only got three in the lab, so they're quite valuable, but we can lend you one to... You don't know how to operate it? Pffttt, go back to play with nuclear fission, you Neanderthal, we don't want you to screw up the multiverse". Bam. Done. Technology shortage. You may understand it, but are you able to mass-produce it? [Answer] Release the tech! Some of it. Use the advances to achieve the goals of the Democratized Green New Deal. Show that superheroes—and their wealthy supporters—are good global citizens. After all, everybody (including the hero class) benefits from clean air and water, more tech jobs, and improved infrastructure. But the rest of it, the fancy gear, the advanced weapons, etc, those are for the military. Specifically, the superhero branch of the military. It wouldn't be safe to expand access to those things. What if they got in the hands of criminals? or foreign agents? [Answer] Smash the Tech These folks are superheroes. With the exception of Batman and a couple others, they don't really need the tech in the first place. (Even Batman and Iron Man are driven by their super-willpower - they use tech because they can afford it). Publicly smash all super-tech in AOC's name. Don't bother keeping secret caches of tech: That's just asking for all kinds of trouble. The genuises among the superhero community will have memorized the tech anyway, and will be able to re-create it at will. [Answer] Move With teleportation and spaceships, you could build an orbiting space station such as the [JL Watchtower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_League_Watchtower) This way you're out of any government jurisdiction and with teleportation, you can get to anywhere you need to be (or just want to be) in a heartbeat. You could also build a hidden moonbase so nobody knows where you live. You could virtually buy a country like [Tuvalu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvalu) who'd be quite happy to have you if you upgrade their power, communication and medical facilities which would also be in your own interest. To be honest, being in New York would have to be the worst place on the planet for a superhero to live. Everytime you fight a supervillain and even scuff the exterior of a building, you'd end up in court. Forget knocking a bad guy right through a building or dropping a bus on his head. You'd have self appointed ethics committees, Social Justice Warriors ("minions are people too") and local government employees harassing you every second of every day and you couldn't even make a cup of coffee without a mountain of paperwork. Move Now! [Answer] AOC doesn’t understand that advanced (i.e. "mad") science only works for mad scientists! This is why Richards is the only one smart enough to turn on his machines even if it comes down to hitting the button. Just like building the machine is one of Reed's powers, so is turning it on. [Answer] It would break the Economy Teleportation Flying Cars, Flame resistent clothing one of Reeds many inventions All those inventions will make a lot of people lose there no more uber driver our building cars because everyone can just teleport when and where ever there want. And fier resisted clothing all thouse 3 world country would lose there Jobs if you can develop those clothing in the Lab It takes time before those people find jobs our study enough to become a engineering of Telportation station It is to dangerous Like Time Machines Why wouldn’t want the Military our the normal citizens a Time Machine to change past mistakes like killing Hitler our stoping a the death of a loved one. Sure it seems Honorable but what if those changes will change the course of History But Reed could help if he would teach them how to build effectiveness Cars our built cleaner Energy Scorsese [Answer] Argue that the users have to be carefully filtered to ensure they use it properly and then, after some arguing, hand out some gadgets carefully designed to fail impressively but without much harm. ]
[Question] [ Most of what follows is scientifically dubious. I'm looking to clarify one aspect and one aspect alone. A small planet is being terraformed by an alien race who have been doing this for millennia. They proceed by wrapping the planetoid at ground level in non-permeable, initially flexible, transparent, indestructible unobtainium. Then they inflate the balloon using gases they have brought with them in liquid form. The resulting balloon has a diameter approximately a mile more than the diameter of the planetoid. This is their standard method. They always choose small planetoids and make the balloon the same height above the ground. The balloon is pressurised and the density of the unobtainium is more than that of the atmosphere it surrounds. The pressure is such that the surface of the balloon becomes very taut like that of a rubber balloon about to burst. Their purpose is to farm the entire surface of the planetoid. EDIT - To make farming easier they flatten any significant mountains then grind the resultant debris into topsoil and fertilise it with chemicals they bring along. The planetoid does not have any substantial satellites - only small alien-made ones. It is circling around a Sol-like star at a Mars-like distance. Question Given the conditions above, will the balloon remain concentric with the planet or will it tend to brush the ground at times? My belief is that it will self-stabilise because atmospheric gradient\* will ensure greater pressure at lower altitudes and so push the balloon away if it drifts too close to the ground. I also believe that it will end up spinning in the same direction as the planet and thus perhaps be flattened somewhat at the poles. Am I right that it will self-stabilise or do the aliens have to have some extra mechanism to keep it from touching the surface? Might the solar wind be a destabilising factor? Would increasing the height above the ground provide a more significant pressure gradient? If it isn't self-stabilising then suggestions for a minimal change to the system to make it stable would be appreciated. \I've edited edited 'pressure' to 'gradient'. Apologies, it was a slip of the fingers. I did mention gradient later. --- Reminder* The balloon is made from non-permeable, initially flexible, transparent, indestructible unobtainium. [Answer] The force that the planetoid and its atmosphere exerts on the balloon is a combination of air pressure and gravity. Assuming that the atmospheric pressure is comparable to Earth's, the pressure on the balloon is 14 lbs/square inch outwards. I have no idea what the weight of a square inch of unobtanium balloon materials is, but since the question has the balloon stay up, we can assume it's less than that, and the balloon can be kept aloft by atmospheric pressure. Now, ignoring gravity for the moment, consider the tightly inflated balloon. The outward pressure on it is due entirely to the atmospheric pressure at the interior surface of the balloon. And that atmospheric pressure decreases with altitude. So the higher up a piece of the balloon's surface is the lower the outward force from air pressure and the lower the balloon's surface is, the higher the outwards force. This is exactly what's needed to center the balloon. But how big is the force? That depends on the lapse rate, the rate at which atmospheric pressure declines with altitude. Here the fact that it's a planetoid works against you. The equation for atmospheric density (or pressure) as a function of height is d = e -kgh where k is a constant, g is the surface gravity, and h is the height. A lower gravity means that density (and hence pressure) declines less rapidly with height. The height at which atmospheric pressure drops by half is inversely proportional to the gravitational binding and thus to the mass. The half-height for Earth is about 3.5 miles. Ceres (the largest asteroid in the Solar System) has a mass of 0.0002 Earth, and consequently has a half-height of 17,000 miles. Smaller planetoids would have correspondingly larger half-heights. So we have a planetoid inside a pressurized balloon of air. The lapse rate of the planetoid is so small that it would make an infinitesimal difference in the atmospheric pressure over the mile from planetoid surface to balloon, and consequently, there would be only a small restoring force tending to keep the balloon centered on the planetoid. Now bring gravity back into the picture: Since we have assume that the air pressure exerts a greater outward force on the balloon's surface than the inward force due to gravity, we can call the balloon a sphere. Newton himself proved that a uniform spherical shell of matter exerts no net force on an object inside it, and the object inside it naturally exerts not net force on the shell. So as long as the shell is inflated by air pressure, the gravity of the planetoid has no effect, and exerts no restoring force. Bottom line: You'd have a spherical balloon of air with a planetoid drifting around inside with no particular tendency to stay in the center. [Answer] # Solar wind will blow the 'wrapper' into the planet Solar wind is a stream of charged particles blowing from the sun out into space. At a distance of 1 AU, [pressure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind#Pressure) from the charged particles is in the range of 1-6 nPa. This isn't much, but integrated over the surface of a planet this will cause significant deformation of your shell. It will not remain perfectly concentric. # ... also, about that solar wind ... Solar wind is mostly composed of protons. Therefore it is positively charged. If the solar wind impacts on the shell, the shell will eventually be positively charged, since protons will strip off electrons. This will turn your entire system into a giant capacitor. Eventually, the voltage across the capacitor will be high enough and then ... [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DCXb0.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DCXb0.jpg) # Does your planet have a magnetic field? Back on topic, an electrostatically charged shell around your planet is bad for other reasons. Does your planet have a magnetic field like Earth does? Well, then you will get a [Lorentz force vector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_force) based on the motion of a charged object in a magnetic field. Even if your planet's magnetic field is perfectly symmetrical, the shell won't be, thanks to solar wind, so there will be some asymmetric magnetic forces pulling on the shell. The direction of the force will vary depending on the magnitude of the magnetic field, the distance the magnetic field extends from the planet, the distance of the shell from the planet, etc. There is also the possibility of relative motion (even if it is minor) between the shell and the planet. All of these factors will be significant, so I'm not prepared to estimate the magnitude or direction of the magnetic force on the solar-wind-charged-shell. But it won't be zero, so your shell is going to move. # Conclusion The shell is going to hit the planet, one way or another. Better idea though, what is wrong with using gravity to capture things on the planet's surface? Gravity is, after all, what kept our atmosphere attached to us for the last few billion years. A 'gravity well generator' that you put your planet into to prevent things from leaving the surface isn't any less realistic than magical handwavium shrink wrap on a planet. [Answer] Action and reaction You omit to give a mechanism for construction other than a semi plausible "inflation". As young engineers we joked about ["sky hooks"](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sky%20hook) but as with all things formerly implausible, such as space elevators, these are now a reality [see wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_%28structure%29). So [tethers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tether_missions) during construction would aid stability on completion and provide a temporary framework for supporting the outer shell. If the planetoid is mined for obtainium to use for the tethers and shell then the orbit will not change as the total mass is unchanged. How many tethers are required? Mathematically four (tetrahedral) would be the absolute minimum, diametrically that becomes eight, say a safety factor of three in pairs for redundancy /maintenance then 12 pairs of obtainium to the core (similar to those shown in photo) and 30 obtainium (green) for the lattice should be enough for a blue inflated translucent unobtanium [Icosasphere](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_icosahedron). Which tethered together rotate together [Click to see animation by Illustr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_icosahedron#/media/File:%D0%92%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B0%D1%8D%D0%B4%D1%80_%D0%B8_%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%8B%D1%80%D0%B5_%D0%BF%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8.gif) CC BY-SA 4.0 Note I have truncated top and bottom as more economic and less problematic to produce 2 level platforms [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1NqfW.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/1NqfW.png) [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/afwrW.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/afwrW.png) Concept of spherical objects with one suspended inside another\\ If inflation during construction is uniform on opposite sides the system will stay self centric. kingledion raised the issue of solar winds but earth is not pushed into outer space, any additional mass will pull the planetoid inwards etc. Equally if containing conductive strands the lattice frame acts more like a faraday cage (with it own electromagnetic issues, but a wide open lattice will not cause hardship). kingledion, Mark Olson et al. Have in general pointed out that there are similarities to Newtons shell theory and there would be nothing to stop the planet and shell moving at different rates thus on completion over time the core and case could drift into one another. Using diametrically opposite tethers will stop any such drift. The "space anchors" would provide an interface for space elevator occupants to transfer to the 12 orbital spacepads, and the lattice could be used for monorail links between them. Given the layout any failure/maintenance would still provide a choice of back-up routes. However due to the spin the shell shape is likely to be squished top and bottom, so 2 polar spaceports would make more sense. To counteract the inward pull at the poles a pillar or stanchion form support is needed as proposed by rek ? these could be triangular in nature to align with the truncated oblate (flattened) spheroid. What could create a calamitous wobble with a catastrophic collision is significantly uneven internal weather, or a drastic external collision event. Both of these would be mitigated by use of tethers. In either case with enough force the "skin" could rupture or exceed the tethers strength and the whole system instantly collapse. But then unobtainium is indestructible, per your specification ! [Answer] I think you will need some kind of alien stabilization technology. Imagine a tennis ball inside a large inflated balloon. The pressure of the air inside will not keep the tennis ball from bouncing around, even in zero gravity. On a planetary scale the rocky planet still needs to spin and orbit its star, so the planet-sized balloon would have to keep up with the orbiting planet, using some kind of propulsion system. I think a better technique for terraforming is to understand how Earth keeps its own warm atmosphere from leaking out into space. It's really quite simple. It's just gravity. Gravity keeps the air molecules on our planet. Our planet also has a spinning core of molten iron which creates an electromagnetic field around our planet, protecting it from solar winds which might strip away our ozone layer and atmosphere. The aliens would only have to pick a sufficiently massive planet, fill it with their preferred atmosphere, and generate a protective electromagnetic shield. No balloons needed. [Answer] Have you ever wrapped a gift for your girlfriend/boyfriend in a balloon? If you have done it, or have at least seen the thing, you should have noticed that the pressure in the balloon doesn't keep the gift in the middle of the balloon. You simply have a body immersed in a fluid, which will then experience the usual buoyancy force. Since the planetoid will be subject to the gravitational attraction of the main body (I assume it is the central star), that won't displace the planetoid with respect to the wrapping. However, your aliens, in order to wrap the planetoid, must have matched its orbital velocity with the velocity of the wrapping. So it is safe to assume that the center of mass of the planetoid and the center of mass of the wrapping are moving in the same way. If they didn't do it, the planetoid will simply burst through the wrap at some km/s. So my suggestion to the alien is: match the orbital velocity of the planetoid! Then orbital mechanics will take care of the rest. If they didn't bother in setting up a rotational regime coherent with that of the planetoid, what will happen? The atmosphere in the wrap will be initially at rest with respect to the wrapping, except for the layer in contact with the planetoid surface, which will be drag around. This drag will then transfer to the outer layers, until the entire wrap and the enclosed atmosphere spin coherently with the planetoid. [Answer] Space.com has an article on [that subject](https://www.space.com/23063-terraforming-planets-shell-worlds.html). The idea that small worlds may have insufficient gravity to hold-on to an atmosphere and therefore a shell is necessary. The article did not mention, however, stabilizing the shell around the planet. For that, I have done a thought experiment and I hope you find that clear to follow. The thought experiment starts with taking a steel ingot. Put it on the water, and it will sink. Now, take that ingot and flatten it, then turn it into a concave plate. Put it on the water, and it will float. A ship made of steel will remain afloat as long as it is not filled with water. Pull it up a bit and leave it, it will drop back to its original height. Push it down a bit and leave it, it will pop-up again to its original height. Now, fill it with water and it will sink. This effect is the result of Archimedes law. Going back to the planet, replace water with an atmosphere, and the air above it with a vacuum. The shell is right between the two. We now cover the atmosphere with a shell. it is atop the atmosphere. The surface atmospheric pressure is the weight of the atmosphere under the planet's gravity, and as you go up the atmosphere, the pressure goes down. The weight of the shell adds-up to that weight. It presses the air underneath as it tends to go down, until it cannot press it any further. At this point, the upwards pressure counteracts the downward weight of the shell and the shell should stay afloat in balance. Let's say we pushed the shell on one side. It is like we made a dent on the side we pushed (Remember the concave plate?), and a bulge on the opposite side. If the shell was artificially held in this off-center position, the atmosphere will be moved as well. It will shift to a new equilibrium state and the surface pressure will once again become uniform all-over the planet's surface. The pressure would go down as you go up, so the lowered section (dent) would experience a stronger upward force than the higher section (bulge) on its Antipodes. The shell will move back to its central position. All the "air columns" of the atmosphere behave like a series of [communicating vessels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_vessels). The shorter air columns (under the dent) will push up the shell at a force, greater than that of the taller columns (under the bulge) Exceptions Solar wind would exert some pressure and will drift the shell a bit off-center, but not noticeably when viewed from the surface. large and small asteroids will not have sufficient gravity to stabilize the shell around the center. It is not necessary to install pillars, cables will be just fine, because the bubble cannot collapse without venting the atmosphere. ]
[Question] [ Closed. This question is [off-topic](/help/closed-questions). It is not currently accepting answers. --- You are asking questions about a story set in a world instead of about building a world. For more information, see [Why is my question "Too Story Based" and how do I get it opened?](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3300/49). Closed 5 years ago. The community reviewed whether to reopen this question 1 year ago and left it closed: > > Original close reason(s) were not resolved > > > [Improve this question](/posts/127780/edit) This question was inspired by [How to survive for a day if everyone is trying to kill you](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/55867/how-to-survive-for-a-day-if-everyone-is-trying-to-kill-you). We're in a country that is basically 16th century Scotland. Born a girl, from a noble family, I became a knight [i.e. noble military leader](which is very unusual, asked a lot of effort, but is not exceptional). Now in my late twenties, I live in the family castle with my mother and father. But I feel trapped in my responsibilities. I became a knight because I liked to ride horses and camp, and break bully's noses. I'm not so fond of politics, and I'm not so fond of war. In a fit of... wilderness call, I left home, on foot, with only a small backpack from a previous journey (I don't remember what's in it). I simply walked through the guarded front door, in the middle of the night. I walked on the royal road until the morning and I am now at a crossroad. Now that I come back to my senses, I feel like I should start to think of a plan. I don't want to come back home but people will start searching for me. I have a few friends in the castle and the town around it. I have a few powerful friends oversea (Think of Iceland), but, after a few years of skirmishes, I am well known and not very liked by the folks from the neighboring country (Think of England). I have a few skills that may prove useful : * I am very good with the outdoors. Making fire, setting traps, gathering food from the wild. * I have already tracked down criminals so I have quite a good idea of how I would be tracked. * I am a very good, strong melee fighter trained with all the weapons of my time (firearms and artillery included). * I know how to ride a horse. * I can sail a small ship alone. * I'm a bit of a controversial hero in my country. A few things that could bother me : * I am quite renowned around the country, but except for the nobles, few people actually saw my face. * I don't want to cut my hair. * I don't want to hide in a cave. I want the great outdoors and I want to find people I can trust. * I'm a bit of a controversial hero in my country. Also : the backpack is kind of a "wild card" here but it's definitely not big enough to have a tent, and there's no food/water/money in it. The question then : How can I escape being caught and thrown back to my responsibilities as long as possible ? What places should I avoid ? What should I look for ? Where should I look for allies, now and later ? [Answer] You will need to find another type of woman who travels alone and does things most people associate with men. Be that woman. Because if you are a noble who acts like a knight, and you're the only female knight around, people will figure out who you are. So who else? A healer? a performer? Some other profession that might not have been done by solo women in our history but could be in your world...judge, farrier, bookkeeper, rigger (for boats), clergy...something usually done by a traveler in towns too small to have a permanent one. If you can find another woman or 3 to travel with, this opens up your options and gives you more safety. Sure, you can fight, but no one does well traveling completely alone and it looks suspicious to others that you don't feel scared being a woman traveling alone. If you can find a man to travel with, you suddenly have a ton of options. Now you're his wife (even if it's fake) and are part of whatever profession he has. If it's a profession you already know (or can learn), that's great, you can do a lot of the work. If it's one you don't know, not a problem, you're "just" the wife. What does he get out of it? A bodyguard! And companionship. Assistance with his profession. And just plain old sharing of the duties of traveling. Whatever you do, don't choose a profession that is one that nobles have or one they'd use from a traveler. For example, you can assume a large estate would have their own blacksmith and skip them. If you're a farrier, there will be lots of small towns that need your services for those regular maintenance things they can't do themselves. Don't take the risk of being recognized. Hopefully you own or can buy the tools you need for your trade. You'll probably need some different way to get short-term cash (or tools). Maybe a stop at a friend's house first. Note that you can switch off professions and traveling companions regularly. Maybe you find a traveling acrobat troupe and take care of their horses for 2 months until they get home for their winter break. They introduce you to the traveling apothecary who needs someone to protect his goods and you pretend to be his wife for 6 months. And so on. Sounds like an interesting novel and your writing seems strong. Good luck with it! [Answer] It is easier for you than for your brother. Go back to plan A. You chose to become a lady knight. Now you want to escape your knight responsibilities of making war. Fortunately for you, you have your original path to fall back on - that of traditional princess. Go home, turn in your armor and weapons and let your family know that you spoke with an angel on the road, who told you to do these things and go back to being a princess like your sisters. Your sisters are not expected to make war. You will not be either. You can keep your horse. Your family will be surprised and delighted. It is medieval days so a divine visit on the road has plenty of precedent. If you want to sidestep all royal obligations (both of knight and of princess) then your option is a convent and a life devoted to Christ and service. This also has plenty of precedent for royal ladies and might be less surprising to your family - if they already think you are uninterested in marrying / having a family they will not be surprised when you choose a female life path that does not involve such things. [Answer] Its Medieval Times, there are no photographs, nothing to identify you other than your mannerisms and people that know you. so just avoid both. > > Think of Worldbuilding.SE as the same as a sort of medieval country, now there are some well known knights (users with over 10k rep), the great Sir RonJohn, Sir Separatrix, Sir WillK, Sir Ash and Sir Szczerzokly as well as many others, these are well known names, each having many fantastic victories (answers) to their names. but we the common people don't know what they really look like, so would we recognise them if their names changed (created new accounts)? > > > Probably not, they are the same people, they would however continue to provide the same sort of advice and answers to the common folk (newer contributers) with the same sort of language used and they could easily earn their way back into greatness overtime, or they could stay back comment occasionally and just be a common person alongside all the others > > > So... that analogy aside Female fighters were uncommon in a militaristic sense, but women did appear in gangs of bandits. and fought to protect their homes so a woman carrying a weapon is not unheard of, it might turn a few heads when you entered a village but not much more than that. especially if you remove armour. place it in your bag and sell it when you get to a town, just don't sell all of it. just a piece here and a piece there. this should give you enough cash to live on for a while. armour was expensive back in the 16th century. Also worth noting that often wild animals were still the property of the local lords, so hunting game would be poaching. and if you get caught saying "its fine its my families land" is likely to get your families attention. After that walk to where ever you want and if you have friends overseas, then buy your way onto a ship and go overseas. [Answer] Since marriage and children has already been mentioned, we come to option b for the medieval independent woman. # Become a nun This is one of the few directly socially acceptable getout clauses for society of the time. If you don't want to do your duty as a knight, and you don't want to do your duty as a woman (marriage and children), then signing up for holy orders is considered entirely valid and doesn't bring any shame on the family. You can take your time on the open road by taking appropriate pilgrimages as and when you like, without having to spend your entire life out under the stars. So in the words of Hamlet to Ophelia: > > Get thee to a nunnery > > > [Answer] I feel like I may not be understanding the spirit of the question but... Go find a man. Get married, get pregnant, crank out kids. No one is going to expect you to fight while you are with child or a few months after. Three kids down and your days of knighthood will be long forgotten. Now i have a feeling you want to stay outdoorsy. Having a family may make this a bit difficult, but as a noble you will pretty much only have to be out of communion 3 months per child. The maids will take care of everything including breastfeeding. At the end of the day people will say your husband tamed you. You will have to live with that. [Answer] Most of the answers seem to focus on the gender issue – if you don't want to be a female knight, do what females typically did then. What about social level issue? # Cease to be a knight I mean, yes, get out from the mail, hide your sword in a backpack, and possibly, get rid of your battle horse. Disguise it (hard and error-prone), discard it (teh feels!), or properly hide it at a safe house / with trusted person. Now, you are a somewhat gentry-level female on a road. If people try to attack or do something bad to you, you'd hopefully still have your sword. Your pocket money is probably enough for few months (if not years) for the life of a lower folk. Wander to a nearby tavern. Get hired for passing dishes around or tending horses. Learn, gather experience, adapt. Move on. Possibly: change disguises. Do you notice, how the world opens up in front of you? You can be anything you want to be. (Cues out to Freddy Mercury.) ]
[Question] [ I've been spending some time thinking about putting a satellite weapon into space. It would look something like this. Don't worry about those letters, they stand for something else. [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hbjt3.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hbjt3.jpg) This weapon can direct an [electromagnetic pulse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse) at the Earth of sufficient intensity to cripple a city. How do I provide enough power for this weapon? The power system must be feasible with 1995 technology, able to survive in space for years to decades until called upon, and powerful enough to energize said pulse weapon. Also, I may have other nefarious satellites in orbit, so this has to be a power source, not a bomb. I don't want to damage any of my other investments while I reduce London to ruin. [Answer] If you want to trigger an EMP with sufficient intensity to cripple a city from orbit, I'm sorry, but it's going to have to be a bomb. EMPs are not efficient. You could use an directed energy weapon (probably microwaves), to disrupt specific targets - in fact, there's research into building such a weapon into a [cruise missile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power_Microwave_Advanced_Missile_Project). But your energy requirements increase non-linearly as the area you wish to affect increases. Additionally, the greater the distance from source to target, the greater the energy required. Eventually, if you're operating from orbit, you're going to need so much energy that it's more efficient just to make it a bomb. (And, in fact, the Goldeneye weapons in the movie of the same name were single-shot bombs as well - from the [James Bond wikia](http://jamesbond.wikia.com/wiki/GoldenEye_(weapon)): > > ...the weapon consisted of two disposable satellites designated "Petya" and "Mischa", each one armed with a nuclear warhead. By detonating the device in the upper atmosphere, a pulse or a radiation surge, is generated; capable of destroying all electronic devices in a 30 mile radius. > > > ) [Answer] Since everybody loves math as much as I do ## Here is some math Geosynchronous orbit (GSO) is ca. 36,000km altitude. Earth radius is 6,371km. So distance to a satellite is about 30,000km. The area of your target (London) is 1,572 km². Imagine a nuclear bomb being set off at GSO. The blast would spread in all directions. So the portion that would be directed at London (if it was directly above London) would be $$R = \frac{A\_{\text{London}}}{A\_\text{Sphere;30000km}} = 1.39 \times 10^{-7}$$ or as a solid angle of $$\Omega = \frac{A\_{\text{London}}}{(30,000km)²} = R \times 4 \pi = 1.75 \times 10^{-6}$$ That would be the focus a weapon would need. It's quite narrow, but a laser should manage to achieve that. (I am not a laser specialist, but I am certain that should work.) ### What radiation passes through the atmosphere? [![atmospheric attenuation](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MGMQ2.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MGMQ2.jpg) Microwaves pass through the atmosphere with only slight issues on some wavelengths. So we can assume they reach the surface just fine without accounting for further attenuation. (That is a simplification. There is some radiation blocked, but we're gonna ignore that. It's not that much.) ([High-Power Microwaves (HPM)](https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/files/Ebomb.pdf)) achieve a similar effect to EMPs, but are more difficult to harden against. Unfortunately, a big part of an EMP by nuclear explosion is caused by ionization of the air by gamma radiation. That radiation would mainly be absorbed by the atmosphere and would not reliable reach the target ground. At least not at high efficiency. So we'll stick with an HPM concept for now. ### The Non-bomb weapon Information on how much energy is needed for a HPM to work is hard to come by. [Bofors HPM Blackout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors_HPM_Blackout) is a weapon like that. Unfortunately, we don't know how much energy it needs. Just that it wighss less than 500kg. Nuclear fission bombs [range from under a ton to more than 500,000 kiltons of TNT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon#Fission_weapons). All of the sizes cause an EMP. - Obviously at different magnitudes. These sizes range from 4.2 GJ to 210 PJ energy output. In a nuclear explosion this energy is manifesting in several different ways. EMP, Air blast, Heat, light, etc.. Not all of those things would be useful for the desired result, so we would need less energy, if we manage to concentrate it. But overall we would still need at minimum several GigaJoules of energy to reliably fry circuits in the target area. ### How would you store this amount of energy electrically rechargable in a satellite with 1995 technology? You couldn't. First of all until that would be charged using solar panels would probably take quite a while, unless your satellite is more than space station size at [230 W/m²](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency) for solar panels. ### And how would you store that energy? Well, considering there are no battery concepts now with more than [5 MJ/kg](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiedichte) (Link in German because of a significantly more detailed list) you would need many tons of batteries. And the additional problem of radiation hardening. To my knowledge batteries are not that fond of radiation, so having them out in space would require significant mass to protect them from it. Even if the radiation wouldn't destroy them, it would probably lower the capacity over time as well as make it lose energy, making your recharging even more a problem. ## Conclusion I doubt it is possible. Maybe today with High-End secret military projects, but not with anything normal I could find. But with 1995 technology it is even less likely. [Answer] The ionosphere will power it. Lightning is a natural cause of electromagnetic pulses. These natural occurring EMP pulses can do significant damage to electronics on the ground. <http://www.alphamarinesystems.com/lightning_and_emp_damage.htm> The ionosphere of the earth carries a high electrical charge. This charge builds up because the atmosphere is a good insulator, preventing the charge from going to ground. <http://www.metlink.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/PhysRev25_4_Nicoll.pdf> > > Global current The potential difference between the ionosphere and > Earth’s surface is approximately 250kV (2.5 × 105V). This very large > potential difference means that the charged ions in the atmosphere > will move and thus produce a vertical current. > > > Your Goldeneye capitalizes on this. It first emits a gas which diffuses out in a large radius, quickly becoming conductive plasma. Then it fires a "rod from god" orbital weapon from its onboard railgun (powered by a solar charged capacitor). As opposed to the typical role of these weapons to traverse the atmosphere intact and deliver a massive kinetic punch, this rod is made of silver and is intended to ablate on the way down, shedding particles and silver plasma en route. It will take it 20 seconds to make it to the ground. But it will not reach the ground - the rod will ablate to nothing before making impact. It does not have to. Behind it, the immense charge coming down the conductive path of plasma will complete the process, arcing across the remaining atmosphere to ground and delivering an immense electromagnetic pulse. Goldeneye produces a lightning bolt from the ionosphere. There is a lot of ionosphere. This trick will work more than once. --- I have seen a video of lightning called down along a rocket-lifted copper wire. The portion along the wire was green, probably from the copper plasma. I am not sure what color silver plasma would be. [![rocket with wire](https://i.stack.imgur.com/k6FBn.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/k6FBn.png) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34NpyA2OuaE> ]
[Question] [ I know it looks like a lot of topics but hear me out here. I am not talking about some nonsense explanation for this ability but more of an evolutionary process. Imagine that for numerous generations some humans survived in radioactive areas, over the years (I mean a looooooot of years) their capacity for regeneration evolved to counter cellular degradation. Also, but I am venturing on a path I know less, could it be they have some way of never losing fragments of DNA (meaning nothing or very little is lost with each new cell created)? So basically they would look like any human when they are in this environment, because their healing ability would be used to counter the radiation damage. But now imagine we take a member of this population and place him in an environment where there is close to 0 radiation, then could his regenerative body heal faster than one of a "normal" human? QUESTION Could it be possible for a human to develop healing ability through evolution in a radioactive environment? If yes, would it help him in a non-radioactive environment? Post-script: For each of your answers could you explain why it would be plausible or why it is nonsense, thank you! Oh and sorry if there are any mistakes, English is not my native language :) [Answer] Here is a mechanism for what you want: 1: In real life, each cell division is an opportunity for that cell to turn into cancer. That is why cancers usually happen in epithelial cells like gut lining, gland linings, skin: epithelial cells divide a lot. Epithelial cells also have a limited life expectancy; one rationale is that within a certain time frame they are more likely to have developed DNA damage and so they might as well be recycled. Very much like the replicants in Blade Runner - recycle them before they develop changes which make them dangerous. 2: In a very radioactive environment, the time frame during which a cell will likely acquire DNA damage is shorter. So these cells divide faster, to do their life's work in the shorter functional life span they have. Cells in such an organism have a faster growth rate. 3: Radiation can cause cancer in nonepithelial cells also - osteosarcoma being an example which one commonly sees arising in places where people have had radiation for a prior cancer. Bone cells do not have the same lifespan safeguards that epithelial cells have, but they could. If bone cells posed the same regular risk of cancer that epithelial cells pose, an organism with bone cells (and muscle cells, and glial cells etc) that lived fast and died young would be protected from cancer risk. 4: Your radiation adapted organism is full of cells that reproduce themselves, grow, then commit apoptosis suicide at breakneck speed - they have to do their work before they turn cancer. This would come at a high energy cost for the organism but so be it. These things would resist cancer because the cells would be born and die so quickly. That fast cellular growth rate also means they heal damage very quickly, radiation notwithstanding. [Answer] No. radiation damage is actually only a little direct damage to the cell: it is mostly the cell recognizing some minor damage and then killing itself in a process called [apoptosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis) This is done far, far sooner than the damage usually has any impact because of the danger that damaged DNA poses: cancer. Cells will happily kill themselves if they can save their host from cancer. So any resistance to radiation will mostly involve reduncancies and processes that make sure that a cell can take more damage before it terminates, not direct radiation hardening. An improved resistance to cancer is a positive side effect. If your organism evolved in a environment where actual, physical, radiation hardening is needed they wouldn't evolve at all because that place would be sterile. see for example [Deinococcus radiodurans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans), the most radiation resistant organism on earth. That tough cookie just has tightly coiled and multi-copied DNA, nothing that involves unusual repair to the cell structure. [Answer] All multi-cellular life regenerates, healing wounds, and this is fueled by eating. The mechanism to repair damaged DNA is caused by telomerase, but it's an energetically expensive molecule for the body to create, so it usually doesn't create enough to counter cancer long term, but common expsoure to radiation would likely give a reason for evolution to select for more intensive DNA repair, especially if they had an abundant energy source (say, for example, the radiation.) So the question is, "Could humans adapt to feed off of radiation?" To look at this answer, the first question would be can -any- creature that can survive intense radiation. And yes, there's already one species that has adapted to it. And not only to survive in it, but it feeds off the radiation. This is a black fungus that lives in the core of Chernobyl reactor. This is a place that melts robots that go in, and this fungus is thriving there. So the next question is, "What dark secrets of evolution has this fungus unlocked that allows it to survive there? To feed there? Is such an evolution so far off track of humans that we could never hope to..." It's melanin. The same stuff that gives Northern European freckles and makes African's skin dark, and makes other people tan. It's how we naturally produce Vitamin D in sunlight. We're already naturally feeding off of radiation, albeit in much smaller doses. Enough generations in steadily higher radiation environments, and we'd quickly (evolutionarily speaking), as a species, be able to chillax in the Chernobyl reactor along with the fungus there, assuming our sweat could keep pace with the heat increase. Further, melanin not only absorbs the radiation, but also blocks it from getting deeper into the body, cutting out a lot of radiation to inner cells. Your idea is spot-on doable without anything weird needed. That said, any human so evolved would look at the typical deep African and call them white. Melanin is a darkening pigment, and the black fungus in the reactor is called that for a reason. These people would be printer-ink black or darker. [Answer] > > could it be they have some way of never losing fragment of DNA > > > With radiation damage DNA is not lost in the sense that it is gone, but just made unusable. Imagine like a scratch on the surface of a CD. Same when DNA is damaged by radiation: some atom or bond is damaged and the functionality is gone. Since we live already in a radioactive environment (background radiation is non zero, and we are also exposed to UV radiation from the Sun), our body has already some repair mechanism, which can cope with small damages. The yield of this mechanism is however not 100%, but rather 99.99x%. This means that sooner or later some damage won't be repaired. Increasing the background radioactivity level may lead, over generation, to the selection of a more efficient repair mechanism, let's say, for the sake of this answer, that it goes from 99.999% (1 error in 100k repair) to 99.99999% (1 error in 10 million repairs). The mechanism would only work for damages to the DNA, so for damages induced by radiation. If your subject would get a wound by cutting his finger while chopping an onion, that would not affect its DNA, so there would be no accelerated healing. It would however give improved resistance to cancer, as long as cancer is the consequence of damage at DNA level, interfering with the normal behavior of the cell. ]
[Question] [ A quick rundown on the zombies: * The Zombies essentially just Walking Corpses, nothing more special to them than that * They are 100% obedient, and have limited intelligence (about the same as something like a moderately well-trained primate, but without emotions) * They do not require resources of any kind * Almost all of the zombies that are running around are from the city's own graveyard * The zombies are used as slaves would be, such as for mining, construction, even domestic servitude in some cases Long story short, this fantasy world is full of kind necromancers who felt all those dead bodies were going to be wasted just sitting in those graves and not helping anyone. So now it's a common occurrence for every city to have its own personal Necromancer, who simply revives the corpses of anybody who died within or near the city limits and puts them to work for the good of the people. Obviously having a bunch of walking corpses shambling around dropping pieces of their limbs everywhere is going to present some issues, like for instance the smell. ## So my question is: what issues do these Zombie Servants cause, and how can I mitigate them using late-medieval technology? I'm okay with advancing technology that is needed a little bit (like for example developments in deodorant technology) if it is a technology that this world would have an increased reason to develop due to the zombies. [Answer] First problem: Disease If the magic doesn't stop them from rotting then you have a whole flock of walking Typhoid Marys. Once the immune system shuts down then all the diseases that like to live in humans just go to town. If the magic that animates the zombie stops the rot then that solves that problem and they shouldn't smell too bad. Second problem: Control * Whose orders do they follow? If someone walks into a factory and yells go to the river, do all of the zombies leave? * When will the stop performing an action? Watch the Disney short "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" to get an idea of one of the control issues. * How literal are they? Do you need to micro manage them? One possible solution would be a control medallion. The commands are issued mentally and the zombies do more what you want than what you say. You could give different orders to different zombies if you can identify them as individuals with the medallion. Also, if you have to maintain some conscious link to the medallion, you prevent the runaway zombie scenario. If the overseer falls asleep or gets distracted, the zombies stop after completing their current action. Side Note: Zombie animals No need to feed the zombie horses pulling the carriage. The best horses are kept for breeding and are only sold (at a high mark up) after their breeding days are over. Inferior horses are used by the lower classes and killed when they can no longer work and sold for prices that are higher than a live horse but much lower than prime zombie horses. [Answer] Cholera, other bacterial and fungal diseases as well but that's going to be a big one if you having rotting bodies doing domestic chores since they can come into contact with food and water. Worse than that, if the Zombies are largely locally sourced and you have an outbreak of something like [Plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_(disease)) then they'll stay infectious long after they're dead. If they're used exclusively for heavy labour outside the city limits, mining and the like, and the goods they produce, ore, coal, timber, firewood, don't come into direct contact with people but are rather either left for a long time in storage or in the case of wood to season and dry or burned with fire before people get near them then you could be pretty safe, barring rogue necromancers. [Answer] Medieval cities were not that scented: there were no sewers and those not living next to the river (if there was one) used to dump the content of their night pots on the street. Add to this that the animals used to move things around (horses, cows, donkeys) used to empty their intestines and bladders on the street, too. Last but not least, garbage was also thrown on the street. To make things worse, if possible, bathing was not common at all, and in certain culture it was considered fashionable to use butter as hair ointment. Honestly, I don't think some rotting arms or legs in this pout-purry are going to make a huge damage to the city fragrance or bring any arm to the city health. [Answer] Free unlimited labor is going to have a massive effect on society. There are going to be both positives and negatives for having a zombie workforce. First off the negative. If this a recent occurrence, what will happen to the unskilled living workers? If an employer has a choice of a paid living worker, or an unpaid zombie worker, why would he pay for a living worker? There is going to be a large portion of unskilled living workers that have lost their ability to make money. What will happen to all the construction workers, miners, and servants in the short term? This could lead to civil unrest and class warfare. Another issue is acceptance and religion. Perhaps there are those in this society that dont like or accept their dead father toiling away in the mines and their deceased mother picking crops. Perhaps they want them to rest in peace and go to an afterlife. As for the positive, you have effectively created a "more Utopian" city. With unlimited free workers, there should be no food or housing shortages. Public works projects, such as plumbing and sanitation will be available to all. Large scale projects, such as dams are far more attainable, with no risk of living casualties. Citizens can spend more time learning in schools and receiving a higher education, pursuing the arts, leisure time, etc. With the abundance of goods and services, the cost of living should decrease, while standards of living increase. [Answer] Zombie 'preadators' modern cities have a bad enough bird problem with bin scraps being left all over the place add to that rats, mice, house hold pets, insects and water based critters if the zombies work in rivers or sewers. That's not only a constant maintainance problem for your 'automation' but a major public nuisance. It could perhaps be fixed by 'spiking' zombies with poison or flavour. Fires! Decomposing flesh releases flammable gas which if zombies work indoors could build up and become a problem without ventilation. Its unlikely and not horrendously dangerous but still a problem. The many obvious psychological ramifications of the dead walking the city streets. (Though to be honest people would probably adapt). [Answer] Rot and smell would be an issue, but you could fix that with the same magic that animates them. Maybe say the spell makes all flesh act as though it was alive, so rotting only occurs in bloodless limbs? That might ruin your aesthetic, but you get the idea. Alternatively, embalming (draining the corpse of blood and replacing the blood with a preserving fluid like formaldehyde) would slow decay to more manageable levels. This just takes a pump, a hose, and something sharp, so it should be possible with medieval-level technology. Maybe the servants are stored in salt when not in use? Rats and (especially) scavenging birds would be a huge problem for all kinds of hygienic and preserving reasons. Other than paying for bird-hunters and putting [spikes](https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5a3972a71600002100c50e72.jpeg?cache=okjdp9yw07&ops=scalefit_720_noupscale) on everything, servants who work outdoor could wear iron masks and thick clothes to prevent birds from eating their bits. This might also help against being baked into jerky by the sun, so win-win. (Plus the [spikes](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRPCxCdSc5NYGCo1NJ3zaGX6w-LvtHpAoCaVYMDtXjcvQBjjwmJ) and clothing would be creepy as all heck, and that's just fun to write). Dropping bits would be a major source of disease and would definitely clutter the streets. In medieval times, they could just grin-and-bear with it, but hiring some street sweepers might be prudent. There also might be an issue with stray dogs and cats learning that the zombie (and, by extension, humans) can be eaten. Socially, this would have some huge effects, but that would be depended on what religions you have in your world, if and how veneration of the dead takes place, and whether zombies can be used in warfare. If the last point is true, that's a massive world-building can of worms. ]
[Question] [ Scene Description in my Book: (You can skip this part if you want, I will put the details below) You are an admiral for "army Red". You have just gained space superiority over the planet you plan to invade by wiping out the "army Green" space fleet. Both sides suffered heavy losses and the space around is littered with the debris of ships from the battle. You decide it’s time to launch your ground forces onto the planet, but the first wave is cut to ribbons by heavy orbital guns belonging to a Green army fortress lying just 5km away from the Green's capital. A Green army traitor gives you the blueprints for the Green's fortress, only for you to discover that taking it would be a more difficult task than you first thought. The fortress is fifteen stories high and eight stories deep in the centre of the complex; the entire compound itself is a two km in diameter. The fortress is built on a hill with 150m straight incline and only one road up. It's also providing overwatch on an air force base 400m away from the hill. The Red army’s admiral has more problems as well. Your fleet may have won, but a large EMP has taken out your long distance travel for several months. With no reinforcements and with the Green army building up man power by the minute, you can’t take or besiege the fortress in time. You have to destroy it, but how? Your ships can’t bomb it, the orbital guns would shoot them down in low orbit, and you can’t use WMDs. Your air force also suffered too many losses to be of use, not that it would matter. The vast network of AA-guns and missiles would cut them down, not to mention the air base. The Admiral is at a loss. There's no way to win this. He walks to the window looking down on the planet with his fist clenched. His view is disrupted by a floating piece of a vessel and the idea comes to him to use destroyed ships as weapons. Important details: The planet is earth-like in nature but with 0.5 times more gravity. The orbital guns wouldn't be able to shoot down something that fast. There are plenty of different sized ships to choose from. WMDs are not allowed to be used, but dropping a battle ship is. The EMP has taken out all space monitoring devices the sole exception being the fortress itself, so no one else will see it coming (or report it); some of the ships are in low orbit around the planet so accidents happen (if you know what I mean). The fortress is fifteen stories high and eight stories deep in the centre of the complex; the entire compound itself is two km in diameter. The fortress is built on a hill with a 150m straight incline and only one road up. It's also providing overwatch on an air force base 400m away from the hill. Rules of Combat: * The Blast Radius and how Powerful would the Blast be. * The Fortress must be ether Destroyed or Damaged Beyond Repair (the airport is a minor concern). * The Blast Radius must NOT harm the Capital. The Sonic Boom would be big so Minor damage is fine (broken windows, missing roofs etc). * Can only use one ship for the attack (multiple strikes against one target would raise suspicion). The Question is this: What Size Ship Should I Launch at the Fortress to be the Most Effective? You can use the names/types of real world vessels to answer this question. For any more details just ask. [Answer] tl;dr Smart bombs (dense, hard, streamlined) are much more effective than ships (big, hollow, bulky) at penetrating enemy armor, since they have a much higher terminal velocity. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment> > > A kinetic bombardment or a kinetic orbital strike is the hypothetical act of attacking a planetary surface with an inert projectile, where the destructive force comes from the kinetic energy of the projectile impacting at very high velocities. > > > Kinetic bombardment has the advantage of being able to deliver projectiles from a very high angle at a very high speed, making them extremely difficult to defend against. In addition, projectiles would not require explosive warheads, and—in the simplest designs—would consist entirely of solid metal rods, giving rise to the common nickname "Rods from God". > > > During the Vietnam War, there was limited use of the Lazy Dog bomb, a steel projectile shaped like a conventional bomb but only about 25.4 mm (1") long and 9.525 mm (3/8") diameter. A piece of sheet metal was folded to make the fins and welded to the rear of the projectile. These were dumped from aircraft onto enemy troops and had the same effect as a machine gun fired vertically.[3][4] Observers visiting a battlefield after an attack said it looked like the ground had been 'tenderized' using a gigantic fork. > > > The system most often described is "an orbiting tungsten telephone pole with small fins and a computer in the back for guidance".[citation needed] The system described in the 2003 United States Air Force report[citation needed] was that of 20-foot-long (6.1 m), 1-foot-diameter (0.30 m) tungsten rods, that are satellite controlled, and have global strike capability, with impact speeds of Mach 10. > > > [Answer] There is precedent for this approach: the Fire ship. Get a crappy old ship that still floats, fill it with flammables, set it on fire and get it going towards the enemy. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ship> [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/s2ttg.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/s2ttg.jpg) > > Possibly the oldest account of the military use of a fire ship is > recorded by the Greek historian Thucydides on the occasion of the > failed Athenian Sicilian Expedition (415–413 BC). In the episode, > the Athenian expeditionary force successfully repels an attack by the > Syracusans: > > > The rest [of the Athenian force] the enemy tried to burn by means of > an old merchantman which they filled with faggots and pine-wood, set > on fire and let drift down the wind which blew full on the Athenians. > The Athenians, however, alarmed for their ships, contrived means for > stopping it and putting it out, and checking the flames and the nearer > approach of the merchantman, thus escaped the danger. > > > The Fire ship tactic has been done a lot over history. Cool reading. Might I suggest you dig in and read up on this. You will find one that resonates. Maybe you might explicitly copy what was done - some strategist who knows military history comes up with the idea. [Answer] given your combat rules, I think that a single wrecked ship is not feasible since the impact will damage what is around. Everything you can drop from orbit will generate some sort of collateral damage if too big and will do nothing if too small. So you have only one option: de-orbit a wrecked ship and once it is on course destroy it, this will create a cloud of debris where you can hide some guided missiles. Since this will make make very hard for the enemy AA to shoot down all of them, your missiles have a good change to enter the atmosphere and then you can activate them to make a targeted attack when is to late to intercept them. And also if they manage to shoot down some the missiles, you always have the debris as backup. [Answer] Raising the questions that need to be asked, not the one you actually asked. Apparently there are fighters and battleships, and the equivalent of anti-fighter [Flak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aircraft_warfare) and anti-battleship [coastal batteries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_artillery). Q: If a mostly intact battleship cannot go over the fortress and bombard it, how can a wreck survive long enough to hit it? A: The mostly intact battleship has a crew that wants to live and fight another day. The wreck is expendable. Q: How can you make a wreck (too damaged to maneuver and fight) hit the exact spot of the fortress, and not the capital next door? A: Let's put the capital further away from the fortress. As a side effect, you can attack the fortress with more overkill. Q: A fortress on a hill, with a steep slope for defense? A: Mountaintop castles are so 15th century. By the start of WWI, [forts were dug in](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Li%C3%A8ge#Li%C3%A8ge_forts), but often still concentrated. By the start of WWII, [forts were dug in and dispersed](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ouvrage_Hackenberg_carte.png). So instead of one fortified hilltop, 2 km wide and 5 km from the capital, have the capital ringed by various emplacements at a distance of several dozen km from the capital. The job of the attacker is to disable most of the "coastal artillery" installations without gross damage to the city center. It is not necessary to destroy deeply buried command centers and shelters, it is enough to destroy all the (armored ?) gun emplacements on the surface. Or possibly just all of those which can bear in a specific direction, if they don't have 360° fields of fire. Look at the attack on [Fort Eben-Emael](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Eben-Emael) in WWII. This might be done with a series of wreckage drops, perhaps over hours or days. If the fragment misses because somebody had mis-estimated how it would tumble, try again. [Answer] So, you want to nuke it from orbit? I will assume the fortress is no bigger than 0,7 miles in diameter. I assume that because we know that to create crater of such size you need to drop 160 feet wide iron meteorite. I name that vessel you need to drop Two bedroom house w/o porch. Bombing things from space IRL [Meteor Crater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater) [Answer] In some SF circles there is an informal unit of energy known as a "Rick" (after Rick Robinson, who came up with the concept). Essentially it states that an object moving at 3 Km/sec has the equivalent kinetic energy to its weight in TNT. Given that orbital velocity around the Earth is 7 Km/sec, you can see getting sufficient "Ricks" to do severe damage is rather trivial. Your main issue is an unmodified wreak is going to disintegrate in the upper atmosphere and all those lovely "Ricks" of energy will end up being dispersed over a wide area as small pieces of debris hit randomly over a wide area. While there may be reasons to do so, this isn't going to do much for your putative fortress destruction, and of course a real space defence fortress will resemble the command bunker at [Cheyenne Mountain](https://infogalactic.com/info/Cheyenne_Mountain_Complex) or the nuclear centrifuge complex in [Fordow](https://infogalactic.com/info/Fordow_Fuel_Enrichment_Plant). [![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SzkO7.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/SzkO7.jpg) The Fordow site from orbit In order to successfully penetrate the layers of rock, armour and even dead spaces (to disrupt incoming weapons effects), you will either have to spend a lot of time smelting wreaked spacecraft down and using the densest metals to create telephone pole sized [kinetic energy penetrators](https://infogalactic.com/info/Kinetic_bombardment#Project_Thor) (sometimes known as "Rods from God"), or perhaps more reasonably, turning your [nuclear HEAT or EFP warheads](http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.html) against the target. > > A 1 megaton warhead could propel a 2.7 ton projectile to 800km/s, while massing only about 3 tons. This projectile crosses the laser's effective range in about 30 seconds, gouges out a crater nearly a 100 meters deep and/or cracks the target in half with 2160 kN.m of momentum concentrated on a spot less than a meter wide. > > > <http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/05/nuclear-efp-and-heat.html> A stream of molten metal moving at @ 3% of c will likely not even notice small obstructions like a mountain when spearing through the heart of the complex. [Answer] What size explosion do we want? Let's assume you can drop your ship precisely on target. Your target has a radius of 1km, but your capital is only 5km from ground zero. We'll have to be fairly precise. Let's use a nuke simulator (<https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/>), set to a surface detonation. We can ignore the radiation component. We'll ignore the thermal stuff, as it ends up not really affecting what we want. According to that, a 10kT will give: * Air blast radius (1000psi): 100m – that's going to totally annihilate your enemy fortress * Air blast radius (20 psi): 470 m – heavy buildings demolished. * Air blast radius (5 psi): 0.99 km – residential buildings demolished, widespread casualties * Air blast radius (1 psi): 2.53 km – windows broken (thus lots of minor injuries) So this should be sufficient to take out your fortress, disable most of the compound, whilst doing minimal damage to the capital – windows shouldn't be broken. So we're looking at the equivalent of a 10kT bomb (approx 4x10^10 J). --- Impact speed Using this site (<https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/escape-velocity>), and plugging in 1.5x earth mass, the First Cosmic Velocity is 9.6km/s. I believe that's approx the speed something will impact from orbit. --- Ship size So what size ship is equivalent to a 10kT bomb (approx 4x10^10 J)? Plugging all this into KE=1/2 Mv2, we get a mass of 800kg. > > You want to drop 800kg at approx 10km/s. > > > We'll need to drop a bit more than that from orbit to cover what burns up on re-entry, but it'll not be much more. --- Issues with de-orbiting a 'wrecked ship' From your post: "Can only use one ship for the attack (multiple strikes against one target would raise suspicion)." You need to de-orbit fairly precisely. Your dead ship will be a fairly random-shaped bit of wreckage, so if it hits the atmosphere at a shallow angle, it'll bounce off (as any ship would), but in a fairly unpredictable manner. That's not acceptable as you need to target your city fairly accurately. So you need to use a large delta-v to de-orbit into a fairly steep decent, so that you'll have a change of hitting accurately. De-orbiting any dead ship like this would almost certainly raise instant suspicion. It'll look like a planned de-orbit, not a degrading orbit. --- But... But we're not de-orbiting a ship, just 800kg of metal. Compared to a ship, that's tiny, even for today's rockets. We'll pick a nice solid metal rod – a 200mm diameter 3.2m steel rod will be about right. We'll probably want to weld some fins to it for stability. We'll then pop a rocket or similar on the back to de-orbit it to the desired trajectory. But this burn will still be fairly large, and could easily be noticed. So you'll have to cover it with an explosion – make it look like an ammo storage went up or something – and create a bunch of other debris. Some of that will also go towards the planet, and hopefully burn up or hit places we don't care about. We might add a few extra smaller bits on controlled trajectories to hit near the enemy base. Perhaps drop a bigger bit 50km away, so it looks like the enemy base got off lightly. We've got plenty of scope to cover this up. ]
[Question] [ Whenever terraforming Mars comes up, the subject of its magnetosphere inevitably arises. When that happens, [someone](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/8832/34127) is bound to suggest using nukes to restart the core a la "[The Core](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/)". ### Assuming the following: 1. We have the technology to drill to Mars' core. 2. We can produce any type of nuclear weapon in any quantity. # How many nukes would it take to restart Mars' core? Please show proof. [Answer] ### A trillion (1,000,000,000,000) According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars#Internal_structure), Mars has a differentiated iron-nickel core. It's radius is approximately 1800 km. This gives it a volume of $2.4\times10^{19}$ m$^2$. Its temperature is not well known, but some [estimates](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11962-lab-study-indicates-mars-has-a-molten-core/) are up to 1500 K. It is at least partially molten, so its temperature will depend on its sulfur content. The Earth's [liquid outer core](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_core) has a [density](http://jersey.uoregon.edu/~mstrick/AskGeoMan/geoQuerry57.html) of around 10000 kg/m$^3$ and a temperature of at least 3000 K. Let's assume Mars' core has the same density of Earth's outer core, and needs to heat up by 1500 K to 'restart' it, whatever that means. The [specific heat](https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/liquid-metal-boiling-points-specific-heat-d_1893.html) of liquid iron is 820 J/kg/C; while Nickel is 730 J/kg/C. Let's estimate the specific heat of the core at 800 J/kg/C, overall. Multiply that by the volume, density and desired temperature differential (1500 K) to get a required energy of $2.9\times10^{29}$ J. Using the [best web page ever](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)), we see that is roughly equal to the rotational energy of the Earth. It is also six orders of magnitude larger than the Chicxulub meteor (that killed the dinosaurs) and 12 orders of magnitude larger than the biggest nuclear weapon. So, you would need around a trillion of the largest nuclear weapons ever to add that much heat to the core. Just for an additional frame of reference: If we put the Moon (like, Luna, our moon) on a Hohmann transfer orbit to intercept Mars, it would hit Mars at around 3 km/s. The kinetic energy of this impact is $3\times10^{29}$ J; this is the amount of energy needed to heat up the core as desired. Of course, this is ignoring all the heat energy it takes to heat up the mantle and the crust, the energy lost blasting bits into deep space, the energy lost through momentum transfer to Mars' new orbit.... ### Conclusion: No It doesn't matter the current state of Mars' core, or if it is even possible to 'restart' it to the point that it will generate a protective magnetic field. It is not feasible add that much heat with nuclear weapons, nor is it feasible by hitting Mars with the Moon. It's not going to happen. [Answer] The problem with this idea is that nuclear bombs can't just start a core spinning inside the planet again, regardless of what Hollywood says; the science just isn't correct. In the movie the Earth's core (made mostly of iron) had stopped or slowed its spin within the centre of the planet. On Earth, it can spin because of the liquid outer core and the mantle. The core of the Earth spinning is good for life on Earth because it's what generates the magnetic field around the Earth. That magnetic field protects us from most of the solar radiation emitted by the Sun, protecting us from what would ultimately be lethal radiation. One theory about why the core of the Earth is spinning in the first place is the theory about how the moon was formed (massive collision of a Mars sized body with the Earth early in its formation) which if it was a glancing blow, could have potentially put a lot of angular momentum into the Earth and into the core in particular. In the movie though, it had slowed (and was stopping) and that meant that the magnetic field was degrading, meaning that they had to go in to basically kick-start it again, or get it spinning back at its original angular speed. Loosely described, the idea is that detonating a bomb in the outer core gets the hot liquid spinning faster, which (hopefully) drags the outer core around with it via friction. But if that was the case, friction would have stopped the core spinning long ago. That means that the science can't be sound, and even if it was, the bomb's energy release is omni-directional, meaning that all you're likely to do is disrupt the flow of the outer core by generating a massive amount of turbulence. Basically, it's a great sounding but REALLY bad idea. But for the sake of argument... Let's assume it WAS possible on the Earth. The actual inner core of the earth is actually smaller than the solid core in Mars, despite Mars being a smaller planet. That means that you've got a smaller amount of mantle between it and the crust. So, you've got a larger mass to get spinning from a standing (not slow like in the movie) start, you've got a thinner mantle and a crust which because of the collisions Mars has experienced, is even less even (in proportion to planet size) that the Earth has. Add to that, the Earth has a massive body of water to even out some of the pressure variations caused by internal nuclear explosions and to tame most of the volcanic eruptions that would occur as a result of the disruptions being caused inside the planet by the explosions. From what I've read, Mars doesn't seem to have a liquid outer core per se (but happy to be proven wrong if others have more detailed articles available). That means that the mantle, which is also liquid because of heat, but probably more viscous and therefore more likely to cause friction, could be a reason why the core of Mars doesn't spin in the first place. To solve the problem more permanently, that would have to be solved and I'm not convinced it can be, even with future tech. If you have the tech to tunnel in to the core of Mars, then may I suggest an alternate solution? You've still got some heat down there (around 1230 degrees Celsius) so perhaps your answer is a thermal generator (a power source that can generate electricity from heat) that could power a MASSIVE dynamo, converting that heat energy to a magnetic field artificially. While neither option is what I would call 'plausible', it seems safer and more 'doable' to artificially generate a magnetic field from heat energy than to attempt to get a large core spinning from a standing start in a mantle that may not be able to support it with bombs that would probably disrupt the surface of the planet significantly as well. Just saying. [Answer] The magnetosphere isn't likely to be restarted due to the effort and the time frame required. Even if you could melt the core with nukes, you can't make it spin which is required to generate a magnetic field. You need a moon to generate spin. Scientists are looking at artificial magnetic satellites that will generate a large enough field and park it between Mars and the sun so Mars will be covered by its magnetic shadow. See [magnetic shield](https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html). ]

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